Anne LeClaire's Biography
I grew up on a farm in a small town in Western Massachusetts, the middle of threedaughters of a school teacher mother and an electrician father. I was the family "story-teller," not always meant in the good way. In fact, I love that while I was once punished for making up stories, I now get paid for it. Okay, so I was a small town girl. But my ambitions were as fanciful as they were impractical. My early career choices werefueled by dreams nurtured in our town library where books fired my imagination. At various times I dreamt of being an FBI agent, a girl detective, a pilot, a spy and a cow girl.
I'm a graduate of the MacDuffie School in Springfield, Massachusetts and continued my education at North Adams College, North Adams, Massachusetts and Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.
I met my future husband, Hillary, while on summer break from college. It's a classic summer story. Co-ed goes to Cape Cod for a summer job, meets and falls in love with a native and ends up living on the Cape. We now live in the seaside village of South Chatham and have two children, Hope D’Avril and Chris, a black cat and sixteen chickens.
While raising a family, I was no closer to being the F.B.I. agent or cowgirl but did work as a radio broadcaster, an actress, a journalist and a correspondent for The Boston Globe. My work appeared in The New York Times, Redbook, and Yankee magazine, among others.
It wasn't until 1983 that, pursuing a long-held dream and encouraged by the fiction editor of Yankee, I quit my journalism jobs and began a novel, Land’s End, which was published by Bantam Books in 1985. I have since written seven other novels, including the critically acclaimed Entering Normal and Leaving Eden. My work has been published in many countries including Great Britain, Italy, Greece, France, Japan, Germany, Portugal, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, Netherlands, Brazil and Israel.
In addition to novels, I write short stories and essays. I also teach and lecture here and abroad on the creative process, as well as on the practice of silence. I have taught creative writing on Cape Cod, in France, Ireland and Jamaica, and to women in prison.
My essays have been included in a number of anthologies, among them I’ve Always Meant to Tell You, Letters to Our Mothers: An Anthology of Contemporary Women Writers; From Daughters and Sons to Fathers: What I’ve Never Said; and A Sense of Place: An Anthology of Cape Women Writers.
My interests are gardening, yoga, theater, travel and aviation (I am a private pilot). I'm also interested in genealogy and am a cousin of the poet Emily Dickinson.
Sarah Hutto: On your website biography, you cite certain childhood experiences as shaping you as writer. Which authors influenced you as you developed your own voice?
Anne Le Claire: How much space to we have? I could fill pages with the novelists alone. One summer, I heard Stanley Kunitz speak at the Wellfleet library - I think he was 90 at the time - and as a way of paying homage to those whose shoulders he stood on, he listed the poets who had been inspirational at every decade of his life. I thought that was not only interesting but generous - typical of Stanley.
Certainly the writers we are drawn to at twenty are very different from the ones we have an affinity for at forty or fifty. My reasons for reading individual authors are varied. Some - like Scott Turow - I read for plot. Others, like Alice McDermott, Sue Miller, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor and Nadine Gordimer I read for character and language. For an understanding of the human heart I read John Steinbeck, and Anne Tyler, and O'Connor. Early on I was heavily influenced by Hawthorne, Camus, Chekhov, and Somerset Maugham ("The Colonel's Lady" is a perfect short story). And I haven't even touched on the poets.
SH: After a five-year hiatus from publishing in the late nineties, your novels seemed to take a turn from a suspenseful and macabre flirtation with death to one that is more sentimental, focusing on survival from loss. What caused this shift? Was there a change in your personal life?
AL: I don't think the "shift" was as dramatic as you suggest. The last four novels all have death as central to their stories. And my earlier books - the ones my publishers called "novels of suspense" - were at their core stories about how characters navigate the minefields of life.What has always drawn me - whatever the envelope within which I am relating a story - is the mysteries, confusions, and contraditions of the human heart. Why do we do what we do? How do we survive in the face of devastating loss? What constitutes family? What are we most afraid of losing? What happens when personal and communal honor are in conflict? How do we forgive betrayal? Must forgiveness be earned? How do we not only survive but thrive after unimaginable loss? What gives meaning to our lives?
SH: How much do you write through inspiration and how much by discipline?
AL: Writing is by definition a discipline, as are all the arts. What's the adage? 10% inspiration, 90 % perspiration.
SH: Do you write a certain amount each day? What sort of rituals have you developed over the years?
