“Wonder,” she said. “We are seeking wonder.” . . . Wonder is a lifting in the heart. Wonder is belief in the fleetest moment. Time stops and starts, goes away and comes back from somewhere. Frankie called Bullfrog the Wonder Dog. “He wonders what’s going on,” he said. It is a wonder she and Michael ended up married.
~ from A Small Crowd of Strangers. (Forest Avenue Press, 2020)
In these times of a pandemic/firestorm/unrest, time stops and starts. We are carried along by the news. We’ve stayed inside so long that our friends become strangers and strangers–in the grocery store, at the gas station–become friends. And like Pattianne Anthony, the protagonist in Joanna Rose’s new novel says, we too are seeking wonder, seeking answers. Watching for signs.
Though A Small Crowd of Strangers is a novel, it is easy to find bits and pieces of one’s own life in the unfolding of Pattianne’s. A young woman who seems to fall into life, Pattianne feels at first that if she was led to a place or a person, she must stay there in that city and in that relationship.
Then, she begins working at a tiny bookstore run by a woman with a huge personality. Pattianne meets stranger after stranger and Bullfrog the Wonder dog, and they become her guides so that she is no longer falling into life but feeling grounded.
I’m honored to host Joanna Rose as she shares more about her new novel, about writing (this whole interview is a lesson in craft!), and about her favorite pandemic pastimes. Plus, there’s a giveaway (courtesy of Forest Avenue press!)
Enter HERE by Wednesday, September 30th.
Now welcome Joanna Rose!
Christi Craig (CC): What a cast of characters in A Small Crowd of Strangers! From Even-Steven, Pattianne’s “sometimes-boyfriend,” to Michael Bryn, the perfect husband (until his Catholicism gets the best of her). There is the interrogator priest and the priest gone rogue, Pattianne’s indifferent mother and Mrs. Taskey, who is everything her mother isn’t. And those are just a few of the people we meet! As each character rises to the page, we feel their pull on Pattianne, giving the story a natural ebb and flow as she is carried along from one place to another to what begins to feel like “home.” Do you build your characters from scratch or do they form from traces of personality in people you see on the street?
Joanna Rose (JR): Early in the story process I start with people I have known, and they are almost always people from my past. I am haunted by my own past and have connections to people I have lost, not necessarily to death but to time. Early in my life, as my parents moved around the country, I formed the habit of letting people drift away. I have spent most of my life interacting with strangers.
Every time we moved I would make up a new past for myself. When I was very young that past was rather absurd; my dog was the original Lassie. I was related to the Queen of England. I had a brother who died of polio. By the time the truth was out it was usually time for us to move again. I was never called out for my lies. Lying was a big problem for me.
What I know now is that in making up myself I was putting a wall around myself, and no one could get in. I am no longer in the habit of telling whoppers but that habit of not getting to know people, of assuming I don’t know people, in is a very basic part of who I am.
What else I know now is that I have always been making up stories and characters.
People are a mystery to me. Do I reconstruct them to seek out the roots of this mystery?
My characters come from all different places in my life. Miss Mimi Stein was very loosely based on my own dear Aunt Mimi, who was not Jewish (very Presbyterian) but who never had children, and was beautiful, and gracious, and had a lovely home. She treated me kindly and warmly and with humor – not something I ever got from my own parents.
Even-Steven is an amalgamation of several boyfriends (none named Steven!).
Jen is an exception; she is my own sister in pretty much every way. Smart-alecky and smart and funny, and we’re not close. I feel like I have managed to immortalize my sister’s smirk. And Pattianne’s parents are my parents in that they were cold and distant.
But I have never known priests like either Father McGivens or Father Lucke.
Michael Bryn was made up out of whole cloth. He was the hardest character to write, and he didn’t even get his own point of view until a very late draft.
So were Mrs. Taskey, and Mr Bleakman and Josie.
