interview with lance olsen about my mother's lovers

Continuities:

An Interview with Joy Passanante

Lance Olsen

Joy Passanante, an apprehensive flyer on the best of days, got the idea for her first novel, My Mother’s Lovers, at 35,000 feet somewhere between St. Louis, Missouri, and Moscow, Idaho, in the summer of 1989 when the 727 she was on encountered a patch of rough air.

She made a promise to herself on the spot: make it out okay, and she’d begin a book—a creative enterprise she had dreamed about undertaking ever since she was nine. The crash that didn’t occur that August day in our world does in the novel that resulted, and forms a major turning point for its protagonist, Lake Rose Davis, in the sometimes funny, frequently poignant, and always emotionally turbulent story of her coming of age. Lake’s hippie parents drive west on their Keseyesque bus in the late Sixties in an attempt to leave behind the country’s violent unraveling. They set up a small bookstore in Wilders Ferry (think Bonners Ferry, then add a dash of Sandpoint), population 508, and commence raising their new daughter. From early on, Lake loathes the gossip, petty feuds, and layered secrets that define tiny-town life. She longs for a more cultivated, unlocked existence that she imagines a city might provide. Through a series of plot switchbacks as involved as a soap opera, Lake gets her wish and soon finds herself living with her nourishing grandparents in the St. Louis burbs.

Born in 1947, Passanante was raised in suburban St. Louis as well. She graduated Washington University with a B.A. in English in 1969 and Cornell University with a master’s degree in teaching in 1971. As an undergraduate, she met Gary Williams in a Shakespeare class. They married in 1970 and after graduate school moved to Moscow, Idaho, where Williams had landed a job as assistant professor of American literature in the English department at the University. Their first daughter, Liza, was born in 1973; their second, Emily, in 1976.

While Passanante has been writing her whole life, she became increasingly serious about the craft during the late Eighties and early Nineties. Her fiction, poetry, and essays began appearing in such distinguished journals as Alaska Quarterly, Short Story, and College English. In 1999, she published a poetry chapbook, Sinning in Italy (Limberlost Press). She received a fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts for her fiction in 1990 and for her poetry in 2001. Since 1988, she has been a lecturer in the English department at the University of Idaho, where she offers classes in fiction and poetry writing, the literature of western civilization, and business writing.

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LO: Lake Rose Davis, your novel’s protagonist, feels deeply out-of-place growing up in Wilders Ferry. She conceives of herself as a kind of freak, someone who finds it impossible to fit in, and longs for a more refined, urban (or at least suburban) existence. What three words would you use to describe your own childhood in St. Louis, and would Lake share any of them?

JP: Ethnically diverse (okay, that’s two words). Privileged. Different. Although an analyst might say I was using Lake’s character to project how isolated and out of place I felt when we moved all the way across the country from upstate New York to Idaho, in most ways my upbringing was not Lake’s but her mother, Mimi’s. My parents, like Lake’s grandparents, were the offspring of immigrants—Sicilian Catholics and Eastern European Jews. My parents drove me to piano and ballet classes and took me to my first opera when I was five. I remember sitting perfectly still, just as I had been told, in the velvety chair, mesmerized by Carmen’s rich mezzo voice and scarlet ruffled skirts. My father spent hours during evenings when he wasn’t at the hospital (he was a surgeon) playing Chopin on the piano or pitching softballs to me in the bird sanctuary across the street. My mother was the Brownie leader, the room mother, the public education activist, and the head of the St. Louis metropolitan Multiple Sclerosis Society, for which she enlisted bevies of my grade-school buddies to count envelopes and fold fliers. She took my sisters and me figure skating every Saturday and made us little skating skirts of blue velvet and white corduroy. Lake’s mother would never have been this involved. But, like Lake, I did feel different. I didn’t talk about clothes or hairstyles the way other girls did. On a careers test in ninth grade, my scores indicated that I should be a cowboy.

LO: Lake is an imaginative, sensitive girl, and bright in a bookish way. By the time she was six, she tells us, her father had read her "most of The Inferno, The Iliad, Jane Eyre, and samplings of Dickens and Shakespeare." What books did you grow up on, and what books remain your models?

JP: The story goes that when I was nearly three, I would walk to the lamppost to meet my father striding home from the bus stop, and as soon as I spotted him, I would shout, "Read a book!" At that point I was addicted to Pinocchio (the unabridged version, which I demanded be read to me daily), but soon my parents introduced Robert Louis Stevenson and Eugene Field, and I wanted poems every night. When I was nine, my parents gave me, along with a Madame Alexander doll in a silver tutu, a children's version of The Iliad. At first I was disappointed, since the illustrations depicted warriors in masks and armor. But I picked it up late one sultry evening, and when I next looked at the clock it was two a.m. and my heart was still racing. And when Achilles dragged Hector around the citadel, the words were blurred with my tears. I also wept my way through Wuthering Heights and the Anne of Green Gables series. Now my models are writers I call "poetic," those that stretch the limits of language, like Arundati Roy, Marilynne Robinson, and Toni Morrison.

