A Conversation with Lori Ostlund and Anne Raeff interviewed by Mackenzie Evan Smith
Photo of Lori Ostlund
Lori Ostlund’s novel, After the Parade, was released by Scribner in 2015. It was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, was a finalist for the 2016 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction and the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Her first book, a story collection entitled The Bigness of the World, won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the 2009 California Book Award for First Fiction. Stories from it appeared in the Best American Short Stories and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Scribner reissued the collection in early 2016. Lori received the 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Most recently, her work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Southern Review, and the Kenyon Review. She is a teacher and lives in San Francisco with Anne Raeff and their two cats, Oscar and Prakash.
Anne Raeff’s stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica among other places. Her first novel, Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia, was published in 2002 (MacAdam/Cage). Her short story collection, The Jungle Around US, won the 2015 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. The collection is also a finalist for the California Book Award. Anne is proud to be a high school teacher and works primarily with recent immigrants. She too is a child of immigrants and much of her writing draws on her family’s history as refugees from war and the Holocaust. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and two cats.
Print-Oriented Bastards' Nonfiction Editor Mackenzie Evan Smith visited Anne and Lori in their San Francisco home to discuss reading, writing, and living with another writer.
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Print-Oriented Bastards: Do you change your reading habits based on what you’re writing?
Lori Ostlund: Fiction almost never helps me with my writing. But nonfiction influences my writing greatly and so does poetry, but in different ways. Poetry, I will read if I feel that with my writing I need to slow down and think more about words and craft. So, there are a lot of poets that I reread. We tend to have the same taste when it comes to poets. A lot of times we’ll read poetry out loud to each other, or to torture dinner guests. So, I’ll say, Oh my god you have to hear this poem.
Fiction, for me, is purely pleasure. It makes me think, and it makes me feel, but it’s not what helps me with my writing. Almost never. But nonfiction does: I’ll read something about economics and I’ll think, that answers that problem I was having. And I think it’s similar for you, Anne.
Anne Raeff: I go through different phases in terms of what I’m reading. Over the summer I read a lot about Nicaragua because I’m working on a book that takes place in Nicaragua, so I was immersing myself in Nicaragua. But for the most part, what I’m reading is not necessarily related to what I’m writing.
POB: Both of you have written stories about young people who are required to act in a way that is more responsible than their years might ordinarily require. Lori, I’m thinking about “The Day You Were Born”, and Anne, your story, “The Doctor’s Daughter.” Both protagonists are teetering on the edge of curiosity about the world, and also responsibility. I’m wondering—what is it about childhood that’s an interesting entry point into ideas about responsibility and curiosity?
LO: It’s true that we both write about this. We both write about children, and I know that a lot of times my students will tell me that their professors have told them not to write from the point of view of a child as your main character. I understand why that gets said because there are so many pitfalls. But for a couple who has never had children, both of us are very interested in the child’s point of view.
AR: I think that we both had these very evocative childhoods, these rich worlds as children.
LO: Or we felt like we were observing something.
AR: And we’re conscious of that. I feel that always when I’m writing—that I’m tapping into my childhood and adolescence.
LO: —that wonder you feel when you’re a child.
AR: That’s what writing is.
LO: Wonder is something that we had as kids on a daily basis.
AR: And when you write, you have to tap into that time when you were a child or an adolescent. It’s a combination of all of that: angst and wonder and torture.
POB: You’ve been together for more than 20 years. When did you discover that the other was a writer? Or that writing was a central part of your life?
LO: I think that’s why we’re together. When we met I was in graduate school and Anne had just left New York and come to New Mexico.
We slowly became friends. I liked Anne, and we liked similar things. We both liked to take long walks and then go have a drink and just talk. We were both readers and we were reading the Bowles, and I didn’t know them. It was one of the first things that Anne mentioned to me. I hadn’t heard of their writing, and I just fell in love with the Bowles. Anne will say that I rejected her violently--
AR: —rebuffed.
LO: Rebuffed. Which is not true. She went to a mutual friend who told her, Lori is very difficult. You can either be friends with her or that’s probably it because she lives in her own world.
So, we were friends for a couple of years. When Anne traveled to Paraguay, I was apartment sitting for her, writing papers for graduate school. One day a package came back in the mail. It was from Iowa. I could just tell that it was a returned manuscript from the Iowa contest. So I opened it—I would never open anyone’s mail—but I opened it, and instead of writing my paper, I read her stories the whole night.
Things shifted after that because I think that if you are going to be attracted to someone who’s creative and certainly in the same field that you are, you have to respect what they do. So I read those stories. It was still probably a year before we got together. We moved to Spain and we got together there.
