Ann Putnam

Ann Putnam is an internationally known Hemingway scholar who has made more than six trips to Cuba as part of the Ernest Hemingway International Colloquium. Her forthcoming novel, Cuban Quartermoon (June 2022), came, in part, from those trips, as well as a residency at Hedgebrook Writer’s Colony. She has published the memoir Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye (University of Iowa Press) and short stories in Nine by Three: Stories (Collins Press), among others. She holds a PhD from the University of Washington and has taught creative writing, gender studies, and American literature for many years. She has bred Alaskan Malamutes, which appear prominently in I Will Leave You Never. She currently lives in Gig Harbor, Washington.

Facebook: @AnnPutnamWriter

Instagram: @AnnIPutnam

Is there a particular genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?

Thank you for this wonderful question! Music is and always has been my writing muse: sweeping, dark, poignant, ethereal, otherworldly music—either classical (Debussy and Ravel, Faure, a little Rachmaninoff for good measure, Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”) but more likely instrumental movie soundtracks. At first a mood—then theme music for each character floating in my head and heart completely divested of the movie from which it came: The English Patient, The Ghost Writer, Million Dollar Baby, The Hours, E.T. to name a few. I can’t think creatively outside music at all. Often I can inhabit one of my characters by first playing their “theme song.”

What period of history do you wish you knew more about?

It began at People’s Storage in Lake Forest Park, Washington. I’m there to clean out my father’s things. He has died and I want to keep as much of him as I can. I’m missing him a whole lot, but I’m moving and must downsize. A snapshot falls out of a folder I’ve just picked up, and lands face down on the dusty, concrete floor. The man in the snapshot has a dark, pointed beard, a handlebar mustache. He’s posed with a cigarette in his mouth, holding an altimeter in one hand and a walking stick in the other. His pants are tucked into his high-topped boots. He has military braid on his jacket and several medals. He looks very important and oddly familiar.  How can that be? What is my father doing with this snapshot? At home, I spread the contents of the folder over the dining room table. Pictures and documents. A soldier’s field diary, birth and death certificates, nobility documents. Most are in Russian, for which I will find a translator.  I pick up a telegram. It’s in English and dated 1914.

            “May your precious child be your consolation. . . . . We too will miss your dear [husband] as we all loved him greatly. I kiss you lovingly and bless you.”

I turn it over. It’s from someone named Alexandra. My heart is thundering. The Alexandra, I learn, is Alexandra Romanov, the Empress of Russia. How can this be? And who is this “precious child?” And who is this “dear one” loved so “greatly?” One letter breaks my heart: 

            “My Dear Son, . . . . Be sweet to [your mother] and listen to her and take care of her because now you are the substitute for Daddy and there is no one else but you [for] your mom.  . . . . I’m tightly hugging you and sending you my blessings.”  The father is Alexander Butakov, a commander on the czar’s yacht, who was killed in Germany, two months later. And this little boy? Nikita Butakov, his son, who was then five years old and playmate to the czar’s son. Why does my father have these Russian documents? Why does he have this father’s last letter to his little boy? Wouldn’t Nikita want to keep this letter forever? Why would he give it to my father? My father died in Spokane, Washington. How did these documents come to him? And why had I never heard of any of it? And what happened to this little family during the Revolution and the nobility purges that followed? So yes! I want to know about Russian history in 1914 and the tragic years that followed. My father has come back to me.

Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?

“And what do you do?” he asks me.

I answer with trepidation, as this usually ends badly.  “Oh, I’m a writer.”

“So what do you write?”

Long pause. I should make something up.  Detective, romance, a romantic detective? I manage to squeak out: “Fiction.”

“Oh, is it juicy?”

“No. Actually it’s literary fiction.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, writing with a lot of extra words.” And now I have successfully diminished myself in my very own eyes.

A look of puzzlement is followed by:

“Where can I buy it?”
“Well, it’s not published yet.”

“Oh. Then you’re not really a writer.”

That last comment may have only been in my head, but it doesn’t matter. The feeling is the same. 

What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?

An author is someone who sits at a table in a bookstore, waiting for her audience to appear so she can read her beloved work to someone, pretty much anyone. And one person shows up looking confused, and leaves after a few minutes. Or as other writers have reported, someone asks for the location of the bathroom or the scotch tape. As one media consultant said, “As an author, your goal is to make money by selling books.” And there you go.

But being a writer is existential. It goes to the bone. If I’m not writing, things aren’t right with me or with the world. It’s something I can’t stop doing. Some days I’d give pretty much anything for one revelatory word. Okay, for one serviceable word. And even that doesn’t come.  Still, the next day I’m at it again. And the day after that, and after that. And somewhere in there a word, or a phrase, maybe a whole line, is so lovely and so original I can’t believe it came from me. 

The writer, Marge Piercy, wrote: “The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.”

What do you worry about?

 Everything.