Contemporary Authors

1. By light we knew our names LCCN 2014504715 Type of material Book Personal name Valente, Anne, author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title By light we knew our names / Anne Valente. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, 2014. Description 224 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781936873623 (paperback) 1936873621 (paperback) CALL NUMBER PS3622.A42577 A6 2014 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Author Homepage - http://www.annevalente.com/?page_id=10818

  ABOUT

  Photo-Valente

  Anne Valente’s debut novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, released from William Morrow/HarperCollins in October 2016. Her first short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize (2014). She is also the author of the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics.

  Her fiction appears in One Story, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others, and won Copper Nickel’s 2012 Fiction Prize and a 2015 Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award Finalist Prize. She was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2014 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a featured author at the 2015 One Story Debutante Ball. Her work was selected as notable in Best American Non-Required Reading 2011 and her essays appear in The Believer, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner and The Washington Post.

  Originally from St. Louis, she holds an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Cincinnati. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Literature Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

  Amazon’s Best Books of the Month: October 2016

  Refinery29′s Best Reads for October

  Ploughshares’ Most Necessary Books for the End of 2016

  Midwest Connections Pick: November 2016

  14517608_10101151455201372_2380494148680037085_n HarperCollins : IndieBound : Amazon : Barnes&Noble : Powell’s

  Written in the collective voice of the community, a la Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, Valente artfully employs short chapters on arson and anatomy, as well as diagrams, newspaper articles, and biographies of the victims on the way to an unforgettable ending, with fire serving as a powerfully fitting metaphor for grief, loss, and our inability to comprehend the nature of fate.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The characterizations are acute and the resolution…is tantalizing and thought provoking.” – Booklist

  “Valente takes us straight to the heart of the horror in this shocking – but tender and cerebral – book.” – The Buffalo News

  “Anne Valente is an ambitious author to watch.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Valente has written a poetic page-turner that explores how we grieve in solitude and grieve together, and what the human body endures when that grief overwhelms. Quizzical, melodic, and unforgettable, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down breaks new ground on issues of mass violence, communal loss, and the act of remembrance.” – Ploughshares

  “Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is a bold examination of a subject that is unimaginably difficult to encapsulate in a way that is neither exploitative nor insensitive to those who have suffered a similar trauma. The subject of school shootings is mentally exhausting for both the writer and the reader, but Valente manages to pull off the emotional gravitas necessary to make this book and its seemingly dark premise work, and, most importantly, spark a conversation about a subject that often feels too heavy to discuss and unpack openly. Valente writes with the ear of a poet and the inquisitive instinct of a journalist. Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is a book unflinching in its portrayal of grief, loss, and the frailty of the human heart.” – Colorado Review

  “Valente’s prose is unique and breathless, full of eloquent turns of phrases and insightful observations…Valente is truly a unique voice in fiction today, knitting words together in ways no one else could.” – Playback STL

  “An important book for our times.” – The Masters Review

  “A mournful and enigmatic novel from a former St. Louisan, whose recurring exploration of violence, loss and community anguish resonates loudly in these challenging times.” – Alive Magazine St. Louis

  “Valente’s beautiful, elegiac novel about a community in mourning, and the unseen forces that unravel and consume us after a tragedy, is a work of heartbreaking timelessness.” – J. Ryan Stradal, Author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest

  “A breathtaking portrait of violence and its ruinous aftermath. As Anne Valente’s riveting characters navigate the transformed landscape of their hometown, they find themselves awash in devastation and redemption and mystery, and this reader found herself increasingly spellbound by this remarkable and urgent debut novel.” – Laura Van Den Berg, Author of Find Me

  “Anne Valente is a sorceress, conjuring a story of sorrow and suspense with characters so real we feel their heartbreak, their bewilderment, the horrible chills down their spines…This is a gorgeous book full of mysteries. It scorches with truth, and sings with hope. Valente writes like all of our lives depend on it.” – Diane Cook, Author of Man V. Nature

  “A book we desperately need…One of the most compelling novels I’ve read in years.” – Matt Bell, Author of Scrapper

  “Lyrical, mysterious, and structurally innovative…This is a book that does not look away. This is a book we need now more than ever.” – Kelly Luce, Author of Pull Me Under

  “Pulsing, eerie, and impossible to put down, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down unearths the grief that raises a Midwestern community in the wake of a school shooting. In acrobatic prose, Anne Valente shows us what tragedy leaves behind: how we ask questions that may be unanswerable.” – Chloe Benjamin, Author of The Anatomy of Dreams

  “Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is a beautifully written, lyrical book wrapped up in a compelling mystery with shades of Stephen King. Gripping and profound, a terrific debut.” – Kate Hamer, Author of The Girl in the Red Coat

  “Gripping, visceral…I couldn’t stop reading – or caring about these characters…There’s a tinge of mythic eeriness to this story…but it was the resilient, appealing characters who propelled me through this intense novel, and lingered long after its close.” – Sharon Guskin, Author of The Forgetting Time

  INTERVIEW

  RECENT INTERVIEWS

  TK Podcast with James Scott: February 2017.
  Memorious: October 2016.
  So to Speak: October 2016.
  The Kenyon Review: October 2016.
  Electric Literature: October 2016.
  The Southeast Review: October 2016.
  The Southern Review: September 2016.
  Jackalope Magazine: September 2015.
  Midwestern Gothic: May 2015.
  One Story Debutante Ball: May 2015.
  One Story: “Tell Us You Were Here,“ April 2015.
  Fiction Writers Review: In Conversation with Diane Cook, Author of Man V. Nature; January 2015.
  The Masters Review: November 2014.
  Origami Zoo Press: Two Part Interview, November 2014.
  Memorious: October 2014.
  Full Stop: October 2014.
  Dzanc Books: September 2014.
  Speaking of Marvels: A Chapbook Interview Series, 2013.
  Origami Zoo Press: March 2013.
  WRITE-UPS

  The Story Prize: “Fiction and the Language of Film,” December 2014.
  Origami Zoo Press: “Resurrect Your Darlings,” October 2014.
  The Chattahoochee Review: By Light We Knew Our Names Feature, September 2014.
  The Next Best Book Blog: “Where Writers Write,” April 2014.
  Ploughshares: “The Lost Caves of St. Louis” reviewed by Lyndsey Reese, May 2013.
  Short Story Month 2011 Featured Story: “By Light We Knew Our Names” (Hayden’s Ferry Review 48).

• Sante Fe University - http://santafeuniversity.edu/academics/creative-writing/faculty/anne-valente/

  Anne Valente

  Full-time Faculty, Fiction
  anne.valente@santafeuniversity .edu

  PhD, University of Cincinnati
  MFA, Bowling Green State University
  MS, University of Illinois
  BA, Washington University in St. Louis

  Anne Valente’s first short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize and was published in 2014. Her debut novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, is forthcoming from William Morrow/Harper Collins in 2016. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, The Normal
  School, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among others, and she won Copper Nickel’s 2012 Fiction Prize. She was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2014 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and will be a featured author at the 2015 One Story Debutante Ball. Her work was selected as a notable story in Best American Non-Required Reading 2011 and her essays have appeared in The Believer, Electric Literatureand The Washington Post.

• Sante Fe University - http://santafeuniversity.edu/news/creative-writing-department-welcomes-new-faculty-member-award-winning-autho/

  CREATIVE WRITING DEPARTMENT WELCOMES NEW FACULTY MEMBER, AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR ANNE VALENTE

  Author
  SFUAD
  Date published
  MAY
  20
  2015

  AUTHOR ANNE VALENTE
  Dynamic fiction writer recognized for short story collections, essays; debut novel set for publication in 2016

  Media Contact:

  Lauren McDaniel

  Santa Fe University of Art and Design

  1-505-473-6440

  lauren.mcdaniel@santafeuniversity.edu

  Santa Fe, N.M.—May 20, 2015—The Creative Writing and Literature Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design (SFUAD) welcomes author Anne Valente as a full-time faculty member in fall 2015. Valente’s first short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names (Dzanc Books, 2014), received wide acclaim and won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, The Normal School, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among others. She will teach fiction and literature classes across all levels as a faculty member at SFUAD.

  “The Creative Writing and Literature Department is extremely fortunate to have Anne Valente join our full-time faculty. Anne is an incredibly talented fiction writer, and has tremendous expertise in her field,” said Matt Donovan, co-chair of the department. “She also brings a wonderfully dynamic presence in the classroom. Anne received national recognition and great success with her first book, a collection of short stories, and we’re eagerly awaiting her first novel, which will be published by Harper Collins next year. Anne gave our students and faculty a sneak-peak at the new novel during her reading while she was visiting campus, and what she delivered to us was a haunting and powerful piece of work.”

  Valente won Copper Nickel’s 2012 Fiction Prize, was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2014 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and was a featured author during the May 2015 One Story Debutante Ball. Her work was selected as a notable story in Best American Non-Required Reading 2011 and her essays have appeared in The Believer, Electric Literature and The Washington Post.

  Valente’s debut novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, is forthcoming from William Morrow/Harper Collins in 2016.

  For more information about the SFUAD Creative Writing and Literature Department, including faculty and student accomplishments, visit santafeuniversity.edu.

  About SFUAD’s Creative Writing and Literature Department

  The Creative Writing and Literature Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design enables students to learn from and grow along with a core of published, award-winning authors. Dedicated students polish their literary skills and discover the right forms for their unique voice, while taking advantage of numerous opportunities to conduct public readings, work collaboratively, and inspire and be inspired by their peers. Annually, the Creative Writing and Literature Department publishes a student-edited and student-produced literary journal, Glyph, featuring some of the university’s best writing in creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry and screenwriting.

• The Southern Review - http://thesouthernreview.org/blog/a-writers-insight-anne-valente/

  A Writer’s Insight: Anne Valente
  By Bobby | Published September 23, 2016
  Anne Valente’s story “Who We Were” appears in the summer 2016 issue of The Southern Review. “Who We Were” is an adapted excerpt of Valente’s debut novel Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, forthcoming from William Morrow/HarperCollins (October 4). Hear Valente read from “Who We Were” in our audio gallery here; read more about her process of crafting the story and novel below.

  “Who We Were” is a harrowing story about a terribly tragic event, a school shooting. Out of that context, however, I’d argue that the story’s structure and language are remarkably playful: the first person plural narrator, the multiple tense changes (past, conditional, future), the frequent use of repetition and lists. How do these craft choices relate to, interrogate, or reflect the larger themes of the story? Why have so much narrative play in such a heavy story?

  In general, I’m a writer who enjoys narrative play—I love repetition and listing, and any other mode that experiments with linear storytelling. But beneath the surface of structure, I also contended with what narrative mode would best tell this particular story. So much of this story—and so much of the novel—is about memory, and how each character attempts to reckon with this tragedy. Neither memory nor grief are linear: both double back, both take loops and turns, both obsess and repeat, and both follow maddening paths that are anything but straightforward. To best reflect the process of grieving and memory, I chose a structure that mirrored the ways our brains attempt to make sense and move on.

  One of the more astonishing aspects of this story, to me, is how expertly the narration guides the reader through the school. We also shift between the points of view of Lewis and Clark’s yearbook staff members: Christina, Zola, Matt, and Nick; and there are shifts in time, toggling between scenes before, during, and after the shooting. This creates a chorus-like effect, further underlined by the use of the “we.” Could you talk about why you chose to write from this point of view, and how it might influence the telling of this kind of trauma?

