The terror of the bear and the sense that I would never be big enough or smart enough to protect my children began my thinking about mortality—safety and peril. The experience of the bear was far more real to me than to them.
Ann Putname – 13 May 2023
The Back Flap
It’s a perilous season of drought in the Northwest, as a serial arsonist sets fires near the woods where Jay and Zoe Penney live with their three children. The threats from without pale against the threats from within when Jay is diagnosed with cancer. Zoe’s most devout wish is to keep her family safe. Her greatest fear is that she cannot.
The Northwest is in the middle of a perilous drought as an arsonist is setting fires all around. It gives Zoe Penney nightmares about her home next to tinder-dry woods rising in explosions of fire, and haunting dreams of a little boy deep in the forest.
Winter brings the longed-for rains but also a cancer diagnosis for Jay which plunges the family into disbelief and fear. The children lean in close to their parents, can’t stop touching them. As Jay’s treatment begins, nature lets loose with strange and startling encounters, while a shadowy figure hovers about the corners of the house.
I Will Leave You Never is also the story of a marriage. Zoe’s fear turns to anger: How can I love you if I am to lose you? How can I live in joy when the sky is falling? Finally, Zoe learns that it’s possible to love anything, even terrible things, if you can love them for what they are teaching you. Love is part of life’s very gamble, and only everything they have.
About the book
When did you start writing the book? How long did it take to write it?
I began it in the car, on the drive home from Glacier National Park, where we’d taken the children, not knowing a grizzly bear had just killed three people. That experience eventually wound up as a short story, called The Bear, but the novel that came out of it had no bear in it at all. It became one story then another, then another, my constant companion over the miles and years. Still, it always had mortality in it, in various forms both strange and familiar. I wrote it at my desk at home, on planes, in emergency rooms, doctor’s offices, PTA meetings, gymnastic and track meets, traffic lights. It took days, months, years, and went through many iterations. It was Zoe’s Bear, then it was Safe as Houses, then Incantation, before it became I Will Leave You Never.
Where did the idea come from?
The terror of the bear and the sense that I would never be big enough or smart enough to protect my children began my thinking about mortality—safety and peril. The experience of the bear was far more real to me than to them. They thought it was a grand adventure and loved wearing bear bells tied to their shoelaces. But that bear let me know I would never be able to protect them from all the dangers life might throw at them.
Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?
I’d say the most difficult part was the ending, which I changed almost seismically, at least three times. And of course, with the changes in the ending came changes in the beginning and changes along the way. The other challenge was how to let go of the autobiographical elements and let the story soar wholly into the imagination.
What came easily?
I’d say the descriptions of the children. They came so easily and from my very heart.
Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?
This answer ties nicely with the previous one. And it’s a great question. Readers, I think, always want to know who’s pulling the strings of the puppet backstage. So here goes:
I began with people I know, and part of my challenge was to let go of the autobiographical and let my characters become re-born through the filter of my imagination. That moment when I can let go of the autobiographical and watch the story take off completely on its own is always exhilarating.
Are there any particular authors that have influenced how you write, and if so, how have they influenced you?
I’m a Hemingway scholar, and an academic, until Covid, when I quit both scholarship and teaching to write fiction full time. So this question is both very easy and very hard. Ernest Hemingway and Toni Morrison come to mind immediately. I taught gender studies as well, and so was often asked how could I possibly read a male writer like Hemingway? Well, that’s a whole page or ten, unto itself. Hemingway taught me the value of less is always more. He taught me the joy in the sensory details of place—the sky, the air, the earth. Toni Morrison taught me the joy of lyricism, which I only hope to imitate in some small measure.
Do you have a target reader?
Oh, I wish I did! I write literary fiction, as labels go, and have never really figured out a niche for myself, or a shelf in a bookstore that spoke my name. I’ve given readings, and book club discussions to audiences of both women and men and see my ideal reader as someone who loves not only a good story, but lyrical writing as well.
About Writing
Do you have a writing process?
Don’t we always want to know how a work came into the world? What’s the magic trick? Maybe with some incense, chants, a candle lit, a shaman or two? Nah. I pretty much always begin unceremoniously, with a little notebook or a spiral set of 3×5 cards where I write words and phrases up and down, and all around. Anything too linear and I frighten myself to death. Little whirls and spins of words and phrases scattered over a little piece of paper and I’m braver than I ever thought I could be. Then I do a cluster. I put a trigger word in the center of a circle and draw spokes of words coming from them and then other words coming from other spokes, not knowing how any of it fits together. But it’s the only way I can start without terrifying myself. The idea of starting a novel, holy moly! I couldn’t do that. I can only write these little snippets of images/words here and there. But when I find myself writing a phrase or word on my wrist, or my car registration or cereal box or in the margins of a book I’m reading because I can’t find paper fast enough, I know I’ve plunged headfirst into the stream.
And that sends me spinning into free-writing, which often begins with: “I have no idea what I’m doing” until, suddenly, I do, and find I’m not free-writing anymore, but I’m in story, and then in a working draft. It’s that draft I spend months, often years, revising: cutting, polishing, deepening.
Do you outline? Extensively or just chapter headings and a couple of sentences?
Only once have I ever outlined a work and that happened in my current project. I have a whiteboard in my office, where I’ve outlined the first working draft to see where I’m going, where I’ve been. But I haven’t touched it since. Still, it’s a comfort to see all those words lined up so nice and tidy, and behaving themselves. All this is to say that the dance I do every time is with fear and trembling, when writing is supposed to be hang gliding over the Grand Canyon. Absolutely fearless. Yet this is my writing life, for better or worse, and the way I have lived it.
