Courtesy of Anne Valente
Anne Valente
Author Anne Valente, who is speaking as part of BookFest St. Louis 2018. Her second novel will publish summer of 2019.
“Because I’m from St. Louis, Left Bank is one of my favorite bookstores of all time,” says Anne Valente, author of the 2016 novel Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down—set in St. Louis—and the forthcoming Utah, scheduled to be released next summer. When Valente heard last year about Left Bank Books and the Central West End Community Improvement District's first-ever BookFest St. Louis, she was excited. But the author, who lives in upstate New York and teaches at Hamilton College, couldn’t make it to town for the first BookFest (“My family went, and they reported back,” she notes). For this year, however, she reached out to organizers to see if she could be a speaker—and got her wish.
On Saturday, September 22, Valente will speak as part of the Fresh Fierce Fiction panel at noon in the McPherson tent in the Central West End. She’ll be joined by short story writer Deborah Eisenberg, and novelists Rebecca Makkai and Lucy Jane Bledsoe as they talk about “writing something a bit edgier, a little heavier,” Valente says.
It’s a topic Valente knows. Her first novel centers on a fictional school shooting at fictional Lewis and Clark High School in St. Louis. It tracks how the survivors move on, and a series of fires that target the victims’ families. SLM caught up with Valente, and asked her what it’s like to write fiction around trauma, how her second book is different, and who she’s reading now.
What are your can’t-miss BookFest panels, and who are you looking forward to meeting?
I’m looking forward to seeing Sally Field speak on Friday night. I read Tessa Fontaine’s The Electric Woman this summer, so [I wish I could catch her talk] about memoir [this panel is scheduled for Saturday at noon, the same time as Valente’s]. The adult fiction panel on debut novelists [Daring Debut Novels] should be really good. Michael Nye’s book All the Castles Burned is a wonderful coming-of-age novel. I’m very drawn to those as someone who has written one as well. I feel like they often center on woman relationships, but this one centered on two men.
Why did you decide to set your first novel in St. Louis?
I’d been writing fiction for a while, and I had never written about St. Louis before. Maybe it felt too close. Because the content is a mass school shooting, that felt less familiar, so to dive into a topic that felt unfamiliar [made me want to make] the setting feel familiar.
What was the most difficult part about writing a book about a school shooting?
It’s a hard thing to talk about. To spend time with the material for that long is tough, but it’s not as difficult as living through it. Newspaper archives are largely what I used, to see how they covered, how long they covered it, what kinds of stories they covered. And then I did research into tertiary subjects like crime scene investigation. In terms of the police force investigation, I didn’t know how any of that worked. From a human side, [I researched] how something like that affects a community. It was newspaper articles and interviews, but pretty heavy work.
What was the most interesting thing you uncovered in your research?
The main archive I looked at was The Denver Post archive of Columbine. Nearly 20 years ago, coverage was very different than it is now. It was before the 24-hour news cycle. It surprised me in terms of how a president responds—or if he visits—how people move on, does the school close, does it move to a different location. The coverage was getting the events, and then focused on recovery.
How is Utah different?
The processes were pretty similar—I wrote them both in one-year sprints. I was moving during both of those novels, and it helped to have a routine. But Utah is a road trip narrative, so there’s a structure challenge. Hearts is pretty stationary in St. Louis. I wondered what could I do with a novel that’s constantly in motion—it’s about two sisters in Champaign, Illinois, and a mom, who leaves them a treasure hunt to a quarry out west, where she used to work as a paleontologist. I’m pretty drawn to landscape and setting, and the setting is so different for both of them that I feel like the writing is different. The language between St. Louis and the west is different, and I just went with it.
Who are you reading now?
It’s been a really good year in books. I just finished There There by Tommy Orange, and R. O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries was incredible. I really appreciate the breadth of Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers [about the AIDS epidemic]. It seems like she really, really did her research. She built strong and sharp characters.
What is your advice for writers?
If it seems like there are waves of rejection, that never stops. It becomes part of the writing life. Don’t focus on some of those external validations. If there’s any way to continue focusing on the spark that made someone want to write in the first place, that will help weather through the rejection. Keep a steady sense of “This is why I started wiring in the first place.”
