Practice Behind the Page, is component of our SHINE series, a monthly event discussions series that features luminary writers and wellness practitioners. This conversation series that focuses on what kinds of self care practices writers use to facilitate inspiration and creative flow. This month, we are honored to be joined by NH friend Maud Newton, author of the new book Ancestor Trouble, that explores ancestral reckoning and a search for truth and reconciliation.
Join us for a live conversation on Instagram Live on Wednesday, December 21, 12 noon ET. Read below for an original interview with Maud about where she finds inspiration for her writing practice and more! Order her book anywhere books are sold!
NH: Describe your writing practice? (ie: is movement or meditation a part of your writing?)
MN: I’d say it’s a combination of both meditation and movement. It’s (still) difficult for me to compile my practice into a few words because I think of it as a complex and organic thing. My writing practice is very different from my art-making practice which is diffent than being a graphic designer/art director. They’re pretty different skills. But they all coexist in the same eco system, and I think of them as a continuum. So it requires being flexible and listening to my body to hear what I need to settle into each one. It’s a continually shifting thing.
NH: What surprised you most about the publishing process?
MN: I was thrilled to have an editor who understood what I wanted to do and encouraged me more fully toward my vision for the book every step of the way.
NH: Where do you find inspiration?
MN: Inspiration comes from so many places for me. To name just a few: books; art; my animal companions; the park across the way from my house, rare woodlands in New York City that I love exploring on long walks with my dogs..
NH: What are you reading?
MN: I just finished Megan Giddings’ wonderful novel The Women Could Fly and I’m getting ready to read Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year. Two books out next year that I read and loved (and blurbed!) are Dionne Ford’s Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing and Ava Chin’s Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming.
To hear more, visit our Instagram to watch an intimate discussion with Maud and Lisa.
About Maud
Maud Newton’s first book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House), was named a best book of 2022 by The New Yorker, NPR, the Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Garden & Gun, and Entertainment Weekly, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and Roxane Gay Book Club selection. It was called “a literary feat” by the New York Times Book Review and a “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” by the Boston Globe. Newton also writes personal essays, cultural criticism, and fiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, Esquire, Harper’s, Narrative, the New York Times Book Review, Oxford American, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications and anthologies, including Best American Travel Writing and the New York Times bestseller, What My Mother Gave Me. Newton has discussed the importance of individual acknowledgments of ancestors’ complicity in larger cultural harms with NPR’s All Things Considered, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, WNYC, and UC Davis Jewish Studies/Religious Studies, among others. She received the Narrative Prize and City College’s Irwin and Alice Stark Short Fiction Prize, both for fiction. She has been a Yaddo resident. Newton was born in Dallas, grew up in Miami, land has degrees from the University of Florida in English and law. Since 1999, she has lived in New York City, on the land of the Lenape people. She teaches, occasionally, on Writing About Ancestor Trouble.
