Torrey House Press: If you could put a copy of Things I Didn’t Do into the hands of anybody in the world, who would it be, and why?

 

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Karin Anderson: Things I Didn’t Do could be read as a love letter to the young men who stuck it out in my college writing classes. Grading is a horrid way to respond to any student’s effort and risk; it interfered with my ability to express how profoundly I was affected by their experiences and ruminations. It interfered with their trust in the humanity of language. But they rose to it, again and again. In a culture that proscribes masculine expression, I valued my rare access to the astute perceptions of men who might otherwise seem “unreadable.”  

 

I refer to this directly in a chapter where Ryder writes a high school essay, opening his evolving heart as well as he can. He finishes the essay with an apology for not reaching the word count, and says he’ll accept a lower grade because of it. Although the fictional essay is written by a fictional boy, I found myself beseeching the fictional English teacher to read beyond his errors, to soften the rigid requirements of the assignment to give Ryder the articulate, encouraging response he deserved. 

 

I hope many readers who simply want to engage in the troubling, lovely little legacies of human experience will let this novel reach them. But if any of the men who risked themselves in my classes sense this novel was written with a warm heart for them—it was. 

 

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Torrey House Press: We’ve been lucky to publish a lot of your work over the years, including What Falls Away, Before Us Like a Land of Dreams, and Blossom as the Cliffrose, and now Things I Didn't Do. What would you say you want to accomplish through your books? 

 

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Karin Anderson: All my fiction is interrelated. Sometimes I pick up a scene or event from one book and reinvent or expand it in another. For example, a mortaring narrative in Before Us Like a Land of Dreams riffs on my father’s story about a young man he’d met as a Mormon missionary in the early 1950s. The man was searching for his family after growing up in a North Carolina orphanage, mistaking an in-law aunt for his mother before learning the truth of his ancestry. Witnessing that encounter shook my father, and his retelling shook me. An altered version of that young man appears in What Falls Away, and he turns out to be the half-brother of the “lost” boy in Things I Didn’t Do. Certain narrative knots stay with me; they play out in multiple ways from novel to novel. 

 

I’m intrigued by the ways “true” stories U-turn or taper where the teller becomes uncomfortable. I learned to write fiction by picking up where community stories go loudly silent, because for me that’s where they become interesting. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams elaborates upon (and rampantly refabricates) connected stories from my Latter-Day Saint and Lutheran immigrant heritage—stories I heard at family gatherings, read in genealogical compilations, and tracked peripherally on the internet. 

 

Blossom as the Cliffrose anthologizes other writers’ ruminations on Latter-Day Saint heritage, and their sense of being in a landscape that bends ideology. The pleasure of compiling those poems and stories (with the brilliant poet Danielle Beazer Dubrasky) reloaded my fascination with ostensibly familiar people and places. 

 

What Falls Away is set in a hometown much like my own, a contextual focus on a girl/woman about my age (I was born in 1962). I drew from many stories, conversations, “kinds” of people I grew up with, and plain hard research to illuminate one possible life of a woman devastated by the loss of her “illegitimate” baby. Things I Didn’t Do is set in a more stark and less wealthy region of Utah, following the story of her son, adopted at birth by another family. What Falls Away and Things I Didn’t Do end at the same point of potential “recovery” of lost relationships, of invisibly connected lives. 

 

I’m drawn to difficult or apparently simplistic characters—people who might represent “types” but emerge as more complex and sympathetic human beings than they appear to be. I guess this is why, despite a certain grown-up aversion to novels, I have become a novelist: The form is designed to give writers and readers time for characters to build and develop. I hope my readers will stay with them, consider their histories, and watch their trajectories. I don’t write “role models” but I tend to look for ways to reveal what I admire, and what I love, about the flawed human race my characters represent. 

 

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Torrey House Press: What is your relationship with writing like? How did you develop your voice and style? 

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Karin Anderson: I recall needing to be a “writer” as soon as I could understand stories. Stories seemed to want answers: take in and give back. My mother had a super technical medical vocabulary, which attracted me to precision. My father and his family were story swappers with a knack for offbeat phrasing and esoteric words, for topping each other round by round. 

 

My grandmother had a subscription to the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series. I didn’t know what “condensed” meant but (so?) I read most of them, even though she made me skip certain titles. Both of my parents read avidly, and I listened in on their conversations. I read the books when my parents set them aside. Now I’m struck by the fun trash-to-bougie-snob range of what they read: Sidney Sheldon, James Michener, Leon Uris, Thomas Malory, T.H. White, Irving Stone, James Talmage, Victor Hugo, Robert and Suzanne Massie, Woodward and Bernstein… 

 

My folks taught me to love stories and words, but worried about what I was willing to take in and how to talk about it. Religion girded a tricky boundary: reading/writing/art/education are fine but do not get carried away. My parents were well educated and deeply religious, and they probably believed they’d stretched the shape of faith enough for their children to live comfortably within. But for me, language became the breaking point, eventually a point of no return. That tension gradually created my voice and style. I want to keep my language true to my native ear, to acknowledge but transgress a legacy of “Truth-telling.” 

