Do Writers Need To Be Alone to Thrive?

Last month, a standing-room only crowd gathered at Brooklyn’s BookCourt for the inaugural installment of Michele Filgate’s quarterly Red Ink Series, focused on women writers, past and present.”Finding Solitude in a Noisy World,” brought together Katherine Towler (Snow Island, Evening Ferry, The Penny Poet of Portsmouth), Leslie Jamison (The Gin Closet, The Empathy Exams), and Angela Flournoy (The Turner House) for a wide-ranging discussion about perfectionism, working mothers, and both the artistic importance and privilege inherent to writerly solitude. The next Red Ink event, “Writing the Body,” will take place at BookCourt on 9/22.

Michele Filgate: So I wanted to start out by asking all of you what solitude means to each of you and how crucial it is to your creative process.

Katherine Towler: I find solitude really crucial to me as a writer, and I feel fortunate that I came of age as a writer before the internet. In my late twenties and early thirties, I spent a lot of time alone, and I often find myself now hungering for that time when you could feel as alone as I felt then. Because I think today, it’s very hard for any of us to find that sense of aloneness; we’re so connected through the digital world that to find the kind of solitude I sought out in those years is a lot harder now. For me, I need to be surrounded by time and quiet to write, and I need a space just to think, just to wander in my own mind. So it’s very crucial to me as a writer.

Leslie Jamison: I guess I would say, for me, there’s a spiritual answer of the question of solitude, and there’s a pragmatic way of answering that question. I do think that every project I’ve worked on, it has felt really important that I have some period in my life where I can just disappear into it for a month, or for a few months. There were times in my life when it felt possible to disappear for longer, to kind of give myself days where I didn’t need to immediately emerge into the banal accountabilities of the rest of the world. Like all the errands I need to run, the after-school deadline of 6pm every day, you know… To be in some protected space where you can really get lost in the work. I use that phrase intentionally because I think there’s a kind of work I can do once I know the shape of a book, or the shape of an essay, where I can say, “Okay, I have three hours, I can do this piece of it.” But there’s a time in the kind of wilder, crazier, unknown stage of a project where I don’t know yet what it wants to be, what it needs to be, or what I want it to be, where I just need to go down a lot of wrong paths, or go down a lot of paths that I can’t see where they’re going, or I can’t see the end of them. It’s that stage where the ability to lose myself in the work more fully feels like it matters so much, because I need to have that experience of disappearing into the thing and not knowing where I’m headed.

Angela Flournoy: I never really had solitude as a writer. So it’s very abstract. I think about my novel, the way it was written, where there were some periods of time I was not necessarily living with other people, which is probably as alone as one can get in a big city. But I am also a person who’s really interested in voices in my writing, and I feel that especially when I’m stuck, that I need to be around a lot of people and just listen to them. So I think the solitude I like is the kind that’s really abundant in the city, which is that you are alone, but you are around a lot of people. That’s kind of my sweet spot of solitude, when nobody’s asking anything of me, but I can still be nosy. I don’t know so much about this next writing project—it’s still very new—but I think that there’s probably a later point where solitude perhaps could benefit me more, but at the early stages I need to hear voices. Not all the time, but for at least a good quarter of the day.

Photo by Sean Fitzroy.

MF: I’m the same way; in fact, I just wrote an essay for Literary Hub about loving to be in cafes and around people and writing. So, Katherine, in The Penny Poet of Portsmouth you wrote, “When I could not find time alone, I became edgy and depressed, unmoored from what truly seemed to matter, that inner journey, that exploration of empty corridors, that road into the self. Writing was the reason for this journey, but there were times when it felt more like the excuse.” But you also write a lot in the book about learning from the intense solitude Robert Dunn cultivated, and how important it is to have time in your life for friends and family in addition to your creative work. Do you think there’s such a thing as too much solitude?

KT: Sure, there is such a thing as too much solitude. I think that as writers we’re always trying to find that balance; as Leslie was talking about, you need to get lost in the work. We need to feel alone with the world—in that lost place where I can immerse myself in the work, and not know where it’s going, and not have much calling me back out. But then, of course, too much of that and you become stuck. So it’s about finding the balance. And certainly when I was younger, I would spend hours sitting at the desk and getting frustrated, getting stuck. I didn’t know when to stop, and I didn’t know when I had been writing for too long or had been alone for too long. I could get pretty stale. So, I think that’s always a risk. And I’m always looking for that balance. I didn’t get married until I was 35, but now I live with someone, and I have a lot more people just in my daily life than I did when I was younger. When I was younger, I really sought out solitude.

