Martha Anne Toll
Below is the transcript to my interview with Martha Anne Toll. Linked below are the podcast, video, and complete show notes with many important links.
Martha Anne Toll:
Looking at myself and thinking, unlike music where I felt some real barriers, where I felt limitations, I felt like no one would hold me back with writing, which is kind of a weird thing to say, but I'd cry for a day and I'd get right back up and write the next thing. I never, I was not defeated by it. And that seems so important and so meaningful that I just kept going. Nothing stopped me, and I did recognize the significance of that.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Martha Anne Toll is a novelist and literary and cultural critic, also a violist whose classical music training informs her artistic practice. She comes to writing professionally after a career dedicated to social justice. She recently published her second novel about musicians, Duet for One, and we focused on both this book and her novel Three Muses. You’ll hear about her high and low points as a violist, different ways she has helped with programs related to social justice, and her involvement in the literary world including supporting less-represented authors. We also talked about processing grief, the classical music world including patterns of different types of abuse, and living true to your values. Linked in the show notes on my website you’ll find Martha’s playlist of music related to Duet for One, a list of books by other authors that Martha recommends, and other episodes of this podcast you’ll enjoy. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel, listen to the podcast on many podcast platforms, or read the transcript, everything linked to my website Leahroseman.com .It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the description of this episode, where you’ll find timestamps and all the links, including different ways to support this podcast!
Hi, Martha. Thanks so much for joining me here today.
Martha Anne Toll:
Hi, I am so happy to be here. Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
Now, this is the first time I have interviewed a novelist on this series, and you are an unusual guest. I have to say, it took me a bit of time to decide if it would be right for my listeners, but I decided in the end for sure, we will be talking about your new novel duet for one. Thanks for sending me a preview copy. So I was able to read it early. I really enjoyed it, and we'll talk about your other novel and your very full life.
Martha Anne Toll:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
So what's unusual, I have had musicians on the series who maybe don't earn their primary income from music, but it's unusual that I have had, I've never had someone that didn't pursue music as their main path. So that's where you differ. And so let's talk about your early life as a violist and what that was like.
Martha Anne Toll:
Thank you, and I appreciate your going off the beaten track here because I have trouble sometimes explaining myself. I started viola in public school in suburban Philadelphia where I grew up. My mother, there are four girls in my family. I'm the third. My mother really wanted a string quartet. That's really how it started. So we already had a cellist and a violinist. So I started on viola in public school. My parents were very interested in music, not musicians themselves, but they always got us good teachers. And I had very, very good private teachers in addition to public school. And our public school system had a very good network of orchestras and community orchestras and county orchestras. And my life really changed when I was 14 years old. And I started studying with Max Aronoff, who was in the founding class at Curtis Institute of Music, founder of the Curtis String Quartet, and still the best violist I've ever heard. And he was someone with a grandfather figure with an incredible gift to the gab, an extraordinary disciplinarian. But unlike, two huge differences from other teachers, one is all of our lessons were about how to practice and so he could deconstruct the music. And two, he was very, very supportive while still being strict. And you and I both probably have an encyclopedia of musicians who have been damaged by teachers who didn't know how to criticize.
Leah Roseman:
Yes. And this is a theme that comes up in this book, and I really felt reading it right away. Well, no one could have written this if they really didn't know the classical music world.
Martha Anne Toll:
We make beautiful music, but there's a lot of hardship behind the scenes, right?
Leah Roseman:
There can be. Yeah.
Martha Anne Toll:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
You did pursue a BA music at Yale.
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes. So Max, so what Max was doing for me was putting a sound in my ear that was just extraordinary. He had an extraordinary instrument, but it wasn't that it was his ability to produce that fat viola sound, but I did not want to go to conservatory. He would have preferred that I do that, but I had really strong, I had really, really strong academic interests. I was always a fanatic reader. I grew up in a house full of books, so I majored in music at Yale. And the beginning was really fantastic. I mean, I got first chair, I rotating first chair in the symphony. And the symphony, the Yale Symphony was made up of people who became professional musicians in orchestras all over the United States and also Europe. I don't know about Canada, but I do know about Europe. And basically over time, and some of this book is autobiographical, I realized that words were more accessible to me than music. And so I opted not to go into a music career and there was a lot of pain associated with that. And it took me, this is a very long story short, but how I write a novel, it took me decades to figure out a way to describe this experience in a way that wasn't totally negative for me. The transition and the transition to being a writer and having a different career than I anticipated as a younger person.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of the autobiographical aspects, the very negative teacher who's pictured in that book, did you have an experience similar to that?
