Ann lived in the Midwest until she turned 10, then moved to Spokane, Washington, where she lived until she moved to Seattle for college, then marriage, and parenthood, teaching, and graduate school. She taught high school English for nine years before she began graduate school at the University of Washington, where she received an MA and a PhD in English. During those years she became a busy, passionate mom to three children, Christopher, Robb and Courtney, wife to Ed.
She was Grace and Homer Cunningham’s only child, and the one and only niece to her father’s twin, Henry Cunningham. She looked out for her threesome for a number of years, and saw each, in turn, through their final days. She describes this journey in a memoir, Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye[ U of Iowa Press]. Charles Johnson, winner of a National Book Award, describes it like this: “Ann Putnam’s luminous prose. . .[transforms] pain, suffering, and loss into a literary gift of beauty and redemption.”
While she was finishing revisions, her husband died, and everything that could change, did. And then some things changed back, and other things were changed forever. She wrote in the Epilogue: “What I know so far is this: how pure love becomes when it is distilled through such suffering and loss—a blue flame that flickers and pulses in the deepest heart. Turned to the light just so, the beauty and laughter of the telling transcend the darkness of the tale.”
Her novel, Cuban Quartermoon, is forthcoming this spring. Much of it came from the six trips she took to Havana for Hemingway conferences. She wrote the ending during a residency at Hedgebrook Writer’s Colony. She fell in love with Cuba, then it broke her heart. So what else could she do but write a book? She had already fallen in love with Hemingway.
Ann taught creative writing, gender studies and American Literature at the University of Puget Sound for many years. Then she took leave last year to write full-time. She completed a working draft of a novel during those Covid months of never leaving home, while her car sat in the driveway with four flat tires. Her writing was a good and faithful companion. She set her Covid novel in the late 1930’s in Athens, Georgia, where her father was born. She’s calling it, for the moment, The World in Woe and Splendor. Quite by accident and strange design, it weaves together Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Pentecostal snake handling, and a boating accident based on her grandmother’s near-drowning and death of her fiancé. Goes to show what happens when you never get out of the house.
Still, she says she’s a kinder, nicer person when she’s been writing. It’s become like breathing. That’s probably a bit over the top. But it feels something like it. And with no segue, she want to add that she has also bred Alaskan Malamutes.
She has lived in Gig Harbor, Washington for the past 10 years.