To Cause a Deep Stirring: The Millions Interviews Debra Jo Immergut
Like most writers who meet young, Debra Jo Immergut and I have been talking about writing our whole lives. From Iowa City’s workshops and bars to NYC, where we struggled to raise kids and pay rent, to opposite sides of Massachusetts, where we live now with our respective families, we’ve been wondering aloud together what sustains our motivation to write when there is always so much else to do.
The exciting occasion for this latest conversation is Immergut’s debut novel, The Captives, on June 5—26 years after selling a short-story collection not long after Iowa. The Captives is part of a two-book deal at Ecco/HarperCollins and will be published in a dozen countries over the next year. Publisher’s Weekly praises this literary novel as “ingenious” and “nail-biting,” and Booklist calls it a “stunning debut.”
1. The Long Game
The Millions: You published a collection of short fiction, Private Property, in 1992, just after Iowa, and now you have your debut novel coming out. That’s a pretty unusual publishing trajectory. How does it feel to debut again? What stopped, or stalled, in the past, and what inspired you to return to your work?
First, it’s clear to me now that I was woefully unprepared the first time around. In New York right out of college, I enrolled in a nighttime creative writing class at Columbia U, mostly because I hated being a bored entry-level office worker. In quick succession after that, I applied and was accepted to Iowa, then
