Narration is Created: a conversation with Anne-Marie Oomen on Artifacts, Most-likely details, and Landscape as Character

Anne-Marie Oomen is the author of The Long Fields, As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book, The Lake Michigan Mermaid (coauthored with Linda Nemec Foster), Pulling Down the Barn, House of Fields, An American Map: Essays, Uncoded Woman, and Love, Sex, and 4-H. She has written seven plays, including the award-winning The Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern. She is a poetry and nonfiction instructor at Solstice MFA at Lasell University and Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She and her husband, David Early, live in their handmade house near Traverse City, Michigan. Visit her at www.anne-marieoomen.com.

On December 6, 2023, Anne-Marie Oomen joined The Interlochen Review editors Bella Rotker, Ben Berman, and Zoe Lenz for a conversation about her essay collections The Long Fields and her memoir As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book, as well as her playwriting and hybrid projects.

Bella Rotker: Your work is honed in on the emotional experience of memory, retelling stories as a practice of making some sort of realization about them. In the note to readers of The Mom Book, you suggest memoir is obligated to a factual truth; “the events described here are less blurred by the vagaries of memory and less free of educated guesses and most-likely details,” but in “Head Cheese” you suggest truth is a more emotional experience based on the need for story: “You find flavor in telling, in the longing for them, in the way the longing feeds the living. But you have to be hungry, both teller and listener.” How do you approach truth in that context?

Anne-Marie Oomen: My answer isn’t a consistent one because the narrative that I’m shaping depends on where that memory starts and what it feels like now in the context of my current consciousness or identity. The memories that are in the past are more malleable because we know how the brain works now, and we know that memory is being replicated every time--but not exactly. Memory doesn’t remain accurate to what we supposedly call fact. It shifts. It honors some of what happened, but not completely. Part of our job as humans is to create our identity narratives and to build something that we rely on that tells us who we are. We call that memory, but it’s often a cultural memory, or it’s all held together in intricate complexities of Being. It’s malleable, but it’s a little different from history. In using those way-back memories, I feel bound to create narrative out of those fragments. I feel more at ease shaping art out of fragmented memories because I know they are a true clay, soft and nearly buried.

Siblings all have a sort of communal agreement that certain things happened, but each has different perspectives of the how and why, and the details of what happened change according to viewpoints. Sort of like a Venn diagram, we agree on some overlapping parts, but we’re not always going to share all of the same details or the same perspectives. This allows each person to shape their personal narrative. That’s what I’m doing with “The Way Back.”

In The Mom Book, which is a book about me and my sister’s caregiving for my mother, I was taking notes almost immediately after those conversations, in part because I was tracking her medical condition. I wanted to keep track of what people said, what I observed, and how she was. Those notes became the basis for some very accurate renderings of those incidents. In that particular case, I wanted to create a narrative much closer to what we call the facts or the history of the moment. To answer the question, the degree to which you lean on and honor what we would call historical truth or historical fact depends on the quality of the memory and the purpose.

Zoe Lenz: In several of your essays, you talk extensively about widening your perspective. For example, in “Head Cheese” you reflect on wanting to broaden your scope of perception and in “Window Pains” you talk extensively about the frame you see the world through. As a writer, what techniques do you use to understand the limits and possibilities of your perspective? How do you learn to recognize your own blindspots?

AMO: I think recognizing our own blindspots is really tough. There are both limits and possibilities in my own perspective. I often find myself stepping outside of myself and saying to myself, “what did the other person see in the scene?” What was my mother’s experience? What was the pig's experience in “Head Cheese”? It’s almost a visceral feeling of transforming into another being for a minute, but in the imagination. That feeling of transferring, seeing through another person’s eyes, seeing through my mother’s eyes, seeing through my father’s eyes, that helps me start to widen the perspective. It’s almost like in a play, you have to move from one character to another as you write each character. You have to get inside each of those characters.

