John Gourhan Interview
Mary Volmer's first novel, Crown of Dust, published this past January by HarperCollins UK, is the story of the boom and bust of a tiny California Gold Rush community, called Motherlode.
Volmer received an M.A. in Writing from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Saint Mary's College of California. She has been the recipient of a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship and has held both the Jim Townsend and the Agnes Butler scholarships at Saint Mary's College. She currently teaches English Composition and Collegiate Seminar at Saint Mary's and is working on her second novel.
JG: You've always been a competitive person, having played for a Division I basketball program as an undergraduate in Saint Mary's. How has this competitiveness led to your publishing success with your first novel, Crown of Dust?
MV: I don't think competitiveness has benefited my writing and, in fact, does damage if I let it. For one thing, competition is based upon outcomes. It's an external motivation and has to be measured through comparisons, which unnecessarily limits our definition of success and growth. The score at the end of the game clearly states, winner, loser. Not so in writing. Even in sports, competition can kill the sheer joy of the game.
When I was a kid a friend of mine had a tee-shirt. On the back was a decal of a basketball and the words: "Somewhere, someone is practicing, and when you meet them in head to head competition, they will beat you." Horrifying. In essence, the slogan says, don't play and practice for the joy of it, for the feel of leather on your fingertips, and hardwood under your feet, for the glorious off-beat bounce that echoes off the walls. You play and practice to simply avoid losing to someone who has worked harder and therefore, by popular logic, deserves to win more than you do. I know of no faster way to kill the joy of playing or writing than to impose upon it such a simplistic dictum, which is ultimately false. Any ball player understands that hard work alone does not guarantee victory, or in the case of that caption, ward off defeat. And hard working writers are all too familiar with rejection. Yet we both toil towards a goal that is never certain. Why is that?
JG: Perhaps the writer's goal shouldn't be publication?
MV: Well there is a pride in publishing, and it is a goal. I think we all write to be read. What good are stories if there's no one to hear them? But publication can't be your sole motivation. Another sports analogy: I think the athlete who plays only for recognition or reward, rather than for the sheer joy and for the daily challenge, will find even victory vapid somehow. For one thing, most victories, to an athlete, are fleeting. It's the losses that stay with us, the missed free throw, the silly foul that cost the game. I think athletes and writers both understand that for the majority of us, dedication is not glamorous and the work we do will go largely unnoticed.
There are days when the last thing we want to do is go to the gym or turn on the computer. And yet we do. Day after day. The work becomes its own reward, the outcome secondary.
I guess I'll always be an athlete and competition is just in my blood. I can still lose all perspective and give into the competitive drama of a game: basketball, football, baseball, soccer, you name it. There's a certain joy in that abandon. But I try to leave my competitive nature at the door each morning I get up to write.
That said I have heard it suggested that competition between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield spurred them to greater artistic achievement. So who knows?
JG: In working with a historically based piece of fiction much research must have gone into the project. Could you elaborate on your background research?
MV: I grew up in Nevada County where Crown of Dust is set, so I was already familiar with the physical place. The research I did for the book focused on the specific details of the time. The larger contextual details, national politics, the wars and revolutions, all of this is pretty easy to find on the Internet and in popular histories. But I was more interested in the everyday details, clothing, food, products and specific personal impressions. I found these details in the journals and letters [sent] home written by men and women of the time. Check out Sarah Royce's memoir Frontier Lady and Louise Clappe's Shirley Letters. There are countless overland trail guides, and I'm thankful for David Comstock's Brides of the Gold Rush, and JoAnne Levy's They Saw the Elephant, both of which reconstruct life in gold rush California through women's letters posted to the east. I also found a History of Nevada County, written in 1880, and I spent time going through Gold Rush era newspapers in Nevada City's Searls Library.
But the truth is while writing this novel, and really every day since, I've become painfully aware of my own ignorance. It's a frightening and inspiring thing, not to know, a great motivator. But I am easily distracted. I'll spend a whole day reading about something utterly unrelated to what I was looking for in the first place. I figure these distractions might come in useful one day. Why not study phrenology? A system would help, but it might just take some of the fun out it. I'm working on a new project now, bigger than the last, and I realize I will need some kind of system to keep me sane.
