Two Interviews on the Landscapes of Love & Loss

Newfound Interviews, Spring 2021

Gwen Goodkin

Love and Loss Intertwined: An Interview with Gwen Goodkin

Gwen Goodkin is the author of the short story collection, “A Place Remote” (West Virginia University Press, 2020), a breathtaking and candid glimpse into the lives of those in small Ohio towns, from the university town of southeastern Oxford farther north to Mansfield and on up to the northeastern towns and farms along Highway 18. The stories appraise and illuminate the attitudes, desires, pursuits, misunderstandings, demands, and caring of their characters, who reach for more, not always finding truth nor satisfaction inside their wishes. In prose that is reflective and thoughtful, Goodkin leads us to places she knows well, to people she understands, with an awareness of and respect for their lives, whether rich with friends, complicated by struggles, or brightened by hope.

Sara Schaff

Love, Love, Love: An Interview with Sara Schaff

Sara Schaff’s story collections “The Invention of Love” (Split/Lip Press, 2020) and “Say Something Nice About Me” (Augury Books, 2016) share a language that is at once straightforward and deeply considered, as well as a landscape that reveals as much about character as it does about geography. Generations of characters are examined, many balanced on the precipice where middle-class meets poverty, from youthful, wishing children to mature, meandering adults, and their stories are threaded with themes of hope, disquiet, friendship, envy, solitude, and community. With great care and understanding, Schaff explores childhood loneliness, teenage rebellion, young adult aspirations, adult anxiety—the kind that occurs between having children and peering forward to old age—all within the boundless and hopeful measures of love. In prose that is direct and honest, the stories reach toward strands of emotion buried within or tightly encircling the characters, breathing them alive.

THE FROM-AWAYS - A Novel of Maine

THE FROM-AWAYS - A Novel of Maine

An Interview with CJ Hauser

“THE FROM-AWAYS,” CJ Hauser’s extraordinary first novel, encompasses the relationships of old-timers and newcomers in a small coastal town in Maine. Here, subjects as diverse as historical preservation and economic progress, along with ideas of love and trust, loss and belonging, shift and fit together. From the first scene of setting lobsters free to the final moments of bell buoys and safe return, the novel reveals itself as “a novel of Maine.” Leah and Quinn, two twenty-four-year-old women who write copy and drink whiskey, are “the from-aways”—outsiders, newcomers—to the town of Menamon, looking for their place in the world, and over the course of a year, they learn how much they belong.

CJ Hauser is very aware of PLACE in her writing, as revealed in many of her stories, from “ABANDONED CARS,” the winner of the THIRD COAST’s 2012 Jaimy Gordon Prize in Fiction, “THE SHAPESHIFTER PRINCIPLE” in TIN HOUSE, and “A BAD YEAR FOR APPLES” in TRIQUARTERLY. Place can be as noisy and hot as summer in Flatbush, as undone as the scorched interior of a car, or as in “THE FROM-AWAYS,” it can be as inviting as a Christmas tree lot complete with hot cocoa in hand, as a quilt-lined dinghy rocked by gentle waves. “THE FROM-AWAYS” invites us to know hardship as well us comfort, and does so with enormous expressiveness via the viewpoints of Quinn and Leah.

Lobstah

“I have two lobsters in my bathtub and I’m not sure I can kill them.”

— Opening line of “THE FROM-AWAYS” by CJ Hauser

CJ, I love the first line of “THE FROM-AWAYS.” Immediately, we know where we are—Maine!—and a New York City girl with a large heart is about to set her supper free. It’s like a different version of the scene in “ANNIE HALL.” No chasing lobsters around the kitchen; instead, Leah’s having a beer with a pair in the bathroom. There’s humor and a beautiful introduction of Leah’s relationship with her new husband, Menamon native, Henry Lynch. How did you decide on the opening scene? Were there influences from your own life that inspired you here?

I love that you bring up “ANNIE HALL,” because that scene is so wonderful, and of course was an inspiration to me. But I think that opening truly grew out of one summer when I was a nanny on Rhode Island. I was supposed to cook the kids lobster while their parents were out to dinner…but I’d never actually cooked a lobster before—my father had always done the cooking—and so I had these lobsters out on the counter and the kids were yelling from the other room and I found myself about to cry because I had no idea what I was going to do. Then, this friend of the kids’ parents, a trouble-making, blustery older guy from Mississippi who insisted I call him “Uncle Richard,” came waltzing into the kitchen and said, You’re doing it wrong! And I said, I haven’t even done anything yet! and he said, That’s your problem, not doing anything. 

