Virginia Hartman

Virginia Hartman is the author of the novel The Marsh Queen. She was born in Florida to parents from Ohio, so she has a hybrid southern/northern sensibility. She holds an MFA from American University and teaches creative writing at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her undergrad degree was in film, and she worked in that industry for several years before going back to school for her writing degree. Hartman's stories have been shortlisted for the New Letters prize, the Tennessee Williams Festival Prize, and the Dana Awards.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

“The Marsh Queen” is the name of a fairy story told to Loni Murrow, the protagonist, by her father when she was a girl. In it, the fairy queen of the marsh is a being who can travel between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Loni believed it with all her might when she was younger, especially after her father died in the swamp. As an adult, she thinks she has put fairy stories behind her, but the richness of this one resonates into the present for her in surprising ways.

What's in a name?

I had fun naming the characters for this book. Loni is named after her two grandmothers—the haughty Lorna Hodgkins and the backwoods herbalist Mae Murrow. She is affectionately known as “Loni Mae” to her dad, but after he dies, she doesn’t like anyone to call her that. Her name represents the two parts of her, and also much of the tension within the story.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I think my teenage self would say, Virginia, you wrote this? Well, good on you! I told everyone when I was twelve that I was going to be a writer, but by the time I was sixteen, my head had been turned by high school theatre, and I was sure there was stage performance in my future. Little did I know it would come in handy when I finally went back to what I should have been doing all along, and discovered that a large part of book promotion involves reading your work aloud in front of an audience.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Ah, heck. They’re all me. Not literally. But, well, I’m a quilter when I’m not writing. And while it’s nice to take a break from words sometimes and assemble a bunch of colorful scraps, the task is not really that different from constructing a novel. All these characters have a scrap of something I feel or have felt—even the unattractive characters. Even the ones you might call the bad guys. I’m sometimes surprised at the fictional elements that bubble up from a memory, a passing phrase, a particular smell, or sometimes a swatch of color I see in my peripheral vision.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Endings. Harder by a mile. But I change the beginnings more. I have a friend, the writer Sarah Sorkin, who was in my MFA program, and for years we have called each other at least once a week to hold each other accountable to our writing projects. She always reads my drafts and she is a stickler about endings. I am so grateful for that. For me, the ending has to have a certain “snap” to it. Not in the tie-everything-up-in-a-bow sense, but in the sense of “Ah, this makes sense and is satisfying.” Beginnings get more rewrites, though, because you don’t know what the story is about when you start. As the story evolves, as you redraft and discover all the connections, you have a better idea of what must go into the first pages of a novel. I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Water, science, horticulture, canoeing, zoology, people’s different conceptions of the world, natural and otherwise, throughout the centuries. I learned so much about herbology while I was writing this novel. I counted lying on my couch reading herb lore as writing. Same with ornithology. Tramping through the woods with binoculars—it was great fun, but it also counted as research. I find the smell of a forest or a swamp inspiring, and I hope readers can smell it with me, go there with me, know it in their bones.

Visit Virginia Hartman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue