Interview with Ladette Randolph
By James Crews
Ladette Randolph is the editor-in-chief of Ploughshares, the editor of three literary anthologies, and the author most recently of the memoir, Leaving the Pink House (University of Iowa Press, 2015). She is also the author of the novels Haven’s Wake and the award-winning A Sandhills Ballad as well as the short-story collection This Is Not the Tropics. Randolph is on the faculty of the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson College and is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe grant, a Virginia Faulkner Award, a Best New American Voices citation, and two Nebraska Book Awards. She currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
James Crews spoke with Ladette at the offices of Ploughshares in March, 2015.
James Crews: I actually wanted to start at the end of your memoir, Leaving the Pink House. The book is about your experience with your husband buying this house in the country, and then rehabbing it, and leaving your beloved home in Lincoln, Nebraska to move to the country. So you’re in Boston now, and I’m wondering: have you written about that change as well?
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JC: As a reader of the book, watching you gut this house, and then seeing it takes shape very slowly, knowing that it’s still in the family and being lived in by people you love makes me feel much better.
LR: Yes, because literally, my husband’s blood is in that house. It really was such an effort. We had the help of so much of our family and so many of our friends. It was a real communal project.
JC: I thought that was one of the most moving parts of the memoir, actually, when you talk about how much you had to rely on friends and family. There’s a part where you talk about your husband, Noel, expressing his gratitude for all the help and getting choked up, getting very emotional about it. And it seems that anytime you make a large change like this, you have to call in those favors from friends and family.
LR: We want to believe we’re all so independent and self-sustaining, and it is a humbling thing to have to ask for help. And yet, I think immediately we recognized we were going to need help to finish this.
JC: What do you miss about Nebraska now? You write so lovingly about it as a place and certainly about the homes you made there. You said you still miss that house. What are some of the other things?
LR
JC: I think that’s a wonderful way to describe it. You mentioned how lonely it was growing up there, and that was one of the pieces I remembered from the memoir. You talked about how you and your siblings would often watch for the postman, and he would bring you little gifts like Blackjack gum, things that you didn’t particularly like, but it was attention and a gift from the outside world. It’s during this part that you’re describing how you’re craving that other world, but you don’t necessarily know it exists. It’s just this inchoate feeling you have, and so you say, “The unknown I had discovered is always better than the familiar. Even then, I understood it was a curse to be limited to one life. I craved an experience of other lives, other times, other places.”
LR: I think that’s the job description of a writer right there. Maybe it’s a large percentage of the population of children who also feel that way, I don’t know. It’s not something I’ve asked or researched, but that is certainly the subset from which a writer’s personality is developed, that you know there are other stories, and that you crave knowing those stories and inhabiting those lives. Maybe there are a lot of people who feel that way. It’s sort of the basis of Eastern religions, to escape that oppression of the self and that limited consciousness, but maybe what happens is that the writer achieves some relief from that oppression by writing. Because while we’re in that process of writing, while we’re in what I call the “fictive dream,” we escape the self. And that’s why we keep writing, because of that process, that moment of creation where you’re free.
JC: It’s like escaping the self. I have written fiction in the past, and though I write mostly poetry and nonfiction now, I find that I write a lot about other people. I’m much more interested in other people in some ways. It’s an enlarging of self as well, realizing as you said earlier, that we are not so special, not so important, and we are not the center of the universe. There are all these other people out there living their lives, having their stories, worries, anxieties, and their joys.
LR
JC: Absolutely. You gravitate toward those repositories of human stories. I’ve been doing this assignment for years with my composition students. I ask them to write about some “scar” from their past. It can be a literal scar, some emotional scar. A lot of other teachers say, of course, students love writing about themselves, and that’s true to some degree, but when you ask them to do something like that, especially in writing, ask them to do several drafts, and then ask them those questions you’re talking about, it’s breaking away at that privacy and reticence. I think most people are actually grateful to be heard and listened to and to be able to tell their story, even if it’s difficult.
LR: And with a non-judging listener. I mean, that is not always a safe thing to do when you’re maybe in a group because not everyone is going to be listening with that same kind of curiosity and acceptance. And I certainly can’t say I’m always loving and great, but I think overall, my motives are pretty much just that I’m interested in people and I find them endlessly fascinating. I’ve met occasionally someone who I thought was pretty relentlessly boring, but it’s pretty rare. It really is rare.
JC: It seems in those cases where you meet someone who seems boring that it’s just so much tougher to get under the surface, at least for me, because I’m a relentless griller as well. It’s been my experience too that everyone does have a very interesting story to tell. So you talk about plundering other people’s stories—maybe “plundering” is too strong a word—but in the memoir, unlike your works of fiction, you had to plunder your own life. I’m curious how this project came about and what that experience was like, after writing a short story collection and several novels.
LR
JC: You say you’re not sure if it works, but I think it absolutely does. It’s surprising for me to hear that there were these two very separate, very different pieces that blend together so well. I thought it was seamless the way the book moves back and forth between the past and the present. It’s a brilliant way to structure the memoir and is woven together so well. It tells such a great history. In America, especially, I think we are very obsessed with where we live and our homes.
LR
JC: I like that, though. Having lived in Nebraska myself for four years, when I find myself in more of an urban setting like this, on the East Coast, or when I visit friends on the West Coast, I try to fight it, but there’s a certain apologetic tone when I say, “Well, believe it or not, I lived in Nebraska.” There’s a sort of shock that comes on people’s faces. And I think that surprise is partly what we’re responding to because people don’t associate Nebraska with creativity or vibrancy and with producing artists.
