Spotlight on... Emily Mitchell

Author: Kathryn Flagg



The Middlebury Campus spoke with author and member of the Class of 1997 Emily Mitchell this week. Mitchell, whose dazzling first novel The Last Summer of the World was published this summer by W.W. Norton, spoke from her home in California about the novel, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and her newest project.

The Middlebury Campus: Let's start by talking a little bit about the book.
Emily Mitchell: The novel tells the story of the work that the American photographer Edward Steichen did flying and taking aerial reconnaissance photographs during World War One. Steichen is probably best known now for the portraits that he took for Vanity Fair in the 1930s. He had some very famous pictures of people like Greta Garbo and Paul Robeson and Winston Churchill. I got really interested in his work in the very early years of the 20th century when he was an art photographer. Also, because of his association and close friendship with Alfred Stieglitz, he was responsible for bringing a lot of French modern art to the United States for the very first time. Steichen was really someone who was involved in lots of different branches and artistic endeavors.
Then, when the war broke out, he was living in France and actually had to flee as a refugee from his home there and ended up eventually coming back to France to do this very sort of brand new and at the time very sort of scary and quite dangerous work of aerial reconnaissance photography in the place where he had lived for many years with his family. The novel is about that and about Steichen's relationship with his wife, his first wife, which broke up around about that time.
I found that as I tried to imagine the sort of person who would be prepared to get into a tiny plane in 1914 and go up into the sky when no one had done this before and take photographs, I had to work backwards and I had to try to understand his life before the war.
I loved Steichen's photography and in particular his work from the very early years of the 20th century. He really pioneered a lot of these photographic techniques in a way that was very, very beautiful and very impressionistic. I saw those photographs and just loved them and wanted to know more about who had taken them. When I found out what he had been doing during the war, I was hooked. I felt like I had to tell some of his story.

TC: What were some of the challenges you faced in writing about a real person?
EM: It was certainly a challenge to write about someone who had really lived, and also someone whose life is quite well documented. I wanted to be careful to get as much right as I could manage but to still have the story be a coherent and interesting story. With Steichen's life there were two mysteries that happened. One of them is what the cause of the break up of his first marriage was. The other mystery has to do with what happened in Steichen's house in France during the war. His early photographs, which he left in his house during the war, were destroyed during that time. So these two mysteries really provided a place for the fiction to imagine what might have taken place.
Having said that, of course, I think that with historical fiction the things that fiction actually talks about are the things that a good history will not put in because we can't know them for certain, which are peoples' private thoughts, their interchanges, the conversations they have in private, their emotions. Those kinds of subtleties are really what fiction, I think, does.
TC: You were a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference this August. What role do writers and communities of writers play in your own writing process?
EM: Oh, gosh. A very important one. I think writing is always by its nature a solitary enterprise at its root. The points at which writers can come together and share some of that experience with each other, and to be in a place in which other people are committed to doing this rather strange thing that we spend so much of our time involved with is incredibly refreshing and replenishing. What you want from a community of writers is an acknowledgement that you are actually all in this together and that what you can really provide for each other is support and encouragement. We're trying to do something very difficult that, I think it's fair to say, the culture in general doesn't necessarily encourage. Bread Loaf is tremendously valuable and provides that sense of support and connectedness to so many writers.

TC: Looking ahead to your own future, do you have a project you're working on right now or things you're excited about working on in the coming months or years?
EM: The thing about novels is that once you've written one you get this idea in your head that the next time you try this ridiculous process you'll get everything right, and all of the problems that you created for yourself in the course of writing your first book, you're not going to make any of those mistakes again. The next time it's going to be perfect. I think that they're fairly addicting, and so of course I've fallen into that trap and I'm hard at work on another novel. I can say with some confidence at this point that it's not turning out to go as smoothly as I had imagined it might. But that, of course, is half the fun of it.

Tune into Radio Arts Middlebury on WRMC 91.1 at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday or visit middleburycampus.com to listen to the full interview with Mitchell.