As a general rule, these columns are dedicated to books that have been published. But when it comes to Thisbe Nissen—a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an author I hold in the highest esteem—the projects that are in process and constantly evolving are just as fascinating as the published work.
In this interview (conducted via email along with the e-conversation I had with her husband, Jay Baron Nicorvo, featured in last month’s column), Nissen reflects on her first novel, the unpublished Maud and Drew, and shares updates on her innovative ongoing projects.
I should note that I am among the limited number of people who have read Maud and Drew. I had been reading it in Special Collections at the University of Iowa Library (where it is still an unbound manuscript from Nissen’s time in the Workshop) when the pandemic interrupted my progress. Nissen kindly sent me an electronic copy of the book in recognition of my desire to be a completist when it comes to her work. The version she sent me is titled In This We Fall, suggesting I am now swimming in the multiverse of Maud and Drew.
Whatever edits, updates, and re-imaginings Maud and Drew has undergone, the book continues to fascinate me as a glimpse into Nissen’s early approach to fiction. The novel—which recounts the relationship of two lovers who can’t quite see each other for who they really are nor change themselves for one another—is part straightforward love story, part experiment in various narrative feints and jabs, and part meditation on the diverse paths people follow as they seek to better understand the divine, the secular, and the intersection of the two. I, for one, think it should be found on shelves next to Nissen’s other works—and particularly as a companion to her award-winning story collection, Out of the Girls’ Room and Into the Night, which features two chapters of the novel as standalone pieces.
The following interview, then, is about books you cannot read—at least not yet. But questions about these unpublished projects led, as I was sure they would, to fascinating thoughts on writing, the very nature of books, and more besides.
You’ve said in interviews that you learned a lot by writing your unpublished first novel. I wonder if you could tell me more about what you learned from writing Maud and Drew and how those lessons have shown up in your subsequent work.
It’s now going on 30 years since I started Maud and Drew as a novel in earnest (the first chapter, the story of “The Mushroom Girl,” I wrote my senior year in college; a late chapter, “Frog Grog,” I wrote during the year I took between undergrad and grad school). But I didn’t call it a novel until I workshopped both stories with the kind and brilliant James Alan McPherson [at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop], who gently suggested that maybe I was possibly working on a novel? And actually it took a while before I was willing to call it a novel, which just felt so pretentious, so I called it “my novel-thing.”
But anyway, 30 years now—many of them spent teaching fiction writing—and I probably talk about Maud and Drew with my students more than anything else I’ve ever written. Maybe that’s because it’s what I was doing when I was in their shoes, and I’m trying to get them to not think so much about publication and the fickle world of acceptance and rejection. I’m trying to get them to play, to try things and fail, to learn experientially.
Maybe I can talk most easily about my process with Maud and Drew because it’s an unknown—unless they go to the University of Iowa library and search it out, they can’t read it and have an opinion about its quality, or lack thereof. It’s theoretical to them, but very actual to me, so I can share things about that process—about scrambling the order so that the chapters alternated between moving forward and backward in time until they met at the end in the middle (!) which is probably a patently ridiculous way to structure a novel (and I ultimately re-chronologized it), but it taught me things about structure, about the way narrative drive and dramatic tension work (and don’t!), and I can talk about that process, that learning I did, and palpably demonstrate that novelists aren’t born knowing how to write novels, that there’s a whole lot of trial and error involved, and that none of it is a waste because it’s all process, and process is what gets you anywhere. You can’t begrudge any stage—or tangent or false start or side trip—of that process, because you would not get where you are without every curlicue and backtrack you took to get there. The product can only be the culmination of that process, wherever that process takes you.
And that’s about as close as I get to faith in this world. I’m not interested in perfection or neatness or efficiency when it comes to making art; I’m just interested in making art, and art is made messily and inefficiently. If I want a paint-by-numbers wallcovering, there are plenty to be had at IKEA. If I want a perfect-pointed, square-cornered quilt in hues that match my wallpaper, I can get the whole ensemble at Pottery Barn. But that’s not art. Art is a human being’s ideas made tangible. And that’s what I’m trying to impart to my students: that there’s no How To Write a Novel; there’s only how you write your novel, and the only way to learn that is to wade in and get messy and figure it out yourself.
But I don’t think I answered the question, really, just ranted about making art and teaching making art. Have those lessons learned in Maud and Drew shown up in subsequent work? Yes, of course, but I’d say the most valuable lesson was getting a novel under my belt. It’s far from great, but I’d made it, and it was a whole thing, unto itself. I proved to myself I could do it. Doing it is about having faith in that process, whatever it is, because it’s different every time.
You’re always wading into a different pile of muck, and you just have to have faith that if you muck around in that muck long enough, and give yourself enough permission to play, that you’ll eventually find a path through, a shape for the muck. All muck is different, and if what you learned in novel A shows you exactly how to mold the muck in novel B, then you’re not making art, you’re following a recipe. You may have made up the recipe, but if you just keep executing it, you’ll just keep making the same thing, even if you use different muck. If you make your muck into dough and cut it out with the same cookie cutters every time—how long could you do that and still call it art, when all you’re doing is making different- flavored muck cookies? Maybe that’s why the Maud and Drew lessons have been most valuable in my teaching—and, clearly, in my extended craft-metaphor making!
Do you ever think about revisiting/ revising/re-pitching the novel? Have you considered self-publishing it? Would you consider such things?
Oh, Rob, well, yes, I have revisited the novel many times over the years. Once I tried turning it into a screenplay—but mostly because there’s a scene at the end where Maud’s on the bus headed to Pennsylvania, and I always hear Dave Zollo’s song “I Am a Diamond (Anyway)” playing in my head when I think of that scene (or, rather, whenever I hear the song, I think of Maud on the bus and it plays in my head like a movie, with that song in the background, and it feels so real that I just want that movie to exist so the song can play in that scene and fill me up with emotion the way it does every time I imagine it)—but the screenplay never took shape because I realized I just wanted to make a film soundtrack, or a playlist for the novel.
