Episode 39
Feminism, Imagination, and Beyond: A Conversation with Anna Quinn
In this episode, we have the pleasure of speaking with Anna Quinn, an author, and founder of the Writers’ Workshoppe in Port Townsend, Washington. Her debut novel, THE NIGHT CHILD, published in 2018, was a Washington State Book Award finalist, listed as #1 Best Real Psychological Fiction on Goodreads, and has been praised for its powerful portrayal of trauma and its impact on identity and relationships, as well as its lyrical writing and gripping storyline.
Anna's latest book, ANGELINE, nominated for the National Book Award, is a powerful exploration of feminism, grief, and the imagination. Drawing on her own life experiences, as well as insights from leading feminist thinkers and writers, Anna gives voice to the silenced and the visionaries through her characters and shows how love and collaboration can free us from limiting social constructs and create a more equitable world.
A little about today's author -
Anna Quinn's twenty-five-year experience as a public school teacher has had an invaluable influence on her writing. Throughout her career as a teacher, she witnessed firsthand the struggles and challenges her students faced. Many of her students came from difficult backgrounds and had experienced abuse, bullying, poverty, or other forms of hardship. As a result of her time as a teacher, Quinn became deeply invested in exploring the themes of identity formation, equality, imagination, and resilience in her writing.
In this podcast, Anna will also share insights into her writing process and the techniques she uses to create compelling stories. For her, writing is all about tapping into the power of the imagination and approaching her work with a sense of openness and curiosity. She rarely knows where a story is going to take her, and that's part of the magic she loves. She believes that nurturing and protecting one’s voice is an essential part of writing stories that resonate deeply with readers.
To learn more about Anna and her work, you can visit her website at https://annamquinn.com. Her latest book, ANGELINE, is available for purchase at https://bookshop.org/p/ and https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5PDRTML
A little about today's host-
Shawna Rodrigues left her award-winning career in the public sector in 2019 to consult and publish her first novel Beyond the Pear Blossoms. Her desire to connect and help others led to the launch of her podcast The Grit Show shortly thereafter. When she learned women host only 27% of podcasts, her skills and passion led to the founding of the Authentic Connections Network. She now helps mission-driven entrepreneurs better connect with their audiences by providing full-service podcast production and through a community for Entrepreneurs & Podcasters – EPAC. Podcasting is her primary focus, so she continues to support the writing community through this podcast, and her writing time is mostly focused on anthologies.
She offers a free 7 Steps to Perfect Your Podcast Title to anyone interested in launching a podcast. You can also follow her on Instagram-@ShawnaPodcasts, and learn more about the network and community at https://linktr.ee/37by27.
Be sure to follow or subscribe to Author Express wherever you listen to podcasts and to follow us on Instagram @AuthorExpressPodcast
Learn more about our hosts, the guests we've had, and their books -
Transcript
We feel it is important to make our podcast transcripts available for accessibility. We use quality artificial intelligence tools to make it possible for us to provide this resource to our audience. We do have human eyes reviewing this, but they will rarely be 100% accurate. We appreciate your patience with the occasional errors you will find in our transcriptions. If you find an error in our transcription, or if you would like to use a quote, or verify what was said, please feel free to reach out to us at connect@37by27.com.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Shawna Rodrigues, one of your hosts and the founder of Authentic Connections Podcast Network, which makes this podcast possible. This podcast is where you discover the voice behind the pages of your next favorite book, and I'm excited about the author we have for you today.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Anna Quinn is the author of The Night Child, listed as the number one best real psychological fiction on Goodreads, and Angeline, nominated for the National Book Award in 2023. Angeline is a call to open arms, a clear-eyed view of our often-flawed humanity and how the power of compassion can change everything. It is a novel of gorgeous sentences and beautiful messages. It left me feeling stronger, wiser, and in complete awe. That is a quote from Erica Bauermeister, New York Times bestselling author. Quinn's writing has also appeared in Psychology Today, Writer's Digest, and the Alone Together anthology Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19. She is the founder of the Writers Workshop in Port Townsend, Washington. A wonderful place to visit if you've never been there. And when she isn't writing, she's reading, teaching, biking, or hiking somewhere on this beautiful planet. Thank you so much for being here with us today, Anna. I'm so excited to interview you.
Anna Quinn [:Oh, thank you so much for having me. I love your podcasts.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Oh, thank you. It's so much fun to get to talk to wonderful authors all the time.
Anna Quinn [:I bet. I bet.
Shawna Rodrigues [:So, tell me something interesting about where you are from.
Anna Quinn [:So, I live in Port Townsend, Washington, and it's about an hour north of Seattle, and it's a very eclectic artist community on the Olympic Peninsula. So, we've got water on all three sides. And, it's also, I think, what's interesting about it is it's also a very busy working waterfront with a hugely industrious shipyard. And they work on wooden boats, which is why we have the big wooden boat festival in September. So, for a small town, it's 10 sq mi and 10,000 people. I think you visit it, it's just filled with bookstores and art galleries and pubs. It's the home of the Central Writer’s Conference and Copper Canyon poetry. And we have just beautiful beaches.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yes, you have all the things. I know. It was so much fun. I feel like it's a world's end. Is that the name of the little eclectic store that you guys have there?