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes, and I had been commuting. So New Haven where Yale is about four or five hour train trip from Philadelphia. I had been commuting back to Philadelphia every two years, every two weeks, I'm sorry, to take a two hour lesson with Max. And I tried to study with somebody on campus, and this was a viola teacher. I'm going to name him. He's dead. There's no problem naming. His name is Raphael Hillyer. He is a very, very renowned violist. And he had spent some time in the Julliard String Quartet, and he had been coaching me for my entire freshman year, and he absolutely loved my playing. And then when I went to play for him as an individual student, he was extremely destructive. And this is always hard for a young person to navigate. It turned out this was a pattern that he did with his female students. He was well known. I didn't know that at the time, but just to finish that thought, it was providential probably because I am a total word person and I never have regretted the decision, but music is so important, and I always wanted, and what Max Aronoff is such an important mentor to me, I've always wanted to bring it together. So that's what this book is for me personally, I don't, I hope it doesn't read that way for the reader. It's the love story. I mean, it's a different kind of a story for the reader, I think.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I mean, you deal with so many important things, like grief. It starts with a death. I can say that right away because that event opens it up.
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes. So the other impetus for this book, which was kind of like a lightning bolt, I opened, this is in an author's note at the end of the book. I opened the paper one day to see that Lilian Kallir had died. Lilian Kallir was a beautiful Czech immigrate to Philadelphia, and I had heard her play, and she was married to Claude Frank, also a very famous pianist. And my first thought when I saw that she had died was what happens to Claude Frank. I mean, he had a solo career, but what happens to their musical partnership? And that is the germ of this book, when the spouse of a famous two piano team pianist, when their spouse dies, it's not just a loss of a spouse, it's a loss of a career. So that is a problem on page one of this book. And the other thing that's on page one is their son, Adam, who's a professional violinist in his late thirties, is looking at his mother totally differently. He sees her as someone who was absent from his life, whereas his father sees his whole musical career being lost. It's two divergent views of the same woman.
Leah Roseman:
And I like the way you use the different points of view of the narrator in both your books.
Martha Anne Toll:
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Leah Roseman:
Now, you mentioned your parents briefly. Your mother was an editor and poet.
Martha Anne Toll:
Yeah. Well, she wrote doggerel. She loved doing that. She was a copy editor and she was freelance. So in those days, she definitely had a career, but us school kids weren't always so tuned into it because she worked at the dining room table. So we always ate in the kitchen, the dining room table, galley proofs for books were always in paper, and there would be rolls. There were long rolls of rolls all over the dining room table along with a laundry. So she worked school hours, and I am ashamed to admit, but I think many of us daughters took some time to realize this. She was working the whole time we were in school, but she was completely available after school. So it took me some years into maturity to realize how she actually pulled that off. And she was a fanatic reader also.
Leah Roseman:
And your dad was a lawyer and author?
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes. My dad was obsessed with the written word, and dinner was a lot of, you had to memorize poetry. The dictionary was next to the table. He encyclopedia was next to the table. I mean, it words were the currency of the household, no question. So I feel very, very lucky. I have no formal education in writing, but I really got it at the dining room table. I think
Leah Roseman:
Later in this conversation, I do want to get into your work as a lawyer in social justice. It's so important. But since we're talking about your writing life, I mean, you were also a literary critic for many years and reading a hundred books a year.
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes, yes. I think you will appreciate this. As a musician, it's never about the quantity, it's always about the quality. But I do read a lot, and that's always been my M.O. From the time I learned to read, I had many, many writers, and again, I don't know quite what it's like in Canada, but in the United States, it's very, very hard to get a novel published. So I had a very typical experience in that it took me 20 years to get a novel published. It's not that unusual. And during that time, I realized I'm reading all these books, I would love to share what I'm reading. So starting in around 2010, I became a book critic. And that is still something that I do very satisfying because it was a way to get published and to share my passion for what I was reading. And I also am mission driven to review books that are by authors of color, by independent presses, by women who get less attention from the mainstream press and the mainstream outlets.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, let's talk about this 20 year gestation, because it wasn't just trying to get published. I understand this particular book Duet for One, there must have been different versions. Maybe you lived with these characters for so long? I found it interesting that the minor characters did show different aspects of a musical career in classical music.
