Interview by Christine Maul Rice
With startling honesty, precise observation, and a deep faith in the beauty of language, Patricia Ann McNair creates a world where the so-called adults in the room abandon, lie, cheat, steal. They’re familiar, these faults, you think as McNair traces the delicate cracks and gaping chasms of the human condition, her gaze unflinching, unnerving, watching as opposing forces collide, unleash catastrophe. Especially then. Who, she seems to ask, is left behind and why turn away? In this remarkable collection, McNair hits her writerly stride with a sureness that is nothing less than breathtaking.
Patty and I caught up to discuss life as it was, what it will be, walking, bellying up to the bar, and her new collection, out now from Cornerstone Press, Responsible Adults.
Hello, Patty.
Hey, Chris! Happy new administration!
Happy, indeed!
We’ve known each other for a while now—before your first short story collection, The Temple of Air, and your essay collection, And These Are the Good Times, were published when there was a free-standing Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago.
I fondly remember (and pine for a future when this can happen again) having a pint at Kitty O’Shea’s with you other CCC colleagues. Remember that? The days before—sitting next to someone and talking?
Oh, man, I do remember that. You know, I think that might be one of the things I miss most lately: barstool time. Philip (my husband) and I are really cautious; we’ve only gone out to a pub once last summer when we sat outside to drink a beer, no one anywhere close to us. I brought a straw so I wouldn’t have to move my mask, but that didn’t really work. We’re happy hour people, he and I, locals at a place where they know your name and pour your drink before you sit down. And now I am aching when I think about all the places you and I and our colleagues have lifted a glass together: New York; Mineral Point, Wisconsin; Minneapolis; Interlochen, Michigan, Boston…all the cities where we went to conferences and things. Damn.
Right. Next, let’s raise glasses on the West Coast.
Your work to hire and support artists in Illinois makes you a gold-star member of the lit community (and your support of my teaching and writing has been greatly appreciated).
In a Hypertext Magazine interview in 2017, you wrote:
I am one of those people who really, really, loves to be alone. I like to feel lonely, especially when I am working on a story or an essay. It forces me to talk to myself, to answer myself. And there is a sort of forced responsibility in that act. People, like all of the other things we surround ourselves with—screens, phones, internet, movies, the daily horrors of the news—can be a distraction. BUT, and this is a loud BUT, if a writer spends too much time alone, there is a danger that the writing might become nothing more than muttering to herself. I guess what I am talking about here is partly audience.
How has the pandemic impacted this desire to be alone? If at all?
I still yearn for it, I have to say, the alone time. Maybe even more so now because my home has become my workplace; the classes I teach are all remote, meetings are Zoomed, we even have our happy hour replacement over the computer. Dinner parties, too. So even while I have some hours in the apartment by myself (not many, Philip is working from home, too, and only goes to his studio a couple times a week) I am constantly connected here in these two rooms where we live. We take walks together in the morning, Philip and I, and I am reluctant to go out much to wander around on my own right now; I can’t daydream in the same way I used to because I am aware and wary of those around me—you know, the great unmasked masses. I guess it isn’t surprising that since this all started, I haven’t been writing much. My muttering and journal scribbling is all about my remote lesson planning and worrying about people getting sick, dying. And the orange guy in the white house. I have felt more terrified than lonely, frankly.
Now though, since the election at least, I feel hopeful. And I am starting to feel like I might be able to let go of my tight grip on my planning and worrying and let some story making back into my life.
Yes. That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling. My daily walks, that once used to bring me so much joy, have become stressful—crossing the street to avoid others, avoiding touch football games populated with unmasked people in the park.
You’ve been a professor at CCC for a few minutes. How long? How has teaching—and listening in the meaningful way we were trained to listen—impacted your life? Your work?
