Maria Hummel, GOLDENSEAL
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[1:03]Maria Hummel is the author of five novels, including Still Lives, a Reese's Book Club
[1:08]pick, and now Golden Seal.
[1:10]Her poetry collection, House and Fire won the APR, Hanukkahman Prize.
[1:14]She lives in Vermont.
[1:15]Welcome, Maria.
[1:16]Thank you so much for coming on Momstone.
[1:18]I have time to read books to discuss your latest novel, Golden Seal.
[1:21]Welcome.
[1:22]Thank you.
[1:23]I don't know if you can see my can you see my background?
[1:25]I can see your background.
[1:27]So that is the Millennium Builtmore's Crystal Ballroom, which was in the scene in
[1:33]towards the end of the book where Lacey kind of spins alone under the chandeliers.
[1:37]And I found this is a 1951 photo, but it hasn't changed much.
[1:43]I don't think over time in terms of the main elements.
[1:46]So I thought it was more interesting than my office, which looks like I can
[1:51]master right now because we're getting it ready to be the guest bedroom.
[1:54]So we'll tell listeners a little bit about your book and why it makes sense that we are
[2:02]looking at a black and white to sketch behind you of an older glamorous hotel ballroom.
[2:08]Okay.
[2:09]Well, so it starts with an old woman, a stranger arriving in a sunny metropolis on the West Coast.
[2:17]And she hasn't been there in four decades and everything looks very different to her.
[2:22]And she goes, takes a taxi to the center of the city to meet a friend who is living in a hotel
[2:30]at the center of the city.
[2:33]And her friend is getting ready for this stranger to arrive.
[2:37]And the woman in the taxi is not sure the street, the woman in the hotel is going to
[2:43]let her up to see her and the woman getting ready isn't sure she wants to see this old friend.
[2:49]But she is going to look as glamorous as possible for her arrival and the book follows from there
[2:56]and their conversation when they finally get together.
[3:00]And what it was that drew them together and what tore them apart.
[3:05]Well, I feel like even though it's based on a scene in a more contemporary world,
[3:12]we're really thrown back again and again to difficult situations in the past,
[3:17]their parents' relationships, like the whole underpinning of who they are as people and how they
[3:21]got to be, who they are, both the good and the bad.
[3:24]And I feel like muddy and poppy have had such a tough life.
[3:29]I mean, oh my gosh, you know, that's why we first got on it.
[3:33]It leaves me with like a sort of sadness, like a melancholy type feeling because
[3:37]there's just so many obstacles that when I got to your afterward.
[3:39]And it was like, oh, 9-11 and the pandemic and this that I was like, okay,
[3:44]so this is the head space that she was ready and like kind of understanding.
[3:48]So maybe just back up, sorry for talking so much, back up with where the idea came from and how
[3:55]how you ended up going backwards as well as forward.
[3:59]Yeah. Well, when we moved to LA, my husband and I in that early 2000s,
[4:06]I got thrown into two cultures.
[4:09]One was the museum world.
[4:10]I was working at the Museum of Contemporary Art and he started working in hotels,
[4:15]the built more in the Bonaventure.
[4:18]And when I was out in the valley and then we had a friend who worked at the Chateau Marmont.
[4:22]And I just fell in love with the hotel culture in LA.
[4:27]I feel like you might be have some scenes in your new books that have LA hotels in them too.
[4:33]I don't know. It's just that I like to hotels have a special character to them.
[4:38]And so I knew I especially loved the built more and that kind of knowledge of that world
[4:47]combined with a book that I read that came out in American translation in 2001 called Embers
[4:53]by a Hungarian author named Chandor Moroy, which was originally published in 1942,
[5:00]is a story about two old friends males, a old general and his soldier
[5:07]meeting at a castle in the Carpathians for the first time in 40 years.
[5:12]And they're also weighing out friendship.
[5:15]But when I read that book, I thought this is such a great treatise on friendship,
[5:19]but it's about male friendship. And the female friendship is different. And wouldn't it be great
[5:24]to use this structure but set it in an American castle? And well, there it is.
