An interview with the 2008 Sar
gent Prize Winner Hannah Tinti
Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts and is the author of a short-story collection, Animal Crackers. Her work has appeared in publications including Story, Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review and Best American Mystery Stories 2003. She earned her M.A. from New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program and has been awarded residency fellowships from, among others, the New York State Writers Institute. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine.
Hannah was interviewed in October 2008 at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction by its director, Noreen Tomassi.
Her debut novel, The Good Thief, tells the story of the twelve year-old orphan, Ren, who is missing his left hand. He was abandoned as an infant at Saint Anthony’s Orphanage and remains there until a young man named Benjamin Nab appears, claiming to be his long-lost brother. Benjamin’s convincing tale of how Ren lost his hand and his parents persuades the monks at the orphanage to release the boy. Benjamin introduces Ren to a hardscrabble world filled with outrageous scam artists, grave robbers, and petty thieves. As Ren begins to find clues to his hidden parentage he comes to suspect that Benjamin not only holds the key to his future, but to his past as well.
The Good Thief is in some ways a very dark novel, steeped in the grotesque and full of murder and mayhem, but the tone is often playful and full of humor. What made you decide to write this particular kind of a novel in this particular way?
I grew up in Salem so this kind of darkness, the world of the witch trials, was very much a part of my growing up. I even played in graveyards. One of my first jobs was working at the Witch Dungeon, a museum filled with torture devices used on witches. So my book doesn’t feel that dark or morbid to me. I chose to write in a humorous tone because I find it very difficult to read a novel that is all dark—that can be brutal to the reader—and I wanted to write the kind of book that I would want to read, something that would have thrills and would explore the dark side of experience, but also have some humor and an element of hope. I wanted to write something that would be an adventure tale.
You’re very interested in fathers and sons and mothers and sons in the book.
In most books where children are the protagonists, parents have to leave for anything exciting to happen. I knew, once I wrote the first chapter of The Good Thief, that Ren had to be an orphan. I discovered Benjamin’s relation to Ren as I wrote the book—so I didn’t set out to write about fathers and sons. It just happened. I also loved the fact that Benjamin’s partner in crime, Tom, takes on Ren’s twin friends from the orphanage part way through. It’s an honorable thing and helps save him in the end.
As a mother figure, Mrs. Sands is not anywhere near what Ren wanted or expected, but they have this bond. Ren needed someone, a mother of some kind, and I knew the men were not enough. Some people have said this is a “boy’s book”, but the women do all the work and are the ones that make things happen. From Sister Agnes to Mrs. Sands to Jenny the harelip, who pulls the trigger when no one else will.
Can you talk about the many damaged characters in the book?
The first section of the book I wrote was the graveyard scene. I described Ren holding the horse’s reins and his breath clouding in the air, but when I tried to say what he was doing with his other hand, I couldn’t come up with anything. Then, I realized he didn’t have another hand. So his deformity came out of the ether. I didn’t purposely set any of these physically damaged people into the story, they just evolved as I was writing. I think it relates to the idea of people wearing their hurts on the outside.
But Ren sees all these people beyond their deformity, doesn’t he?
Yes. In that sense there are elements of myself in Ren. I’ve always been able to relate to and become friends with all sorts of strange people. I think I put them at ease, or maybe, underneath it all, I’m a little strange myself. Ren is a listener and he observes others from a distance. It isn’t really until the middle of the book that he begins taking responsibility and making decisions for himself.
What were your influences outside of particular books or writers?
Movies, I love good movies. When I was growing up, my brother and sisters and I would make our own super8 movies, a lot of it based on our excitement about “Star Wars.” We’d use these old fencing swords, then draw on the film with magic markers to create the lasers.
Also, my mother was a librarian at the Brookline Public Library and ingrained the habit of reading in all of us. We’d read every night, sometimes aloud. And sometimes we’d eat together, each having our own book at the table. That was a treat, a special night, when we could all bring our books to the dinner table!
What were some of books that shaped you as a writer?
