Ruminations: In conversation with Letitia Trent, author of Summer Girls
"I feel like I finally am emerging into the kind of person who can write the books I truly want to."
I have never figured out how to live a life I can tolerate with my mental health that also gives me ample writing time. But I try, and I do my best. I am allowing myself to be a slow writer with the goal of writing the kind of book I want to read. — Letitia Trent
Tell us all about Summer Girls, your newest novel out with Agape Editions (who publishes such wonderful work, like your own!).
Summer Girls is a kind of adult problem novel/family drama/dark psychological character study of two young women who cross paths with a bohemian family that changes the trajectory of their lives forever.
I wanted to write something that could be a 'page turner,' but that's also emotionally engaging, a kind of book club novel with a lot of thorny "issues" but also something alive and ambiguous. I wrote it because I just got very curious about how something can change the trajectory of a life.
Can one connection change a person so much that they become unrecognizable to themselves, to the people they love? The idea that this could happen is terrifying to me, so I had to write about it.
In a way, this is more a horror novel than any of the other supposedly horror things I've written. I'm currently working on a book about the sole survivor of a serial killer who happens on a body and becomes obsessed with solving the crime. In this book, I'm curious about true crime, how we consume it, and the effect it has on survivors to see your own story fictionalized and made into entertainment. I also just love a novel about a woman who is losing her mind due to an obsession—absolutely my favorite genre.
“Can one connection change a person so much that they become unrecognizable to themselves, to the people they love? The idea that this could happen is terrifying to me, so I had to write about it.” — Letitia Trent
You can summon the spirit of your work with three things or objects. Name those objects.
Ooh, I like this question.
A mud puddle that reflects a tangle of electrical wires and a cloudy sky beyond.
The film Stealing Beauty (in the form of a VHS tape.)
Chipped black nail polish.
As Ruminations is the name of this literary interview series, I want to know: What are you obsessed with right now—literary or otherwise? What is influencing, inspiring, or driving you to create, to think, to feel?
I am reading the Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante, years later than everyone else, and I am astounded by these books. I've never read anything that describes what it feels like to be a smart kid who comes from poverty. These novels take place in a completely foreign place and time, but still, I relate so much to Elena, the watcher, who gets out of her neighborhood but can never get the neighborhood out of her.
Obsessed with the album Luminescent Creatures by Ichiko Aoba and Sincerely, by Kali Uchis.
Also obsessed with watercolor and painting the most basic bitch wildflowers. I am loving having a pre-teen - my son is 11 and getting to share art, literature, and FILM with him as been an enormous joy in my life. Having a child is an insane experiment that it still feels strange that somebody let me do. How did they let me walk out of that hospital with this baby, as weird and incompetent as I am? What a miracle.
I am doing Morning Pages and trying my best to actually complete The Artist's Way and damn, it actually works.
I am always interested in how writers are showing up to themselves or the world or their communities. How does your writing intersect with, critique, or reflect current realities and the cultural landscape?
I am really trying to connect with writers who I admire more. I have so little time, but I want to make sure I let people who are alive and writing know how much their work inspires me.
I am exchanging work with other writers and trying my best to not lose those connections, as much as I sometimes want to fall off the face of the earth. I do love Substack and how many authors I've discovered there. Community is something I'm working on and struggle with, but I am so grateful for the people who can hang with me despite my limitations (being a weirdo who struggles with believing anyone actually wants to hear from me).
What are some of your thoughts on the barriers or challenges of the writing life: Are there experiences you've had that make writing harder? I'm interested in platforming complex thoughts on MFA, money, gender, race, parenting, disability, access, time, mental health, etc.
I grew up extremely poor in rural Vermont (Bennington) and Oklahoma. When I was a preteen and teenager, I already had a passion for literature and secretly wanted to a be a writer, though that was not a desire I told anyone about. It felt embarrassing to want something that I knew was not meant for me, who came from a family of housekeepers and factory workers.
My mother didn't graduate from high school and I barely knew anyone who had gone to college. When I graduated from high school and got married, I got serious about writing. I wasn't home anymore, I didn't have to hide my writing (my mom did not let me have a private life, so I didn't start writing until I had a home of my own), and I immediately got serious about poetry. I took a year off between graduating and going to college, a year where I worked as a nanny for a very dysfunctional family and spent most of my time reading and writing and posting my poems to a discussion board called The Critical Poet, where I learned so much.
“When I was a preteen and teenager, I already had a passion for literature and secretly wanted to a be a writer, though that was not a desire I told anyone about. It felt embarrassing to want something that I knew was not meant for me, who came from a family of housekeepers and factory workers.” — Letitia Trent
By the time I got to college, I was writing and reading poetry like it was my job. I did well in college and applied to 20+ MFA programs. I got into a few and picked Ohio State University, where I got a full ride with a stipend teaching position. I loved the MFA experience, I am so grateful for it and for my instructors and am so grateful for the space I had to write so early in my life, but I did constantly feel the class differences between me and my peers.
