Ask the Author: Heather Tosteson
Answered Questions (6)
Heather Tosteson
My last short story collection, Germs of Truth, was inspired in part by my step-daughter and her wife's use of a sperm donor. They invited us to read descriptions of potential donors and give our opinions, and I began to imagine all sorts of scenarios, many of them humorous, based on different dimensions of the whole experience and the questions it raised about how we decide to have children—and how life keeps upending our logic in fortuitous ways. The other half of the book, made of longer stories, took situations roughly similar to ones I had encountered in my own family life or saw in the lives around me—what I would call burrs, those things that for some reason catch uncomfortably in our heart, mind, or imagination and that we feel we can't share or put to rest. I gave myself the freedom to explore these situations as openly and honestly as possible—with one constraint: the stories needed a resolution that was liberating to whoever I felt was most trapped by the situation. The title of the collection reflects that tension.
Heather Tosteson
Strong emotions, mysterious drives, unsettling questions, evocative phrases, haunting images, desire.
Heather Tosteson
We have spent the last two years interviewing and reading intensively for our latest Wising Up Listening Project on prisoner reentry and now are at the point where we are beginning to write, discovering what it is we have learned through the process. It is exciting and also challenging because so many people, from ex-offenders to commissioners of corrections, have entrusted their stories to us and we want to be able to share them in vivid and insightful ways.
Heather Tosteson
Along with being a writer, I am a publisher and one of the first questions I ask aspiring writers, young or old, is "Which of your works was so important to you to create that you would have written it even if there was no possibility of getting it published?" The reason for this questions is that our relationship with our writing needs to begin with ourselves as our first, and sufficient, audience. Writing is time consuming, energy consuming, and the writing life is filled with rejections, so you need to know there is going to be one person who will be deeply fulfilled and changed by what you write. However, my next question is, "Who would you like to enter into conversation with through this book? What kind of conversation do you want to have?" When we write, we explore and reorder our own experience. People who like our stories often like them because they shape something that has been troubling for them. So my question really is, What did you learn from your writing that allows you to generously and attentively hold whatever your readers bring to you in response?
Heather Tosteson
For years my only form of artistic expression was writing, but for the last twenty or years, I have used other art forms as well as writing, so I think one of the most rewarding things about being an artist, any kind of artist, is your relationship with the material you use—words, images, stories, or clay, paper, plaster, or the human voice and human body, or some combination of these. The material is intrinsically fascinating to me, especially how it connects whatever inside me that aches to be known with something beyond itself.
Words are intrinsically social, intrinsically visceral, they bring cultures and contexts deep inside us. The fact that we can also actively shape them to reveal, explore, connect with that which is uniquely ourselves or uniquely other never ceases to amaze me. I love reading, I love slipping into worlds that exist in some transformative space that is both accessible and always out of reach, substantial and immaterial. I love the intimacy of the connection this permits with the most open and mysterious part of another person. When I write a story, often all I feel while writing are the holes in the story. But when I'm through, when I'm reading it, I never get over the amazement that what has come from my pen now has an existence outside me, that it feels as solid as the wood floor beneath my feet, the other stories I love to slip inside for hours or days. Each time, my attention is turned to the mystery of where these stories come from and the amazing reality of their existence too.
Words are intrinsically social, intrinsically visceral, they bring cultures and contexts deep inside us. The fact that we can also actively shape them to reveal, explore, connect with that which is uniquely ourselves or uniquely other never ceases to amaze me. I love reading, I love slipping into worlds that exist in some transformative space that is both accessible and always out of reach, substantial and immaterial. I love the intimacy of the connection this permits with the most open and mysterious part of another person. When I write a story, often all I feel while writing are the holes in the story. But when I'm through, when I'm reading it, I never get over the amazement that what has come from my pen now has an existence outside me, that it feels as solid as the wood floor beneath my feet, the other stories I love to slip inside for hours or days. Each time, my attention is turned to the mystery of where these stories come from and the amazing reality of their existence too.
Heather Tosteson
I respect it! I don't believe in writing just to prove you can. I think we write when there is something we really need to know that we can only know through the act of writing. Writing, at least as I understand and practice it, engages the whole person and poses questions for us that we have to grow into—questions of skill, insight, importance. Growth takes time and something beyond consciousness and conscious intent. The best way forward often is not the most direct way.
I work in different art forms—photography, sculpture, sound, and movement, so often I find that one of those other forms of expression will reach where words can't. Sometimes I just need to ground in the nitty gritty of daily life—loving my husband, children, and grandchildren, folding laundry, paying bills, testing cantaloupe at the farmer's market, calling a friend. I've also found that just beginning with the pitifulest, infinitesimal thing, a sentence, phrase, or single word, acts as a magnet, drawing other ideas, feelings, words to it—in their own good time
I work in different art forms—photography, sculpture, sound, and movement, so often I find that one of those other forms of expression will reach where words can't. Sometimes I just need to ground in the nitty gritty of daily life—loving my husband, children, and grandchildren, folding laundry, paying bills, testing cantaloupe at the farmer's market, calling a friend. I've also found that just beginning with the pitifulest, infinitesimal thing, a sentence, phrase, or single word, acts as a magnet, drawing other ideas, feelings, words to it—in their own good time
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