  Much in the same way that memory circulates in nonlinear ways around trauma, I think that point of view is also so difficult to pinpoint around a tragedy like this. One of my leading questions while writing this was: Whose story is this? I think we’re accustomed to stories of tragedy belonging to the media and news, and it’s one of the only ways we access information about mass violence. Broadcasts bring such authoritative voices, and I didn’t want a singular voice to own this narrative. The news is only one voice, and I imagined whether trauma like this belongs to everyone, or to each individual who experienced it, or to some gray space in between. I wondered if this kind of tragedy would bring a community together—a township, a high school, an entire city—while also splintering the collective apart, since no one experiences grief in the same way. By shifting the points of view between the collective and the individual, I wanted to explore the ways in which trauma is communal but also singular.

  Unfortunately, school shootings like the one featured in “Who We Were” are all too common. How did current events and politics influence you while writing this story? Moreover, why set it in 2003, rather than, say, 2013 or 2016?

  I began writing this in early 2013, just after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I’d been a junior in high school at the time of the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, and a college instructor at the time of the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. I couldn’t believe in 2013 that as a nation we still hadn’t found a way to prevent mass tragedies like these from happening. Though gun violence occurs every day in America, something about mass shootings—maybe because they are almost always carried out by men—suggested to me a fixation on power and a perceived threat to that power. Though this isn’t explicitly explored in “Who We Were,” I set the book at the time of George W. Bush’s presidency and the search for weapons of mass destruction. The audacity of that search, as well as its need for power and answers when there weren’t any, felt like the right backdrop for a community seeking answers where grief so often provides so few. I also wanted to set this at a time when we as a nation hadn’t yet grown numb to so many incidents of mass violence.

  “Who We Were” is being published in 2016, a year that feels marked by an excess of gun violence. These incidents, as well as so many that occurred after I finished writing the book in 2014, have further saddened me about the state of violence in this country—mass shootings, including those in Charleston and Orlando, but also police brutality in Ferguson and Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights and so many other cities in America. I don’t know what to say about so much violence, other than that I hope we continue to stay vigilant to not grow numb, and to continue speaking out and fighting against brutality, gun violence, and excessive force.

  This story is the first chapter of your forthcoming novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down. Why or how is “Who We Were” a beginning, structurally, tonally, or otherwise?

  I think “Who We Were” sets a tone of interrogation of memory; that in the wake of trauma building an archive is not only an objective but also an impossible task. For the yearbook staff members, the project of building a book after this kind of tragedy is both a diversion and a compulsion—a project that helps organize and funnel their grief, but a project that is essentially intolerable because of the material it forces them to engage with. I also wanted to begin with an account of the shooting so that the novel explores the aftermath—what we so often never see after television cameras and newscasters move away. Our media tends to focus on shooter and motive, and not as readily on how a community does or does not move on. “Who We Were” addresses the shooting immediately, but through the prism of four points of view, so a new narrative can unfold considering how these points of view process grief.

  Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is also your debut novel. Congratulations! You’ve published dozens of short stories, including two collections. How did your process change while writing a novel? Did it change? What advice would you give to someone shifting from short stories to their first novel?

  Thank you! I did write only short stories when I first began writing, and I still write short stories now. To write a novel, I extended what I knew of short stories to a much longer form—that there still needed to be conflict, rising action, everything that a short story required, but outlined across multiple chapters. My process didn’t necessarily change, though I’d say that writing a novel required far more mapping of events, of timeline, and of the background of 2003. I built a big visual map above my desk to keep me on task. It also required more devoted time to stay within the world of the narrative, so I made time to write every single day.

  For someone shifting from short stories to a first novel, I’d definitely suggest creating concentrated time each day so that the world of the novel stays fresh and immediate. In terms of more abstract advice, however, what was most helpful for me was to hear that a novel can be an enormous umbrella for many ideas. Whereas so many of my short stories tackle a single narrative across fifteen to twenty pages, I’ve found that a novel can contain even the kitchen sink. Part of the fun of the novel was drawing connections between fragments of ideas I’d kept but not known where to place: gun violence, but also astronomy, swimming, memory, cicadas. I found ways of exploring these ideas through character development and setting within the novel. Constellating ideas together is a big part of my process, and the novel provided a bigger playground for drawing connections between different strands of thought than short stories.

  Anne Valente is the author of Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, forthcoming from William Morrow/HarperCollins, and the story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names. Her stories and essays have appeared in One Story, Ninth Letter, and the Washington Post. She teaches creative writing at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

  Kathleen Boland is the editorial assistant of The Southern Review and an MFA candidate in fiction at Louisiana State University.

  Support great writing by subscribing to The Southern Review.

• The Southeast Review - http://southeastreview.org/author-qa-anne-valente/

  Author Q&A: Anne Valente
  by Kayli Tomasheski on October 4, 2016 in Interviews
  Interview by Misha Rai

  Anne Valente’s debut novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, is forthcoming from William Morrow/HarperCollins in October 2016. Her first short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize and was released in September 2014. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics.
  First of all congratulations, congratulations, congratulations on the book! This is such a beautifully written and necessary novel that unflinchingly looks at a very destructive and devastating subset of American life, something that shockingly continues to occur even now: shootings at schools and universities. What drew you to this subject matter? What kind of research did you do and how much did you do? Are you the kind of writer who has to finish their research before they can begin work on a project or do you research as you go along?

  Anne Valente
  Thanks so much for these kind words, Misha. I’d actually been working on short stories about St. Louis, where I’m from, when the school shooting at Sandy Hook happened in late 2012. I began working on a short story about a school shooting in St. Louis because I kept thinking about the families in Newtown after the media began pulling away. I did finish the short story, but felt like a much larger narrative could be explored. So I began working on a novel, something I’d never done before, and did a good amount of research before I began writing – about mass shootings, and also about October of 2003, the time frame where the novel is set. But I kept researching while I was writing. This is probably not the best writerly practice, but I often research not only while I’m working on a project but while I’m actually writing, with a browser open just in case. I’m not very good at going back and filling in the details, so I usually incorporate them as I work.

  Oh I totally identify with the latter, I’m very much a browser-open-just-in-case sort of person too. Talking about openings or beginnings, in many ways the first few pages of the novel sets the narrative up to be a mystery story, and trying to figure out what or who is causing the fires makes it one, but it also works away from the whodunit genre and takes a closer look at the inner workings of the narrators and this community in the aftermath of these tragedies. What prompted you to have the narrative lean more one-way as opposed to the other?

  In watching how the media covered not only Sandy Hook but so many other mass shootings, I grew tired of the incessant focus on the shooter’s motives and the need to solve, as if solving would change the fact that people were gone and families were grieving. There was less focus on the families themselves, and I wanted to look at how a community reacts, rebuilds, or doesn’t rebuild at all. The fires do serve as a way for the characters to focus their grief, and to funnel their pain into solving, but I wanted to explore the need to find answers when so often there aren’t any. There is so much unknown in violence and in the way that grief works, and I wanted to sit with that lack of knowing instead of our culture’s push to solve and move on.

  Running concurrently in the novel are other news of the world—baseball, the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, the invasion of Iraq, questions about Weapons of Mass Destruction etc.—that seep into the narrative, more tangibly with the literature Matt’s mum is reading, and I couldn’t help think if the purpose of the more graver, political pieces of news in the novel was not just to remind the reader that there were other, bigger tragedies at play but also that this school shooting, so devastating, so close to home was something that took a very uncertain time and made it unbelievably unbearable. Also, the deployment of news in the novel is necessary to the plot, and it made me reexamine the interplay of news, a domestic and international tragedy unfurling at the same time, through the lens of your novel. That was disquieting. Was that part of the response you were looking for from a reader?

  Initially, my main impetus for choosing a time period in the early 2000s was to set the novel in an era when we weren’t so acculturated to mass violence, and to 24-hour news, and quite possibly to numbness. But upon researching further into this window of time, 2003 became a relevant backdrop for the narrative. George W. Bush’s search for weapons of mass destruction was at its height, a search that ultimately found no answers, or at least, not the answers Bush was looking for. This push to know, and to press for false knowledge at any cost, felt connected to this narrative, as did a spinning cycle of news that inevitably absorbs then forgets this mass shooting. So much of what was happening in the United States and in the wider world at that time felt distinctly about power, which isn’t all that different from the violence we are seeing today, but I saw connections between the kind of America that Bush was pushing upon the world and the forceful violence of mass shootings, as well as connections between the uncertainty of that post-9/11 era with a pressing need to find answers at any cost.

  O.K. You mention power and mass violence and mass shootings and one word comes to my mind when I think of the world of this book: bleak. I guess my next question is: how did writing this book, with its very bleak subject matter of school shootings, impact you? The first person plural POV, though inclusive and beautifully rendered, is also relentless, so were there times you had to step away and do something else?

  heartsAbsolutely. While working on this novel, I was also taking breaks to write short stories about St. Louis. I’d written a few before starting the novel and wrote a few after, and knew I was building a collection of stories about my hometown. At the time, I thought I was writing those stories to deepen my understanding of the novel’s setting, especially since I was no longer living in St. Louis while writing. But now, I wonder if I took breaks to write short fiction because I needed to step away from the unrelenting darkness of the novel’s world. I wrote the novel in a year, and it was an extremely hard year. I feel ashamed even saying that, since writing a book about the grief of a mass shooting is nothing to the lived experience that so many people have of mass violence. But I felt deeply impacted by the novel’s content, and in general talked very little about its impact.

  You have already talked about this a little bit earlier on, but I wondered why the reader finds out next to nothing about the motivations of the shooter, even though he is always present, and in stark contrast so much about the survivors because there are many varied perspectives and stories about them in the novel?

  We’ve seen the shooter become the center of a narrative, so many times in the news. There’s more of a pushback now against this, of not showing photos of the shooter or even saying the shooter’s name, and focusing instead on the community and families. I very much wanted to focus on the community, to push back against this notion that mass shootings are a crime to solve. Even if we determine a motive, it doesn’t bring anyone back. It doesn’t repair a community. It doesn’t fill in an irreparable hole in any home or make healing any easier. And I think sometimes focusing on the shooter and motive is a distraction, a turning away from grief. Across this novel, I wanted to be able to sit with the grief, and to not be distracted by a shooter’s domination of the narrative. I wanted the community to speak for itself, and to see what happens in the aftermath once the media loses interest and pulls away.

  I was very interested in the structure of this novel, the shorter chapters and how they provided a break from the longer sections. I thought it was so smart, but more importantly emotionally poignant, to have the small eulogies—for lack of a better word—of the students who were shot mirror the struggles the four protagonists are going through, as they grapple with what has happened to them and their community at large, and write these pieces for the yearbook. Then there were the Brief History’s of’s and I was curious about where they came from, how much in those sections was factual information, how much of it was fiction, how did the combination of the both serve your vision of the story and move the narrative along?

  In general, I’m interested in playing with form and structure, and I wanted to break up the novel’s chapters a bit. But the structure served the needs of the narrative’s content for me, as well as my sense of its politics. The smaller sections – eulogies, brief histories of factual information – allowed me to convey information without requiring the characters to do it. Many of these sections were researched, such as the chemistry of fire and the protocols of crime scene investigation, and I was struck by how poetic some of the language was in textbook descriptions of these processes. But I also conceived of this novel as a multi-voiced project, with diagrams and maps and newspaper articles and yearbook excerpts, and I think this ties back to your last question, which is that I didn’t want the shooter to own the narrative, nor did I want the media to own it. We’re accustomed to both of these being the case when mass shootings occur. I wanted more voices in this novel, largely because this kind of tragedy is both collective and so highly individualized – it is everyone’s grief and no one’s grief. I wanted to be able to possess a collective we but also break it apart, and look at grief from so many prisms and angles of singular viewpoints.

