Anne de Marcken’s Shelf Life


Anne de Marcken is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and publisher. She is author of the novel It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions and Giramondo, 2024) and the lyric novella, The Accident: An Account (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). Her work across disciplines has garnered numerous awards including the Novel Prize. She lives in the US at the southernmost tip of the Salish Sea on the unceded land of the Coast Salish people, where she works as Editor and Publisher of the independent press, The 3rd Thing.

How and where are you?
I am on my back porch. I am well.

What are you currently reading? 
I recently finished Heather McCalden’s The Observable Universe and Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961. In between and along the way I’ve been reading Practical Suggestions for Handling, Fitting Out and Caring for the Boat (a book from 1918 on wooden boat maintenance), Dionne Brand’s Nomenclature, Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu, Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams…a bunch of other things that come and go from my nightstand or desk. I’m also researching for a project, which includes combing through local historical society records, newspaper archives, potamology papers and a strange variety of other sources.

And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming? 
Two movies I finally just watched that felt worth it are Past Lives, written and directed by Celine Song, and Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet and written by Triet with Arthur Harari. I also just tore through latest season of The Bear. I listen to podcasts whenever I am doing anything that isn’t reading or writing. Some favorites are David Naimon’s Between the Covers, BBC Radio Ulster’s Gardeners’ Corner and BBC Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time (the climate in much of Ireland is a lot like ours here in Olympia), and Ezra Klein’s show for The New York Times. I listen to a lot of political analysis. As for music, it surprises me how seldom I put on an album. I honestly don’t listen to a lot except when I’ve created a playlist for specific projects, or it’s Christmas time (I love all kinds of Christmas music, from Medieval to cheesy), or for running (which I haven’t done for a while). I do always put on an ‘80s mix when I’m cutting my spouse’s hair… to get that salon vibe—The Cure, Cyndi Lauper, Annie Lennox, Deee-lite, Beastie Boys, The B52s…. Sometimes M and I will remember a song because it is connected to a part of our lives or some other association, then we’ll look it up online and play it over and over again—this often happens in the car. We recently did this with ‘Blackbird’. Also with Arlo Guthrie’s ‘The City of New Orleans’ for some reason I don’t recall. That song is amazing… and the way he, in particular, sings it. Oh, and just last week my friend Arden shared with me a playlist they made—it’s a kind of intense and also playful collaboration with rules about the transitions between songs and some very sophisticated sound engineering. It has a lot of music I’ve never heard before, some I know but would never otherwise listen to, and also some long-lost favorites. It’s called A Genius Night Out with DJ Setlist and d’Jarden. You can find it on SoundCloud.

What did you read as a child? 
There was a lot of reading aloud in both my mother and father’s households. Arthur Ransom’s Swallows and Amazons books, Gerald Durrell’s books about his childhood on Corfu, the James Herriot books, Roald Dahl—in particular James and the Giant Peach. My brother and I would then read and reread these books on our own (I’d like to blame my terrible spelling on the mismatch between the British English of the books I was raised on and the American English of my schooling). They became a framework for our lived experiences, even a set of myths—we built our lives and saw the world according to these instructions… what was beautiful, what was funny, what was worth doing, what was possible (the impossible), what was happening under a leaf or in the dark. Animals were central. Speaking of myth, at bedtime, my mother often read to us from The Children of Odin. I remember slipping into sleep on the Norse gods’ long, slide toward self-fulfilling apocalypse. Also, for many years I would take to bed and study two picture books: Snow-White and The Seven Dwarves and The Snow Queen. It was the illustrations that captivated me. In the editions I had, there was a lurking darkness. Nothing at all cartoonish. I remember I was especially drawn to the shadowy cathedral vastness of the room where Gerda finds the prince and princess asleep in beds shaped like lotus blossoms, and to Snow White’s stepmother in the chamber where she wove her spells—with its bones, books, poisonous roots and secrecy, it seemed to me the ideal haven. I wanted a room like that. Also there was something off about the relationship of her head and body. It fascinated me. I think I wasn’t sure if the illustrator had not resolved some trouble they’d had, or if this villain, whom I preferred to the protagonist, was actually misshapen. As I think about it now, I realize I inferred a tension between the story and the teller of the story—or between what really happened and how it was represented. It was the gap between that held my attention.

Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them? 
Every writer. Every book. In one way or another. Which is to say, this is an impossible question. For many years I cited Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium as my favorite book. My favorite parts have varied over time—I spent a long time rereading ‘Lightness’, then was caught up with ‘Exactitude’, then ‘Quickness’. Probably it was important that I was reading Calvino’s fiction along side his critical writing—I was experiencing his enactment of the virtues he extoled. I especially love his short story collection, Difficult Loves, which is not as formally unusual or fantastical as some of his other writing. A friend recently observed to me that Calvino should be considered an experimental writer. The same friend insists It Lasts Forever… is experimental. I don’t think of the novel as especially experimental and I never thought of Calvino that way, so it made me wonder if Calvino is so deep in me that I lack perspective on both his work and my own. I just think of him as lucid and nimble and not in-the-way of the reader or the story, which are all things I would want someone to be able to say about my writing.

As a young teenager I read almost exclusively fantasy books—mostly not well written but deeply engrossing; probably they gave me a feeling of immersion that I value. I had some important realizations about structure because of Haruki Murakami, but I think my sense of duration, pacing and scale comes more from film and architecture than from books. Roland Barthes helped me name and work more intentionally with my affinity for gaps and my relationship to readers. I’ve learned a lot about sentences and movement and wholeness from Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, Anne Carson, Gertrude Stein… also about humor. There are particular books that changed everything for me as a reader, and as a writer filled me with a sense of possibility and also seriousness: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Immortality by Milan Kundera, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, others I’m forgetting to mention…. Maybe these are among the first books I read—along with those illustrated children’s books—in which there was a pervasive affect that was more pronounced or forward than plot. When I think about them, that’s what still arises in me. They each sustain and seem to operate narratively according to feeling in a way that I now strive for. I haven’t named any poetry, which is misleading. Probably Auden and Wallace Stevens excited me most on first encounter. A little later it was Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Simic.

The books I’ve named are mostly long-ago reads. They landed at a time in my personal development and in my development as a writer that was especially open. Like music from your teen years that always takes you back to that time and feels more like you than music you listen to now or music you would recommend to a friend. I have some perspective on these early reads and can reflect more on their influence, but it is just as true that what I’ve read more recently is affecting my work in more formal ways or more intellectual ways or in ways I may not recognize for a while yet.

What’s the worst review you’ve ever received? 
Elvis Mitchell clearly hated Group, an experimental feature film I made way back in 2002. His snarky write-up for the New York Times probably did real damage to the film’s ability to find an audience. But I remember laughing out loud at how over-the-top bad it was. I felt no shame. It was the kind of review that reveals more about the reviewer than his subject. We used pull quotes from it for publicity. More recently, I read a low-stakes Goodreads ‘review’ of my novel that actually made me mad because it was so self-regarding. The reader pitted their opinion against what other (one should assume, lesser) readers might think. Whether they are writing about my work or someone else’s, I am bothered by anyone who positions themselves as a critic but acts as an arbiter of taste or value rather than as a public thinker.

Tell us a little about your creative process.
I have two primary ways of writing: 1) slowly and deliberately, and 2) accidentally. In the first case, a project usually starts with an idea that is persistent enough to grow more clear rather than dimmer in the time it takes me to attend to it. Once I am writing, the idea eventually yields a feeling—some line or passage reveals the heart of the piece. Once I have the feeling, the heart, I stumble around for a long time looking for the rest of the body…the nature of the book’s wholeness, the shape of it, the wave of it that will carry me from sentence to sentence and to its completion. I experience this process as akin to listening very closely. When I am working like this, I am very slow—I tend to need to get a line ‘right’ before I can move to the next, and I can get bogged down. Reading can help. Constraints can help. I make use of spreadsheets, redaction, printmaking, photography…. Sometimes these lead a project far from the page into other forms—installation, performance, video.