Do you edit as you go or wait until you’ve finished?
Again, what a great question. And difficult. The old saying that all writing is re-writing is certainly true for me. There are rushes of words that can turn into paragraphs or pages with no looking back, until suddenly I do, and everything stops. But the more usual way of being is to do both writing and editing, in a kind of back-and- forth manner—that is, until I have what I call a “working rough draft” (a draft that itself has undergone multiple drafts and much revision along the way). Then comes the serious and slow process of finding just the right words, images, sentences rhythms. This can become almost glacial. I can spend an hour or more revising a single image or a line rhythm until it “sings.” And all this takes a very, very long time.
Do you listen to music?
Let me just say that I can’t write without it! Along with reading a bit of poetry before I begin, or when I’m stuck, music is my best and only muse. At first I look for a mood—then a theme for each character, drawing mainly upon movie soundtracks. Sweeping, dark, poignant music that floats in my head and heart completely divested of the movie from which it came, is my muse. The English Patient, The Ghost Writer, Million Dollar Baby, The Hours, E.T., Never Let Me Go to name several. Alexandre Desplat and Gabriel Yared are two favorite movie soundtrack composers.
About Publishing
Did you submit your work to Agents?
An earlier version of I Will Leave You Never, then titled Incantation, was agented for a time, I think about a year, with no real luck. I asked for its return and then deposited it into that proverbial, dreaded desk drawer. By then I was deeply involved in six trips to Cuba and the novel which came out of them, called Cuban Quartermoon, which, as luck would have it, was published six months ago. During those years, I lost both my father and mother, and I began and then completed a memoir about that letting go, called Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye, published by University of Iowa Press.
What made you decide to go Indie? Was it a particular event or a gradual process?
Back to that dreaded desk drawer, and that manuscript which in some ways, felt like my most important work, though I don’t quite know what I mean by that. I dusted it off, and sent it to a developmental editor, who helped me re-vision it. Then I pretty much re-wrote it, and it became I Will Leave You Never. And then I went to a writer’s conference where I met Brooke Warner, of She Writes Press, and was so impressed, that I just kind of decided on the spot that this would be where I would send it.
Did you get your cover professionally done or did you do it yourself?
I worked with wonderful designers at She Writes Press and couldn’t love the cover more.
Do you have a marketing plan for the book or are you just winging it?
My plan is indeed called winging it. I’m still trying to figure out the practical differences between publicity and marketing. If indeed I am marketing, I’m not doing it very well.
Any advice you would like to give to other newbies considering becoming an indie author?
I’m still not exactly sure what an Indie author should be about. Whatever it is, I’m sure I’m not doing it. I’ve read a couple of books, listened to some webinars, and podcasts and still the marketing tasks elude me. I couldn’t even sell Girl Scout Cookies. But that being said, I think that, as they say, there is a certain freedom available to the Indie author and that has been wonderful. I’ve self-published, traditionally published, and now I Will Leave You Never is my first Indie publication. So we shall see.
About You
Where did you grow up? Where do you live now?
I was born in Greenville, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. I started school in New York, while my Dad went to New York University. Then I finished growing up in the Northwest and have been in Washington ever since (Spokane, Seattle, Lake Forest Park, then Gig Harbor, where I now live, next to woods which are home to a black bear family who comes into the front yard from time to time to steal our bird feeders). Not just the bird feed, but the feeders too. We wave at each other, and all is well. Being that close to wildness brings a strange and unexpected peace.
What would you like readers to know about you?
I have bred Alaskan Malamutes, which figure prominently in I Will Leave You Never. I can twirl the batons but am a terrible cook. However, I am a wonderful mother if I do say so myself. And I’m mostly a writer.
But if I weren’t writing, I’d be sad, bereft, and things would not be right with the world, or with me. But let’s imagine I’m not writing, but sitting at a Paris café, maybe, Les Deux Magot, where Hemingway wrote, and drinking a cappuccino as I watch folks go by and I’m thinking how nice it is to just sit here as long as I want. Then my mind gets busy, and I begin thinking of Hemingway and what book I’ll choose for my next class at the maximum-security women’s prison where I sometimes teach in the evenings. I’m thinking of the coiled razor wire they’ve recently installed and wondering if I’ll have my claustrophobia at bay in time. I stretch my arms to the sky and feel as lucky as can be to be here under this azure, Paris sky. And I know I must write about this and can’t wait another second to begin. But for the grace of God, as the saying goes. For Whom the Bell Tolls. That’s what I’ll teach. “Never [seek] to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
What are you working on now?
Georgia, 1939: A drowning, a mysterious healing, a cottonmouth snake, and Virginia Woolf. This book has all of them. At the heart of the book is an inexplicable boating accident—three went into the water and only one survived. Lily O’Connor, the survivor and the main character, experiences both the terror and ecstasy of love. Yet all characters suffer loss of one kind or the other. There is a villain to be sure, with auburn hair and ice-blue eyes, but he too, has loss in his benighted, damaged heart. In the end, this book takes the reader from ordinary life to a place as far from the ordinary as one could get, only to find that it is as profoundly familiar as it is strange. The book asks: what can I believe in, if everything I have loved is lost? It’s called The World in Woe and Splendor.
End of Interview:
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