Recognizing blindspots is harder to do. In putting together the new book The Long Fields, I had to acknowledge that some of those essays were almost thirty years old. I was going to touch them again. I wasn’t trying to rewrite them, but I was aware that in those early moments of writing them, I was far less aware of the longer history of land with the Indigenous Peoples than I am now. Back then, it wasn’t on my radar in the same way. That was a blindspot I hadn’t reckoned with until I went back and really looked at those essays. Now of course, people have raised social and political awareness, and that’s been a growth process for me as a writer. I knew I had to address that in some way, so I rewrote the entire introduction, acknowledging the limits of my vision at that time. I tried to put in perspective that this was a consciousness that would grow through the course of the entire manuscript. If you look at the last essays in the book, I think they acknowledge the complex stewardship and spiritual kinship that I hope to muster in caretaking the land.

Ben Berman: In many of your essays, you work to approach the unapproachable, all-encompassing subjects writers are often so afraid to talk about; growing up, witnessing and working through death and mental decline of loved ones. How do you write about these things in a way that feels productive, fresh, and real? How do you avoid falling into cliché and stay true to the experience of the story?

AMO: I don’t think I can avoid thinking about those big moments. That is where I delve into my humanity and figure out how to practice compassion, hard as that sometimes is. It would be easier to stay distant from those darker things. When we grapple with the unapproachable on a personal level, it also allows us to grapple with that on a more cultural level. Losing a mother, losing a relative, watching an animal die—all those things happen to individuals, but also to many, and so may help shape a collective grief. Acknowledging our personal pain while simultaneously entering into a collective consciousness--that’s a practice for being aware of the devastations that are happening around the world, including the new wars: Ukraine, the Israeli and Palestinian war, and wars that are happening that we don’t even acknowledge. Having that smaller empathy in our personal lives is a gateway, a portal, into being able to acknowledge the larger need for empathy.

I’m not trying to say I have this great empathy. I simply think this is how we begin to practice compassion and how we start to enter into the larger picture. Writing about those things allows me to explicate my own grief. It takes my grief out of the masses of psychic energy around it and makes it discreet. Writing it is also a process many people find healing. Even if you're not thinking about a readership and you’re just journaling for yourself, the process of actually getting loss or grief or fear into sentences can be healing. Language begins to structure grief and mourning and loss so that it has an order that becomes more manageable for the psyche. You basically use art to shape the un-shapeable. You do that for yourself; then, with revision, you may be able to do it for others. You can expand the discreet to the universal, or at least the next neighborhood.

BR: You mentioned writing for yourself or writing for an audience. I was wondering what you think about work that approaches or turns away from an audience in the context of grief. How do you do that in a way that feels productive, how do you do that in the context of nonfiction?

AMO: It seems to me that early drafts, or first drafts, are always for ourselves. We’re working it out. The process of revision, and particularly deep revision, is coming to understand that your audience is giving you their most precious commodity, which is their time. So the practice starts with writing a piece strictly for me and getting all that massive stuff out but slowly moving it toward an empathy in the writing that makes it a gift to the audience, so that they can have a worthy experience in reciprocity for that gift of their time. It’s a process of moving that vision out of my own head into theirs. It’s that perspective we were talking about earlier. Is their brain going to light up with something? Even if they don’t particularly like the piece you’ve given them, is the brain going to be engaged? If they can’t stop reading, that’s the greatest gift back. If they can’t stop reading your words. To do that, I have to both get inside that piece but also inside your head—see it as you would see it. That’s the process that leads towards that compassion for your audience.

ZL: In many of your essays, moments that represent both life and death like the calf being born in “When Eden Shifts” or fixation on the death of the brain in “Head Cheese” serve as motivations for growth. Can you talk about how those dichotomous experiences both became vehicles for growth? Given their placement, did you intend these two essays to be in conversation with one another?

AMO: They inform each other. The birth and the death inform each other, each one giving information about the other. They’re in constant conversation. As you grow older and you experience both of those things, like if you’ve had a child born into your family or if you’ve lost a grandparent or any of those things, those experiences are talking to each other all the time. A death will speak to a birth. They are melded in ways, as if our bodies know more than our brains do. They live side by side. Sometimes they’re inside each other. Birth inside death inside birth. It is perhaps what gives us some hope that they are always talking to each other. If death is not an ending but a transition—that’s part of the mystery of death. It’s also the mystery of birth, where does this consciousness come from? All of that is melding and spiraling. As a writer my job is to try and let the conversation happen.