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes, yes. The book changed a lot. As I said, I went back and checked when I was writing the afterward for my book. So Lilian Kallir died in 2004, which must be when I started this book. And I was, usually in the States, you sell a book via a literary agent, and I got a literary agent for this book right away. And then that person could not sell the book. So then I wrote several more novels and was really excited to have Three Muses published. But that was 18 years later. So Duet for One, which is the book we're talking about, about music, I basically, I don't know, it was like a child. I had to go back to it every year and revise it. And the initial names, you'll just be amused, were, of the two pianists, were Lawrence and Francis Kates. And there were too many apostrophes, like the S apostrophe didn't work. So I changed their names. And occasionally I make a mistake in the early drafts, it's like, what is Lawrence doing here? Their names are Victor and Adele Pearl, which got rid of my S apostrophe problem. So their characters didn't change. I had to change their names, but minor characters changed and a lot of characters, I added a lot of additional characters. And over time, Adam became the center of the novel. The early drafts of the novel were written in the shadow of my own mother's death. And I was very, my father lived for 20 years after her. I was extremely engaged with my father's grief and how he was handling it. So in the early days, I was more focused on Victor, who is the husband of the pianist who's died. But over time, I realized Adam's the star of the show and I should pump him up a little bit. So that's one way in which it changed. And the other way is the acceptance as I've gotten older, and I do think it's characteristic of aging, is to accept more complexity. There are a lot of things that can't be answered in this book. And as we get older, we realize there's a lot of conflicts and inconsistencies that are true at the same time.
Leah Roseman:
And you've talked in social media too, I think, addressing a younger audience that your parents had lives before you were around.
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes, yes, yes. So I have an unpublished novel that I wish to return to, but there was a time I thought, gosh, I'm only writing my parents' stories as they came to me. That's the first thing. That's one of my unpublished novels. But the other thing is I'm the mother of 30 something daughters, and same thing, I realized how little, when you're raising children, you realize how little you knew about your own parents earlier lives. My parents were raconteurs and they were writers. So I am the person who went through all their papers when they died. And there were a lot of them, really a lot. But still, there's so much we don't know.
Leah Roseman:
So Martha, for Duet for One, I'd asked if you had it could prepare a couple of passages. So what have you chosen?
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes, I would love to do so. I'm going to read from the very, very opening of the book, which needs no introduction. And then I'm reading still from the first chapter, but a little bit farther along where Adam, the son who's at the graveside and also a professional violinist, comes back to his apartment and plays by himself, takes out his violin, plays by himself in his apartment, and thinks about his early love. Dara, who's the other protagonist in the book. So this is from the very beginning. Adele Pearl was dead, vanquished by ovarian cancer. Adam and Victor shivered at her graveside. Adam was 37 when his mother died. He was a violinist known for fluidity and grace. Victor was Adam's father, the surviving half of Pearl and Pearl, a world renowned two piano team and joint piano faculty at Philadelphia's Caldwell Institute of Music. Out of the corner of his eye, Adam watched Philip Hissel hurry downhill. Hissel tripped then bent to pick up his fedora from the damp muddy ground. Instinctively, Adam moved closer to his father, although Hissel was too far away to create a disturbance. For this small knot of mourners, time paused and music slept. For Victor, Adele's death was a black hole that sucked in music, for Adam, a numbness.
This is the end of the first chapter where Adam has returned to his apartment and has been playing his violin through the night, thinking of his mother. Adam had been playing for hours. Daylight was emerging, gray, pushing away cobalt. He unscrewed his bow and slid a cotton handkerchief outside the stick and under the fingerboard to clear away rosin dust. Then he tenderly dressed as violin in its blue satin bag. He laid down on his bed, closed his eyes, and thought of Dara in the rear of the viola section. He could see her even after all these years, her green eyes and thick chestnut braid her small breasts, outlined by a black cardigan. She had no interest in fashion. She wore faded brown corduroy pants that were several sizes too large. She arrived at rehearsals, lugging a backpack stuffed with books, her hand smeared in blue ballpoint ink, with a pencil stuck through her braid for marking the music. for concerts, she wore a floor length, black skirt over a scoop neck leotard, nothing like the frilly blouses other girls wore. The way she embraced her viola left hand and classic Isaac Korav position, bow arm circling downward, made Adam want to transform into a genie and hide inside it. He'd heard she'd married and was an English professor at Penn. What about the intervening years? Adam had been with other women, of course, fine musicians, every one. What about Patty? Adam was sinking to the bottom of love's ocean, layers of pressure bearing down. He may as well be 21 again. He loved Dara that much tonight, or was it already tomorrow? He picture Dara lying on his twin bed as she turned pages in a textbook while he practiced, saturating the room with sound. Her presence was reassuring, comforting. Dara, Adam said to no one in particular. My mother died.
