New West Interview

An Interview with Amy Shearn

By Jenny Shank, 9-22-08

In Amy Shearn‘s debut novel, How Far is the Ocean From Here, Susannah Prue, a nine-month pregnant surrogate mother for a wealthy Chicago couple flees to the desert “somewhere between West Texas and East New Mexico” and installs herself at the “godforsaken fleabag” Thunder Lodge motel, where she tries to sort out her complex emotions and makes a set of quirky friends.  I recently interviewed Shearn via email about the inspiration for her book, writing from the perspective of a pregnant woman, and how she “always felt like anything could happen in the southwest.”

New West: How did you come up with the idea to build a novel around a nine-month-pregnant woman fleeing to the desert?

Amy Shearn: It really all came from an image that just popped into my head of this pregnant woman driving alone through the desert.  I had a vague idea that somehow the baby wasn’t hers, which obviously didn’t make any sense, so the whole process of writing the book was really an exercise in picking apart this mystery I’d set up for myself.  Also, I’m just interested in those weird things that the human body can do.  Pregnancy itself is surreal enough, but surrogacy sounds like science fiction. 

NW: In your book jacket bio, it says that you were educated in part in New Mexico (as well as Chicago, Iowa, and Minneapolis).  Where in New Mexico did you live and how long did you live there?

AS: My freshman year of college I went to University of New Mexico and lived in Albuquerque for the year.  I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, and New Mexico felt about as far away from there as I could get without leaving the country.

NW: What was it about the southwest desert region that prompted you to set your novel there, instead of in any of the other places you’ve lived?

AS: I always felt like anything could happen in the southwest.  It must be something about there being so much space, and so much sky, and so much horizon.  The landscape is just so evocative.  I also always felt very foreign there – I talked and walked and acted differently from people in New Mexico (and I still do when I go to visit!).  I wanted to create a sense of timelessness and displacement in the book, and I figured Susannah would feel pleasantly out-of-place there, in a way that would, as cliché as it sounds, help her to find herself.

NW: The quirky desert society you created out of the residents of this motel reminded me of the 1988 movie Bagdad Café.  Did any prior books or stories set in the desert inspire you?

AS: So funny that you mention that movie – I haven’t seen it in probably 10 years, but I remember absolutely loving it.  I wasn’t consciously influenced by any works set in the desert, really, that I know of.  But I did see Robert Altman’s film 3 Women for the first time while I was waiting to get a round of edits back from my editor.  I was astonished by the similarities in sensibility and imagery between my book and the movie – the setting, the weird interactions between the women, the central role of the pool, the way a little family is formed.  I’m glad I didn’t see it while I was writing as I’m sure it would have influenced me too much, but seeing it when I did felt incredibly magical.

NW: You sponsored a writing contest on your website for people to share their own motel stories.  Do you have any favorite books or stories with a motel setting?

AS: Well, I got some pretty amazing stories from my contest!  You can read them here.  I loved Wayne Koestenbaum’s novel Hotel Theory (I reviewed it for Bookslut), which I read while working on my book.  He writes about the different possibilities people see for themselves when they are living in these empty rooms.  It’s fascinating.

NW: Not to be a total jerk and quote myself, but heck, I guess I will.  In my review of your book, I wrote, “Three characters who form a team by the end of the novel all have in common the threshold status of their lives—Susannah stuck somewhere between youth and almost-motherhood, Frankie between male and female, and Tim between child and man.” Did you think about this when you came up with your characters, or did this happen subconsciously?

AS: I loved that review!  And I thought you made a really good point there.  I wasn’t thinking about this consciously when I first started reading the book.  I remember quite vividly, though, the day when I was about 3/4ths of the way through the first draft and decided I needed to figure out what the heck was going on.  I drew this big sort of Venn diagram listing out the characters and locations, and it was in doing this that I realized all of these things – how the main characters are these weird threshold creatures, and how many of the characters are sort of twisted doubles of each other, and how each familial relationship is warped and how.  I think this is the best thing about writing – the way you make these things without quite knowing what you’re doing until later, as if something inside is driving.

