Stephanie Reents

Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Reents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years; a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Reents's new novel is We Loved To Run.

My Q&A with the author:

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

We Loved To Run is a funny title because the first line of my novel is “We hated a lot of things…” followed by a whole list of running adjacent things my characters dislike, including their coaches. I knew from the very beginning that my novel would explore how my characters – the members of a women’s cross country team competing for a small New England college in the early 1990s – both love running and also hate it at times because of the amount of sacrifice involved in training to be fast and setting their sights on a spot at nationals. The first plural voice – “we” – is very important in my novel, which alternates between the communal voice of the team (which truly belongs to the team and not any single character) and the perspectives of two individual runners: Danielle, the team captain, and Kristin, a runner who is determined to steal the top spot from another runner. In my experience whenever a character insists on something – like “we loved to run” – you know their feelings about it are probably more complicated. As it so happens, my characters do love to run (and also hate it) and there are other less tangible challenges they’re trying to convince themselves they can overcome.

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

I ran in both high school and college, and so writing this book meant spending a lot of time with that distant teenage and young adult runner. (I’m in my 50s now.) I think she would love this novel because it’s about young female athletes: their physical strength and mental fortitude; the highs and lows of training, the thrill and heartbreak of racing; the complexity of team dynamics; and finally, the beautiful fierceness of women’s friendships. I didn’t know of a single book about women runners – or even women athletes – when I was growing up. There are a handful of novels about women sports now more than thirty-five years later, but we still need more!

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

I wrote the beginning of this novel in my first graduate school workshop in the late 1990s. Then it was the beginning of a short story that wasn’t very good. I remember a very cool man named Eli (who also happened to be a talented writer) scribbling on the back of my manuscript, “Find a plot!” What I did find was the communal voice of the team—which was still exciting to me twenty years later when I started working on this novel in earnest. The first lines of that story became the first lines of this novel; of course, once I began discovering the plot and getting to know the six cross country runners at the heart of my novel, I layered in more details to the opening chapter of my novel.

I love writing endings, and they’re also really hard to figure out. With We Loved to Run, I first tried an experimental shortcut way to get to the end of the novel, which failed because it was just a lame attempt to avoid writing the final section. Then, I wrote an ending that took me (and my characters) to the right place (an abandoned farmhouse) but missed the mark on tone and mood. Then, I got the tone and action right, but my editor suggested that the novel needed one more chapter.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Walking both inspires me and fuels my creative process. I love what Rebecca Solnit says about web of connections between walking, observing, and thinking in her book, Wanderlust: “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.” I spent hours roaming Providence, where I was living when I started writing this book, and Seattle, where I moved with my family when I was finishing it. I also backpacked in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho and repeatedly climbed Old Steepie, a stretch of dirt road on an island in the San Juans, one of my very favorite places for writing and walking and thinking.

Visit Stephanie Reents's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Kissing List.

Writers Read: Stephanie Reents (June 2012).

--Marshal Zeringue

Marisa Silver

Marisa Silver is the author of the novels The Mysteries; Little Nothing; Mary Coin, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award; The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; and No Direction Home. Her first collection of short stories, Babe in Paradise was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. When her second collection, Alone with You was published, The New York Times called her “one of California’s most celebrated contemporary writers.” Her fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Cullman Center for Scholars and writers. She lives in Los Angeles.

At Last is Silver's new novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

At Last follows the lives of two women who enter into an uneasy, often competitive relationship when their children marry. The lengths they go to prove that they are the more essential matriarch is sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreaking and often both at the same time. But underneath all of their missteps lies their desire to love and be loved by their children, their granddaughter, and, in the strange ways that love shows up, by each other — at last.

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

I wasn’t the most dedicated reader as a kid. This is an understatement. My free time was mostly spent sitting in a swivel chair in our den daydreaming or staring out the window, observing people on the street, and wondering about their lives. My parents were great readers who considered reading to be maybe the only valuable way to spend your spare time. They found my lack of interest troubling, maybe a sign that I just wasn’t going to measure up to their hopes for me. Often, my mother would come to me with a book she’d just read and loved, urging it on me. And because I wanted to please her and maybe because I secretly believed my parents might be right, and that I wasn’t going to amount to much, I read what she gave me: the works of writers like Paula Fox, Toni Morrison, Alix Kates Schulman, Marge Piercy, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, to name a few. My mother was interested in the lives of women, and although I don’t think I would have been able to articulate this when I was a teenager, she was interested in the ways women claimed themselves in worlds where they were not always given agency. I like to think that had At Last been published when I was a kid, it would have been one of the books she would have found compelling for those same reasons and that she would have pressed it on me, and that I would have read it.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings?

When I start a novel or a story, I feel like I’m circling a monolithic building that has no obvious doorway and I’m trying to figure out a way in. And then, after a lot of thinking, some pounding (i.e. my head against a wall) a little fissure opens up and I slip inside and begin. I tend to start in the middle of something that’s already going on. In the case of At Last, the two central characters are stuck in a car together as they make preparations for the wedding of their children. They’ve never met before. The intimacy of the tight space horrifies them both. This seemed like a great way to begin a story about the battle of two formidable wills.

I never know where I’m heading with a novel and so I don’t know where things will end up. I like to work this way. I want to discover and be surprised by what I write just as much as I want a reader to be surprised by how the novel delivers more than what might be obvious at the outset.

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

When I was a young girl, my parents would go on holidays and leave me and my older sister in the care of our grandmothers. One day, when one grandmother was driving us to the other’s house, she said “You love me more than you love her, don’t you?” I have never forgotten this, and I wrote At Last to explore what might have made her say that. But beyond that, the novel and its characters are imagined. Figuring out how to make a pure invention make what we think we are familiar with and know, unfamiliar and new – that, for me, that’s the challenge and the joy of writing.

Visit Marisa Silver's website.

The Page 69 Test: The God of War.

--Marshal Zeringue