LJ: I was just going to add, part of what I was saying was that a certain kind of solitude is something of an abstraction. I feel like in my own life as a writer, the logistics of paying the rent and making a living means that there’s never a time when solitude isn’t a counterpoint to something else. Through the course of my twenties I worked so many different kinds of jobs that the constant interruptions to solitude in my life always had a different texture. Sometimes I worked as a tutor, sometimes I worked as an innkeeper, sometimes I worked as a teacher, sometimes I worked as a baker… None of those jobs were about solitude. They were, in a number of ways, kind of a series of opposites to solitude. But they also sharpened what it felt like to be alone with the work because I was more aware of the time I was writing, or with my work as what the other time had been in service of. The solitude of being able to write was always contoured by these other jobs where I was engaging with people in a variety of ways, and those jobs were also feeding the work. In terms of teaching, there’s a much more direct relationship because the kind of conversations I’d have in the classroom are connected to what the work is, but even with the jobs that had nothing to do with writing. it was more of a kind of consciousness thing. What you were saying, Angela, about voices, resonates a lot with me. All of these people I was engaging with in other parts of my life, they were, in ways that sometimes I could see, and sometimes were just happening invisibly, were charging my moments of solitude. So it always feels that solitude has to be in relation to life, which is a kind of communal and necessarily shared, logistically shared, experience.

MF: Going off that, today in an interview at Literary Hub you said, “I don’t think of my art essentially as trying to find solitude in a noisy world. I think about my work as deeply informed by the noise of the world.” When I look at The Empathy Exams I see so much noise in them, but it’s noise that has been curated, metabolized, and processed. So how is that noise processed into your work; do you even know, or is it kind of mystical?

LJ: I think I know some of it. My work over the past 10 years has changed concretely, as I used to write fiction, and now I write non-fiction. It’s not that I feel those shifts are absolute, or that the kind of imagination and engagement that are called for by the genres are mutually exclusive, but a lot of what I do when I write nonfiction is engage with another life, another voice, and another consciousness. That engagement takes so many different forms. It can mean descending into an archive for weeks, engaging with all of these voices that exist in that archive, or it can mean a more journalistic, reported process, where I’m engaging with another human being and somehow responding to their life, or involving their life in the work that I’m writing. Process-wise, my work has really come to include this oscillation between engagement with a text, with a work of art, with a living human being, and then responding to them. The more solitary part comes in when I shape that response.

MF: Definitely. Angela, you experienced success with your debut novel. It was, as I mentioned in your introduction, nominated for the National Book Award and named a best book of the year by many publications. Has your relationship to solitude and creativity changed since you first started out?

Photo by Sean Fitzroy.

AF: Oh, Michele. [laughs] Well, I don’t know if my relationship in my mind has changed, it’s more about, logistically, how many hours there are in a day. That hasn’t changed so… I’m not complaining. But a thing that happens is that, you know, you get invited to do stuff, and you find yourself traveling a lot. I was actually just thinking sort of about charged solitude. The place that I look forward to being the most these days is on an airplane. You can get kind of religious about what you will or will not do while you are on airplane. Do you pay for the wireless or you don’t pay for the wireless? Don’t pay, depending on what you want to write. I find myself looking forward to flights because I can focus on writing something, or just finishing something in a way that has not necessarily been possible in the last 13 months, for good reasons. But I think that ultimately you get to a point where you still have to make decisions to reclaim your time to write. I am turning that corner and very much looking forward to it. That’s why I’m very excited about the Library fellowship.

MF: So here’s a question for all of you. How do we reckon with being artists and also being engaged with the literary community? What are our obligations to both ourselves as writers and to other writers?

KT: I teach in an MFA program, so I have a real commitment there to my colleagues and my students, and that I find very rewarding and enriching. It’s a wonderful community, and I have gained immeasurably from being part of it. Obviously, it takes time away from the writing, but besides my teaching, I also do freelance writing. I try to do my creative work first thing in the morning and my paid work in the afternoon. Again, it’s always juggling enough time for the writing and enough time for other commitments, but I do try to give back to my writing community in New Hampshire. The one thing I do find really a challenge is reading. It’s really hard to carve out enough time for reading, and there are so many things I want to read by fellow writers that it’s really hard for me to get to. It’s really, really great stuff, but finding the time to keep up with that—there’s so much good stuff being published, and there’s so much great stuff online. Keeping up with it is a challenge, and there are times when I put my writing before that; I have to.

LJ: I just want to build off what both Angela and Katie were saying about different kinds of engagement with the work and then the bigger world, and also the different shapes that my life has taken. My day-to-day life looks really different than it did five years ago, and in certain ways it’s a million times busier, but I find there really are these pockets. I, too, have a very intense and loving relationship with airplanes and also with airports. People talk about being stuck at the gate, but to me, all I ever want to be doing is reading or writing, and I can do that at the gate. Nobody is asking me to do anything at the gate besides sit there. So I feel like there are all these little spaces that might not look to somebody else like opportunities or anything to be desired. My therapist, when I described residency to her, she said, “This sounds like living hell. You go someplace, and nobody there wants to speak to you, and you know the rule is you don’t speak to anybody else.” But there are certain situations that look like things we have to put up with that are really these charged spaces of opportunity. What you were saying about reading, Katie, really resonates with me. Two days a week, I go to Columbia to teach, and I have an hour commute on the train, and I read. That’s two hours of reading a day. Sometimes I’m sitting for it, sometimes I’m standing for it, other days I have only a half hour on the subway. All of that is the gristle of the commute, and I feel so grateful for it because I do a lot of reading every week but only really because of my subway commute. There are all of these things that I wouldn’t necessarily have thought as sites of opportunity, but if I have the hunger for it, I find where the hunger can land in the space of a day.

MF: Right, you make it work. What about you, Angela?

AF: When I think about solitude, I also think about all the other ways that I have had to spend my time and make money. So even when I’m doing things now that I don’t necessarily think 0f as close to writing, I just remember, “You could be in a walk-in freezer right now.” So even when I don’t have that moment alone, I still find it a valuable moment, and still find that I learn something during it.

KT: I just wanted to say that Isaac Bashevis Singer said that he did his best writing in hotel lobbies.

MF: Oh, hotel lobbies, I haven’t tried that! That brings up, you know, residencies and whatnot, and I’m curious what you think about the idea of solitude and privilege which we’ve been getting at here. There are many women, like single mothers working several jobs, or those who can’t afford an MFA, or who don’t have access to the artistic solitude that writers crave and need. There really needs to be more funding for women. I know that it’s out there, but I feel like there’s not enough for what is available. There are people who don’t even know about it. I know several places that offer it, like A Room of Her Own Foundation. So the question is, how do we make these things accessible for everyone, and how do we help those who are less privileged find the space they need, or learn how to find the space that they need?

AF: I’m kind of going back to a previous question, but one of the things that I think is important to do, for me personally and for me as a writer, is to reach out to writers who perhaps don’t necessarily come from the same pedigree that I do. First of all, the idea of me having a pedigree is very new, but with the way things are in the world—I’m sitting with Leslie, who also went to Iowa, and I start to see how certain things align. I’m not as bristly as I was before about some things. So I try to reach out to other writers. People email me and—not everybody—but I will go to coffee with them

MF: Everyone’s going to email you now.

AF: I try to be aware of how most things cost money. Even if you get a fellowship from A Room of Her Own, there is still the child care, or the lost wages, or whatever you have. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to go into a residency and use up all of their vacation days and all of their vacation money. I’ve met a few people like that, and I try to steer them to places that aren’t completely exorbitant and actually have people who are engaged with their work and can foster some sort of community

LJ: One thing that came to mind when you were asking that question really had to do with childcare. In my own life, I became a full-time stepmom two years ago to a little girl. Everyone’s version of it is different, so I don’t want to project onto anyone, but I experienced the ways in which my own life changed radically, and my own relationship to time changed radically. It’s kind of like the interior space of my own mind, I guess. There’s always this whole set of questions and concerns and plans; the jigsaw puzzle of the day just feels like it’s the fourth dimension in a way it hadn’t before. And it really made me think about how rare the kind of resources are that recognize this part of an adult mind. It’s also reality for men, but I think we all agree it’s a reality in a different way for women. So I really started to get excited when I heard about things like Hedgebrook, which has a residency that also provides child care so women don’t have to figure out a way to leave their kids at home in order to get time to write. I haven’t spent time in that particular version of the community, but it’s very appealing to me, the idea of creating a community where you don’t have to completely bifurcate the kid part of your life and the creative part of your life, but where you can go somewhere for a few weeks and both of those are part of the scene. There are other women with their families, and you’re allocating time to your creative life and to that pursuit but also figuring out ways to bring your kids into that space.

