Typewriter interview with Sally Mann

10 questions for the photographer about dogs, Moby-Dick, gin, and heavy lifting

Hey y’all,

In 2015, the photographer Sally Mann released her highly-acclaimed memoir, Hold Still. I loved that book and hoped she’d write another. To celebrate the release of her follow-up, Art Work: On The Creative Life, she kindly agreed to a typewriter interview. She got rid of her Olivetti years ago, so she answered my snail mail questions via e-mail from her home near Lexington, Virginia.

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What isn’t about dogs?

I have learned more from my dogs, and from my horses to a lesser extent, than I’ve learned from almost anything else in my life, including from one of the most expensive educations that could be crammed down a gullet.

Dogs are devoted, forgiving, intuitive to a fault, and intelligent beyond our reckoning. When I am without my dog, if there is a trip where he can’t come with me, I feel like a Philip Pullman character who possesses a spirit animal and has been separated. There is a sense of bereavement– I know real bereavement but this is different– as if some fundamental aspect of my life has cleaved off, a slab has calved off the glacier.

I mean, I like people, too, but there’s just something about a good dog that is not replicated in a human relationship and anyone who has had a good dog knows what I mean. To be clear; all dogs are good dogs. There are only people who have made bad dogs. I have been that person and it has taken me years to learn how to be a good dog person. It is not intuitive. It is a skill and it is as important as any I have learned. I grieve the mistakes I have made with my dogs---my short temper, my mistaken assumptions.

Rescue a dog and if you don’t know what you’re doing, as I didn’t for so long, find a trainer who can show you. It will change your life forever.

That creative family tree is one of those that seems unprepossessing above ground, with meagre branching and a minor crown, but which has a gigantic root system. I have drawn aesthetic sustenance from so many sources, it would be nearly impossible to trace all the mycorrhizal root threads below ground.

Every day is a perfect day. I am the luckiest person alive. The unmeasurable, incalculable complications of family and property and animals and career are all luxurious complications: I am lucky to have them and they enrich my life, even as they cause me to grind my molars into shards.

I get up early, sometimes too early, sometimes after a night spent in a welter of anxiety and self-recrimination, but always early. I push through my day with the dedication of the peasant worker that I am—my inviolate hour of exercise and a seriously protein-heavy breakfast. After that, always something different: sometimes mind-numbing print production, sometimes computer work, sometimes writing, sometimes farm work. Whatever it is, I go down on my knees, my bony old knees, in gratitude that a) I can still easily go down on them and b) that I have too many goddamn things to do.

What could be luckier?

I have so many of what you call “silly rituals” that I could almost be diagnosed as having that level of OCD where you tap the wall 5 times before you turn off the light switch. One wonders if it is somehow a betrayal of a deep, quirkily unique homunculus to discuss all the ways we feed it so that keeps us oiled and smoothly operating? Maybe it’s not the 5 taps, but can we really do our work without the pencil cigarette? Without the exaggerated intake of breath, the downloading of the podcasts, the ritualistic wiping down of the counters, the tightening of the boot laces, the making of that third cup of tea?

I live by ritual. I live by organization and repetition and predictability; I’m a terrible traveler and not the person you’d want beside you in an emergency. Chicken Little c’est moi. I like things to stay in the sky, where they belong.

I have loved singing forever, and used to have a clear soprano. Sang in church choirs as a child (the only reason I would go to church) then at Friday night group sing at Putney School, then in local choral groups, esp if they were singing the Messiah, or Mozart’s Requiem or Carmina Burana…All the classics, I loved.

In the darkroom, alone, of course, I would sing along with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt at the top of my lungs, everyone outside of the door rolling their eyes, I am sure…Now I’m older, I’ve got a lower voice, and my pitch is off. The only way I’d sing now is if nobody was in the house but the poor dogs, covering their ears with their paws.

So many songs make me sad, but not many make me happy. Why is that?

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Of course, being an obsessive, I keep a list of books I have read, it’s 10 single-spaced pages, and one day when there’s no chainsawing and weed eating and firewood-hauling to do (by which I mean never), I will go through and asterisk the ones I especially love.

But, yes, I do love Moby-Dick, such a humanistic book and so beautifully written. I was on a big War and Peace kick when I wrote Art Work, so Tolstoy gets a workout in it…

But, here’s a story: I revere Sharon Olds. I kiss the hem of her skirt. So, one day while we were having coffee in a sky-top restaurant in San Francisco, I screwed up my courage and asked her what books she read and she knocked me over by saying “Oh, mysteries! I only read mysteries.”