As you grow older and you have more of those experiences, you realize time is linear because it has to be for us to live in this world. But our understanding of time too is limited. I suspect there are spirals of time: waves, currents, overlappings. On a farm, more than perhaps any other place, you will see more animals die and animals be born. Those things happen in the same stalls, in the same spaces—the invitation to be part of that gets bigger as one grows up and ages. Time gets reshaped into something not chronological, but mosaic. It’s our jobs as artists to explain that, to open that and explore that.

BR: You’ve written extensively about your rural upbringing, especially in collections like Pulling Down the Barn, in the opening of which you describe your grandmother as an “old hill of a woman.” How do you see the landscape of rural Michigan influencing the way you write about the people that interact with that landscape?

AMO: I think landscape is character. It actually needs to be developed as though it were a member of the human race. Though we often miss the power of landscape in our daily lives, I think land shapes us. I just came from the Arizona desert and I was also in the Colorado mountains and I was acutely aware, particularly in Colorado, that there was a particular physicality that happens with mountain people that I don't see in other settings. And when I was in the desert, there's a certain way that people who are born and raised in the desert stride, the way they're moving over the land. To me, it's a signal that the land is actually affecting their physicality, that the land as a character is interacting and influencing them.

What I'm curious about is if it also affects the way we think? Does being raised or living for a long time in the mountains begin to affect the way you see the world, or think about it? Having a horizon that is snow covered mountain peaks, is that different from here in northern Michigan, where the gently rolling hills are always affecting the horizon? You're rising and falling in these gentle rolls because we're glacial. Or does it matter to our psyches that we have these enormous lakes that we can't see across? Does that affect the way our mental state addresses the world? I'm very curious about that. Landscape is a character and I think it shapes us as much as we shape it.

BB: In terms of looking through the lens of landscape as a character, I'm curious what your perspective is on cities, the ever growing lack of nature and how you think that affects people, if landscape affects character.

AMO: First of all, I am astonished in urban settings at the amount of nature that I do encounter. I swear to God, raccoons have a whole urban ecosystem going. You know, they've done it. They've managed to figure it out. You hear stories of coyotes, and, of course, how hawks and the falcons on small plots of park have managed to survive and thrive. It always amazes me how much of the natural world has inundated and percolated into the urban setting.

I also think that cities have character. If I'm in a city, this is going to sound strange, but the first thing I look for are the murals. I want to know what the artists are doing to interact with architecture. I want to see how those buildings are operating. I want to know if there are neighborhoods versus suburbs. Whenever I'm in Chicago, I am enamored by the museums. I go to the Art Institute. The fact that that city bumps right up against Lake Michigan and you have this beautiful shoreline with skyscrapers just leaning on it, that gives it a certain character. Coming out of Phoenix this last week, it was barren. It was absolutely barren. But then going into Tucson was a different experience. There was a lot of green and it was clear this was a city that has become water conscious and they're doing things to keep their parks alive. There was not one green lawn that I saw anywhere. It was all stone and cactus--which was just perfectly righteous. But also, and this represents the opposite, there’s landscape as sprawl. Sprawl tends to be homogeneous. Sprawl is all one tone. A writer can use that too, that sort of universality that you're going to find in a Home Depot, McDonald's, Starbucks, Walmart, strip mall, and or on one big plaza and Target will probably be anchoring them. A writer can use that, but the character is going to be of a type, not nearly as complex. So those characters operate much like landscape.

BR: I'm really interested in this idea of landscape as a character, and I know that your voice translates through a lot of your work regardless of what genre you're working in, so I'm wondering how you consider landscape as a character in the context of playwriting. How do you stage that, and how do you think about how the audience interacts with that?