JG: Which authors do you feel have impacted your writing style?
MV: So many! I am an unfaithful book lover. I love whatever I'm reading. Right now it's Here is Where We Meet by John Berger. I just read Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. I return again and again to Rose Tremain, to Karen Joy Fowler, and Virginia Woolf. I'm hooked on Wallace Stegner who paints a place so vivid and with such intelligent emotion. I admire Ursula Le Guin who continues to experiment with language and story without ever losing sight of the reader.
Stylistically, I think I'll always be changing. I wrote Crown of Dust having written very little fiction before, so my learning curve was very steep. In this case the story itself seemed to dictate the style. The choices I made, to write in the present tense for instance, I made for the sake of the story. Even now, as much as language moves me, I find the story still has to dictate how to tell itself. A fantastic first line or an image might come. I'll write it down, maybe even blast through several frantic pages as the story seems to unravel itself on its own accord. But for the most part, those first lines are followed by a period of stagnant silence. Sometime the line fizzles, sometime it ends in a solitary scene and sometimes it evolves into a story.
Let's see, who else? Margaret Atwood's books captivate me. Andrew Greer, Michael Chabon, Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Dillard, Tracy Chevalier, Jeffrey Eugenides. The list goes on and the list keeps getting longer. I'm not sure who has had the greatest impact on me. Maybe ask me again in five years. Tobias Woolf is someone whose style I've actively studied, taken apart and put back together. The same with Stegner and Steinbeck, and Dillard, ha, what a combination. Each writer offers a bit of themselves, in story, insight and language.
JG: As an MFA graduate and a participant in writing seminars such as the one in Squaw Valley, what in your view are the benefits and shortcomings of such programs? What did you take from these programs that enhanced your writing?
MV: I'm grateful for the writing community. Writing is, for the most part, a lonely habit, and yet I absolutely write to be read. Writing is a delayed performance art. There must be an audience, and when you're learning, it's a very good idea to have an honest, an encouraging and a captive audience. In reading and critiquing other people's work I became a more objective, editor of my own. Workshops taught me the hard lesson of how to take, and reject, criticism. Lit courses exposed me to writers, and styles and books I might not have discovered on my own. I've had the opportunity to study under seasoned authors who love books and love writers. Now when I have work I need read, I send it to one of my writing buddies from Squaw Valley or Saint Mary's.
JG: You mentioned that "writing is a delayed performance art." Art and writing—are they synonymous?
MV: No, not synonymous. I think the best written works are works of art. But not all writing is art. Some writing simply informs or warns. A stop sign. A nutrition label. You can call yourself a writer or an artist while you're working (maybe only while you're working), but someone else gets to decide if what you've created deserves to be called art.
I think stories do represent a special kind of delayed performance. When I'm writing I'm absolutely conscious of an audience and the effect a line, a word, a character might have on them. I feed off this imaginary audiences' energy and their presence represents that constructive voice inside my head that offers hopeful encouragement and tries to smother that other evil voice booing at the back of the auditorium.
But there is another, a real breathing audience, and for them the performance is always delayed until the moment they open the book, or pick up the story. This is the audience who is allowed to enjoy the polished whole, and, well, to judge it.
JG: Back to Crown of Dust: Emaline is a larger than life character that jumps off the page, endowed with strength and country heart and wisdom. You chose her as a centerpiece in this story set in the Sierra hills. Tell us how Emaline developed as well as Alex.
MV: Emaline was a surprise to me. Originally I thought she was a supporting character, a strong contrast to Alex, a presence yes, but not the driving presence. But Alex, by nature of her secrets, and her disguise, and hollowed emotional state, was easily overpowered by the likes of Emaline. Emaline knows herself and the town better than anyone else. Alex doesn't know herself. She spends much of the book coming in and out of focus, either denying her identity or trying to assume a new one.
JG: Emaline appears a bit of a hard-ass.
MV: Oh, definitely a hard ass. Early on I understood that Emaline would have a hand in whatever happened in Motherlode. She is the foundation of the little community Alex stumbles into and in the end the foundation of the book. I wish I could say she is based on someone in particular, but she was a composite of traits, observed and fabricated. After writing the book I discovered several historical women whose profiles matched aspects of Emaline. Madam Mustache was a female gambler in Nevada City during the gold rush. She too had a prominent fringe of hair on her top lip and was imposing in a similar self-affirming way I imagine Emaline to be.
