MARTHA ANNE TOLL’s debut novel, Three Muses, is the winner of the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. It is just out from Regal House Publishing. She is a book reviewer and author interviewer at NPR Books, the Washington Post, Pointe Magazine, The Millions, and elsewhere. She also publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of outlets and has recently joined the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Listen in and read along as we discuss writing fiction from the large themes of life.
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Martha: Thank you so much, Marion. I’m delighted to be here.
Marion: Well, it’s a joy, I have to tell you. Let’s set this up for my listeners. They’re writers and they want to know how to live this writing life. We’re going to start with who you are and how that is reflected in the work you choose to do. I read that your mother was a copy editor who worked at home, that your father, an attorney, was a writer as well. You started taking dance lessons early. And while you moved on from that, the imprint of that beautiful art stayed with you, even as you took up playing the viola in a semi-professional orchestra.
You went on to law school, spent years in the not-for-profit world, and then moved into professional writing. That’s a really diverse background and much of it comes into play in writing this book. For instance, you choose a prima ballerina as one of the central characters of this book, Three Muses. Talk to us a little bit about making that choice and what you pulled from you to write her.
Martha: Thank you. Well, the first thing I would like to say to all you writers out there, because I think that you share this with me, I’ve been writing all my life. I was one of those geeky kids that kept a diary and looked up all the words on the page in a dictionary and wrote snail mail. All the things that might suggest you’re a writer. I had always felt that I had a lot of words and didn’t know what to do with them in terms of putting them into a book. I absolutely love reading. I’m a fanatic reader. I always was. I kept thinking I really want to write, but I don’t know what to do. And something happened. My mom died fairly suddenly in 1999 and the floodgates absolutely opened.
I have several thoughts about that. One was that she was an incredible champion of my writing, even though I wasn’t doing anything for publication at that point. I think that was a blessing and an endorsement that has stayed with me. My first thought about getting started with writing was how could I get music and dance on the page. I had had this really, really, really rich immersive background in the arts, and I wanted the challenge of trying to see how to put it into words. I did a lot of writing before this novel. I think many novelists will tell you that. My favorite quote on this is from Anne Enright, who’s a Booker Prize winner, an Irish writer.
When I heard her speak at my wonderful local independent bookstore, Politics and Prose, she said, “I think debut writers are usually on about their 16th novel.” And that worked for me. I had done a lot… I had done a lot around music. And the ballerina just came to me one day. She just came to me one day. I think the reason I stayed with her is because dance was such an incredible passion of mine. I think it might have been my earliest passion. I go to as much ballet as I can, and I was really excited by the challenge of trying to get her on the page.
Marion: I love the answer. I love the Anne Enright reference. I read Anne Enright’s most recent book, Actress, and was so taken by what wasn’t in the book that I then read backwards through her work, literally all her books, to try to figure out what her learning process was to give herself the kind of permission to only put what she put in Actress because it was so different. It was so remarkably constructed. I’m just so grateful for you for bringing her up because I kind of did the same thing with your work. I started to read backwards. I read from this book, then I started to read your essays. I had been reading your reviews for years. Along with fiction, you write reviews and essays.
It was in one of those essays, specifically an essay on memory in The Millions, that I was brought face to face with something I did not know I believe and now I fully understand is true and I think speaks wonderfully for the debut novel. You wrote, “Writing, I quickly discovered, doesn’t thrive on memorization and memories that are free from doubt, anxiety, and pain are nearly useless. Writing thrives on conflict and those irreconcilable problematic memories.” Wow! Wow! Is that what you did in your novel? Did you dive into some irreconcilable problematic memories here and finished the thought, if you would? What likely will we find if we dive into those? Why did you give that advice on that page?
Martha: Well, I want to talk about the Three Muses. The Three Muses in the title of my book are song, discipline, and memory. I found them just kind of googling around. They are part of the Greek mythological tradition that comes from the island of Boeotia. Memory in one tradition is said to be the mother of all the muses, the nine that we know better. And that really, really struck a chord with me. I think memory is the wellspring, possibly the wellspring for writers. There are many writers who will say they only write on one theme no matter what their books come out looking like. I’m just finishing up Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which I love.
