On Art and Life: A Conversation with Award-Winning Author A. Manette Ansay
by Sharon Snow Pinson
A. Manette Ansay grew up in Wisconsin among 67 cousins and over 200 second cousins. She is the author of six novels, including Good Things I Wish You (July, 2009), Vinegar Hill, an Oprah Book Club Selection, and Midnight Champagne, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as a short story collection, Read This and Tell Me What It Says, and a memoir, Limbo. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Prize, and two Great Lakes Book Awards. She lives with her daughter in Florida, where she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami. A. Manette Ansay’s latest novel, Good Things I Wish You is an interesting mix of the historic and the modern, with two love stories, set apart in time by over 150 years. The novel contrasts the story of Jeanette, a struggling author/college professor in her first post-divorce relationship, with the story of real-life pianist and composer, Clara Schumann, her husband Robert Schumann, and their protégée, the young and handsome Johannes Brahms.
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Sharon Snow Pinson: You say that this novel took its time being born, evolving from a serious historical novel to a modern novel with the historical elements set as metafiction within the story, so that both stories, the modern and historical-based story, unfold together. When did it become apparent to you that you needed the modern story to discover the themes and bring them to life?
A. Manette Ansay: It became apparent that I needed to think about the entire novel differently after I’d completed roughly three-quarters of the historical portion. Basically, I ran into the same wall that others writing about Clara and Brahms have faced: what happened between them in Switzerland, why did they part ways, how did the friendship survive? I didn’t want to make up events to complete the narrative arc, so I began thinking of ways to set up a parallel story, one in which key events could stand in for the missing portions of the historical text.
SSP: Did you find yourself drawn to one story more than the other?
AMA: They became part of the same story as I was writing them, so for me, it’s hard to pick a favorite.
SSP: You take the current and the historical, fact and fiction into the actual physical structure of the novel in a fascinating way, by the use of
collages that include pictures of your personal journals, excerpts from scholarly research and pictures. How did you arrive at this unique
structure, and how did it contribute to the understanding of the overall structure of the past and present stories?
AMA: The collage structure evolved accidentally. I wrote a lot of the novel while commuting by Tri-Rail to Miami, where I teach. For
awhile, I was lugging a suitcase full of research--books, photocopies of journals, not to mention my teaching materials and lunch-- but then I
fell down the stairs on the train and decided I’d better lighten my load. I began taking photographs of my desk and importing those photos
into my Word files so that I could have, if not my actual desk, the images from my desk at my fingertips. After doing this for awhile, it occurred to me that the images weren’t just affecting the writing of the book. They were part of the book. It helps that the portraits of Clara and Robert and Brahms are so striking in and of themselves. And, like Jeanette, I do keep writing journals for each book I’m working on. Some of the journals in the image are actually mine; some are fictionalized. I really enjoyed making these clutter-collages. And it was always a good excuse not to clean my desk.
SSP: Your first date in nineteen years is the inspiration for the opening scene of the novel where Hart asserts to Jeanette that “men and women can never be friends.” His question is answered in seemingly similar ways throughout the book: Clara and Brahms appear to move uneasily between friendship and romantic love throughout the course of their lives, Jeanette and Hart do an uneasy dance between love and friendship in the same way of Jeanette and her husband Cal, and even Jeanette and her long-distance email pal “L.” What do you think happened in the real-life story of Clara and Johannes? Do you believe that men and women can, or should be friends?
AMA: I think the real-life story of Clara and Johannes mirrors the real-life drama that often plays out between contemporary women and
men. Brahms longed for Clara as long as he could not have her. The moment she was free, he fled. Throughout his life, he continued that
pattern, attaching himself to women he could not have. Clara writes to him that she wishes she could find longing as sweet as he does. Yet she, too, had her own fascination with longing, with the energy of attraction and its subsequent obsessions. For Clara, as a woman,
fulfillment of longing would have meant more children, the end of the second, mid-life career she claimed after Robert’s death. For Brahms,
it would have meant, in different terms, much the same: the banalities of day-to-day living as a couple, the drain of one’s time and energy
on domestic concerns. What they felt for each other—as friends and as would-be lovers—got translated into music. I believe that without
that friction, that spark, their art would have been less passionate, less mercurial.
SSP: Clara was in many ways, very ahead of her time as a famous female concert pianist and composer in an era when female artists
were rare. Even more amazingly, she combined her career with running a busy household as mother of seven children and nurturing her demanding, mentally unstable husband’s career most often ahead of her own. Jeanette’s book about Clara’s life as a struggling mother/
artist parallels her own struggles as a newly single mother trying to find time and space for her creative work in the modern workaday world in academia. As a divorced mother of a young daughter, you also have had to balance the pressures and time commitments of motherhood, everyday life, and your job in academia with your writing life. Do you mine your own experiences as a single mom to help you with these details?
