Flash Focus: FlashFiction.Net Interviews Mary Tabor, Modern Day Fairy Tale Maker

[Editor's Note: Read Anne's review of Mary's (Re) Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story here.]

Mary L. Tabor was a high school English teacher who bridged the gap to the business world, rising on the corporate ladder while also raising two children. She then made a transition from the business world to the creative world, leaving her corporate job when she was 50 to earn the MFA degree in Creative Writing. Her book The Woman Who Never Cooked won Mid-List Press's First Series Award. Mary's experience spans the worlds of journalism, business, education and fiction writing. Her fiction and essays have appeared recently in the anthology Electric Grace, Paycock Press, The Missouri Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Image, the Mid-American Review, River City, Chelsea, Hayden's Ferry Review, American Literary Review and elsewhere.She was a visiting writer at University of Missouri in Columbia (academic year 2006-07), teaches fiction writing at George Washington University, the Smithsonian's Campus-on-the-Mall, and works with the DC library to reach less-privileged populations on how to begin writing about family, personal history and writing a story--the stuff of life. She's been interviewed on XM Satellite Radio and Pacifica Radio to discuss Joyce, Shakespeare and others and her lifelong career-journey. She is a Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellow.

(Re) Making Love: Sex After Sixty began as a blog. Did you have difficulty writing a book within the constraints of an online viewing audience?

Yes and no: I have to admit to a certain thrill from the direct interplay with readers. When I wrote and readers commented, I was deeply encouraged. I work in solitude and my work strikes some as quirky, even elusive. So, the response from readers who were moved gave me courage. But I feared posting. Writing from the heart--and I don't mean the heart icon, but rather writing without fear--strikes me as aggressive. In my real life that is not one of my qualities. But then writing is my real life.

Did you receive any negative feedback or constructive criticism from fans as they read the blog? If so, did you let it influence your writing?

Readers told me I was making mistakes in my life, questioned what they saw as too much forgiveness, especially for the man named "m." and many along with me about "D." But I saw this as concern for my well-being. I was deeply touched. I have been on a journey of discovery while writing this book and my readers have been part and parcel of that journey that continues. I wish often that I were still writing the book so that I could hear them. I am in the debt of all those who took the time to comment.

Okay, sometimes readers were confused about a metaphor. I don't think I'm the easiest writer to read. I say in one place that Paris is not on any map. I stand by that one. But readers argued about what I meant. I loved that.

Have you thought about your next project?

Yes. I wrote and posted a lyric essay entitled "Absent" on the blog after the book (Re) Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story was finished. The new book is in my head now. I am writing about the Russian immigrant experience of my family on my father's side and my mother's side, about the ways in which we are repeating history by creating our own diaspora from the diaspora that was imposed on us by anti-Semitism. I am both horrified and intrigued by what I see as my own role in the loss of family. I'm interviewing family members now. But ultimately I see that the story will come from inside me. I write not because I know but because I don't know. And the discovery is deeply personal: It is the struggle to make sense of my own existence.

(Re) Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story is an intensely personal memoir. Did you worry along the way that D., your children, or your friends would have difficulty with any of the content? Has anyone in your circle of friends and/or family commented on the book?

My son told me he hasn't read any of it but also that he thinks I should be embarrassed by what I do. My daughter and son-in-law gave me the idea to write the blog but both say they didn't read it.

My daughter maybe read some of it because she told me I don't write with enough irony. I took those words to heart and rethought. She then did read the opening chapter and told me I hit the mark with perfection. Her praise meant so much to me: more than any critic could ever mean to me.

But as to their not reading: I say, Why should they? What child would want to know about the romantic life and sexual philandering of his mother? I don't blame them for not reading.

I am grateful for their successes in the world. Both my children are extraordinarily accomplished: My son, a famous wine importer; my daughter, a distinguished philosopher. That's the correct role for me: admirer. And I glory in that role. I've always done that. But I had to learn to get along without their support through reading of my work and I'm sorry that learning took me longer than it should have. That learning has been part of my journey of self-awareness.

I did fear that D. would be appalled by what I wrote. And I wrote about that in the book. The answer to that part of the question lies in the book.

Some define the biography as 100% fact, whereas the memoir is more loosely defined as the writer's perception of the truth. In writing (Re) Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story did you ever struggle with remembering any of the details, and if so, how did you write those scenes?

Memory and the question of its reliability lie at the core of your question. My first book The Woman Who Never Cooked is fiction but I'm hidden inside the fiction and oddly or maybe not so odd, I included three memoir pieces that I don't identify as such. In one of the fictional stories entitled "Sine Die" I assert that the two sisters walked on Baltimore Street where the strip joints used to be. The street is a fact, but I could never have put the two sisters on that street in a memoir. Yet, the emotional truth of that story is stronger than anything I think I've ever written.

