Q&A with Tess
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How has your upbringing colored your writing?
My parents were (and mother still is) remarkably kindhearted, and raised us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, which is essentially the task of a fiction writer. We were a working class family who budgeted to make the mortgage each month and never missed mass on Sunday. The youngest, I spent a good deal of my childhood beneath a drape of forsythia in our yard where I dreamed up many rooms and even a barn with horses. I was never bored. From an early age, writing became a tool I used to navigate my way through life, both through journal keeping and story writing. As with any household, there was occasional turbulence, but it all seemed very normal to me. All in all, I am fortunate to have had a more stable and loving upbringing than most of my characters.
I once heard Milan Kundera say in an interview that his characters start where he leaves off. That feels right to me. You could say that each of my characters is an unmanifested aspect of my personality, a particular trait taken to an extreme. They each represent someone I might have become, but didn’t. Oliver is probably the most like me in that I often feel compelled to “do the right thing” without necessarily listening to my intuition – that nonlinear wisdom that doesn’t follow the path of logic but is nevertheless essential to getting at the truth. As for April, I never worked in a bar or was beaten up by a boyfriend. However, I did grow up in an environment where alcohol was an issue, and like April, I developed radar for the loop-the-loop moods of the household. I share with her the ability to read a situation and (metaphorically speaking) duck when necessary. At times, my characters also draw from people I’ve known, but in the same fashion. The character “Nana” in April & Oliver begins where my own grandmother left off. They bear a physical resemblance, but are no more the same person than April is me.
Nature, animals, science, art, fiction, poetry, and something else that is hard to label, that embodies all of the above. Not religion exactly. Even the word “spirituality” feels wrong. I’ll call it presence, which I see as awareness of the big picture though attentiveness to the inner landscape. It’s about what we notice. Take a look at Todd Boss’s poem, “One can miss Mountains.” The mountain is my sustaining interest.
There are many writers I love, including poets Rumi, Mirabai, Rilke, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, and Billy Collins, as well as fiction writers Anton Chekhov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Alice Munro. I enjoy writing that is spare yet feels abundant.
I loved Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser and Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, and am looking forward to reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.
When writing a first draft, I try to lock my editor hat in a closet. I get onto the train and try to sustain forward movement all the way until the last stop. Then, I go back to the beginning and edit mercilessly. Many drafts later, virtually every sentence has changed, usually multiple times.
I am the queen of rejection letters. They could wallpaper my house. To boot, I never handled them well. They are always so disappointing. But the truth is that over the years I sent many things out before they were ready, and it took me a long time to hone my skills. I don’t really regret that, because failure and dejection can be enormous teachers. I gave up on the idea of publishing, and discovered that I am a good teacher and could draw a great deal of satisfaction from that. Nevertheless, I kept writing because it is what I do. I worked on April & Oliver on and off for years, periodically stuffing it in a drawer for long stretches. It was my good friend, novelist Sasha Troyan, who encouraged me to haul the manuscript out one more time and send it to agent Anne Edelstein, who sold it in two days. Without Sasha, April & Oliver would still be collecting dust.
I am working on a novel set in China during the period of the Tiananmen protests. I lived in China on and off from 1987 to 1991 as an English teacher, and fortunately kept copious notes about life there. I say fortunately because that version of China doesn’t exist anymore.
I don’t believe it consciously plays a part in how I write a story, but it does influence how I understand it after the fact. From a Jungian point of view, April & Oliver can be seen as a kind of allegory. She represents his anima and he her animus. Oliver’s attraction to April has to do with his unconscious search for his unlived feminine side, that intuitive, receptive and musical sensibility that he was connected to in his youth but largely cut off from in adulthood. Because she represents both his lost youth and his music, he projects onto her all that he has lost. For her part, Oliver represents her unlived masculine side, the logic, assertiveness, and courage that would allow her to take control of her life. Naturally, they could never fulfill these roles for one another; they are flesh and blood human beings, not archetypes in a myth. However, through their honest interactions there is the possibility that they can nudge one another toward the kind of awareness that would allow them to start reclaiming the lost pieces of their souls.