LO: You mentioned your parents taking you to the opera when you were five. It’s clear by the number of references in My Mother’s Lovers and your instinct toward poetic (one could say "melodic") prose that music is an important art form for you. But what caught my eye were your myriad references to art and art history. Lake’s mother, for instance, is an artist, and everyone from Rembrandt to Magritte float through your pages. Moreover, many of your descriptions of landscape are rendered in painterly prose. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of art in your life, and the relationship of art to your writing?

JP: I grew up expecting art to be part of my life. And it has been. In first grade, my parents took me to the Art Museum in St. Louis every Saturday morning, and I joined a bunch of kids who were given postcards and instructed to find the particular work of art depicted on the card. I loved roaming around the shadowy, silent museum in the hours before it opened to the public. Then a docent would plunk us into a gallery and we could sketch any artwork we wanted there. As a child I had rheumatic fever, as Lake does in my novel, and while I rested my heart for eight months in bed, my parents entertained me by narrating the juicy details of the lives of artists (my mother had a penchant for post-impressionists) and showing me pictures of paintings. Works of art make cameo appearances in most of my writing. In my Italy poems, they’re spot-lit. Writing for me is an analogue of visual art: arranging and re-arranging scenes, touching up diction and syntax, covering a seemingly infinite canvas with words. Showing my readers the details of scenes, the minutia (I love describing designs on tablecloths, wildflowers in glass pitchers), seems to me "artful" in the way of, say, set decoration or embroidery are. I find so much pleasure in that meticulous, carefully wrought beauty. In another life, I might have been an interior decorator.

LO: Speaking of the confluence of arts, you’re a poet as well as a fiction writer. Are there certain areas of experience that lend themselves to one form over the other? Can you articulate the harmonics between your poetry and your fiction?

JP: Actually, I think I’m genre-challenged. I’m often confused to the point of anxiety about which experiences should feed poems, which essays, et cetera. Just call me Our Lady of Bleeding Borders. I always wanted to be a novelist because it is easier in that genre to sweep over more time, and many of my thematic concerns are about generations and consequences over time. But the bottom line is that in all writing I want the language to sing. I’m in it for the words, and how they make a reader feel. My sense of distinctions between the genres is clouding over. I like my prose to sound like poetry—bubbling with sounds, metaphors, all that sensuous and subtle stuff, though I’ll never be first rate in the subtlety department. And I’ve been told that my poems try to cover too much ground. Perhaps they should be essays or stories?

LO: My Mother’s Lovers places a good deal of emphasis on generational continuity, both literary and familial. I’m reminded of how Lake’s grandfather collects his keepsakes on the walls of the shelves lining his basement. He evinces an impulse to save, to treasure, to remember, and, from what you’ve said, so does your novel itself. It likes to recall texts and people and places and things that have been important to you. Where do you imagine such an impulse springs from? What is the importance of holding on to histories for you?

JP: You’re right on the money. I do have a need to collect. And I think that need stems from my desire to remain part of my family in spite of its distance in time and geography. I have a floor-to-ceiling cabinet in my bedroom that’s like a shrine to my childhood, including one of my father’s surgical masks and an eclectic assortment of glass animals. Maybe some of this stems from my insistence on seeing my childhood as a glimmering series of events that brought me—and many others important to me—pleasure and a profound sense of well-being. And also, of course, there’s a connection to art here—I see myself as a kind of assemblage artist. In some ways writing for me is reinventing history using familiar facts and visuals. For instance, my father, like Lake’s grandfather, recorded his experiences as a medic in World War II in diaries, and, with his permission, I’ve borrowed details and phrases from these for my novel.

LO: As well as familial and literary bonds, your novel places much weight on the bonds among women. What’s interesting to me, though, is how, at the same time it embraces those bonds, it also explores the damage women do to one another—the real betrayal, resentment, the painful secrets they keep from one another. One could even argue, I suspect, that Lake’s underachieving, yet kind and honest father, and her strong, wise, active grandfather, become her ultimate role models.

JP: Interesting insight, though I didn’t think of this phenomenon as a gender issue when I wrote the book. I shy away from those sorts of distinctions. All relationships worth writing about have their darker side. I think I focus on women because I was brought up with women—I’m the eldest of three sisters, the mother of two daughters—and women offer more possibilities for exploring the sort of small-perception-laden writing I like to do. They are often more verbal about their lives; often, too, more analytical, especially self-analytical. Their identities are more integrally wrapped up in their relationships than men’s are.

LO: In many ways, your novel is also about the specter of the Sixties—but not, I should hasten to add, in any simple way. On the one hand, Lake’s parents, themselves products of that time, come off as admirable idealists. On the other, they seem innocent, even naive, about the emotional hurt they’re causing Lake on various levels, often by their appeal to such Sixties clichés as "doing your own thing." Where do you situate yourself with respect to the notion of the Sixties, which, it seems to me, is finding it increasingly difficult to settle comfortably in our cultural consciousness at the millennium.