I cut it down once to novella-size. Friends used to joke that, if I kept at it, someday I’d publish Maud and Drew: A Haiku. But I do still haul it out and keep playing with it from time to time. It still holds a place in my heart. And I do think that I’d still love to see it exist as a book. I really would. I haven’t thought about self-publishing it, probably mostly because that seems like it would take a tremendous amount of work, but I have thought about trying to submit it to small presses, which I never did back then after it got rejected by all the mainstream ones in 1997. I may, someday. I just well may.
But the thing I’m also remembering now . . . Maud and Drew got me my beloved agent, who has now been my agent for close to 30 years. And although it did get rejected by all the publishers we sent it to, there was one assistant editor who read it then, and then remembered it a couple of years later when Out of the Girls’ Room and Into the Night was published. My agent sent her a copy of the University of Iowa Press first edition. By then she’d become a full editor, and it was she who had the collection reissued by Anchor Books, and then it was she who bought and edited The Good People of New York. So Maud and Drew served me extraordinarily well along the way, even if no one ever sees fit to publish it as a book itself.
Last time we talked, you had two projects going. One was centered on your mom that was shaping up to be a combination of short pieces and photos and some artifacts from her life. The other was a writing and quilting project, and you suggested you were thinking of it as a “fabric scrap novel.” Are either of those projects ongoing? It strikes me that the first, in particular, would be in a kind of conversation with Best Copy Available (her husband’s memoir).
They are indeed—both of them! I was granted a sabbatical in 2022–23 to work on the one about my parents, which continues to evolve—more flash pieces and photographs, but also archival photos, documents, and “artifacts” from our lives, all of which I’m imagining will be interspersed with the prose. But the other thing that’s come about with this project—although it might be a separate project unto itself, I’m not sure yet—is that I’ve been quilting with my parents’ things: their clothes, linens, accessories. And I’m now conceiving of the quilts as part of the/a book as well. Right now I’m playing with the idea of a photo of the quilt and then the text posited as if it were a museum placard: artist’s name, title of work, and then a list of the materials used in the composition, which is where the story would unfold as I trace the origins of each scrap in the quilt.
I’ve just finished a quilt I’m calling Hydrapuss, or My Mother Got Married in a Seafoam Wool Minidress and No One Thought to Take Photos. The quilt utilizes said wedding dress, flayed open and turned into a many limbed, many headed, winged cat/sea creature with my grandmother’s fur stoles and kid gloves, my mother’s Christmas stocking, her collection of cat-themed socks, the shark fin from my son’s swim vest from toddlerhood, etc. and etc. I’m doing a whole series of these quilts evoking different homes, different eras of my childhood, my parents’ lives, different relationships. All with museum placard stories. All in continuous process.
In terms of being in conversation with Best Copy Available, I think in some ways Jay and I are always working in conversation these days, whether overtly or subconsciously. He’s a character in my Mymy book (the pet name by which our son called my mother), and he’s also pretty much serving as my mother’s proxy in my writing process. I can be pretty hard on her, and it’s Jay who reminds me of her humanity, reminds me not to vilify her, that what’s interesting about her is her contradictions, her depth, not the one-note nastiness I tend to lean on in characterizing her. Jay and my mom had a really beautiful relationship, far less strained than hers with me, and he can stick up for her when I get childishly mean and resentful. He enables me to see her in more nuanced and more interesting ways that don’t just scapegoat and pigeonhole her. Jay’s relationship with his own mom is a pretty extraordinary thing to get to witness and be part of—to see the way they communicate and support one another. As you have undoubtedly gathered from Best Copy Available, she’s a pretty extraordinary woman, and Jay is a pretty extraordinary man. To have witnessed the way they talked through and about this book has been a privilege and a gift.
And, yes, the other quilt-novel is still in the works, too. Set at an Adirondack summer camp in the aftermath of a Covid pandemic gone way worse than ours has gone. The narrator is the last person alive, as far as she knows, at the camp that’s been in her family for generations, wrapped in a quilt her mother made—a quilt that’s a map of the camp, constructed entirely from fabric salvaged from the camp, used and reused until only scraps remain and find their way into the quilt. The narrator, who’s essentially waiting to die, is passing her time telling the stories of the origins of each scrap in the quilt she can identify, combing through the camp photo archives for snapshots of the scraps in their previous incarnations as lost-and-found T-shirts, bathroom-stall curtains, tent flaps, costume-chest ballgowns, color war flags, windsurfer sails… Each scrap spawns a story, and the accumulation of the stories should, ultimately, tell the story of the camp, the lives of the family that’s run it for a hundred years. And I’m making the quilt; I started piecing together little cabins this summer, amassing fabric to make the lake, the stables, parking lots, bike shed, vegetable garden, boats, trees, woodland creatures, signage, archery range… It’s been so much fun!
What (else) are you working on now?
Oh, well, there are side stories, and other quilts, a collaged kids’ book I still sometimes dip back into. And there’s another more traditional novel percolating, occasionally spouting scenes—set in rural Michigan, where I’ve now lived for 14 years. It started as a collection of anecdotes about deer—a muck of deer stories, if you will, and you hear a lot of them in rural Michigan—but now it has human characters, too, and Australian Shepherd puppies, accidentally wild quail, a lot of roadkill and methamphetamines, and some very valuable black walnut trees. At this point, I really only have summers to get any work done because of my teaching load during the year, but I am planning to retire in another two and a half years. Then I’ll be able to make some real headway on these projects. Two and a half years. Two and half more years. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to it!