I recognized that so many people already lived in this world of possibility that I felt I had just now clawed myself into. I worried that my work was derivative, clumsy, that I would reveal my lack of education when I didn't know when to use "were" versus "was," for example, or that I didn't quite know how to use commas at all (I figured it out just in time to teach Comp 101, ha!). I felt that my poetry revealed me as a hick, backwards, some girl from Oklahoma who got married at 17 and had only recently learned that you are supposed to have sheets on your bed (as a teenager, I slept on three old couch cushions on the floor) or how to do laundry or open a bank account.
I think some of my "failure to launch" as a writer was psychological — I felt a lot of invisible barriers. I shut down opportunities before they could even occur because I assumed certain things just were not for me, but many of them were material. I did not enter the job market in academia right after the MFA, as many of my peers did, because I knew I was limited by where I could live. I couldn't live in a major city; I couldn't imagine us being able to get an apartment anywhere that wasn't absolutely podunk.
We had a shitty car and my husband managed a videogame store. I also just couldn't see myself in that role — I didn't trust my education, felt acutely that I just wasn't ready for it. I also had a lot of undiagnosed mental illness at the time - intense social anxiety that kept me from connecting to my peers or taking advantage of opportunities I should have taken. I was so consumed by anxiety that I would make myself sick after many of my classes.
I sought out therapy for the first time during this time, I was distressed by one of my instructors so much so that I remember breaking down in tears in a session, unable to speak, absolutely blubbering. I cannot, for the life of me, remember what he said or did, but it killed my confidence in my writing and myself for years.
I didn't trust myself as a writer, and I had no cushion and no family in my life to support me or tell me that whatever happened, it was not the only judgment of who I was. So my husband applied to grad school and got in and we lived off of his student loan money and what I could make adjunct teaching and working part-time for the Town Manager's office in Brattleboro, Vermont.
I have since gotten treatment for my mental health and work in the mental health field, but I do really feel that the need for money and fear of losing security has restrained me in both small and big ways, ways I feel I am only just now understanding. I did a lot of editing of what was possible for me early on, I didn't even know I was doing it. I reduced my hopes and goals, I always settled, and I did not aim big or high because that felt like a silly thing to do: What if I failed? Then there would be nothing and I'd live in poverty, something I was determined to never do.
So I've always worked multiple jobs, often for less pay than I should have, due to desperation. I often wonder what my life would look like if I'd actually tried to get an academic job or even trusted my passion for writing early on, if I'd been more aggressive about publishing, if I'd trusted myself enough early on to believe that I could be a "real" writer. But I also know myself well enough to know that if I'd gotten a position at a university at 26, I would have been far too mentally ill to hold that job.
This is a long story to say that I think there are some inherent struggles for people who come from a poor background in writing, barriers that have been written about more thoroughly than I could, but the biggest one for me is that I've never been able to trust myself or my talent or even my hard work enough to take a chance on myself and let go of the security of always having multiple jobs.
I have always had the spectre of my aging, animal-hoarding parents and their inevitable decline that I'm going to somehow have to take care of in the back of my mind. I also have the challenge of my Complex PTSD brain. I am so much better than I was, and I have worked hard on it, but that time it took to get well was most of my 20s and 30s. I have a child now, responsibilities, a house payment that eats up most of my paycheck every month.
I have never figured out how to live a life I can tolerate with my mental health that also gives me ample writing time. But I try, and I do my best. I am allowing myself to be a slow writer with the goal of writing the kind of book I want to read. I am okay with no longer being a young, sexy writer on the rise. That idea of success does not work for me. I'm not an emerging writer anymore, though I feel like I finally am emerging into the kind of person who can write the books I truly want to.
“I am allowing myself to be a slow writer with the goal of writing the kind of book I want to read. I am okay with no longer being a young, sexy writer on the rise. That idea of success does not work for me. I'm not an emerging writer anymore, though I feel like I finally am emerging into the kind of person who can write the books I truly want to.” — Letitia Trent
What are you reading and loving right now?
I just finished Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay, one of my favorite contemporary horror writers. Have also been reading the online journals Ergot. and Hex and am currently obsessed with short fiction/flash fiction and the flexibility of that form. I am reading C.D. Wright's old poetry collections—a fellow Arkansas poet (I've lived here for eight years, officially feel like I can say I love Arkansas, despite some of the downsides). Alice Notley's recent death made me revisit her work; she's a genius. And of course, the Neopolitan novels!
As I ask in every interview, what is your astrological sun sign, and how do you think this shows up in your work?
Libra! So, I go in phases with how I feel about being a Libra. I am very vain and beauty-obsessed. But I also am very much not a social butterly, not particularly social at all. I do love some balance, though.
Read an excerpt of Letitia’s writing over at her Substack, where she writes about her friend and family member Cyndi, who died in late January of 2025, and pick up a copy of Summer Girls.
Letitia Trent is the author of three novels, including Summer Girls and Almost Dark, and two full-length poetry collections. Her poetry and short stories have most recently appeared in Biscuit Hill, Figure 1, Alice Says Go Fuck Yourself, and Smartish Pace. Her short story “Wilderness” was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award and later appeared in Best Horror of the Year, Volume 8. She lives in a haunted Ozark mountain town with her family and works in the mental health field. She can be reached via her substack Tell Me Something Good or Bluesky.