  In an interview you gave to Midwestern Gothic about your short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, you said (and I am direct quoting you here)—More and more, I’m interested in magical realism that builds upon the natural world. There’s so much that is strange to me about our planet and universe – that Saturn has so many moons and every one of them so unimaginably far away, that octopuses have three hearts, that the starlight we see is hundreds of years old and just reaching us now. For me, it isn’t much of a leap to create magical fiction from just how extraordinary this world can be—and I wondered when in the conception/drafting/writing of your novel you found that element sneaking into the story you were telling? I’m thinking more of the answer to the mystery behind the house fires—not giving anything away from the plot—than anything else because that does seem to lie in the realm of the fabulous, doesn’t it? I also wondered why was it necessary for you to have the answer be what it was? Why not provide a culprit to blame?

  I think the fantastical was inextricable from my early conception of this novel. Wonder is certainly a part of why I trend toward magical realism, but while I was writing this novel, I became more aware of magical realism’s other possibilities – to imagine other worlds, and other histories and alternatives beyond the horrors and oppressions of our own world. The mystery of the fires felt necessary for imagining some unknown beyond the hard fact of grief, and beyond our culture’s insistence upon violence and domination. To be honest, the magic in this novel felt so much more difficult and grim than the magic in my collection. The characters do still turn to the natural world at times for solace – constellations and stars, the Midwestern fall, anything that offers them some reprieve from their grief – but beyond that, this book felt far different from my first. I wasn’t feeling much wonder at all while writing the book, though I think the connective element is still the unknown – the ultimate mystery of the fires is every mystery of this world and the human heart. Whether in wonder or in grief, the world is so unknowable and I wanted to preserve this in the end rather than offer the false resolution of a culprit.

  It’s funny that you say that this book felt very different from your short story collection. I can see that but having first read By Light We Knew Our Names, I thought, in a very loose way—first person plural POV, elements of fabulism, setting to some extent, the bit about Starlight from the part where Zola and her mum talk, which is so beautifully rendered, etc.—Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down seemed an extension of the collection although the novel, for the most part is realist and definitely a different beauty entirely. Did you feel some of that? Or as you have already said did you imagine the novel, as completely it’s own thing?

  I think my central concerns as a writer overlap in both books, the same obsessions I keep mulling over and over – magic and grief, the world’s beauty and terror, how there’s such a thin border between the two. What it means to lose one another. Ways of imagining worlds beyond the beautiful but faulted one we have. I do think there are strong connections between both books, but I think I was in a much lighter headspace for the collection than the novel. I also wrote the collection across four years, and the novel across one intense year. It’s interesting to see the differences between them, not only in content but in what those different writing conditions and processes produced, but I do agree – and hope – that both books are an extension of who I am as a human being and as a writer.

  Is there interesting stuff you came across during your research but couldn’t find a use for in this book? Anything that ended up on the floor during the editing process?

  I did so much research for this book, and almost all of it ended up in the book in some way. I read the Denver Post’s archive of coverage during Columbine, which helped me gain a sense of how news outlets address mass tragedy and also how communities begin to move on. I also checked out a number of college textbooks on fire science, arson investigation and crime scene examination, all of which made their way into the book. The only research that ended up on the cutting floor was the research I didn’t end up completing – I tried setting up a meeting with the local FBI branch to learn more about regional crimes becoming federal investigations, as well as the ins and outs of SWAT teams and special units, but I didn’t get very far. That was my own fault and naïveté. I thought I could just call the FBI and ask them what I wanted to know.

  Oh wow! Top marks for trying to set up a meeting with the FBI regardless of the result. Oh man! Completely unrelated to that but I think just as necessary, what were you reading as you wrote this novel? What books inspired this book, whether through form, voice, narrative, or content?

  I was studying for my doctoral exams at the time, so I read over a hundred books the year I wrote this novel and tailored the reading lists to my writing objectives. I read books centered on the Midwest to see how other writers wrote the region, and I also read novels that captured the more unsettling aspects of the suburbs. Perhaps the most helpful books I read, however, were a list of cross-genre books that played with form, language and content, which helped me better shape the multi-voiced sections of the novel. Anne Carson’s Nox was instrumental in looking at form and also in setting down grief, as was Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder. Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely was also crucial to me while writing this novel, in the ways it addresses grief but also media, violence and alienation.

  That sounds like a wonderful reading year and those are some awesome ladies to have read. Oh and I love Rankine! The rawness in her work gets me every time. So, what are you working on right now? How does something new come to you? Are you a writer who works on various projects at one time or do you work entirely on one thing?

  I’ve just finished a new novel about a road trip from Illinois to Utah. Landscape continues to be essential to my writing, and since my first novel explores a fixed region, I wanted to see what would happen in a narrative that moves across states. Though I did work on short stories while I was writing Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, I’ve worked solely on this new novel across the past year. I’ve moved three times in the past four years, and that has without a doubt inspired new ideas; now that I’m living in New Mexico, the landscape definitely influenced this new novel. Since I haven’t written short stories in awhile, I’m hoping to get back to writing a few this year, and possibly an essay or two to further rediscover the short form.

  Misha Rai is the first-ever PhD in Fiction to be awarded the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies for her novel-in-progress, Blood We Did Not Spill. She is also a 2016-2017 Edward H. and Mary C. Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University and has been the recipient of the 2015 George M. Harper Award. Her prose has appeared in Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sonora Review and The Missouri Review blog. Misha Rai was born in Sonepat, Haryana and brought up in India. She currently serves as Fiction Editor for The Southeast Review and as Associate Reviews Editor for Pleiades.

• The Masters Review Blog - https://mastersreview.com/author-interview-anne-valente/

  The Masters Review Blog

  NOV
  24
  Author Interview: Anne Valente
  We had the pleasure of talking with Anne Valente, whose debut collection By Light We Knew Our Names was published by Dzanc Books this fall. In these thirteen luminous stories, adolescent girls morph into black bears, a man is tasked with caring for one hundred baby octopi, and abused women form a fight club under the northern lights. Throughout all of this, Valente’s stories maintain an intimacy with their characters. Here, we talk to Valente about structuring her collection, magic in nature, inspiration from research, her nonfiction, and what’s next.

  By Light We Knew Our NamesFirst of all, let me just say how much I enjoyed your debut collection, By Light We Knew Our Names. I thought it was incredible. I’m wondering how you decided to order the collection—if you had a particular pattern or arc in mind. To me, it seemed like the first few stories were about the magic of self-discovery, as the characters came of age. Then, I felt a palpable shift as the characters looked outwards to focus on the harshness of the world, and the frustrating mystery of those closest to them. I thought this was a lovely progression. So: how did you structure the collection?

  Thank you so much for your kind words! Your observation is spot-on in how I ordered the collection. When I put these stories together, I saw them as a progression from the wonder of childhood to the grief, loss and even violence of adulthood. It was my hope, however, that even amid the losses of growing older, the characters and stories still find some capacity for wonder, and that magic isn’t entirely lost when childhood is left behind. There is an unadulterated hopefulness to the earliest stories in the book that I hope serves as a touchstone through the darker traumas of the later stories, where ghosts and northern lights and pink dolphins still cut rays of wonder and light through the dark.

  I really loved the story “Dear Amelia.” It’s now on my list of The Best Stories of All Time. I’ve been describing it to people as “a story about girls who are slowly turning into Maine black bears, and it’s addressed to Amelia Earhart.” But that summary doesn’t really encompass the power of the story. I’m wondering: what was the inspiration for this story? I would love to know anything about the process of writing it.

  Thank you! The idea for this story came to me after I read a Center for Cartoon Studies graphic novel, Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean by Sarah Stewart Taylor and Ben Towle. The Center for Cartoon Studies has done a series on famous historical figures including Thoreau, Houdini, Satchel Paige and Helen Keller. The illustrations in this particular book were magnificent, and they made me think more about Amelia Earhart’s journey and what it must have looked like to young girls in the 1930s when women had fewer options than they do now, and when women’s rights were first being discussed. I’d taken a trip to Acadia National Park in Maine around the time of reading this graphic novel and recalled a naturalist in the park mentioning that it was one of the easternmost points to view the sunrise in the United States. Since Amelia Earhart took off from the easternmost points of the United States in her attempts to travel across the Atlantic, I began to think about what that must have looked like to those who witnessed this, and in particular, those in Maine. The bear transformation came quickly from these ideas as a way of exploring frontiers, limitations, and the boundaries of one’s own biology and body.

  What are some of your favorite short stories of all time?

  Oh, there are so many. A few that I return to again and again are Megan Mayhew Bergman’s “Housewifely Arts” (the final lines make me teary every time), Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” Anthony Doerr’s “The Caretaker” (his use of language is incredible), and Aimee Bender’s “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.” I also reread Margaret Patton Chapman’s “The Wormhole, A Romance” often, which appeared in DIAGRAM a few years ago. It’s just lovely. Definitely one of my favorites of all time.

  I’m a really big fan of magical realism, and many of your stories (though certainly not all), include magical elements in a way that felt very seamless to me. In “Dear Amelia,” for example, the transformation of the girls into black bears is conveyed with such conviction that it feels perfectly natural. I’m wondering: how did you approach the magical elements in your stories? And, are there any magical realist writers you were particularly inspired by?

  Magic feels as much a part of this world to me as anything else, so approaching these elements in the collection was often a process of trying not to draw too much attention to them as something extraordinary, unless the story demanded that they be extraordinary. In some of the later stories, for instance, the magic manifests as bizarre and noticeable in contrast to some of the harsher realities of life, such as the appearance of a sentient, shapeshifting octopus in the face of a couple’s infertility. But in others, the magic is an inherent, accepted part of the story’s world, such as the transformation of girls into bears. I read a lot of magic realist stories as guides to how magic is handled, and beyond Gabriel García Márquez’s seamless aligning of the magical and the mundane, I also really love how Aimee Bender introduces magic with frankness in her stories, how Haruki Murakami lets ordinary monotony slowly unravel into layers upon layers of magic, and even how writers like Laura van den Berg introduce magical elements in otherwise realist stories. The protagonists in her first collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, are often scientists or explorers very much tied to the real and tangible within the world, and yet they’re exposed to the possible existence of the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, or even the more magical elements of nature (such as the discovery of a rare flower) that are entirely extraordinary.

  Your stories also include many spellbinding facts about the natural world. You discuss the northern lights, echolocation in dolphins, the biology of octopi. Did you do research for these stories? And, did the facts contained in these stories help to inspire them?

  I love research in fiction, particularly research into the natural world, so many of these stories required a significant and enjoyable amount of digging. For me, there’s an inordinate amount of magic and mystery in the natural world – how seasons change, how birds know when and where to migrate, how whales communicate to one another, how leaves know when to turn all at once in autumn – and the magic of nature inspired so many of the magical elements in this book.

  You earned your MFA at Bowling Green State University. Since a lot of our readers are in MFA programs, considering an MFA, or just generally curious: What was your experience at your program like, and what do you think made it unique?

  My MFA experience was seminal and definitive for my writing, and my two years at Bowling Green were incomparable. I came late to writing fiction, so I felt way out of my league by the talent that surrounded me when I entered the program. But it was an amazing experience: the MFA taught me how to establish a writing schedule, how to work hard for something, how to be a good literary citizen, how to support journals and other writers, and how to submit and publish. The program has a literary magazine library, for example, and I’d barely read any before entering the program; I spent hours in that library reading journals, getting a feel for magazine aesthetics, and discovering up-and-coming writers while also learning how to submit my own work. Furthermore, the program gave me an incredible cohort of such amazing writers and mentors, and two fantastic years of inspiration, creativity and learning how to pay attention to the world around me, all things that I feel have set me for life in being an engaged writer. Bowling Green is a small town, but it’s quirky and strange in the most wonderful of ways. The nature that surrounded the town inspired me, everyone in the program motivated me, and the program ethos of learning how to be a working writer set my writing habits well.

  You’ve also published essays in publications like The Believer and The Washington Post. I loved, for example, your essay “My Body, My Machine” in The Rumpus. Would you consider publishing a collection of nonfiction? What inspires your nonfiction and how does it contrast for you, personally, with the process of writing fiction?