AMO: There’s always a time and place in a play. It’s so much fun to create a sense of place on the stage, and it can be done in so many different ways: sound, lighting, costumes, backdrop, and now even video. But I really like to identify the artifacts of place. I wrote a play for one of the CTAM [Community Theater Association of Michigan] contests called The Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern. It takes place in the Upper Peninsula in a bar/café. It's one of those places where the smallest artifacts can say the whole thing—there's a rifle hanging on the wall. There's a moose head, there's those bad little plaques that make jokes we now consider politically incorrect and that tells us about the culture. The stool covers always have cracks in them. The walls have layers of dust toward the top or shadows and cobwebs on the ceiling. It’s a dive landscape. Economically strapped. And when people come in, even the way they hang their coats, the coats themselves, those artifacts, all of that tells you about the landscape even though it's an interior. If those coats are winter coats, if they're puffers, you know you're in a seasonal place. That may seem so obvious, but those details can be very indicative. Are the coats in a hunter's plaid or are they Land's End microfiber? Are the characters wearing boots? What kinds of boots are they? Are they high end UGGs or are they old school Sorels with multiple layers of insulation? Those kinds of things tell you everything about who's walking into that space and what kind of world they've come from. Those are ways that the setting begins to communicate what the characters’ lives are like.

You can also do a lot with sound and lighting. Are the sounds that are coming into that space indicating that people are driving pick-up trucks or catching commercial buses? Are they the sound of old beater cars without mufflers, or the whoosh of a tram? Those are all different indicators, and we read them pretty organically. Lighting people and set designers thrive on this kind of conversation. It’s their kind of world-building, but as a playwright, you want to lead them with specifics that can actually be visually read by an audience.

BB: One thing I've noticed in recent debate in the playwriting world is how much you're supposed to give the reader when you're writing the script. For example, some plays are in a blank theater. Other times it's like, this is a specific living room. All the books have been read like a thousand times. If you opened up a book, you would be able to see that. What are your thoughts on when that is deserved, and do you have a rule of thumb for yourself on how much you want to include in creating the world of the play?

AMO: It depends on what you're doing with the play. You know, if those things are important to the narrative arc, the message, then you give that information to your audience. Because playwriting is so collaborative, you have to be willing to give up certain things. Unless you're an Edward Albee or somebody like that, you have to be flexible to work with. But it ultimately depends on the narrative. In the case of The Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern, I had a very specific sense of how I wanted these people communicated—so the set was realistic. But I've also written plays in a virtual black box, where I know that it's esoteric enough that the narrative can be played many, many ways in many places. I like that too.

For example, I’ve seen many Shakespeare plays where the sets have been updated to a contemporary setting or they've been done virtually without set, just costumes and suggested weaponry or something like that. Others have been very exotic, beautiful with time-specific sets and grand costuming. This is where your director's vision plays on and plays with yours. Because that whole element of collaboration is going to influence everything.

ZL: In “Wishbones and Scars,” you use the wishbone as a tool to explain family traditions, relationships, and fears. When writing memoir, how do you choose what objects are important to the emotional arc of a story?

AMO: It has to support the narrative. I'm very careful about trying not to invent that, to try and actually go back in memory. If I don't have a specific artifact, I ask: what was the most likely detail? You know your settings. Or you should. So what was the most likely detail to have arisen from that moment in that real place? In that real situation? I may not have remembered the color of the wallpaper, but there was a little chipped egg cup at the breakfast table. It may not have been in the year, but at some point in those years, there was a little chipped egg cup on the table. That will work. I can use that detail to support the narrative of the chipped heart. All those settings have to be carefully curated in your own imagination. So you are saying, okay, what really fits here? The taxidermied antlers are unlikely to show up in the newly remodeled suburban kitchen. Or if the antlers are there, why are they there? Because they indicate a certain kind of story. And what does that tell us about this particular group of people that we're going to meet? It’s always about looking at the narrative and saying, okay, how can the setting that I'm creating either on the page or on the stage support the story I'm trying to tell?

BB: Throughout your work, you use this wonderfully distinct tone. It’s heightened, it’s poetic, it’s distinctly funny at times. I’ve specifically been drawn to your written out sound effects at some points, I remember “hmph” for example. How do you flow through a variety of different tones in a balanced way? Is it something that comes naturally to you, or is it an intention that you have to work for?

AMO: I work for it. I really do. It’s something I learned over time. I remember many years ago, very early in my career, reading an article about teaching children through sensory language. In your brain there are different parts associated with different senses. And if, when you’re teaching children, you can use language that highlights more of the senses and gets their brains warmed up—if you can use words like, “it smells like this,” “it tastes like this,” then their experience of learning is more likely to stay because there are multiple senses associated with that big lesson.