He showed me how to cook them, a method that involved pots of sea water from the bay, and beer, and lobster-belly tickling, and both of us drinking chardonnay.

The lobsters came out perfectly—but the kids wouldn’t eat them. They took one bite and said lobster was gross and so I made them butter noodles instead and Richard and I ate the lobsters and everyone was happy. Why aren’t you at dinner with the grown-ups? I asked Richard. He said, I’ve never much cared for grown-ups.

“THE FROM-AWAYS” – by CJ Hauser

The structure of “THE FROM-AWAYS” relates to the seasons—the book moving from “Summer” to “Summer, Again”—and relationships—as revealed by Leah and Quinn’s alternating chapters. Leah and Quinn each have their reasons for moving to Menamon—Leah, to become part of Henry’s life, and Quinn, to rediscover the father she’d lost in childhood. What were the reasons for choosing seasonal markers and characters new to the town to tell this story?

Maybe I’m just homesick because I live in Florida now, but up north the seasons feel so important to how we live in the world. Every winter, sometime around March or April I’d start to give up all hope for life and feel like tossing myself from a window. And then every June I’d think everything is so wonderful I might explode and I couldn’t even remember what winter was like. I think New England summer might have the same effect on the brain that the chemical cocktail new mothers get hit with does… You know, where they feel so full of love and happiness that their memories of the pain of childbirth are dulled and fuzzled so they’ll forget the bad parts and remember the good and be more likely to do it all again?

This may sound extreme, but so is a New England winter.

It felt impossible to tell a Maine story without seasons. It was also important to me to show that this takes place over the course of a year because Leah and Quinn both want to make changes in their life so quickly. Leah wants to be a local in Menamon and comfortable in her marriage, and Quinn wants to be grieving her mother less keenly and to form a relationship with her father… But these things can’t happen quickly. There’s a German word I learned by way of Emerson: naturlangsamkeit. It means the slowness of nature. Both women in the book have to learn to let things grow and die at their own natural pace.

Backshore Afternoon – by Joshua Adam

“Because you cannot always know with love.

If we knew how things would turn out for certain,

knew a person completely, that would be far too easy.”

— Leah – “The From-Aways” by CJ Hauser

Relationships, especially occurring in pairs, are central to the novel: Quinn and Leah, Leah and Henry, Quinn and Carter, Leah and Charley, Quinn and Rosie, and so on. Ideas of trust and love, honesty and lying, forgiving and growing up arise within the various formulations of these pairings. Leah and Henry begin and end the book, and it’s lovely how their relationship develops, particularly in that we learn this through Leah’s perspective. How did you discover her sensibility—from her humor and her anger to her eventual understanding of her marriage and her place in Menamon?

Honestly, I think that in the first draft of this novel Leah was a lot more competent and kind and that just wasn’t very interesting at all and I knew something had to give…

I once had a relationship where I just felt like I was failing all the time. Everything I did was wrong. And I learned a lot of things from that. I learned to sometimes stand up and yell I AM NOT WRONG THIS TIME! MOST OF THE TIME BUT NOT THIS TIME! But I also learned that there were a lot of things about being in a relationship I didn’t know how to manage, and that there was a lot of sacrifice and synchronicity required to pull one off.

In the following drafts of the book I gave this experience to Leah in an amplified way and suddenly she was no longer nice or competent. She repeats throughout the book that she is “good at many things,” until it becomes a kind of protest-too-much refrain and we realize that she knows she’s trying but failing to be good, most of the time. As we all are.

Including all of Leah’s mistakes and selfishness made writing her more difficult… but I hope it makes her character more honest too. She is not necessarily a blanket-likeable woman, but I hope that a lot of readers will see the truth in her and respond well to that.

“Totem, Houligan’s Gulch” – by Joshua Adam

The novel’s complications push past individual concerns to larger ones, each piece fitting into the story and then moving it forward. Quinn will eventually meet her father, the famous musician Carter Marks, and discover her own talent for music; Leah will decide where she stands, even if in disagreement with Henry; and the town will gather in the local bar and on the town green to work against the forces that threaten a longtime way a life. When juggling all of the parts that create a whole—in light of character arcs and plot lines, pivotal moments and scenes—how do you keep track?