Yeah, just a few minutes. I started part-time there more than thirty years ago. Full-time now for twenty-five. And before that, I was a student in the Fiction Writing program at Columbia. So I have been learning from my work there for a long time. Like you, I learned to write with an ear toward oral storytelling and voice awareness. I listen to my work as I write it, I actually silently vocalize (is that possible?) a bit as I put words on the page—I get hoarse when I have been writing for a while even though I haven’t said anything out loud. Weird, right? When I am writing my best, it is very much a listening thing, and the same goes for teaching. I have a character in Responsible Adults in the story “Maria Concepción,” you guys published it here first, and she is the kind of person who admitted to being the kind of person who did not listen well to others, to her husband, for instance. She thought she knew how sentences would end, that sort of thing. That is my natural inclination, truth be told, to think I know what people are saying before they say it. And that does not make for good teaching, good writing, good anything, really. There is wisdom in what we don’t yet know, what we have to listen hard and deep for, the discoveries therein. I can learn from listening to how you end a sentence, you can learn by figuring out what you want to say instead of my filling in the gaps. Funny, I am blabbing here. I’ll shut up now. Practice some of that listening.
No. Not babbling. I love the decision to listen to how others end a sentence. Listening is so important and so underrated.
Yeah. And it ain’t easy, is it? There is so much noise around us and in our heads, it is hard to listen through to what matters. I think you’ve got to want to, though. That’s the first step. Care about what is said around and to you, not just by you.
In the dedication, you write:
For the men I’ve lost: Wilbur, Roger, Paul
And for the one I found: Philip
You grew up as the only daughter in a family of boys. You also had brothers who were much older than you. Could you talk about this dedication and how, if at all, being one of two women in a family of men, impacts your writing?
Huh, what an interesting thing to think about. I grew up with three brothers, I was the baby, and I had three half-brothers who were older than us but didn’t live with us. Philip is my husband, as you know, and when I found him—at the Vermont Studio Center—my life changed in all the best ways. Wilbur was my dad. Roger my brother, Paul my-half-brother. Each of these men died too young. People always think I must have been spoiled, protected as the only girl besides my mom, as the baby. I don’t think I was. I was the dutiful kid, the one who got up to do the Saturday chores (my mom made lists, like one of the moms in Responsible Adults) before a couple of my brothers would even get out of bed. My closest brother, Roger, was just two years older than me; we were pals. I guess I was kind of one of the guys in my family. My mother had a career, and it was a time when kids didn’t have their parents around them all the time. In the sixties and seventies, too, I was influenced by the idea of unisex style—girls dressing like boys, short hair, boys in flowing shirts, long hair. I never felt girly-girly. I thought I was tough. Part of that, too, had to do with sexuality. I was sexual (too young, really, because of the kids I hung out with) and not afraid of it. Why is that, I wonder. I guess because I knew my brothers, so I suppose I have always felt I know boys. I was not—am not—afraid of them. I think this attitude is in my writing. Tough girls, hurt occasionally, but not in fear.
You have mentioned that you are writing a novel too. What have you learned from structuring short stories and essays (and those collections) that carries through into your process writing the novel?
I have learned that I don’t yet know how to write a novel. I have learned that I will keep trying until I get it right.
A good number of these stories deal with mother/daughter (or motherly) relationships—with familial relationships in general. Why do these relationships keep tugging at you?
We talked about my growing up with all boys; you know my father died when I was just fifteen. That influences much of what I write, fathers are often absent or abandon their families. Because my mom and I were the only women in the family, we were very close. I was her baby girl. She died while I held her nearly two decades ago, and there is a uniquely shaped hole in me where she used to reside. I suppose these stories come from me trying to fill that hole in some way, or to at least try to mend it a bit. That seems like a strange thing to say since a number of these story mothers are not particularly good at mothering, and I think mine was, at least her mothering of me was good. But maybe there is still a feeling of betrayal I carry somewhat because she died on me, left me, and perhaps that influences how I write these mothers. Is that it? Huh. I should ask a shrink about that, maybe.