My daughter, I don’t want to see her as a thing that has to exist over here while my creative life exists over there, which maybe gets back to why solitude is necessary for the work. But I’m also really excited for and can see my relationship with her feeding my creative process in so many ways. It’s not like I’m, you know, painting a pot with her for Mother’s Day or something, but I’ve just started to think, what are the ways we can recognize this reality of a woman’s life and try to create spaces where women can be mothers and also have the time they need to work. I do think it’s been a kind of exciting couple of years in terms of women creating pieces of work about motherhood. different facets of the experience, that sort of pushes back against the imperative to keep those sides of life on different sides of a wall.

Photo by Sean Fitzroy.

KT: I’ll just say I really applaud any writers or artists who have children, because I did not have children and it’s partly how I was able to carve out the time for myself. And I became aware, I think, at an early age, that I wasn’t that interested in having children, with my personality and the amount of energy I had—there was only so much that could go around. I did get married, as I said, and have that rich relationship, but I also chose not to have children, and I think it’s really important to find ways to support women who do both.

MF: Exactly. I know there was a lot of talk after this year’s AWP conference about how AWP should offer childcare for mothers who go to that conference.

The writer Dorthe Nors wrote about solitude in a fantastic article for The Atlantic. She said, “Solitude, I think, heightens artistic receptivity in a way that can be challenging and painful. When you sit there, alone and working, you get thrown back on yourself. Your life and your emotions, what you think and what you feel, are constantly being thrown back on you. Artistic solitude is a decision to turn and face these feelings, to sit with them for long periods of time.” So, have any of you ever run away from yourself and what you wanted to write? If you did, how did you find your way back to the page to deal with and reckon with yourself?

KT: Certainly, I’ve run away from plenty of things. I’ve run away and had to put aside things that I couldn’t write at the time; it wasn’t the time for that piece of writing. I guess could answer this question on a day-to-day basis. When I hit those walls in myself or hit those walls in the writing, I take a walk. I go outside. For me spending time in nature is really important. I’m a bird watcher. I find that extremely restoring, so I’m lucky to live in a place where it’s easy for me to get out into the woods pretty quickly and easily. That for me is a way to sort of clear my mind. But in the bigger picture, certainly there have been pieces of writing I’ve simply had to put down from six months or a year or longer and come back when I felt I was ready to confront whatever I needed to confront in that project.

AF: In my novel there were many things that I didn’t want to write and sort of wanted to run away from, usually just from the generic doubt that I can’t pull this off, or I’m not the right person to tell this story. There was one particular element of my novel, a section that’s set all in the 1940s and has a different tone and different characters, and that I really really really kind of ran away from. I didn’t want to do it because I thought it would somehow jeopardize the integrity of all the other parts of the book, but it was also not receding in my mind as something that needed to be in the book. I was living with my boyfriend at the time in DC, and I rented an Airbnb in Tacoma, Washington. I was in this apartment in Tacoma, Washington for 72 hours, and for me, as I said, I like to be in a coffee shop. And I don’t want to be in a quiet coffee shop; I want to be in a loud coffee shop where I can mutter and no one can hear me. So, for me this was really, really difficult. But what was more difficult was that I had a deadline, and I didn’t want to turn in these pages without giving them a shot. I was in this Airbnb for 72 hours, and I just really forced myself—I  didn’t even bring a laptop, so there was no way to procrastinate. The apartment didn’t have a TV which was something I made sure of. It was all I could afford at the time, and I just forced myself, maybe a little bit in a fugue state, but I think I wouldn’t have a novel if I hadn’t forced myself to do that, so I’m a believer in it. I have never been to a residency. Probably because I have a bit of PTSD from the 72 hours in this penthouse, but that is something that would probably be a challenge for me, to be alone for that long.

MF: What comes up for you when you have to be alone for that long? What do you have to deal with?