[5:32]So, and then the third piece was, as we all experienced, we lived like requluses
[5:38]in the, you know, particularly for me, the academic year that was 2020, 2021.
[5:44]And I thought, I know how to write this character now. This person who's basically a hermit
[5:49]who lives in the hotel and never goes out and slocked in her tower.
[5:53]Well, there were some scenes. Can I read this one passage? Is that okay?
[5:57]Which I found particularly poignant about what it's like, sort of growing older
[6:03]and being sort of lonely at the same time. I know, this is, this is lacy talking.
[6:07]I know myself and I am old and I have few choices left. One of them is to fear death.
[6:13]All my life I have feared it. That healthy fear everyone has. The death would steal something
[6:17]from me, my remaining years, my golden days. But I no longer need golden days.
[6:21]Tomorrow will be the same as this day and the day before that. And I could live them,
[6:26]or I could let them go. You see, it's quite extraordinary what happens to you when you live alone
[6:30]for a long time with only your thoughts for company. A devil's self grows, a mirror self,
[6:36]the one who lives and the one who watches her live. And the second self begins to understand
[6:40]that the first is terribly ordinary, has always been, even if she was once beautiful and happy.
[6:46]The second self says, don't be afraid of death or the truth. They have been waiting for you all
[6:51]along. Thanks for reading that. Oh my God. That was definitely a lesson of the pandemic. That second
[6:57]self, I feel like a lot of us went through that. And that definitely came out of that experience,
[7:05]I think for me. I mean, the idea that life is just every day on repeat, like a grandhog day type of
[7:11]existence. And it almost doesn't even matter if you live another day. I mean, I don't know. I
[7:16]feel like it's like depression personified in a way. Or just, you know, reality.
[7:25]What is life? I don't know. Maybe I'm just feeling in a mood today. She's trying to prove to
[7:33]her friend too that she doesn't, that she's steelier than her and she doesn't care. You know what I
[7:38]mean? Yeah. And so there's that too. There's a little bit of posing in it, I think. But that's good.
[7:46]You also talk about experience, Poppy and Maria. I mentioned earlier if I'm pronouncing it even
[7:51]right. But how they were at Theresa's stat and Bergen Belson and all of the camps and how then
[7:59]he said, Maria and Poppy came home inseparable for the rest of their lives, but they never left again.
[8:05]Yeah. Also, so heavy. It doesn't, it's not designed to feel heavy. You know, it's like a reflection.
[8:13]Did you design it to feel heavy? Like, are you surprised how I'm feeling or am I misinterpreting?
[8:20]Do you know what I mean? I think there is a tragic layer to the book that I actually had to
[8:27]drop pull back a little bit. I think as a writer, it was originally I had written a more tragic
[8:32]ending and then nobody liked it. Oh no. So I think, but yeah, I think the, well, the people of
[8:40]Motie and Poppy's generation went through a whole lot. You know, and these, those two,
[8:47]they were from Prague, a Prague that no longer, you know, the, the World War II just decimated,
[8:53]you know, that crossroads of Jewish and German and Czech culture and the sophistication and the
[8:59]incredible art that came out of that period. And it got destroyed for, for Motie first because she
[9:05]was Jewish, but the Germans were expelled by the Czechs very forcibly after the war too. And,
[9:13]you know, there were enemies. I don't, but not, you know, gonna say that, but as a people, they
[9:19]didn't deserve retribution in ways that, or at least I can understand the feelings behind that
[9:27]longing for retribution. But those were people who were very devoted to their city and to the
[9:32]culture that they had lived in. And then suddenly they were said, you know, you don't belong
[9:38]here either, you're gone. And so I, I thought that was interesting that the Germans got sent to the
[9:43]same place that the Jews had gotten sent to that which was Tarazin or Tarazin Stott. And,
[9:51]you know, and then the Russians rolled in. So those texts didn't have it easy there.
[9:57]Yeah, just couldn't win there.
[10:00]Now basically Eastern Europe, it's a hard place, but do you have a connection to
[10:07]Prague yourself or this time or are you just interested from a historical perspective?
