Ginnah Howard

Books by Ginnah Howard

Night Navigation: A Novel

by Ginnah Howard

Mariner Books, 2010.

About Me

I was born in 1939 in Charleston, West Virginia. Though I didn’t discover writing until much later in my life, I was a lover of books. A long-term thumb-sucker who could be happy for hours off in stories. My favorites were usually English orphans or a girl in the limberlost, characters wronged by people I loathed. Though finally I overcame my attraction to Rhett Butler, I’m still leaning into some of the after-shocks. I grew up under the care of a strong mother, also a lover of books, a person who always encouraged me. The kind of woman who was able to run the night infirmary on the 17th floor in one of Pratt’s dormitories after undergoing some failed knee surgery, dressed in a bright caftan which covered a body cast that ran from below her breast down her left leg to her toes. A woman who when I became pregnant encouraged me not to drop out of graduate school with the advice that I might have to work one day. A one day that began almost immediately and lasted for twenty-seven years of teaching high school English, a job I graduated from in 1995 which left me more time to sit down to put words on the page.

Why do you write?

I came to writing by chance in my late 40's. The New York State English Bureau began to press all teachers to actively write with their students: how could you teach something that you didn't do yourself? I remember writing my first short story as part of an assignment I'd given one of my senior classes. After a weekend of struggling to put into fictional scenes the experience of seeing a boy have an epileptic seizure on the playground when I was a sixth grader, I said to my class, "Wow, writing a story is hard isn't it?"

My first novel, NIGHT NAVIGATION, Book 2 of a trilogy-in-progress, will be released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 4/14/09. Book 1, ROPE & BONE is "finished" and sitting on my agent's shelf ready to go out when/if the publishing houses recover from the down-turn. I'm now working on Book 3, COMMON DESCENT. These novels all deal with two rural upstate women and their families,covering the years from 1955 to the present.

Any favorite authors? Books?

I began writing during the time of the so called "minimalists": Carver, Beattie... I still lean toward that spare language, letting the images show the world beneath. Two of my favorite books are Margaret Atwood's CAT'S EYE and Tim O'Brien's THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. I love Alice Munro's stories, especially her earlier work: THE LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN, DANCE OF THE HAPPY SHADES...