Anne de Marcken Answers Some Questions

by Lauren Rivera & Jennifer Rathgeber

Anne de Marcken is a writer and time-based artist. Her short stories have been featured in Best New American Voices, Glimmer Train, The Way We Knew It, Hunger Mountain, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She has been awarded the Howard Frank Mosher Prize for Short Fiction, the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Prize, and has received grant and fellowship support from the Jentel Foundation, Centrum, the Hafer Family Foundation, and Artist Trust. She and her partner divide their time between Olympia and Oysterville, Washington.

Southern Indiana Review: Both “Stray” and “Best Western” are very much tied to particular places. How important is place in your writing?

Anne de Marcken: Maybe all of my stories begin with a premise, but take hold—really come to life for me—once I situate them in a particular setting. Place gives rise to characters. In my experience, certain people gravitate toward particular places. “Stray” is set at Tahoe, where I grew up. It’s a strange place. Our foundational legend is the story of the Donner Party’s cannibalism. The natural environment is dangerous—and almost overwhelmingly beautiful. Very beautiful places often attract people who are not more powerfully drawn by other influences, such as family or career. Drifters fetch up and can’t get loose. Tilly is adrift. Also, there are good narrative possibilities because of the human dynamics in resort areas where there is invariably economic and cultural disparity between locals and tourists. Maybe more important, though, for me early fall at Tahoe has a particular poignancy and static charge that mirror Tilly’s state of mind, giving me a way to connect to her loneliness and ambivalence through my own “muscle memory” of the place, while allowing me to illustrate rather than expound on her internal life.

SIR: You write both fiction and non-fiction, what do you like most about each?

Marcken: Today it is hard to remember what I like about fiction. I’ve had a bad day at my desk. But if I remember correctly, I write fiction because I live better when I do it. I am more observant. More patient. More compassionate. I go slower. I care more. Food tastes better. The sun shines brighter. And ultimately I believe it can make a positive change in the world. Fiction is a transformative art. It transmits truth through imagination, which, at its best, is an egoless mechanism of real authenticity and spontaneity. I write nonfiction to sort things out for myself, to clarify an idea, to better understand a concept. I often enjoy writing nonfiction more, but I am less compelled to do it. The kind of nonfiction work I do is usually more analytical than personal, so for me, although still intuitive, it is a more intellectual process. The exception is with my interdisciplinary work, which tends toward more lyrical or meditative essayistic forms. But usually with the personal stuff, I have to change the facts to get at the truth.

SIR: As an interdisciplinary artist, how do you decide how to divide your time between written and visual projects? Do you devote certain amounts of time to each area or is the division more fluid?

de Marcken: A project generally asks to be a particular form. Sometimes I’m working on a story and I think, maybe I should be making this a movie instead…. But usually, the inspiration for the form a project will take arrives at the same time as the idea for the story: it just is a short story, or a photo essay, or a documentary, or whatever. The balance of my time is a matter of practicality. I divide my day in half: the first half of the day is spent on writing, the second half on paid work. I get paid for video work more than anything else, so usually I am working half the day on writing, half on video or film. The unpaid (experimental) video/film projects are always in the backseat because they are more expensive, they involve additional resources and equipment, and they take more time. I chip away at these projects between paid gigs, or work in sudden bursts when I am avoiding other responsibilities. If I had my way—that is to say, if I had Virginia Woolf’s proverbial 500 pounds per year—I’d mix it all up. I’d do all of it all the time. It would be creative mayhem. Ideas everywhere. One thing playing off another.

SIR: How do you deal with your artistic identity? Do you feel that you are identified most often as a photographer, film-maker, writer, etc. more often than your other areas of concentration?

de Marcken: I am not really identified much at all, so it isn’t a big problem for me. Seriously, perhaps I would be better known for any one thing if I weren’t doing so many different things, but what are you gonna do, right? I do find it a little challenging to write a 50-word bio. There is just too much to explain. Now I’ve got it down to the “writer and time-based artist” thing, which sounds affected—it’s hard to call yourself either a writer or an artist without sounding pretentious, and I use both! I do feel that interdisciplinarity is still more respected in the art world than it is in literature. Although perhaps this is changing. More and more journals are experimenting in online editions with new definitions of literature that encompass moving image. And graphic novels are hot hot hot. As with all areas of first world life, technology is changing the way we apprehend, comprehend, and manipulate creative media. Hopefully the shake-up will result in new methods of cognition and expression, not just a flattening of the marketplace.

SIR: How does your writing relate to your other areas of work, which are largely visual in nature? Do you find writing to be a welcome change of pace or simply one of many areas of art that you enjoy?

de Marcken: I think of myself as a writer first, but that might be a result of believing, as a child and for a long time, that I had to choose…or it might just be the ascendant interest presently. Yes, the change of pace between writing and more directly visual techniques is welcome and productive, but it is all the same work, and no matter what medium I’m working in, I am the same artist. I write and make films and take pictures with the same sensibility, the same driving interests, the same aesthetic and critical influences. I am engaged differently depending on how I’m telling a story, but when I look back on all the work, it all makes sense to me. It coheres. I do wish I had more time for all of it.

SIR: On your website, you say that you are “...trying to write less and less.” You go on to say that you are after a “productive lightness” in your writing. What techniques are you using to try and achieve your goal?

de Marcken: I could go on and on—I try everything! Most important is maintaining a daily creative practice. My present practice is composed of diverse elements, including studio time, meditation, cooking, time outdoors, and non-work productivity. I’ve experimented and paid attention to what contributes to the condition of balanced, energetic openness that allows me to be more responsive to subtle impulses, creatively spontaneous, interested, curious…. When I don’t keep up with all these areas, I notice I get either controlling or lax and the writing stiffens up or sags. No lift. No loft. I’m sure the bad time I had writing today was my own fault—I took last week off! For me, daily practice is key. When I am living in balance, then the work is better.