AMA: I tend to draw on personal experience—or, failing that, personal interest—in all of my books. I can’t imagine researching a life that did not contain elements that interest me, and since hours in each day are numbered, elements that interest me tend to be those that help
me interpret and/or explain the world I know. My writing process has changed a great deal since the birth of my daughter seven years ago. Before I was a parent, I used to work in long stretches, particularly early mornings and then, later in the day, between 4 and 8 PM. Those
hours now belong to my daughter; there’s really no way around that. Like Clara, like Jeanette, I’m working in stolen moments. Writing Good Things, I was both learning what that meant for my creative process and describing what was happening to that process. For me, art and experience go hand in hand.
SSP: How much of your private life do you use and how much do you withhold?
AMA: I don’t think about it that way. When people asked Anne Sexton if her poetry was true, she’d say, “It was all true when I wrote it.” Sometimes, because readers ask me to, I’ll go back into a section of the book and try to parse it, line by line, this one fact, this one fiction. I feel as if I kill the story when I do that. I feel as if I’m killing something in myself.
SSP: Jeanette talks about fate dismissively with Hart, almost as she half hopes it to be true, but intellectually dismissing it. You have a great deal of unique circumstances that led you to writing as a career: you became ill and couldn’t keep up your rigorous concert pianist training schedule, someone secretly sponsored you for a writer’s conference, your boyfriend helped push you to write a novel. Do you believe in fate, or like Jeanette, the more we think of it, the more we influence our choices?
AMA: I believe that, in order to survive psychologically, we assign meanings to the things that happen to us, much like, when writing fiction, we plumb details for their thematic significance. I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe things happen for a reason, aside from reasons we assign. But I do think the things we give energy and attention to go on to influence our subsequent choices, so in that way, our own
behavior does impact, to a certain extent, our own lives. I don’t believe in fate or, for that matter, any kind of god. Things happen because
they happen, and the real trick about life is to embrace the largeness of that simple statement, the great mystery, and live with it peacefully.
SSP: In your website, you say that you missed the world of academia. Are you glad to be back teaching?
AMA: I am glad to be back teaching but I’m doing the usual dance in terms of finding time for everything: home life, writing life, teaching life. At the same time, I know how very lucky I am to have a life so rich that it contains all three. What a terrible thing, to sit home, being
bored! Sometimes I wish the balance were better, but at least I’m not one of those people living my life in front of the TV.
SSP: Speaking of teaching, what are the biggest mistakes that your creative writing students make? What would be the best advice you
could give them?
AMA: The biggest mistake my creative writing students make is thinking that they are too busy to write, that somehow, after graduation, things are going to be different. This isn’t the case. Life will always interfere, and the older you get, the more complicated things are. If you want to write, make time for it now. Take advantage of the academic environment, your teachers and your classes and your peers. If you get overwhelmed by feedback on your work, just listen to whatever comments help you write the kind of story you yourself would like to read.
This interview originally appeared in Volume 5.
__________
Sharon Snow Pinson: You say that this novel took its time being born, evolving from a serious historical novel to a modern novel with the historical elements set as metafiction within the story, so that both stories, the modern and historical-based story, unfold together. When did it become apparent to you that you needed the modern story to discover the themes and bring them to life?
A. Manette Ansay: It became apparent that I needed to think about the entire novel differently after I’d completed roughly three-quarters of the historical portion. Basically, I ran into the same wall that others writing about Clara and Brahms have faced: what happened between them in Switzerland, why did they part ways, how did the friendship survive? I didn’t want to make up events to complete the narrative arc, so I began thinking of ways to set up a parallel story, one in which key events could stand in for the missing portions of the historical text.
SSP: Did you find yourself drawn to one story more than the other?
AMA: They became part of the same story as I was writing them, so for me, it’s hard to pick a favorite.
SSP: You take the current and the historical, fact and fiction into the actual physical structure of the novel in a fascinating way, by the use of
collages that include pictures of your personal journals, excerpts from scholarly research and pictures. How did you arrive at this unique
structure, and how did it contribute to the understanding of the overall structure of the past and present stories?
AMA: The collage structure evolved accidentally. I wrote a lot of the novel while commuting by Tri-Rail to Miami, where I teach. For
awhile, I was lugging a suitcase full of research--books, photocopies of journals, not to mention my teaching materials and lunch-- but then I
fell down the stairs on the train and decided I’d better lighten my load. I began taking photographs of my desk and importing those photos
into my Word files so that I could have, if not my actual desk, the images from my desk at my fingertips. After doing this for awhile, it occurred to me that the images weren’t just affecting the writing of the book. They were part of the book. It helps that the portraits of Clara and Robert and Brahms are so striking in and of themselves. And, like Jeanette, I do keep writing journals for each book I’m working on. Some of the journals in the image are actually mine; some are fictionalized. I really enjoyed making these clutter-collages. And it was always a good excuse not to clean my desk.
