Author Confessions: Anna Mitchael
On ignoring the naysayers and finding wisdom in everyday moments.
I read Anna Mitchael’s They Will Tell You the World Is Yours like a morning meditation. I would sit down with my coffee and read a few of her insightful vignettes about the journey of a woman from birth to death. Inevitably I wouldn’t be able to put the book down. It’s so chock full of beautiful moments, both painful and joyful. To understand what I mean, here’s a sample of the names of the 85 brief, lyrical stories: “First Love,” “Let’s Feel It All,” “With This Ring,” and “On Turning Thirty-One.”
“The book began coming to life about five years ago, when I finally got sick and tired of being sick and tired with the world,” she writes in the author’s note. “I didn’t want to become bitter, yet that was how I felt.” Instead, these short stories helped her to feel human again in all of its complicated ups and downs.
Formerly, an editor at Magnolia Journal, Anna was told she’d never publish these gems and she’d nearly given up on writing them until….she decided to try anyway. And thank goodness. I feel wiser just having read the book.
Welcome, Anna!!
You and I are fairly similar. We both transitioned out of a career in journalism (you, an editor for Magnolia Journal) to a career as a fiction writer. Why did you decide to make this jump?
Even though I left full-time work, I still freelance as a writer and editor, so I haven’t left it behind completely. There have only been a couple of short times in my life where I had the space to focus on my personal writing without freelance other writing or editing happening—what I think of as my “professional” writing. While it seems like that would be ideal to only write my own stuff, I’ve found I function better if I have both pieces in my life to bounce back and forth between.
I’ve tried to understand why this is, I think the structure of my professional writing gives me something to push against with my personal writing, so those stories become more creative and free. Whatever the reason, I just know it’s the formula that works for me. Of course now that I said it’s “the formula” watch it fall apart. Isn’t that always how the writing life feels? Just when you think you’ve grasped it, poof, it goes and have to re-figure out how to make your way again.
Even the title of your novel They Will Tell You the World is Yours is evocative, but so are the myriad vignettes that you pen in this gem of a book. Which of the vignettes do you feel is the most compelling and why?
Because the book spans a woman’s life from birth to mid-life, my hope was always that different spots in that arc might hit at different times for readers. That was just an idea though, truly, just a hope. When I wrote the book, my daughter was around 1 and so the early life stories were really on my mind, just thinking about how she was being shaped and how we might be a part of that in positive ways. Then earlier this week I recorded the audio book and the stories about the woman’s late 20s were actually physically slowing me down. I had to stop a couple times because they just took me back to some of those deep learning times of that decade. While it was surprising, it also was kind of exciting because it meant the theory was working.
When it comes to choosing one very favorite vignette, I don’t think I could zero in like that, but currently what’s happening in the vignettes about those early searching years of adulthood is stirring me.
Why did you decide to tell the stories of what a woman learns from birth until midlife? What about that journey captivates you and why?
The jacket copy of this book has a line that says “we find ourselves in this story.” I thought about that line a lot because I never thought I could create one character whose life would—by the outer, visible details—look familiar to “most” people. What the copy is speaking to, and what I want people to get from the arc of the vignettes, is shared revelation about how or why the world has affected us, sometimes without our realization.
There’s nothing prescriptive in here about answers, or how to live, I set up the arc because I wanted the feel of a line of dominoes—that’s how I understood the anxiety and disillusionment to grow for the character. When the pieces fall, what does she do? Watching it, hopefully, gives us space to evaluate what we do—where we turn for comfort, who we trust, what voices we let in.
This felt like a deeply personal story. Can you pick a specific moment that you pulled directly from something that was said or told to you, whether it's a wide-eyed observation, a career disappointment or the realization of your place in the world? There’s a story about the main character discovering that her new boss at work is younger than she is. I didn’t have a sudden moment where I made that discovery, like the character does, but I did have a job where much of the management was significantly younger than I was. There was initially so much discomfort in that because I had to face a lot of the agism I had been unknowingly holding. But then from there I got the opportunity to really look at how I was valuing what I offered to the world, and what metric I was using for success. Those shifts and realigning moments—which sometimes aren’t as gentle as that language makes them seem, sometimes the moments are everything blowing up and pieces going everywhere—are points of non-fiction throughout the book. The characters and stories pull from all kinds of places, and many are just straight-up imaginary, but I wanted the revelations to feel very real, and so most of them are straight from life.
You've said that you had a writing teacher tell you that you'd never sell a book of vignettes. You listened at first, writing other things, but found yourself drawn back to these poetic short tales. What made you believe there might be an audience for this kind of writing?
I have written plenty of things for an audience, but I can honestly say this book was written for an audience of 1. I was in a season where my professional writing and career had taken over. I had the lost the thread of creating—not in a casual way, but in that deep way that making things can truly bring life. I knew I had to write something that was mine so I decided to shut down the outside world and write what I needed in that moment.
When the book was done and I decided I did want to just see if there was an agent who might believe in the work, what I had seen at Magnolia Journal gave me footing to make a case for shorter vignettes. I had seen how much readers liked the shorter, more evocative stories—they didn’t have a ton of free time in their lives but they still wanted beauty, comfort, and some thought provoking, revelatory moments.
Was there a point in a woman's life that you left on the cutting room floor? A subject or point that you struggled with creating a vignette around?
I knew the moment I had written the last word in that book. The feeling was just there, in my gut: Done. My agent and I really looked closely at the whole manuscript before she took it to publishers because we knew a collection of vignettes was a hard sell. I thought briefly in that period about trying to extend the storyline into another phase of life for the woman. Those attempts are in a folder tucked deep in my hard drive, it didn’t take long to realize my initial feeling of where the story needed to finish had been correct.
If someone wanted to write their own vignette, how would you instruct them to do so? How do you get yourself writing these? Maybe you should teach a Substack class on writing vignettes!
Oh, I would love to teach a vignette class! Especially in times like this when everyone is so strapped for margin in their lives. Pressing in and saying, “I’m experimenting with this new thing for the sake of creativity and nothing more” is the ultimate resistance to the efficiency culture.
For an actual tip to take home and try, I will repeat great advice given to me by an editor many years ago. She told me to handwrite what I love and then read it out loud so I could get the feel for the rhythm coming off my pen and then settling into my mind. I still do that sometimes, when I want to get into a space of writing more rhythmically and lyrically. I also love writing out song lyrics—it clicks my brain into a different mode of looking at how a story might be told.
Okay, as a subscriber to Magnolia Journal, I have to ask: How has Joanna Gaines and Magnolia Journal changed Waco, Texas? Tell us about what it was like to live and work as an editor there.
My husband grew up in Waco so I am full of “What Waco used to be like,” stories. I had the opposite childhood, we moved all the time, so I am always interested in his perspective and sense of place within this city. There’s no doubt Magnolia completely transformed Waco. It was widely known for tragedies, then all of a sudden a very positive vibe was being sent out to the world and people were just like, “What? Waco?”
Working at Magnolia Journal put me around the Silos a lot for events, and in that process I met people from every corner of America who had come here, to Waco, Texas, to visit. And they were always so excited! So eager to tell you about what they loved about the city from the show.
No one ever thought Waco would have a pull like that, so I just try to keep it in my mind as this really beautiful story of unexpected transformation. If you see it happen on the scale of a city, it makes you a true believer in the possibility for great change in people, families, neighborhoods. That’s just solid hope, brought to you by a little Texas town no one expected a thing from.
Brooke, I loved our back and forth. Thank you for giving these little vignettes your time + a corner of your beautiful substack space!
what an awesome interview!