Prompt to Page, Ep. 52: Mary Anna Evans === Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prompt to Page podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet, Carrie Green. Each episode we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Mary Anna Evans. Mary Anna Evans is an award-winning author with a PhD in English literature, a handy background for writing The Dark Library, the story of a woman menaced by her dead father, a literature professor whose rare book collection holds the secret to escaping him. Her crime fiction has earned recognition including two Oklahoma Book awards, the Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award, the Mississippi Author Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, and three Florida Book Awards bronze medals. In addition to writing crime fiction, she writes about [00:01:00] crime fiction as evidenced by the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity and HRF Keating Award-nominated Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie, co-edited with JC Bernthal. Bloomsbury will publish her Agatha Christie and the 20th Century Woman: Rewriting Female Justice in 2027. Welcome, Mary Anna, and thanks for joining us. Mary Anna: Thanks for inviting me. It's good to be here. Carrie: And so I should also maybe mention that you joined us on the other library podcast Books and Bites. Mary Anna: mm-hmm. Carrie: We were discussing your novel, The Dark Library. So I would encourage anyone who hasn't listened to that to check that out as well. Mary Anna: Yes, please do. Carrie: As your bio notes you not only write crime fiction, you write about crime fiction. Mary Anna: It's very meta. [Laughter] Carrie: Yes. So I was just wondering, what you have learned [00:02:00] from the authors that you write about? Mary Anna: Oh, wow. I write mostly about Agatha Christie, also, you know, other female writers, other 20th century writers. Because I try to place her among not just crime writers of the era, but because she definitely read the Modernists and she wrote outside the crime fiction genre and it's very clear she read Virginia Woolf. It's really interesting to put her in the context of her time. But then in the greater scheme of things, you know, I learned plot from Christie. I learned atmosphere and setting from Poe. And I learned--now I've lost the thread. I'm sorry. [Both laugh] Carrie: That's okay. Mary Anna: I learned characterization from so many, but I'm very inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle because Sherlock is such a durable character. He keeps going, we keep interpreting in different ways. He's from a different time. Arthur Conan Doyle was writing in a different style and [00:03:00] era from modern crime fiction. But you know, there are multiple Sherlock adaptations coming out this year. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Mary Anna: And so I'm inspired by that. I'd like to write characters that live that long. Carrie: Yeah, yeah. Mary Anna: That will Carrie: absolutely Mary Anna: do that. Yeah. Carrie: Do you ever have any desire to write an adaptation of Sherlock? Mary Anna: Not Sherlock. I have a, I'd love to write a Christie continuation. Carrie: Oh, okay. Mary Anna: I don't know. You know, I've got to talk to my agent about how one approaches that, but there are people who do it and I've been immersed in her work since 2018, and I have ideas. Carrie: Oh, well that's intriguing. Look forward to that. So you also have a science and engineering background? Mary Anna: I do. Carrie: Which sometimes shows up in your work. What advice would you give to writers who want to draw on their own expertise in their work? Mary Anna: Well, I actually think it's critical to draw on, [00:04:00] you know, your own expertise, yes, but also your own experience. I don't think write what you know means that I have to write about an engineer just because I studied engineering or an English professor or whatever, I think that we have a wide experience far beyond our training and job. I hunted arrowheads with my mother all through my childhood and wound up writing about an archeologist. So my advice always is to, you know, go out and live your life. It's very valuable to study writing. I did everything backwards. I taught myself to do what I do. I wrote and published six books and then went back and got an MFA in creative writing and got the PhD in English. Because I, the engineer in me, is an analytical sort, and so I wanted to learn how I do what I do and learn how other people do it so that I can improve. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Mary Anna: So all of that is to say that, you know, writing is that interesting thing where all experience is useful and you never know when it's gonna crop [00:05:00] up in a book. Carrie: And I mean, you mentioned why you wanted to go back and get your MFA after already publishing. What benefits did you gain, I guess, from getting that MFA? Mary Anna: You know, well, my late father always said, no education is ever wasted. And that has always been my experience. So I went to deepen my approach to fiction, to learn techniques. I went to a literary program even though I was publishing mostly genre fiction because I wanted to, you know, I've always appreciated beautiful language and, you know, important themes and all the things that go with great literature. So, I've always tried to incorporate it into my genre fiction, and so why not go learn more is always the thing. