What You Write Teaches You: An Interview with Marcia Bradley

Marcia Bradley is a writer and teacher who grew up in Chicago and lives in the Bronx, New York. Her debut novel, The Home for Wayward Girls, was published by HarperCollins in 2023. She has published in The Chicago Review of Books, Drunk Monkeys, The Writing Disorder, Eclectica, Hippocampus Magazine, and Two Hawks Quarterly. She won honorable mention from Glimmer Train and a Brio Award for Fiction from the Bronx Council on the Arts.

Bradley earned a BA at Antioch University, Los Angeles, where she edited Two Hawks Quarterly and studied with Alistair McCartney, Deb Lott, Caley O’Dwyer, and Ed Frankel. She also attended Jim Krusoe’s creative writing classes at Santa Monica College and credits him for motivating her to write.

Bradley holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where her mentors in fiction were Carolyn Ferrell and Joan Silber. She teaches at The Writing Institute of Sarah Lawrence College, where her warmth, curiosity, and dedication have won Bradley the respect and admiration of many students.

I conducted this interview over Zoom on February 1, 2024, two weeks prior to the Valentine’s Day start of Bradley’s 12-week manuscript workshop class, where I was a student.

KEVIN J. CUMMINS:  In your novel, The Home for Wayward Girls, the story shifts back and forth between New York City, when Loretta is 35, and west of the Rockies, where Loretta turns 18. Reading about Loretta’s last days of high school made me wonder what path your life took when you turned 18.

Readers like to know real stuff. I’m the kind of reader who, if they mention a restaurant or a park or a national forest, I’m making a note, and I want to see it someday.

MARCIA BRADLEY: I went to three different colleges and wasn’t on any kind of a curriculum track, and then I got a job with an airline. Now, I tell you, in my family, working for an airline was better than any college degree. It was the top of the mountain, like—You rock, girl! Go work for an airline. I was not a flight attendant. I worked in marketing, and it was many years before I thought – Time to try something different.

Because I was a director in marketing for an airline, I traveled a lot, and I paid attention to details of setting. I love to create a setting, not just a backdrop, but something palpable.

KJC: Whichever town or state west of the Rockies is the setting for your novel is left to the reader’s imagination. The novel’s table of contents lists each chapter with a number and setting tag: “New York City” or “West of the Rockies.” Your “New York City” chapters have specific places – Hunter College, Central Park, an eighth-floor apartment at Broadway and 69th. Your “West of the Rockies” chapters, whether in a guns and ammo shop, a Walmart, or a Dairy Queen, come alive with sensory details like the boys Loretta knew who “reeked of Aqua Velva menthol aftershave.” How did you choose to call the setting for Loretta’s childhood “West-of-the-Rockies” as opposed to naming a town or a state?

MB: When I teach writing, I am a proponent of real places.

I teach people who are writing novels and memoirs, and I read manuscripts, and when a writer says – a diner on the corner of such and such – I say, name the diner. Does the diner have a name? Is it a real place? Readers like to know real stuff. I’m the kind of reader who, if they mention a restaurant or a park or a national forest, I’m making a note, and I want to see it someday. I’m big on real places. But get it right. My father was a surveyor who knew Illinois like the back of his hand. If you said, “I’m at the Dunkin’ Donuts at Seventy-Ninth and Ashland,” he’d go, “I don’t think so. There’s no Dunkin’ Donuts there.” He knew every block across the state. If your car broke down, he’d say, “Walk two blocks south. There’s a restaurant there. I’ll come and get you.” We want to be mesmerized with real places.

When people at readings tell me, “I know that place,” or “I’ve been there,” or “I never knew that,” I love it. New Yorkers have told me there are places in my book in Central Park that they never knew of. So now they are going to go to them.

While I was in grad school at Sarah Lawrence, during my breaks I took a lot of road trips. I went to all the national parks west of the Rockies and got to know the land a bit. That’s how I came up with the idea for The Home for Wayward Girls. I’ve never driven as fast as I drove in those states out West. Eighty miles an hour is nothing. People ask me, “How did you come up with this home where these girls are sent to stay because they’ve misbehaved, or been truant, or errant in their lives?” I was whizzing down a back road, in between two national parks, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw this building made of cinder blocks with little narrow windows and a sign out front that said, “Home for Girls.”

When you’re driving 80 miles an hour, it’s like this – [snaps her fingers]. I thought, I’ve got to figure out what that’s all about. And that became my book. I didn’t want to malign a particular state because these homes exist all over the country.