Mr. Patel is based on a really kind man who runs the QuickPrint shop near my house, who always helped me with the copy machine. Mr Patel looks like this man, and he’s kind like this man.
Lakshmi and Maya were easy; I’ve worked with youth for 20 years, and I know how funny and fun and annoying they are.
What I see as I consider them all is this: I start out with a character like me and a couple people whom I give characteristics that are like people I know. Brushstrokes of reality just to get me started. But as I create the story they become who they need to be in the story, and my work is in fleshing them out. I have to pay very close attention to what they do in the story, and I have to understand why they do it, and not only I terms of story dynamics. They all have to be real in their own stories even if their own stories never emerge. They develop from the story itself.
It’s the same with place. I have to make it up, but for a reason.
I have even never been to Montclair New Jersey, but I lived near there quite a bit as a child, and I loved the name Claire – St Claire was kind of a female St Francis, who was a big hero to me from very early on. I had a little paperback book called The Lives of the Saints, and while I was too young to read many of the stories, which are mostly pretty gory, I did learn that St Francis could apparently talk to animals, and somehow I learned that St Claire was a female St Francis. One of the first churches we went to was St Francis Church in Edison new Jersey. This might be a good time to say that while I was never a believer when it came to God in the clouds or Jesus and miracles or guardian angels, I loved going to Mass. The Latin chanting, the music, the priest in his beautiful robes. So I learned that St Francis talked to animals, and they to him. I actually equated him with Shari Lewis. When I got a Lamb Chops puppet for Christmas I was disappointed that she didn’t talk. My mother explained that Lamb Chop only talked to Shari Lewis. I remember thinking Aha! Just like St Francis.
Is this a good reason for making Montclair the beginning of the story?
These beginnings are sacred to me: my love of the drama of the liturgy and my love of animals and the natural world. So it made sense for Montclair to be the beginning of the story.
CC: I’d love to know a little more about Bullfrog, the unassuming hound-dog like companion that Pattianne calls her “spirit guide…St. Francis’s Brother in Christ.” He’s made famous in gracing the cover of your book. Were you anticipating that he would make the cover design?
JR: Bullfrog. That’s an easy one – he was my first dog (as a grown up.) We’d always had dogs when I was a kid, and a few of them were basset hounds. When I was about 20 I got this basset mix puppy, whose name was Bullfrog but whom I renamed Frisco, after the little mountain town I was living in then. He became my hitchhiking buddy – I was the girl on the side of the road with a dog, thumb out, just me and him. There were some dark years there. I had him until he was 17.
When he died I cried for a year. I’ve had other dogs – I’m on numbers 5, 6 and 7 now. But he was the first creature that I had to take care of, and taking care of him meant taking care of myself. Get home at night. Make sure there’s some food around. Like Pattianne and Bullfrog, alone against the world.
And I do find animals, dogs in particular, to be spirit guides. I am kind of crazy for dogs.
Frisco has been gone for 40 years, and here he is again. I find his presence both in the story and on the cover compelling. There is my past, haunting me.
And no, I never thought of Bullfrog being part of the cover. Gigi Little, the artist who created the cover, came up with that. I love it. She looked at a few old fuzzy Polaroids I have of him, and she got him perfectly, which thrills me. The cover speaks to a gentler, funnier side of the story.
CC: One of the things I love most about your book–about Pattianne, really–is the way she takes in the world around her, often in bits and pieces. Small bits and pieces…a bobbing Adam’s Apple, the short painted fingernails of a woman who drinks too much, “Cuticles, too, bright red.” Sometimes we never get a full glimpse of a character, but we get just enough details from Pattianne’s perspective that we know that character. Putting those kinds of telling details together in such a way isn’t easy. But I know you write poetry as well as novels. Does your craft in poetry play a big part in how you craft your novels?
JR: My poetry owes much to the tendency of the ordinary. I love the drama of objects and the physical world.