AL: When I'm working on a book, I write every day. I don't set myself a daily word count. Although that works for a lot of authors, when I've tried it I find I'm writing toward a number instead of to the story and eventually I end up tossing a lot of those words.
I don't have any rituals. So much changes during the months and years spent writing a book - mood, weather, health, obligations, seasons, to mention a few - that there is little that remains constant, except for showing up. I do the New York Times crossword every morning before work so I suppose you could count that as my warm up ritual.
SH: Are you generally on a deadline for your books?
AL: Always.
SH: How do you push through writer's block, if you experience it at all?
AL: I'm not sure what writer's block is. And time I hit a wall, I find one of two things have happened: either I don't have enough information and need to do more research, or somewhere in the writing I have taken a wrong turn. That means I have to go back and discover where the story went awry. Sometimes it can be a tiny detail. I was stuck during the writing of LEAVING EDEN and when I went back over it I saw I had one character driving a car. How was I to know he didn't have a license? Once we got that detail straightened out, I was back on track. I once read an interview with an author (it may have been Gail Godwin) who said she got stuck when one of her characters drank a martini. When she discovered that was the wrong drink for that character, everything flowed.
SH: On your website, you have a page devoted to the practice of Silence, which you have found to be an invaluable tool in many areas of your life. You spend every first and third Monday and Wednesday of the month in silence. What do you do on those days?
AL: I carry on as usual, except I don't speak. Outwardly, probably everything looks the same, but a lot is going on. Silence is very active. I reflect. I rest. I listen. I learn. I have been observing silence now for fifteen years and it has been life changing. Life enhancing. I am currently finishing a book on it - part memoir, part meditation on stillness. HarperCollins is publishing it next year.
SH: Aside from silence, do you have any physical exercises which are directly linked to your creativity?
AL: I think generally it is not understood how physically draining it is to write.I always think of writing a book as completing a marathon. And, like any athlete, I stay in shape. I do yoga, life weights, run. I often end my writing day with a walk to the beach. This is when any problems I've encountered with the work often get solved. I carry a little notebook with me. Ideas and breakthrough understandings most often come away from the computer While I'm driving, or in the shower, or walking. In dreams, too.
SH: Being a Chatham-based writer, it seems safe to assume that you draw inspiration from your surroundings. Do you have a favorite spot here in town?
AL: Any of the beaches. Especially the one at the end of my street.
SH: In your years before living on Cape Cod year-round, you must have visited many of the other inspiring areas on the Cape. What was it about Chatham that made you choose it for a home?
AL: The man I fell in love with lived here. Pretty good planning on my part, huh?
SH: When you picture your audience, who comes to mind most frequently? Do you find yourself focused mainly on Cape Cod readers?
AL: I'm not really thinking of a reader when I'm writing. I am more focused on the fictional characters and getting their stories right. I would guess the majority of my readers are women, but I've gotten some wonderfully thoughtful letters from male readers.
SH: Would you say you are more well-known on the Cape or over the bridge?
AL: I haven't a clue. It might sound naive, but I am not keen on tracking my career, re sales, readership etc. My job is to write the books, and I let the rest take care of itself, so I don't think a great deal about whether or not I am well known. I am blessed. That I do know. I live in a beautiful place and do what I love for a career. I have a wonderful family.
The English have a saying, "She landed with her buns in the butter," and that sums up the way I feel about my life. Pretty damn lucky.
SH: What's next for you? Do you tend to take a breather after writing a book or do you jump right in to the next?
AL: Right now I'm not looking beyond finishing the current book and meeting the deadline. At the end of August I'm off to Hawaii to teach at the Maui Writers Retreat and Conference. When I return from that I'll start up with something. I have ideas for both more novels and another non-fiction book.
SH: Your new book, Silence: The Book is your first non-fiction work. Considering the personal subject matter, did you find the process more daunting than that of your novels?
AL: It certainly is different to be working on non-fiction and to be drawing from personal experience. I find fiction more liberating. More playful.
SH: You narrate a multimedia teaser for the Lavender Hour at your site. Do you have any plans to record full audio versions of any of yourbooks?
AL: My publisher hires the narrators for my audio-books and I haven't gotten involved at all in that. I will do another trailer for the Silence book. Taping the teaser for THE LAVENDER HOUR was enormous fun. Should the silence book be recorded, I would like to have it in my voice.