I cannot tell you how much I wish I were the sort of writer who had a master plan for plots and characters—but I’m not. Honestly? I invented the place and the people and the relationships… seeded some conflicts… and then I figured out how they all worked together from there. Which is to say, it’s like I bought a bunch of ingredients and decided what meal I could cook with them, instead of having headed to the store with a recipe in hand.

I don’t recommend this. I’m trying to be more intentional and scheming with my next project…. but maybe some of our brains just don’t work that way. I’ll let you know how it goes…

“I watch this solar system of tiny revolving bodies orbiting Rosie’s head.”

— Quinn - "THE FROM-AWAYS” by CJ Hauser

Imagery plays a role in terms of the characters. Quinn describes Rosie in a halo of light with moths circling and landing in her hair. Quinn says: “All I want to do is stare and stare at this girl’s face, and yes, I really am in trouble now. Bad trouble, I think as I watch this solar system of tiny revolving bodies orbiting Rosie’s head.” Leah speaks of Henry in similar ways: “the moon” like a marker, “the deep orange color of wild honey,” illuminating their marriage, its brightness “too bright,” fooling them with its reflection. Tell us how you come upon imagery as it relates to your characters.

There are lots of reasons to write, but for me, most things begin with an image. Blood-brown lobsters in an old bathtub. A moon hanging low so it looks like its sitting on a hill. A swarm of moths around a head. Someone fingering a glass taxidermy eye their pocket. These are things I see in my head and I want to make them so that other people can see them too. I used to draw and paint a lot because of this same urge, but GOOD GOD was I a terrible painter. I don’t code images as symbols, and I seldom enjoy work where writers work with images as symbols first and as visceral things second. It’s a gut thing. And if you get it right, the meaning will follow.

           “I’m not really a New Yorker in a dinghy anymore.”

           — Leah – “THE FROM-AWAYS” by CJ Hauser

Belief in belonging is something Leah and Quinn share as “the from-aways,” while trying to find their way in Menamon. Quinn understands this as framed within the family picture, a family perfect in its imperfections. And Leah finds she’s “not really a new Yorker in a dinghy anymore,” how she “may have gotten a late start but it is not too late… to belong to this place.” Is the idea of belonging one you visit now and again in your writing, or is it a newer concern? What are other ideas that call to you and inspire your fiction?

I worry a lot about geography. I grew up in a little New England town to which I very much belonged. I felt at home there and had family ties there back some years. But, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized I’ll likely never live there again, and while it’s exciting to think I could live anywhere, I wonder what I’ll lose by not staying at home. Sometimes I think this means I’ll never get to feel like belong to a place again. When I say belong, I mean you can describe who lives in every house and what the snow there tastes like and you know what day in May the dragonflies will emerge for their yearly insect orgy and that every godforsaken thing in the place you see kaleidoscopically, like it’s shattered into all the different times you’ve seen it over the years and you can see all those times at once. A depth of experience, I guess, is what I’m talking about. But maybe there’s something to leaving all that behind. To starting fresh. It sounds very liberating, actually. And I like to imagine that if I do someday live in a new place, I’ll have to learn all that stuff from scratch. Probably from the people who are from there. I will probably have to learn it through stories those people will tell me. And that, actually, sounds pretty wonderful.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way certain stories resonate through time while others get lost. I’ve been thinking about how stories work with time and what stories might look like in the future. And all this is part of the jumble that I’m working on for my next book, which is going to be an adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s comedies.

Eagle Island Bell – by Joshua Adam

Bell buoys, lobster pots, or coastal carousels?

Bell buoys, forever and always.

Thank you, CJ, for this wonderful conversation! And for all of the readers here, spread the word! “THE FROM-AWAYS” is a beautiful debut novel and even includes Maine recipes, a familiar jukebox playlist, and the more in its final pages.

CJ Hauser

CJ HAUSER is from the small but lovely town of Redding, Connecticut. Her fiction has appeared in TIN HOUSE, THE KENYON REVIEW, TRIQUARTERLY, AND ESQUIRE, among other places. She is the 2010 recipient of McSWEENEY’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award and the winner of THIRD COAST’s 2012 Jaimy Gordon Prize in Fiction. A graduate of Georgetown University and Brooklyn College, she is not in hot pursuit of her PhD at the Florida State University. Though ever and always a New Englander in her heart, CJ currently lives in a small white house under a very mossy oak in Tallahassee, Florida.