  Thank you! In addition to writing fiction, I also really love nonfiction. I find that they complement each other as two different outlets for being curious about the world. I’d absolutely consider publishing a collection of nonfiction, though I suppose a collection of my nonfiction would be a little disjointed at this point: I love the personal essay, but I also love the creative nonfiction essay as a means of researching and exploring. The essay I have forthcoming in The Believer, for instance, is about sea monkeys and the growth and transportation of brine shrimp from the Great Salt Lake. I wrote features as a freelance journalist before I started writing fiction, a process that was more about discovery for me than about hard news. I’ve carried this sense of exploration into my fiction, and though I don’t know definitively what makes me choose to address a topic in fiction or in nonfiction, both processes most certainly involve research and curiosity.

  This leads me to the question: What’s next for you? I’d love to hear not only about what you’re working on now but also about any projects you have in mind for the future.

  I just finished a novel manuscript about a series of mysterious house fires that erupt in a community after a mass school shooting, a project that took a significant amount of time and emotional energy across the past year. Now that it’s complete, I’ve been working on a collection of short stories about the city of St. Louis, my hometown. I’d also like to tackle a few more essays in the future, again possibly involving research. I tend to collect notes from various avenues of research and thinking and try to connect the dots between them: right now, those avenues include the mechanics of rollercoasters, the chemistry of neon tubing, and the life cycle of the luna moth. I’m not sure yet how they’ll constellate together, but I look forward to finding out.

  Interviewed by Sadye Teiser

• Fiction Writers Review - http://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/big-and-small-an-interview-with-anne-valente/

  Big and Small: An Interview with Anne Valente
  Diane Cook talks with Anne Valente about her short story collection By Light We Know Our Names: "In fiction, I think objects and patterns among those objects serve as something tangible for me and for characters, a way of making meaning out of something concrete in the face of uncertainty, intangibility, and everything we can’t and don’t know."

  by DIANE COOK
  I met Anne this past summer when we were both scholars at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. I took to her immediately as she’s the kind of person whose heart isn’t on her sleeve—it’s on her face, in her eyes, and in the ready smile she’ll flash at you across the table. In her debut collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, published by Dzanc Books in September, she showcases this empathy as she explores both the banality and hardship of being alive at all ages, as any gender. The stories are rippling with the emotions felt by characters who are bewildered—powerless and angry, tender and hurt, confused and wary. Anne handles their feelings and their plight intellectually, precisely, and with great humanity.
  In addition to this collection and the fiction chapbook An Elegy for Mathematics (Origami Zoo Press, 2013), Anne’s short fiction has appeared in such places as One Story, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Normal School, among others, and her essays appear in The Believer and The Washington Post. Her work won the 2012 Copper Nickel Fiction Prize and was listed as notable in Best American Non-Required Reading 2011. We emailed back and forth about her book and a little about mine over the past month.
  Interview:

  Diane Cook: In the first story in By Light We Know Our Names, the children have special powers and can shapeshift in various ways. In the next story, young girls begin to morph into ursine figures and soon realize their mothers have this power too. In subsequent stories other kinds of shapeshifting in big and small ways occur: mothers and children disappear, people become distant, or withdrawn after trauma. It happens in fabulist ways or, as you demonstrate, in quieter reality-based ways. What interests you about this shapeshifting?
  Anne Valente: That’s a fantastic observation, and something I hadn’t considered before about the collection—but if shapeshifting implies destabilization, then what interests me about disappearances and transformations is a lack of certainty, and maybe even a lack of assuming that we know and understand everything. We don’t know everything about the people around us: their quiet powers, their hidden grief.
  ” We don’t know everything about the people around us: their quiet powers, their hidden grief.”
  We don’t know everything about so many things in the natural world. I like this lack of certainty in fiction, and of raising questions for the reader to consider rather than providing definitive answers.
  Many of your protagonists are at first bewildered by what is happening. They are having a different experience from the other characters who often seem to know more. Almost as if you’re exploring the uncertainty while acknowledging that it isn’t forever. That at some moment we morph into people who are more knowledgeable. And perhaps that isn’t any easier.
  I think I like exploring how the same situation can be experienced very differently by anyone involved, and that this too destabilizes the line between reality and non-reality. A lack of authority on how something is experienced opens up space for the possibility of magic. Your stories have a surreal, fabulist quality, too: I absolutely loved “The Mast Year,” where people gravitate toward Jane’s house and her banner year of good luck, and “Man V. Nature” where the men find themselves adrift on an easily navigable lake. Most of these stories begin with the predicament and unfold through character action or inaction. What is most intriguing to you about your characters’ decisions in the face of such extraordinary circumstances?
  Much like you, what I find so interesting is how perfectly, unheroically human the characters are and at the root of that is a deep sense of uncertainty. Is this what I want? they all seem to be asking. Is this right? Or, even when they are certain, the situation is such that I think the reader can’t help but weigh in on their choices. I recently visited a class who had just read my story “The Way the End of Days Should Be,” which is about two neighbors living through an end of the world flood. One neighbor lets all survivors into his house and the other neighbor—the narrator—turns everyone away. The question the class was mulling over was which house they would rather live in. They started talking and it got complicated. Even though many didn’t admire the narrator and thought it might feel better to be in the house crowded with people, they understood that his life might be better in very important ways, and that, depending on your priorities there was perhaps something right about what he had done. I found the discussion fascinating and totally satisfying. I like to think about rules, whether real hard and fast ones or more slippery rules like moral codes. I like to watch characters test those lines, cross them, and see what happens. And I like for that to have an effect on readers.
  I love that students discussed the narrator’s choices in “The Way the End of Days Should Be.” In this story, I also noticed a boundary of space where the narrator’s house keeps out the masses. This concept of borders appears in other stories as well: the alleged safety of home in “Somebody’s Baby,” while the man lurks just outside to steal children; the colleagues in “It’s Coming,” who hear the alarm sound and know something terrible is approaching just outside. What is compelling about these limits or borders in your fiction, which I suppose speaks to the title itself? What is gripping in the “versus”: the supposed dichotomy between inside and outside, known and unknown, man and the nature beyond the door?
  I think it’s more of this line crossing I mentioned earlier. And also it’s looking at ideas of safety and where and when we feel safe. It is when there is an actual barrier between us and danger, or when there is a philosophical shield around us, a This Is Right shield. I think our sense of our well-being has a lot to do with the lines we draw between ourselves and others, whether they are real or imagined lines. And the book is concerned with a sense of well-being, or how hard that is to secure for oneself. And probably that wobbly sense goes back to that preoccupation with uncertainty that our work shares.
  Since we’re talking about the physical meeting the philosophical, I want to ask you about the work objects do in your stories. In some stories they appear seemingly full of meaning, but the story ends often without a cathartic clarification. For example, the tea seems to be just tea in “A Taste of Tea,” where a mother’s inexplicable obsession with tea after her divorce confuses her son. But it means something to the people there. The objects are important but the story doesn’t end up hinging on them and it feels a bit like a lesson in truth telling in fiction. How do you think about the objects in the stories? Is there something you want to explore about the role of objects in our lives? Do these objects in the stories lead you through as a writer? Are they a kind of carrot for your own exploration of the characters, the story, and the actual object’s purpose?
  photo(2)This sounds a little bit like red herrings, right? Or in film, the way that MacGuffins serve as plot devices but in the end offer no explanation, and no real relevance to the movie. I feel like we do this as people, or at least I do—we attach significance to objects, we try to make meaning from seemingly disparate patterns. We name constellations for a seeming connection between stars. In murder mysteries in film, we follow a seemingly relevant object because we have no other answers to pursue. I don’t know if there are really patterns here or not, but I find myself looking for them. In fiction, I think objects and patterns among those objects serve as something tangible for me and for characters, a way of making meaning out of something concrete in the face of uncertainty, intangibility, and everything we can’t and don’t know.
  The mirror near the playground rocket from “Until Our Shadows Claim Us” seems to do this work you’re talking about. It is an object (and place) for all the children to put their confusion, fear, and uncertainty after other children—their friends—begin to disappear from the community. They explain it all away with the myth, a ghost, an old story of a bad man. And even though it too is terrifying, it’s an answer, and so, perhaps feels better to them. It’s a beautiful, haunting story about shame and guilt and so well exposes how the weight of the world often has nothing to do with us, though we imagine ourselves to be at the center of it. I loved how even into their adulthood they still feel responsible in such a childlike way for these kidnappings.
  In the same vein of making patterns out of the intangible, I see these children as taking on the responsibility of their classmates’ disappearances and these world disasters in order to take control over something they can’t control, and to contain their grief. In some ways, I see the connection here between what you mentioned about lines and crossing them, and where we draw those lines: these kids have been placed in a set of terrifying, almost outlandish circumstances at a very young age, and their sense of well-being has a lot to do with how they draw lines between action and inaction, between culpability and blamelessness, and between themselves and the missing children.
  The situation is terrifying and their response so tragically believable. You know, we both wrote stories about children getting kidnapped, but we took on different POVs for it. Isn’t that funny? I wonder why it was such a compelling idea to both of us.
  Though I know we’ve gone about it in different ways, you’re absoutely right. In “Somebody’s Baby,” I had a similar sense that Linda maybe took on the responsibility for her children being taken—as if there’s something she could do, some extra step of being cautious or watchful—to prevent this from happening. There’s a lot more going on in this story, obviously, but I wondered if this story takes up a similar concern of trying to find ways of controlling the danger beyond the front door of Linda’s home.
  I think so. Linda is trying to control a danger for sure. The strange thing is, is that by accepting this danger into their lives the other women in the neighborhood have also controlled the danger. They’ve embraced it as a part of life, as one of the steps. If your child gets taken, just have another. Easy. Of course it isn’t, but what choice do they have? Linda is the one who balks and takes matters into her own hands. Like in some movie where every other character is doing the wrong thing, she’s the hero trying to do the right thing. Except that in her world, the right and wrong are mixed up, and by rejecting the way things are done in her community, she ends up burdened and confused about what she wants and what is actually good for her and for her children and the world they’re living in.
  Man v. NatureQuestions of motherhood also feature prominently in some of these stories. In “Somebody’s Baby,” two lines in particular stood out to me. In anticipation of her children being taken, Linda feels “shot at every day of her life since she’d begun having children,” and in the face of the man taking every woman’s child: “And the defeated young women thought this must be what motherhood is, and they let it continue. They learned to expect—and so, accept—certain losses.” Can you talk a bit about the mothers in this collection, and how parenthood in general is envisioned across these stories?
  I think I ended up writing about mothers as a way to shed light on my own. Not that my own mother is emblematic of these mothers, but I wanted to have mother characters who surprised me, had secret yearnings and complicated feelings about their role. I wanted them to be fully fleshed out people, fully human and not just, well, mothers. My own mother is gone now. And now I have this ache to know her as a person, not just my mom. And as far as her role of mother goes, I find the questions I want to ask her most are about the times she hated being one. I want to know what that feeling is like. I don’t hear about it, and even the recent bounty of articles and essays on mothers being honest about their feelings doesn’t quite scratch the itch. It’s not exactly what I’m yearning to hear. I want to hear something more primal and basic. For me the best way to do this was to explore what instincts—and warring ones at that—mothers hold within them. There’s that nurturing, protective instinct, but what happens to a self-preservation instinct when that mothering instincts kick in?
  As a reader, I definitely felt like those questions came through in the stories, and also an honesty in your writing. The stories felt frank in a way that feels rare sometimes in fiction, maybe as rare as addressing the taboo of what’s really hard about being a mother: the things people are less inclined to admit or talk about. To me, the surreal, fabulist quality of these stories provides a really wonderful set of circumstances for the characters to be even more honest with their actions and reactions, if that makes sense. They’re pushed to extremes, to the point where maybe taboos and social rules no longer apply.
  It totally makes sense. I think surreal situations let the author, the characters, and the reader take a break from the pressures of fact and reality and let them work out these more abstract things about feelings, about being weird, messy humans. If done well it can be like working in a white room, stripped of all the distractions. I think that is why I like working in a fabulist realm so much. It feels like a pursuit of big ideas, big emotion, something off the page. You write a lot about childhood, and I wondered if that, along with some fabulism, is another way to get at something bigger and more true about how it feels to grow up and mature (or not). Even your adult characters have a not-quite-yet tethered feeling to them. Is this stemming from your pursuit of uncertainty or is there something about this time of life?
  In the same way that your stories maybe ask for a more honest view of motherhood, I’m eternally interested in a more candid view of childhood and adolescence. I don’t really trust the common view I’ve learned across the years, that YA literature is about young adults and literary fiction is about adults. That seems narrow, and so do our notions of what writing about adolescence means: only teenage love, or angst, or a time when things were more carefree. I think the representation of childhood in fiction is more complicated than that. In writing about children, I’m seeking a more honest view of what being a kid might mean. As you mentioned, writing about childhood also offers more room for uncertainty, and more room for blurring boundaries between reality and magic.
  So one of our earliest conversations was on a walk to dinner at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and we talked about how we both liked to think about/write about female violence. When I got your book, I expected to read a bunch of wild violent women stories. What I was so fascinated by is that many of these stories are told from a male perspective. But I understood that the stories were still about the women in them, just from this other perspective or in a juxtaposed sense. I’m thinking specifically about the riveting and surprising “Minivan,” a story that explores a brutal sexual assault told from the perspective of the victim’s boyfriend/husband. Can you talk about working with these male characters and what it afforded you as a writer?
  valenteWriting from the point of view of a male character, especially one who is witnessing or experiencing a female partner’s trauma, was maybe an exercise in empathy for me in trying to grasp what sexual and gender violence looks like for a man who doesn’t quite understand. In order to comprehend an outsider’s point of view, I chose an outsider’s point of view too as the writer. In some ways too, though, I think I was initially drawn to male perspectives as a way of softening the blow of addressing female violence head-on. I don’t feel this way now, but at the time of writing these stories, I think there was a lot of talk about “women’s stories,” whatever that means, and talk in my writerly circles of trying to submit stories under male names to see if the response from editors would be any different. This was a few years before the VIDA count really began. I wrote the title story shortly after writing these few stories of female violence from a male perspective, just to see what it would mean to address violence directly and very much from a female perspective.
  In that story you’re talking about, “By Light We Knew Our Names,” the young girls in the story are brutalized by the men in town. It is a raw story with the violence happening mostly off the page while the evidence of the attacks is drawn horrifically on it. Thinking about what you just said, what’s interesting is that the narrator, even though she is a girl, isn’t the girl being brutalized. She’s the one who is getting by with less personal trauma (though the trauma of threat and being witness is still there) so much so that in the end she doesn’t even feel as compelled to run away. I found this to be a stunning turn, and so…lonely for her! I thought about young girls and how often we covet even the worst things, as a way to feel we belong to someone or someplace.
  That ending was hard to write because I wanted more for her and for all of these girls—I wanted all of them to run away or else fight back, but that’s just not the world they live in. Both options felt futile for them, in the end. Though the narrator has her mother, the one saving grace that keeps her from fleeing, there’s still what you mention about this ending, that to be less alone means you share a history of trauma. That violence and endurance are what binds you. I was fascinated by violence in Man V. Nature too. The violence in many of these stories is palpable, and yet also unexpected such as in “Girl on Girl,” where adolescent girls resort to punching one another. Can you talk a bit about violence in your fiction, and, in particular, female violence?
  To me, in these stories, the violence is uncontained emotion, whether that is the obsessive emotion of teenagers or the urgent emotion behind some effort to survive. Violence can be used to portray a lot—power dynamics, war, etcetera—but to me it was one of many doors helping me get to an emotional truth. I think this is especially true for young people, whose edges aren’t smoothed out yet, and so their expressed feelings come out much more raw. The rawness translates to violence for me because violence seems to come from impulses we haven’t learned to control or haven’t socialized ourselves out of. Or don’t want to. Meaning, even if we don’t act on impulses, we still probably have them. A friend asked a table of us recently how many times a day we have deep, white-hot raging feelings. And all of us admitted to having that feeling several times a day. (And I should note that we’re a real congenial bunch.) But it took some of us a few minutes to recognize our feelings as rage, and then, admit that to others. Some of us weren’t as comfortable with that idea of our uncontrolled, wilder responses to the world, to name them as that. Or of having people know that about us. I’m really interested in contradictory feelings like that. They feel like our animal selves looking into a mirror and seeing our civilized selves staring back. Disconnect meets familiarity, intimacy.
  That’s fascinating, especially given our discussion of taboos—of all human emotions, anger feels like the most taboo to me, or maybe the least understood. It’s the most antithetical to civilized behavior, and it also seems to disguise so many other emotions. Like how we rage when we’re actually terrified, or when we’re deeply frustrated or deeply sad. Maybe this points to being fundamentally uncomfortable with raw, uncontained emotion, or being socialized out of expressing our emotions in such an unprocessed manner.
  In your title story we’ve been talking about, the young girls are brutalized into a kind of action. They are emboldened by their rage and we see that action and that rage on the page. They become wild by it. As I read, this story seemed to be a kind of linchpin to the collection, that much of what we get in subtle or small doses in the other stories slaps us hard with this one. But how do you see this story speaking to the rest of the book? How do you think about the violence, and does it instruct or illuminate the subtler tensions of the other stories?
  I agree that this story feels like a linchpin, in content and tone and also in its placement midway through the book—the spoke of a wheel is a really apt way to think about it. In so many ways, this story feels like a direct, full-frontal addressing of many of the themes that other stories touch upon: violence, the unknown, taking control in the ways we can when so much else is beyond control, nature as solace, finding ways to live with uncertainty. This directness didn’t feel right for all of the stories, but it did feel like the most vocal in touching upon the book’s central concerns. In addition to the themes I mentioned, I think voice is paramount: some sense of naming oneself, particularly amid the many violences and losses these characters experience, big and small. Despite the lack of control that so many of these premises and situations offer, there is still solace in finding moments of solidity—between characters, in relationships, in what we know of ourselves. This seems to be similar, in some ways, to what I noticed in Man V. Nature—that despite the extraordinary circumstances presented to your characters, each still had choices, or some measure of acting or reacting to what was beyond their control. In other words, the stories introduced amazing conditions—a testament to the power of your imagination—but how the characters chose to react to them created really fascinating turns in each story.
  Elegy for MathThey had to react in real ways, which is why I think they are surprising. I think it can be hard to react in real life in the ways we want to. There are so many expectations and rules in place for our own behaviors and interactions. In fiction, maybe we can get closer to a truth, and that true thing can slowly become more comfortable to us in our own lives. We learn how to be better humans because when we read about other people we slow down and get comfortable with our own complexities. Which makes me think about this small thread I saw in your stories which looks to animals to get at something more human. In the last story, “Mollusk, Membrane, Human Heart,” a doctor captures an octopus and hides it away in the recesses of the lab to experiment on. He tells our protagonist, “Any scientist can find a cure for heart disease, but we, we will find the origins of love.” It’s one of two stories in your collection (and possibly there are more subtle examples) where there is something very human we are trying to find in some animal or animal form. In “Dear Amelia” the girls can become bears in order to self protect in the dangerous society, and in this last story, the answer to something unknowable in us we hope can be found in a creature as different from us as can be found on earth. As though, in these natural forms can be found some key to surviving. Some key to the truth. It’s one of many keys throughout the book. How do you find truth as a writer?
  It’s a hard question, but one of the simplest ways I know to find truth in fiction is to pay attention and to make connections. For me, so much of writing is taking notice and asking questions, and figuring out how everything is connected. I keep a small notebook of observations from daily life, just lines here and there about things that capture my attention. When I write, I try to figure out how to pull everything together—how bear populations might be connected to Amelia Earhart’s flight, or to lobster anatomy and the dawn of WWII and the bright hope of teenage girls. To me, truth in fiction is a belief that everything constellates together. I just have to be open to learning how it does.

