@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:42

#AuthorInterview | Talking with debut novelist Anne Burt about The Dig

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In 2018, I went to my first writing residency at Ragdale, and I met a writer named Anne Burt. At the time, I believe she was working on a novel, and I remember hearing her read at the end of the residency and thinking, man, I can't wait to read that whole book. Now, five years later, her debut novel, The Dig, is a March 2023 American Booksellers Association Indie Next Pick and the Strand Bookstores Mystery Selection of the month. Anne, congratulations

#newbooks #books #mysteries #amwriting #amwriting https://www.anneburtwriter.com/

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@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:33

#readaloud

So I would love to start out if there's a brief excerpt or maybe just a few sentences or pair graph that you would like to share with us from the dig to give us a sense of what we can expect in the novel
@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:47

#writinglife

I know that the writing of a book from initial conception to actual publication, can be such a journey. Could you tell us a little bit about how you got the idea originally for this book and how long it took you to draft it? Were there many drafts? Was there an initial first draft that was really solid and essentially was the bones of the book that you just iterated on? And how did you go about finding the right agent and publisher and home for this book?
@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 1:15

#writingadvice

Without sharing. Any spoilers for those who haven't read the book yet? Absolutely. One of the things I love about this story is that our protagonist is pulled back home after her brother's mysterious disappearance when she has very much wanted to escape. And I am so drawn to stories with, um, that kind of theme where one is forced to face something that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise if it wasn't for a significant life event like this
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@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 0:49

#askafailure

I'm looking forward to what you have to share so much. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with these questions and to be in conversation with us
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@Anne_Burt
Anne Burt
@Anne_Burt · 3:40

@bowie

A hand whose wrist sports the brown sleeve of her mother's dress. The dress the girl helped fold that very morning, warm and sunsweet from the clothesline in the back
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@Anne_Burt
Anne Burt
@Anne_Burt · 4:54

@bowie

I mean, there are benchmarks that are the same, but the way you get there, it's full of loops and surprises and major disappointments and a lot of girding your loins and saying, okay, all right, that was horrible, but maybe next time it won't be so bad. So I could start with the conception of the actual writing of this novel, which took place, as you and I discussed, in 2018 at the Ragdale Foundation Writers Retreat
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@Anne_Burt
Anne Burt
@Anne_Burt · 4:30

@bowie

You, writing The Dig as a mystery was very much a process of having to teach myself how to write a mystery. So for those of us who came up through MFA programs, I did a long time ago in the 1990s, and I know a lot of writers who are coming up through MFA programs that are geared toward literary fiction only. Now, that's not part of the curriculum. I know that there are amazing places where you can learn how to be a mystery writer
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@Anne_Burt
Anne Burt
@Anne_Burt · 4:51

@bowie

But get amazing at something that you can get amazing at, whether that's living with it or laughing at it or being kind of generative in a new way as a result of it. But hey, you know what? Again, if we were only talking about successes, I wouldn't have anything to say to anybody in the writing world until I turned 55. And I've been talking a lot for a lot of years
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@bowie
Bowie Rowan
@bowie · 3:01

@Anne_Burt thank you!

And I truly cannot think of a better way to start the week than listening to your responses. It was amazing to hear that at the time at Ragdale. The idea for this novel is what actually was coming to fruition while you were working on something else in my memory. I thought you were working on a nonfiction book, burt Dig thought I must have misremembered it or maybe you were doing research for this novel
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