Interview with Donna Seaman

Contributing editor Sophia Ihlefeld interviews Donna Seaman, Editor for Adult Books at Booklist, a member of the Content Leadership Team and National Advisory Council for the American Writers Museum, and a recipient of the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman has written for the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. Her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. Seaman lives in Chicago.

You truly unearthed some fascinating women artists. How did you choose them? Did you know of them before you began your research?

It’s interesting. I guess this all started with me thinking about Louise Nevelson. I’ve always loved her work, as I write about, and I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t included in the art history surveys that I was seeing. I’d see these big books about modern sculpture, and I would go to the index to look for her and she wouldn’t be there. Her sculptures I used to see in museum collections were put away, and we weren’t coming across her like we used to. So that whole question of how can you attain such renown and then disappear sort of haunted me. So, that was the first article I wrote and it really just started as an essay for something different to read. I’ve been an editor of Booklist for a long time, so I wanted to go back to my art roots. And I was seeing all these art books, many of which I was related in. After I was lucky enough to have the Nevelson article published in TriQuarterly I said, “I want to do more of these. I know there are more women artists that this has happened to.” And so I started thinking about artists whose work really meant a lot to me, and who’d achieved enough recognition to make it into historic records, but who most people didn’t know about. Even people who really like museums and art. The Chicago artists really struck me. I remember the first time I saw Gertrude Abercrombie, and I was just so taken with her! And I had no idea who she was. The one whose art I did know was Christina Ramberg, and when she became ill and died I felt that I should write about her; I felt that way for many years. So to finally be able to do so was really meaningful to me. That was a really emotional part of the book to work on. And many of the others I came across in my reading or museum-going. I was at the Milwaukee Art Museum when I saw that Lois Mailou Jones painting and thought, “who is this?” I’ve been looking at art my whole life, and I’ve typically been able to just walk into a museum and name everyone. And so when I can’t I just get really excited, like, “Oh, a new artist for me! Who is this?” 

In Identity Unknown, you draw on so many amazing primary sources that allow the reader to feel as if they truly know these women. Can you tell me a little more about your researching process?

That was really important to me. I’m a huge reader; I’ve been a huge reader all my life. I really respect other writers, researchers, people that make that effort to find sources. So that was important to me. Everything from going to museums and talking to curators to borrowing packages of microfilm from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. There’s a library where I work, and I would sit there at night rolling through microfilm for hours and hours. A lot of the microfilm I went through was everything an artist had left behind. Gertrude Abercrombie had left all of her papers behind in boxes, and then people just diligently photographed them all. So you find things from shopping lists to amazing journal entries to photographs, reviews of her shows, clippings that she’d kept. The same with Lois Mailou Jones: Christmas cards from friends, all kinds of papers and old documents from her travels in Africa. It was just amazing to be able to look at all these things! I was able to print out a lot of the information from the microfilm and make my own archives. I did a lot of that and did a lot of interviews, with people who knew the artists or people who knew their work. And just a lot of reading, and following footnotes. I was such a geek about this book; I was very proud of my endnotes. 

I was also incredibly fortunate in the generous support of Christina Ramberg’s family. I was given unique access to Ramberg’s personal files and papers. I was also helped tremendously by the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, where I was able to see many of her small works and notebooks and personal objects. I also was allowed access to a museum vault and was able to make requests to curators who took works out of deep, long-term storage. So I did a great deal of library and archival research, a lot of reading and studying of microfilm, and I also had a lot of direct contact with materials and artworks and conducted interviews.

About how long was the book-writing process for you, from the idea conception to manuscript publishing? 

The piece on Nevelson came out nine or ten years ago. And I’d decided then to keep working on these, and I did so without knowing if I’d be able to publish them all together or not. Every once in a while editors would ask me, “Are you working on a book?” And I’d say, “Yeah I have this idea for a collection of profiles of women artists!” And they’d be like, “Oh, okay…” And that really was just it until I met the editor of Bloomsbury. And Bloomsbury publishes tons of art history. I just got very, very fortunate to find an editor who shared my vision and felt that it was worth doing. I’d pictured it as a book of biographical essays, but they wanted to go out and include illustrations! That was amazing; I couldn’t dare dream of that. That was a lot of work and I had to do all that myself. Find the images, get permission, get the files; this is a big undertaking! After years of writing, I wrote Louise Nevelson, I wrote Ree Morton, and then I was working on Abercrombie when I turned out my contract. I hadn’t completely decided on how many profiles there would be, and I kept refining my list. When I decided I wanted longer pieces, I lowered my number from ten or twelve to seven. I also decided to further refine my choices in a couple of ways. One, I decided to only write about deceased artists. And I wanted to focus on artists who worked with their hands, made sculptures, painted or drew. It was important for me to think about that rather than women photographers whose work I loved. I thought, that’s machine mediated, that’s another topic. I wanted to talk about women who used studios, women who got dirty; it was kind of a way for me to get back in the studio. 

