An Interview with Annette Gilson

Annette Gilson, author of the novel New Light, is an associate professor of creative writing and contemporary literature at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.

What do you love about writing? What drives you to keep at it?

When I'm thinking about a project, or even at the beginning and middle stages of it, I feel this wonderful sense of potential. The idea (which in Didion’s words is an image that “shimmers” in the mind) is less an image for me than a feeling, which has clustered within it a number of characters who are related to each other in varying and complex ways. Part of the joy and satisfaction is finding out what those relationships are, and realizing the ways in which the idea has become manifest in the characters’ lives—been made flesh, if you like.

What does the rhythm of your writing life look like? What have you learned about how you write best?

Oh boy. My rhythm is, on the face of it, pretty chaotic, because it really depends on where I’m at in the school year. I can get a lot of writing done at the beginning and toward the end of the semester, but get almost nothing done around exam and paper grading times. I’m also a reviewer for Publisher's Weekly and a few other venues, so I weave into my teaching- and writing-lives the life of the reviewer, which requires me to enter into a rather different mode. I like the reading and writing that reviewing requires, but at times that means sacrificing some of my novel-writing time.

However, the stimulus provided by reviewing and teaching tends to compensate for the loss of (novel-writing) desk time. I find that when I come back to my desk after a protracted period of grading or critiquing, I’m eager and grateful for the writing time again. It helps me shed the itchy feeling I get sometimes, where I’m looking for distractions. (Though that mood inevitably returns, which is usually when I leap up from the desk, take out the dogs, or plan out some crazily complicated gardening scheme.)

Do you have any fears around writing?

Well, the obvious ones. Are the novels I’m spending all this time on actually any good? Does the work that I get so excited by stand up? I felt these things with particular intensity after my first novel, New Light, came out last spring. It wasn’t picked up by any of the traditional review venues, with the exception of a few, such as the Midwest Book Review. The reviews it did get were very positive, but I felt like I was standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, calling out “Helloooooo….” It’s very hard not to take neglect personally, very hard indeed not to fault the book. That was when I started to do reviews. I know there are so many books published, and fewer and fewer venues in which they might be “discovered.” So I decided to try to do my part. I had sent out the book to a number of lit-bloggers whose work I admired, and then I also volunteered to review for some of the more established venues, like PW, so as to get some “street cred.”

Happily, I also found that reviewing is a good way to get a sense of what’s going on “out there” in the publishing world. Don’t get me wrong—it’s very difficult to do more than get a taste, because there’s SO MUCH “out there”, but I think that making an effort to get at least something of a sense of that world “out there” is very helpful to a writer. It’s a way to start finding your place in the writing community. It’s also a good way to get to know how crazy the publishing world is these days. Small presses are doing a lot of the work, picking up the mid-list authors who are being dumped by the big presses these days, as the big presses are looking for the big sells in books. But the problem with the small presses is outreach, because most of them don’t have much of a budget for PR. For this reason I also started reviewing for Rain Taxi, and now also for American Book Review, both of which are devoted to books that might be neglected but worth readers’ attention.

However, I should add that too much attention to the world “out there” can be debilitating. It can diffuse your focus on your own work. So it’s important to be able to withdraw and collect yourself. Not get too distracted.

What's been the most challenging aspect of creating a writing life for yourself?

I’ve talked about some of that above. I guess it’s maintaining faith in my own work. When I first sent out New Light to some agents, the response was unanimous: "Interesting but too weird. Send us your next book." Poised as I am to send out that next book, I’m wondering whether that might not happen all over again. But I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that I write about, and am interested in, weird things. And if that means I remain a marginalized writer, so be it. You have to write about the things that are yours. You can’t do anything else. You have to dedicate yourself to honing your vision, to making it as crystalline as possible. So that’s what I’m doing. And I get my professional satisfactions (and money to get by on) from being a reviewer and a professor. It’s not quite enough, because I identify most strongly with my writing role, but it’s okay. I make do.