SSP: Your first date in nineteen years is the inspiration for the opening scene of the novel where Hart asserts to Jeanette that “men and women can never be friends.” His question is answered in seemingly similar ways throughout the book: Clara and Brahms appear to move uneasily between friendship and romantic love throughout the course of their lives, Jeanette and Hart do an uneasy dance between love and friendship in the same way of Jeanette and her husband Cal, and even Jeanette and her long-distance email pal “L.” What do you think happened in the real-life story of Clara and Johannes? Do you believe that men and women can, or should be friends?
AMA: I think the real-life story of Clara and Johannes mirrors the real-life drama that often plays out between contemporary women and
men. Brahms longed for Clara as long as he could not have her. The moment she was free, he fled. Throughout his life, he continued that
pattern, attaching himself to women he could not have. Clara writes to him that she wishes she could find longing as sweet as he does. Yet she, too, had her own fascination with longing, with the energy of attraction and its subsequent obsessions. For Clara, as a woman,
fulfillment of longing would have meant more children, the end of the second, mid-life career she claimed after Robert’s death. For Brahms,
it would have meant, in different terms, much the same: the banalities of day-to-day living as a couple, the drain of one’s time and energy
on domestic concerns. What they felt for each other—as friends and as would-be lovers—got translated into music. I believe that without
that friction, that spark, their art would have been less passionate, less mercurial.
SSP: Clara was in many ways, very ahead of her time as a famous female concert pianist and composer in an era when female artists
were rare. Even more amazingly, she combined her career with running a busy household as mother of seven children and nurturing her demanding, mentally unstable husband’s career most often ahead of her own. Jeanette’s book about Clara’s life as a struggling mother/
artist parallels her own struggles as a newly single mother trying to find time and space for her creative work in the modern workaday world in academia. As a divorced mother of a young daughter, you also have had to balance the pressures and time commitments of motherhood, everyday life, and your job in academia with your writing life. Do you mine your own experiences as a single mom to help you with these details?
AMA: I tend to draw on personal experience—or, failing that, personal interest—in all of my books. I can’t imagine researching a life that did not contain elements that interest me, and since hours in each day are numbered, elements that interest me tend to be those that help
me interpret and/or explain the world I know. My writing process has changed a great deal since the birth of my daughter seven years ago. Before I was a parent, I used to work in long stretches, particularly early mornings and then, later in the day, between 4 and 8 PM. Those
hours now belong to my daughter; there’s really no way around that. Like Clara, like Jeanette, I’m working in stolen moments. Writing Good Things, I was both learning what that meant for my creative process and describing what was happening to that process. For me, art and experience go hand in hand.
SSP: How much of your private life do you use and how much do you withhold?
AMA: I don’t think about it that way. When people asked Anne Sexton if her poetry was true, she’d say, “It was all true when I wrote it.” Sometimes, because readers ask me to, I’ll go back into a section of the book and try to parse it, line by line, this one fact, this one fiction. I feel as if I kill the story when I do that. I feel as if I’m killing something in myself.
SSP: Jeanette talks about fate dismissively with Hart, almost as she half hopes it to be true, but intellectually dismissing it. You have a great deal of unique circumstances that led you to writing as a career: you became ill and couldn’t keep up your rigorous concert pianist training schedule, someone secretly sponsored you for a writer’s conference, your boyfriend helped push you to write a novel. Do you believe in fate, or like Jeanette, the more we think of it, the more we influence our choices?
AMA: I believe that, in order to survive psychologically, we assign meanings to the things that happen to us, much like, when writing fiction, we plumb details for their thematic significance. I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe things happen for a reason, aside from reasons we assign. But I do think the things we give energy and attention to go on to influence our subsequent choices, so in that way, our own
behavior does impact, to a certain extent, our own lives. I don’t believe in fate or, for that matter, any kind of god. Things happen because
they happen, and the real trick about life is to embrace the largeness of that simple statement, the great mystery, and live with it peacefully.
SSP: In your website, you say that you missed the world of academia. Are you glad to be back teaching?
AMA: I am glad to be back teaching but I’m doing the usual dance in terms of finding time for everything: home life, writing life, teaching life. At the same time, I know how very lucky I am to have a life so rich that it contains all three. What a terrible thing, to sit home, being
bored! Sometimes I wish the balance were better, but at least I’m not one of those people living my life in front of the TV.
SSP: Speaking of teaching, what are the biggest mistakes that your creative writing students make? What would be the best advice you
could give them?
AMA: The biggest mistake my creative writing students make is thinking that they are too busy to write, that somehow, after graduation, things are going to be different. This isn’t the case. Life will always interfere, and the older you get, the more complicated things are. If you want to write, make time for it now. Take advantage of the academic environment, your teachers and your classes and your peers. If you get overwhelmed by feedback on your work, just listen to whatever comments help you write the kind of story you yourself would like to read.
This interview originally appeared in Volume 5.
