Anise Vance: Be Intentional in the Development of Your Craft
Anise Vance is a writer from the African and Iranian diasporas. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden. As a Mitchell Scholar, he received an MPhil in Geography from Queen’s University Belfast. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and currently lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children. Follow him on Twitter.
In this post, Anise shares his experience of writing an emotionally draining novel that needed to be written, how his publishing team helped him, and more.
Anise Vance (photo credit: Shannon Delaney)
Name: Anise Vance
Literary agent: Caroline Eisenmann
Book title: Hush Harbor
Publisher: Hanover Square Press, Harlequin, HarperCollins
Release date: September 5, 2023
Genre/category: Literary
Elevator pitch for the book: After the murder of an unarmed Black teenager by the hands of the police in Bliss City, New Jersey, a full-scale resistance group takes control of an abandoned housing project and decide to call it Hush Harbor, in homage of the secret spaces their enslaved ancestors would gather to pray. Jeremiah Prince, alongside his sister Nova, are leaders of the revolution, but have ideological differences regarding how the movement should proceed. When a new mayor with ties to white supremacists threatens the group’s pseudo-sanctuary and locks the city down, the collective must come to a decision for their very survival.
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What prompted you to write this book?
I’ve always been fascinated by questions of justice, love, and sacrifice—especially under conditions of oppression and extreme political pressure. In some ways, the novel was inspired by my time living in Belfast (Northern Ireland), where I met with and interviewed people who had participated in the Troubles and who had wrestled with many of the same questions that I had.
In obvious ways, the novel draws from ongoing abuse that black souls experience at the hands of police in the United States. The novel worms its way into often unspoken reactions to those tragedies and explores collective dreams of a truly just society. What would it take to build that society? What sacrifices would need to be made? How do we honor those who have passed away—and how do we protect those who will come after us?
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
The idea came to me sometime between late 2011 and early 2012. I sat on it for about three years, until the successive murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice. The idea itself stayed the same for the eight or so years that I was actively writing the novel. But the structure, points of view, and plot changed too many times to count.
It was an unexpectedly difficult novel to write. How do you write about material like this without re-traumatizing people? Without making pornography out of pain? Without writing something that comes across as a “race war” story? I needed to find the right characters and perspectives and entry points and plot to support a novel that has revolution as its premise, but love and sacrifice at its core.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
So many. The most important: I genuinely had such a delightful, invigorating, warm, learning-filled publishing experience.
My agent, Caroline Eisenmann, is something of a literary genius and a business savant, in addition to being a justice-driven, wonderful human being. My editor, John Glynn, is a storytelling visionary (read his memoir, Out East) and a publishing guru, who is the perfect balance of compassionate and frank. And I can’t say enough good things about the whole team at my literary agency and my imprint—those teams are just out of this world talented, generous, and skilled.
I know there are horror stories out there about the publishing world. But folks should also know that there are really, really great people working very hard every day to get meaningful books into readers’ hands. I got so lucky to be surrounded by some of those people.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
How exhausted I was at the end. After the final edits, I really never wanted to touch or read another page of the book. It was tough material to write because it was premised on such a tragedy. I think many writers probably have similar experiences: You get to the end of a book that you absolutely needed to write and find that you are emotionally spent.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope readers will find, in reading this book, that they experience a sliver of catharsis and hope. We’ve all been through so much trauma related to the treatment of bodies—black bodies, bodies of color in general, bodies that don’t conform to traditional gender norms, bodies that cross national borders, bodies that are seen as out of place, bodies that others want to confine or control or destroy.
There is pain and anger and deep sadness in all of us. This book explores that—hopefully in a way that is gripping and tense and cathartic. And, hopefully, in a way that brings some measure of hope.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Be intentional in the development of your craft. I think about that in three ways: keep writing on a routine that works for you (just stick to that routine, whatever it is); keep reading widely and with curiosity and with an eye towards what is working in texts (sometimes we can lapse into excessive critique that serves little purpose and drains us of the joy of reading); and use your writing and reading routines to think about what elements of craft you’d like to improve on and how you can go about doing that (which could mean searching other books for techniques, writing your way into your own set of tools, or a combination of those approaches).
Whatever you do, keep love for the craft at the center of your practice.