Anna Quinn [:It's one of them.
Shawna Rodrigues [:One of them. It was so fun. We found like all of this steampunk pirate-type stuff there. We got something for a Halloween costume from there. When we were in Port Townsend, it was just such a unique little store and there were so many just unique little places there.
Anna Quinn [:Yeah, it's pretty quirky. And it's kind of fun because The Officer and a Gentleman was filmed here. Up at Fort Worden and I don't know if you got a chance to go in there. So that hotel that you first come into in town where they filmed it. So, everybody's always trying to get in the same bedroom that Richard Gere was in. And that's kind of funny.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Oh, that is funny. I had no idea that was filmed there. That is so much fun. Little piece of knowledge about Port Townsend, huh? It's a great place. That was the first time I ever got to visit there. And it's funny when you say it was an hour north of Seattle because of course, I came up in a totally different route up the coast to get there, and I'm like, oh, really? Was I north of Seattle? Because it depends on how you're going to get there.
Anna Quinn [:Yeah. Did you take the ferry?
Shawna Rodrigues [:No, we drove out there.
Anna Quinn [:Oh, you went the other way through Tacoma. Ferry route is very beautiful to come that way, and it's a lot faster, but both routes are interesting.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Lots of options. Lots of options. That's fabulous. So, to get to know you a little bit better, what is something about you that other people find very hard to believe?
Anna Quinn [:Oh, gosh. Hard to believe. Hard to believe?
Shawna Rodrigues [:She’s jumped right in there. She's like, we're not going to keep it easy.
Anna Quinn [:You were serious when you said no script.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yeah.
Anna Quinn [:Well, gosh, I don't know. Sometimes people are surprised to learn that I play the accordion.
Shawna Rodrigues [:I am surprised by that. I could see that would be something surprising to learn about you.
Anna Quinn [:Yeah, it's a very tiny accordion, and I started playing when I was around five. Irish music because I have a strong Irish heritage. So that's probably something.
Shawna Rodrigues [:That qualifies. It absolutely qualifies. We will take it.
Anna Quinn [:You’re pretty transparent. Otherwise.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yes, otherwise pretty easy to figure out. So, when looking at your book, and I love both of your books. The Night Child actually was one of the books I had to read in one day, which is very rare for me because I'm a slow reader. It was an amazing read. The character development, how intense and connected it all was. It was a wonderful book. But today we're going to focus on Angeline. And what is something that first came to you about the idea for your book?
Anna Quinn [:It was interesting. A lot of my stories come from my dreams, and this one in particular, my dream life around it was very strong. Angeline started showing up probably three or four years ago, and first just as a very blurry vision of a young woman in a full nun's habit, then I kind of pushed it away. And because I had left the Catholic Church decades before that, and I was just a little bit suspicious or concerned, but she began showing up more and more vividly and she began to face forward. And sometimes she was with a child, a girl in a yellow dress, and sometimes she was sitting across from a sheriff. She started; a lot of the images that are in the book began in my dreams. So, when my images and my dreams become really insistent, I do start to pay attention to them. And I decided that I would open to her. And that's when I began getting to know her in my awake time. So, I began taking walks with her in my imagination, asking her questions. Who was she? What did she want? What did she need me to know? Why was she here? All the questions you might ask a character. And so, the book just opened up from there.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Oh, that is so exciting. And if you've read the book, you just got goosebumps like I did, because that is such a beautiful way that she came to life, because she is such a complex character. And it is very interesting to have that theme of a Catholic nun to be where it starts from and where your story grows out of is so beautiful how you integrate so many themes with that. So, was it hard to balance all of those themes you were bringing together, or do you feel like they just kind of flowed as the characters came to you?
Anna Quinn [:Yeah, I know people have commented about the numerous themes, and for me, it just felt that they just blended all together really well. Because, you know, I learned very quickly when she took me into this cloistered convent in 2014, where silence was her life for 24/7, except when they were chanting or praying. Very quickly I had the sense that this was a young woman who wanted to leave her life or who she was before. She believed she had caused a tragic accident that killed her entire family. And so, because she believed that she really sentenced herself to this cloister, she was in there for the wrong reasons, partly. And then I realized as I kept writing with it, that she was actually in there for a good reason. And so that's part of what I explore in the novel, how she just needed that time with her grief and her loss. And it was so extreme to her, that loss, that she needed an extreme place to begin to process it. But it's when it kind of got stuck in this constrictive feedback loop that I really was hoping she would, there'd be another way that she would be able to reshape it in a different place because it was becoming harmful.
Shawna Rodrigues [:And that's a beautiful thing. So setting is very crucial in your novel as well. So, it starts in, was it Chicago that it started in?
Anna Quinn [:Yeah, starts in Chicago, in the city.
Shawna Rodrigues [:And then it transitions. You can talk about the majority of the book and the setting for that and kind of what inspired that and that connection you have to the setting for the second part of the book.