KJC: Your reluctance to name a state reminds me of Erica Krouse’s memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation. It mentions no state or town by name because Krouse’s memoir indicts a powerful institution for permitting a pattern of misogynistic practices destructive to all people involved.

MB: I felt the same way. My novel is about a business practice across the United States that gets publicly funded with tons of money every year. I wanted people to become aware of it. At every event I do, someone there knows a girl, or a guy, who’s been in one of these homes. People come up to me and say, “My niece, my nephew…” One person wrote and said they had sent their own child. Twenty years later, they are beginning to reconcile with their child over what happened.

KJC: “Friendship has no expiration date” (p. 77) is a morsel of wisdom Loretta gathers from her teacher, Ms. Del, and it’s one of your novel’s great lines.

MB: I have to tell you a funny thing. I spoke with a book club about my novel. They were in Scottsdale, Arizona and they had posted my quote on the wall: “Friendship has no expiration date.” So touching!

KJC: A Marcia Bradley quote! From a novel punctuated with insights by Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Eleanor Roosevelt. I loved when, on Loretta’s graduation day at the Dairy Queen, Ms. Del gives Loretta a bracelet with an “A” for Amelia and tells her to remember what Amelia Earhart said – “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, that the rest is merely tenacity” (p. 132).

The literary quotes sprinkled through the book are great for the reading journey. A favorite novel of mine, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, also means a lot to Loretta, who quotes its last line, “All human wisdom is contained in these two words – wait and hope” (p. 86). I sense Loretta’s reverence for literature reflects your own.

MB: I collect quotes all the time. Loretta has this type of memory where she remembers these quotes and spurts them out. But I love that she has this relationship with a teacher, Ms. Del, who saves the day. Despite the craziness in her life with her horribly mean father, she likes The Count of Monte Cristo, hides books under her bed, and reads them. People find solace in books.

In July, I went back home to Chicago to give a talk at the Mount Greenwood Library, where we picked up our books when I was a kid. Almost everyone in the neighborhood is still there. Mrs. Murray, from next door, came with her daughters. I’m sure my mom was up in heaven, highball in hand, praising the occasion because we loved books. My mom and I read Alice Adams’ Rich Rewards together. I give it away constantly.

KJC: Is there a book about Chicago that you admire or has meant something to you?

MB: Drunkard, by Neil Steinberg, is a tough memoir about a hard-drinking life. A Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Steinberg loved his job, his wife, and his two sons, but he also loved to drink. It’s a Chicago story about sitting in bars. He could be anybody’s brother, uncle, friend.

KJC: Do you read much memoir?

MB: I read Maggie Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, about a youngish mother with kids going through a divorce. Smith is a poet, and the way she lays out her memoir on paper is beautiful. Whether she writes about how to knit or how to make mac and cheese, the writing just sweeps you away.

I’m reading Day: A Novel by Michael Cunningham, who wrote The Hours. It’s fiction and beautiful. I don’t care if a lot happens in a book. I like learning about people’s lives, family, love, how they deal with the atrocities thrown at us all in our daily life. I don’t need thrills. I just like to read.

It’s crucial for a writer to sit down and write from their heart about why they wrote a story. Not just for the reader. We write to answer our own questions.

Also, Ordinary Notes, by Christina Sharp, is not a novel or a memoir. You might call it essays about loss and the shapes of black life that emerge – memories, observations, artifacts – all numbered, some redacted. Tough truths. Sharp and compelling.

More and more, we are asked, in regard to memoir or fiction, who are we to write this story? Why? Do we have the right to write this story?

Anyone writing has an opportunity to bookend their book. My novel has a section in the back called “Why I Wrote This Book,” which tells a bit about my family story and how it relates to the novel. It’s crucial for a writer to sit down and write from their heart about why they wrote a story. Not just for the reader. We write to answer our own questions. Writing The Home for Wayward Girls taught me about the ability to stand on your own, decide when to go, and decide what to do with your life – like Loretta does. What you write teaches you.

KJC: You mentioned the story’s conception, how its first glimmer came as you whizzed past this roadside Home for Girls on a two-lane road. Did the revision process lead you to a place you had already imagined? Or did the final draft include discoveries you hadn’t foreseen?

