SUMMER WOOD is a writer passionate about place and the human stories that play out against a particular landscape.  Author of the novel Arroyo (Chronicle Books) and currently at work on a second novel and a collection of short stories, her work has won numerous awards and garnered national recognition for its warmth, humor, and intensity.  Until receiving the Literary Gift of Freedom, she has supported her family – and her writing practice – running a hands-on construction company.

Q&A with Summer Wood:

AROHO: As of right now, you plan to dedicate your award period to your novel, Wrecker, and a collection of short stories, correct?

Summer : Yeah.  Completing Wrecker – and getting it out into the world – is my top priority right now.  Once that’s done, my focus will shift to the collection of short stories, writing new ones and polishing some of the ones I’ve already written that would fit the collection.

Obviously, you have been able to carve out time to write in the midst of your full and busy life – but how do you hope this award period will allow you improve or change your writing?

Oh, it’s so apparent to me the different quality of thought and language that arises when there’s the promise of enough time to really relax into the work.  It permits a much deeper and broader experience, and the product reflects that.  Especially with a big novel.  So many novels get written like a series of pearls on a string.  Time like this lets you mine the big diamond.

In your creative project plan, you repeat a very simple, genuine statement:   "To write fiction, deep stories, is to make radical connections in our hearts and our minds."  Does this remain, for you, a way to describe your belief in the power of fiction?

It does.  As much credit as I give to the entertainment value of storytelling – and I love a rollicking tale as much as the next person, believe me – it’s the ability stories have to transform the raw material of experience into significant, life-governing meaning that I find so compelling.  And not just those times when stories tell us something that will help us.  Just as often the stories are what kill us, right?  Fiction provides a kind of window into that process, a way to look at what we believe to be true about ourselves, individually and collectively.  I should make that plural.  It gives us ways, windows.  And the view is constantly changing.

Women writers have been evening out the playing field with men for quite a few years now – but what would you say are the primary challenges that women, in particular, must face in turning their writing into a career (or just a part-time passion)?

If I can be crass enough to generalize, I’ll say that it’s no lie that women take care of other people more than men do.  It’s programmed in.  That’s one part, the getting yourself, with attention intact, to the table.  (I’m leaving off the whole thing about working a job, which everybody, regardless of gender, has to contend with.)  The other part that interests me is the question of:  what will you settle for?  How much will you demand of yourself?  Of the world?  How big are you willing to think?  Feel?  Act?  There are pressures, both subtle and overt, that society exerts upon women to contain ourselves, to pack down smaller and tighter than our true dimensions.  So the challenge is to either resist that compression or to use it in an intelligent way in your writing.