[10:13]I was so lucky I got to do my study in Prague about two years after the wall came down.
[10:19]So it was three I guess and it was so amazing because it was a city kind of communism that
[10:29]really preserved its outline since World War II and there was such an incredible flowering of
[10:35]Czech culture, you know, under communism and I've absolutely fell in love with the city and thought,
[10:42]you know, one day I got to put something here. So those passages were easy to write the
[10:48]Prague scenes because I just had them in my memory from wandering around Prague, but I just also
[10:53]loved what a crossroads culture it was and I don't think often it's recognized what an incredible
[11:02]melting pot Prague was for early 20th century literature and art and everything.
[11:09]I actually went to Prague once but it was probably in 2002 but I've always been so fascinated
[11:15]by the culture there as well, like it's sort of mysterious. Yeah and they've produced so
[11:20]so much great work. It's phenomenal. So okay sorry for cutting off but I feel like I don't have
[11:27]a good sense of you as a person. So like where did you grow up? Like who are you? How did you become
[11:33]a writer? Yeah. I know where you live now but give me like the background of and I know you
[11:38]became a Reese's book club Vic which is amazing. What's the backstory here? Well I'm back in my
[11:42]home state. I grew up in Vermont. I should also say I'm the daughter of a German my father immigrated
[11:48]in the 60s and my mother's family has been in the US for a really long time but and so I did
[11:55]also spend quite a bit of time going over to Europe as a kid so that also I think seeded
[12:00]the things that I've written about but yeah so I grew up in Vermont. I bounced around a lot of
[12:07]different places went to grad school in North Carolina. UNC Greensboro for my MFA then moved out to
[12:14]LA and worked in the museum art museum and then I got a Stegner Fellowship to Stanford and spent
[12:23]a long time at Stanford. I think 11 years both as a fellow and then as a lecturer there and then
[12:30]I got a tenure-track job at UVM at University of Vermont and wanted to come back east because all
[12:38]of our family was on the east coast so we came back here and have been Vermont was a great place
[12:44]to spend the pandemic you know it was it was an easier place I think to get outside and low
[12:50]population density so I've been feeling lucky although I do miss California too and I've
[12:56]love Santa Monica I know you have a bookstore there my brother lived there for a long time so it's
[13:01]spent a lot of time there. Oh yes I love it out there. Wish I went there today. Yeah I'm sure
[13:06]sorry. And what was the experience like of becoming a Reese's booklet pick? I got hives
[13:17]video. Okay so I don't know if they still work the system this way but they told us about a month
[13:25]and a half in advance and at that time it was a kind of a roll out thing where they would do like
[13:31]a video where you'd give clues to the whoever was the person before you would give clues to your
[13:37]book and people would you know on Instagram if they guessed it right they were entered into a drawing
[13:44]and so there was very strict warnings that you could not let this information out of the bag in
[13:52]any way or the you know the honor could be rescinded so you know we my editor threw his back out
[14:01]and I got hives I think trying to like keep a lid on it and then I think some London tabloid like
[14:08]saw pictures of her holding the book and they were like is this the nextries whether it's
[14:12]food and book club pick and stuff but anyway it was such a I mean what a terrific experience
[14:19]being connected with those folks they do such great things for women authors women readers readers in
[14:25]general and I felt so fortunate to be kind of inducted into that family because it really is
[14:34]it's been such an honor and kind of revelation to see how much they've been able to do as a as a book club
[14:41]it's amazing wow what a story yeah do you have an old girlfriend from camp or someone you know
[14:48]you know I came out of that question and let how to respond to that if people ask
[14:53]a most of the time when I write fiction my characters are composite characters with the exception of
[15:01]a few usually secondary characters that I might be drawing from life so Lacey and Edith
[15:09]I mean honestly those two characters I don't like it always seems corny when writers start
[15:15]talking about their characters like they're their own people but in as much as any characters
[15:21]I've ever written are their own people these two are I mean I would send them on book tour instead
[15:26]of me and art remarks about people and to you know or whatever because they just once I started
[15:33]writing them they just kept talking and I believe was as a writer and that's never happened to