Leah Roseman:
So when you launched this book, you're going to have some music, some live music?
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes. We're going to have several. We're going to have a violinist. So I'm launching at Washington's biggest independent bookstore Politics and Prose, which is in my neighborhood and very near and dear to my heart. We're going to have a violinist play a movement from one of the Bach partitas, which is something that is part of the narrative book. But I really care that the audience here what's on the page. And you are a professional musician, so I'm sure you were familiar with everything I was talking about, but, and again, in the early two thousands when I was beginning this book, I thought, oh, could I attach a CD to the book? But now we have access to all of this online, so it just feels really important that people will hear it. And I don't have to tell you that many, many, many much of the reading audience will not be familiar with these pieces. I think that would be my guess.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I mean, they're certainly well-known works. So normally in this podcast we have musical excerpts, usually from people's albums. We won't be doing that today, but I thought what we could do is in the show notes, we could link some recordings that you love of some of the works featured in the novel. So if people want to click on those,
Martha Anne Toll:
That's wonderful. I should, I'd be happy to get those to you.
Leah Roseman:
So just get them to me, and when I put it all together, people will be able to click.
Martha Anne Toll:
Wonderful. I love that idea.
Leah Roseman:
So to that idea, maybe do you want to speak to one or two of those pieces, maybe you had played?
Martha Anne Toll:
Finlandia is an iconic piece for music students by Jean Sibelius, the Finnish composer. And the first time that Dara, who is a young violist who ultimately becomes a English professor, she is Adam's love interest. And so the rehearsal, her first time playing in an orchestra of semi-professional caliber is with the rehearsal of Finlandia. That is a very personal experience. And you sort of toward the back of the viola section, the trombones in French horns are in your ear blasting out. And I wanted very much to give readers the feeling of being inside an ensemble because I don't think we get that very much when we read what it means, where you are in the orchestra, what you can hear. And sometimes in the back of the viola section you can't hear the first violins, which is very problematic. You're often trying to match with them and just the fascination of what's coming out of your right ear basically. So that section of the book is very autobiographical. And my first memory of playing Finlandia, which I played many, many times since.
Leah Roseman:
Now, I'm curious about, obviously you've had such a full career, we still have to get into that as a lawyer, but did you have time to play the viola? Did you play in amateur ensembles or did that have to go by the wayside?
Martha Anne Toll:
So, so after I graduated college, I went to law school in Boston. I played all through law school. It was a very good antidote to the pressure of law school. Again, I think no classical musician will be surprised by this. It turned out that every member of the MIT math department was a really accomplished classical musician, not just, okay. So I played with them every week and it was so great, and they were very funny. They were like the prototypes of the absent-minded professors. One of them came, he was our first violinist. We played piano quartets and the pianist was also cellist, so we played string quartets. The guy who played first violin showed up one day and said, oh, I forgot it's my birthday, which is pretty hard to forget, and my wife is having a party for me, so I can't stay. But it turned out he was some world famous. I mean, I'm not a math person, so I don't even understand what they were doing. So that was wonderful. And we performed at MIT from time to time. And then when I moved to Washington DC same, I played in a semiprofessional orchestra here, did a bunch of wedding gigs over time. And this is very associated with the death of my mother. My mother died very suddenly in 1999, and she had always been a champion of my writing, even though I was writing a lot of stuff for work, but I wasn't writing fiction and something unleashed with her death that hasn't stopped. That's when I really started writing fiction. And so sort of, I mean, I don't know the timings exactly. Eventually I stopped playing. And part of that is because I could not keep up the practicing. I didn't have time. And it was so unsatisfying to play with being completely out of shape. And I felt like the minute that I started really thinking about fiction, what I want to do is get music on the page, which is impossible, but it's still what I want to do.
Leah Roseman:
And actually just one more little question about this life. As an amateur musician, when you were practicing and you had kids and all this, what was your routine to keep in any kind of shape? Would you play Bach? What would you do?
