By Patricia Ann McNair
It was through her photography that I first became acquainted with Lynn Sloan, but it is through her prose that I feel I have come to know her better. Lynn’s latest book, the novel Midstream, is one young woman’s story of a creative life at first abandoned and then—fortunately for us readers—revisited and revised. Polly, the novel’s protagonist, finds herself at the brink of middle age in 1970s Chicago, doing a job that pays the bills, fumbling with a relationship that seems painfully unbalanced, watching (from afar) a dear friend struggle with a serious illness. This is not how she imagined her life would be. The novel retraces her steps to this place and time, and allows Polly a go at another chance.
Lynn and I had a chance to sit down and talk about the book, about recent history, about what we see in the rearview mirror. Here is what we came up with.
I am intrigued with what starts things off for writers when they are working on a project. What was the first impulse of Midstream for you? A character’s voice or an image (or images) maybe? Or perhaps a situation?
My first thought was that I wanted to write a novel, not a story. I’d just published my story collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough. Wanting to write a novel meant I wanted to spend a long time on a project, which meant I wanted it to be something important to me, but I didn’t have a topic or a situation in mind. I spent some time looking through my story starts files, jotting down issues that troubled me, saying no to this one, yes to that, an emotional, not intellectual, process. What emerged is that I find work life to be extremely interesting and important, but in fiction it usually takes a backseat to relationships. And in real life, a woman’s desire to have a creative work life is often limited or thwarted. I would write about a woman whose primary desire was to have an inventive, purposeful career. Love, family, relationship, these elements could, no, would, be important to my character, but creative work would be key to her identity. Now I needed to find a time or place where this would be a problem. Many options here—almost endless—but I chose the early seventies when second stage feminism emerged. My character would not be a feminist, but a woman simply trying to make her way. Then I chose Chicago, because I know Chicago well, and I like the Midwest.
Is this way of beginning a project the way things usually start for you?
A moment ago I would have said no, that I start stories with an image or a moment observed or a specific character, but as I think more carefully, I realize that I always start with a feeling that disturbs me, usually something unfair, and this perturbance immediately attracts a character, so immediately that I can overlook the real starting point: upset at unfairness.
You have a very strong protagonist; did she come to you fully realized, or did you have to create her piece by piece? When and how did you find her voice?
I wish I could say that Polly was born full-blown in my imagination, but she wasn’t. In early drafts she went through so many personality changes, she or I could be accused of a major personality disorder! From the beginning, I knew her story would cover a decade or so in time. But for her voice, I kept muddling up the young Polly in 1962, straight out of college, eagerly embarking on her career, with the older Polly in 1974, who’d learned to accommodate the compromises of adult life and was grateful for what she had. Once I could really put myself inside the girl of twenty-one and the woman of thirty-four, I was able to find her two different but connected voices.
The structure of this novel is both complex and easy to follow. Someone else might have chosen to tell the story chronologically, but you have a couple of different timelines that braid together to get us to the final moments. How did you decide on this structure?
“Decide” implies intentionality. I would say I “sighed” into the structure. One character, Polly, two time periods, each with its own plot. I thought it would be simple. I tried various ways of aligning the time periods—a frame structure, a version with lots of flashbacks, alternating the two time periods throughout. None felt right. They all felt rigid. When I sketched out two stories braided together for the first half of the novel, it just felt right.
I love this idea of “sighing” into the structure. To me, it coincides with what you have discovered about the emotional pull of story for you, the way things start with a feeling. In Midstream Polly’s emotional hold on her world is shaken by the too sudden but not entirely unexpected death of her dear friend, Eugenia. The role of women’s friendships in literature is interesting, don’t you think? Can you talk about how you use friendship to push your story forward?
Friendships are huge in life and are interesting to me in literature. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, beginning with My Brilliant Friend, are great on so many levels, but what continues to exert a hold on me is her depiction of the lifelong relationship between Elena and Lila. Even when they are estranged, they influence each other. Friendship as a force, that’s what I wanted in my novel. Polly has different kinds of friends, from college days, a work friend Polly keeps at a distance, and her best friend, Eugenia, also a college friend, but a crucial figure for her, more important than her boyfriend.
Polly’s relationship with Eugenia is what I’ll call awkwardly a “benchmark” friendship. They love each other in the way of deep friendship, and they have similar aspirations. Without intending this, the accomplishments of one become markers for the other. Especially for Polly. Who gets a good job first? Gets the first promotion? Has a serious boyfriend? Advances toward the life desired? It’s not so much a competition—maybe a little—but more that when either of them achieves a goal, the other thinks about her own trajectory. When Eugenia dies much too young, Polly realizes on a bone-deep level that the long arc of life that seemed inevitable isn’t, and she’s driven to take risks. But there’s more. Without the comfort of Eugenia’s support, Polly is challenged to examine herself in a new way, to question who she is and what’s she capable of. Again, one friend, Eugenia, influences the other’s, Polly’s, life.