[15:39]be before but they are not I think they're more like anime in a way or yeah then they are actual
[15:47]you know model on actual people it's like deep from my subconscious I always wonder if those
[15:52]are actually real people somewhere or like yeah yeah yeah maybe people or I don't know I hear
[15:57]this so often you know people are like this sounds crazy but my characters talk to me which I totally
[16:02]get so yeah yeah and you wrote it in six weeks right the first draft that's crazy yeah it was
[16:09]unbelievable experience I don't know when I look back I don't really know how it happened but I
[16:15]just would be you know I have two kids and it was lockdown so we would be it was post I started
[16:21]right after school ended like literally the day or two after my UVM semester ended but you know I'd
[16:27]go from parental stuff and then like go upstairs and just keep writing and I was really living in
[16:34]the world of the novel the whole time I was writing it I don't really know what I cooked or
[16:42]anything else but and you don't pronounce it what was the old-fashioned way it wasn't Lacey
[16:48]there was some other you would see yeah oh yeah yeah that would be the like I was like trying to
[16:55]say it out loud the way you wrote it I was like how am I saying this yeah I know maybe in my
[17:00]fanatics aren't so good no no it's fine I just I didn't know that wasn't a name the way that it's
[17:05]pronounced well are you writing anything else or have any other characters taking a residence and
[17:10]you brain lately I have in a different way but I got really into researching into the life of one of
[17:18]the grim's fairy tale world yeah you mentioned that whole thing yes so her the one I mentioned in the
[17:25]in the afterward Dorothy of Yemen she is now occupying a presence as the the heart of a novel that
[17:34]I'm writing I learned more about her she was the daughter of an innkeeper and the wife to a tailor
[17:41]you know had seven kids she doesn't tell the grim's the stories to land of her life but in the
[17:47]record she disappears and her husband disappears for nine years like there's birth, birth, then gap
[17:54]and then more births and so I was like okay there it is I can write into this like what happens
[18:01]in those nine years and what it's it's a love story I think a story of a long marriage and it's
[18:08]also a story it's all those the tales that she tells are kind of wound through it in like
[18:13]more like as if things from life inspired them so awesome well what advice would you have for
[18:20]aspiring authors you read one a really good one once which is like the first seven years are the
[18:25]worst it is kind of cynical I would say the thing that I tell most aspiring writers is make allies
[18:36]make friends find people around you who also really care about writing and if you find them
[18:42]hold on to them because the farther you go at any time in your writing career but but it never
[18:49]ends that you need those people it never ends that you need advocates or that you need readers
[18:55]or that you need just somebody who understands and so sometimes people can get sort of pitted
[19:02]against each other when they're younger thinking like if you know it's a competition of who's
[19:08]gonna make it kind of thing and and honestly the writers I know who are happiest are ones who
[19:14]have really nourished their networks and and have people that they regard very highly and regard
[19:22]them highly and and and work together to achieve a common goal which is really to just keep literature
[19:31]in the world you know like you I mean you're doing a lot obviously and that it's it's people like
[19:38]me are really grateful for that ambassadorship you do between writers and readers I like that
[19:46]ambassadorship maybe I'll steal that thank you for that that's great advice nourish your network
[19:54]I like it sounds like a whole article you should write it if you have more in
[20:00]Anyway, Maria, thank you so much for coming on.
[20:02]Thank you for Golden Seal and for the time spent
[20:06]with these two lovely ladies.
[20:08]Sorry, I appreciate it.
[20:09]Yeah, thank you and have a great afternoon,
[20:12]and I love that I've been watching the very-
[20:14]Very good.
[20:15]Keep being positioned, so I'm very happy to see you again.
[20:17]Yeah.
[20:20]Really, sorry about that.
[20:21]Anyway.
[20:22]All right, bye.
[20:23]I need to take you.
[20:25]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms.
[20:27]Don't have time to read books.
[20:29]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
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[20:41]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan.
[20:42]In fact, texture sound for the sound editing.
[20:45]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[20:46]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.