About Alexandra Marshall
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My formal training was in Modern Dance and French, parallel disciplines that would together inform and define my identity as a writer. As a choreographer, Martha Graham was a storyteller, but her compositions were realized by the strict mechanics of her signature contraction-and-release technique. Similarly, learning a foreign language—becoming fluent—requires musicality as well as a focused knowledge and appreciation of the rules in order to achieve freedom of expression.
Philip Roth was a teacher of writing who believed that, while writing can't be taught, it can be learned. I was guided by his advice to writers to spend twice as much time reading as writing, and with this instruction I learned by doing, finding the correspondence between a dancer's movement and a writer's joined phrases moving across the page on a breath. This improvised process, as I discovered and pursued it, was both science and art.
I was already an eager reader. A vivid early memory from my elementary school years was that, when I was reading past my bedtime, in order not to get caught, I'd sit on my pillow on the floor of my closet with a flashlight tied to the sash of one of my smocked dresses. It was probably Nancy Drew who first taught me to make my own rules.
Dance Club got me through grades 7-12 at my girls' school in the suburb of Manhattan called Dobbs Ferry, and I continued to study dance at Wheaton College where I majored in French because the degree requirements were fewer than for English and allowed me to take extra dance classes at the New England Conservatory. Somehow, my conventional parents proved sufficiently liberated to permit me to substitute for graduate school a round-the-world air ticket, good for a year, which gave me the chance to live in Kyoto for six months, studying Japanese classical dance, before making my way back to New York and a job at the Japanese Consulate.
I got married at the end of that year to my college boyfriend, Timothy Lee Buxton, and, a year later at Columbia University's Teachers College, I switched back to French. My corporate-lawyer dad's well-intentioned career advice—it sounded helpful back in the mid-60s—was to do something (other than dance ) that "I could go back to once the kids were in school."
Instead of that standard trajectory, however, as co-leaders of a group of student volunteers for Operation Crossroads Africa, a program JFK called "the progenitor of the Peace Corps," on the tenth day after our arrival in Ghana, my charismatic 28 year-old husband killed himself. America itself was in grief in the aftermath of the violent assassinations of MLK Jr. and RFK, so I fit right in as someone radically in need of redefinition.
It was then that I began to write—I had a story to tell—under the gentle and generous guidance of Philip Roth, who gave me "The Child Widow" as the title of my first composition. And although I would succeed in publishing two books before the end of that decade of the 70s, I also made several unsuccessful attempts to write versions of my own story. In fact it took me thirty years to publish something bearing that "Child Widow" title, a short story, my first, which appeared in Ploughshares and was included among the "100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2003" in The Best American Short Stories edition edited by Lorrie Moore. I thought I was finished at last with the need to fulfill that wish, but after nearly another twenty years I finally fully claimed the subject in a memoir called The Silence of Your Name: The Afterlife of a Suicide. The truth I discovered was that, indeed, reality is beyond the reach of mere invention.
And since a writer's memoir is both a biography of the imagination and a chronology of events, my account describes those first two books published a year apart, my debut novel Gus in Bronze, published by Knopf and in condensed form in Redbook magazine, and a work of nonfiction called Still Waters, the companion book for the "Still Waters" PBS Nova film. The novel imagines the death of a woman whose age I put halfway between my own 29 and my mother's 58 when she died of the ovarian cancer diagnosed five months after my husband's suicide. Katha Pollitt wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Gus in Bronze is a Love Story about grown-ups, written by somebody with a grown-up mind." At its publication I was already at work on Still Waters, about which The Christian Science Monitor reviewer wrote, "Not since Thoreau have experiences surrounding a Massachusetts pond been as worthy of our attention," crediting my amateur-naturalist tendency to embellish "a scientist's attention to detail" with "a poet's feeling." It suited me that this chronicle began on a grim winter day when the pond's life was waiting for spring to detonate it. I knew the feeling.
And while I will always wonder what novel I might have written instead of Still Waters, propelled as I was by my own regeneration with my first book publication, my memoir also records the life-changing turn in my story that year when my literary agent introduced me to another of his authors, James Carroll. Jim and I have been married for these nearly fifty years since that day, and we have the children that my father blithely assumed for me all that time ago. Together Jim and I have published twenty-eight books (mostly his) and, since writers seem never to retire, we are both still at work in our separate but adjacent studios.
When I'm asked how many books I've written, I always count the novels that didn't get published—even my two unpublishable "practice" novels before Gus in Bronze—with the explanation that this number more accurately describes both the life of an artist and the meaning of vocation. Over the years I've written about the complexity of suicide in The Pull of Gravity, and about figure skating and the Siege of Sarajevo in Adopting Love. Since my memoir in 2021, I've written The Status of Orphans, a novel about dance and protest music set in Haiti, and I've just completed a novel called The Hour of the Nightingale about a hospice nurse and her patients in a small town in coastal Maine. Whether or not these books are published, they exist.
So while I consider myself a full-time writer, like many and perhaps most, I've also taught in several Boston-area colleges and universities. With Jim I cofounded, and then directed, the Ploughshares International Fiction Writing Seminar that we held for nine years at Emerson College's Kasteel Well in The Netherlands. I've been a Film Critic for The American Prospect and a Guest Columnist and feature writer for The Boston Globe, with a focus on culture and politics. For thirty years I edited the annual volume of The Courage of Children: Boston and Beyond, a national and international collection of "Courage in My Life" essays by sixth-graders. I've served as a director of the Massachusetts Center for the Book, affiliated with the Library of Congress, and am currently on the board of Consequence, the international literary journal uniquely dedicated to presenting the work of writers and artists addressing the human consequences of war and geopolitical violence.
In my own writing, including the crafting of this statement about myself, I'm mindful of Virginia Woolf's instruction: "If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people." This citation is from "The Leaning Tower," a paper she delivered in 1940 to the Workers' Educational Association, where she distinguishes between England's cherished fiction writers of the 19th Century and those writing in the decade from 1930-1940, when "the leaningtower writers wrote about themselves honestly, therefore creatively." Philip Roth was famously not a fan of Virginia Woolf, but since I am—she was my second teacher after him—I've read and continually re-read her work. In the world of dance my passion has expanded from Martha Graham to the choreography and legacy of Alvin Ailey, as in French literature from Camus to Ernaux. But I'm still mindful of Roth's original directive, and example, to learn by reading. Woolf makes the same point when she urges, "Write daily; write freely; but let us always compare what we have written with what the great writers have written. It is humiliating, but it is essential." ▣