My Interview With Ann Hood
Highlights:
- Some writers are just born to write and there is no other option.
- Having a vision of your writing journey, and what kind of writer you want to be, is important to making it come true.
- Every writer has a voice and when you find it everything fits into place.
- What it’s like to be a best selling novelist turned memoirist.
- Her new book, “The Book That Matters Most”.
Ann Hood wanted to be a writer for as long as she can remember. She majored in English at the University of Rhode Island, and that's where she fell in love with Shakespeare, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
When Ann was in seventh grade, she read a book called How To Become An Airline Stewardess that fueled her desire to see the world. And that's just what she did when she graduated from URI—she went to work for TWA as a flight attendant. Back then, she thought you needed adventures in order to be a writer. Of course, she knows now that all you need, as Eudora Welty said, is to sit on your own front porch.
But Ann did see a lot of the world with TWA, and she moved from Boston to St. Louis and finally to NYC, a place she’d dreamed of living ever since Ann watched Doris Day movies as a little girl. Ann wrote her first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, on international flights and on the Train to the Plane, which was the subway out to JFK. It was published in 1987. Since then, she’s published in The New York Times, The Paris Review, O, Bon Appetit, Tin House, The Atlantic Monthly, Real Simple, and other wonderful places; and she’s won two Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Food Writing Awards, Best American Spiritual Writing and Travel Writing Awards, and a Boston Public Library Literary Light Award.
Ann lives in Providence, RI with her husband and their children.