Antje Rauwerda is a writer and professor who lives in Baltimore’s Radnor-Winston neighborhood, part of the Govans area in which most of her novel, Slow Time, takes place. She had a peripatetic childhood, living in Canada, Singapore, North Wales, Texas and Ghana before coming to Baltimore in 2004 for a job teaching at Goucher College. Twenty years later, she is still at Goucher, teaching international fiction. In addition to Slow Time, Antje also published a nonfiction book, The Writer and the Overseas Childhood, about writing by Third Culture Kids (TCKs)—people who were raised in a culture other than their parents’ or the culture of their country of nationality, and who lived in a different environment during a significant part of their childhood. Her first novel, Slow Time, came out on March 1 with Spuyten Duyvil Press.
Recently, we met over lunch to discuss her novel, how her Baltimore neighborhood inspired it, and how writing can feel a bit like acting; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Baltimore Fishbowl: Your novel is beautifully written and I’m so happy to be able to talk to you about it! The first thing that struck me was that the book’s opening is from the point of view of a wise and mystical character—the earth, nature…what would you call it?
Antje Rauwerda: Yes, both! In the early stages of the book I was teaching Benang, a novel by Australian writer Kim Scott, in which perspective is often from above. As I was working on the story of these two fictional people living in my real neighborhood and the mechanics of what brings them together, I began to see that it came from below, that the place has agency and is its own character, that character and place became one. Also, as someone not from Baltimore I was interested in what place can mean to someone who belongs.
BFB: I was captivated by the lyrical and poetic voice of this character. Those chapters read like prose poems. How did you write them? Do you also write poetry?
AR: I’ve dabbled in poetry, but never published any. I have taught other people’s poems for a long time. [laughs]. Writing those passages were a bit like going into a dream. Breaking rules and using portmanteau words that don’t exist. It was a bit like acting, I suppose, immersing myself and trying not to be self-conscious or embarrassed at this outrageous thing I was doing by making my neighborhood speak. If place had a voice, what would she say?
BFB: The heart of the book is the dynamic that develops between Danny, a 50-something Black man who works as an accountant, and his neighbor Em, a White woman in her late 40s who teaches yoga. Both are haunted by childhood trauma, and the place character wants to bring them together so they can help each other heal. At a literal level, the story was gripping, but it also felt like a metaphor for the healing effects of nature and place. Was that your intention from the beginning or a byproduct of the story you wanted to write?
AR: I was interested in Danny to start off with: he sits on his porch on a busy street and knows all the neighbors. He is friendly, but a bit of an enigma. I wanted to write about his friendship with Em, and how, through experience, they become almost kin. I especially wanted to frustrate some stereotypes in how I conceived those two people and their interactions. Em is not a white savior (except in saving dogs). Danny is not a black drug dealer. The healing part came later, as the place’s voice and agency developed. There’s a lot in popular media these days about nature being healing. I guess I wound up spinning that so that it was quite literal: the place, nature, is trying to heal its residents. Govans is the kind of neighborhood in which vacant lots are overrun with weeds and miscellaneous volunteer trees. I think that wild disorder is beautiful. I wanted to position even that rough and scrubby wildness as a source of well-being.
BFB: Danny’s character has a father who is in the Air Force and brings his young son to the Philippines, Japan and Germany. How much did your own upbringing in different countries inform your understanding of his character?
AR: I didn’t live on any American military bases as a child, but one of the chapters in my book about TCKs is about what is sometimes referred to as “military brats.” In my research, I learned that while American education stateside is fraught with racism, at bases what matters is rank, so black kids get a better education than if they attend school in the U.S. Danny having that schooling set the stage for him defying stereotypes.
BFB: Likewise, Em’s life has parallels to yours. She spends a year in Ghana, where you lived at one point; she regularly walks her two dogs, and you have—
AR: Two.
BFB: Ah, the same number, then. How does the character of Em resonate for you?
AR: Sometimes I walk the same path as Em does with her dogs, so I’m describing the same landscape. Also, one of her dogs, Girlfriend, is a dog she rescued from an abusive situation—that’s an actual dog that I regret not taking. But Em is also very different from me. For instance, she grew up in Baltimore and goes away but comes back. It reminds me of The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, set in China, where the farmer is bonded with the land. As a TCK, I never had that, so writing about it was a bit like playing out a fantasy: what is it like to live in a place that claims you?
BFB: And yet you’ve lived here for twenty years! And there are so many references to places and things in Baltimore—like Sherwood Gardens, Atwater’s and arabbers—that you’ve come to know it well. There are also historical references to local figures such as Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. How much of this is knowledge did you have from years you’ve lived here and how much required research?
AR: I did a lot of research. I read books about Govans and its history, and obsessed over various old maps, particularly ones that showed who owned what parcels of land. The Walters family and Enoch Pratt both owned “summer retreat” farmland in the Govans area, which is bizarre to think of as you drive past all the tire repair shops these days. I talked to people who have lived in Govans since the 1960s, getting some anecdotal history that way. I used the Maryland Historical Society’s sources a lot. They had a great exhibit up on the Bonapartes as I was writing. It was really fun to include some of that material. I also did a shocking amount of Googling. You can find images of Hanh Air Base in the 1970s, for example, showing basic housing of that era. I used various print and digital sources for the Indigenous American history of this region. However, in the years since I drafted this novel, many many more resources have come available. Were I to write those parts of my novel again, I would like to be more pointed in including land acknowledgements. A key feature of the Govans neighborhood now and through history is York Road, which has an amazing past. It was a major Indigenous American footpath. It eventually became a path down which the British rolled tobacco barrels to the harbor, and then an important trolley route. It’s been a significant thoroughfare for a very long time.
BFB: All that research and writing—while you’re teaching full-time. How did you find time to write this book?
AR: Early mornings and weekends. Stealing time from other things and procrastinating over what I should be doing, like writing academic articles and grading papers.
BFB: Do you have another novel in the works?
AR: I do. It seems like a total departure from everything I do academically (which is very contemporary and international) in that it’s about New Netherland (New York) in the 1600s. However, it’s really fairly on-brand for me, because it’s all about the displacement of a young Dutch boy (Hendrick Wiltsee—he may have been a real person, depending on your sources) through Indigenous, French and Dutch cultures. It’s concerned with the international diaspora created by the Dutch West Indies company, and, like Slow Time, about how you find a place, and a family, for yourself.
Antje Rauwerda will discuss and sign copies of her book, Slow Time, at the Ivy Bookshop on Thursday, May 9 at 7 p.m.
