The Storyteller: An Interview with Meredith Hall
Hi and welcome to Issue #12 of The Storyteller!
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I'm writing this from a very snowy Boston (yes, in October!) and wondering where this year's gone while simultaneously feeling like 2020 has been endless. Hope everyone is still keeping safe, healthy, and finding sanity in the small moments.
One of my recent experiences of this was the time I spent reading Beneficence by Meredith Hall (published October 2020 by David Godine). This is a quietly radiant and powerful story about grief, forgiveness, and love already garnering critical acclaim, and I'd recommend it for fellow fans of keenly observed and lyrically written literary fiction.
I'm so excited to welcome Meredith to The Storyteller. Her award-winning memoir Without a Map is a New York Times-bestseller, and Beneficience is her debut novel.
AN: I’m sure the readers of my newsletter would love to know about your journey to becoming a writer, as well as your journey to get to where you are now. What are some of the most memorable/indelible experiences from your travels?
MH: I returned to college as a single mother at forty years old, and then received an MA in writing. I taught creative nonfiction and memoir in the undergraduate and graduate writing programs at the University of New Hampshire for many years before I returned to my own writing. The first two essays I wrote were well-published and won the Pushcart and Notable in Best American. I was on fire! I applied for and won a two-year support grant from A Room of Her Own. I lived in San Francisco during that time and had to learn fast what it means to be a writer. I wrote my memoir, With a Map, believing that maybe one hundred people might ever read it. Instead, it was a Times bestseller. So then the trick was to figure out what it means to be a successful writer. I decided then to write fiction, and it was the beginning of Beneficence. In that process, I fell in love with fiction, and am working on a new novel.
AN: If I may say so, writing a memoir like Without a Map requires immense fortitude. How/why did you take the decision of embarking on the book? Could you elaborate a little on what the process of working on it was like?
MH: The stories I told in my memoir were secrets, held by me for many decades. Forbidden by my family and cultural expectations at the time to speak about the pregnancy or the child, the events seemed to be waiting to be written. Even though I had no idea how to write a book, or what its scope and shape might be, it felt as though I sat at my desk in my shabby, wonderful little rooftop apartment in San Francisco and the writing just happened. I think all that shame and secrecy for so many years brought me finally to a kind of defiance, a determination to delve deeply and honestly into that dark past. Silent so long about my experiences, I imagined a crone, an old woman, who sat beside me day after day, silently listening as I spoke my life. She was like a very loving old auntie, someone finally to hold me in tenderness and listen. The writing came.
AN: What was the shift from memoir to fiction like? Any challenges or elements that surprised you about the process of writing a novel? How did you approach each one and how did being a memoirist and creative nonfiction writer help you?
MH: I believe that narrative—scene making—is at the heart of both memoir and fiction. True or made up, the craft of telling a story is the same. When I wrote Without a Map, I discovered that I love to tell stories. I can see now in Beneficence that I am an episodic writer. I tell story after story after story, some in present tense and many as memories from the past. What I love most about writing fiction is the writer’s astonishing freedom to make story. Anything at all can happen, if I am smart enough to figure out how it will come to the page.
I think the biggest surprise about writing Beneficence was how powerfully I was effected by the people I was writing. Their lives, their home and farm felt so strangely real, as if I had known them and was recording the events, not making them up. My imagination is acute. The empathy I experienced knocked me over some days. I have come to trust my story-making as I work on this next book, and to revel in the pure joy of making up people and their stories.
AN: Beneficence strikes me as a novel that’s intensely rooted in the land on which it takes place. How important is location for you as a writer? How much of your own work is informed by the places you’ve been to and how would you define the concept of home, for your characters, and yourself?
MH: I grew up in a small northern New England town and my sister and I kept sheep. Later, while I raised my children on the coast of Maine, we lived on a little homestead. I kept sheep and hens and big gardens. Although I never lived on a dairy farm, somehow that life feels so known to me. I carry a deep nostalgia for a life I did not know. I think that longing somehow came to the page as a reality, as if that house and that farm were my own. Isn’t it strange—I love the Senter Farm.
The fields and fences and barn and orchard and pine hill and creek, the sounds, the rhythms of the hard work Tup and Doris and their children do every day are all inseparable from who they are and their capacity for love and dedication. They belong to that land and that barn and that house, are defined by it as much as they shape it all by their labor.
AN: Of course, it’s impossible to write anything without putting something of our self in there, however immediately unnoticeable. But given the many parallels between the emotional landscape of the novel and your own life, was there anything you had to watch out for or decide as you wrote the novel? I guess, I’m interested in knowing, from a craft point of view, how you traversed that space between fiction and real life, and how much of the overlap was a conscious decision.
MH: This is an interesting question. I never felt for a moment that I was writing my own life or anything I have ever experienced. It never occurred to me that my life had anything to do with what I was writing. I made up from thin air every scene, the people, the place. I am certain that our experiences live in us in deep ways, like a quiet reservoir that lies below the surface, and I am sure the waters of that reservoir seep into our fiction. But I don’t recognize myself in this book. I felt a great compassion for this family, so maybe that was the stories in my reservoir calling out.