I realized even though that’s set in a very different era from how she usually writes, she’s still writing about those incredibly strong, powerful women who are finding their strength. I want to guess that that’s a theme that’s really important to her. What I realized about my memory as I started to get serious about writing was, first of all, the sensation that I was holding a lot of people’s memories. It’s not something that I understand very well, but I have a retention of so many strands of memory in my family. And that essay grew out of the death of my second parent, my dad, and I felt like I was holding a lot of my parents’ memories and my sibling’s memories and my friends’ memories.
I thought maybe this really is the resource that we writers write from. The memories that stay with us often are the ones we cannot fully find answers to. We didn’t finish the thought. There was conflict around it. It stirs up emotion that’s very present in the current time, even though they may be ancient memories. Memories also can educate us about why we are the way we are in our present lives, what memories do we hold on to. My earliest memory is being a three year old and sitting in the backseat of my parents’ Chevy station wagon between my two older sisters and being really relieved that I wasn’t responsible for putting down the locks.
We went on a trip. From that I surmised, wow, there is that overly responsible type A person as a three year old. I just think memories are an incredible wellspring. I guess to connect that to my book, which is deeply about the Holocaust as well, the individual memories get us into collective memories. I feel in Judaism, collective memory is an enormous, enormous part of our heritage and our storytelling. We can talk more about that, but that is the connection for me.
Marion: It’s a great answer. I love the idea of these Greek Boeotian muses of music, discipline, and memory and how heavily they feature in this book and how they then tie to these extraordinary themes. You have these big themes you just mentioned, perhaps the largest the Holocaust. The extraordinary power of music and dance, the power of living a disciplined life, the interplay of time and memory also come in here. Chicken and egg this a little bit for us. Did these themes roll out as you started to write? Did you make a list of what you wanted to explore? Did you think about what the readers might be thinking about in 2022 when this book was published, or did you just go with what was in you?
Martha: It’s kind of none of the above and all of the above. I am a pretty organic writer. I’m also untrained in the sense that I basically haven’t taken writing classes. I do a lot of reading and related stuff, but I haven’t been in a classroom very often with writing. I’m very organic. My writing philosophy, I have one overarching mantra, which is write what you can, because God knows we writers are really skilled at figuring out what we can’t do. For me, write what you can and start wherever there’s some action, some energy. Everything that I do that’s long usually starts in the middle and works out. And then if I get stuck somewhere, I go work on something else.
I had Katya, the ballerina, and John, the Holocaust survivor. I had them very, very early on, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to connect them and what they meant to each other. I think connected to your previous question about memory, what I was able to drive this book was emotional truth. I was hoping to get to emotional truth for these characters, even though they’re both completely fictional. The truth of you may survive the Holocaust and be incredibly fortunate to land well in the United States and a loving family, as John does, but that doesn’t mean that you get over your injuries. How do we talk about that on the page and how do we communicate that story that is so many people’s story?
Unfortunately, trauma is deeply a part of so many people’s lives and so relevant today as we look at our own country and we look around the world, the atrocities that are in our nightly news feeds. I’m really interested in getting to the emotional truth of what that means for the individual. I think writers often say that stories are more powerfully told through individual experiences, rather than these kind of oppressive statistics that make your brain shut down, at least if you’re a humanist like I am. I’m not a math-science person.
Marion: Yeah, it does make your brain shut down. I mean, even if you put a face on as dry a story as the New York State Budget, but if you write it from the eyes of a child who’s just lost services, we care differently. We relate differently. This phrase you just used, write what you can, of course, absolutely. Every writer that’s listening to this is going to scribble it down. I hope sort of scribble out that phrase, write what you know, because we’re given that advice all the time to write what we know, and it’s imperfect advice at best.
