Go Forth (Vol. 44)

Photograph of Annie DeWitt by Jerome Jakubiec

An Interview with Annie DeWitt

Annie DeWitt’s work represents a sort of minimalism comparable to such writers as Amy Hempel and Christine Schutt. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Granta, NOON, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere, and her short story collection, Closest Without Going Over, was shortlisted for the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her newest novel, White Nights in Split Town City, is about a twelve year-old girl named Jean in the summer of 1991 who is leaving adolescence and discovering sexuality. It is out in August from Tyrant Books. We spoke via email.

—Brandon Hobson

BRANDON HOBSON: I know you spent a long time working on this book, but how long exactly? What was the process like?

ANNIE DEWITT: It’s been seven years total from the day I penned the first page to just now as the book is arriving in the world. I started it in 2009 in a workshop for Ben Marcus. Originally it was a short-short about a light rail system run by a pre-pubescent girl which crossed the U.S. In total the story was literally 1.5 pages. Those pages are long gone.

I wasn’t one of those kids who wrote a novel in MFA school. My thesis when I graduated was primarily short stories and short shorts. The novel was something I started during research arts year. Ben Marcus had recommended Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life to me in a conference once. I was reading that and Christine Schutt’s brilliant short novel Florida when I decided this was a novel that needed to be written. I think I always knew this story about the rural road where I grew up needed to be told. It was boiling in my blood somewhere. Waiting to come out. I just didn’t know when.

BH: You wouldn’t expect the writing to have taken so long, given that the book itself is pretty short.

AD: A factor was time and money. I worked during all seven of those years, sometimes three or four jobs at once, and still do. In the beginning I was working freelance for The Princeton Review, penning short descriptions of various colleges for their Best Colleges and Best Law Schools type guides. I lived in a seven-foot wide studio with my partner, a photographer. We waited for the salad bar to go on sale after 7pm to eat dinner. I kept salt and pepper packets from the to-go places in an empty tea box in our one cupboard. Sometimes I walked the thirty blocks...