Images and author photograph with permission of CJ Hauser.

Images of Joshua Adam’s oil paintings, including the feature photo, “Boathouse at the Point,” with permission of artist.

Visit The Adam Gallery in Castine, Maine.

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

Questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

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First posted in the Arts section of Hothouse Magazine.

The Coastal Concerns of JoeAnn Hart

“While he lamented the shipwreck that was his marriage, he mourned the equally disastrous changes in his old route. It was no longer the road of his blissfully rudderless youth, when this stretch was a wild and untamed curve of the bay, dotted with signs of warning—“Swim at your own risk” and “Caution, strong tides”—which had only encouraged recklessness. This area had once been so sparsely settled that, at low tide, he and his older brother, Nod, could walk the few rocky miles from their house to their dad’s office without ever touching the civilization of the sidewalk. They loved the damp band of earth that was neither wholly sea nor entirely land, a constantly changing landscape that offered their prepubescent souls new, exciting dangers to overcome. Duncan and Nod had felt themselves gifted at avoiding the perils of the seaweed slicks. They had leaped across the cracks and crevices with ease, even grace, and had waded unafraid through tide pools full of barnacles and crabs. They had scratched their bare legs on wire lobster traps and tripped on minefields of trash, surviving to tell the tale. As boys, they were masters of their world, demi-gods of the water’s edge. Now their infinite kingdom was gone.”–JoeAnn Hart

JoeAnn Hart writes about environmental concerns that affect coastal regions, where sea and land meet, and where ecosystems are made even more fragile by man’s irresponsible pursuits. Her characters are observant and engaging, her prose layered with metaphor, her setting lush with realism, and her themes linked to the beauty and tragedy of the natural world. In this interview she speaks of her novel, Float, and the environment, as well as community and collaboration.

JoeAnn, tell us about your background. Has Gloucester always been your home? And how has that coastal landscape influenced your writing?

I grew up in the Bronx, then Westchester, before escaping to the Rocky Mountains, which is where young people went in the 70’s. Most of New York was cavorting about in Boulder, including the man who would be my husband. He was from Manhattan, but had just inherited a creaky house in Gloucester, and so I was dragged, somewhat kicking and screaming, from the sunny mountains to the icy sea. It was January, 1979. The sky was gray, the snow was gray, and the harbor was frozen over for the first time in decades. It was no Coastal Living magazine spread. I was only 22, and I wasn’t sure I had the fortitude for maritime life, but love being what it is, I stayed, and Gloucester became a part of me, and me of it. I didn’t start writing until much later, when the working waterfront had already begun its decline. The fisheries were decimated by the industrial fleet with their bottom-scraping trawls, and plastic debris was becoming the main harvest in the nets. In Float, I’ve tried to come to grips with the crippling of the local fishing fleet, and the ecological devastation of the seas. Most writers attack these problems through journalism and other non-fiction formats, but I am comfortable writing about these issues in fiction. I believe that environmentally conscious fiction can forge a strong connection between the brain and the heart, and become a catalyst for social change.

JoeAnn Hart’s novel, FLOAT – Art by Karen Ristuben / Design by John Yunker

“A wry tale of financial desperation, conceptual art, insanity, infertility, seagulls, marital crisis, jellyfish, organized crime, and the plight of a plastic-filled ocean, JoeAnn Hart’s novel takes a smart, satirical look at family, the environment, and life in a hardscrabble seaside town in Maine.”

I love this description of Float. Would you tell us the details of what inspired you to write this novel? And how you decided on the title and on Duncan Leland, the man whose “infinite kingdom” is facing rising tides, as the character through which the story is revealed?

As with my first novel, Addled, I started out with the title, Float, then dove in to play with all the many different meanings and images. The concept of Float began when I heard a friend tell me what her therapist told her, that she had to learn to float over her stress, that she couldn’t struggle against every crisis or else she would get pulled under and drown. So she learned to just say the word float whenever she was stressed and it helped get her through. I thought that was brilliant, and started building on it. I developed a main character, Duncan Leland, who had both his personal and business life in jeopardy, then I gave him a crazy mother to boot. Through the course of the book, he must learn to float, or sink. I used ‘float’ not just in this psychological sense but also in its financial meaning, as in, to float a loan. Then there are the things that float in the ocean, such as plastic, or dead humans. A float is also a wooden platform connected to a dock by a ramp, and it moves up and down with the tides. Not to mention, floating on air.

