Author Name: Ann Putnam

Book Title: I Will Leave You Never

Book Genre: Literary fiction

Release Date: 5/9/2023

Publisher: She Writes Press

Welcome, Ann! How would you describe I Will Leave You Never?

How can you live in joy not fear when the sky is falling? Children, parents, pets, and arson, heartbreak, laughter and love—I Will Leave You Never is a book that will not let you go.

What do you hope readers can take away from your book?

My protagonist asks of her husband: How can I love you if I am to lose you? But she learns that you can learn to love anything, even terrible things, if you can love them for what they are teaching you. I want the reader to fall in love with this book’s characters, worry over them, laugh with them, root for them, and then cry for them. I want the reader to feel wrenched apart, then surprised into joy and ultimately transformed.

What’s the worst moment and best moment in a writer’s life?

“And what do you do?” she asks me.

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

“So, what do you write?”

There is a long pause. I know I should make something up.  Detective, romance—a romantic detective? I manage to squeak out: “Fiction.”

“Oh, is it sexy?”

“No. Actually it’s literary.”

“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. 

Then:

“Are you Ann Putnam?”

Okay. Here we go:

“I read your novel, and I couldn’t put it down. It made me cry, but that’s one of the reasons I love it so much.”
“Oh thank you!”

Now why is the worst moment more interesting than the best one?  Compliments are rarely remembered or believed, and criticism is remembered forever. Now that’s interesting. 

How long did it take you to write the book? Did you do any research?

I began it in the car, on the drive home from Glacier National Park, where we’d taken the children, not knowing a grizzly bear had just killed three people. That experience wound up as a short story, called “Zoe’s Bear,” but the novel that came out of it had no bear in it at all. It became one story then another, then another, my constant companion over the miles and years. Still, it had mortality in it, in various forms both strange and familiar. I wrote it at my desk at home, on planes, in emergency rooms, doctor’s offices, PTA meetings, gymnastic and track meets, traffic lights. It took days, months, years, and went through many iterations.

This book came mostly out of the magic that occurs when memory and the imagination meet in completely strange and startling ways. But. When I was well into the first draft, I suddenly knew that the story I was trying to tell had an arsonist in it.  So, I plunged into research. What a relief! Research is always easier than coaxing a first draft onto that terrifying blank page.

I needed to know so many things.  Who was he and why would he want to cause such fear and suffering? Why is someone drawn to fire like that?  The stalking? Choosing this house and not that one? The ritual of setting the blaze and watching it take hold then explode into a blood-red fury? Watching people flee? The heroism of the fire fighters? A feeling of power? Revenge? So I read and read, until a figure took hold in my imagination and then in my dreams.

For you, what’s the different between being a writer and being an author?

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 pauses, then 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.”

Any new projects in the works?

Georgia, 1939: A drowning, a mysterious healing, a cottonmouth snake, and Virginia Woolf. This book has all of them. At the heart of the book is an inexplicable boating accident—three went into the water, only one survived. Lily O’Connor, the survivor and main character, experiences both the terror and ecstasy of love. Yet all characters suffer loss of one kind or the other. There is a villain to be sure, with auburn hair and ice-blue eyes, but he too, has loss in his benighted, damagedheart. In the end, this book takes the reader from ordinary life to a place as far from the ordinary as one could get, only to find that it is as profoundly familiar as it is strange. The book asks: what can I believe in if everything I have loved is lost? It’s called The World in Woe and Splendor.

Where can readers find you?

www.annputnamwriter.com

https://www.facebook.com/annputnamwriter

https://www.facebook.com/ann.putnam.98

Thank you, Ann! I Will Leave You Never is out now.

I Will Leave You Never