AF: Sort of just trying things. The idea that one shouldn’t come to the page with so much, one should risk things. If you’ve been working in a certain kind of voice for two years with a particular kind of cadence, it’s like a really well fitting pair of jeans; these are the only jeans you want. You see another pair and you think, they could work, but they could not, so why do this to myself? It’s really just trying on a new kind of posture to write something different. Now, especially as I’m writing more nonfiction, it happens much quicker. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a few hours of pain involved in turning off the part of my brain that was doing this kind of writing and switching to something else, but it’s never as bad as it was that one time. It was really just bizarre how much I didn’t want to write that. But I also think it was because a preponderance of my research had to do with this section that I didn’t want to write; I just felt overwhelmed by all the factoids that I loved.

MF: You’re nodding, Leslie.

LJ: I was just remembering the years I spent failing to write a historical novel, and I would also describe my life as overwhelmed by factoids. I guess I was thinking, for me, one of the most psychically difficult things about writing is that I’ve had to fight in all these ways, through day jobs and life circumstances, to make these pockets of time. Which is true for everyone’s experience of writing, you fight so hard to create this pocket of space and time in which you have no idea what will happen. I used to run cross country in high school and it was like, I knew if I put in a certain kind of training, it was going to make me faster. If X, then Y. But with writing, it’s like, if X, if I do this thing that’s necessary, which is giving myself the space and time, then what? It’s sort of a question mark. You have no idea. You work so hard to offer yourself up to the space of the unknown. So this is much of what I have to coach myself through.

The last residency I went to was a month in Texas, and I was at this point in my life where everything had gone so loud for me. I had this daughter, I had this new marriage, I was traveling every week, I was teaching at two different places, and all I wanted was to have a month to work on this book, you know. I’d been looking forward to it for so long, and then you show up and what you’re showing up for is just terror. Because finally the horizon has come, you’re in it, you’re no longer able to defer like, Okay, when I have the time, when I have the space. You’re in it, you know, and then you have to own up to—I have no idea how to structure this book, I have no idea what it’s going to look like, I have a suitcase and a box of books. They’re with me here in this room. There’s nobody else with me here in this room. But I also feel in kind of this weird way attached to that terror and uncertainty, because I do believe in it as part of the process that you have to offer yourself up to. It’s—you know, like the 72 hours in Tacoma—everything that’s frightening about that is also the thing that you fought so hard to even be able to encounter: the fear of what’s going to happen next, or that terror of what’s going to happen next.

Photo by Sean Fitzroy.

MF: What the three of you are saying makes me think of a great talk I watched last night that Cheryl Strayed gave on Oprah called “A Humble Journey to Greatness.” If you haven’t watched it you should; it’s fantastic. She mentions how she was always ambitious, always wanted to write the Great American novel. With her husband, who’s a documentary filmmaker and also didn’t make that much money—you know, writers, documentary makers, same financial bracket really—she moved to a small town in Massachusetts, and for a year she was just going to have time to write, and they were going to go into credit card debt to allow her to do so. But then she found herself watching reality television because she had cable TV for the first time in her life. And she got hooked on it, and she wasn’t writing, and she started to really resent herself. It wasn’t until she was able to let go of the idea of writing the perfect novel that she was able to focus. So I’m wondering if you guys think perfectionism is the enemy of artistic solitude?

KT: Certainly it’s an issue. I mean, I am something of a perfectionist, and I take my work through many many drafts. I’m a slow writer, I’m a diamond polisher, and I have to get one section of what I’m working on right before I can move on to the next section. Years ago, when I wrote my first novel, I read books on how to write my own novel and most of them said, Sit down, write a draft straight through, don’t look back. Just get it out, get it on the page, and then you can go back and fix it. But I couldn’t do this. I was completely incapable of doing this. And I thought for a long time, you know, I’m doing it wrong, obviously I don’t really know how to write a novel. I’m clearly doing it wrong because all the books tell you to do it the other way. I couldn’t write any other way but going back over and over again to perfect one chapter so I could go to the next chapter. That was the only way I could write. I finally decided, well, I just won’t tell anyone that this is what I’m doing because I know I’m doing it wrong, but I can’t do it any other way. And eventually I got to other writers, like Anne Faderman, who is really wonderful in talking about this, about what it means to be a diamond polisher, and she said, “If that’s your process, that’s your process. Do not fight it.” So, I’ve sort of accepted my own perfectionism and my need to revise repeatedly to work slowly. But there are times when I wish I could get over it.

