Author Interview with Katherine Howe

Katherine wrote The Lost Book of Salem, released today. This interview is taken from Penguin's website (no credit to me - every credit to the anonymous interviewer). Great advice here!

Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you’re writing?

The hardest part of writing for me is, of course, getting started. Even if I am in the middle of a project, if I am starting a new segment of it – like a chapter, for example – I spend a lot of time agonizing without actually getting anything written down. I will find anything else to do: laundry is perfect, because you can really draw out the folding process. This can go on for hours or days. Then I will usually push through the fear long enough to get something written, like a page or so, which I promise myself can be thrown out later.

My desk is fairly spare. It contains a jar of pens, a box of graham crackers, a photograph of my husband, a couple of finger puppets, and a small sculpture of an ancient Egyptian cat, a replica of one in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. My study is a small room in the attic of our house, probably eight feet by nine feet, with a sloping ceiling. When we bought the house the room was painted black, with a trompe l'oeil cloudy sky overhead. I repainted the whole thing flat white, and nothing is hanging on the walls except for one mirror, to catch the light from the window. The desk faces the only window in the room, which looks out over an auto repair shop roof and down the street to a sign that says “Not a Through Way.”

Sometimes, home offers too many distractions (laundry to do, dog to walk, refrigerator to stare into), and so I work at a little table in a cafe in Salem. They make terrific coffee, sell half-sandwiches, and I can camp out by the screen door at the back, looking at a sliver of brick walkway and nothing else. I can be incredibly productive there, largely because I can't leave the computer at the table by itself. With no excuse to get up, all I can do is work.

I often play a game with myself that I have started to call “time travel tourism.” I will be walking along in Boston or Cambridge, and I will imagine what would happen if all of a sudden I stepped through some kind of time fabric rip, and found myself on the exact spot where I was standing, but in, say, 1877. How would people react to seeing a woman suddenly appear in blue jeans and a pea coat? Would anyone accept the cash I was carrying? Where could I go for help? Would the hologram on my driver's license prove that I was from the future? If I couldn't get back, how would I support myself? A lot of my writing grows out of these kinds of thought experiments.

How did the idea for this book originate?

To relax while studying for my PhD qualifying exams, I would take my dog on rambles in the woods along the old railroad tracks between Marblehead and Salem. We were living in Old Town Marblehead, a concentrated historic district of antique 17^th and 18^th Century houses. Many of them had horseshoes nailed in various secret places, including one tiny one over the door in the bedroom of our little rental house. Further, Salem one town over has built its tourist industry on the Salem witch trials, and I often found myself thinking how vastly the tourist account of the witch trials differs from the historical understanding of them. The book began as a thought experiment on my rambles in the woods: what if magic were real, but not in the fairy tale way that we now imagine it? In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, magic was very small, very personal, very tied to individual belongings, and to health. I tried to imagine what magic would have looked like, had it been real the way that the colonists understood it.

Of course I knew the general outlines of what had happened during the Salem witchcraft panic, but now, having settled only one town over, I started to think more specifically about how life must have felt for those women. Genealogy serves a paradoxical purpose: on the one hand, it provides extreme specificity, with concrete people living in a concrete moment in the past. It is a powerful way to feel personally connected to a time period that might otherwise seem hopelessly remote. But on the other hand, by the time we start looking at ten generations back, what we mean when we say "family" is actually several thousand people. At that point, the connection becomes less about "family," I think, and more about humankind. Everyone has a right to feel connected to the women (and men) caught up in the Salem panic, for the story touches deep reservoirs of feeling about community, religion, relationships, and spirituality still at work in American culture today.

Did the book involve any special research?

