What was your initial conception of The Excellent Lombards? Has it changed much?

I wrote many versions of this novel. I have a friend who writes crime fiction. She is often understandably shocked at the inefficiency of my process. “You had another failure?” she once lovingly said to me, when I was explaining that yet another version of the novel hadn’t worked out. At the start I knew the situation of the orchard family but I kept superimposing ridiculous plots onto the basic structure. For instance, there were several versions involving a nun and the lesbians in the neighborhood. The nun drowns in the marsh. I read Catholicism for Dummies and went to Mass. That version was six hundred pages.

How did your own experience of living and working in a Wisconsin orchard farmhouse inform the content of this book?

I certainly couldn’t have written this novel if I hadn’t lived the life I live. I suppose that could be said for any novel in relation to the novelist, but for this book and my life that statement is especially true. My business associates have for some time been suggesting that I write a memoir about my farm life, but I can’t seem to muster enthusiasm for nonfiction. The pleasure and requirement of writing a novel is living in an invented world. There is the basic material that is the novelist’s life, the marble, clay, the canvas, and as the work progresses the invention becomes entirely separate from whatever real-life events or situation inspired it. So this book lives in an altogether different plane from my own life and times.

What was your greatest challenge in writing The Excellent Lombards?

I had the voice of the girl at the beginning. I knew the situation of the family. But situation is not the same as plot. How was I going to organize all the material? How was I going to make a contained narrative with material that is close to me, and ongoing? What should the time frame be? In several of the many different versions Frankie—whose name was once upon a time Nina—is in college. In one version she is well out of college. In one version her father and Sherwood die, a double accident in snow. Chain saws are involved. At a certain point I realized it was better to limit the passage of time. Also, there are specific challenges in an episodic novel. There needs to be connective tissue from chapter to chapter. The whole thing has to flow and cohere through the episodes. I didn’t want to write an eight-hundred-page, intergenerational book with a family tree but rather a book that was relatively short, the girl’s narrative a story that is a distillation of her family history, that history contained, you could say, in her body.

In her essay “On the Art of Fiction,” Willa Cather said, Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole, so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. I’m not a poet but that goal of condensing and being precise—that trick!—was my impossible goal. All that to say, I wanted to write a short novel about time passing.

Which characters did you enjoy creating the most?

Oh Frankie! I love the clear sight and confusion in the child, and the fury of the teenager. Frankie cannot bear to grow up. She cannot stand the idea that her family’s ties will have to change as she and her brother grow older. She is in love with her family as it is. Her rage as she tries to hold on to time and place was compelling to me. I loved looking at the world from her point of view. Inhabiting her mind and spirit was a privilege.

Frankie clearly loves her family deeply, but this love sometimes manifests itself through seemingly bratty behavior. What do you think love really means to her? Do you believe that people often struggle to express love?

Frankie is trying to figure out how and if she can cement her future, trying to foresee who will get to stay on the farm, who will have to leave, who belongs, and what a person is if they don’t have a place that roots them. For her, all of those problems, those conundrums, are bound up in the word love. She is at times nothing but raw feeling. She is powerless even as she exerts her powerful self in her household. Back to Willa Cather: In an essay on Katherine Mansfield she wrote, As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates an element of strain that keeps everybody almost at the breaking point. Love threads in and out of that “mere struggle.” Certainly in Frankie’s family each member is at different times almost at the breaking point. It’s hard to express love when you are at that point.

Frankie’s family structure is unusually complex, especially the dynamic between Gloria and Jim. Is this tangled web of people—and the heightened emotions that accompany it—reminiscent of your own family? If not, what inspired you to create such a complicated group?

A family business is always a good place to observe tribalism, and the subtribes within the overarching tribe. Mrs. Kraselnik asks her class to think about Who Your Tribe Is? (The word tribe seems strange to the fourth and fifth graders. Tribe? We’re not in a tribe!) I first started to think of tribal society not long after I stopped going to ballet school, in the 1970s. The pecking order at ballet school was brutal! And I’ve continued to think about how we all operate inside and outside of our particular tribes. All tribes, I’m quite sure, are tangled and complex, and my own family is no exception.

Did the character of Frankie evolve much as you were writing? Is the experience of writing a young woman’s coming-of-age story ever like going back in time to your own childhood?

That is the pleasure of writing about childhood and teenagehood! Although Frankie was born around 1987, so her childhood takes place in a very different time than mine. She was born just as Steve Jobs was hitting his stride in his first stint at Apple. It’s tricky, although not impossible, to imagine being a baby now, swiping through the parents’ photos on an iPhone. The challenge and pleasure of writing a child: trying to access how a child lives at a sensory level that is far more intense than the average adult’s: heat, cold, taste, smell—the world new, a heady brew to absorb. One must try as best one can to remember how it all felt, and how bewildering the adult world seemed, and how essential it was to create a private world, a place to which to retreat. When I was a girl I lived in and retreated to the worlds I found in books. Frankie has that escape hatch, too.

Jim encounters many obstacles in running and maintaining the integrity of his orchard, a number of which are raised in the town meeting Frankie attends. Are these issues indicative of difficulties faced by your own orchard?

Yes. Land-use issues are issues for farmers the world over. How can we preserve what we’ve built? How can we live in the world with people who have different values when it comes to land? Should landowners be granted privileges for their holdings, or should they be supported? Are large tracts of woods, owned by a single person, good for the community and the ecosystem as a whole? How much regulation should the government impose when it comes to property and farmland? Time-honored problems.

The section where Frankie interviews May Hill, rather than being a dry, lackluster conversation with an old woman, is interesting in its emotional intensity and horrific elements. Can you discuss what sparked the decision to include this?

May Hill is crucial to the solution of the farm crisis, to the matter of succession. I knew that Frankie had to have a major event with her. Frankie considers marriage to various bachelors who could affect the solution (after she understands that she can’t marry her brother—or her father, for that matter). She comes to believe that May Hill regards her as a frivolous person, as a girl who couldn’t possibly be a serious contender. That first scene allows Frankie to have her initial display as an unfit future farmer.

What was your thought process behind The Excellent Lombards title?

Finding the right title is often a trial-and-error process. The title has to somehow hold the book. At first the novel was called The Boy Who Could Do Anything. Then it was called During the Reign of the Lombards. I very much liked the idea of monarchy in the title. But it didn’t have the right music, that title. And it was a mouthful. When Mrs. Kraselnik says, “Let’s give another hand for the excellent Lombards”—I thought, The excellent Lombards—that’s what this book is about.