• -

QUOTED: the characterizations are acute and the resolution, though ambiguous, is tantalizingly thought provoking.

4/13/17, 1:43 PM
Print Marked Items
Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down
Michael Cart
Booklist.
113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p59. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down. By Anne Valente. Oct. 2016. 384p. Morrow, $25.99 (9780062429117); e-book, $12.99 (9780062429131).
Not long after a teenage gunman rampages through a St. Louis high school, killing 35 people, the fires start, fires that consume the homes and families of those who died in the school, leaving no survivors of the conflagrations and-- improbably--not even a trace of their dead bodies. How this could be and who is responsible for the fires are questions that plague public-safety officials and the book's protagonists, four surviving students, all staff members of the student yearbook, who begin their own de facto investigation: Nick, who is a compulsive researcher; Zola, the staff photographer; and staff writers Christina and Matt, whose father is a forensics specialist with the police department. Answers to the puzzling questions raised by the fires are very slow in coming in this deliberately paced novel that takes itself very seriously, so seriously as to seem, at times, self-important as it strives for a significance larger than the story it tells. Despite this, the characterizations are acute and the resolution, though ambiguous, is tantalizingly thought provoking.--Michael Cart
YA: Despite the book's slow pace, teens will be intrigued by its premise and identify with the vividly realized protagonists. MC.
Cart, Michael
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cart, Michael. "Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 59. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463755156&it=r&asid=eb2e6ee5612f3ab0f84e5c433208a9fd. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463755156
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4/13/17, 1:43 PM
Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

QUOTED: unforgettable ending, with fire serving as a powerfully fitting metaphor for grief, loss, and our inability to comprehend the nature of fate.

Publishers Weekly.
263.32 (Aug. 8, 2016): p38. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down
Anne Valente. Morrow, $25.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-242911-7
The specter of the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 hangs over Valente's haunting first novel. At Louis and Clark High School outside St. Louis, Mo., in 2003, a junior kills 28 students and seven faculty members in a shooting. Four of the survivors are juniors on the yearbook staff--Matt, Nick, Christina, and Zola--who spend the weeks after the tragedy trying to process the event. But that becomes impossible when, one after another, the houses belonging to the dead students' families are burned down. Matt's father, a police officer, works on the fire investigation but is hard- pressed for answers. The most confounding piece of evidence in every case is that the bodies of the family members appear to have been incinerated out of existence--a scientific impossibility. While Matt deals with his closeted lover, Tyler, Christina tries to care for her wounded boyfriend, Ryan, and Zola looks up at the stars for comfort, Nick turns to the Internet for answers as to what might have caused the fires. As these characters try to put their lives back together, the house fires continue, threatening to engulf the entire community. Written in the collective voice of the community, a la Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, Valente (By Light We Knew Our Names) artfully employs short chapters on arson and anatomy, as well as diagrams, newspaper-articles, and biographies of the victims on the way to an unforgettable ending, with fire serving as a powerfully fitting metaphor for grief, loss, and our inability to comprehend the nature of fate. Agent: Kerry D'Agostino, Curtis Brown. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 38. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900337&it=r&asid=9040a70fadc192b0a54fcea6e3e52d17. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460900337
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4/13/17, 1:43 PM

QUOTED: In general, issues trump characterization in these stories; well-crafted and perhaps overly solemn, ... Valente's territory may be small, but she covers it with insight and depth.

