Abigail Cutter
Abigail Cutter started out as an artist/printmaker with a MFA from George Washington University, but during a long stint at the National Endowment for the Humanities she developed a deep love of American history. She married a man who came with a farm and an 18th-century farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The farmhouse came with a very active ghost. She currently lives at both the farm and in the small town of Waterford, VA, with her husband, a black Labrador named Emma, and a cat named Barnibi.
Favorite non-reading activity?
My husband and I have just returned from hiking in Dartmoor in southern England. We’ve gone now for ten years except for during the Covid crisis. The vast, empty hills of the moors are like the ocean rolling into the distance with little sign of present-day life. It’s the perfect combination for me: hiking in a place of natural beauty and immersing myself in history. Dartmoor is home to at least 75 Bronze Age (meaning at least 5,000 years old) smaller circles like Stone Henge, ancient stone burial chambers, and stone avenues leading to summer solstice sites. I suppose this attraction dovetails with a life-long fascination with picturesque cemeteries. In college I often took a snack to the local cemetery mid-day and walked between headstones, thinking about all those lives before mine. Hiking in Dartmoor takes me deeper into history, making me imagine people so different on the surface but the same in more profound ways.
Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?
I have an MFA in visual art and studied painting, printmaking, and art history. My silk-screened prints have been exhibited in galleries, and I’ve taught art. So, if you asked me who I am, I’d have said “artist” until recently. Not identifying as a writer gave me freedom to revise, edit, and discard parts of my book without being so self-involved in the process. I’m truly a visual person, and it has been a stretch to become a verbal one. But the visual part hasn’t gone away. Instead, all the sights I unconsciously absorb go into richer descriptions of my characters’ worlds and how they appear in them.
Vacation druthers–City or Rural?
I used to be a museum person, and cities are home to great museums. I grew up in cities with the exception of summer visits to a grandmother on a farm. But increasingly I’m drawn to vacations on the water or in the mountains. I’ve changed from wanting to fill my eyes and mind with man-made things to wanting to fill my senses with sounds and sights of nature. You can walk for miles in a city, but it’s not as exhilarating as climbing to the top of a high hill and looking across a landscape that disappears miles away.
Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?
I no longer read to lose myself in a novel, but instead read to see how it’s crafted. If a book isn’t well written, I put it down after a few pages. I also break the unwritten rule of reading the last pages first to see where it’s all going. The best is a book that’s beautifully written and that I can fall into, forgetting the world around me. Those books, like anything by Anthony Doerr or Marilynne Robinson, I read five or six times, underlining as I go.
What brings you great joy?
So many simple things: the first crunchy bite of spring lettuce I’ve planted in my garden, the love-brimming brown eyes of our black Labrador, the purr of my old cat Barnibi as he snuggles into the covers on a cold night, crisp clean sheets, and having my family around the dining room table for a holiday meal. I guess I’m not supposed to talk about writing here, but real joy is letting my unconscious loose on a story idea and flying with it. And then revising the writing, each bit like a strand of yarn pulled from a skein and then divided and divided into smaller strands until it feels complete.