You seem to writing about it…working it out that way though. When does the book launch? What are your thoughts about virtual readings and launches?
Cornerstone Press, my publisher, is doing a first launch event and celebration on December 3, so before this interview is out. But the Chicago launch will be on January 3, my birthday! Women & Children First and the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame will be supporting the launch, Eric May will be my chat partner. Remote, yes. It doesn’t feel the same as the real, in-person thing (just like Zoom happy hour is not as happy as real happy hour) but there are some benefits. Friends from all over the country—maybe even outside of the country—can come, so that is really cool. Drinks are cheaper at home than in person. I don’t have to wear pants if I don’t want to. (Don’t worry, I will!) And no one will get someone else sick. That’s the best part. I am definitely going to miss signing books and hugging folks. I have a bunch of other writers’ books I have been buying after these remote launches, and I am sorry to not have them signed yet. I miss the ritual. But I am glad that bookstores are working hard to keep us engaged, to keep our community vital and connected. Do I love it this way? No. Am I grateful for it? Abso-fucking-lutely.
I’m thinking about how short stories can be published online or in print before they are published in a collection—and how publication gives immediate feedback via social media or even a good old-fashioned phone call. How does this back and forth with readers sustain you (or not?). And how do you handle the much more isolated act of writing a novel?
There you go with that novel thing again. I will let you know when I figure that out. But to the other part of your question, I so appreciate the on-line publishing world now. I remember when folks first started to put journals on-line, I was quite skeptical, wary, sure it would be the death of literature. I would not publish anything on-line for a while, but then got a piece in Brevity, and all of a sudden, I started to hear from people in various ways because they had read the essay. It turned up in someone’s syllabus. Dinty W. Moore actually added it to one of his nonfiction textbooks. I had an audience I was not likely to reach before. I still love the print journal most of all–in theory. The ones you Hypertext folks make are so beautiful. They feel good to hold, they look groovy on your coffee table, they are full of good writing. Nothing can quite replace seeing work in print, feeling the paper under your fingertips as you turn the pages. And yet. My cousins read my on-line publications, my mother’s neighbors do. Hundreds of my closest friends on Facebook might. More than once I have had an agent reach out to me because they read one of my pieces on-line. There is a certain quick, bright flash of gratification that can happen with publishing on-line that is different from the warm glow of having a print publication of your work on someone’s bookshelf, seeing it on a table at a book fair, in a bookstore. It certainly can be a distraction, though. I have been lucky with some of the pieces that you have published of mine in Hypertext in that they get a lot of likes and shares, and I want to witness that, to see if anyone read it, responded to it. I could be writing, you know, but instead I am jumping over to your site, keeping tabs.
And I want to take your question about writing a novel and the isolation it takes more seriously now. I know that the only way I will succeed at finishing a novel that might find a publisher, is by allowing myself to immerse myself in the work. Turn off the internet, the phone. I have finished a few drafts of another novel that is still not done, and the only way I was able to do that was to be away from my teaching, my distractions of connection. I have been on sabbatical, in residence, on summer break. No one hits “like” or “share” when I make a good sentence, when I finish a chapter. It is only me and the page. Listening.
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Patricia Ann McNair’s short story collection, Responsible Adults, was selected as a Legacy Series book by Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point.
Her essay collection, And These are The Good Times: A Chicago gal riffs on death, sex, life, dancing, writing, wonder, loneliness, place, family, faith, coffee, and the FBI (among other things) published by Side Street Press was named a finalist for the Montaigne Medal for most thought-provoking book of 2017.
The Temple of Air, McNair’s story collection published by Elephant Rock Books, received the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Society of Midland Authors (US) Finalist Award.
McNair has lived 98 percent of her life in the Midwest. She’s managed a gas station, served as a medical volunteer in Honduras, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and taught aerobics. Today she is an Associate Professor in the English and Creative Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago, where she received the Excellence in Teaching Award as well as a nomination for the Carnegie Foundation’s US Professor of the Year.
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