JG: Why did you choose a smaller, limited town rather than a thriving community?
MV: Keep it simple. I should have this tattooed on my forehead, or maybe my forearm where I can see it easier. This was my first try at writing a novel. I was very careful to limit the scope of the story and to limit my research by avoiding real people and for the most part, real places. Nevada County exists, Grass Valley, Nevada City, and Sacramento and San Francisco are mentioned, but I didn't want to worry so much about getting history wrong when it was the story that really interested me. I knew it was a tale of boom and bust, and that it would begin when a stranger (Alex) came to town. As long as I returned to this simple, bare bones truth, the characters, the plot and research, all played nicely together.
And when a new character appeared to turn my plot on its head, I returned that first basic idea. It's the story of boom and bust and begins when a stranger comes to town. Simple.
JG: Would you address the tone and your choice of tense of the novel?
MV: At first I wrote in the present tense for the immediacy it offered. I wanted the story to unfold cinematically, frame by frame, scene by scene as though it were occurring on the page at the moment. At the same time each of the main characters is haunted by her past. Each character seeks to recreate herself in California, to live as if in a perpetual present, entirely on her own terms, but no one is really ever free to do so.
In early Gold Rush California this ambition might have been somewhat realistic. At first there was no established law or system of government. Merit, brains, grit and luck were the only credentials of any worth. Providing you were white, no one cared who your daddy was. Many of the social strictures that restricted women in the east were, by necessity, cast away in the west. Laws were established community by community, and the methods of governance were quick and often violent.
Eventually, as more and more people moved west, they rebuilt the very civilization they sought to escape. Each character's past catches up, and the illusion of this perpetual present is broken.
JG: What is the timeline for you for your next novel? At what stage is the process currently in?
MV: I'm in the chaotic research, wonder, dreamy stage. I've got pages of scribbled notes, a few false starts, lots of questions, lots of ideas. I know where it begins, what the big moments are likely to be and where it ends and a vague idea about what happens in between. The book is due in 2007. If I get a head of steam this may just be a reasonable goal.
Volmer received an M.A. in Writing from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Saint Mary's College of California. She has been the recipient of a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship and has held both the Jim Townsend and the Agnes Butler scholarships at Saint Mary's College. She currently teaches English Composition and Collegiate Seminar at Saint Mary's and is working on her second novel.
JG: You've always been a competitive person, having played for a Division I basketball program as an undergraduate in Saint Mary's. How has this competitiveness led to your publishing success with your first novel, Crown of Dust?
MV: I don't think competitiveness has benefited my writing and, in fact, does damage if I let it. For one thing, competition is based upon outcomes. It's an external motivation and has to be measured through comparisons, which unnecessarily limits our definition of success and growth. The score at the end of the game clearly states, winner, loser. Not so in writing. Even in sports, competition can kill the sheer joy of the game.
When I was a kid a friend of mine had a tee-shirt. On the back was a decal of a basketball and the words: "Somewhere, someone is practicing, and when you meet them in head to head competition, they will beat you." Horrifying. In essence, the slogan says, don't play and practice for the joy of it, for the feel of leather on your fingertips, and hardwood under your feet, for the glorious off-beat bounce that echoes off the walls. You play and practice to simply avoid losing to someone who has worked harder and therefore, by popular logic, deserves to win more than you do. I know of no faster way to kill the joy of playing or writing than to impose upon it such a simplistic dictum, which is ultimately false. Any ball player understands that hard work alone does not guarantee victory, or in the case of that caption, ward off defeat. And hard working writers are all too familiar with rejection. Yet we both toil towards a goal that is never certain. Why is that?
JG: Perhaps the writer's goal shouldn't be publication?
MV: Well there is a pride in publishing, and it is a goal. I think we all write to be read. What good are stories if there's no one to hear them? But publication can't be your sole motivation. Another sports analogy: I think the athlete who plays only for recognition or reward, rather than for the sheer joy and for the daily challenge, will find even victory vapid somehow. For one thing, most victories, to an athlete, are fleeting. It's the losses that stay with us, the missed free throw, the silly foul that cost the game. I think athletes and writers both understand that for the majority of us, dedication is not glamorous and the work we do will go largely unnoticed.