Danny, the Champion of the World and all the Roald Dahl books had an impact on me. He was one of my favorites, growing up. I also read Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as all those fairy tale books by color—The Red Fairy Tale Book, The Green, The Blue. And I loved the Wrinkle in Time series by Madeleine L’Engle and Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. But my favorite book, hands down, was Jane Eyre.
Of course, when you’re writing you don’t always realize what your influences are or what you’re writing about; your unconscious is tying the threads together. In this book, I knew I wanted to explore the concept of resurrection in various ways, not only in the religious sense, but also in the physical sense. I was also thinking about the reinvention of the self through story-telling. Benjamin Nab tells story after story and each story is a reimagining of who he is and who Ren is and what their situation is. He teaches Ren how to tell a story, and in the end Ren is able to tell a story that saves his life and turns out to be true. He stumbles on the truth through lies.
Do you think we tell stories to save our lives?
I think so. I think we lie constantly, lots of little lies, making our way through the world. We have to lie to ourselves sometimes to get from one place to another. We have to lie to other people to alter how they look at us. All that lying is not necessarily bad. There are elements of goodness in moments of badness, in sins.
Can you talk more about your writing process?
I don’t outline, I don’t do note cards. I try to follow my intuition. The only way I can describe it is as a divining rod. I just sit and try to write and let things come. I don’t realize what I’m doing until after the words are on the page, and then I go back and edit and try to make things make more sense.
I saw an interview with John Irving and he said he thinks of the ends of his books first, then he spends a year plotting, and then writes. But I creep along wondering do I turn here? Do I open this door?
When I was a little girl, I once went net-casting on a fishing boat. They throw a net overboard, then drag it a hundred yards, then pull up whatever they catch into a big tank onboard, and you toss things over that you don’t want, and keep the fish that you do. I remember that the water seemed so clear and empty, but when they pulled the net on board, it was full of the weirdest things I’d ever seen. Bizarre creatures from the bottom of the sea. Novels seem to be like this—casting a net through a writers’ subconscious and pulling the unexpected into the light.
So you don’t use a map of any kind—written or not? Did you start with an idea or with a character or did you start it as a story that then evolved?
The idea for this book started with the words “Resurrection Men.” A friend of mine had given me a book called Forgotten English by Jeffrey Kacirk, about English words and expressions that have fallen out of use. “Resurrection Men” are thieves who dig up bodies and sell them to medical schools. I was intrigued, because these men were doing the worst possible thing, but ultimately, it led to the greater good. I was interested in that moral murkiness, so I began with a sketch of a scene in a graveyard, that now falls in the center of the book, where Benjamin, Ren and Tom resurrect Dolly. Then I wrote the chapter in which Dolly and Ren become friends, and then I went back and wrote the beginning, knowing I had to get to that scene in the graveyard. And then I wrote the end. So I started with this idea and thinking about resurrection—as someone who grew up Catholic and knew it as the central idea of Catholicism.
In writing that first graveyard scene, I asked myself what was the weirdest thing that could happen? I wondered if one of the corpses sat up, what Ren’s reaction would be, and so I woke Dolly up, resurrected him and the book evolved from there.
What do you think of the idea that people graduate from writing short stories to writing novels—a bit of an irritating idea, but can you respond to that?
As editor of One Story, I consider stories as completely separate works of art. That’s our format and the reason why we publish them individually rather than in an anthology. Our readers can sit down and have a complete artistic experience in a very short period of time.
So of course I don’t feel writers graduate to writing novels. The only reason I wrote The Good Thief as a novel was because I knew, after sketching out that first scene, that it wasn’t a short story. At the time, that knowledge filled me with dread and trepidation. I’m a very slow writer; it often takes me six months to write a short story. The idea of devoting years and years of my life to this was daunting.
What do mean by saying you’re a slow writer? Are you revising and fine-tuning as you write?
