Colleen Curran / Writer’s Memo No. 2

Writer’s Memo: An Interview with Colleen Curran

Alex Carrigan and Amy Sailer

Colleen Curran is the author of the novel Whores on the Hill (Vintage Publishers, 2005). Her short stories have appeared in journals like Glimmer Train, Jane, Mid-American Review and Meridian, and she has edited the anthology Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings. Curran holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. Currently, she is an editor and writer for Richmond.com’s Arts, Entertainment and Events section. She lives with her husband and two sons in Richmond, Virginia. --

Colleen, reading Whores on the Hill was a particularly unique experience for me – it was the first book that I ever read on my Kindle. I’d been so skeptical of Kindles, but it really was enjoyable once I tried it. Were you happy to see your novel in new media print?

I just starting using a Kindle myself and I love it. I’m excited that you read Whores on the Hill on a Kindle! I’m surprised how a good book is still a good book anywhere, no matter where you read it – on your phone, a tablet or whatever. If there are great characters, a good plot and strong writing, I’m immediately sucked in to the story – whether I’m reading on my phone or my Kindle.

Right now, I find the Kindle incredibly helpful to read my own work-inprogress. You can read a whole manuscript on it and take it with you. I strongly recommend it for writers. You can write notes to yourself in the margins and bookmark pages. It’s a great way to see your writing in a new way. And much more convenient than lugging around a 300-page manuscript in your purse.

The novel is set in Milwaukee, but some of the places – I’m thinking particularly of Hollywood Cemetery – felt familiar to Richmond. Coincidence, or is the novel a hybrid of the two cities?

That’s Richmond, for sure. I wrote the novel the year after I graduated from VCU’s MFA program. I fell in love with Richmond immediately – it has so much character. And I really enjoyed using Richmond markers in the book.

Byrd Theatre, Southside Speedway, they all make an appearance in Whores on the Hill.

Do you have a particular place where you like to write?

I write in my study. I’ve moved around a bit – from Fan apartment to Fan apartment, and now from a Church Hill house to a house in Bon Air. Always at my wide-topped, cherry wood Mission desk. I had dreamed about having a big, comfortable desk for years, and then finally, I got this hand-me-down from my father and I love it. I began writing Whores on the Hill in a single apartment on Grace Street. It had these beautiful bay windows that faced Grace Street. It was a beautiful – and slightly distracting place – to work. If I was writing late at night, I always ended up becoming much more fascinated watching the transvestites walk up and down the street.

Then I wrote in a Museum District apartment I moved into with my boyfriend. I had a study at the back of the house and I really liked it, it faced the trees and I liked shuffling in the early morning from our bedroom at the top of the house all the way to the back to the study. It was close to the kitchen and perfect for making a cup of tea right before I sat down to right.

Then we moved to Church Hill and I took the best room in the house for my study. It was the front parlor with three huge bay windows with stained glass panels. I was finishing up Whores on the Hill and completely obsessed with it. I didn’t want to unpack the boxes. I didn’t want to paint. I didn’t want to touch a thing. I didn’t want to do anything but sit down and wrestle with this thing that was giving me so much trouble. There is this fear sometimes, when you’re working on something, that you’ll just run out of gas or lose interest. And I desperately didn’t want to put it down, for fear that I wouldn’t be able to pick it back up again.

I’ve had a “room of my own” ever since I starting writing seriously. Which has been very, very important. Even psychologically, just to know that there was a space I could call my own. Even if it was just the kitchen table.

Although now, I must admit, I share a study with my husband and I don’t like it. I keep moving the desk around, trying to find a good spot, but this room – the study we share overlooking the neighbor’s garden – is the best writing spot

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in the house.

That’s what having kids will do to you. I now have two kids – a four year old and a seventh month. They’ll take all your writing space – and your time!

Much of Whores on the Hill is written in first-person-plural. I once read in an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides that writing The Virgin Suicides in first-person-plural helped him learn how to develop a novel. Did you find this was true for you? What attracted you to the choral voice?

First-person plural came naturally for my narrator’s character. She didn’t have an identity of her own – that was the crux of the novel – until the very end. At the beginning, she doesn’t even have a voice. She is so shy and unsure of herself and her place in the world. But when she falls in with these new girls – she suddenly has a voice. A braver voice in the collective: “We go to clubs, we go to the mall, we smoke cigarettes…” etc. I think that’s reflective of a being a teenage girl too – finding strength and solidarity in a group. Finding yourself.

Like your main characters, you also attended a Catholic high school. Was it anything like your portrayal of Sacred Heart Holy Angels in the book?

I was similar to Thisbe in some ways. Before I transferred to the all-girls’ school, I was a total mess. My parents were getting divorced. The experience of co-ed school, for me, was incredibly traumatic. It was a very aggressive school with a bad reputation. It seemed like everybody was out to hurt someone in some way. I found the two first years of co-ed high school incredibly traumatic. I didn’t fit in, I was an outcast, I was very alone.