There are days when the last thing we want to do is go to the gym or turn on the computer. And yet we do. Day after day. The work becomes its own reward, the outcome secondary.
I guess I'll always be an athlete and competition is just in my blood. I can still lose all perspective and give into the competitive drama of a game: basketball, football, baseball, soccer, you name it. There's a certain joy in that abandon. But I try to leave my competitive nature at the door each morning I get up to write.
That said I have heard it suggested that competition between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield spurred them to greater artistic achievement. So who knows?
JG: In working with a historically based piece of fiction much research must have gone into the project. Could you elaborate on your background research?
MV: I grew up in Nevada County where Crown of Dust is set, so I was already familiar with the physical place. The research I did for the book focused on the specific details of the time. The larger contextual details, national politics, the wars and revolutions, all of this is pretty easy to find on the Internet and in popular histories. But I was more interested in the everyday details, clothing, food, products and specific personal impressions. I found these details in the journals and letters [sent] home written by men and women of the time. Check out Sarah Royce's memoir Frontier Lady and Louise Clappe's Shirley Letters. There are countless overland trail guides, and I'm thankful for David Comstock's Brides of the Gold Rush, and JoAnne Levy's They Saw the Elephant, both of which reconstruct life in gold rush California through women's letters posted to the east. I also found a History of Nevada County, written in 1880, and I spent time going through Gold Rush era newspapers in Nevada City's Searls Library.
But the truth is while writing this novel, and really every day since, I've become painfully aware of my own ignorance. It's a frightening and inspiring thing, not to know, a great motivator. But I am easily distracted. I'll spend a whole day reading about something utterly unrelated to what I was looking for in the first place. I figure these distractions might come in useful one day. Why not study phrenology? A system would help, but it might just take some of the fun out it. I'm working on a new project now, bigger than the last, and I realize I will need some kind of system to keep me sane.
JG: Which authors do you feel have impacted your writing style?
MV: So many! I am an unfaithful book lover. I love whatever I'm reading. Right now it's Here is Where We Meet by John Berger. I just read Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. I return again and again to Rose Tremain, to Karen Joy Fowler, and Virginia Woolf. I'm hooked on Wallace Stegner who paints a place so vivid and with such intelligent emotion. I admire Ursula Le Guin who continues to experiment with language and story without ever losing sight of the reader.
Stylistically, I think I'll always be changing. I wrote Crown of Dust having written very little fiction before, so my learning curve was very steep. In this case the story itself seemed to dictate the style. The choices I made, to write in the present tense for instance, I made for the sake of the story. Even now, as much as language moves me, I find the story still has to dictate how to tell itself. A fantastic first line or an image might come. I'll write it down, maybe even blast through several frantic pages as the story seems to unravel itself on its own accord. But for the most part, those first lines are followed by a period of stagnant silence. Sometime the line fizzles, sometime it ends in a solitary scene and sometimes it evolves into a story.
Let's see, who else? Margaret Atwood's books captivate me. Andrew Greer, Michael Chabon, Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Dillard, Tracy Chevalier, Jeffrey Eugenides. The list goes on and the list keeps getting longer. I'm not sure who has had the greatest impact on me. Maybe ask me again in five years. Tobias Woolf is someone whose style I've actively studied, taken apart and put back together. The same with Stegner and Steinbeck, and Dillard, ha, what a combination. Each writer offers a bit of themselves, in story, insight and language.
JG: As an MFA graduate and a participant in writing seminars such as the one in Squaw Valley, what in your view are the benefits and shortcomings of such programs? What did you take from these programs that enhanced your writing?
MV: I'm grateful for the writing community. Writing is, for the most part, a lonely habit, and yet I absolutely write to be read. Writing is a delayed performance art. There must be an audience, and when you're learning, it's a very good idea to have an honest, an encouraging and a captive audience. In reading and critiquing other people's work I became a more objective, editor of my own. Workshops taught me the hard lesson of how to take, and reject, criticism. Lit courses exposed me to writers, and styles and books I might not have discovered on my own. I've had the opportunity to study under seasoned authors who love books and love writers. Now when I have work I need read, I send it to one of my writing buddies from Squaw Valley or Saint Mary's.
