Laura Stanfill

 

 

I've always been a fan of books with a lot of chapters and Laura's has a lot of them (bless you, Laura). They help move the story along. And to have a story that is also beautifully told, well, Bingo! 

 

I was drawn in by the description of The Neighborhood Dames as "chock full of brave women who defy societal expectations [and] . . .a stirring exploration of friendship, music, and womanhood.”

"What a ride! The kind of smart and snappy historical fiction that is a delight to sink into" Amy Stewart

The characters –Violet, Minnow, George, Sally, and Matthew, all of them are essential to this story’s telling– prompted me to put the book down repeatedly and sigh over how good it is. The Neighborhood Dames is set in the early part of the last century and you know how I love time travel. All in all, an enchanting, satisfying read I highly recommend!

Laura, tell us about where you live and what you love about it. 

I live in Portland, Oregon, in a quiet neighborhood with schools and grocery stores and food carts and an ice cream shop. My kids grew up being able to walk or bike to get a snack or swim in the community pool. Over our years of walking dogs, my neighbor and I have superimposed a secret linguistic map over the real landmarks. There’s the ghost, the goat, the swamp, the hedge, and of course the root beer flowers. I have a top hat I often wear on these jaunts, because I want to live in a neighborhood where someone wears a top hat when walking their dog.

Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?

I grew up in a Historic Register house in Glen Ridge, New Jersey—the house The Neighborhood Dames is set in. I had wonderful neighbors, especially right next door, and supportive parents who filled our rooms with books and mechanical music, including juke boxes, player pianos, barrel organs, music boxes, and a nickelodeon. I loved making up stories and treasure hunts in the wooded area behind the house. For months, I pounded rocks into dust that I mixed with water and turned into paint, which I used on my treehouse, a ping-pong tabletop mounted a few feet off the ground. Every few years I dug around in the pachysandra where I buried a wooden figure with birds in his beard to keep him safe from robbers. Part of me believes, even still, that if the current owners would let me have one more crack at it, I’d be able to rescue him from the grave I dug.

Laura

My dad, when I was six, founded Horn &Whistle, a magazine dedicated to air horns and train whistles. I loved seeing the pages on his desk and breathing the ink smell of the proofs. Sometimes I went with him to the print shop on Bloomfield Avenue in Bloomfield, New Jersey. When people ask how I became a publisher, I sometimes say, because nobody told me not to, but really my dad set the example. At six and seven, I saw how seriously he took the making of a print journal intended for a specific community.

Is there a book that changed the way you look at life? 

I recently discovered a list of the books I read in the summer of 1994, right after I graduated from high school. That was a pivotal time for me—the liminal space between being a kid and leaning toward a future of independence. In those few months, I devoured books by Isabelle Allende, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, and John Irving. I can’t imagine a more influential time in my reading history. I had opted to study the great Russian novelists my senior year, but the other class studied Latin American authors, so that’s probably part of why I committed myself to magical realism (in addition to works by Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, and F. Scott Fitzgerald).

The House of the Spirits is one of my all-time favorites, and I probably read that and Eva Luna before choosing The Infinite Plan and The Stories of Eva Luna in the summer of 1994. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work is oddly absent from my list—I discovered him in college thanks to my friend Piya’s recommendation. I guess it wasn’t odd then, as I didn’t really know anyone who read as much as I did. I remember gifting a friend a copy of Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness, around the same time—it came out in 1992—and the puzzled expression on her face. Did she find it strange I bought her a book for her birthday? Or that book? I wanted her to have the experience I had when reading it. I guess maybe it was a weird gift for a teenager to give to a peer, but I felt so excited to share Pam Houston’s stories, and so let down when she didn’t know how to respond.

Do you have a favorite children’s book and what about it makes it so? 

I loved the sweet Little Bear series, books my aunt gave me, but I can’t pick between them, so I’ll say William Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic Pebble.

Sometimes I wanted to disappear and get turned into a rock—just so nobody would look at me and judge me. I am an only child and I love my parents, and am grateful to still have them, but I think Sylvester’s loneliness also hit home for me. Being right there with nobody seeing me felt like a metaphor for my extreme shyness.

What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you? 

I was such a serious kid. I feared being seen as funny and I was absolutely terrified about doing anything embarrassing that might turn into someone else’s story. My mom used to recite charming anecdotes about me to her friends on the phone, and I remember feeling secretly mortified. I didn’t want anyone to think of me as anything but Very Serious. After all, by second grade I had decided to be a professional writer. I had a reputation to build. Around 2002, when I joined the Pinewood Table writers’ group, I brought pages, read them aloud, and people laughed. At places I didn’t expect! And these incredible writers told me I was funny. I had no idea. Now, of course, I can look back at my early writing and think about my childhood and there’s so much humor there. I think that material is so funny because I was so earnest. Now my dad—he has all kinds of childhood stories! Here’s one, written down by me in 2019, from my dad’s best friend Bob Partridge, who has since passed: “He and I were riding through the garden behind his house on the road. We were in his mother’s little Chevy Coupe, a nice little car. Jack and I liked to turn off the key and turn it back on and hear it backfire. So we did that and not only did it go backfire—boom!—but it blew the muffler off the car. We had to sneak it into the garage. We would have been just after we got our driver’s licenses, 17 or 18. Oh mercy. We still laugh about that. We were very quiet we drove around the garden and went in his garage and closed the doors and walked away. We never heard anything from his mama!”