 

I do write, to a degree, to people I know will never read my work, who resist the very act of literary portrayal. Those people keep me grounded. But I also write to readers who love the literary tradition, its penchant for reinvention and innovation, for reflecting what’s on the flickering temporal ground. I write to readers who love words, who love the concrete world, who pay attention to fellow travelers. Chaucer taught me this in my second year of college, a thunderous revelation. 

 

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Torrey House Press: As you stated earlier, the novel as a form is the perfect place where characters and narratives trouble one another. This idea of people “resisting the very act of literary portrayal” feels very pertinent to your work. Can you elaborate to us a little bit on the process of writing Things I Didn’t Do? Is there any advice you would like to share with aspiring authors?

 

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Karin Anderson: I’m ready to start a new novel once I know how it’s going to end. Everything else can be pretty vague. At first, I concentrate on getting my characters moving in that direction. I write self-standing scenes that let me see what the story is up to: Characters take on histories and personalities; events from one episode might answer to others. 

 

Then I rethink my (always) unrealistic outline, streamline and revise it, and write more scenes. And I keep doing that, experimenting with the larger assembly. I don’t write a novel sequentially—I write the pages that come, three to five hours per day once I get rolling. I’m not a fast writer but I’m steady. Advice to aspiring writers: Put words on the page. Yes, they’ll be awkward and ugly. Deal with that later.

 

I don’t write or read primarily for what happens. I’m more interested in how it happens, and what it does to the characters. Plot allows characters to reveal themselves: to change, exceed prior boundaries; to empathize, claim a gift, or refuse to respond. So as the novel develops, I keep my scrutiny on the characters, and I make things happen to affect them. I bring characters together, bring characters back, let them draw from prior events and revelations. At a certain point I start to “get it,” but it’s usually after I’ve written a lot of pages that don’t, so now it’s time to really write this thing. 

 

Truly practical advice: Writing is easier than we tend to think; committing to sitting down and getting words to pages is not good for butts and backs, so get up and move after every grind. 

 

But it’s also the hardest thing I do, at least in my professional life. Many people tell me that they’re “writing [their] novel,” and ask if I’ll give it a read. But then it’s not written yet—it’s just an idea. Or it’s jammed out in pieces and parts as if the writer couldn’t wait to get the task behind them, and now the author wants me to help find an agent or publisher. It’s often great stuff, potentially, but it’s not ready. 

 

I had to learn this too: Choking out a full draft is the minimal starting point. The end arrives after every element of the manuscript has been answered, reconsidered, enriched, chiseled to clarity, connected to the whole. Again and again. This is deep craft; I relearn this by watching my son and daughter, professional artists, attend to every graphite, paint, or electronic stroke, every proportion of the paper, screen, or canvas—even the blank spaces, even the spontaneous gut moves. Look at an artist’s thumbnails, drafts, ghost strokes, rise to finish, body of work. Yes, plenty of genius, but artists of every kind work to claim their place among generations of talented practitioners who realize their gifts through collaboration, discipline, practice, and attention. Every time I write a “real” novel I’m shocked at how hard it is, how much it asks of me, how frightening it can be. 

 

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Torrey House Press: Thank you so much for this, Karin. You describe a sometimes frustrating, tedious, and lengthy process with such grace. I think people “in the midst” of writing deserve to hear this advice. The process of writing a novel is full of twists and turns as you describe, but the result is often a piece of art that impacts readers lucky enough to engage with your work. If we could ask every reader to do one thing after reading your book, what should we ask them? 

 

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Karin Anderson: Things I Didn’t Do presents its characters with opportunities to rupture the circumference of self, to step toward potential other selves. I’m compelled by the ways our lives are constrained by circumstance, yet also are exponentially larger than we dare imagine. As Whitman says, “I contain multitudes.” 

 

In the novel, Sami Begay, made of worlds juxtaposed, tells her husband: “You can ride two rivers. More. People figure it out.” I think we can learn to contain more, to invite another and another version of self into ourselves. I think we can believe that we’re not finished until we hear that Blue—uncertain—stumbling Buzz. 

So, I guess I’d ask people who read Things I Didn’t Do to open a little more space to embrace yet another possible self, and another. Maybe fierce integrity is overrated. Fiction is one way of laying down our lives for our friends, but there are many ways to step toward the monster. To know it, become it. To make it us.

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