I understand you have done some editorial work, for TriQuarterly and Fifth Wednesday, for instance. Can you speak on how your editorial and writing experience interact? 

I have to work, I have a full time job, and so it was very challenging. In my position at Booklist I do a lot of writing, a lot of reviewing, and a lot of interviews like you’re doing. And I oversee the section of the magazine devoted to adult books: so I assign many reviews and edit other people’s work and reviews. I develop two minds: the writer mind and the editor mind. And the rigor of doing both was a benefit to me. I was able to switch into editor mode to look at my own work. It also had a funny difference. Booklist is very concise. The reviews are short, the features are short. I spend much of my editorial life cutting things down, and having to give up passages I love because there’s no room for them. So when it came to writing this book I wanted not to be writing about books for a while but to do something a little different. I also wanted to let myself write freely and more personally, because there’s an editorial style to Booklist. And when you’re reviewing other people’s work, it’s about their work and voice, not yours, so you should be almost transparent in your writing. Whereas here, I wanted to immerse myself in the world of visual art, which is a very different, more sensuous experience, and also let myself write a little more freely and publicly. So I was pushing against all the limits I was used to. 

Would you say your editorial and publication experience was an advantage for the editorial process of your book? You know, from being on the other side of things—that it’s no hard feelings when you have to take out that one passage you loved? 

Yes, I’d definitely say so. We all had a really good time because I knew the drill. I knew what to do, I knew what they had to do, and I respected that. It was all very cordial and exciting. And I think in many ways I edited myself harder than my editor did, which was fun. Even working on the layout for the illustrations, since I have an art background, I was able to step into that. I don’t know what someone without my experiences would’ve done; it would’ve been so overwhelming! I’ve spoken to writers who have never been shown the background process [when their books are being published] or couldn’t choose their own book jackets, so I was very fortunate that my experience allowed me to work on that level. 

You said you originally thought you’d write on more than seven artists. Are there any specific artists you unfortunately had to cut but would still like to write about? 

I was very happy with the seven I chose, but there were some, including photographers and filmmakers, that I still feel like I want to write about. I wanted to have a diversity of artists. It was really hard to find any information about artists of color from the past century that didn’t achieve a large or even regional reputation. I came across images in old books about Mexican American or African American artists, and I’d be like “this is great it looks so interesting!” But I couldn’t track down any more information than I’d originally found, which was usually no more than a paragraph or two. 

What advice do you have for new writers? 

I think there’s so many outlets now. I’d really encourage new writers to keep writing and show your work to someone. I’d have friends reading my work—artist friends, and a poet—who were so generous, and read my book as I worked on it and gave me feedback. And that was so helpful. A lot of people join writer’s groups even if it’s just a couple people to share their work. You write to communicate, you write to connect. Anyone that’s able to respond to what you’re doing, ask questions, point some things out—so you’re really having a conversation about what you’re writing—really helps your work and helps you present yourself to editors. I’d also look for opportunities to get published somehow; book reviews are a great way to get published. You experience the editorial process. Submit to as many literary magazines as you can; it’s a worthwhile pursuit. It really helped [when looking for a publisher] that I could say two of my essays had already been published. The magazine Poets & Writers is just full of information on where you could publish your work. And entering contests, too! The more you know about the writing world, the easier you’ll know how to move forward, who might be interested in your work, how you’ll get an agent. 

What are you reading right now? 

Let’s see. We do different issues at Booklist with different themes and subject areas. The last issue, the one we’re closing, was our arts issue. I had a really good time reading some other art biographies, including the first big biography of the sculptor Alexander Calder, written by one of my favorite art writers, Jed Perl. It’s going to be a two-part biography. This book is just full of amazing details about Calder’s life. Two more novels I’m wild about right now are Here in Berlin by Christina Garcia and Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich. I also just finished a biography about a photographer written by Pamela Bannos, Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife. 

What’s next for you?
I’ve been really thinking hard about this. I love my work at Booklist, but I really need to start doing more of my own writing. I’ve been thinking a lot about two different directions. There are a lot of stories about artists and writers in Chicago that haven’t been told. This was an amazingly literary place in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. There are a lot of overlooked writers and artists and creative people. I’ve been thinking about writing connected to that, in a similar fashion to Identity Unknown. And then part of me wants to do something completely different!

Donna Seaman is the Editor for Adult Books at Booklist, a member of the Content Leadership Team and National Advisory Council for the American Writers Museum, and a recipient of the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism and the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award. Seaman has written for the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. Her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists. Seaman lives in Chicago.