When we pay close attention to the sensory world we are strangers in a strange land. This may be the influence of Alice in Wonderland, which was my favorite book as a child, and quite possibly still is. I still read it every so often.
I love how the concrete world can be stepping stones through a story.
Sound is also important to me. Mark Twain said “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” I understand this to go beyond content. The sound of words can build create or ease tension and can affect pace.
A longer line in poetry goes by a little slower. A short line speeds things up. Same with sentences, and clauses within sentences, in prose.
And vowels and consonants have specific sounds that resonate in the body. Harsh sounds like Ks and Ts cause tension. Low vowel sounds like Os or short Es can create calm or dread. High sounds like long Es or long Is can create a sense of excitement or panic.
CC: What are you reading these days?
JR: Ack! I always have several books going at once. I eat up UK crime novels (Anne Cleeves, PD James, Elizabeth George) and am always looking for new ones. I love the way language is so different from character to character, and the landscapes of the north of Britain. They usually stay on my bedside table for when I wake up and can’t go back to sleep in the middle of the night. That’s when I need a good plot to carry me along.
I usually have beefy non-fiction book going. I just finished The Architecture of Happiness (Alain de Botton) which is actually about architecture. Now I’m reading The Gene (Siddhartha Mukkergee).
I had to stop everything to read the new Anne Tyler. And dear friends gave me the new Carl Hiasson, which means I won’t get any work done on Sunday.
And poetry: Norman Dubie, Jack Gilbert and Brigit Pegeen Kelly tend to float around the house these days. And I love poetry essays. Right now I’m reading What Light Can Do (Robert Hass)
David Biespiel has a new memoir called A Place of Exodus: Home, memory and Texas. This one I’ll probably save for when I can dive deep into it. Like take it away for a rainy beach weekend. He was one of my poetry mentors at the Attic Institute and this is prose but his sentences are each small journeys.
CC: Favorite Pandemic Pastime?
JR: Watching re-runs of Perry Mason and Big Bang Theory.
Going for long walks in Lone Fir Cemetery. It’s a big and it’s easy to veer wide around d other walkers. It’s a pioneer cemetery, and I read the gravestones and it helps me remember that there are entire lives that have come and gone during other times, troubled times and peaceful times alike. Gravestones are beautiful. I’ve always loved going into cemeteries anyway, and now it feels particularly powerful to be among the dead.
And while it’s not really a pastime, I like getting up at 3 AM. As do many people I have trouble sleeping now. I finally gave trying up at one point and just started getting up and going downstairs and puttering about. I find it a particularly good time to read those beefy non-fiction books I mentioned I find it soothing to be up then. Since the shut-down the streets of my urban neighborhood are depressingly still. The busy little cafes are closed, and the shops are closed. No music from the bars, no outbursts of rowdy laughter. At 3AM all that stillness feels normal. I look out and see lights on in here and there and know there are other people awake and it’s comforting. It plays hell with my productivity though. I would like to cultivate the habit of napping.
JOANNA ROSE is the author of the award-winning novel Little Miss Strange (winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Prize, and finalist for the Oregon Book Award). Her poetry, essays and short fiction (as well as other pieces that don’t fall into any of those categories) have appeared in Oregon Humanities, High Desert Journal, VoiceCatcher, Calyx, and Bellingham Review, among others. Her essay “That Thing With Feathers” was cited as Notable in 2015 Best American Essays. She works with youth in Portland Public Schools and cohosts the long-running critique group Pinewood Table. When she’s not at the beach she lives in Portland OR with her husband and, at any given time, several dogs.
A Small Crowd of Strangers (Forest Avenue Press) is part slightly sideways spiritual journey, part coming of age: a middle-aged librarian from New Jersey accidentally gets married and ends up in a convenience store on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island playing Bible Scrabble with a Korean physicist and a drunk priest.
DON’T FORGET: Enter the book giveaway by Wednesday, September 30th, for a chance to win a copy of A Small Crowd of Strangers!