POB: Since you’re both such close readers of each other’s work, are there themes or topics that you don’t perhaps recognize in your own writing but you see in the other’s work?
LO: I think our writing is quite different. I think that’s a reflection of the fact that we come from very different backgrounds. Anne’s parents were refugees, immigrants on both sides, and her first language was German. She grew up just outside of New York. Her father was a professor and her mother was a psychologist.
I grew up in a very small town in Minnesota, and neither of my parents went to college. I grew up in a hardware store; we didn’t leave that town. When my family came to the US from Norway and Sweden that was where they settled. By the time I came along, my family had been there for well over a hundred years. I think because of that we explore such different things in our writing.
AR: I think that both of our writing is character-based, but our themes are completely different. Lori’s work is largely about very small towns and what happens to people when they leave and go out into the world, and my writing, my books are almost the opposite: it’s about people who are taken up by the claws of history, people who are swept away by history, who have been completely washed away by the forces of history and move from one side of the world to the other, and how that affects them and continues to affect the next generation.
It’s the world coming in, whereas Lori’s work is about going out. My work is all about exile. And Lori’s work is about seeking the wider world.
LO: Also, I think you write a lot about what it means to be a victim. Your first novel dealt with that a lot and not being defined by being a victim, and looking at things like depression and whether they’re a result of a circumstance. That’s what your first book was very much about and I think that you get into that in the second book as well. It’s funny because we always have to do the elevator pitch for each other.
AR: Lori always says, 'Tell them what my book is about, and Lori tells people what my book is about.
POB: As two writers working together, how do you organize your time two allow for two writing schedules? Are there periods where one of you is very productive and the other one isn’t?
AR: Throughout our lives there have been periods of time where we’ve worked a lot on writing, and periods of times when we haven’t because we’ve been living.
We’ve lived a lot of different places. I think when we were in Malaysia, neither of us wrote at all. When we were in Spain, I was writing, but it wasn’t very good, and Lori was just reading.
LO: I read like crazy in Spain.
AR: When we started our furniture business in New Mexico we both hunkered down and focused on writing. That was a good thing because there were times of the day when one of us would go home and work, and the other could stay with the store. And we kind of took turns doing that.
My first novel came out when we were in Albuquerque, and when we decided to move here, one of the things that we agreed on was that I would be working full time so Lori could work on her collection.; I’m very devoted to teaching. And this job, it was all-encompassing. It was a charter school. I basically just lived and worked there, so I didn’t do any writing at all while I was working in that school, for what—three years?
LO: Yes, you would try on the weekends, but it was hard.
When I was a visiting writer at Chapel Hill, those two years were very hard for Anne. She was the following spouse. The first year she was trying to teach there, that was kind of a nightmare. The second year, I just said, 'you know what, even if we have to go into debt, just write and do something else.' So, so she got a job as a waitress. She wrote a memoir there about her life and education and teaching. She did a ton of writing during that period and that was kind of a changing point.
When my novel sold, the first thing we decided was that part of the money would go toward Anne working part-time, so she works three days a week now.
POB: It sounds like you two have worked very hard to make a plan to create room for your writing and the other’s writing, and also to compromise when needed.
LO: One of us has often been in a position of sacrifice and only now are we at a point where we both have time, but it’s always been hard. Anne had the first book published; we’ve always been really happy about each other’s successes, but it’s always weird when that’s happening. In those early days everywhere we went, people would kind of not think of me as a writer. We didn’t really know a lot of other writers, but they would talk to Anne if it was about writing. Then I think that kind of started to shift, and so it was very hard for Anne during that period when my writing was happening more easily. Now, I think we’re at this equilibrium where good things are happening for both of us. But I think it’s only because for the last ten or fifteen years we have been doing this kind of back and forth. Is that accurate, Anne?
AR: I think so.
LO: So now our biggest goal is to make sure that neither of us has to work full time ever again, because it’s really hard.
POB: Because you read each other’s work so closely and you’ve been reading each other for so long, is there a particular topic or story that you’ve heard the other one talk about that they haven’t tackled yet, that you would like to see them write?
LO: One thing that I’m a little careful about, and I think that Anne is as well, is not talking so much about stuff until I start to write it. I don’t actually show Anne stuff until I’ve worked on it for quiet a long time because I always figure she’s my only reader—I’ve only got one shot to surprise her—so I want it to be perfect and I want to be stuck.
AR: You want to be at a point where you don’t know what to do with the work.
LO: Yes, I want to be in a place where I don’t know where I’m going, and Anne is very big picture, and I’m very detail-oriented.
