H. S. Cross
A Conversation
Novelist H. S. Cross speaks with L’Esprit about her new novel, Amanda, as well as her creative process and the influences that find their way into her writing. Read a review of Amanda by L’Esprit Editor Dan White here and listen H. S.’ appearance on the journal podcast here.
L’Esprit Literary Review: Tell us a bit about Amanda. How did the book come to be, and what do you want our readers to know about it? Is there any context you’d like to give for the novel?
H. S. Cross: It grew originally out of my previous two novels, Wilberforce and Grievous, which are set in the same time and place though they focus on the school that is a background concern here. In Grievous, Jamie and Marion are married, but the POVs in that book didn’t think much of Marion. I wondered, why did Jamie ever marry her?
From the very first freewrite in Marion’s point-of-view, I realized she was not what I had been led to believe. She was the kind of character who yanks powerfully on the line every time you put pen to paper, no matter how long neglected, the kind of character you don’t find very often. For a long time, I thought that Jamie would be the main character, but after writing scads of material, I gave in and let Marion have the book. I retitled the book and restructured it to begin with her point-of-view. That’s when it started to work.
Another difficulty in writing the book– and I suppose it’s ironic since the given circumstances dictate that they reconcile and marry – was how to overcome their many obstacles, most of them internal. For a long time, it seemed impossible that they could ever stop thinking of each other in the past and meet again in the present. To me it felt just as impossible as seeing my husband again. He died 17 years ago, and his imprisonment in my memory and in the past made it for a long time insurmountable to imagine Jamie and Marion recovering each other.
LLR: We’d love to know a little about yourself and your writing background. How did you come into literature?
HSC: As a reader, and also through the theater. We had books all over my house growing up, and my mom read to us every night. These pictures and stories occupied my imagination and morphed into the stories I would tell myself. Then when I was five, I joined a children’s theater, and these plays and musicals made up the other half of my imaginative life, well into adulthood. I often dragged my brother into performing with me in shows that I wrote, but I also wanted to make books like the ones I loved. Unfortunately, I had slow handwriting, awful spelling, and a huge imagination, so since I didn’t have the ability to write what I wanted, I decided that I wasn’t meant to be a writer and devoted myself to theater. In high school (did you want the long version?), I had a job one summer as an assistant in a bio-chem lab researching earthworm hemoglobin. I loved science, but lab work turned out to be very boring. At the end of the summer, I admitted to myself that I’d been more excited to write stories in my spiral notebook while the gels set than I had been to perform electrophoresis.
The next summer I started writing a long fantasy novel. I got through a whole legal pad, front and back, but was exhausted by the thought of revision, even just spelling and handwriting, since I’d barely covered the exposition. I remembered hearing about these things called word processors and talked to my father about it. We went 50-50 and bought an Apple IIc, amber screen, DOS, big floppy discs. This changed my writing life forever because I could type very fast and correct errors later. My writing pace finally had a chance to outpace my internal critic, at least sometimes. In twelfth grade, I discovered Dorothea Brand and began to get up early before school and write in bed. Despite my commitment, I was a good-girl writer, in other words awful.
The breakthrough came at the end of college when I took a playwriting class with Adrienne Kennedy. She was the hand that flipped the switch and unleashed the wild, not-good-girl inside me. I wrote a play in her class, another one afterwards. I secretly wanted to go to Iowa for MFA, but I never applied there or anywhere because I was sure I could never get in. I worked in the theater, then for an agent, then started teaching K-12, and somewhere in there I accepted that I needed to write the story set in the English boarding school, the one I’d been toying with for almost ten years. This is when my real work began.
LLR: At L’Esprit we like to talk about literary ancestors–those who make up our inheritances as writers, sometimes whether we’d like it or not! Who are some of those figures for you?
HSC: So many, but highlights: there was an encounter with Joyce when I was too young to resist, ditto Dickens, Bronte (all three), later Austen, later yet Nabokov. As a child, I loved anything with orphans, followed by To Kill a Mockingbird (my relationship with books was essentially that I wanted to be the characters, blame theater), Chronicles of Prydain + Middle Earth, and finally Kipling’s Stalky & Co. The last is responsible for the whole English school whatever-you-call it that has dominated my adult imagination. I was struck at age 16 and here we are with Amanda, still adjacent to that world.
LLR: Amanda is, in some sense, “historical fiction”–at least in that it is set in a discrete time and place that is not our own, and this temporal setting is integral to the book’s compositional concerns. Can you talk a little about how you first conceived and then researched this aspect of the project?
HSC: I’m attracted to inter-war Britain (and Europe) for reasons I don’t entirely understand, but I like that it’s a time demonstrably not our own, yet one that feels relatable and modern; that it’s between two catastrophes; that society is changing rapidly and is therefore off-balance; that the exciting history-making events are in the rearview mirror and in the future, so the characters feel their time doesn’t exactly matter. In writing Amanda, I finally had to confront the war (WWI) and Jamie’s direct experience of combat, both of which are far beyond my personal experience. I’d read plenty of WWI material, both fiction and non-fiction, and I continued reading diaries, memoir, and other non-fiction treatments of the war’s effect on English society and England’s literary and educational worlds. A lot of making a period sound authentic has to do with the key detail or word, and those I found mostly by reading in the period.