Yes; I read all the major secondary source literature on the Salem witch trials and its period, including histories of the economic background of Marblehead and Salem, and used that reading to develop an undergraduate research seminar which I taught twice at Boston University. I read the records of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County to try to learn how people actually spoke during that time period, and also relied on a study of New England accent and slang terms in one chapter of a book on English settlements in America called Albion's Seed. I relied on the Salem witch trials online archive run by the University of Virginia for primary sources, like arrest warrants, court documents, and so forth. I read several histories of magic, especially work by the historians Keith Thomas and Owen Davies, to learn about the “cunning folk” tradition in early modern England, and to further my imagination of what magic might have looked like, if it had been real the way the colonists understood it. I read a number of contemporary histories of occult practice and Wicca, which were of varying degrees of usefulness, and also read academic journal articles on alchemy and the history of alchemical thought. For details of dress and interior I read several histories of material culture from the time period, most notably the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's catalogue New England Begins: the Seventeenth Century. I can supply a bibliography upon request.

What do you think is the main point of interest for readers in The Lost Book of Salem?

There has been a lot of interest in the fact that I am descended from two accused Salem witches, Elizabeth Howe (who was hanged) and Elizabeth Proctor (who was spared). But I think it is also interesting to talk about the book's new approach to witches in general. We are accustomed to having a fairy tale notion of what witches are like: black pointy hats, warts, green skin. We are also accustomed to thinking about magic as acting on a macrocosmic level: good versus evil. The book proposes that we instead look at witches as they were understood to be, back when people actually believed in them. They were individual women, dressed like everyone else, with strange personality quirks, and the magic that they were accused of practicing was very personal and small: causing someone to fall ill, causing property to disappear, being able to be in two places at once. This book brings fresh insight to the witch lexicon, by bringing real historical research and imagination together.

Witches are the new vampires!

How long did it take for you to get published? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?

I was shockingly fortunate with Lost Book, though the road to the writing life was circuitous for me. I had always written, usually just on my own, and had never considered that writing could be a viable way to support myself. A life in academia seemed like the natural alternative, leaving time for writing and thinking in between teaching and research. I slogged my way through the first half of my PhD program, often doubled up on teaching to make ends meet. In 2005 I was scheduled to take my qualifying exams, and the stress from preparing for that process caused me to lose ten pounds, in addition to developing near chronic insomnia. The only way I could escape from that anxiety was to take my dog walking in the woods, and since my mind if left unsupervised would automatically turn itself back to worrying, I started telling myself stories as a distraction. The outline for my first novel gradually coalesced out of these stories. After passing the qualifying exam I began work on my dissertation, while secretly starting to write the novel on the side. My dissertation was slow going, however, and funding quickly began to run out.

Meanwhile, without my knowledge, a close friend who is a novelist, Matthew Pearl, mentioned my project to his wonderful, marvelous literary agent. To my utter surprise and delight, she was able to place The Lost Book of Salem with Hyperion/Voice when it was finally finished, about three years after I first started to play with the ideas that went into it. The day that my first ever advance check arrived, I had $112 in my checking account and $130 in my savings account. And it was my turn to pay the rent.

What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?

The first, and most important, thing that I would say to an aspiring writer is that one should never be afraid to share your work with others. I initially balked at mentioning my novel project to any of my “real” writer friends, for fear that they would think it was silly just because it was different from the kind of work that they did. Of course if I had never said anything to anyone, Matthew Pearl would never have mentioned my project to his agent, and my book would probably still be sitting on my laptop, read only by my husband and me.

The second, and perhaps equally important, suggestion that I would make is that a writer must be able to listen to constructive criticism. I had been teaching freshman composition courses at Boston University while working on the novel, and one of the biggest pedagogical challenges for me in those classes was to reassure students that writing, while it feels very personal and closely tied to who we are and what we think, is actually a project separate from ourselves. Sometimes it can help to imagine a writing project as a daring cooking experiment, like grapefruit and fennel risotto (the most colossal dinnertime failure I have ever made). You're trying new things, learning technique and ingredients. Before it comes together, it is bound to need reworking. You might have to throw the whole thing out and start over, and that is okay. Teaching students how to revise and accept criticism was invaluable in helping me revise and listen to feedback about my own work. I think I went through ten or twelve drafts of just the first chapter of The Lost Book of Salem, and not just little tweaks either: entire points of view, characters, outcomes, and pacing changed several times over. Revision and criticism can only make the work stronger.