When I am stuck in the mud of a story, I sometimes turn to a short stack of index cards on which I have written a set of ‘essential elements’ that serve me in lieu of received narrative structure (which has never felt useful or inspiring to me). The cards say things like “The protagonist must die at least once,” “Ambiguous agent,” “Vision of pure beauty,” “Haven,” “Moment of terror,” “Talisman.” These can help cause something surprising to happen that jogs me into the unknown. While I am working on a project in this slow, deliberate way, I generate a lot of bits and pieces of things, stumble on other stories. I stash these in poorly named files. When I happen upon them again, I find sometimes they add up to an entirely different project. I call this accidental writing. I have written whole books behind my own back.

How has your experience of the publishing industry been? 
I am more at ease in the margins, more able to maneuver and create in spaces (literal and conceptual) that are overlooked, more excited by the currents and back eddies that flow there—the people, ideas, methods and forms of exchange that have a fungibility to do with mutability, ingenuity and need rather than commodification. I feel more myself, am more myself, ‘outside.’ I am suspicious of what goes on ‘inside’ and am uncomfortable when I find myself there, whether by default or by chance… or even because I worked for it. Publishing feels like an inside realm. Walled, not open. Not only because it is, by and large, a mechanism geared toward reproduction of the canon rather than upheaval and entropy, generativity and imagination—but because it is opaque, inscrutable…or simply operates according to such different processes and logics than writing itself, which are what I have oriented myself to.

At the same time, I love books as objects, value them as relatively inexpensive, anachronistic (or maybe anti-chronistic) cultural artifacts that can be physically handed from one person to another and which, unlike much art, become cheaper or free and increasingly available once they’ve passed through an initial transactional gateway. Also I acknowledge the way a set of ideas is transformed by the publication process into something of value, often for worse but potentially for better. Books can be insurgent agents. These are the reasons I started The 3rd Thing, the small press I run. And though I am not above the desire for recognition and validation, they are also the better reasons I have continuously worked to get my own work published, win a prize, find an agent (which I still have not managed!)…. Also—and most important at the level of creation—I deeply believe that each reader is an essential participant in the writing process, so the more readers the more fully told—fully realized—a story is. (Though maybe there is a tipping point when readers become ratifiers? A pervasiveness that makes the idea of the book larger than its text, a saturation that leads unsatisfyingly to agreement.)

I think the most important, almost accidental discovery that has come from running The 3rd Thing, and which I sometimes feel about my own work, is that publication can be a way out, not in. That to the varying extent any of us are inside ‘the institution’, publication (books) can be a way out—for writers and for readers. Thinking of it this way, I feel not only somewhat liberated from trends and ‘comparables’ and all those things that cause a sinking sense of dread or loss of center when you’re filling out submission forms and trying to write a synopsis or fit your work into a genre category, but also an ethical imperative to imagine and tell (and publish) ‘stories’ we—or at least I—need.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? 
Drop out of school.

What are you working on right now?
Slowly and deliberately I am writing a 600-year speculative memoir of the allegorical figure Columbia, figurehead of Democracy and quintessential White Lady. I also am contributing to Delisted, a vast, interdisciplinary collaboration about the 23 species most recently removed from the United States’ endangered species list because they are presumed extinct. On the side, I have a couple ‘accidental’ projects: a book-length poetry collaboration with Jennifer Calkins about climate change called Annihilation is Underway, and a hybrid thing called The Solace of Phenomena. And right now at The 3rd Thing, I’m working on getting comix artist and poet Mita Mahato’s brilliant Arctic Play to press for release this fall. It’s going to be so beautiful!