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Mary Anna: And so I got all of that, but then you get more than you expect because I wasn't even aware that creative nonfiction was a thing and I wasn't, I was only vaguely aware that you could say, write memoir that wasn't a full-on [00:06:00] autobiography. You could, write an essay about a moment in your life. And so I was so taken with creative nonfiction that instead of writing literary novel I thought would be my thesis, I wrote a collection of essays drawing on my experience of being a woman in science in the eighties. Carrie: Oh wow. Mary Anna: So I, you know, and then a number of those have been published, so it's just opened a new door, which is what you hope for education. I also was not aware of flash fiction and nonfiction, which had sort of come up. I think it sort of really emerged as a big thing in the early aughts. And I think with cell phones, because you can read something short right there while you're waiting in line. And so I wrote and published several fiction and nonfiction pieces that were just tiny little things. And it's a whole different art form. It's akin to poetry where there's just this one feeling that you wanna beam into somebody else's head, so, Carrie: mm-hmm. Mary Anna: And my first mystery [00:07:00] I turned in after the MFA, my editor said, well, you really kicked it up a notch, so Carrie: Oh, wow. Mary Anna: that's what I was going for. [Laughter] Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. That's great. So do you use writing prompts in your own writing? Mary Anna: You know, for myself it's, I probably do, but it's a little more vague than what I would when I was teaching where you formally give a prompt, ask somebody to do it. But I have instinctively always set myself goals intended to explore. I think it's very valuable to explore one technique or one approach, and so way back when, you know, when I was in my twenties and I was learning to write short stories, I realized that I was very weak in dialogue. And so I set out to write a short story that was all dialogue. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Mary Anna: So it is that I guess I gave myself a prompt, but at that point in my life, I wouldn't have been able to tell you what a prompt was. Carrie: Right. Mary Anna: So in my teaching, I gave a lot of prompts and [00:08:00] always though, you know, you've got them all sitting out there and I never wanted to say, okay, you know, write 500 words. Because that terror of the blank page and the ticking clock, you know, that's not good for your creativity. And so I would always give a prompt or three prompts maybe. The fourth prompt would be, or if you're really feeling something, it's a creative writing class, I'm not gonna tell you what to do. So, Carrie: yeah. Mary Anna: But I do think it's valuable to free up the mind from that, trying to decide what I'm gonna do right now. Carrie: Right. Yeah. Especially if that clock is ticking and you don't have anything in mind. Mary Anna: I would not, and the advantage of getting the MFA is I've sat in that seat. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Mary Anna: And I would never have wanted to be in that kind of pressure. And then also I saw the value of it in the first flash piece that I published began as an in-class writing assignment. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Mary Anna: You know, and [00:09:00] it was a very, very vague prompt, something like one character's watching another character do something. And I had an idea and developed it, and it, you know, it was published in a little literary journal, not long after that. Carrie: Yeah. So you never know. Mary Anna: Yeah, I always tell. And then I, you know, I always, and this was different from some programs, is I always had my students submit early in their intro class, one of their assignments was submit something, you know? And I would guide them through, so part of it was, how do you identify a market that you might be interested in or that might be interested in you? And so we went through sort of the professionalism part of what you do with your stories once you write it. And then you submit it. And I helped them find things that would probably be approachable for young writers, and quite a number of them published something from their intro class. Carrie: That's great. Yeah. Do you do much submitting yourself to smaller markets these days, or are you focused mainly on [00:10:00] novels? Mary Anna: Right now mostly novels. It's sort of, my writing life kind of ebbs and flows in that way. I did a lot of submitting to small markets shortly after the MFA because I had all these things I'd written, I wanted to see them out there. And it was also, I had moved from the MFA into teaching and so I was able to look for things for my students, you know, know what was out there. And so during that time I submitted to a lot to small markets. I started doing the academic research into Agatha Christie in 2018 and started pursuing the PhD. So I always had my novels and something else going on. So before it was my novels and my literary short stories, and then it shifted into my novels and my academic work, so I would see stuff. Carrie: Yeah. So I kind of got us off the topic of prompts a little bit. Do you wanna share some of your favorite ones? Mary Anna: Yeah, well there's one, it's a prompt that [00:11:00] leads into an exercise, so I'll just kind of talk people through it because it is something you can do alone at home, but there's some reward in doing it in a classroom situation because you get to share with others. But I find that it, one of the things, you know, when you kind of reach an intermediate level or you're trying to, maybe you have your story down, but the creating the world is hard because you want the reader to feel like they know where your characters are, but you don't want to over talk, over describe. And I think those of us that, you know, were children with big vocabularies can over describe. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Mary Anna: And so the prompt I would give is, I would tell people to imagine themselves in the setting of their story, or if they're not working on something right now, pick a real place that you would like to make the reader feel like they're there. So I give them a [00:12:00] minute to picture the place and really be there. And then I say, okay, I want a list of 15 words that you would use to describe the place. And I gave, I did this prompt so much that I learned that I had to tell people, I mean, really a list of individual words. Because people would be trying to craft 15 word sentences or something. Just a list. Don't overthink it. And this is one time when I would give them a short time for their prompt because I didn't want them to worry about it. Just 15 words to describe, and then we'd look at the words. And then again, without giving them a lot of time to think, I'd say, okay, do you remember haiku from elementary school? You know, five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. Haiku is a lot more than