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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.”

In Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up by Remica Bingham-Risher, the poet and essayist, reflects on her life and the influences of the Black poetry community, as framed by interviews with 10 influential mentors. An Affrilachian Poet, Cave Canem fellow, and winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award as well as the Diode Editions Book Award, Bingham-Risher writes that “‘Soul culture’ is a phrase meant to evoke the nuanced living of Black American poets and, particularly, contemporary Black American poets. It is Black devotion; Black reclamation and reframing of the past; Black joy, liberation, and a radical love ethic despite Black trauma, fear, and rootlessness. … This project was meant to be part oral history, part coming-of-age on the shoulders of giants.” 

On all counts she succeeds, and Soul Culture, her first book of prose, is a reckoning of self, craft, and culture. Tracing a childhood split between Arizona and Georgia, a move back east to Norfolk, her time at Bennington College, and beyond, Bingham-Risher skillfully weaves personal experiences with mentor interviews. Throughout the book she highlights wide-ranging themes, from faith and family to trauma and the art of revision—in writing and in life. “I know the power that other Black poets have given me: Enlightenment. Scrutiny. Camaraderie. Words to subvert fear,” she writes.

The highlighted mentors range from Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, and E. Ethelbert Miller to Tim Seibles, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and others, all esteemed writers, beloved by many, who shared wisdom, warmth, and support with Bingham-Risher. “The 10 poets I included are poets that I have long admired and, honestly, Black poets are so giving that each poet that I asked said ‘yes’ to an extensive interview about their life‘s work,” she says. “When the time came for me to compile the book, I made sure every single one of them was there.”

Bingham-Risher’s deep love for these writers’ work shines. “Clifton turned me topsy-turvy,” she writes. This project and her work as a writer seeks to overcome what Ethelbert Miller referred to as “awe syndrome,” the paralysis that results from adoration so intense that it scares a writer off from sharing, or even creating, their own work. 

“Doing the interviews taught me that these poets were living, breathing, tired, worrisome, exhausted, loving, busy human beings, just like I was, and that they made time for their work on a consistent basis,” says Bingham-Risher. “These poets were living their lives in the world of literature because they made time for the poems. So I learned very quickly that they weren’t miraculous so much as persistent, and I made my way toward that as well.” 

Never heavy-handed, the thematic connections highlighted in each chapter are imbued with grace and gratitude as the author reflects on lessons learned, bringing her whole, authentic self to the effort—as a Black poet, a mother, an educator and mentor, a daughter, and a wife. 

Attention to the craft of writing is also a recurring theme in Soul Culture, as Bingham-Risher shares wisdom from her mentors alongside her own, learned from years of writing and teaching. Selections of her poetry are featured throughout the book. Comparing her poetry- and prose-writing processes, she says, “Writing prose is very different from writing poems for me. When I write poems the initial idea comes like a lightning strike. It’s fast and furious. When I’m writing prose I know I’m entering into an idea that is expansive in a way that has to have a much larger receptacle than a poem. Because of that, it usually takes me much longer to wade into it.”

The deeply personal book is also an unflinching look at contemporary American culture, devoting attention to mass shootings and police killings of Bingham-Risher’s close friend, Rumain Brisbon, as well as Trayvon Martin and others. Further, this contemplation orients the author’s work within the history of influential Black writers and community organizing that she traces—from the early days of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s to contemporary convening work done by Cave Canem and others—including those writers who, “speaking in the voices of those in their communities … validated those silenced for centuries.” Going forward, she ponders: “What is revolutionary work in the age of a somewhat freer Blackness?”

“Attentiveness, deep consideration, thoughtfulness: Each a different kind of love,” writes Bingham-Risher. Written as its own expression of love, her memoir offers each of these, as she invites the reader to join her in “navigating the strange space that is often our living … in the context of an ever-changing, ever-strange, and difficult world.” It offers a roadmap for younger Black poets, an informed and enthusiastic guide for curious readers, and a resounding call to creative self-reflection and the work of building community. And for readers eager for more of Bingham-Risher’s poetry, her next book, Room Swept Home, will be a return to the form and should be on shelves in Spring 2024. 