JP: I am grateful to have come of age myself in such electrifying times—when so many of us felt that the times were indeed a-changin’. I’m nostalgic about all those intense coffee house political tête-à-têtes, the reckless, heady questioning of the Powers that Were, our certainty that youth was righteous and influential. The night my senior year hundreds of students spontaneously marched to Graham Chapel to decide whether or not to exclude the military from campus was thrilling. But the aftermath of that era did leave a kind of negative residue. I think there were heights that the flower children and anti-war activists leapt beyond that were counter-productive, even damaging. My Mother’s Lovers is in part a drawing out of the consequences of the Sixties, particularly in its focus on the global and political—and the myopia about not seeing the right-in-front-of the eyeballs … in this case Mimi’s inability to see her daughter and address her daughter’s needs. The book is also about what happens to the idealists who were ultimately disillusioned with the promises of the Sixties.

LO: What sort of coming-of-age pains did your novel itself go through in terms of narrative choices, and what was its journey toward publication like?

JP: I always imagined I’d have published a novel before now, but my progress was diverted by a teaching career and family—the usual suspects. The fiction-writing fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts came as a sort of deus ex machina in 1990 and enabled me to convert my workload at the University to part-time that year. First thing every morning in a still-sleepy fog, I’d switch on my computer, and I often wrote through lunch and dinner. I’ve rarely been happier. After completing a draft, I got an agent in New York excited about it, and she sent the book around to a few editors, who usually liked most of it but had some quibbles; she then suggested I make it about 250 pages shorter. My mouth gaped in horror when she said that, and all I recall is the word "marketable." She also suggested I trim my long sentences and substitute more dialogue for description. At first I rebelled against what I thought of as a dumbing down. I did revise it, however, tightening it also by focusing more on Lake: putting it into her voice only (it was originally in the voice of a friend of Lake’s mother as well), and cutting down the role of minor characters. When the agent circulated it again in its shorter/tighter form, the editors had nothing negative to say about it, but by then the market had tightened considerably, publishers had gone belly up, and I was told that publishers that used to publish thirty-five new writers a year were now taking on only three. The agent then suggested I take it to the small presses, but declined to approach them herself because there wasn’t any money in it. I’m glad University of Nevada Press was enthusiastic about it, and they’re doing a wonderful job, but it took more time than I expected to push it through to publication. When I edited the page manuscript a final time, I put back some of my juicier sentences, but I do think the revision is more effective. I long for some of the scenes I cut, though, think about them with nostalgia, as if they had happened to me.

LO: Lake ultimately makes a kind of peace with Idaho. Have you done so as well? In your author’s note, you mention that "For years I saw the West’s stunning expanses of land as a deterrent to close community as I had known it."

JP: Yes, I’ve done better than Lake. I find myself as reluctant to leave Idaho, even for a week, especially during our glorious summers, as I used to be about leaving my father’s lily-and-cactus gardens around the Passanante swimming pool. But this evolution took its not-so-sweet time. Like many oldest children, I’m obsessed with the ebb and swell, the tugs and expectations of familial love. And coming to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to live in St. Louis, where I’d always imagined myself, was difficult. So I felt like I was raising my daughters in the midst of strangers, without the kind of love I’d had. It put more pressure on me, I think, to be more to them. This is not an East-West division, but a division between the kind of family I was brought up in and the kind I met in the West. I have connected with communities here in Idaho, not only in Moscow but throughout the state. I appreciate about Idaho that there are few enough people for it to feel like a community despite its geography. In some ways, Idaho’s laid-back-jeans-walk-to-work atmosphere is more me than the lifestyle of my family in St. Louis was.

LO: First novels are often deeply autobiographical, a way for many authors to exorcise various demons and/or re-enjoy certain moments from their youth. Goodness knows mine was both. But I’ve found the real challenge in fiction writing comes with Novel Number Two, which asks the author either to re-mine the same areas he or she has already mined in his or her life (a dangerous enterprise, as many writers from Fitzgerald to Bret Easton Ellis have discovered) or move into the uncharted and frequently choppy seas of the imagination. What comes next for Joy Passanante?

JP: I think my first novel would have provided an exorcism had I written it earlier in my life. Then I was busy exorcising demons. Fortunately, not too many folks read the stories and poems I wrote back then. My Mother’s Lovers, where it does echo the details of my real life, is more a celebration, an affirmation, than an exorcism. Next—well, as I said, I’m genre-challenged. I still can’t decide what form I want my stuff to take. I have started another novel, also set in Idaho. I think I’ll dig in more when I begin to write some flashback scenes set in, well, some big city. I can’t seem to get away from being a split-loyalties lady. I need some East-of-the-Rockies details to feed my Western narratives. I still have an itch to resurrect the Sixties, and, to scratch that itch, I find myself depicting Idaho as an escape from the struggles of that time. As I have envisioned it, this novel-in-progress has more danger to it than My Mother’s Lovers; it even has a murder. I’m a sucker for thrillers, though I don’t know if this will be a bona fide thriller or not in the end. I have also played with writing a memoir, but I think my privileged middle-class existence is too ho-hum to draw in most readers. Not much grit there. I suppose that’s the price I pay for so many happy childhood memories.