Clare Beams on Harmful Good Intentions

Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.    

*

Today, Clare Beams (The Garden) discusses the fascinating medical history behind her new novel, writing a “ghost story,” crafting a sympathetic villain and an unlikable main character, finding inspiration and darkness by re-reading The Secret Garden as an adult, and more!

From the episode:

Clare Beams: I am fascinated by characters who are doing great harm even though they have good intentions. That seems to be the shape that my villains tend to take. The same qualities that have enabled her to be what she is–a woman doctor in the ‘40s–of course she’s single-minded. She would never have achieved what she’s achieved if she weren’t that way. The same things that make her admirable also make her really scary.

________________________

Clare Beams’s new novel, The Garden, will be published by Doubleday in April of 2024. It has been longlisted for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize and featured on anticipated lists at LitHub and Bookshop.org. Her novel The Illness Lesson, published in February of 2020 by Doubleday, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was named a best book of 2020 by Esquire and Bustle and a best book of February by Time, O Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. Her story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, was published by Lookout Books in 2016; it won the Bard Fiction Prize, was longlisted for the Story Prize, and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her short fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, Conjunctions, The Common, Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and has received special mention in The Pushcart Prize and twice in The Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize. Clare lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters and currently teaches in the Randolph MFA program.