By Jessica SullivanThe emotional ups and downs in a novel are arguably what make novels great. For Carrie Callaghan, the emotional rollercoaster is almost always tied to relationships. Lithub describes Callaghan’s debut novel, A Light of Her Own, as a novel that “catches the reader in a web of intrigue, art, and ambition and does not let go until the final page.” Salt the Snow, Callaghan’s stunning second novel, is based on the life of one of the first American female war correspondents, Milly Bennett. In 1930, Milly Bennet and her husband are living in Russia when her husband is arrested by the secret police. As Milly tries to get her husband released, secrets about both her marriage and the Soviet state that she served come to light. Her piece in Furious Gravity, The Tea Ceremony, examines friendships and the moment they form. I had the pleasure to discuss novels, writing, and other topics with Carrie Callaghan. JS: What drew you to writing historical fiction? CC: I like to write what I like reading. I’m really interested in how our lives today are really a product of what came before, and the more that we know about history, the more we can understand how we got here and that helps those figuring out the way forward and also understanding how to deal with how we are here. I find a lot of solace in history, and so then using fiction to explore that is just a ton of fun. JS: What time period are you drawn to? CC: You know, honestly, I love all sorts of different time periods. And part of it is just that thrill of getting to do the research and getting to learn about a new time period. Right now, I’m writing about the 1930s, which is the same time period my second book was set in, and so I’m not having to redo quite as much research, but I envision that in the future I will again switch to a different time period for fun. JS: I also write historical fiction. Before I realized that was what I wanted to do, I wanted to be able to keep doing research without being in the sciences, and my first workshop professor asked me to try writing historical fiction, and it stuck. CC: The research is a ton of fun, definitely one of my favorite parts. It’s like you’re like walking through a meadow gathering flowers, and some of the flowers are really inspirational and some of them aren’t, they’re just pretty, but they all go in your basket. The research is a nice way to have sort of a structured approach to learning. Especially as you’ll find once you’re out of school that you still enjoy learning so it’s nice to have a project to focus your intellectual curiosity. JS: So do you start with the fiction aspect of historical fiction, or do you begin with research? CC: I really need to do the research first. I find that I don’t have a good sense for the characters and the plot if I haven’t done at least a heavy amount of research first. There’s often some research afterwards that I will do, but once I’m in the middle it’ll be like more for smaller things, like how a lantern was lit in the seventeen century. But for the most part, I need to do the research ahead of time. JS: I’ve always really liked history classes, but every time I read historical fiction I am always struck about how little I actually know about history. So I like that historical fiction teaches me new things as well as provides a number of rabbit holes for me to go down. CC: That’s right. I love that feeling of doors opening while reading a novel. Lights are turning on in your mind and your curiosity is getting sparked. I think that’s such a wonderful thing about literature in general but particularly with historical fiction. Actually, I was supposed to be giving a little talk to people at work about why reading fiction is good for your job and makes you better at your job, which I hoped would counter that narrative that you can only learn by reading nonfiction. JS: Do you share your work with your family while you’re working on it? CC: Not usually. When I’m writing a novel my husband is one of my early beta reads, but for shorter pieces I share that with my critique group. JS: How did your critique group form? CC: It grew out of a writing class I took at George Washington University. Everyone in the class really, really liked each other, so when the class finished we decided to continue meeting. That was a little over five years ago, now. JS: In your story in Furious Gravity, The Tea Ceremony, could you talk a little about the Japanese idiom iche-go, iche-e? CC: That phrase was the inspiration for the whole story. I saw it at an art exhibit that was about Japanese art at large or some broader aspect of Japanese art, but that particular saying was on a painting about a tea ceremony. The idea of a tea ceremony is that you take joy in every unique moment, and even though perhaps we might even be repeating things in a ritual, there still is a uniqueness to every lived incident. I thought that was really beautiful, so I wanted to try and figure a way to create that emphasis on the exact lived moment in a story. JS: How did you come to think of it in terms of meeting - at the initial moment a stranger - who then became a friend? CC: Oh gosh, I do not remember