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This piece appeared in the April 2003 issue of Reinventing The World:
Maryanne Stahl: an interview on the Writing, and also the Sex ("Rub Her Ducky")
[1157 words, est. reading time - 3:51] Interviewer:
Alan C. Baird
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Novelist Maryanne Stahl "lives on a lake with her dog, cats, ducks, humans and other wild creatures." Originally from New York, she's a folk artist and teaches English at Kennesaw State University, near Atlanta. Ms. Stahl's second book, The Opposite Shore, will be on bookshelves in August 2003, but she continues to relentlessly flog Forgive the Moon, which came out in June 2002.
Baird: Do you still consider yourself a New Yorker?
Stahl: Certainly. I'm also a Southern belle, Italian by descent and Eurotrash by inclination. Both of my books have New York area settings (Montauk and Shelter Island), as will my third (cue suspense music). I make seasonal migrations to the city, so I consider this place to be my muse and bitch goddess, all at the same time. You can take the girl out of New York but you can't keep her from drinking Manhattans.
B: You've been described as a "folk artist known throughout the South-[who] uses painting as a theme in her fiction." What type of folk art do you create?
S: You name it. I use "found" materials--old barn board, roof tin, etc.--and just, um, make stuff. Often animals. I also do paintings, really un-accomplished oil paintings, which is another way of saying "just folk." But I'm known only throughout the South end of my cul-de-sac.
B: You teach university-level writing courses. Does the activity of grading student papers provide a different perspective on your own work?
S: Yes. It makes me long for the time to do it!
B: How do your students respond to Forgive the Moon? Have many of them read it? Are they required to?
S: Most of them think it's cool to have a teacher who is a "real" writer. A few read it, even though it's not a requirement! In fact, I told one young man last semester not to read it; I suggested he give it to his mother instead.
B: Many of the closely-observed details in your book sound quite personal. How much of this novel was borrowed from your family experience/history?
S: Very few of the details. I've never played the violin and my mother didn't die in a car crash. In fact, she was alive when I began the book. Things such as landscape--the beach at Montauk, for example--are of course from my own observations, although my family did not have an annual vacation there when I was growing up. Our first Long Island holiday inspired the book, but I used a combination of real and imagined locations. As to the emotional content, well, how could it not come from personal experience?
B: What was your family's reaction to Forgive?
S: They loved it!
B: During the process of finding a publisher for this book, was there a specific turning point?
S: I think it was a matter of getting the manuscript to the right person at the right time--which takes some skill on the agent's part, and a lot of random good fortune. My publisher (New American Library/Penguin-Putnam) had just initiated a (gulp, cough, sputter) "women's fiction" line and my editor was looking for a book. She thought Forgive the Moon was perfect. But she told me that had she read it six months earlier or six months later, she wouldn't have been in a position to buy it.
B: How would you define "women's fiction"?
S: I wouldn't separate "women's" from "men's" novels. The label is a marketing tool. If The Corrections were written by Jane Franzen, it would be considered women's fiction.
B: Has the book-marketing experience matched your expectations?
S: Not really. I got next to nothing in publicity support. Even my home paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wouldn't review the book. (They're notoriously bad at supporting local writers. It's a travesty.) And my publisher allotted zero dollars toward marketing, which seems to be par for the course these days. In order to get publicity money, one needs to have a best seller. Makes sense, eh? (Luckily, the book has performed well. It "earned out" my advance during the first few months. Heh.)
B: Have you tried any online promotional activities?
S: I'll try anything, but I find the most effective promotion to be riding a bus, sticking my arse out the window next to a sign saying "Forgive the Moon." But yes, I've done iVillage, workshops, book clubs, readings, conferences, book fairs and offered my firstborn grandduck in exchange for a review. That offer is still open, by the way.
B: Many of your short pieces have been published throughout cyberspace. When you began submitting to e-zines, were there any trepidations?
S: I can't speak for the editors, but given my rowdy reputation, I sensed they published me primarily out of fear for their lives.
B: You've edited several online publications. Why did you get involved in that side of the craft?
S: I have great enthusiasm for online literary journals. Seems to me they're an ideal forum for short work--stories, poems, flash fiction--and I wanted to support them. Plus, I have a hard time saying no. (HEY: check out LiteraryPotpourri.com y'all!)
B: How have the editing gigs changed your writing?
S: I don't know that they have, really, though editing in general, even when it's done in workshops, teaching, etc., does develop a critical eye. Is that always a boon to one's writing? Debatable.
B: Word has it that you host an invitation-only writer-salon-cum-free-for-all at Francis Ford Coppola's Virtual Studio, and that you're widely known as a modern version of Perle Mesta. Do these online social activities interfere with your work?
S: You betcha. Why else would I do 'em?
B: Do you feel a strong kinship with other writers?
S: Absolutely. So much so, I sometimes think I'm Sylvia Plath or Alice B. Toklas or--and this is very scary--even you.
B: But you'd never interview me.
S: One must maintain certain standards.
B: You've just completed your second novel. Was the experience of writing that book different from the first?
S: Very much so. More pressure, fewer drugs.
B: Does that mean caffeine, alcohol, or other mind-altering substances play a part in your writing?
S: Yes. Sometimes the handsome prince, sometimes the rogue scoundrel, and sometimes the court foole.
B: Are you a disciplined writer?
S: Sure, I occasionally enjoy being blindfolded, tied up with silk cords and... Oh. No. Not at all.
B: Your novel's cover features the phrase "Fiction for the Way We Live." What does that mean?
S: It means, of course, if you don't buy my bloody book, my ducks and I will perish from the face of the earth.
B: Speaking of ducks, I understand that a family of them recently waddled into your second book, just before it was sent off to the publisher. What do ducks symbolize in your work?
S: Sex. Or, more likely, the lack of it.
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