But every once and awhile we’ll go out—much of our relationship is built around walking—and we’ll be talking through some stuff, and I’ll say, 'remind me to write that down when we get home,' but so often it doesn’t get written down. And later I’ll say to Anne, what was that? That’s the story that needs to be written now. But that’s usually how it happens: it’s just small stories that we talk about, together.
Photo of Anne Raeff
AR: I think that both of our writing is character-based, but our themes are completely different. Lori’s work is largely about very small towns and what happens to people when they leave and go out into the world, and my writing, my books are almost the opposite: it’s about people who are taken up by the claws of history, people who are swept away by history, who have been completely washed away by the forces of history and move from one side of the world to the other, and how that affects them and continues to affect the next generation. It’s the world coming in, whereas Lori’s work is about going out. My work is all about exile. And Lori’s work is about seeking the wider world. LO: Also, I think you write a lot about what it means to be a victim. Your first novel dealt with that a lot and not being defined by being a victim, and looking at things like depression and whether they’re a result of a circumstance. That’s what your first book was very much about and I think that you get into that in the second book as well. It’s funny because we always have to do the elevator pitch for each other. AR: Lori always says, 'Tell them what my book is about,' and Lori tells people what my book is about. POB: As two writers working together, how do you organize your time two allow for two writing schedules? Are there periods where one of you is very productive and the other one isn’t? AR: Throughout our lives there have been periods of time where we’ve worked a lot on writing, and periods of times when we haven’t because we’ve been living. We’ve lived a lot of different places. I think when we were in Malaysia, neither of us wrote at all. When we were in Spain, I was writing, but it wasn’t very good, and Lori was just reading. LO: I read like crazy in Spain. AR: When we started our furniture business in New Mexico we both hunkered down and focused on writing. That was a good thing because there were times of the day when one of us would go home and work, and the other could stay with the store. And we kind of took turns doing that. My first novel came out when we were in Albuquerque, and when we decided to move here, one of the things that we agreed on was that I would be working full time so Lori could work on her collection.; I’m very devoted to teaching. And this job, it was all-encompassing. It was a charter school. I basically just lived and worked there, so I didn’t do any writing at all while I was working in that school, for what—three years? LO: Yes, you would try on the weekends, but it was hard. When I was a visiting writer at Chapel Hill, those two years were very hard for Anne. She was the following spouse. The first year she was trying to teach there, that was kind of a nightmare. The second year, I just said, 'you know what, even if we have to go into debt, just write and do something else.' So, so she got a job as a waitress. She wrote a memoir there about her life and education and teaching. She did a ton of writing during that period and that was kind of a changing point. When my novel sold, the first thing we decided was that part of the money would go toward Anne working part-time, so she works three days a week now. POB: It sounds like you two have worked very hard to make a plan to create room for your writing and the other’s writing, and also to compromise when needed. LO: One of us has often been in a position of sacrifice and only now are we at a point where we both have time, but it’s always been hard. Anne had the first book published; we’ve always been really happy about each other’s successes, but it’s always weird when that’s happening. In those early days everywhere we went, people would kind of not think of me as a writer. We didn’t really know a lot of other writers, but they would talk to Anne if it was about writing. Then I think that kind of started to shift, and so it was very hard for Anne during that period when my writing was happening more easily. Now, I think we’re at this equilibrium where good things are happening for both of us. But I think it’s only because for the last ten or fifteen years we have been doing this kind of back and forth. Is that accurate, Anne? AR: I think so. LO: So now our biggest goal is to make sure that neither of us has to work full time ever again, because it’s really hard. POB: Because you read each other’s work so closely and you’ve been reading each other for so long, is there a particular topic or story that you’ve heard the other one talk about that they haven’t tackled yet, that you would like to see them write? LO: One thing that I’m a little careful about, and I think that Anne is as well, is not talking so much about stuff until I start to write it. I don’t actually show Anne stuff until I’ve worked on it for quiet a long time because I always figure she’s my only reader—I’ve only got one shot to surprise her—so I want it to be perfect and I want to be stuck. AR: You want to be at a point where you don’t know what to do with the work. LO: Yes, I want to be in a place where I don’t know where I’m going, and Anne is very big picture, and I’m very detail-oriented. But every once and awhile we’ll go out—much of our relationship is built around walking—and we’ll be talking through some stuff, and I’ll say, 'remind me to write that down when we get home,' but so often it doesn’t get written down. And later I’ll say to Anne, what was that? That’s the story that needs to be written now. But that’s usually how it happens: it’s just small stories that we talk about, together.
Mackenzie Evan Smith studied creative writing and Arabic at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly Online and Main Street Rag, and has been a finalist for awards from Glimmer Train and New Letters. A former Luce Scholar in India and Fulbright Fellow in Montenegro, she is currently an MFA candidate at Oregon State University.