It took me six years to write The Good Thief. I write slowly—a page a day maybe—and I revise as I write. Perhaps this is because I’ve done so much work as an editor—at Boston Review, then Atlantic Monthly, then at an agency, Writers House, for three years going through manuscripts, then editor of Washington Square magazine at NYU and then starting One Story where I’ve been for six years.
Will you continue to work as an editor?
Yes, working as an editor gives me a lot of pleasure. I’ve honed the skill pretty well and I enjoy working with an author to bring something to another level. If I see a story that’s not done but has something really spectacular in it, I’ll work with the writer through several drafts. My goal is to help them say what they are trying to say.
But it’s more difficult with a novel isn’t it, which can say many things at once? What if someone asked you, for example, what you wanted to say in The Good Thief?
Yes, it’s harder with a novel. I don’t know if I could answer that question myself. There were so many things I was trying to say about loss, story-telling, loneliness, friendship and family. I also wanted to explore death in a different, unconventional way, because it’s a topic most people are concerned with but block out of their lives. I try to deal with my own fears, particularly about death, by writing.
So what did this book teach you?
So many things—it’s hard to answer. One is that it is very important to make connections to other people, even though those connections are very hard to make.
Has anything really struck you in the feedback of readers?
It’s been fun to meet readers on the book tour. Many people have said that The Good Thief brought them back to that feeling they’d had as an early reader, of falling into a book. It’s exciting to hear, because that’s the kind of novel I wanted to write.
At every event I’ve done for The Good Thief, I’ve given a wishing stone away. Ren’s wishing stone is an important part of the novel, so passing one to a reader feels like I’m making a real connection. It also helps me explain the book. At a recent event in Connecticut, the woman who got the stone at the reading wrote to me through my website, and she sent me a wishing stone she’d found herself, on a beach in Rhode Island. That was such a nice thing. It surprised me and made me very happy.
Do you feel connected to a community of writers here in NYC?
Yes, very much so. It’s difficult and lonely to work as a writer. Writing this book, I was in a hole, going to these dark places, and barely able to communicate with other people. So for me, being involved with writers as editor of One Story was my tie to the outside world. I’ve met so many wonderful authors through the magazine, not only here but also in other parts of the world, and formed great friendships. When I’ve had problems with my own work, I’ve read sections to friends and that’s helped me get from one place to another. I still meet and exchange work with some of the writers I met at the MFA program at NYU. I went to that program to get a community and it truly gave me that.
Did you have a mentor at NYU?
Different professors—A.M. Homes and Dani Shapiro, in particular, helped me to become a better writer. E.L. Doctorow was my thesis advisor, and one of the things he said that helped me write The Good Thief was, "When working on a historical novel, don’t do any research. We’ve all seen enough movies to fake a specific time period. Especially in the first draft, let the characters drive the story. Then, go back and do the research, add enough details to make it believable, but don’t let it take over.”
I did in the end do some research. I read old newspapers, as well as Sarah Wise’s The Italian Boy and Wendy Moore’s book The Knife Man—but that advice was invaluable.
Can you tell us about your editor and agent and how the book came to press?
The magazine Story and its editor Lois Rosenthal published my very first story. She said that when I was ready to look for an agent, I should think about sending something to Nicole Aragi. So years passed and when I had a manuscript polished and ready, I sent it to Nicole. She called me and asked to meet. I had the collection, Animal Crackers, and two chapters of The Good Thief at that time. Later, Nicole admitted she wanted to meet before agreeing to represent me, because after reading my stories, she wanted to make sure I wasn’t crazy. We laugh about it now. She is a marvelous agent, the best in the business.
I was very lucky to have the book placed with Susan Kamil at Dial Press. Susan’s a great editor. She cooks me dinner and we sit down at her kitchen table and go over things page by page. She treats us, the Dial authors, like her kids. It feels like family at Dial.
What next?
I can’t say. I was revising this book right up to the moment we went to press. They were ripping the manuscript from my hands. I have a few ideas that may explore another part of this alternate New England that I’ve created, but I don’t have enough written to announce what it will be, just yet.
