Mary Allen
Mary Allen is the author of The Deep Limitless Air: A Memoir in Pieces, published in May 2022 by Blue Light Press. Her literary memoir, The Rooms of Heaven, was published by Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage Books. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship and has published short work on the Psychology Today website and in Poets and Writers, Tiferet, Real Simple, Library Journal, The Chaos, CNN Online, and in the anthology If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught in the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing MFA program and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. She currently makes a living as a writing coach and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
What’s the oddest thing a reader has ever asked you?
Once during the Q and A period at the end of a reading, someone ask me what the afterlife is like. I’ve written a fair amount about the afterlife, in my memoir The Rooms of Heaven and elsewhere, and I’ve thought about it long and hard and read a lot of books related to it. These days I’m writing a novel set in the afterlife, which is causing me to think even longer and harder about it. So that question was a little easier to answer than it might have been. Still, it was a little bit like being asked to summarize the meaning of life in a two-minute answer in front of an audience.
Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?
I’ve never been able to get any sort of fix on myself, never been able to see myself the way other people see me. Probably nobody can see themselves in any detached sort of way, but my case might be more extreme as a result of having a mother who had postpartum mental illness and didn’t look at me affectionately and reflect back who I was. That inability to see myself extends to my writing, so I’ve never been able to get a real sense of my writing at all, although I know when it does and doesn’t work. I don’t feel like an imposter pretending to be an author. There’s just a blank space in my mind when it comes to myself.
Is there another profession you would like to try?
If I wasn’t a writer I’d be an EMDR therapist. (EMDR is a kind of psychotherapy that involves psychological healing through dislodging old trapped trauma with the help of bilateral stimulation.) I have a friend who’s a therapist and she and I do EMDR on each other at least once a month. I absolutely love the feeling of looking deep into someone’s unconscious, my own or my friend’s, and noting what I find there. In a way it’s not that dissimilar to writing.
What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?
To me being an author relates to my writing self in the outside world—going places and giving readings, being seen by others in the persona or role of author. I do think roles are different from who we are—I remember reading once that Stevie Wonder said, “There’s Stevie Wonder and Stevland Morris (his real name). I’m Stevland Morris.” Or Cary Grant saying, “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.” So the author me is the person I am in the outside world when I’m presenting myself as a writer. The writer me is the person who sits at a desk and works with the writing over and over until she gets it right. She knows that that’s the only thing that matters (the writing) and she can never take it for granted.
Is there a work of art that you love. Why? Have you ever visited it in person?
I love Cloud Banks by Marvin Cone, which I have seen in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. I moved to Iowa City in the 1980s and have loved the wide sky and towering cumulus clouds here ever since. Marvin Cone lived in Cedar Iowa his whole life, and his paintings of clouds capture something elemental and unnamable that I find in the clouds and wide-open spaces of this place. I also love his depictions of doorways and stairs, which are haunting and mysterious in a different way.
