Known best for her short stories and novels, author Ann Beattie recently published More to Say: Essays & Appreciations, a collection of short nonfiction. The winner of numerous awards, Beattie brings her keen insight and sense of language to these curated pieces, all of which were originally published between 1982 and 2022 in a variety of publications, such as The New Yorker, Life, and The New York Times.
The book’s essays celebrate some of the writers and artists—and their work—who Beattie holds in high esteem, including Andre Dubus, Sally Mann, Scott McDowell, and Alice Munro, among others. Her subjects are revered for their work, though not necessarily contemporary household names, and Beattie’s reflections on their lives and work exude heartfelt love and respect. No stranger to Charlottesville (she taught at UVA for many years), Beattie now lives in Maine with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry, who is also one of the artists profiled in the new book. In an email interview with C-VILLE, Beattie discusses the collection in advance of her upcoming reading at New Dominion Bookshop on March 11.
C-VILLE: How did your selection process for More to Say compare to that of fiction collections you’ve compiled in the past?
Ann Beattie: “I found this more difficult. When I was compiling The New Yorker Stories that came out in 2010, every story I’d published in the magazine was included, and there was the book. It seemed to make sense to have the stories arranged chronologically, from the beginning of my writing career through what was then my most recent publication there.
“I didn’t feel that organizing [More to Say] chronologically would be helpful to the reader, or that that was the right approach. Also, gathering these pieces together after so many years gave me the opportunity to revise them, while I wouldn’t do that with fiction.
“With my other individual story collections, I tried to think about how I’d like to read the stories as a reader, not as the writer. I try to assemble story collections to have a trajectory that makes sense to me. I don’t think it’s a problem if people just read around in More to Say. To me, the essays on visual artists also explain how I see, while the essays about other writers rely on my having a visual sense of their stories.”
The essays range in publication from 1982 to 2022, with your attention on artists largely occupying the earlier half of that and your focus on writers occupying the latter. Was there anything that caused you to shift the focus of your nonfiction work in that way?
“I’ve taught at UVA and other places, but for one stretch of 27 years I was primarily a freelance writer. It was only when I returned to UVA for one semester a year in 2000 (now I’m gone), that I had any opportunity to voice my opinions about literature. One advantage of teaching is that everyone’s read the same thing (supposedly). I’m not part of a book group, but that would also be true of a book group. Otherwise, I can be reading something now that was very popular, say, 20 years ago, so if I want to have a conversation about it, the other person probably doesn’t remember that novel or story in detail. In some of my essays about writers’ work, I wanted to remind people how exciting certain writers were [and] to introduce them to writers I admired.
“To answer the other part of your question: For whatever reason (actually, for many reasons), certain publications didn’t continue to give me assignments. If I’d relied on writing essays or nonfiction (as opposed to fiction), obviously I’d have to have been more proactive.”
Were there any pieces that you wish you could have included but had to omit for any reason?
“No, though I also knew how long the book could be. Sometimes I realized that I hadn’t remembered a piece that I added belatedly—the Updike essay, for example. I was looking for something else entirely on my bookshelf in Maine, and saw the publication in which that had been printed. I re-read it, and decided it was better than another essay I’d intended to include.
“I still wonder how many things I might have totally forgotten. Some of these essays are so old, they were very hard to locate. (I had to order an old Life magazine to get my piece on Grant Wood.) My filing cabinets only hold so much, and quite a few things were written on a typewriter, before I had a computer with a filing system. If I didn’t have the original, I had to try to buy it, if possible.”
Were there any surprises for you as a reader as you reviewed your past work?
“Yes. My overreliance on certain words, such as ‘sensibility.’ It’s such a useful word, but it gets boring if I keep using it. Also, I’ve done many fiction readings, but I’ve rarely had a reason to read my essays aloud. I never had any reason to re-read them after they were published, either, so I tended to forget them (or things about them) more than my stories. … I guess selecting these particular pieces and putting them in this order made me more aware of what caught my eye at certain periods, and what gets my attention now. Of course I’ve become a different observer than I was in my 30s.”