Let’s just dig a little more deeply into annotation, about going in and getting what we need from what we know, from what we have on us. It is a process not only of gathering, but it’s also one of discernment since you can’t take delivery on all you have on you or you’ll just fly on the floor and hyperventilate because you can’t pick through what you need, which I do anyway, but for different reasons when I’m writing. But I think of my subconscious sort of as a Walmart Superstore, where as a writer, you show up at the door and then you must use the discipline of discernment to not take everything home with you, right?
You’ve got to remember what you came in for. I just need that one detail to illuminate this one piece. How do you describe this process of going into your very self and getting what you need and leaving the rest behind?
Martha: First of all, I’m definitely adopting that phrase, my memory is a Walmart Superstore. I love that. You mentioned that really old saw, write what you know. I am a little bit skeptical about that, and it took me years and years to figure out what it meant. I wanted to combine it with what fiction writers always say, which is fiction is the real truth. My current reinterpretation of both of those phrases is when people say write what you know, they don’t mean that I went to Kenwood Elementary School on lovely Mill Road in Bailiwick, Pennsylvania and what did the bricks look like. I think what they’re talking about is some understanding of what you, as the writer understand as an emotional truth.
I think that’s why people say fiction is the ultimate truth. First of all, good fiction should be about everything. But second of all, it should deliver something that resonates with the reader emotionally. I’m really interested in love and death generally. That’s what I want to write about. When I’m getting serious about a scene or something, I’m usually thinking on two tracks. One is the more specific we can get, the more we can bring our characters alive. Specificity is a challenge for me. I mean, we all talk a lot and we have our opinions and that kind of thing. When you get on the page, you can’t use any of the things that you might say in conversation about whatever generalities you want to say.
The Holocaust was horrible. Six million people were killed. I mean, it doesn’t really mean anything on the page. First of all, I think it’s most important to get specific early on. A wonderful writer who read my manuscript say, “Any boy could have been in the Holocaust, but would a boy have been eating potato peels from Cokes kitchen?” He loved that potato peel thing and I’m like, okay, well, I guess I’ll keep the potato peels, but basically to make it as specific to that character as possible. But the other thing that I have to ask myself pretty much every 30 seconds, and sometimes I leave it in big caps when I turn off my computer for the day, what is this person feeling?
And that’s really hard, but we all have feelings. We are all experts in feelings. We really are. It’ s a question of bringing them to our consciousness. The thing about feelings is when we’re feeling them, we usually have no analytical powers. We just feel the feelings. For me as a writer, I want to be able to describe that kind of maelstrom, the confusion, your stimuli coming at you, but you can’t really ascertain what you feel. One of the aspects of my book is John the Holocaust survivor becomes a psychiatrist and he is tortured by his training psychiatrist.
Not because the training psychiatrist wants to torture him, but because the training psychiatrist is trying to motivate John to really analyze and describe what he’s feeling. In some ways, I just thought of this for the first time talking to you, Marion, but in some ways, that’s the writer’s task to get it on the page so the reader can recognize it.
Marion: Yeah. Wow, specificity and when you talk about the feelings. We’ve got these hefty themes of discipline, music, memory and the muses, the Holocaust. I talk to writers all day long. I teach writing. I work with writers. I coach writers. I edit manuscripts. You hit this perfectly. It’s a chord. You balance these themes beautifully. I want to understand this idea of specificity and feelings a bit. Many of my writers, some of them use spreadsheets. Every character gets a spreadsheet. What was he feeling in act one? What was he feeling in act two? What was he feeling in act three? How you keep all this straight. I want to just literally talk to you about how you map this out.
Do you draw diagrams? The great John McPhee does those wonderful drawings of his book structures. We’ve seen Gay Talese’s shirt card boards that map out his books. Those are two older men, and I understand that not a lot of people might understand those references, but I’ve seen those things reprinted so many times. They’re sort of imprinted in my head. How about you? How do you map this out so you’re keeping straight the feelings through?