I realized the same thing happens in writing. That if a reader is beginning to experience multiple sensory responses to language, more parts of their brains are engaged in the reading experience. The goal is that they’re so involved in the story, and the narrative, the sensory experience of that, that they forget they’re reading. What a gift. Suddenly they’re in the movie of the mind. You want that experience for them.

The second part is practicing sentence variety and sentence length, changing the length of your sentences so the syntactical rhythms have to change according to mood and purpose. Changing the structure of the sentence, so that your paragraphs ebb and flow among those sentences, becomes a way to control tone and mood. They’re talking to each other by contrast or by parallel. What is the effect of a long sentence versus what is the effect of a short sentence? What do multisyllabic words do against single syllable words? All of that affects how your reader engages. I have to keep working at it until I can feel this tension and release in a sentence. It’s like a dancer.

BR: You’ve mentioned your research in teaching and working with children. You taught at Interlochen for a while, you were Director of Creative Writing, and your legacy is so tangible in the Writing House. You can stand in the Great Room and look around and feel your presence in there. I think in a lot of ways that’s affected all of our writing, so I’m wondering how your experience teaching and working with the people at Interlochen has affected your writing, specifically in terms of tone and how to get the reader involved.

AMO: I have always found teaching in general inspirational, because it’s a way to practice articulating how we do what we do. I’ve also been inspired by students over and over again. That’s been one of the joys of teaching, especially at Interlochen, that students were trying different things, and even when I could see that it was rough, I could feel the intention toward transformation—that movement toward, “how do I transform this” or “how do I create transformation,” which is one of the purposes of art. Teaching, if you’re open, is a gateway to change. In terms of your relationship with the audience, it’s also a portal to transformation.

I had the incredible opportunity to be a part of the team that created the design for the Writing House. What I knew about living a writing life is that we often work in our pajamas, and even though we weren’t going to be able to do that in the Writing House, it had to create that sense of home while still being an educational building. The very first design that came back, there were like four classrooms in a row and forty carols were all lined up and they were all exactly the same and we went “oh, I don’t think so.” I didn’t want uniformity. We had the idea that there had to be these two parts talking to each other, the fireplace, that flame of passion, and then the opposite end of the Great Room where you have that huge tree trunk, which is actually structural to the building, and that would be craft. To have those two things in conversation with each other is an invitation to ignite the work: the structure of craft coupled with the flame of passion and inspiration and then that open gathering area between. It felt like the architecture was metaphorical and also physically adept at meeting the needs of an artist.

BR: Your voice has such a beautiful balance between the direct, the matter of fact, and the lyrical or poetic, particularly in terms of your use of metaphor. For example in the opening line to As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book; “The breath, or rather, the unbreath,” in Pulling Down the Barn, “An earliest memory is something like a flag tying you to a country,” or in The Long Fields; “If you have not yet realized that hunger begins with death, skip this essay. Because butchering is its own story and you need to finish what you start .” How do you approach the balance of a more oracular voice versus image in your nonfiction, and how do you craft metaphor and figurative language in that context?

AMO: Metaphor, to me, has to inform. One of the most dazzling things that we do as human beings is create metaphor. It’s a way of opening meaning and associating one thing with another. We use metaphor to say ‘this experience is like this’ and we hope that it brings light to it. In some ways it also blurs. It connects and blurs, and it's something that I love to do. I know when it’s happening, that metaphor is starting to evolve. I can feel it moving, and I don’t always know why. It’s part of practice. I’m driven toward it because I feel the opening in meaning at the same time that I feel the blur.

Image becomes the basis for the best metaphors. Start with something concrete. A particular image of an experience: holding a bale of hay or a cup of cold water becomes a metaphor for something else, but you find the image first and then you’re building from that. It’s also a practice, like learning piano scales. You try to do it and go over and over it, just practicing to see what you get. You find a metaphor in another piece of writing and study how that author did it. How does it fit; why does it fit? You see if you can do a transfer of that: how did that metaphor operate in the context of the piece? You read and practice and replicate, and then you gradually make the transfer to your own materials. That’s the practical way that you learn to build metaphors. It’s lovely and kind of addictive how it grows. After a while you know when you need one. If you look at my very early writing there are very few metaphors; now that’s very different.

