Fanny Howe & Bill Corbett Talk Fiction & Poetry at Literary Hub

A longtime Boston resident (and recent Brooklyn transplant), Bill Corbett is the publisher behind Pressed Wafer. In this Literary Hub interview, he visits Fanny Howe in her Cambridge "brick womb" to discuss her poetry, fiction, and family.

To begin the interview that follows, I came up from Brooklyn, where after 50 years in Boston I now live, to Cambridge, meeting Fanny Howe at her apartment building off Cambridge Common. After teaching for many years in California Fanny returned to Cambridge. She named her new apartment “the brick womb.” From there we walked to her office in the former Radcliffe College Bunting Quad. Her apartment and office are ten minutes by foot from the Highland Street house in which she grew up.

Fanny’s office is on the first floor and looks out on lawn crossed by sidewalks, the backs of building and several parking spaces. She’s not there for the view. The single room has no personality—this is an office for work. There is a large standing bookcase filled with books she has carried with her and read many times, books that she pulled from the shelves to correctly quote a line or two. She sat in the room’s only armchair. I sat in her office chair across from her. On her desk three oranges and a deck of yellow Post-its lit up the drab, early March afternoon and there sat her computer attached to a printer. Off to the side stood a file cabinet. The room’s one unusual feature was the stacks of notebooks on a table. These were in the process of being catalogued. Fanny prefers cheap notebooks, ring bound or old-fashioned composition books easy to fit in coat pocket or carry all. Those on the table had known hard use.

At the first interview I placed my cell phone, set to record, on the hassock between us. We spoke for over three hours and the machine worked fine. On the second day, unbeknownst to us, it picked up only the first fifteen or so minutes of our talk. I went to Grafton Street, our Cambridge local, ordered a stiff drink and wrote down as much as I could recover of what Fanny had said. A few weeks later in Manhattan I attended a seminar Fanny gave titled “Acts of Mercy” at the CUNY Graduate Center on Madison Avenue at 34th Street. Some of what follows came from that afternoon during which Fanny showed two of the short films she has recently worked on.

Continue at Literary Hub.