Martha: Thank you. I love that reference to John McPhee’s drawings because I’ve never understood them, but they’re pretty terrific. I want to tell a little story. As I said, I’m down the street from our wonderful independent bookstore Politics and Prose. A bunch of years ago, I heard William Boyd, who’s a wonderful English writer, screenwriter, reporter, novelist, give a talk. He said, “Oh, I don’t believe in writer’s block because I spend two years researching, then I make a big spreadsheet and an outline. And so it’s impossible for me to have writer’s block because I know exactly where I’m going.” The next week I went back and I heard Alice McDermott speak.
She said, “If I wanted to be a researcher, I wouldn’t be a novelist. The whole point about novels is they’re novels and I get to make stuff up. I don’t do any research. I don’t do any mapping. I start with a word or a phrase and out from there.” I think I’m more from the Alice McDermott school. I don’t do any mapping. Or when I do, I tend to kind of ignore it. I really, really care about book structures. When I read and when I review, I’m extremely aware of structure, but it’s sort of like on the edge of my consciousness when I’m writing. I have a sense of architecture. With this book, I mean, it took me 10 years to write. I don’t know how many drafts that I went through, but at least 10 probably complete overhauls.
I had one person who gave me terrific help early on who said, “If you don’t tell the story chronologically, you shouldn’t write the book because it’s not going to be comprehensible.” Eventually I had to let go of that a little bit because I felt chronologically ended up with too much backstory. Basically I have this thing in my head, it’s not on paper, about what I want the overall structure to be, but it changes as I’m writing, but it’s also the most important thing. It’s a very, very much an iterative process. I left so much on the cutting room floor. As I said, it took me a long time to get the two characters connected to each other. I overwrote a lot of that, so I had to cut it.
The last maybe one or two drafts when I was pretty close, and I guess I will say I do my best work in revision, which many writers will say, I went through every single word of the manuscript and challenged myself to see whether this word or this phrase or this description or this action was in service to the story. And that I think is probably the thing I most care about. Everything has to be in service to the story. But you don’t know when you’re starting out quite what your story’s going to be. Maybe I should say I don’t know.
I have a lot of ideas and they don’t end up in an outline, which is not what I do when I’m in a work setting where I’m writing a legal memo or something. I do outline there, but I don’t do it with my fiction.
Marion: It’s fascinating. My first editor was the great Nan Talese and she taught me to touch every word with a pencil and read it aloud to yourself after you have your first draft, to ask yourself if this word is in service to the story. I love that and I live by that. I use it all the time. I think you just gave such an enormous gift to everybody listening, but it speaks a lot of personal discipline. You may not do a spreadsheet. You may not do a chart like John McPhee or a Gay Talese or whatever. That’s a lot of discipline. Let’s talk about discipline. I’ve sat on innumerable panels where we discuss creativity and always someone says…
The guy to the right to people say, “Oh, writing’s about getting in touch with your angel’s feather and tickling the left side,” and I’m like ugh. I’m the one making those awful groaning noises because I’m about the hard chair and the caffeine. I was raised in a newspaper. Maybe that shows too much, but discipline is so important. You talked about holding in your head this idea of structure. Talk to us about your own sense of discipline and its role in this writing life you’ve chosen.
Martha: Thank you. Well, I really appreciate that question. I need to tell you that my husband says that he thinks the only thing I ever write about is discipline, which is really interesting. I’m not sure I agree with him, but I find it really interesting. I am a maniac about discipline. I think it’s the most important thing. And now I want to call up my absolute beloved viola teacher/mentor who taught me everything I know after my parents. His name was Max Aronoff and he was in the first class at the Curtis Institute of Music and helped found the Curtis String Quartet. He had something that is very, very difficult for musicians and also ballet teachers to impart. He could teach you how to practice.
There are a lot of really, really accomplished musicians who can’t take that apart for a beginning student or a middle level student. He had this expression, “You’re the 99%. I’m the 1%.” The 99% to him for the writer would be get your tush in the chair and write because it’s not going to happen while you’re on walks having inspiration in Lalaland basically. You have to write. Writing begets writing. Writing teaches you how to write. I think writing is an apprenticeship. Like many other things, time makes a difference. I am incredibly passionate about discipline, because I think in any art form… I mean, probably art form before writing that I was most deeply engaged with was music.