Tidal pools, salt marshes, or white-capped seas?

Since I am a total wimp, no white-capped seas for me. I enjoy watching them from a distance, inside. Near a fireplace. And when I think salt marsh, I think greenhead flies, who will rip the flesh off your bones during breeding season. There are a few toe-biting crabs scuttling along the bottom, but you won’t ever find a shark in a tide pool.

JoeAnn Hart with Daisy – Photo credit: Morgan Baird

What has been the most memorable harbor sighting from your dory? And does Daisy, your rescue pup, share these fair-weather outings?

The most wonderful part of rowing around the harbor in a silent vessel like a dory is the seals. They are as curious about us as we are about them, so we – me and my rowing partner, Sarah – always have an eye out for a mammalian head peeking out of the water. It is amazing to think of these large animals, these air-breathing animals like us, living under the ocean’s surface. It is not just a parallel universe to ours, but a completely foreign landscape, and here is an ambassador from that country –  a seal – saying hello. To them, we are a dark lozenge shape moving slowly over their heads. They see the tips of our oars enter the water, then disappear. What are we doing, they wonder. What are they doing, we wonder. Daisy doesn’t come on the dory with us – she much prefers luxury motor yachts with staff – but when I walk her on Brace Cove and it is low tide and the seals are sunning themselves on the rocks, they seem to know one another. The seals arch up, as she goes by, and stare. Perhaps they feel their vestigial leg bones twitch, just a little, as they watch her jump from rock to rock.

You are active in the Gloucester writing community—including the Gloucester Writers Center and the Rocky Neck Art Colony—as well as environmental alliances and animal rescues—NAMA: Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, Save Your Ass Long Ear Rescue, and more. It seems you’ve found a way to traverse the worlds of art and environment. Collaboration is also evident in your choice of artist Karen Ristuben’s cover image for Float, and your partnered gallery reading/artist discussion this September. With your past, present, and future endeavors in mind, is the environmental path of your writing career ever overwhelming? Or does the support of community and collaboration keep you energized and inspired?

In almost all cases, I get back more from an organization than I give. Usually, that pay-back is in the form of satisfaction of having at least tried to make a difference in the world, especially when it comes to the environment. There is also the payback of connection. I’ve met wonderful people working with groups. I’ve also met a few clunkers, but it’s all grist for the mill. Humans just crack me up. We say one thing, and do another, and we almost always work against our own best interests, especially when it has to do with the environment. Here we are, a species destroying our own habitat, and we just continue on our way as if it’s not happening. So I have nothing but admiration for organizations that keep fighting the good fight even as we’re sinking. Especially the arts and humanities, which are too often viewed as if they were an accessory to our culture, and not the defining aspect of our species. Science can make us think, but the arts make us feel, and in order to make the right decisions for the future of the world, we need to use the whole brain, not just half of it. We should all try to approach the world with the wonder of an artist and the curiosity of the scientist. Gloucester artist, Karen Ristuben, who did the cover art for Float, has this sensibility, so I was thrilled when Ashland Creek, who specializes in environmental literature, chose her photographs for Float. We were on a panel together this summer with other environmental artists and writers – Kyle Brown and David Abrams – to talk  about how the arts can be used to enhance environmental action. It was the hottest night of the year in an un-air-conditioned space, and we had a packed house, which demonstrates a great deal of interest in the collaboration between the arts and the environmental sciences.

NAMA is important because they promote local fishing in the same way that the plight of the family farm was brought to our attention. We can fish and save the fish at the same time if we have the right international policies, and if people understand where their fish comes from and how it is caught. And of course, Save Your Ass is close to my heart because we got Abe and Zach from them. We love our donkeys, and we like to think they love us too.

JoeAnn Hart – Photo credit: Brendan Pike

JoeAnn Hart is the award-winning author of the novels, Addled, (Little, Brown) and Float, (Ashland Creek Press), a finalist for the Dana Award in the Novel, and an excerpt of which won the Doug Fir Fiction Award. Her work explores the relationship between humans and their environment, natural or otherwise. Recent stories, essays and articles have appeared in The Sonora Review, Newfound Journal, and The Boston Globe Magazine.

Photos by JoeAnn Hart, Morgan Baird, and Brendan Pike.

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

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This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.