Ann Putnam - Ann Putnam, Writer

ANN PUTNAM is an internationally-known Hemingway scholar, who has made more than six trips to Cuba as part of the Ernest Hemingway International Colloquium, sponsored by the Cuban Ministry of Culture. Her novel, Cuban Quartermoon, came, in part, from those trips, as well as a residency at Hedgebrook Writer’s Colony. She has published the memoir, Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye (University of Iowa Press), and short stories in Nine by Three: Stories (Collins Press), among others. Her literary criticism appears in many collections and periodicals. She holds a Ph.D from the University of Washington and has taught creative writing, gender studies and American Literature for many years. She has two forthcoming novels, and lives in Gig Harbor, Washington.

I Will Leave You Never

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It was the fall before the Millennium, and fears were apocalyptic: planes crash, banks fail, clocks stop, dogs howl, no water, no food—all tabled for the moment as the Northwest drought kept on. It was almost Halloween, but there were no lighted pumpkins on porches, no ghosts and goblins tacked to front doors or swinging from the eaves. Everything was now combustible. And things once longed for—homecoming bonfires, or autumn leaves in wondrous mounds, and the very trees—were now a fiery blooming. It had been three months of fires—fifty-one and counting.

Tonight, it would be a ghostly shelter of a moon, a lantern lit against the night. Zoë was sitting at the dining room table, watching out the cathedral window, waiting for it. By day, the blue heartbreak of the October sky made you feel that winter would never come, and you’d live forever in this strange sunlit peace. Night was another story. She had dialed 911 in a thousand dreams.

Cuban Quartermoon

Short-listed for the May Sarton Prize for Historical Fiction

Why did Laura (Annie Laurie) Gallagher lose both her parents the summer she turned twelve? Answers can’t be found by running away, but she’s doing just that. She’s been living a half-life for so long—the death of her mother, her baby girl, her marriage. Now she’s run off again—this time to Cuba. But Cuba seduces her, betrays her, takes her apart, and transforms her.

Her rite of passage begins with a violent illness and the appearance of a woman named Maria. It deepens in Old Havana, where a man slams her against a wall and whispers, “Mind your own business.” What business? Laura is so beguiled by Maria and the Cuba she embodies, she can’t help but be pulled into her dark-tangled drama.

Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye

Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye is the story of Ann Putnam’s mother and father and her father’s identical twin, and how they lived together with their courage and their stumblings, as they made their way into old age and then into death. It’s the story of the journey from one twin’s death to the other, of what happened along the way, of what it means to lose the other who is also oneself. And it’s the story of how Ann Putnam herself struggled to save them and could not, and how she dealt with the weight of guilt, of worrying that she had not done enough, said enough, stayed long enough for them all. How she learned that through this long journey all that was really needed was love.

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