Douglas A. Martin: New Releases and Author Interview
Currently a professor at Wesleyan University and a long-time faculty member in the MFA Program at Goddard College, Douglas Martin is a poet, novelist and short story writer. Martin’s recently published books, Branwell and Wolf, have received critical acclaim from a variety of national news sources. We were thrilled to have the opportunity to conduct an interview with him to learn more about his work and writing process. Continue reading to see what Douglas has to say!
First off, congratulations on your two new releases, Branwell and Wolf! Can you tell us a little about both?
“Thanks! It was an interesting time this summer with these two beginning to make their way into the world, and with the case of Branwell, a second launching in its repacking: the new cover, the introduction by Darcey Steinke, and a new editor and crew at the press that first published it way back when I was just leaving behind finally some of the cycles and circles I had spent my twenties being shaped by, the subject matter of my first novel and first book of stories. There’s a synchronicity to them coming out this way now in tandem. Although Branwell was completed and published first many years before Wolf, both books were begun in the same year. I was working with an agent who had a powerful reputation and very formidable client list — Joan Didion! Anne Rice! — and at the same time that she was asking me if I wanted to meet Gore Vidal, coaching me to do what she called I remember in one of our conversations “leaving my world behind.” She meant the broken family and race and class issues and the struggles of sadness I was writing all of my first manuscripts about. She got very excited when I managed a kind of breakthrough in the second person with the interlocking novellas that became Your Body Figured. But ultimately it was a hard sell. Branwell was me saying, ok, if I am going to write something historical, what will my particular intervention into this genre be.”
We’re extremely interested in your process on Branwell. Although a work of fiction, it contains real historical characters — what was your research process like?
“There was a constraint, which I think can be very helpful when dealing with a massive subject like the one evinced by the never ceasing, ever expanding field of Brontë scholarship. It’s like when I am trying to pull weeds, starting with just what happens to be growing close by whatever wildflower I want to encourage. I wrote it in a library. There were about four shelves, ceiling to floor, that were devoted to this family, their lives and work. I would each day go in the morning and pull down a book and read whatever about the brother where he happened to be mentioned, and then I would write. This would be some version of my thoughts on what was said and how and maybe why. Once I had worked through those volumes on those shelves, I felt pretty confident I had made my way through a rather fair sample of the terrain. And I began sculpting the raw material after that.”
How much does the perspective of the reader influence your writing, if at all?
“Always. Keeping in mind that I am a reader of my own writing, too. One of the things I believe workshop gives is a sense of audience which in turn calibrates an inner editor. Sometimes the shapes I make are to draw one ear more or less in. Often, I am thinking how can I tune this so that it can get on that person’s frequencies, too. This without sacrificing the real life and blood of the piece.”
With Branwell, some have drawn you into comparison with Michael Cunningham, who many readers will know from The Hours. We’re curious to know what you think about this!
“When I was doing my PhD, I had the great fortune of working with the critic who really pioneered the study of Woolf as a feminist and pacifist and radical socialist, Jane Marcus. I read Cunningham as part of my work for that class. I was able to eventually frame for myself through her thinking a perception of one writer’s read and transposition of the domestic inside another’s aesthetic. The Hours is a book after modernism, still a character driven novel, though the slices of identities and their playing off and against each other does hint at our potential to be various. But by and large, the novel consumed is still in the roll of the Victorian, move around the edges though it might. I know I have inherited that, like it or not, reductively or not, given the dramas culture are still steeped in. I could hook into that. The Brontë’s weren’t modernist, though certainly I think Branwell as a writer could have benefited from access to what could have come through to him from like the future tales of Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” “The Figure in the Carpet.” As someone trying to make a living, I thought a lot about what affords Woolf her room and how seldom it seems to be considered the Brontë’s just really had to figure out how to make a living.”
The story of Wolf also has its underpinnings in historical events, though these are quite recent. Perhaps you can tell us a bit about what motivated you to write this book?
“Wolf was me seeing a picture of two boys on the front page of The New York Times around the same time as beginning to consider throwing myself into a life of Branwell. So, it too began when I used to spend all day writing in the library. In this work, a seed was being really confused by how I knew I had begun reading the article because of the accompanying picture, how they looked, and then finding my normal way of parsing a news story made no sense when I attempted it this time. It took me something like eight years after making the initial notes to figure out the voice and what I was able to do and say and stand behind how.”
You have worked with both poetry and prose. Do you have a preferred mode of writing? How do you decide which form is the best for each story?
“It makes me happiest when I have time to write a little each day, preferably first thing. I like a long stretch at the desk, but whenever I am sitting there, I feel like I have a kind of poetry passport. It was what I first wrote and the writing that first came out of me. Truly I started writing poetry again after high school because I wanted to act in college and saw none of the plays being staged had any roles for me. I started doing these theatrical things myself, my voice, my emotion. My earliest influences in forming writing were Ntozake Shange and some of the spoken word of Patti Smith. Seeing how they both let the lyrics gather into stories developing… I never studied it formally in a classroom setting, because when I went to do my MFA, I thought I’ve already made some poetry books and now I want to see what I can get away with in fiction, how far that could go and where the line would be. But still there’s always more to learn, and when I teach poetry, I go back to writing it. And point to it often even in teaching fiction or nonfiction, just like I do with painting, or sometimes music, degrees of film and its cameras. Arts need each other. But I feel my way in prose much the same way I did when what I was doing was making my poems. Speaking the truth as I felt it. The medium is the instrument.”