LJ: It’s funny, I think I don’t necessarily experience perfectionism as an obstacle, if only because I never feel that I am approaching the possibility of a perfect work. But I think that for me, I feel really saved by everything that drafting and redrafting is, because knowing my work, almost all my work, has gone through so many drafts. That can be paralyzing because, you know, you thought you were done with the thing, and now you have to do it six more times, but I actually usually experience that as liberating. Because I have a certain set of things I’m trying to do in the first draft, but I can’t do everything in the first draft, so I’m literally just trying to provide an account of something. And I know that it’s sort of deferred onto this other layer of hypothetical drafts, so I can stop worrying. It’s a way that I can put some anxieties in another room for a little while while I’m writing the first drafts. When I come to the second draft, or the third draft, there’s a different set of questions on the table, but I’m also starting with something more. I really don’t talk about cross country at all, but now I’m bringing it up a second time, but I always loved—I used to run three-mile races—and I would always love to run the third mile the best. Even though physically it’s always the hardest on your body, I loved it because I knew I already had two miles under my belt and that, psychologically, was really wonderful. So I think sometimes what feels so wonderful about a sixth draft, even though I might be exhausted or sick of a thing, is that I also feel the momentum and the layering of what’s happened before. I also really loved what you were saying before, Katie, about not taking on the gospel of some other writing process and instead just listening to what yours is, trying to figure out what yours is and not needing another one. Because so many people put down, You should write every day, or you should write this, and you know, it’s just different. It’s just different for everybody.

MF: Definitely. So, you guys have all talked about where you live. And I’m wondering why you live where you live and how the geography around you influences what you write about? Katie can answer this, I know.

KT: So I grew up in Manhattan, and I went away to college, and I came back in my twenties. I left when I was 30 or so, and I’ve lived in New England ever since then. I loved, loved, loved, the energy of the city when I was a teenager; it was fantastic. And I loved it in my twenties, you know, up until the time when I left, but I feel that to be a writer I really needed to be in a place that was slower and quieter. I just needed more space around me than I had in the city. You know, my other novels are set in New England; they’re set on a fictional island. My new book is set in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Place is very important in my writing. Place is a big part of my novels and my memoir as well. I’m very fascinated in the character of different places, how places shape us and influence us, and I’m always trying to evoke the atmosphere of place in my writing.

AF: For my novel I lived in Iowa City, and then in D.C., and then in LA. I think the important thing is that none of those places were Detroit, where the novel is set. I’m not a person who can write about a place that I live in; at least, I didn’t think I was. While there, I’ve wanted to write about LA, which is also where I’m from, but everything felt very stilted. Again, it comes down to this overwhelming amount of information. Everything seems top priority, but when you have a little distance you’re able to prioritize better. But really, for me, living in New York right now is more about relationships. In LA, I just have so much family. I have so many people who—they’re getting better at understanding that writing is a real job—but I just have so many people who want me to be with them so they can be in the carpool lane and go somewhere, or are cooking meals and inviting me, and I’m interested in meals, so I’ll go. But in New York, I have a lot of—it was important for me to have a support group but not made up of all writers. In New York it’s just worked out in this way way that two of my oldest friends live here. My social circle is not related to my professional circle by and large, and that is something that’s been really good for me. These are people who I’ve known for a long time and I can invite over to my house because I’ve cooked something, but I actually don’t have to put real clothes on. And also, New York is just a beautiful, disgusting place. I was on the G train yesterday and this man was popping his pimples and just sort of wiping them on the subway. At the end of the ride he pulls out a napkin from his pocket—he had a napkin the whole time! I guess he didn’t want to waste it.

MF: What about you, Leslie?

