Pamela Thompson's first novel, Every Past Thing, explores the story of a rural painter whose daughter has died. Thompson's inspiration for the novel was a painting—entitled Mourning Picture—by Edwin Romanzo Elmer. The painting hangs in Northampton Massachusetts' Smith College Art Museum. Themes in her book range from rural life to the incredible depth of parental love and unfathomably deep well of parental loss.

mamazine.com: Can you talk about why this particular painting captured your imagination?

Pamela Thompson: I first saw this painting while I was working on my MFA at the University of Massachusetts. The painting, created to memorialize a nine year-old girl, who had died of ordinary causes, was so powerful and so sad. The story of the painter and his wife trying to reckon with this loss was compelling. The piece really got me thinking about the consolations of art.

I saw the painting before having my own kids, and I know that the desire to be a parent was there for me already. So I was wondering what it would mean to try to write and parent, live in the country, and make myself vulnerable to all this entailed.

I was also interested in the somewhat condescending way rural artists were portrayed, as somewhat lesser. I was grappling with this myself, having just moved to the end of a dirt road in the hills. I loved where we'd landed, but I was surprised to find myself in the country. So, that city versus country dynamic was intriguing to me.

mamazine.com: Did you start right away—get the idea and go?

Pamela Thompson: No. The novel took almost a decade to reach fruition. By the time I got to it, I was learning that truth all artist parents come to: that 20 minutes, of necessity, turns into a real block of time. My youngest was a toddler, and for my job (Thompson's the editorial director at Interlink Books/Olive Branch Press), I was about to go to Frankfurt for an international book fair. I literally had 20 minutes until I had to get ready to go and that brief beginning sustained me for months. It was as if I'd launched this secret imaginative life. Something about separating from my kids—across an ocean—allowed me to realize I could actually retreat to that other world you must inhabit in order to write a novel.

It was hard to start, but with a novel, once the bulk starts to accumulate, momentum builds. Although short stories have theoretical appeal for me, I don't divide things up very well. I'm not good at doing that.

mamazine.com: Did you write the entire novel in those brief blocks?

Pamela Thompson: No. But it's no coincidence that I really got started once my youngest was in preschool and my older child in elementary school. My job is halftime so I had some normal daytime hours available for writing. Once I got into the book, I got up early as many mornings as I could, like all of us working parents do, grabbing for available time.

mamazine.com: Did you have a writing group or people you showed your work to while writing the novel?

Pamela Thompson: In that very erratic way parents with young children do anything, I did have a few women friends from the MFA program I sometimes got together with and I did show them some of the novel in progress. They were encouraging. But I'm really susceptible to what others think. So even though they were encouraging, I found their comments confusing. Next time, I'll just finish a draft before I show it to anyone. Having said that, I did go to Bread Loaf partway through because I thought I should be connecting to the writers' world and Andrea Barrett was very encouraging of the novel. She really became a champion of my work, which was extremely helpful and also comforting. I recently read a quote from Michael Chabon about how he feels obligated to write blurbs for other writers when asked: "We're all out there drowning so we writers have to help one another out." I think he's right, that what we're trying to do is so hard we owe it to one another to help each other out.

mamazine.com: Speaking of that writers' world, how does your work as an editor inform your life as a novelist?

Pamela Thompson: Being an editor helped me understand what the business is. What this business entails is both interesting and heartbreaking. Take translations, which is my field: translation is such a hard business. With a book by an acclaimed Greek novelist, we are struggling because the translator can't afford to do the work of translation for what we can pay. Knowing how hard the business is allowed me to be more realistic about not taking rejection quite so personally.

I also think that being an editor and appreciating the business side of things allowed me to ask different questions of myself as a writer than I might without knowing about the business. What do I imagine my audience to be? Who should read my book and why?

From my experiences, I really appreciate how important it is to figure out how people find books. In translated fiction, a book may take 15 years to really "hit," having sold 800 copies a year for that long. I started to think, after my book came out, that it's really a civic responsibility writers owe to one another to write reviews. I've written a couple for Rain Taxi and I hope to write more of them. I have hopes for what's happening online, even blogs, anywhere that has people talking or writing about books.

mamazine.com: Have you jumped into the blogosphere?

Pamela Thompson: I did start a blog called Girl with Glasses. I can't really do what the genre requires, though. In part, living in the hills, we don't have high-speed Internet access at home. Posting regularly is important and I don't do that; I'm aiming for once a week. I'm also not comfortable with writing about things I feel are too personal although that's happening in the blogosphere. So I blog about only what I decide I feel can be public. I sort of want to hide, but I like to write about things I want to be public about, most recently that Robin Morgan piece on Hillary Clinton.

mamazine.com: Was it a long and hard road to the publication of your first novel?

Pamela Thompson: I was extremely lucky. I got an agent right away and after sending it to about a dozen places, a couple were interested. That process of waiting for answers once it was out took about six weeks. My daughter Rosa told a friend, "I don't think it will be as popular as Harry Potter, but I think it's good." What I—and my agents—loved was that when the book sold in six weeks, to which Rosa remarked, "Your agents are really good because you sold your book much faster than JK Rowling sold the first Harry Potter."

Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser writes for many publications including Mothers Movement Online, NPR's Justice Talking blog, the Women in Media & News blog, Literary Mama, Brain Child, and Preview Massachusetts. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.