In writing what I term as a memoir, I certainly can't assert that my husband left me if indeed he did not. But my memory of the day I left our home after it was sold, the day I got in the taxi to drive me to the airport to go teach and live in Missouri comes through my lens.

A photograph comes through a lens. The question always is, How good is the eye of the photographer? For the writer, the question is, How deep into yourself are you willing to go? The memoir writer--and I think the fiction writer--must give us a backstage pass to his soul if he is to be trusted.

My journal helped me. I thought I had stopped writing when my husband left me. I certainly was not sitting down to compose the way I did when I wrote the blog and the memoir. But when I looked in my journals, I saw that I had been writing in what I recalled as the dark days of no creation: fragments, yes. Memories, yes. Saved letters and e-mails, yes. Those entries jogged me back.

The real question here is whether you trust my narrative voice, my search for discovery about who I am, my struggle to find love again, to trust again and how I was changed by the journey.

What was the most difficult part to write in (Re) Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story?

I don't think of the work that way. The work when it's most challenging to my inner life, the journey to discover, results in joy: The writing, that process--not of catharsis--but of the creation of something "other" gives my life a fullness that I think only the attempt to create art can do. Whether or not I have succeeded is for others to judge. But I do know that I live life more fully and deeply through the attempt to make art, no matter how flawed the work may be, no matter how long the process.

The most difficult part has been the after-writing: the permissions needed to quote fully acknowledged brief excerpts. This has been a torturous process that I will write about at some point. For now, know that live writers: the poet Dana Gioia, the poet Robert Hass, the glorious philosopher Wendy Doniger, the incomparable philosopher and poet (her work is so lyrical that I see her as poet) Hélène Cixous all were glad to be quoted and viewed the use as "fair use," meaning no charge. The e-mail exchanges and letters from these glorious writers whom I quote in the book have given me hope; their work gives me courage.

How will your post-publication involvement differ with this e-book versus your short story collection?

I have learned that the writer must be her own publicist. The writer unless very well connected in the literary world or, even better, the publishing world, is no Lana Turner: she will not be discovered in Schwabb's drugstore, as that legend goes. The blog, my website, Twitter and Facebook help. I will talk with anyone, write stuff for anyone, visit book clubs, anything that gets people to know the writer behind the book. I tried to do some of that with The Woman Who Never Cooked, but, as you know, when the book came out, my husband took a hike--so I was not in the best place to do as much as I should have. What you and Randall Brown are doing for me by simply talking with me means so much to me. I'm in your debt.

Do you have any advice for other writers considering writing their story on a blog?

My writer friends all said I was crazy when I did this: putting out full formed essays for free on a blog. I guess we're about to find out how loony this project was.

If Hollywood were to produce your e-book as a movie, any thoughts about which actress would play you, and what about D?

As my mother would say, "From your mouth to G-d's ears." But let's fantasize: Audrey Hepburn: I talk about her all through the blog and I did love her (We're into fantasy here with this q.) Susan Sarandon would be fabulous, such a great actor; we're about the same age and I've heard she and Tim Robbins--did you know they met making Ron Shelton's great flick Bull Durham?--have split. And who wouldn't want Meryl Streep: I adore her and she can do anything. I can never forget Jessica Lange's performance in a little known flick Men Don't Leave--rent that one if you haven't seen it.

For D.? I often think of him as William Hurt. I just think it would have to be him--a girl can dream. D. is such a laconic man with wry humor. Hurt seems drawn to those types of roles. And then, they look alike--to me anyway.

But, we're into fairy tales here--and you know me and fairy tales.

Editor's Note: Although the book site won't be fully live until June 15th, you can log in here and leave your name now. Beginning on the 15th, you can actually order/purchase the e-book.

About the Author

Anne Converse Willkomm began writing shortly after the death of her mother. In 2004, she was named a semi-finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition Novel-in-Progress category for her fictionalized account of her mother's life. Later in 2006, the completed manuscript Unfinished Business was also named a semi-finalist. Her work has appeared in Sibyl Magazine and in the anthology Memoirs of Meanness. She has just completed a novel, Promises We Keep, set in Boston and the Appalachian Mountains. She is currently working on a YA adventure novel dealing with grief, The Gift. Also, Anne has written a full-length play chronicling the devastating effects of Alzheimer's--Declining. She lives in Bryn Mawr with her husband, three children, their dog, and two cats.

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