By Light We Knew Our Names
Publishers Weekly.
261.25 (June 23, 2014): p133. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
By Light We Knew Our Names
Anne Valente. Dzanc (Consortium, dist.), $14.95 trade paper (222p) ISBN 978-1936873-62-3
Family looms large in the 13 stories in Valente's debut: children are nurtured or neglected; parents dote on their young children; grandparents tell colorful yarns. It is familiar material, but the warmth and fluidity of Valente's prose and her eye for the detail have genuine resonance. "To a Place Where We Have Light," in which teenage Mike and his dad struggle to remain calm while his mom lies gravely ill in the hospital, derives its poignancy from what's left unspoken. Like a few other entries, it is instilled with a sense of immediacy by the use of the present tense. In "Minivan," the unnamed narrator, a schoolteacher, worries about his live-in girlfriend, Jane, after she is sexually assaulted. The title story lacks the compassion and quiet authority of the rest of the collection, but it does explore family dynamics and unresolved feelings. The circle of teenage friends are full of pain and rage, and act out with violence. In general, issues trump characterization in these stories; well-crafted and perhaps overly solemn, they are the kind of fare that used to appear in the "better" women's magazines. Valente's territory may be small, but she covers it with insight and depth. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"By Light We Knew Our Names." Publishers Weekly, 23 June 2014, p. 133. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA373371328&it=r&asid=60653e8825464e0ad26c99e689e90486. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A373371328
about:blank Page 3 of 3

Cart, Michael. "Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 59. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463755156&it=r. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017. "Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down." Publishers Weekly, 8 Aug. 2016, p. 38. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900337&it=r. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017. "By Light We Knew Our Names." Publishers Weekly, 23 June 2014, p. 133. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA373371328&it=r. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.

• Kirkus Reviews
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/anne-valente/our-hearts-will-burn-us-down/
  Word count: 374

  OUR HEARTS WILL BURN US DOWN
  by Anne Valente
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  KIRKUS REVIEW

  A high school shooter kills 36, including himself, and then a series of house fires annihilates the bereaved families.

  “Three days after Caleb Raynor opened fire, the first house burned to the ground.” Valente’s debut tracks four survivors of a St. Louis–area high school massacre from their hiding places during the rampage through the grief-stricken weeks ahead, when, amid the funerals, the surviving families of the victims are incinerated in their sleep, so completely that no bodies are found. The chapters alternate between a collective first-person voice—“We stayed in. We did not move”—and close-up narration following Matt, Zola, Nick, and Christina as they attempt to process what they have been through and write profiles of their dead classmates for the yearbook. Additionally, there are chapters titled “A Brief History of Containment,” “A Brief History of Cremation (Or How The Body Burns),” and so on, which deliver big chunks of factual information, poetically phrased. Matt was in the restroom making out with his boyfriend and exited to find his friend Caroline Black dead on the floor in a pool of blood. Zola was in the library, where the most people were killed—her memories are beyond description. Christina's and Nick’s classes were spared a visit from the shooter, but Christina’s boyfriend was shot in the leg. A new set of devastating images haunts the four as the house fires begin, “the charring of so many homes that had held bodies that had held memories, a matryoshka of grief.” The novel itself is a matryoshka of grief, piling surreal tragedy on top of truth-inspired tragedy to poor effect. We never learn anything about the shooter or his motives, and the resolution of the mystery plot simply doesn’t fly.

  Valente is a promising writer. She should write something else.

  Pub Date: Oct. 4th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-0-06-242911-7
  Page count: 384pp
  Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
  Review Posted Online: Aug. 9th, 2016

• St Louis Post Dispatch
  http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/reviews/novelist-imagines-mass-shooting-in-st-louis-school/article_330b1a65-ebe0-5d07-a26c-a05b6584a46d.html
  Word count: 913

  Novelist imagines mass shooting in St. Louis school
  By Kelsey Ronan Special to the Post-Dispatch Oct 8, 2016 (0)
  For all our practice with massacres, our response to them becomes no more sophisticated. Thoughts and prayers, we repeat. There are no words. Anne Valente tasks herself with expressing the unspeakable in her debut novel, “Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down,” which opens with 35 students and staff killed in a suburban St. Louis high school. While the community organizes memorials and grapples with its loss, the houses of the victims begin to burn down one by one, claiming the lives of their families.

  The novel is narrated by a collective “we” looking back on the 2002 shooting from the vantage of adulthood. The yearbook staff — Christina, Zola, Matt and Nick — must archive this brutal year and present it to their fellow survivors. Their narration is woven with newspaper articles they collect, profiles of the deceased they draft, and a series of “history” chapters (“A Brief History of Fire Scene Investigation,” “A Brief History of Memory,” etc.) that aren’t really histories but lyric interludes that explain, for instance, the temperature required to cremate a body (about 2,200 degrees, if you’re curious), or the neuroscience of memory.

  For a novel that begins with 35 murders, “Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down” isn’t so much a story of grief (none of the protagonists were especially close to any of the deceased) but of collective witness. While each character’s shock and trauma manifests individually, from obsessive reading about the killing to denial, they mostly navigate the event with solidarity and surprising maturity. They ask each other how they’re feeling, report to their part-time jobs and assure one another they’ll be OK.

  Largely absent is the gunman. He’s an archetypal school shooter: a quiet loner in a hoodie “who some of us might have been friends with, who we might have dated if he’d ever moved to speak a word, if he’d thought to join the Art Club or Mock Trial, if he’d ever taken off the headphones that became his armor once we entered seventh grade.”

  It’s a daring omission. In the awful phenomenon of mass shootings, figuring out the killer’s motive becomes a national preoccupation. Perhaps the most successful work of literary fiction yet to explore a school shooting, Lionel Shriver’s 2003 “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” took us through the killer’s life from conception to massacre from his mother’s point of view, and offered up a smorgasbord of motives — everything from the mother’s emotional distance to pure evil. Valente eschews that psychological speculation for a story that looks more Stephen King-esque as it advances: Halloween and the homecoming dance are approaching, and the fires are looking less like arson and more like paranormal phenomenon.

  The book’s anaphora-heavy style also gives pause. Valente writes in fragments, often using the same word or phrase to begin three or more sentences in a row. While sometimes this is effective in driving home the obsessiveness of trauma and grief, often it is simply monotonous, and amplifies empty sonic words and weak imagery.

  The word “vulnerable” is used often.Against the backdrop of the war on terror, Daniel Pearl is executed and weapons of mass destruction are nowhere to be found. There’s a sense that what is happening in St. Louis, an island of frozen custard, Cardinals and KDHX in a Midwestern sea of corn, is happening on a grander, even more terrifying scale. The tone is one of constant but unfocused dread.

  “Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down” sets itself a difficult task and doesn’t quite fulfill it. Still Anne Valente is an ambitious author to watch.

  Kelsey Ronan is a St. Louis editor.

  Anne Valente

  When • 7 p.m. Wednesday

  Where • Left Bank Books, 399 North Euclid Avenue

  How much • Free

  More info • 314-367-6731

  'Our hearts Will Burn Us Down'
  "Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down"

  A novel by Anne Valente

  Published by HarperCollins, 370 pages $25.99

  "Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down"

  A novel by Anne Valente

  Published by HarperCollins, 370 pages $25.99

  ANNE VALENTE

  When • 7 p.m. Wednesday

  Where • Left Bank Books, 399 North Euclid Avenue

  How much • Free

  More info • 314-367-6731

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• The Paris Review
  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/03/06/staff-picks-no-conscience-no-hope-no-october/#more-83412
  Word count: 117

  I became a fan of Anne Valente after reading her ferocious, elegant essay, “My Body, My Machine.” Her story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, is full of weird, wild, and finely observed stories that explore questions of identity and longing. In “To the Place Where We Take Flight,” a teenage boy plays Pink Floyd covers at the hospital where his mother is dying; “Dear Amelia” takes the form of a loving and desperate address to Amelia Earhart, expressed by girls who find themselves turning into bears. Valente slides between realism and fabulism, and her imaginative leaps alone are noteworthy—but even more so is the heart that beats throughout these stories. —Catherine Carberry

• Colorado State University
  http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/our-hearts-will-burn-us-down/
  Word count: 1093

  Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down
  Fiction
  By Anne Valente
  Reviewed By María Isabel Alvarez

  William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers (2016)
  384 pages
  $16.98
  Buy this book
  Anne Valente’s Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is a valiant exploration of human suffering in the aftermath of public tragedy. At almost 400 pages, Valente’s first novel is hefty in style, lingering in the main characters’ family dynamics, romantic relationships, and the unique experiences of individual and communal trauma. Despite its grisly premise—the after effects of a high school shooting—Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down uses empathy as the lens through which tragedy, suffering, and public grievance are closely examined.

  The book begins in the first person plural, a resounding “we” that propels the narrative forward:

  We were accustomed to uncertainty then. We lived in an era of ambiguity and the numbness of television and news, strange days we witnessed but barely understood. We’d watched our country step that year into the light of a Baghdad dawn, a morning in March when we woke to the news of air strikes booming across the city and marking the beginning of a war we knew nothing of, a war that felt faraway and distant and numb.

  From this initial collective, the narrative breaks off into four distinct voices belonging to high school students Matt, Nick, Christina, and Zola, a group of four childhood friends connected by their roles as the school’s yearbook staff. Matt, the son of the town’s lead investigator, loses the will to sleep, perpetually haunted by the image of a bloodied classmate. Nick, in an attempt at coping, becomes absorbed in researching a series of mysterious house fires that plague the town. Christina struggles with the fall out of an abusive relationship. And Zola remains marred by the moment during the shooting when her own death is staved off by fate and a few library bookshelves. Through these characters, we are lodged into the kitchens, bedrooms, and living room spaces of a community searing with questions. We are complicit in the passionate nature of adolescents. We are witnesses to the shock, confusion, and powerlessness that strongholds a grieving community in the wake of a senseless act. Valente pushes our general understanding of perspective by using the individual strengths of both the braided third person narrative and the collective first person, balancing multiple, distinguishable voices in a single arc.

  Attention to craft and lyricism is undeniable. Valente has a style similar to knitting in that it builds upon itself, pulling details, images, and key objects from one sentence into the next. In a greater sense, this layered style is what gives the book its weight, though at times, this constant piling of things feels more cluttered than cumulative:

  This: an attempt to archive. An attempt at futility. An attempt to gather and collect and piece together and put away, an assemblage of articles and documents and reports and profiles. An archive of record, that this happened. An archive of moving on. An archive of prisms, of refraction, of looking at the same light from an endless stretch of angles. An archive that evaded us, that still evades us, an archive of pressing on regardless of evasion to put everything back together, to reassemble parts, to create a perfect whole from scattering fragments.

  Repetition becomes the go-to choice in describing moments of emotional poignancy, but it is this same device that becomes a crutch for rendering scenes of high tension. When it comes to repetition, Valente is a maximalist, and while it works beautifully in certain emotionally driven chapters, at times it feels much like a meal that has been overly salted. Despite this, Valente writes with poetic wisdom, never passing up an opportunity to linger in scene and extract from it as much detail and beauty as she can.

  In terms of structure, Valente is something of an archivist. Pillared in between the larger narrative are brief chapters written as newspaper clippings, student profiles, and a litany of hard facts about fire science, such as the exact degree at which a human body burns, all written in Valente’s carefully crafted prose. The inclusion of these mini-chapters sparks a collage-like quality, a device that is refreshing in its approach, but at times tedious in its delivery. One such example is the chapter titled “A Brief History of Fire Investigation Terms,” formatted as a straightforward Q and A:

  Q: What is a fire point?
  A: The temperature at which a substance will burn for at least five seconds beyond ignition by an open flame.
  Q: What is a flash point?
  A: The point a few degrees below the fire point, wherein ignitable vapors are present.
  Q: What is heat?
  A: The release of energy when a substance changes from a higher to a lower state.