And, you know what? I am loving mysteries, in a loose sense, too. I stay plugged into crime and spy novels and police procedurals and forensic studies and court dramas. Occasionally there is some great writing in them! John Banville, Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling) and Mick Herron I adore, for example…

But of course, I have so many books I love, if I started listing them, I would go mad with “Oh, and what about….” syndrome. Like…what about A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon? The Transit of Venus? Just so, so many; “items too numerous to mention” as they say at the country auction listings.

Ha! I’m sure the Temperance League is going to come after me for this book…

And you clever young people are mostly now too well-informed to drink, so I must seem like a real lush in Art Work.

But when I was growing up, not only did my parents unfailingly have a pre-prandial cocktail (just one, measured in the sterling silver jigger that I use to this day: my MD father was almost always on call) but they also had a little nip of sherry or Dubonnet before lunch. And, of course, after-dinner liquors when they gave the occasional big dinner party. One of my early memories was getting up the morning after a party, before my parents, and walking around sticking my tongue in those tiny glasses where a hardened lozenge of crème de menthe rested in the bottom.

But, in my own adulthood, I was always too poor to buy good gin, so it was rot gut for years, but I was never so poor that I couldn’t afford good tonic. Schweppes, not Canada Dry (there were only two options back then), and I still am fussy about the tonic (Fever Tree and Q).

And, oh my, I do love a good gin. By which I mean any gin residing in my de- commissioned dishwasher (where I store my better liquors), and not the house gin, usually Gordon’s, in the regular cabinet.

But, now in my later years, I am drinking more bourbon. The dishwasher is divided down the middle between the two, gin on the left, bourbon, the right. Some days I stand there studying the array and mentally thanking all the sweet people who have thought to give me expensive alcohol. A treat I would never allow myself.

Dogs? I’ve had almost a dozen (greyhounds) at one time, but I guess that’s not a hobby.

I rode horses with a focused and competitive passion for decades, but if that was a hobby, it was a hobby fueled by steroids.

I designed a whimsical and horticulturally varied garden at my old house, which even was included on the blue-haired, white-gloved VA state Garden tour. I, to this day, know all the Latin names of an almost infinite number of trees and shrubs.

…and I collect mummified animals. Please don’t anyone else send me anything that is younger than an Egyptian tomb dog.

My young friends are more than spies—they are my Virgilian guides through these purgatorial times. They offer me hope for the future; so smart and canny and kind---when I am with young people, I feel an uncharacteristic surge of optimism.

People my age, the baby boomers, were given everything---post-war prosperity, disease and pregnancy-free sex, great music (imagine listening to the Rolling Stones for the first time!), interest rates so low we bought our first house with a $72.00 a month mortgage payment, and we get to check out just before the planet we have sucker-punched begins to kill the remaining humans.

But when I hang out with you youngsters, I am suffused with joy. I hope to be taken by my wrinkled, quavering arm and led out into the sunshine by my young friends in my (even more) ancient days. Their company is vital to me. (the old cynic, Oscar Wilde, also suggested that we old people be nice to the youngsters because they would be the ones writing about us…but I don’t think that way. I am just glad they tolerate me)

I thought you’d never ask.

Yes, I am a ferocious exerciser. As a young person I never did any sport at all– the cool kids at my boarding school, Putney, used smoking Gauloises as their after-class exercise. I never participated in any organized sport at all, no jogging, no weights: the feminine ideal back then was muscle-less Twiggy.

Then when I was 38 I took my first tentative runs. I remember calling my then-runner brother Chris and asking him how to run---was it ball-first? Heel-first? and I leapt off down the trail in a pair of Keds sneakers.

Since then, my compulsive tendencies have amoked. Now, at age 74, three days a week I lift weights (I mean, heavy weights) and do planks until my whole body is shaking, and weighted squats, lunges, crunches. Two days a week I row, between 8 and 12K, ie between 40-50 mins, and the two remaining days I run 3 miles on a hilly trail on the farm. I hate every minute of it. I never miss a day.

I’m just that way. I know there is probably a treatment for a compulsive personality like mine, but it’s too late for me. And plus, look at the shape I’m in! I can’t quit now or I might get old.

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Huge thanks to Sally Mann! Go out and get a copy of Art Work: On The Creative Life today.

xoxo,

Austin