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Ann Hood’s real people
BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ
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An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life
By Ann Hood. W.W. Norton, 224 pages, $23.95.
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Taking notes
Providence writer Ann Hood was one of those bookworm kids who often had to be coaxed by her mother to "go outside and play" and who, at nine, turned to writing her own books because the local library had imposed a one-book-per-week check-out limit. In the extended Italian-American family of her maternal grandmother in West Warwick, she soaked up the stories her aunts, uncles, and cousins told to and about each other. But at school, she felt out of place, and when she told her guidance counselor in junior high that she wanted to be a writer, she was summarily dismissed. But Hood’s curiosity to see new things and to write about them never left her. After graduating with honors in English from the University of Rhode Island in 1978, she took a job as a flight attendant with TWA, where she stayed for seven and a half years. Interacting with so many people and getting a chance to see so much of the world during those years gave her the confidence to start grad school at NYU and to attend a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in ’84. There she was encouraged to shape four of her stories into the novel that became Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, which hit the bes seller lists in ’87 and was optioned for a film. At that point, Hood began to fly in a different way, turning out six more novels and a memoir (Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time) that was initiated by her father’s terminal illness. Her latest book, a collection of short stories, An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life, was published this summer, to a rave review in the Washington Post and to the excitement of her fans, especially those in Rhode Island, who eagerly await each new offering from Hood. She will do a reading and a book-signing at the Kingston Free Library (next to the URI campus) on Saturday, November 20 at 7 p.m. To reserve a free ticket, call (401) 783-8254. Hood, who teaches part-time at the Rhode Island School of Design, talks a bit about her writing in the following exchange. Q: How does a story take shape for you? A: A story usually begins with a combination of characters and a situation, though the connection between those things is not readily clear. They bump around in my mind for a long time usually. Eventually, a first sentence takes hold, and I write and rewrite that until another follows, and another, and then I’m on my way. Or the story is. Q: Are there people whom you encounter whose lives (or imagined lives) you want to capture and who become your characters? A: I am a very keen and constant observer of people, things, places. When I leave a party or gathering, I always take away something that is slightly askew. For example, I recently was at a meeting and a woman there is going through a divorce. I noticed there was an indentation on her finger where her wedding ring used to be. That is a detail I can imagine using somewhere. But I don’t write about real people, or I should say people that I know. Fiction is a lie, as Eudora Welty said. Writing about real people and events is non-fiction, and I do that in the form of essays. But fiction grows from the seed of something real, and that thing is hopefully made universal by changing and morphing it. Q: Are there themes from your own life that you want to explore through your fictional characters and their lives? A: Themes are always personal. Terry Tempest Williams says that every writer has a secret, and that they are always writing about that, just changing the props. Q: How have the losses in your own life informed these stories? A: I really don’t want to talk about my own losses. In fiction, I use the idea of loss and the movement through it to the other side all the time. That theme is what drives me and my writing. Q: What captures your heart more these days: writing or teaching? A: My heart is always with writing. It’s what I live to do. When I’m not doing it, I’m thinking about it. If circumstances keep me from writing for stretches of time, I can get very cranky. I only teach one class a semester and that’s enough. It gets me out of my little study and forces me into the world. Plus, I have amazing students there whom I get very attached to. Q: What’s your next project? Is there anything that’s gripping you and leading into your next novel? A: I am 400 pages into a novel called The Knitting Circle, about seven women who meet to knit and share their life stories. Kind of like The Joy Luck Club meets knitting. I am an obsessive knitter and am very aware of how it connects people emotionally, culturally, and traditionally. I’ve written a few non-fiction pieces about knitting and grief (for Real Simple) and knitting and relaxation (for Body and Soul). I have an urge to travel to cultures where knitting has a long tradition, such as the Aran Islands, Peru, Latvia, and other cultures. This novel uses knitting as a way to connect women of all ages and with different backgrounds. Hopefully it will be finished by the first of the year. Q: What made you choose An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life for the title of the collection? A: I read a Little Golden Book about birds and bird-watching and was struck by how similar ornithology and writing are. The skills of observation, the note-taking, the heightened awareness of surroundings, all made me think of writing. The title story is about a girl who observes her mother beginning an affair with the neighbor and I made her an amateur ornithologist to mirror that, as well as to reflect writing in general. So it seemed the perfect title for the whole collection as well. -J.R.