  While these intermittent chapters function as breadcrumbs to the book’s central mystery, their inclusion can be distracting from the larger narrative. These instances are few, however, and the choice to include these chapters of “brief histories” is not without value as their presence creates texture and offers relief from the grieving world of the larger story.

  Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is a bold examination of a subject that is unimaginably difficult to encapsulate in a way that is neither exploitative nor insensitive to those who have suffered a similar trauma. The subject of school shootings is mentally exhausting for both the writer and the reader, but Valente manages to pull off the emotional gravitas necessary to make this book and its seemingly dark premise work, and, most importantly, spark a conversation about a subject that often feels too heavy to discuss and unpack openly. Valente writes with the ear of a poet and the inquisitive instinct of a journalist. Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down is a book unflinching in its portrayal of grief, loss, and the frailty of the human heart.

  María Isabel Alvarez was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala and is currently an MFA Candidate at Arizona State University. She was awarded first prize in the 2016 Blue Earth Review Flash Fiction Contest and her short stories and poems are published or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Sonora Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @maria_i_alvarez.

• Quarterly West
  http://quarterlywest.com/?p=1479
  Word count: 707

  A Review of By Light We Knew Our Names
  by Jaclyn Watterson
  Anne Valente
  Dzanc Books
  222 pages
  $14.95

  The thirteen stories in Anne Valente’s debut collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, reside in a world where loss is easy to map—until it isn’t. Parents and children die, mothers and fathers leave their families, babies are not born, or else lose their innocence. Pain is the most reasonable thing in this world, and yet it is always, always eclipsed by wonder.

  In the face of rape, the aurora borealis. With coming of age, the discovery of powers to see what few others can. Sirens in the night calling to witness mourning and the possibility of a marriage breaking up. Amidst war and the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, a sisterhood that spans generations and species.

  This is the stuff Valente’s fiction is made of.

  She is adept at tracing the pain of death and divorce, the wrenching of innocence from us, so that we recognize these familiar breaks, recognize our own potential to suffer what she knows. And yet, Valente insists in every story, there is more to loss than the simple fact of it. There is the natural world, and it is glorious, splendid, and every bit as harsh as the beauty of human relations:

  Through summer, we waited.
  We waited through June, through July, when the sun ripped a white fissure from treeline to sky, a sky that burned all day and all night, turning away from us for only moments, four hours, five, settled into its own sleep. The days were long then, stretched wide and full of light, but for us full of only bruises. Full of slaps across sunburned cheeks when flowers weren’t watered, when dishes sat and scummed. Full of cuts from broken bottles held against our throats until we gasped yes, take my money, just take it and go. Full of scratches from the exposed metal of pick-up flatbeds, latticing the backs of thighs, hands held across our mouths to catch and crush the word no. They were long days full of spilling light, so much light it shadowed every hurt.

  So begins Valente’s title story, “By Light We Knew Our Names.” The story is set in Alaska, and the northern lights refract the physical and emotional pain of the violence of a man’s world where girls are treated as less than human. But Valente’s girls respond to the impossible pain of rape their community refuses to acknowledge, incarceration by boyfriends who “play rough,” theft by fist-wielding fathers, and other unspeakable violences by emerging as more than human—by holding each other up to the light.

  This is what Valente does with her characters, and to her readers: she shows us the pain, but also the transcendence we are all capable of. She reminds us that beyond the pain, there is always light.

  Valente notably achieves this effect in several stories with her exquisite renderings of first-person plural narrators. In “Dear Amelia,” a stunning sort of love letter to Amelia Earhart, Valente writes, “We might have accepted this, Amelia. We might have grown to love our double lives the way our mothers learned to accept theirs, all the secrets they kept, a power they held against bone, a protected full-house hand.” In this story, we feel the pain of separation, that “we” can never be “them,” that no matter how we love our mothers or our heroes, we can only, at best, approximate being them. But this separation is equally cause for celebration—that there exists a “we,” that we possess the incredible potential of collectively experiencing the world, and narrating our place in it.

  Anne Valente’s new fiction appeared in issue 82 of Quarterly West. Read “Sister, I Paved the Way” here.

  Jaclyn Watterson is originally from Connecticut. She works as Fiction Editor at Quarterly West and studies and teaches at the University of Utah.
  OCTOBER 26, 2014 BY ADMIN
  ANNE VALENTE, BY LIGHT WE KNEW OUR NAMES, DZANC BOOKS, FICTION, JACLYN WATTERSON, REVIEWS, STORIES

• Necessary Fiction
  http://necessaryfiction.com/reviews/AnElegyforMathematicsbyAnneValente
  Word count: 940

  BOOK REVIEWS · 08/25/2013
  An Elegy for Mathematics by Anne Valente

  Reviewed by Michelle Bailat-Jones

  Origami Zoo Press, 2013
  The fourth line of “The Water Cycle,” the ninth story in Anne Valente’s slender collection, An Elegy for Mathematics, reads:

  But sometimes it made me feel strange, for reasons I can’t explain, to think that maybe you knew we had separate lives in some way, and that sometimes we did things that weren’t always the same.
  The narrator and the “you” of this beautiful little story are a mother and daughter, and the question the story ultimately asks is about what the tie between them is made of, how is it formed, but this single twisting sentence works to open up a discussion about the kind of questions Valente is posing throughout the collection. How exactly are two people connected? What does that connection feel like – physically, mentally, metaphorically? And how are we different despite that fundamental association, what does our difference do to affect and alter the bonds between us?

  Valente revolves around this idea in a number of ways: how at times an imperfect lover carries the same complicity, the same echoes, of a parent; how something as intangible as desire can become a very felt (and sometimes painful) lived experience; how a physical body transforms itself, breaking or altering the connections that previously bound it (perhaps in violence) to another body; how can death work a transformation on a connection that was not physical in the first place.

  Beyond these larger explorations and questions, Valente is also very much interested in metaphors of the body and metaphysical renderings of physical experience. In the first piece, “10 Permutations of Desire,” she explores this mingling:

  In dreams, finches replay the melody of their songs. What hums through them ghosts back, a ceaseless signature of time, a song braided to the birdbeat of their small hearts long after the song has passed.
  She does this again in “A Field Guide to Female Anatomy,” perhaps the most complex and riveting of all these pieces, a work that invites multiple readings. Here Valente is going through the smallest details, listing, creating a richly textured but invisible narrative out of hints and images. There are moments of real and precise description:

  NECK (CERVIC)
  FIELD MARKS: Slender column that connects the head to the thorax. Contains seven vertebrae. Contains the larynx, invisible to the eye.
  DESCRIPTION: Can turn 90 degrees in either direction. Can work in tandem with ears and eyes to keep the body alert. Bears the mark of hickeys. Bears the mark of thumbprints. But more often bears the mark of nothing, the most visible and obvious place.
  Valente uses this kind of methodical, pared-down prose with real skill. Just feel how loaded the word “slender” becomes, and what menace both “visible” and “obvious” suddenly contain. She can also subvert this kind of precise language, using it to push the story calmly toward the fantastic or metaphorical.

  SHOULDER BLADE (SCAPULA)
  FIELD MARKS: Two ridges twinning the posterior of the torso, mimicking the shade of folded bird wings.
  DESCRIPTION: The wings are folded. They are waiting beneath skin. What matters is not that they are folded. What matters is that they can unfold.
  For all its brevity, “A Field Guide to Female Anatomy” is one of those impossibly short fictional pieces that manages to contain an epic narrative in all its hints and unspoken story. It is an impressive piece of collaging.

  Another hallmark of An Elegy for Mathematics is its diversity of voice, approach, and style. Valente’s pieces sit along a spectrum that runs between poetry and prose, and they explore the different possibilities of creating emotional tension through fictional revelation: a list, a scene, a narrative summation, first and second and third person perspectives, first person plural, realism and fantasy—each piece takes on a new voice, a new method, and it is to Valente’s credit that, in the midst of all this spectacular variety, the collection retains a balanced atmosphere and feeling.

  Because these forty-seven pages could easily be read in one sitting, in one breath, with the slim fissures of white space between each story providing just enough of a reset to prepare the reader to go on to the next. And after that first rushed and heady reading, the individual stories ask to be taken up again at a slower pace, on their own terms, one by one. This is a collection that will sustain multiple re-readings, that is as elegant as it is intelligent, as simple and touching as it is provocative and complex.

  +++

  Anne Valente is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names (Dzanc Books, 2014). Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, The Journal, and Redivider, among other publications, and won Copper Nickel’s 2012 Fiction Prize. Her work was also selected as a notable story in Best American Non-Required Reading 2011, and her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Believer, The Washington Post and The Rumpus. Originally from St. Louis, she currently lives in Ohio.
  +

  Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator living in Switzerland. Her fiction, translations and reviews have appeared in various journals, including The Kenyon Review, PANK, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Quarterly Conversation, Two Serious Ladies, Cerise Press and Fogged Clarity. She is the Reviews Editor here at Necessary Fiction.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2013/05/an-elegy-for-mathematics-by-anne-valente/
  Word count: 1089

  “AN ELEGY FOR MATHEMATICS,” BY ANNE VALENTE
  REVIEWED BY PATRICK TROTTI
  May 7th, 2013

  An Elegy for Mathematics, Anne Valente’s first full-length release, is a wonderful little book. Checking in at fewer than fifty pages, it’s a quick but deeply layered and poignant collection of material, most of which was previously published online. (She has a forthcoming story collection coming out from Dzanc Books.)

  The collection is comprised of thirteen stories, mostly only a few pages in length. Three are making their debut on these pages, and despite the stories having been written over a two to three year period, it’s hard to tell the difference between her earliest story and her most recent. She’s grown as a writer no doubt, but the effect that her stories have remains consistently gut wrenching.

  Published by Origami Zoo Press, this collection is simple and to the point, lacking pretention. Sandwiched between the likes of Laura van den Berg and Brian Oliu I’d say she’s not only in fabulous company but that she more than held her own.

  The cover art by Nathan Pierce is unassuming yet intricate with its hushed tones and fine point lettering. It depicts the inner workings of a bird, fitting given the fact that much of the ground Valente traverses is the unknown, unseen, underbelly of the human existence.

  My favorite stories were “If The Hum of Bees Flooded Are Ears” and “The Water Cycle.” They delve into those unnoticed and often forgotten crevices of daily life that are usually where people go for comfort.

  “If The Hum of Bees Flooded Are Ears” is a simple enough story, a snapshot of a moment in time shared by two people that is illuminated by Valente’s pitch perfect ear and deft maneuverings of the intricacies of human interaction. Consider the following paragraph, which showcases her poetic touch for finding the right word, that perfect term to put the reader right there on that porch with the two characters. It’s subtle but moving.

  I asked him what he held his breath for, since he was taking the risk anyway, picking up bees. We were sitting on my back porch, away from my parents inside watching Wheel of Fortune, and the show’s piped-in applause warbled through the open screens of our house, curling into the smoke Tom exhaled from his cigarette.

  She manages to take a simple scene and slowly rev it up, carrying the momentum of that second, longer sentence far enough out to wander inquisitively yet disciplined enough to bring it back in time to end it on an evocative and wholly original ending. It gives me hope that the elusive, perfect sentence is out there, somewhere (quite possibly within these pages.)

  Anne Valente
  Anne Valente

  “The Water Cycle,” a deeply moving tale of a mother trying to explain to her son where he came from, has been done before, but it’s Valente’s personal stamp on this often-mined material that makes it stand out in this collection. It’s not without a twist at the end either, which makes for great reading when it’s done as elegantly as Valente. There is no clumsily inserted twist, just a subtle whisper of a rotation, a pivoting of the narrative and then it’s over.