MB: I have a good story about revision. The book begins with Loretta in her thirties, living in New York. She’s safe. She’s on the eighth floor of a co-op building. And all we know is that this day is important. But that opening was intentional. I needed the reader to know, before we get to the more gruesome parts of her life, that she makes it. She is an adult. She’s safe. She has a good career. She got to New York, and she got away from this other life.

I wanted to save the reader from any anxieties they could have had if it was written differently. You can tell your reader anything you want in the first chapter, and they will forget it and then remember that the protagonist is safe.

People still tell me they were nervous while reading the book. Would Loretta get away from the Home for Wayward Girls? Would she get out of that area west of the Rockies? Even though, from page one, she’s fine, she’s safe. But that was purposeful. And so were the friends that helped her. And the friends that help her the most are Ms. Del, her English teacher, and Mrs. Barry, the librarian who gives her a Rand McNally map. You probably noticed that when Loretta hitchhikes across the country, the narrator says, “Not that I would recommend hitchhiking, but sometimes you have to.” Because I know people would worry at the thought of anyone hitchhiking.

KJC: I was thrilled that she hitchhiked. Hitchhiking is a part of my journey.

MB: Mine, too! I did it when I was younger, and it’s wonderful. I love the scene when Loretta is a hitchhiker being driven across the George Washington Bridge by one of her rides when she first sees New York City across the river.

The ending was part of my structural plan. Even near the end, when she is having her conference, and she’s a success in her business, she doesn’t say, “Oh! Life is perfect.” She’s talking to other people who’ve been through situations like hers – having to get away, having to escape. Many of us have had to decide, “Do I stay, or do I go? What do I put up with, or what do I escape from?”

The ending is hopeful, and I wrote it before I wrote the book. As a writer, I need to know where I’m going. Usually, when I’m halfway through the book, I know the ending, and I write it.

The ending is hopeful, and I wrote it before I wrote the book. As a writer, I need to know where I’m going. Usually, when I’m halfway through the book, I know the ending, and I write it. In this case, I never wanted to suggest along the way that life would be perfect. Life poses challenges, and we meet them. That’s the hope in this book. Loretta meets challenges and goes forward.

You can write an ending, and when you get close to it, you can write another ending. By the time you get there, you might be ready to add yet another ending, and that’s okay, too.

KJC: That happens in this book.

MB: Yeah. I had an ending, and another ending, and another ending.

Books change during revision. The Home for Wayward Girls is 270 pages. It’s not a long book, but it was 60 pages longer when my agent called me and said, “You need to take out the chapters told from William’s point of view. Can you do that?” I said, “Sure.” She said, “How long will that take you?” And I said, “Oh, a couple of weeks.” As any writer will tell you, we can do anything we’re asked for.

KJC: Did you read through the William chapters to see what information to excerpt and implant elsewhere?

MB: Yes. You’ve been telling your reader a story that includes stuff from William’s head. If you’re taking out William’s head, it’s going to have a few nuggets in there, and somehow you have to recast that material. My agent was right. It is a better book. William doesn’t deserve any more of the stage than he already gets.

KJC: I appreciate hearing this because I hate William, and I don’t think any reader could feel any fondness or respect for him. But Loretta is asked to say something she likes about her father, and she talks about geology.

MB: There’s one moment, and it’s brief – he tells Loretta to respect the earth because they are standing on millions of years of land. That’s because of a teacher I had at Sarah Lawrence. Carolyn Ferrell, who wrote Dear Miss Metropolitan, said to me in a conference, “Marcia, you have to remember that no one is 100% evil.” That’s the reason why there’s that one moment for William. But my daughter Frances, in San Francisco, read early drafts and said, “Don’t let him off the hook. Do not give him a troubled childhood. Mom, I have friends who had fathers like that. If you give him an out, it’s a disservice.” That had a big effect on me.

The only William chapter that mattered to me is a scene later on where the reporter meets with another young woman who lived in this home. They meet in Omaha in a Denny’s, where a waitress recalls William meeting with other owners. I wanted to establish that William’s home for wayward girls is not a lone place. It’s one of many across the country. These homes house about 200,000 kids a year. This industry deserves attention. When I do a reading, the nodding heads in the audience know about these places where kids get taken against their will. Young people come up to me after a reading and say, “Yeah, my friend, the goons picked them up.”

Other people say to me, “Your book, it’s like, about fifty years ago. Right?” And I’m like, “No, it’s right now.” Loretta was there twenty years ago, but these homes exist today. This is now.