Please tell us about your work.

I’m a Hemingway scholar who went to Cuba to give a conference paper on Ernest Hemingway. I came back with the beginning of Cuban Quartermoon. I fell in love with Cuba, and then it broke my heart. I told everyone I met about Cuban deprivation and how our embargo was responsible. Most didn’t know what I was talking about.What else was there to do but write about it? But I had to return six more times to try and see what was really there. So I created a main character who is continually upended by events she can only begin to interpret. She’s told, “Believe only half of what you see and none of what you hear.” 

How did you develop your characters?

My characters in Cuban Quartermoon are both completely real and wholly imagined. They came from people I’d known and some who came to me in dreams. All carried dark and compelling stories that needed to be told. In the end, they came from that mysterious alchemy that takes place when memory and imagination meet completely outside of words. There were some characters whose stories were too disturbing to tell, yet their emotional weight became the impetus for the stories that took shape right before my very eyes.

How did you research your book?

How do you learn about a country that’s not your own? I didn’t learn what I most needed to know from the dozens of books I read. Or from guided tours sitting comfortably in an air-conditioned bus. The deepest, most meaningful research came from immersion. This meant having meals in the homes of new Cuban friends, standing in line with them for the day’s rations, walking the streets holding a new friend’s hand tightly. Or how could I write about Santeria, which became such an important element in the book, without immersion? At a reading, where I described a Santeria ceremony that ends with a blood sacrifice, someone asked if I’d really experienced this. Yes, of course, I had. If you fall in love with people for whom Santeria is a real thing, and not just a story but a source of meaning and comfort in a comfortless world, it becomes real for you too.

Did your storyline change as you wrote?

Yes! The mother of my main character suffered from manic depression, as did Hemingway himself. Both were given electroshock in the early 1960s. I needed to know what that was like, so I interviewed a psychiatrist who said, “You must find out what happened in Montreal before you go any further.” What I learned changed everything. The mind-control experiments imposed upon innocent people, part of the CIA’s Project MKUltra, couldn’t help but become part of my own urgent narrative.

How will your next works be different?

My second novel, I Will Leave You Never, will be published in May. It’s about an arsonist, children, pets, mortality, laughter, heartbreak, and love. And my most recent novel is set in Georgia in 1939 and features a mysterious drowning, a snake handler, and Virginia Woolf.  The book asks: What can I believe in if everything I have loved is lost? It’s called The World in Woe and Splendor.

Find out more about Ann Putnam at www.annputnamwriter.com.

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.