A lot of my friends that I played with during college became professional musicians. I’m intimately aware of how you become a professional musician. I just think it’s work. It’s so much about work. It’s so unromantic. It’s so pragmatic. It’s like whatever you said, Marion, whatever you’re doing in those meetings, that’s me. I just feel like it’s about the work. I figure this out in freshman music theory class. We talked about Mozart. I mean, what made Mozart great was not the fact that he knew his theory back and forth and he understood the structure of scales and harmonics and how the minor and major keys related to each other.
But if he hadn’t have had that, he couldn’t divert from them to write the great music that he did. You have to have those basics before you can depart from them.
Marion: You absolutely do. I think they’ll never invite us onto the same panel ever because they apparently want that like, “Oh, it’s just a spiritual.” I said, “No, it isn’t. It’s a lot of caffeine. If it’s a bad day, it’s half a bar of dark chocolate and a lot of caffeine, but it’s still that sitting in the chair.” Let’s take this idea of discipline just a little bit further. Because in what might be the most illuminating detail I’ve read about you in terms of how to do the work of writing and what one must be willing to do for the work, I read that while you danced, have followed dance, apparently you struggled to get your ballerina to perform works that had already been created for this book.
To free up the writing, your solution was to choreograph your own ballets. This is a first for me in terms of what a writer decided to do. First, talk to us about hitting that obstacle and what self-talk you did to combat it, and then a little on the process of choreographing works that have never existed.
Martha: Thank you so much. I really struggle with this, and I appreciate your asking this question. I would say for the first four or five drafts, I had Swan Lake as the centerpiece of this book. Swan Lake is probably my favorite ballet. I’m not original in saying that, and I watched dozens of YouTube videos of it. I knew certain dances by heart. I certainly know the music inside out. I’ve played a ton of Tchaikovsky. I realized I was just angsting about, I’m going to make a mistake. I’m not a professional ballerina, and whatever I write is going to be riddled with errors. I’m going to hate it. Plus, this is not the story I’m telling. I ditched it all.
I realized I have to write my own thing, because as you and I were just saying, we want to be in service to the story. How I got to choreographing on the page is I think through what I’ve learned about writing dialogue. I went to some wonderful craft lectures about this when I was at the Tin House Writers Workshop. Dialogue on the page is not how we speak. I mean, if you go back and when you go to edit our podcast, you’ll find that I’m probably saying um a lot or making asides that you wouldn’t put on the page. Conversation is much more relaxed and it’s fuller than what dialogue is on the page.
We don’t say, “Well, I’m going to go upstairs and get a shirt before I go out,” even though I might say it to you if you were visiting me and we were about to go out for coffee. Conversation paired down to its essence where it needs to be communicating something in service to the story. And then what I try to do after I’ve written a sentence or two is get inside the character’s head and say what their reaction is. It’s actually a minimal amount of dialogue, even though it could go on for pages, because in between the characters are thinking whatever they’re going to think. I think I realized it could be similar for choreography.
I certainly am familiar with the classical canon. I’m one of those people who’ve turned on the radio. I know it’s playing on the radio in four bars or whatever. It was easy for me to choose the music for the dances. But then I thought, I think the reader has tremendous power, and I never want to underestimate the reader. Writing is a partnership with the reader. Readers who are enjoying a book are going to access their own imaginations.
I realized if I could set the stage and describe the sets and the costumes and give the essence of what the opening scenes were of each ballet, the exception to this would be Three Muses the ballet, which was a longer section, but most of the shorter ballets in the book are just enough to spark a reader’s imagination about what the rest would be. That’s what I did. I described the opening. I described the music. I described the feeling that the dancers had or that the audience had. I hope that the reader will be able to fill in the rest in her imagination.