JG: You mentioned that "writing is a delayed performance art." Art and writing—are they synonymous?
MV: No, not synonymous. I think the best written works are works of art. But not all writing is art. Some writing simply informs or warns. A stop sign. A nutrition label. You can call yourself a writer or an artist while you're working (maybe only while you're working), but someone else gets to decide if what you've created deserves to be called art.
I think stories do represent a special kind of delayed performance. When I'm writing I'm absolutely conscious of an audience and the effect a line, a word, a character might have on them. I feed off this imaginary audiences' energy and their presence represents that constructive voice inside my head that offers hopeful encouragement and tries to smother that other evil voice booing at the back of the auditorium.
But there is another, a real breathing audience, and for them the performance is always delayed until the moment they open the book, or pick up the story. This is the audience who is allowed to enjoy the polished whole, and, well, to judge it.
JG: Back to Crown of Dust: Emaline is a larger than life character that jumps off the page, endowed with strength and country heart and wisdom. You chose her as a centerpiece in this story set in the Sierra hills. Tell us how Emaline developed as well as Alex.
MV: Emaline was a surprise to me. Originally I thought she was a supporting character, a strong contrast to Alex, a presence yes, but not the driving presence. But Alex, by nature of her secrets, and her disguise, and hollowed emotional state, was easily overpowered by the likes of Emaline. Emaline knows herself and the town better than anyone else. Alex doesn't know herself. She spends much of the book coming in and out of focus, either denying her identity or trying to assume a new one.
JG: Emaline appears a bit of a hard-ass.
MV: Oh, definitely a hard ass. Early on I understood that Emaline would have a hand in whatever happened in Motherlode. She is the foundation of the little community Alex stumbles into and in the end the foundation of the book. I wish I could say she is based on someone in particular, but she was a composite of traits, observed and fabricated. After writing the book I discovered several historical women whose profiles matched aspects of Emaline. Madam Mustache was a female gambler in Nevada City during the gold rush. She too had a prominent fringe of hair on her top lip and was imposing in a similar self-affirming way I imagine Emaline to be.
JG: Why did you choose a smaller, limited town rather than a thriving community?
MV: Keep it simple. I should have this tattooed on my forehead, or maybe my forearm where I can see it easier. This was my first try at writing a novel. I was very careful to limit the scope of the story and to limit my research by avoiding real people and for the most part, real places. Nevada County exists, Grass Valley, Nevada City, and Sacramento and San Francisco are mentioned, but I didn't want to worry so much about getting history wrong when it was the story that really interested me. I knew it was a tale of boom and bust, and that it would begin when a stranger (Alex) came to town. As long as I returned to this simple, bare bones truth, the characters, the plot and research, all played nicely together.
And when a new character appeared to turn my plot on its head, I returned that first basic idea. It's the story of boom and bust and begins when a stranger comes to town. Simple.
JG: Would you address the tone and your choice of tense of the novel?
MV: At first I wrote in the present tense for the immediacy it offered. I wanted the story to unfold cinematically, frame by frame, scene by scene as though it were occurring on the page at the moment. At the same time each of the main characters is haunted by her past. Each character seeks to recreate herself in California, to live as if in a perpetual present, entirely on her own terms, but no one is really ever free to do so.
In early Gold Rush California this ambition might have been somewhat realistic. At first there was no established law or system of government. Merit, brains, grit and luck were the only credentials of any worth. Providing you were white, no one cared who your daddy was. Many of the social strictures that restricted women in the east were, by necessity, cast away in the west. Laws were established community by community, and the methods of governance were quick and often violent.
Eventually, as more and more people moved west, they rebuilt the very civilization they sought to escape. Each character's past catches up, and the illusion of this perpetual present is broken.
JG: What is the timeline for you for your next novel? At what stage is the process currently in?
MV: I'm in the chaotic research, wonder, dreamy stage. I've got pages of scribbled notes, a few false starts, lots of questions, lots of ideas. I know where it begins, what the big moments are likely to be and where it ends and a vague idea about what happens in between. The book is due in 2007. If I get a head of steam this may just be a reasonable goal.
