How Anne Germanacos Became a Writer

As writers, we live double lives: lived once in the world of others, and again, in the quiet of our own minds. It takes a certain amount of will and courage to leave with regularity the circle of humanity in order to enact a kind of theft, which is one aspect of what the writing life seems to be.

Anne Germanacos is the author of the short story collection In the Time of Girls (BOA Editions). Born in San Francisco, she has lived in Greece for over thirty years. Together with her husband, Nick Germanacos, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Studies Program on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete, and taught writing, literature, and Modern Greek. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in over eighty literary reviews and anthologies, including Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2009. She and her husband have four children and five grandchildren. They live on Crete and in San Francisco.

Web page: http://www.annegermanacos.com/

Update June 13-14, 2012: Celebrating Freshly Pressed with a book giveaway! Click here for a chance to win a signed copy of Anne’s book.

Read more by and about Anne:

Book: In the Time of the Girls
Short Story: “Killing the Husband”
Interview: A Writer’s Dictionary
Short Story: “Whore of Babel”
Book Review at Blackbird
Flashes: “Drops (rain, lemon, tear) Cough!”

How Anne Germanacos Became a Writer

This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions. Thanks to Donna Miscolta for recommending Anne, and thanks to Anne for saying yes!

1.  Why did you want to become a writer?

Writing brought the world into a different focus while conferring something that felt like a secret, additional self.

The desire began with this revelation of clarity, difference, separateness and power. (I’m sure my receptivity to the revelation was encouraged by need.)

Writing offered another body (in words) that could hold the many shifting parts, adding new ones when they occurred. It allowed me to go my own way, holding out the possibility even in situations that required me to go against my own grain.

2.  How did you go about becoming a writer?

I became a writer by writing every day, creating, rewriting, sometimes destroying in order to make space for something new.

As writers, we live double lives: lived once in the world of others, and again, in the quiet of our own minds. It takes a certain amount of will and courage to leave with regularity the circle of humanity in order to enact a kind of theft, which is one aspect of what the writing life seems to be.

If we steal in the right way—from ourselves and the world—we may fashion (and be rewarded with) a gift. I love the ecology of writing, the way it turns nothing into something, generally without too much damage to the environment.

Painting by Belinda Bryce

My writing is in constant (often unconscious) conversation with the books I read. Writing for many years without an audience, reading gave me a sense of the human community we’re all a part of, and written companions. It made me want to write something worthy of that conversation.

More than anything, though, it’s likely I became a writer by a certain act of daring: I left home at seventeen to live in another country, married and had children young, taught, and wrote. I’m sure it was the desire to be a writer—to make a life that would nourish and replenish me as a writer—that allowed me to make such a bold decision. Being in love didn’t hurt, either.

3.  Who helped you along the way, and how?

When I was 12, a teacher encouraged me to write daily, and because I was a little in love with him, I did. The next teacher who responded to my writing returned my love, and so we’ve been married for many years. Having someone by my side who never faltered in supporting my desire to write helped tremendously to create, if not smooth, the path. (There is no smooth path to becoming a writer.)

Painting by Belinda Bryce

My children required me to be strong enough to be both a mother and a writer. In order to teach, I had to read carefully and find ways of conveying a passion for language to young people who were sometimes more interested in other endeavors. Sometimes, though, the intensity of their focus made class worthy of a story!

Graduate school gave me fine teachers, a sympathetic audience and wonderful, supportive writing friends. This community was both preparation for and launch toward the book that would garner a small audience.

4.  Can you tell me about a writer or artist whose biography inspires you?

Rather than looking to a particular writer or artist’s biography, I take inspiration from any life along the way and hold my life against any number of lives, measuring, to know how far I have to go, as a person first, always, because without the primacy of the life—both lived and imagined—there’s no story.

I recently read a biography of the artist Joan Mitchell and was fascinated by the descriptions of the way she saw—she had an eidetic memory and synesthesia, to boot! It sometimes helps me to understand the way I move through space and time, trying to make something of it, by stepping away from words toward another medium, and one I don’t work in.

I recently read a biography of the artist Joan Mitchell and was fascinated by the descriptions of the way she saw—she had an eidetic memory and synesthesia, to boot!

I admire the work of Homer, Padgett Powell, WG Sebald, Geoff Dyer, Isaac Babel. Grace Paley, Adam Phillips, Anne Carson. David Markson, David Malouf. Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson. I could go on.

The work they produced against their days helps sustain me—as a human being and a writer. Also, some of these writers have created works that seem to lend validity to certain less conventional aspects of my own writing.

I know that doesn’t exactly answer the question. I guess I’m resistant!

5.  What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer?

Minimize doubt. Find a way—a method, a trick, a psychological tic to dissolve doubt’s potency. You will most likely always be working alongside it, so best to have some useful way of repelling it. I write against it, a little like diving into a cold pool of water—scary but invigorating. Generally, it does the trick. But if that doesn’t work, get up and do something else. Forget about it for a while.

Be gentle with yourself—you will find so many reasons not to be. But it’s most likely your kindness toward yourself (I’m not saying self-indulgence) that will help you alongside the rigors of constant, daily writing.

I can’t speak to a practice that is anything less than daily. It’s the only one I know, so it’s the one I peddle.

By writing daily, you make it your life.

And one more thing: publication is the icing on the cake. The act of writing itself gives you a way to be in the world and is its own reward. Publication just makes it okay, finally, to actually mention that you’re a writer.