But then, when I turned 16, my mother separated from my father. We moved to downtown. I transferred to the “’last all-girls’ high school in Milwaukee” and everything became better. The whole tenor of the school was different. It was like the world opened up for me there.

I think I got some of that in the book.

But really, I used the “’all-girls’ school” as a metaphor for girlhood, for

innocence. These girls are in a safe place, they’re in the world of girls. But they want to grow up. They want to grow up and go outside into the world. And leaving that world of innocence and childhood behind can be very painful and scary.

Did you know what would happen in your novel before you began?

No, I didn’t. And that was a problem. Endings are always a problem for me. I go around and around and around and around until I find the right one. And it feels like I waste a lot of time. I’d like to be more like Joyce Carol Oates who says you can’t write your first sentence until you know your last sentence. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. And if I could do that, I could shave a year or two off my projects.

The protagonist’s name, Thisbe, is so unusual – it’s Classical, isn’t it? Was there a particular reason you chose the name?

Unconsciously, I believe I was thinking of Pyramus and Thisbe – the Roman myth of ill-fated love. Because Thisbe has this thwarted love affair with a boy. And with her friends, Astrid and Juli, too.

I also liked the writer Thisbe Nissen. I believe I was thinking of her as well, because her book was very popular at the time, The Good People of New York. And she ended up writing a very nice blurb for the back cover of Whores on the Hill.

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Were there particular authors who influenced Whores on the Hill? Who are you reading now?

My teacher, Bill Tester, influenced me the most. He was an amazing teacher and had a huge impact on my writing and my style. I don’t think I would have gotten my novel published if it wasn’t for him. He was a student of Gordon Lish’s and had a very particular teaching style. Which I loved. But mostly, he talked about how each sentence had to be important. “No walker sentences!” He talked about paying attention to the sounds of your sentences – assonance and dissonance. He talked about raising the stakes, constantly, higher and higher, blocking your characters’ desires. All of that, stays with me, always. And I love reading his fiction too. Especially his collection, Head, when I’m having trouble. It’s often instructural. I break down the mechanics, trying

to figure out how this thing worked or that thing. But mostly, I just read it for the pleasure of it. And to remind myself – this is how it should be. This is how high the bar is. And can you reach it?

Tom DeHaven was also a huge influence. I’m a big fan of his work as well – I especially loved his Superman novel. And he’s just a terrific teacher. He taught a screenwriting class when I attended VCU and that was something of a sea change for me as a writer. It was so important. I was having a lot of trouble with plot – figuring out how plot works and how it needs to be the engine of your story. I knew that, but I didn’t really understand how it worked. Until I took Tom’s screenwriting class and I finally had a breakthrough as a writer. Finally, finally – I understood how important plot was and how it worked. And I was able to write stories where things changed, where something happened. And that was huge. Absolutely huge for me.

As for books, Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction was a big influence on Whores on the Hill. I found it in the used bookstore on Forest Hill just before I started working on the novel. It was exactly the right book at the right time. Up the Junction is about young twentysomethings growing up in Battersea, England. It’s about a rough group of working girls who have abortions and blue collar young men who drink too much. It was published in 1963. The chapters are very short – two or three pages long – it was originally serialized in the newspaper – and I loved how the short, vivid chapters gave it a real immediacy. And I tried to use that in Whores on the Hill.

After the publication of Whores on the Hill, you edited the anthology Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings. Did taking on such a large editing project influence your own writing?

It was a much larger editing project than I knew. It took about a year and a half. Which was a surprise – I had never edited an anthology before and thought I could knock it out in six months. But it took much longer to secure the writers and edit the essays into a book.

I really enjoyed working with the writers in Altared, writers like Dani Shapiro, Amy Bloom, Curtis Sittenfeld, just to name a few. Their essays made me laugh, they gave me greater insight into marriage and they really helped me come to grips with my own

wedding. When I proposed the book, I had been engaged for something like four years with no wedding date in sight. I was terrified of actually doing it. But working on that book helped me face my fears, and by the time I sent the final manuscript to my publisher, I was ready to take the leap and I got married on my front lawn in Church Hill in front of a bunch of friends and family.

Any advice for young fiction writers who are submitting to Poictesme?

Read Poictesme first. Spend a few hours with the back issues. Get to know it. Ask yourself if Poictesme seems like a good fit for your work. Read the submission guidelines carefully. Make sure you follow them. That’s the first step in acting like a professional writer. Take yourself seriously. Make sure your story or poem or essay is the absolute best it can be. Have a trusted reader take a look first. Consider their feedback. Consider revising. Work at it until you know there is not one more thing you could do to it to make it better. Then, and only then, should you submit it.

And then, if it doesn’t get accepted at Poictesme, try somewhere else! Keep trying, keep going with your work, keep writing. I sent out stories for two years before someone finally picked up one of my stories. And that first publication felt like a huge accomplishment. When you put in that kind of time and finally push through, there’s nothing else like it. Never give up.

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