how that idea came to mind. I thought that the moment you begin a friendship is a unique and beautiful moment and a lot of my writing and interest is about friendship, so that’s probably why. JS: So when I was reading The Tea Ceremony, it seemed like I was walking through Gillian’s memories. What drew you to write it in this format? CC: It was partly an experiment to play with tense, but it was also partly a formal effort to narrow the focus on the present. I wanted to have this back and forth that narrows into the exact pinpoint of the present moment when they meet. JS: I love that their friendship is very sincere. How do define sincerity in friendship and in literature, at large? CC: I think if you’re asking about any kind of sincerity, it’s really just a matter of being honest. And not having pretense, so that honesty will vary in terms of what form it takes, for depicting different relationships. Sometimes relationships are deep and complicated, sometimes they are short-lived but intense, and so sincerity is just a matter of trying to take each relationship for what it is and then represent it simply. JS: You write short stories as well as novels, when you start a piece, do you have any idea of it’s going to be a short story, or do you write it and see where it goes? CC: Yeah, I definitely have a very clear sense of whether the idea is a better fit for a short story or a novel. I have to confess, I recently decided that I’m not going to write any more short stories. It’s really a factor of time. I have a day job and two small kids, and personally I have a lot more fun with the novels. The short stories were good for me to learn and to improve as a writer, and of course I know I still have a long way to go as improving as a writer but I think I can probably do that by working on the novels. I saw a quote recently that made a lot of sense to me and explained my feelings about novels versus short stories. It said something like “a novel is trying to be your friend, a short story is not.” I do feel like there is a bit of hostility sometimes in short stories that makes me uncomfortable with them as a reader, and I don’t know how - if that’s how you’re supposed to write short stories - to replicate it. I understand how a novel brings you into its embrace and makes you feel comfortable and makes you keep reading. There are things I can do better, but at least I sort of see the path ahead, where with a short story I have no idea. So now that I’m not writing short stories, if I have an idea that I feel like is not enough, I just set it aside with the hope that one day I can clump a bunch of ideas together. If there’s an idea that’s cool but not big enough, maybe that becomes an aspect of a novel rather than the premise of a novel at large. JS: That’s a good idea. I find that when I have an inkling of an idea that isn’t big enough to do anything with, I don’t write it down and then forget. CC: I figured that out from reading Salman Rushdie’s memoir, when he was talking about his creative process. He had an idea about a girl being carried by butterflies and he said “oh that’ll be great for my novel,” and it just clicked in my head that every idea doesn’t have to be its own novel, you can combine them into one novel. That felt very liberating. JS: So since you clearly read a lot of books, not only for your job but also as a writer, have you read anything that made you think differently about fiction? CC: One of the earliest books that influenced me as a writer was A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. It was exactly the book I was looking for when I bought it. This is a recommendation for browsing in bookstores. I browsing in Kramerbooks, looking for some kind of historical fiction that had women characters but that wasn’t about someone’s relationship to their mother or to their daughter or to their lover. I wanted human relationships with women that were more than just romantic or familial, and A Place of Greater Safety fulfilled that. It’s about the French Revolution, and though not all the characters are females, but it does have female characters who are political, bold, and interesting. I loved that. That helped me think about ways to use my writing to highlight different types of relationships. Another is a debut novel that came out a couple years ago, called If You Leave Me by Crystal Hana Kim, and the main character is a young woman living through the Korean War who suffers difficulties, many mental-health related. This novel had me thinking about how the main character doesn’t necessarily have to be likable, which I knew already, and what is it that makes a reader want to keep reading a particular protagonist’s story. I think that’s just a fun thing to consider, to interrogate our own prejudices about what we’re looking in. Carrie Callaghan is the author of the historical novels A Light of Her Own and Salt the Snow. Her short fiction has appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Mulberry Fork Review, Silk Road Review, the Northern Virginia Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband and two children.
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