ZL: In “Head Cheese” you also talk about the writing process and the speaker being self-aware of the story itself when you write, “I am now part of the story. I am participating.” This line could also be read as you becoming part of the occasion or event of that story. How do you strike a balance between self-awareness in that sense and narrative?

AMO: In that particular essay, because I knew it was going to be the opening essay, I wanted to introduce the idea that narration is created. That in all these essays the narration is going to be made, and that it might not have been there from the beginning, or barely there, but it can be created out of the incident. It’s also my way of trying to be aware that art is a making and you can make it from ordinary chaos. It can be built from the quotidian, and it in some ways should be built from the debris of everyday life. Writing an essay about head cheese, which was the last thing used in the butchering process of a pig, is an example of that practice. You use the smallest thing and it becomes a portal to other meanings, and that’s part of what we do. I know we all have trouble with change, but we’re all in stages of transformation and we just have to live inside that process, the story of the process in addition to the story we are telling, and we need to ask what our process is doing because that’s one of the ways we can re-inspire our art.

BR: We were talking a lot beforehand about that line, “I am now part of the story. I am participating,” and we were talking about the different ways that you can read it. Namely, “ I am now part of the story” in terms of the occasion of the story, like you are part of the pig’s story, or a more literal reading, like you are now part of the essay. I was wondering about how you interpreted that as a reading over the rest of the collection, especially because you knew it was going to be the first essay in the collection. How did you write this essay in comparison to the order of the rest of the book, and how do you think that it should be read over the rest of the collection, in terms of being part of the story? Being a part of the collection?

AMO: I hadn’t thought of that line as being so pivotal. Yes, it is an announcement that I’m now a participant in the story. And also that this is a “making,” all these essays are makings. Like the head cheese, and I have to engage, to participate. And I'm also making something called an essay, a construct of language and logic. When we tell stories, especially in nonfiction and in memoir, there’s a point at which we engage almost spiritually. I mean, you can keep your distance in memoir but it’s hard. In memoir particularly, you are the center of the story even if you’re telling the story about someone else. Readers see the story through your lens, your vision, your eye. You can use point of view—you can play with that. That can flex back and forth among different psychological distances or closeness. You should ask: am I writing the story as a participant or as a writer with the consciousness of a maker? Or both. I was doing some of both in “Head Cheese.” It depends on what you want your essay to create in/with your reader. I wanted to do both in that first essay, to set up the rest of the collection. So we ask ourselves: how are we going to connect? How will we use the tools to make this thing. That’s another way you can manipulate that psychic distance.

BR: I’ve seen documentation of a project that you did entitled “Entropy” in which you left a piano out in the woods for a year and wrote poems about it in collaboration with Nikola Conraths. Although it’s not public, I was fascinated with the interaction between, as you call it, “the entropy and unpredictability of nature, and the act of poetry as a kind of evolution.” Can you talk about the collaborative nature of poetry and how it interacts with nature itself?

AMO: That was such an amazing project. The piano sat just outside of Corson Auditorium. It was there for an entire academic year and periodically it was used by the Interdisciplinary Arts department for performances, even in the snow, and we were all watching its process of entropy. The Interdisciplinary Art Department invited people to interact with the piano. So things would appear on the piano. Things would be taken away. It was covered with graffiti. Carolyn Forché was one of our visiting artists that year and she signed the piano. I have the board she signed.

In terms of the entropy, the breakdown, the energetic cycle was happening alongside the interaction. I walked past that piano and often lingered every day. I was paying attention to the artifacts, but also to what was happening to the strings, what was happening to the veneer, what was happening to the ivory. What was happening to the legs as it sat and as it leaned,when the leaves gathered in it. All of those things became a part of my witnessing. It was also a time when my mother was failing and entering dementia, and that started to enter into the poems, her presence personified in the demise of the piano mixed with the life I was living and the natural world interacting with the piano. Once again, metaphor, what I’d call a soft weave through the pieces. And that craft work is also a natural process, even though the subject matter is also a tragic and heartbreaking process. So there was this sense of the piano talking to us about its experience, giving voice to the process of its own entropy, and then also letting my awareness of my mother’s own form of entropy underpin the poems. It’s all connected, again. You just have to see those connections. You have to practice seeing it all.