that in Japanese culture. So we're talking American elementary school haiku. But there is a relationship even there to what we're trying to do because the Japanese tradition of haiku is very much inputting you in a place [00:13:00] and very tactile and you know, not cerebral, just to physically be there. So I would show, and then this is where it would turn into more of an exercise. I'd show them some classic Japanese haiku, some modern American haiku, and then I'd say, okay, set your list aside and write a haiku set in the place that you imagined, and I said, and if you're fast do two. You know, I'd give them a reasonable amount of time, but again, I didn't want them to overthink it. And so then I'd have everybody read because it's so short everybody can read if you've got a reasonably sized class. And they would be good and people would be, I mean, it's instant gratification. And this is an exercise and a prompt you can do with non-writers. So I used to talk about writing to science students. And so we would do the setting haiku exercise. Then I'd say, okay, go back and pull out your list. Did you use any of the words? And it would vary, but I said, it's impossible that you use them all because I made you write down too many. You had to [00:14:00] pick and choose, and some people don't use any of them, you know? And I said, then we looked at them, I said, are they all adjectives? Probably, or, you know, pretty good chance. And so we talked about varying parts of speech. You know, it doesn't have to be an adjective for you to feel it. A very specific noun will do that for you. And so from their lists and their poems, we were able to spin out into ways to use language economically and beautifully. Carrie: Yeah, that sounds like a great prompt. Now, was this in a, like a general creative writing class, or was it in fiction or, I'm just curious what the genre was? Mary Anna: Anything, because Carrie: anything, yeah. Mary Anna: In nonfiction you have to, you know, you want people to feel like they're there. Literary fiction, you want people to feel like they're there. It's anything, you know, anything except for, you know, science projects or academic prose. You know, if it's a creative [00:15:00] work and you wanna reach the person on the other side of your words, you don't really want them to be floating in space unless they are, and again, you still need to describe it. [Laughter] Carrie: Yeah, no, no. I was just curious what kind of class it was in that you were doing the prompt, just because I think it's interesting that you're using you know, as a poet, I think it's interesting that you're using such a compressed form to teach that about setting. Mary Anna: Yeah. And that, you know, and going back to what I got from my MFA, discovering flash fiction gave me that access to the value of a compressed form. Stephen King talks about putter-inners and taker-outers. And some people it all goes on the page and some people are very Hemingway-like and so the idea of choosing specific words that give enough Carrie: mm-hmm. Mary Anna: Of a sense of what you want to [00:16:00] convey is valuable to both. Carrie: Right. Right. Mary Anna: The putter-inners figure out what to take out and it helps taker-outers figure out where what they're missing. Carrie: Yeah. And you said you used to do it with science students as well. How was, what was their reaction to it? Mary Anna: Oh, it was great. I had a teacher, I made a friend, you know, on campus who was in the architecture program, environmental architecture. And so when I was working as an engineer, most of my work was as an environmental engineer. And so he would have me come in and talk about how writing had been valuable to my career. And talk about how, you know, for their, they would do one big project a semester. It was their capstone, and they would have to go to a site, come up with the project, and then present it. I said, you have to write proposals. You have to make presentations. If you can emotionally reach the people that you're trying to reach it's not cheating, you know. So we [00:17:00] talked about the value of it, and then we would do the exercise and, you know, they all came away with creative work immediately, you know, so. Carrie: Wow. Mary Anna: There's a lot of instant gratification and affirmation. You know? We're all artists and we all speak. We, you know, it's good to think about the clarity of what we say. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. I might, I'm gonna try that myself. Mary Anna: Okay. [Laughter] Carrie: So do you have any final writing tips that you'd like to give our listeners? Mary Anna: Well, a couple. The first thing I say in every class, and so people who have me multiple times heard it multiple times 'cause reinforcement is good, is that if I just gave you four words and you went home and we never saw each other again, they would be, "make them feel something." And that's, particularly for a poet, you know what I'm saying is that, you know, the whole point of telling a story, writing a poem, the whole point of art really is to convey feelings to another human being [00:18:00] who's not sitting there with you. And so I think that it's critical. And so make them feel something is something that I talk about with my students a lot. And then another thing that came out in a recent podcast with somebody else is related, I think for the writer, is three words. Don't be afraid. It, you know, but the world will not end if you write something and you don't like it, you know, you can throw it away. There's, you have more in your head, it's all fine. And if you're not afraid, then you're free to say what you really had to say. Carrie: Right. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your prompt and your tips. We really appreciate it. Mary Anna: I enjoyed it. Thanks for inviting me. Carrie: Thank you for listening to Prompt to Page. To learn more about the Jessamine County Public Library, visit jesspublib.org. [00:19:00] Find the Carnegie Center for Literacy and learning at carnegiecenterlex.org. Our music is by Archipelago, an all instrumental musical collaboration between three Lexington-based university professors. Find out more about Archipelago: Songs from Quarantine volumes one and two, at the links on our podcast website.