AN: As you’ve said yourself, forgiveness is complicated. So is love and acceptance. How did you navigate emotions as you crafted your characters’ journeys and narrative arcs in Beneficence so that the sentiments remained nuanced (and, to an extent, relatable and universal) while simultaneously deeply connected to the individual characters?
MH: I have to say that I did not navigate those emotions very smoothly as I wrote! I entered these lives so fully they feel like my own family. I love them. I worked very hard to be truthful, to hear truly what each character had to say, what they felt, their responses to the events and to each other. It was a very difficult process for me as I wrote. I felt it all too fully, more fully in fact than when I wrote my own life in Without a Map. To write memoir, we are required to step outside ourselves and be a sort of reporter. There is no such requirement in fiction, and that permeable boundary between me and my characters made for some very costly writing for me. I hope it paid off, that these people are real and true.
AN: What has been one of the most challenging aspects of being a writer that you didn’t expect? Equally, what’s one of the most enjoyable?
MH: Time is, for all artists I think, the biggest challenge. I love to write. It feels absolutely wonderful to me to slide into that faraway place that is story and free myself in it. But I need large chunks of time to do that. I start writing at about 9:00 each morning. I click into the Gregorian chants I listen to while I create, and I am gone. My favorite days are those in which nothing at all interrupts me. I suddenly come back to my little writing room and the changed light and realize it is 5:00 and I am starving! That is joy.
AN: Could you give us a glimpse into your writing process? Are you someone who plots down to the last detail? Do your characters grow first or the plot? How do you work from conception/idea to the final version?
MH: Hmmm. I’m not sure I have good answers to these questions. I definitely do not plot or plan anything. I can’t know what my characters are going to decide to do. I joke with friends sometimes in great frustration, “They refuse to do what I tell them to!” I think a fiction writer needs to be in acute attendance with her characters, to live that life with them, to not know ever what is coming. That is how we live our lives. There is no known future moment. There can’t be for the people we bring to the page.
When I started Beneficence, I had a small bit of story I had heard about a tragedy hitting a family. I immediately grabbed the idea, wanting to develop a character, a husband and father, who responds very selfishly. I wanted to understand how he explained to himself that failure. But within a few pages I saw that Tup was not that man and never would be. And so I stopped having big ideas and agendas and let myself go meet this extraordinary, and also very ordinary, family. I accompanied them.
AN: What’s your favourite writing advice for aspiring writers? Secondly, what’s a piece of advice you received that really helped you in your work? Thirdly, what is one thing you wish you had known when you started out in your writing journey?
MH: I tell writers of both fiction and nonfiction that you do not have to write anything. Go do something else. But if you do write, you need to open your chest and invite us inside. You need to be fundamentally honest. You need to have the courage to tell the truth. Readers are hungry for a blueprint of how a life is lived. The writer doesn’t have any answers to that question, but she can’t cheat them as she says, “This is what I know.”
I was once told by a writer that writing is a solo act. It gave me permission to write in the way I do, separate from the world. I don’t share my work with anyone until the book is done. It is a profoundly private act.
I wish I had dared to imagine myself a writer much earlier! I thought writers were somehow different from me, exceptional, exotic. It was a great relief to discover that ordinary people like me could write a book.
AN: What’s in the works next?
MH: I have been working on another novel, getting to know my characters as they move through their lives. But lately I have been feeling that I am not yet done with the Senters, and so I am roaming around in my mind and heart, considering what might come next for them.
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Thank you, Meredith for allowing us so much insight into your journey and writing.
As always, I've included both mine and Meredith's social media links below. There are buying links as well, which include links through my own online affiliate shop for Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores. I have a separate section on there titled "The Storyteller newsletter" so you can access the relevant buying links for all the authors I've had on here so far.
In Issue #13 heading your way on November 15, we have Isabel Ibañez, the author of Woven in Moonlight (which I reviewed here), a young adult, own voices fantasy debut inspired by Bolivian mythology, politics, and culture.
If you enjoyed this and know someone who would, as well, please forward this to them! I'm also always up for a book (or general) chat so feel free to turn this into a conversation at any time by replying to the email, even if just to let me know your thoughts on an issue or if you have any feedback, but also if you must share with someone how awesome something is that you've recently read, watched, or listened to.
Thank you and until next time!
Anu
Currently reading: Still making my way through I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and also reading (and loving) The Ancient Guide to a Modern Life by Natalie Haynes
Currently watching: This is Us season 5 which just started airing (I loved The Good Place, even though I know I am super late to the party!)
Latest writing: Don't have anything new here, but wanted to shout out Tether's End Magazine, a new online literary journal dedicated to publishing new and emerging writers. Go check them out here, subscribe, and maybe send in some work!
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