FARMINGTON – Jennifer Haigh, author of three published novels and many short stories that have appeared in magazines all over the country, read on April 28 at the University of Maine at Farmington. The final part of the Visiting Writer’s Series, she was introduced by Jeff Thomson, UMF’s poetry professor, reading from her most recently published novel The Condition.
Haigh currently teaches as a visiting professor in Massachusetts, where she lives with her partner and his two children. Her other novels include Mrs. Kimble, which follows the lives the the various women who marry Kenneth Kimble, and Baker Towers, which depicts life in a Pennsylvania coal town.
Reading two chapters of the The Condition, Haigh sketched out a scene in which the protagonist, Gwen McKotch, is diagnosed with the chromosomal abnormality Turner’s Syndrome, which prevents the onset of puberty. Haigh read from a chapter where Paulette, Gwen’s mother, is the focus, and then another where Gwen is the subject.
The novel details the lives of the McKotch family a Gwen and her brothers grow up, her parents grow apart, and Gwen herself becomes a brilliant, emotionally-distant scientist. When she falls in love, her family is horrified by the dissonance of her child’s body and the man with whom she is involved, and the ensuing fall-out distances Gwen further from her family and even the man she loves.
As is the habit of the visiting writers who come to UMF, Jennifer Haigh agreed to meet some creative writing students before she did her proper reading. In these pre-reading talks, she discussed her methods, her experiences writing in college, and how easy it is to get a book deal.
Upon graduating from college, Haigh had tried to go straight into her graduate program of choice – the Iowa Writers’ Workshop – for which her undergrad writing professor refused to write her a recommendation. He told her that she didn’t have the writing experience to compete, and according to Haigh herself, was probably correct. She said that she needed the time away from her undergrad writing, and her own experiences, to mature as a writer. When she later applied to the workshop, she was admitted. Her first novel, Mrs. Kimble, was accepted in her second year at Iowa, and she’s been writing full time since then.
With the reputation that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, agents are frequently scenting out new authors in an environment that, for many authors, is unlike anything they have experienced before or will afterward, according to Haigh. That was her experience, as she has been with the same agent, editor, and publishing house since her first book. Such was their faith in her, after she delivered her first three books, that her most recent novel has already been purchased without her editor knowing anything about it.