In Sofia Samatar’s latest book, The White Mosque, the author and James Madison University professor weaves stories from her life together with histories of a group of Russian Mennonites who migrated to what is now Uzbekistan. Ak Metchet, which means “white mosque,” is the name of the Uzbek village that was settled by 19th-century Mennonites known as the Bride Community, followers of a false prophecy of the second coming of Christ, their bridegroom. This eponymous mosque serves as an engine for wide-ranging explorations of identity, home, and belief, sparked by Samatar’s curiosity about the story that Ak Metchet might have become known as such because of the whitewashed church the Mennonites built there. It may be a mosque that is a church that is a village (that is now a book)—but that is just one telling of it.

From this central troubling of language to the vast unknowability of our lives, the author wonders, “How do you know whether you’re on a pilgrimage that will foster wholeness or just aimlessly roving?” Aboard a bus called the Golden Dragon, rumbling across Uzbekistan with other tourists on a Mennonite history tour, taking part in a very literal pilgrimage, Samatar puzzles the ways we build a sense of self and how we embrace community and history. “We are inhabited by archives, steeped in collective memory, permeated with images and impressions, porous to myth,” she muses. She examines the imprecision but also the joy that these stories and their imperfect language and interpretations afford us, probing the intersections of present and past, family and faith, Muslim and Mennonite, all juxtapositions reflected in her own life.

The child of a Somali Muslim who married a Mennonite missionary from Nebraska, Samatar recounts, “How often I’ve been told I’m false, impossible, unreal. Somali and Swiss Mennonite: no one can make it work.” She grapples with a “magpie existence,” cataloging her experiences as a child, a mother, a novelist, an academic, and someone whose life was inexorably shaped by beliefs she no longer adheres to. A person whose body was perhaps never fully accepted as part of the religion that is, to some, also an ethnicity, a white identity that overlooks the majority of contemporary Mennonites of color around the world.

Still, to think of The White Mosque as her memoir is to oversimplify and flatten, to overlook the light sparked by the conjunction of her own experiences with those of the 19th-century Mennonites. Rather, this is a speculative memoir, a multi-genre mosaic, and an outgrowth of Samatar’s other published books of speculative fiction, most notably her previous book, Monster Portraits, a fantastical yet autobiographical collaboration with her brother. A past finalist for the Italo Calvino Prize, her fabulist experimentalist style in fiction, now adapted to the nonfiction form of The White Mosque, is transcendent, a feat of transmogrification by means of poioumena, a work of metanarrative about the process of writing, which simultaneously transforms the act of reading into one of pilgrimage—or roving, albeit with aim and exuberance.

In her extensive research, Samatar traces the history of Mennonites, whose pacifism has led them to be “people leaving their homes time after time,” and for whom martyrdom is a prominent theme (see also the popularity of a “guess the martyr” game that the author played at Mennonite youth retreats). She tells of encountering Ak Metchet in a history class, forgetting it only to later encounter the story again in a photograph, which in turn motivated her to undertake years of research before and then again after the pilgrimage that forms the backbone of The White Mosque. She reads and re-reads the accounts of the pilgrims as well as the subsequent histories written about them. She finds in them the unerring faith of believers, and “language to shift the breath.” Samatar makes the choice to retell the past in the present tense, twice over, through the Bride Community pilgrims’ experiences, but also her own pilgrimage, which takes place in 2016. She inserts refrains back to previous sections, simultaneously echoing songs sung in a round and the process of working through a thought aloud, uttering words until the phrase has the intended mouthfeel.

Samatar often references other works; fragments of novels, biographies, poems, and songs seep in to create fractal re-imaginings, doggedly asking: “How do we enter the stories of others?” As readers, we are immediately alongside and, at last, fully immersed in this inquiry.

“To be very close to the very foreign is one definition of haunting,” writes Samatar, and The White Mosque is a vivid, feverish haunting that is alive with the same “historian’s alertness to those small details that clarify the past” that the author appreciates in her research. It makes her own book a captivating and compulsive read. A different writer might have concluded by framing the pilgrimage experience as life-changing, a dramatic moment of becoming, of self. Instead, Samatar squares off with this narrative expectation, naming it and then putting it aside: “I thought it was the promise of integration, of seeing myself as one, of finally claiming emphatically I Am, but instead I saw them, those others, how variously and chaotically They Were.” In the end, it feels like a vital reminder that the search for wholeness, for self, is never undertaken in solitude, is always informed by our communities, our ancestors, and the stories we inherit about them—just as much as the future will be informed by the stories we tell about ourselves.