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In Ann Hood’s new collection of 11 stories, An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life, many different characters walk across the pages, from a not-wanting-to-recover alcoholic who’s shacking up with a decidedly younger minister ("Total Cave Darkness") to the young girl of the title story, whose new hobby leads her to careful observation of parents and neighbors as well as birds. Most of these people are coping with turning points in their lives: some seem to move toward an inner truth that helps them understand what they’ve been going through; others seem blinded by their passions, destined to stumble into anyone in their path. Nonetheless, whether or not we feel sympathetic to the characters, as they work their way through their issues, Hood’s on-the-nose descriptions and dialogues keep us hooked. She makes it easy to enter the mindset of her first-person narrators (I was particularly fond of the three young sisters, who used "we" all the way through "Joelle’s Mother"), and though her third-person protagonists might be one step removed, many of them are quite gripping. The grandmother, Dora, in "The Language of Sorrow," is one of these. She and her teenaged grandson Peter are stuck with each other for the summer, as he struggles to come to grips with the loss of his father the previous year (to suicide) and with the loss of his infant son (put up for adoption by his girlfriend). Hood is deft at weaving in Dora’s own memories: of her two children, including Peter’s dad; of her affairs with young soldiers headed off to war (and maybe death); of her husband and his death from lung cancer; of her affair with her husband’s business partner and his sudden death. Her old friend Madeline comments on Dora’s many losses and advises her to let herself get angry. But Dora just replies that someone had once told her that "one death was a tragedy, but many deaths were a statistic." It’s through watching Peter trying to come to terms with his grief that she finds a way to truly experience her own pain, and we can hope that both she and he will begin to heal. A similar story about a teenaged niece with scars on her wrists who is sent to live with her aunt ("Escapes") has another suicide related to drug abuse, and when the aunt finally admits to Jennifer what happened to her father, they can both move forward in their lives, holding on to each other. But the losses that Hood writes about are not always death. Often, they are about the end of relationships, such as a man walking out on a woman ("After Zane" and "The Rightness of Things") or a woman risking an affair and the break-up of a family ("The New People," "An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life," "Inside Gorbachev’s Head"). In the last two, we are shown the effect (or potential effect) on the children inside the family that is pulling apart. Another kind of loss in Hood’s book is a complete breakdown in communication, such as happens between a mother and her son, who is afraid to tell her that he is gay ("Dropping Bombs"). As he sees her off at the airport, she says to him, "There is nothing worse than losing a child . . . You’re my only child, my boy. And I love you. I accept you for what you are. Do you know that?" And he’s thereby released to feel his love for her, instead of the resentment he’d been harboring. Despite the heavy topics that she tackles in these stories, Hood manages to give many of them a hopeful tone. She celebrates friendships and moral support between women: trying to fix up single friends with a date; offering to be a labor coach or a companion at an abortion clinic; or dragging a grief-stricken friend to an artist’s colony ("Lost Parts"). She honors families and the connections family members are trying to make to each other, such as with the grandmother/grandson and niece/aunt in the above-mentioned stories. Hood emphasizes that getting at the truth buried deep in family break-ups can release dangerous pressure on relationships and lead to new beginnings. We believe that will happen for the grandson Peter and the niece Jennifer; for the gay son and his mother; and for Joelle, her three young half-sisters, and perhaps their mothers. On the other hand, we’re not so sure where the truth is leading the one young man and the two young sisters involved in his mother’s and their father’s betrayal ("Inside Gorbachev’s Head"). Nor can we predict what the truth about a neighborhood sexual predator will do to the families involved, in "The New People." Thus, the lives of Hood’s characters are never as crisp and clean as her prose. Much is revealed by the way they talk about themselves but much is also held back. And though that technique is often a way to stir up a reader’s imagination, there are places in Ornithologist where I’d like to be led deeper into the feelings or motivations of the characters. Perhaps the very fact that these stories have left me wondering about the characters is the mark of their effectiveness.
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