One reason I wanted to write in period in the first place is that I wanted to deal with spiritual, religious, and emotional territory that I didn’t think could be easily treated in a present-day setting. I wanted a world in which people took for granted belief in God, religious life, and so on. I didn’t want to devote energy to arguing why those things mattered but wanted to be in a time where I could simply assume it, and then get on with letting the story show why and how they matter. Also, I like playing with aspects of identity without having to tick boxes and define people. These characters, for instance, have sexual urges that range through many of today’s categories, but it doesn’t occur to them to define themselves by these feelings or actions. Ditto their religious backgrounds and beliefs, their nationalities, their sex. I find the obsessive defining we do today unbelievably boring, and the past was a place to be more free.
LLR: Along similar lines, a key narrative element to the book is Anglo-Irish tensions in the years immediately following the First World War, when the Home Rule debate was at issue. I thought it was done very well, with a subtlety that both belies its significance to the world and the characters and manages nonetheless to capture it. What drew you to writing a book about this incredibly resonant and complex socio-political atmosphere, and how did you prepare to do so?
HSC: Ireland is an enormous subject, one I could never fully understand let alone portray. I wanted to bring its social and political atmosphere into the story in a way that touched the characters’ lives without taking over the book or, conversely, treating the subject in an ignorant or shallow way. I read about Irish experiences with the War, which were heartbreaking. I also read about women in Ireland, particularly unwed mothers. As well, I had spent time in Cos. Galway and Clare, so that informed the atmosphere. In the end, I had to be extremely sparing with fact and try to filter events through the minds of the characters, both of whom have more pressing concerns than history or politics.
LLR: I’m interested in your use of multiple perspectives in Amanda. We have third-person approaches from both Amanda / Marion and Jamie; the POV techniques, in my read, are similar but not identical. How do you craft this, and why was this the right compositional choice for the novel’s internal goals?
HSC: I love writing in close third person (or free indirect third) because it’s the most intuitive way to channel the mind, attitude, style, gestalt of the character. I find it the most intimate point-of-view, and I can get much closer to the character’s psyche with this tool than if I were writing first person, which always introduces problems of audience and reliability (among other things). With close third, the reader knows the POV is only somewhat reliable, and the clash between points-of-view helps the reader see each more deeply, as well as providing suspense and humor. The dual POV was the only possible choice here because the novel is about their obsession with each other and their internal obstacles. Each POV sheds light on the other, while also letting the reader participate in the most intimate secrets each one keeps and shares. As for any differences between the two POV techniques, I’d say they’re a function of each character’s psyche and voice.
LLR: How would you characterize the elements of violence and trauma in Amanda—personally, one thing I admire about the book is the frankness, the unapologetic nature of that treatment—and the manner in which they’re explored in the text?
HSC: I’d say they’re presented as the characters experience them, and both characters live in worlds that contain violence as a matter of course. Thus, they aren’t especially surprised by it and even accept it as a matter of fact, rather than, for example, hiding it away as a secret no one must ever know. I guess there’s a kind of intimacy with the reader, hearing how the characters talk to themselves about those experiences. They both see these events not as something set apart from life that ought never to be expected, but as integral parts of a life that sometimes brings joy and sometimes brings tribulation. I don’t think they, or the book, believe that there is such a thing as life without some suffering. Thus, the suffering itself is less interesting than what they do with it, and as a result of it.
LLR: What is your creative process like? When you sit down to write, how do you approach your work?
HSC: It’s been different with every book, but with each project, there’s some kind of initial hook, a setting, a question, and I start writing what are essentially free-writes, or sketches. I try to write very fast without editing, resisting as much as possible judging and shaping what’s coming out. This stage of writing often feels like holding your breath under water, and it takes a lot of nerve because you don’t know what you’re doing. But, it’s where wild, intuitive, surprising, out-of-control things happen.
At a certain point, a plot starts to emerge, and I continue the wild writing while also starting to consider shape, structure, framing. This stage, which I call the zero draft (in that it’s a draft before the first draft), went on for a long time with Amanda. I’ve been in a writers’ group for 25 years, and quite a bit of Amanda’s zero draft was written during COVID. We changed our format to meet once or twice a week on zoom for a 40-minute free-write with optional prompts, and then we’d read them to each other. There are so many moments in the novel sparked by a random prompt drawn out of the jar. The process was kind of magical in that I’d sit down not knowing which POV I’d use or what I’d write about, and then here would come a prompt, and things would start to happen. Eventually, when I couldn’t take the anxiety of how much material I’d produced, I started composing the first draft out of the pieces.
LLR: What’s next for you and your work?
HSC: I’ve got two books in the pipeline, both set in the present. If writing is unpredictable, publishing is even more so, and having published three novels in no way makes it easier to sell a fourth, or a fifth. However, I’m reaching an age that forces me to confront my own finitude. How many more years do I have left to write the stories I’ve been given? I want to finish more books, and faster, because you never know when the last day is going to come.
H. S. Cross was raised in Michigan and lived many years in New York City. She has taught grades 2-12, and many of her formative experiences involved being semi-lost in the countrysides of England, Ireland, and Scotland. She currently lives in Savannah, Georgia.
Photo Credit: Ignatius Sridhar is an emerging artist and photographer in Toronto. In his work, Ignatius focuses on the digital arts in the areas of street photography and landscapes. His current project is Found Latin, a study of the language’s influence in modern Rome. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Kitchen Table Quarterly, Burningword Literary Journal, and Sheepshead Review, among others.
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