LR: Even though it’s produced all these great artists. And I don’t want to start being that person who has to do a catalogue of all the famous people from Nebraska because I think it’s part of the apologetic tone. And I feel like I’ve staked a claim and just said, this is how it is, and I don’t want to apologize or indulge people’s ignorance in that way (laughing), or their provinciality. And so, it’s a ridiculous tiny fight, and nobody’s even watching it, but it’s a personal thing. I think it’s something I needed to do to grow and to move beyond something.
JC: I said earlier that you write about Nebraska “lovingly,” and I think that is true, but I think there’s also a certain ambivalence—a healthy ambivalence in your writing. You’re honoring this place, and that comes through in the memoir very clearly to me. You’re honoring this place that made you, that shaped you, but at the same time you’re not afraid to tell the truth about how you felt or what life was like in this place. It’s not playing the victim. That’s another form of apology, I think. So it felt very balanced to me. A healthy detachment was coming through when you were writing about the past.
LR: I’m glad to hear you say that because there were a couple of reviews in Nebraska papers—The Daily Nebraskan and even The Lincoln Journal-Star—where there was this sort of statement that I had found only one thing wrong with Nebraska and that was the Blizzard of 1880, or that the book was a celebration of the state, and I thought: Wow, I don’t think so. I think that to love something, you must embrace it for what it is. And Nebraska is not perfect, and it is not an easy place necessarily to grow up. And that history is one of huge potential and disappointment. Living in a little town with empty storefronts, clearly I was living in the midst of a failed history. And I don’t want to pretend like that was all hunky-dory and that everything was easy. So I’m glad that you saw that. Because I was a little surprised when I read those reviews.
JC: I think that with a book that’s not openly critical, and if you’re writing about a state that perhaps doesn’t get much attention, people can twist the words a little and say, you know, you’re writing a “love letter” to the state of Nebraska. But that’s not the case at all.
LR: And there’s a whole culture of people leaving a degraded place or devalued group and making fun or distancing themselves by overly playing up the difference, and I don’t like that either. I actually feel it’s a cheap thing to do. It’s one of my pet peeves. I know that a lot of people really enjoy that and expect it, and I made a very conscious decision that I wasn’t going to do that. To me, it doesn’t feel genuine to throw people under the bus. Even if you didn’t like them. It’s just playing to the prejudices of the dominant culture.
JC: One of the things I really appreciated about this memoir is that it was written with so much self-awareness. I read a lot of memoirs that don’t have that piece of awareness or the willingness to be honest enough to say: “Well, this was my stake in things. I’m not going to go around blaming everyone else for my unhappiness or disappointment or isolation or abuse.” I appreciated that about Leaving the Pink House. The writing seems to me self-aware, honest and compassionate. Because you’re showing compassion for everyone.
LR: Including myself. And there is one section in that scene at the Christ Temple Mission where I finally leave my faith, that I talk about that.
JC: Yes, you do. And that’s a beautiful passage. There’s one piece I wanted to quote from that section. This is after you’ve lost your faith and you’ve had a kind of larger revelation: “‘We’re just people trying to understand our lives, trying to make sense of a world too big to ever understand. We’re just people needing something to get us through from one day to the next.'” That’s so forgiving of yourself, as you say, and also others. You talk about leaving behind this fundamentalist Christian background, which had given so much structure and meaning to your life, and you still say, we all need something. That worked for me for a while, but now it doesn’t.
LR
JC: It seems a very realistic way of looking at it. I didn’t grow up with Christianity or any sort of strong religion at all, but I’ve thought enough about spirituality that it makes sense to me that people would still want to be a part of that fundamentalist world. It’s not a world that I would want to be a part of. But what you’re talking about here, this switch for you, is stepping out again into the unfamiliar, into a new life, and stepping out of that structure into no structure at all.
LR: Even if you’re pushing boundaries, if you’re disagreeing or challenging, there’s a sense of a conversation, a discussion that’s going on. Now what’s the discussion? It’s many things, everything, nothing. It was great discipline in a way. Now I don’t really enjoy arguing that much anymore. I was a great debater and was vicious probably. But a lot of energy went into that. Maybe all of us, in our teens and twenties, are very passionate in that way. It was a great place to have those kinds of discussions. Now I’m not that interested.
JC: Believing in extremism, or fighting against it, takes so much energy either way. So when you’re deciding to go maybe middle of the road, your own direction, that just takes much less energy.
LR: It does. Also, I think we’re so divided and we’re so isolated from one another, that unless you have family members or friends who have beliefs that are different than yours, you don’t have those conversations. There’s not much fruitful discourse in this country about spirituality that I’m around. And that goes back to that inclination to talk to people about their stories. We’re all human. That’s why I adore Chekhov. He’s my great literary hero because even if he wants to be critical of a character, inevitably, as he begins to write about that character, he comes to love them for their humanness. Not in spite of their flaws, but for their flaws. That goodness comes through. That’s what saves me. I can still remain open to the person who seems so hateful and seems so incomprehensible to me. Then I think: what’s going on, what’s happened, what is it about what I feel is so obvious that is so frightening to this person? Trying to get behind that rhetoric is important.
JC: I think it is, and what I find in your fiction and in the memoir is that notion of looking for stories, but also with a capacity for empathy. If you can imagine yourself into the life of someone else, you need never hate them or reject them because you feel what they feel.
LR: And that’s why Willa Cather spoke of fiction in almost spiritual terms: for her it really was her belief and her church. The longer you do this, the longer you are someone who dwells very deeply and closely with the stories of characters who come to you—and you have no idea where they’re coming from—the more you do feel that you’re doing something very powerful and humbling. You’re in the presence of something that’s much bigger than you.
