The Literary Constancy of Virginia Pye
Tenacity Tales: Virginia Pye on Persistence and Pivoting
Our September Tenacity Tale is Virginia Pye, author of River of Dust (2013), Dreams of the Red Phoenix (2015), Shelf-Life of Happiness (2018), and—launching this Tuesday, October 3—The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann (2023), the story of a successful Guiled Age romance writer who “becomes a champion of women’s rights as she takes on the literary establishment and finds her true voice, both on and off the page.”
In just six days, Virginia Pye will launch her fourth book of fiction, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann at Harvard Square Books1 to a room dominated by members of the Boston-area writing community who helped inspire the novel.
“When I moved back to Boston after 17 years away, I was inspired by both its bookish culture and the looming lineage of writers—historical and contemporary—that are so prominent and successful that you’re forced to ask yourself where your own work fits in,” Pye says. “In my new novel, there’s a question about whether Victoria Swann is a hack, yes, but there’s also a question about whether you should write what you think you should write or what you actually want to write. The book is really about finding one’s own voice among all the noise.”
But although Tuesday’s event is about celebrating Pye’s latest, the career leading up to this triumph is a story of persistence and pivoting over more than three decades.
If you zoom in close, though, Virginia Pye’s 1988 introduction to the New York publishing world looks like the stuff of legends.
At 27, Pye sat across from a high-octane agent2 who showered her with praise.
The agent saw Meryl Street playing the mom.
The agent saw Judd Hirsh playing the dad.
The agent saw Pye herself as the next Mona Simpson.
This agent saw—in short—big things coming Pye’s way.
What she didn’t see was that it would actually be 26 more years—almost another lifetime—before Pye finally published her debut. Six weeks later after that heady meeting in New York, Pye’s agent returned the book to Pye with two bits of news—the editors she had tried all passed, and the agent was done with Pye.
“But you don’t give up,” Pye says. “You lick your wounds and then you go on.”
So, she wrote a second novel—this one much darker than the first—and she interested a second agent. But the agent wanted a revision Pye decided not to write. Not because the revision was a bridge too far—revisions are de rigueur—but because between finishing the draft and the agent asking for that revision, Pye had given birth to her first child.
“I loved being a mother and was too happy to revise a book that dark,” Pye said, “so I put my writing career on hold. But almost a decade later, when my second child started kindergarten, I was itching to write again, so I wrote a third book and contacted a third agent.”
That agent tried to sell the book, came close, but couldn’t sell it.
A less tenacious writer might have turned away from writing altogether, but not Pye. She wrote another novel—this one based on her time living in Richmond—and had no luck with that one either, but she kept writing.
Enter a transformative writing retreat at The Porches in Norwood, Virginia where Pye spent a boot-camp-like three days reimagining one of her novels under the mentorship of Nancy Zafris, a former Kenyon Review editor who advised Pye to turn it into two novels. The suggestion—and the outline that Pye and Zafris hammered out during their time together—ignited Pye’s muse.
“I thought this book would take me years just like the others, but suddenly I wrote a novel in six weeks.”
Fast? Yes. But things were about to get much faster.
Shocked by how quickly the draft poured out of her, she shared it with Zafris, who not only agreed that it worked but knew of an editor looking to fill a hole in his publication line up.
Horrified at the thought of submitting a first draft, Pye tried to buy time to revise—“I hadn’t even run a spell check!”—but Zafras said the editor needed to read the book over the Memorial Day weekend. Pye did a feverishly quick pass, then sent the book to Greg Michaelson at Unbridled Books, who published the book in May 2014—it was River of Dust, a postcolonial novel about an American missionary couple in northwestern China whose child is kidnapped by Mongol bandits.
Pye leveraged the contract with Unbridled to sign with an agent to help her navigate both this contract and the one she signed two years later for Dreams of the Red Phoenix, a novel set in North China in 1937, when the Japanese invade and an American woman joins the Red Army, risking her safety and the safety of her teenage son.
Meanwhile her short story collection had twice been named runners up for Press 53 prizes, so Pye decided to take bold action—she wrote to the editor to ask if they might want to publish a collection. As it turned out, the editor already had that idea and was trying to contact her to suggest it. That book became Shelf Life of Happiness, a collection Kirkus Review called “a deeply moving meditation on the complexity and potential generosity of love.”
Which brings us to The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann, Pye’s fourth book in ten years. Though her agent shopped the novel, she had no luck at the big presses. Again, Pye looked to smaller presses—Regal House Publishing this time. And again, it was Pye’s tenacity that moved her literary career one step forward.
“Take control of your career,” Pye advises aspiring writers. “Don’t sit back and wait for someone to tap you on the shoulder.”
And sometimes taking control of your career means that aspiring writers would be wise to release their stranglehold on their works-in-progress.
“So many first-time novelists just keep revising for years. I want to rip those novels out of their hands and say, ‘just throw as many darts at the dart board as you can,” Pye says. “It’s better to have a book out there than not have a book out, so don’t get precious about yourself or that one novel you’ve been working on for years. Press on.”
Which is not to say this deceptively simple advice—take control and move on—is easy because it’s not. In fact, Pye is currently building a conference workshop called Persistence & Pivoting: How to Build a Writing Career.
“Persistence and pivoting,” she says. “Out of necessity, I’ve become an expert at both.”
And she’s not done pivoting yet.
Although The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann launches in less than a week, Pye has recently completed her next novel, a revised version of the Richmond novel that she wrote years ago. She has reset the story in 2020 against the backdrop of the social justice protests and the removal of the Confederate monuments.
In truly tenacious fashion, Pye is already shopping that novel to agents and editors.
“I just think in this day and age when the larger houses are fewer and harder to be placed in, you have to keep re-envisioning where your books are going to fit best and who your audience is,” Pye says. “A small press can do things with integrity, and you can definitely feel proud of what you’ve done.”
The opening paragraphs of The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann
On an overcast afternoon in April, Victoria Swann stepped from a carriage onto a brick sidewalk in Beacon Hill. Under her boots coursed rivulets of slush and mud, evidence that Boston had survived yet another winter. She gripped the iron handrail and climbed the steps to her publisher’s door. Lifting her face into tepid sunlight, she felt the early spring air brush her cheeks. She was a mountaineer, high at the peak and flush with accomplishment. In her carpetbag lay the start of an altogether new sort of novel, unlike any of her previous ones. She lifted the knocker and struck it against the brass plate. Her writing had gotten her into this mess, and it would have to get her back out.
The door swung open, and her editor’s gangly clerk bowed and moved out of the way.
“Welcome, Mrs. Swann, welcome.”
Victoria prepared for the fanfare that greeted her at Thames, Royall & Quincy. Her editor would serve her favorite pastries, and as she sipped tea, the young clerks would circle around as if she were that rare snow leopard Mr. Barnum paraded about the country. But who were these young men who liked to toss furtive glances her way? Aspiring editors, they were never the best-looking specimens, their posture weakened from hours bent over manuscripts. But at least a husband of this sort wouldn’t go missing for days. These fellows were decent. They were, after all, book lovers.
Read more here!
Tenacity Tales is HIBOU’s monthly celebration of the tiny tenacities in a writerly life. If you have a tenacity tale you’d like to share, comment below or send me your pitch at hibou@substack.com. To learn more about what we’re looking for, read the original Tenacity Tale here.
I love this story, and it is indeed an inspiration! You go, Ginny! And go, Victoria Swann!
So glad to know this about Ginny - she is an inspiration!