You mention that you wanted to use the 1960s and 70s as the era for the story, partly because it gave you access to a time when women had a particularly difficult time balancing their professional and personal goals with what they were able to accomplish in a world with men at the helm of most things. Some things have changed, but not enough, really. Still, the way you use the specificity of this time, its fashions, its social structures, etc., makes me wonder if you consider this a work of historical fiction. And if so, were you aware of that as you were writing the novel?
No. I was shocked when a reviewer referred to Midstream as historical fiction. I didn’t believe it. In fact, I looked up the definition of historical fiction. Taking place more than fifty years ago sources say. So Midstream qualifies. Why didn’t I see this as I was writing? Partly because I lived through these times, even though I was younger than Polly. Another reason may be that I thought that historical fiction takes readers to faraway times, which are a marked contrast to our own, and I chose the era for my novel because some of the dynamics echo today. In 1961, President Kennedy established the Peace Corps calling on men and women to contribute to their country and the world. “And women” stood out. It was electrifying to young women at that time. (One of Polly’s friends in 1962 joins the Peace Corps.)
You and I have talked about how our aging might affect our professional work as college professors and also the role it plays in our creative process and output. You make good use of this idea in Midstream by allowing Polly to look back at her life from some distance, to reconsider her role and her choices. Are you, like Polly, able to see your earlier work with a different lens now? And if so, what is the outcome of this backward glance? And this seems like a question pulled from the same well to me–what do you think younger readers, readers who were not around in the sixties and seventies, perhaps not even eighties or nineties, might find surprising in Midstream? Or perhaps find all too frustratingly familiar?
Your phrase “backward glance” offers an insight into aging and writing. As we get older, we accumulate experience and our perspectives change, not simply because we have more experience. What matters to us changes. From my perch today, everything is more complicated than it seemed when I was younger. I hope when I write I bring some of this understanding to the page.
You asked about how readers have responded to Midstream. I’ve met with several book groups. Women in their sixties remember their own early working lives, and say, “this was how it was,” often adding their own stories. Younger women are horrified and say they understand their mothers or grandmothers differently. Then the conversations shift to current ways patriarchy affects women’s work lives. But for me, Midstream is about a particular woman in a particular time and place, a time and place I see differently with a backward glance.
Finally, Lynn, I’d like to refer back to something you said in the beginning of this conversation: “Love, family, relationship, these elements could, no, would, be important to my character, but creative work would be key to her identity.” Do you hold your creative work to this same standard—is it key to your identity? If so, has it always been? And while this next question is not original, I do think it is important, especially in light of how you grappled with the issue in Midstream and Polly’s story: do you have advice for creative women who are trying to navigate these life elements and still hang onto this key?
Is creative work key for me? Yes, right from the beginning. Or it’s more accurate to say from the beginning, I chafed against the roles given to girls. I wasn’t a child who saw herself aimed in any particular direction. I wasn’t especially creative, I wasn’t ambitious, I just wanted to have fun. When I was five, I was told I couldn’t join in a rough playground game because I was “a girl.” I protested, “But I’m me.” Me was curious, eager to be tested, energetic, and at that moment, furious. I didn’t get why girls had limits. By my teenager years, I found the roles idealized for women to be stupid and unsatisfying. Rejecting those roles made it necessary for me to figure out what I wanted—to live in my head with imagination and wrestle what I imagine into an expressive form. These days, that’s a story, a novel, or an essay.
As for advice—I am leery of giving advice. The wisdom of an older woman doesn’t translate into wisdom for the young. Maybe one piece of advice: try to find the quiet to listen to your own most inner voice.
Lynn Sloan is a writer and a photographer. Her novel Midstream (Fomite, 2022) was called “luminous” by Foreword Reviews and her Principles of Navigation was chosen for Chicago Book Review’s Best Books of 2015. She is the author of the story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough. Fortune Cookies, her flash fiction using fortune cookie fortunes, was produced as an art book by Lark Sparrow Press in 2022. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshare and included in NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work can be found at www.LynnSloan.com
Patricia Ann McNair’s short story collection, Responsible Adults, was named a Distinguished Favorite by the Independent Press Awards; The Temple of Air (stories) was named Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year; her collection of essays, And These Are the Good Times, was a Montaigne Medal Finalist for Most Thought-Provoking Book of the Year. McNair is an Associate Professor Emerita of Columbia College Chicago and is Artistic Director for Interlochen College of Creative Arts Writers Retreat in Interlochen, MI, as well as Mining the Story, Shake Rag Alley’s Writing Retreat in Mineral Point, WI. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.