  Trying to explain that his classmate was correct about how babies come about, the mother details a beautifully magical and moving story, invoking an imagery so rich with fairy tale-like elements that the reader gets lost in the moment, in the world the mother is creating. “I told you that weather was fickle, that much in the same way hurricanes and thunderstorms and tornadoes pop up in the most unexpected of ways, so too can babies if you’re not watching and waiting for you, with my eye on one small cloud that had been hovering over my backyard for days.” She goes on to say that it rained one day and that she went outside and picked a droplet from the sky and it popped like a bubble and the boy appeared. If the story ended there I would’ve shed enough tears, but as I flipped the page I wasn’t ready for the final paragraph, the final gauntlet to be laid down, her final trick in which Valente must’ve reached deep into her writing tool bag to execute so masterfully.

  This is what I told you, right through to the end. But by the time I’d told you how it was that you began, you were already asleep, your cheeks puffed and soft. As I headed back down the stairs, toward the light of the muted television, I wondered if now might be the start of something hard, of an inevitable slide toward one terrible moment when I would have to tell you that I was your mother–always, your mother–but not in any manner of blood.

  I could quote from each story but then you wouldn’t go out and get the book and if there’s anything you should take away from this review it’s this: go buy this book, right now.

  In many ways this book had a schizophrenic feel to it, in a good way though. Each story zigged and zagged in its own direction, forcing itself down its own narrative path, unencumbered by the previous story of by the promises of the next one. Each story in An Elegy for Mathematics is like a beautifully aged Polaroid found at different yard sales around your hometown. Little unexpected gems, snapshots into a moment in the everyday life of strangers that moves you enough to buy it and place it proudly on your mantle because you still remember that moment you first laid eyes on it, and you don’t want that feeling to go away. So read this book; peek beneath the veneer of a different world, one that’s eerily similar to yours but so gracefully observed that it makes you feel good to just be in the proximity of these. You won’t be disappointed though you might be mad at yourself for never having heard of Anne Valente before.

  Patrick Trotti is a writer, editor, and student. Visit him at www.patricktrotti.com. More from this author →

• SunDog Lit
  https://sundoglitblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/an-elegy-for-mathematics-by-anne-valente-a-review/
  Word count: 732

  An Elegy for Mathematics by Anne Valente (A Review)
  Posted on May 13, 2013 by sundoglit
  By Jessi CapeElegy for mathOrigami Zoo Press$8 (regular book) | $12 (UnArchived Special)
  There was a time in my early life when I only read novels – great ones; epic, with huge, billowing characters and sweeping plots. I ran toward a carrot-on-the-stick assumption that if I sought literary true love and found it, I would want to remain immersed in it for as long as possible. As if time or space are reasonable measurements; as if love or life are ever entirely rooted in happiness. Then, years later, I discovered the chapbook: Word blasts intended to blow the dust off cognitive keys, each combustion disintegrating the emotional brush so life can begin again. The powerful quickness reinvented my perception. Discovering characters whose hearts beat in tune with my own, whose linguistic lungs draw breath in pace with mine has no prerequisite frame.

  Vibrant, strategically placed words are essential to the short form, and Anne Valente nails it with An Elegy for Mathematics. Every piece plays a role; each small story stands firmly on its own. The arc builds and releases orgasmic endorphins, allowing just enough time to wipe away a rogue tear.

  “A tongue strong enough to lick fur clean from shrews, to conceal the sheen of gold, but no match for my father’s, sharp enough to lash, to kill my voice before the woods unearthed the sound to keep.”

  The etymological root of “Elegy” is Greek, and Valente’s mournful tribute pays homage to Tragedy, topically, while simultaneously acknowledging the fast-paced, quick-to-emote, modern world. Where life’s tragedy meets a desire for explanation, the analysis becomes mind scrambling. There we find Mathematics, the language of the universe: perfect, often covert answers defining the chaos. Numbers dance through our lives as often as emotion.

  “One thousand beats per minute to sixty. Sixty beats per minute to eighty, a new elevation. Eighty beats and still, nothing to one thousand.

  There is a syllogism of the heart, here.

  There is a syllogism I cannot map.”

  The collection is as frustrating as it is beautiful, because every relatable bit touches a nerve. After all, despite the human psyche’s tendency to find solace in closure, wounds reopen with empathy. In “10 Permutations on Desire,” the narrator attempts repairs of the mind and heart while caught in the throes of a relationship’s end, systematically listing thoughts along the way. In “A Hummingbird Comes to the Feeder,” unspoken earthly chaos transforms into a week’s collection of time snippets caught in the deceptive reassurance of a web woven with deep breaths.

  Other stories in the ghost-peppered collection include heartbeats reverberating against the smallest human bones, an obsessive archival of life’s tedium, sage advice not without painful prescriptions, parent/child relations posed multiple ways, and “A Field Guide to Female Anatomy.” Sexuality and ruthless truths permeate as well.

  “The Archivist recognizes the splitting instant that turns, the flash-burned fulcrum of before, of after, the way a single second can hold the dagger and the flame to rip a gaping wound so wide, to sear a chasm, the raze the known world to scorched, rubbled ash.”

  Valente offers synchronized science and metaphor, lyricism and surgeon’s precision technicalities. She rounds every character just enough, and each scenario maintains its unique quizzical nature.

  “Imagine that the world ends in light, that what love floods your veins is a gleaming of stars.”

  Expertly steeped existentialism blooms as multifaceted flavors in An Elegy for Mathematics, and the cup – dark and darker still – results in questions only answered in the mirror. Light bounces, cuts across shadows, geometrically explains surfaces but allows each object’s core its due privacy. Resolute peace, found here, is worth every brow furrowed under the weight of analysis. It all happens so fast, but it lingers anyway.

  —

  Jessi Cape is a writer in Austin, TX, who loves living room dance parties with her tiny superhero. She spends most days coloring outside of the lines and planning world travel around food and film. Her work has appeared in various publications, including weekly articles in the Austin Chronicle. Follow her at jessiryancape.com and @jessicape.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2014/12/by-light-we-knew-our-names-by-anne-valente/
  Word count: 1265

  BY LIGHT WE KNEW OUR NAMES BY ANNE VALENTE
  REVIEWED BY SADYE TEISER
  December 23rd, 2014

  Anne Valente’s stories possess an intimate magic. By Light We Knew Our Names, Valente’s debut collection, enacts the (often terrible) wonder of growing up. In the first two stories, the magic is literal. In “Latchkey,” a girl, Sasha, refuses to open a present she receives for her seventh birthday. Instead she carries the wrapped gift with her everywhere. We soon discover that three of Sasha’s companions possess a touch of enchantment: tiny planets orbit the head of one; another’s belly turns into a fishbowl; another houses a miniscule, talking librarian in her pocket. Sasha longs for “some small mystery to call her own.” What she wants, more than anything, is her own secret to keep.

  In “Dear Amelia,” a group of adolescent girls can feel themselves turning into Maine black bears, a secret they cling to along with their undying hope for the success of Amelia Earhart, who is in flight during the time this story is set and to whom the story is addressed. It’s the best story in the collection and it is now one of my all-time favorites. The girls speak in the collective voice: “We learned to shroud our animal truth from the world, and in the end, to obscure our beating hearts. / We hid our hope, Amelia, our bright burning hope that you would succeed.” In By Light We Knew Our Names, the personal is the magical. Many of the stories in this book are about young people coming of age. And while we may not morph into bears or have friends who keep tiny librarians in their pockets, everyone remembers the magic of discovering their own, private selves.

  Even stories in which there is no literal magic celebrate the power of imagination. In “To A Place Where We Take Flight,” a pair of middle-school boys gets a gig playing at a hospital where the narrator’s mom is a cancer patient. The narrator holds onto a secret hope that the concert will return his mother’s health. In “Terrible Angels,” a high-school senior who has recently lost her mother sees the angels of her grandparents (mother’s side) everywhere. They leave her mementos—a grappling hook, chalk, a pogo stick—that recall childhood memories and help her find her own footing in the world.

  About halfway through the collection, there is a palpable shift. The stories grow up. The characters realize the world’s other mysteries—from global disasters to the frustrating impenetrability of those who they love most. In “Minivan,” a man struggles to connect with his girlfriend in the wake of her rape. In “Not for Ghosts or Daffodils,” a father attempts to understand the eccentric behavior of his young daughter.

  Anne Valente
  Anne Valente

  Science, not magic, begins to emerge as a common source of wonder in these stories, a contrast to their increasingly harsh worlds. In the title story, four young women start a fight club. They vent their anger for the terrible injustices committed against them in their small Alaskan town: a father who steals his daughter’s paychecks; generations of emotional and physical abuse from boyfriends, family, and men they barely know. This all takes place under the northern lights, which the narrator explains in scientific terms: “The auroras burned bright, shimmering lines, a beauty I knew blazed only from trapped particles, nothing more, ions shuttling toward earth, beating back, enraged that gravity held them.” In “If Everything Fell Silent, Even Sirens,” an expectant mother mourns the recent death of her father, who studied echolocation in dolphins. The story is full of life’s bitterness—the narrator’s anger at her husband, her grief over her father’s death—but it’s also infused with passages that celebrate the miracles of science. In the collection’s closing story, a man is horrified by his boss’s plan to illegally use one hundred baby octopuses as test subjects to uncover the secret behind love. As he cares for the octopuses, he contemplates the mysterious love of his wife, an affection he can never fully understand.

  The penultimate story in the collection, “Until Our Shadows Claim Us,” combines the theme of secrets with the reality of disasters beyond our control. The story is told in the collective voice of a class of elementary school kids who believe that their conjuring the phantom of a local killer has led to the kidnappings of their classmates and the coinciding large-scale disasters they see on the news—beginning with The Challenger explosion. They hold their secret close as the kidnappings continue and global disasters unfurl. At the height of their terror, the class proclaims: “We feared the shape of our own organs, that our lungs could fail us, that our hearts could sputter and cease, and that we held things beating inside of us, things we’d never fully understand, things we couldn’t trust.”

  Valente’s prose is beautiful. Her verbs are exact and unexpected. Children describe their feet as “tattle-taling our path through the snow behind us.” They tell us their parents “sandboxed our play to the corners of the yard.” A boy’s voice “sliced the stillness in the room.” Her similes are spot-on. Valente turns out stunning sentences like: “I studied the lines of wood in our kitchen table, swirls as complicated as fingerprints.” And: “The baby punches the air behind her, his tiny fists like clementines.” Children recount “the threats pressed like palm prints against our panes.”

  There are many authors who use magic in their stories to examine the characters’ personal lives; among them are Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, Ramona Ausubel, and Kelly Luce. There are also many writers, such as Laura van den Berg and Abby Geni, whose stories examine the complexity of human relationships alongside the wonder of nature. But I think it’s best, for the purposes of this review, not to compare Anne Valente to any of them at length. What her debut collection mimics most precisely, for me, is the process of growing up: first, the discovery of the private, impenetrable nature of the self and, second, the inexplicable, often terrible, nature of the world.

  All of the stories in this luminous debut straddle the line between the known and the unknowable. By Light We Knew Our Names illustrates the fact that, whether it’s the discovery of your own identity or the inexplicability of others, the world is full of secrets, and we feel most alive when we are trying (futilely) to uncover them. It’s this sense of mystery that torments and sustains us. Valente writes of the girl in the opening story: “But when she looks down at the package, at its paisley edges and purple string, she wonders if what lies beneath could possibly be better than those colors, that pattern, if what’s known is ever better than what isn’t.” This is the question that the collection asks, over and over. It never answers it. But then again, how could it?

  Sadye Teiser is an editor at The Masters Review. She earned her MFA from The University of North Carolina Wilmington and her BA from Princeton University. She is working on a novel and a collection of surreal stories. Her fiction has appeared in Gigantic. She lives in Portland, OR. More from this author →

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