Marion: Wonderful answer and so illuminative of the process. Let’s just jog to something else you do really where I met you on the page because writing book reviews is its own art. You review books for The Washington Post, NPR and others, and you are a tireless advocate for the underrepresented authors. Reading through your reviews, it is impossible not to notice that you have reviewed dozens of books by Black, Indigenous, writers of color, for which I thank you profusely. Publishing can be accused of many things, including exclusivity. Please, if you would, talk to me for a minute about diversity and give the writers listening a sense of the benefits of reading outside our own experience.
Martha: Thank you. I am so happy you asked me this question, because it’s one of my core beliefs. People used to ask me, “How do you connect your social justice work with your writing,” and I didn’t have a good answer to that, but I think they connect very deeply. I am really, really, really passionate about social justice. My previous job involved doing anti-death penalty work, working on criminal injustice in the United States, homelessness, but it’s hard to get anywhere in America and not think about racial justice. I think it’s the core for everything that we are going through now or the injustices that we have wreaked upon our fellow people in the United States, that we were founded on a genocide.
We were founded on slavery. And very early on, I made a commitment to myself and to my reading, for every white author I would read, I would read a person of color. I stopped having to think about it because I was so, so excited about what I was discovering. This was decades ago. I mean, basically that’s all I wanted to do. Part of it is selfish when you ask about the way that I review. Part of it is selfish. I feel we are deprived as white people with a monochrome literary life. It’s just incredibly limiting. I mean, it’s not even diversity. It’s just there’s so much to learn, and there’s so much beautiful art, and there’s so much incredible stuff coming out from people of color. And why wouldn’t there be?
It’s just that our traditional education doesn’t speak to it, or at least mine didn’t. I had quite a white education. That’s one answer. The other answer is in addition to the wealth of beauty and art and the aesthetics of reading beyond our own experience is just learning so much. I just learned so, so much. I think more than learning, I have unlearned. I feel like it’s going to be a lifelong process of unlearning so much of my own biases and prejudices, so much of what we hear in the public arena. There’s so much to unlearn. My reading of non-white authors has continually helps me along that path.
As a literary citizen, which I take quite seriously, I think it’s intimately connected to my social justice life, I think we owe it to other readers to lift up voices that are different from our own. It’s not a job or a task. It’s a joy. It’s a joy to bring other voices to the public arena. We just need it. I mean, it’s a necessity and a joy.
Marion: We do need it. We need it so desperately. As we wrap this up, can you give us a few examples of books you’d recommend that you have reviewed recently or any time that have broadened your worldview or challenged your thinking, or as you just beautifully said, unlearned you to some degree about what you already knew that you would just recommend that we read?
Martha: Well, I’d love to start with Heavy by Kiese Makeba Laymon. He’s one of my heroes. I think he’s a magnificent writer, and he’s really raw about his own experience and what it means to him. He has a throughline through his books of radical love, which is different from the way we might understand love. Not romantic love. It’s this radical, all embracing love that’s extraordinary. I love his book Heavy. I love it. I just finished Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book called An Indigenous History of the United States, which opened my eyes to what I…
I mean, I had an inkling of this, but it was a huge education about exactly how the American military and vigilante militias participated and spurred the Native genocide and the resonance with today. I love Ocean Vuong. I just finished an interview with Laura Warrell on Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm. Her book’s coming out on the same day as mine and it’s just a beautiful exploration into a variety of Black women’s experiences and jazz and music. Oh, I could go on and on, but those are a couple to get started with.
Marion: Well, those are perfect and they are a couple to get started with. I recommend everybody go and get your reviews because I’ve been taking cues from you for a long time and it’s done nothing but good. Thank you, Martha. I so appreciate you coming along today and a really deep and genuine personal thanks for what you have exposed me to in the literature that has helped me live more fully in my own country. Thank you so much for your work.
Martha: And thank you, Marion. Right back at you. I’m so honored to be here, and it’s an incredible pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for this opportunity.
Marion: You’re absolutely welcome. The writer was Martha Anne Toll. Her new book is Three Muses. Just out from Regal House Publishing. See more on her at Martha Anne Toll dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overit Studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit Marion Roach dot com where I offer online classes on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcast and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