NW: I thought your details about how it feels to be pregnant were vivid, funny, and accurate (speaking as a woman who is currently eight months pregnant with my second child).  You don’t mention having children in your bio, so how did you come up with these details?

AS: Oh, good!  It felt like a risky move, like writing from the point of view of the other gender.  When I started working on the book my day job was writing for a women’s website that had tons of pregnancy content on it, so I’m sure I learned some from that.  Also, I have a good imagination, I guess.

It’s funny because now I actually am pregnant for the first time!  But I was aware as I writing HFITOFH that it was the kind of book that maybe someone who had actually been a mother couldn’t quite write, not in the same way anyway.  I wanted everything to be a little surreal, slightly out-of-whack.  And Susannah’s pregnancy is so symbolic to so many people, in a way that, boy, pregnancy sure isn’t when it’s actually happening to you.

NW: Going along with that, do you prefer to write fiction that’s based on at least a grain of your own experience, or do you prefer to invent your stories from scratch?

AS: I like to think I invent stories from scratch, though later on I’m usually able to see what snippets of my own life have made their way into the writing.  But my life is and has been so happily boring and uneventful that I have to make things up.

NW: How Far is the Ocean from Here is your first novel.  Could you share a bit about how the book came to be published?  Was it a long struggle for you to achieve this, with earlier manuscripts that you’ve put aside, or was this the first idea that has gripped you to write about in a long form?

AS: I’d written a couple of failed novels in grad school, which is what really taught me how to write this book.  The actual writing of the book didn’t take a particularly long time –about a year and half or two years—but I think a lot of the ideas and themes were things that had been cooking for a while.  Many of the stories I wrote in grad school were about people trying to take care of other people or children or creatures and failing, or else about weird permutations of the human body – Siamese twins and hermaphrodites and such. 

NW: What was the most difficult part of the process of this book from conception to publication—the first draft, the revision, finding an agent, landing a publishing contract?

AS: I think writing and revising are both hard, but in different ways.  There were many moments in writing the book when I felt myself starting to lose my nerve, when I suspected I had no idea what I was doing and was just wasting my time.  But really, so little was at stake – I often didn’t think anyone would ever read the thing – that I felt very free to just enjoy myself.  The revision process was difficult in a different but equally sort of wonderful way.  My editor was extremely intuitive and smart, and pushed me (thankfully!) to make the book as good as it could be.  This was when it got scary, though, because now there really was something at stake, and I was terrified of disappointing my publishers.  But I learned so much in the process.  It’s the best kind of hard work.

NW: You have been writing a blog for several years now.  Does blogging help you with your creative process?  Do you think blogs have become sort of the writer’s notebook of today?  How does its public accessibility change the process of working through raw thoughts and observations?

AS: Well, I have to admit that I haven’t been blogging much lately.  I don’t know what’s happened.  For a while I really, really loved it.  I always wrote more about what I was reading than what I was writing.  It’s been a great place for me to sort through my feelings on books and stories that I love or that confuse or confound me, and to carry on a sort of dialogue with other passionate readers.  I don’t write much about my writing process on the blog, because that’s just not as interesting to me.  And lately I’m not feeling motivated to blog much at all.  I think it’s less about the form itself, which I still find really interesting, and more about this pregnancy situation!  It sort of turns your brain to mush, have you noticed that?

NW: What are you working on now?

AS: Well, in theory I’m working on the next novel.  I have about 200 pages though I feel like I’m only about halfway through the story.  It’s a very strange book, I think, but at least I really am amusing myself, and sometimes I think that’s the only real point to writing. Progress has been slow the past few months, though I’m hoping to get back on track soon.  It would be great to have a draft of this baby done before the human baby comes, but I guess we’ll have to see.

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