LJ: I’m just loving imagining all these people getting on the G train with with fear in their heart and Purell in their hands. I guess I would echo some of that. When I moved to New York this time around, it was totally for personal reasons. I came here for the relationships that are here for me, and because I wanted a world and a community and the people that I could wear sweatpants around. And the reason that I still live here is because of my family. My husband lives here, and it was a big deal to get my husband to move to Brooklyn because he’d been in Manhattan for 20 years. I was telling some of my students this—our daughter had only ever known Manhattan, so when she moved a year and a half ago she experienced that as shifting from a city girl to a country girl. So this is their home. In certain ways, there’s a lot I love about New York. In terms of my writing life I experience New York probably more as an obstacle than as a catalyst, although I’m totally open to the ways that that can keep shifting and changing. There’s a lot that’s exciting to me about being here, but I think it’s a little more intuitive or organic for me to write here than in less engaging and outward places. Writing has been really central to my life, but relationships have always been more central. So in terms of how I make decisions, that’s never been a question for me. That shapes the terms of things, and the writing sort of finds ways to move into the grooves of what life is.

Photo by Sean Fitzroy.

MF: So my last questions for you guys is, in a recent article for Literary Hub called, “The Perpetual Solitude of the Writer,” Adam Haslett says that artists remove themselves in order to return. Do you agree with that statement?

AF: I haven’t read the essay yet, but Adam Haslett four years ago was teaching at a conference, and I was lucky enough to be there. Sort of related to that same sentiment, he talked about the particular way a writer moves through the world feeling guilty about the way that they process intense experiences, because they’re happening to you—maybe not everyone is like this, maybe I’m just exposing myself as a terrible person, but if I’m terrible he is too, because he had articulated this—say you’re on the phone with your uncle who is on his deathbed and you’re very upset about it, but you’re also sort of disgusted because even as it’s happening, you’re turning it over, and you’re looking at it from other angles. You wish you weren’t, you really wish you weren’t, but you cannot stop. And it’s not because you want to make money, because for me particularly, I’ve been doing it since I was a child. So it’s not that I want to make money or write a story. But it’s this way in which I am both there and not there, thinking about what it means and how I can explain what it means, which is the grain, the story, right? There are moments when you’re both open and you’re drinking it in, but then you can feel that there’s a conflict there, that you’re not actually experiencing anything that’s happening in your life. I think that one of the benefits of solitude is being able to pull back and mine that which you’re preoccupied with and get it down on paper so that you’re not greedily turning through your actual life experiences. That’s what I think solitude can help you do, have those moments when you can be in the world and be a little bit closer to a normal person.

LJ: Yeah, in that vein, what really resonates to me from that quote—and I thought it was a really beautiful piece, I read it a couple  days ago—is the idea that part of what it means to be a writer, at least how it’s felt to me, is being in this constant state of moving between. Certainly this book that I’ve been working on for the past five years has felt like moving between states of intense engagement and remove. My artistic life is always about removing myself and then returning. It’s embedded into the whole process of the work, immersing myself into different environments like reporting relationships with subjects, like archives, like sustained bouts of reading. I had to be in all of those in order to even encounter the issues that were driving the work. And I guess I would include certain life experiences as sort of states of immersion from the past decade of my life that have now become part of the book. But all of those states of engagement were so necessary to what the book was, so I don’t think of my artistic life right now as primarily one of removal, even though certain parts of the writing process have involved being alone in all kinds of rooms and being alone in all kinds of quiet. It’s always in this state of flux with all those other kinds of engagement.

MF: What about you, Katie? The poet Robert Dunn removed himself from society in lots of ways, but he also was very much part of his community in Portsmouth. So how do you think about that sentiment?

KT: Well, part of what made me want to write the book was that I was so fascinated by this person who managed to be very solitary and very connected at the same time. But he dictated the terms on which he was connected. You know, he’d stop to talk to people on the street, he walked everywhere because he didn’t have a car, he knew all the shopkeepers in town, and that was his social world. But no ever went to his house; he rented a single room in this house that was downtown, and no one ever went to that room, no one was ever invited there—so he was connected to people and yet maintained this sort of wall around that private life and writing was his private life. And in the book I write about, for myself, this sense of almost constantly living a double life, of being in the world and watching it at the same time, and as Angela said, as writers that’s the way we work, that’s the way we process our experience. But I think it’s part of why I took up birdwatching really seriously about six years ago, because when I am doing that, I am completely immersed in the moment. I am completely present, and I’m not reflecting on it, and there’s nothing there. I mean, I might someday write about the experience of birdwatching because it’s very compelling to me but there’s nothing there I’m going to use, you know? I’m really purely in the moment. There was a hunger in me for that kind of experience, to experience something in that way where I’m not filing anything away that I could use later, I wasn’t observing something that might be fuel for the writing.