Anna Quinn [:When the convent in Chicago closed down, she was transferred to an island in the Pacific Northwest, very close to where I live, though the island in my book is imaginary, but it's inspired by a lot of the San Juan Islands that surround us here physically. And I just seem to be really enamored with islands. I write about them often. I think I'm drawn to the fact that they are their own whole entity, but they're disconnected from the whole. And that really intrigues me because that's how Angeline also felt. When I look at people that are on islands or disconnected like that, there's a resilience and often a misfit characterization of them. And I'm just very curious about that, how they shape their island and how the island shapes them.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Oh, I like that. And that is definitely a large part of the story of how each of the characters is kind of shaped by that environment and that island is part of that unique environment that they're all in as well.
Anna Quinn [:Yeah, for Angeline, it's kind of, it absorbs her, embraces her, it takes her in, but also it kind of provokes and stimulates change. So, felt her beginning to change her lens, which was initially a lens of grief and loss. And I feel the lens opening and considering looking at these other possibilities for her life.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yes, the transformation in the book is exciting, not just for her, but for some of the other characters along the way as well. There's a lot to it. That's wonderful. Is there anything that you hope readers will really take away from reading Angeline?
Anna Quinn [:Well, I know that readers, you know, everybody has a different way of reading a story and taking what their own personal reactions, it becomes very personal to them. So, I try to just be in service to the characters and the story and then I just put it out there and let it be what it's going to be. I always hope books and stories, open conversations. And I hope that has been happening with this book, which I really love the conversations around it, and particularly the ones about self-forgiveness, that it's possible and that we can really truly find beauty in those broken places. And, you know, as in the book with the Kintsugi, that it's not really about when you're fixing a structure, let's say that's broken and you use clear glue and put it together and you don't see the scar, with Kintsugi, it's gold and you highlight the scar. And it really impacted me because sometimes we can hide from our traumas and hide them or not talk about them very often and just kind of keep them away. But I think the idea that maybe it adds to our beauty and our wholeness really touched me.
Shawna Rodrigues [:No, it is a really important perspective, I feel like. And that's a beautiful thing that you definitely were able to highlight in the book, is the pieces that people were hiding from themselves even as they gave light to them, that they were able to find more beauty in them. So, it was a really powerful part of the book.
Anna Quinn [:Oh, thank you.
Shawna Rodrigues [:That's wonderful. So, with your writing journey, what do you think has surprised you the most about your writing journey?
Anna Quinn [:I'm pretty surprised to be published.
Shawna Rodrigues [:I love honesty and you guys; you look in the show notes and see everything. She's been nominated for awards, so this is very exciting, this humble perspective. So, yay we got published and everything else is gravy.
Anna Quinn [:Well, I think I had the Writers Workshop for so long in the bookstore, I know what an arduous path the publishing process is, so I had really braced myself and prepared for it. So, it was just a fabulous surprise and joy to have it happen.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Well, good. I love that. Gratitude is a great place to start from. Are you currently working on anything else for your writing or mostly for little pieces?
Anna Quinn [:I started the third novel and I'm really enjoying it, so that's all I can say about it, but it's very exciting to me. I love it.
Shawna Rodrigues [:That's wonderful. I'm glad you're still finding that joy and still doing that piece. That's lovely. Well, what is the best place for people to find you and to learn more about you?
Anna Quinn [:I think just going to my website, Anna M, just be sure to put the M in. Annamquinn.com. And my Facebook page is pretty alive and well so far and Instagram. Just put in Anna Quinn and you'll find me there.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Wonderful. And what book or story do you find the most inspiring?
Anna Quinn [:That's a hard thing to ask.
Shawna Rodrigues [:I know. It's hard to narrow it too.
Anna Quinn [:I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. But I do think about that often. And a book that I just can never stop thinking about that has influenced me so much and haunts me is The Bone People by Keri Hulme. And it was written in 1985, and it's just so unusual in its structure. And she won the Booker Prize for it. It was the most controversial book that the Booker Award was ever given to because they were so divided on whether she should have this award. But it's about a young woman, a New Zealander of Maori descent who lives in a kind of lighthouse-like tower on the New Zealand Sea. And she's an artist who is estranged from her art and in exile from her own family. And one night her solitude is disrupted by this little boy. So, it becomes a really complex story after that and it's fantastic. But I think what captures me the most and why I've read it twelve times is because the writing style is so unusual. It's part poetry, it's part third person omniscient, part first person, and it can change within a sentence and it's constantly mirroring what's happening for the characters, what's happening in this setting, and it just gives this surreal sensibility to it and it's fascinating to me. I just love it.
Shawna Rodrigues [:That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. I'm sure there's going to be people that listen to this and are going to go check that out immediately. So, thank you for sharing that, and thank you so much for being here, Anna. Your work is wonderful, and it was delightful to speak with you today.
Anna Quinn [:Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Thanks for joining us. I hope you take a second to give us a review or a couple of stars on your favorite podcasting platform, and we'll be here again next Wednesday. Follow us on Instagram, @AuthorExpresspodcast to see who's coming up next. Don't forget, keep it express, but keep it interesting.