How did you meet your beloved? How did your first date go? 

Jonathan and I met at a local coffee shop. He invited me to join him, this was the summer of 2002, and being the Type-A workaholic I’ve always been, I told him No, I’m on deadline. So he asked about deadline, so I chatted with him about my work as an editor at a community newspaper. I stood there, not committing to sitting down, and when I made it back to the newsroom, I told my friend Tracy, I think I just met a boy. And she said, Did you meet someone or not? I didn’t want to breathe on the maybe of it all, so I told her, I don’t know! We had our first date at the same coffee shop. I showed up after covering the YMCA’s pool draining, which sounds like a drag, except the city invited all the neighborhood dogs for a swim before they let the water out. For my post-work date, I didn’t have time to change. I showed up in my plain reporter attire, still damp and smelling of fur, especially after a mastiff shook on me. Jonathan loves coffee, but he was so nervous before I got there, the barista insisted he order herbal tea. And then I showed up all rumpled and smelling like dog. And probably sneezing, because I’m allergic to pretty much everything.

Laura and Jonathan

How are you different now than you were in your 20's? 

Well for one, apparently I’m funny. Ha! 

Is there a question no one has ever asked you that you wish they would?

Something, perhaps, that people would be surprised to know about you? 

People who know me now might be surprised that I expected to have a career in music. It’s no wonder that my creative writing often includes musical history or themes! I practiced my flute for three or four hours a day by the time I was a senior in high school.

We all have or can point to a certain experience where, because of this

experience, it shifted our lives in a way that led to where we are today, it could be a person you encountered or you were in a certain place or you had a certain experience or all three, but it was so pivotal that you can say that because of this experience, I am where I am today as a writer or in a greater sense as the person I am now.

Twenty-some years ago, Steve Arndt joined the writing group I held twice a month at Annie Bloom’s Books. He had seen a flyer at the same coffee shop where I met Jonathan—and in fact Steve and Jonathan knew each other before I knew either of them!

Steve introduced me to Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose, founders of the Pinewood Table writing workshops, where I met so many local writers working as hard as me, invested in the craft of writing and in each other’s stories. I think I’ve stayed in Portland all these years because of joining that community and finally feeling like I belonged someplace.

Steve passed earlier this year, and I’ve been grappling with his loss and focusing my time on what he taught me: just keep showing up for others. For many years, I’ve compensated for a low self-image by jumping in to volunteer or give gifts of art or time. Besides connecting people, Steve’s gift, what he gave all his friends, was being present with us. This spring I’ve kept volunteering, because hey, that’s me, but I’ve also paid more attention to the moment I’m in and the person who’s in it with me. My friend Jean and I met for coffee and a writing session this morning, but we ended up chatting and laughing for an hour and a half. That’s exactly what I needed today. The Laura I was last year might have felt a pang of regret for the missed productivity, but today I just felt like everything worked out better than my original plan.

Can you remember a particular random act of kindness from a stranger?

Probably about ten years ago, when my kids were young, I went to a nearby coffee shop to work on my novel. While I was lost in an imaginary world of my own making, an artist drew a picture of me with ink pens. I had retreated to a public, not-so-quiet space so my kids wouldn’t interrupt me, and because intentional work blocks helped me claim my identity as a writer before I had published a book. The artist presented her art to me and I remember feeling astonished, not just by the sweet gift, but by being seen by her. I keep it on my desk.

Is there a song, person, or group that you listen to when you are feeling a bit

down?

My teenagers—whoever happens to be home! They are endlessly interesting, entertaining, and distracting. And when I’m blue, distraction is often what pulls me out of it and into a fresh mindset.

Were there parts in your book that your editor cut that you hated to see go? If so, what were they? 

My editors at Ooligan Press, a wonderful publishing house based at Portland State University and distributed by Publishers Group West, requested I add more than cut. Although I did have a lavish party scene flow through several chapters, and the team suggested I shorten it. Cutting to avoid a pacing lag was a cinch, once they nudged me to do so.

How do you feel about “Independent Bookstores” and their role in your success? 

Independent bookstores are my favorite; my author bio says I wish on them like stars. Which is true. In 2012, I decided to start a publishing house, Forest Avenue Press, to bring people together around books inside indie bookstores. We even printed our first title inside Powell’s at the Espresso Book Machine kiosk.

That concept of showing up in a place together, supporting a local business and listening to ideas and great writing? That’s why I am a publisher. And as a reader, I am a relentless appreciator of hand-selling and shelf talkers. I want to know what my local booksellers recommend, not what an algorithm throws in my face.

And finally Laura,

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME 

to any period from before recorded history to yesterday, 

be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your choice, 

actually experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all, 

meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them. 

When would you go? 

Where would you go? 

Who would you want to meet? 

And most importantly, why do you think you chose this time? 

I’ll say the 1920s, in my house in New Jersey, where I set The Neighborhood Dames. Who lived there? What were their lives like? Did they have an iron like the one I placed in the fictional version of the den? What ingredients did they favor in their homemade deodorant powder? What did they store in the secret vault beneath the slate in the foyer?

When you step into a home, and people have loved and been loved inside, it feels good to be there. Like all is well. I always felt that in our house, and it’d be wonderful to visit one of the families that lived there before mine.

Thank you Laura for answering my questions and for writing such a wonderful book!

Readers, order Laura's book at your local independent book store.