Ann Putnam teaches creative writing and women’s studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She has published short fiction, personal essays, literary criticism, and book reviews in various anthologies such as Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice and in journals, including the Hemingway Review, Western American Literature, and the South Dakota Review.
Ann’s latest memoir, Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye, is the story of her mother and father and her dashing, bachelor uncle, 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. And 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.
In her interview with the Tacoma News Tribune, Ann spoke about the impact of writing on her life: “I’d live a more diminished life if I weren’t writing. Writing sends you to a country of the imagination,” Putnam said. “I had so many losses in such a relatively short period of time, I had no idea what my future was. I did know I had my work. I had my writing.”