Martha Anne Toll:
Oh, well, so Max Aronoff, I always go back to him. He was a Ševčik guy. I don't know. Do people still play Ševčik?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Martha Anne Toll:
Okay. It's torture. For those of you non-musicians, it's like cod liver oil, your vitamins or something. I always go back to those early exercise of Kreutzer or Kayser, basic scales in arpeggios. And as I said, he had these set of finger and bow exercises that were so meticulous, and this is in the book. He told me as soon as I started studying with him, I was in a 10th grade in America. I don't really know what that is in Canada. He said, you have to practice three hours a day. I'm like, how am I going to ever practice three hours a day? But the thing is, by the time you went through all his machinations of every exercise, three hours was up and you could have go six hours. So it was not Bach. It was always those grunt exercise, like whatever you do at the gym.
Leah Roseman:
Well, let's talk about Three Muses, which I also really enjoyed. I actually have the ebook, so I can't hold it up.
Martha Anne Toll:
Oh, can I? You can. Do you mind if I hold it up? Yes. So this is Three Muses. It's my marked up copy.
Leah Roseman:
Really a very beautiful book. Difficult to read at times, both because of the Holocaust, which is part of the story, and also some of the harshness of the ballet world. You also danced ballet as a child.
Martha Anne Toll:
I started very early on ballet, and I would say it was my first passion, but this is to sometimes readers want to know this. It's less important to me. I have no talent, so no future there, which is really normal. Very few people have a future in ballet. But I would say that was my first artistic love. And I was able to study the school of the Pennsylvania Ballet, which was in Center City, Philadelphia. And I watched the rehearsals, and that was still, now, even now is life changing for me. I just loved watching ballet dancers rehearse. It was so interesting. So it was really imprinted on my psyche, I would say, but there's no way I would ever tell you I was a ballet dancer. I wasn't. I mean, I took classes and just loved it, but no talent, to be really clear. And I loved the music and it took me, we had live piano, and I was a little bit older when I realized exactly what I was hearing, which was all of Chopin, Brahms' Haydn Variations, stuff that was really major classical music that we're just doing a grands battements to, and I didn't realize what it was. So I loved that musical aspect of it too.
Leah Roseman:
So the character Mr. Yanakov is, there's exploitation, there's grooming, there's really bad behavior. Did you see any of this firsthand? Or was it more just reading?
Martha Anne Toll:
Well, so two answers to that question. One is I'm of an age where I came of age as George Balanchine was developing his repertoire, and Philadelphia was a trial city, so I saw a lot of that. I mean, I didn't see it in New York, but a lot of stuff came to Philadelphia first. And I read all of his reviews, so I knew what he was doing and followed his lives. He's a shadow figure in the book. I didn't want to model the character of Yanakov on him exactly. But he was in the background. But no, where I saw it was in the music world and a lot of it, because I wasn't ever in the ballet world in any kind of professional capacity, but I was very familiar with the music world and I, you know we're living in an era of Me Too. And Three Muses is set in the 1950s. I never considered toning it down or whitewashing it or anything because it's just what it was in the fifties. I mean, there are any number of situations. I'm sure you're familiar with them too, where incredible abuse happened. And yeah, there's an ongoing, I'm sure you know this, an ongoing horror show of Lara St. John and the Curtis Institute of Music with Jascha Brodsky, who was the first violinist in the Curtis Quartet. I mean, I knew him. I didn't know anything about this, but I'm sorry to say, it doesn't surprise me. It doesn't surprise me.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, no, I'm very well aware of all that. Yeah.
Well, at 14 you met Dr. Henri Parens was in this, one of the influenced one of the characters.
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes. And he pronounced it. That was his name, but he pronounced it Henry Parens, he was a child analyst in Philadelphia. Sorry, this is always hard to talk about. He was a Holocaust survivor. And my impression from my own family and from him and other people I know is every Holocaust survivor story is monumental. So he had his own monumental Holocaust survival story, and he became a renowned cycle child analyst in Philadelphia. So the protagonist in Three Muses named John is a survivor who survives by singing for the Commandant as a child. And that Commandant is the one who murdered his family, and John makes it to America and becomes a psychiatrist. But he has an extremely fraught relationship with music. I mean, it saved his life, but it also, he associates it with his family's murder. And Henry was the inspiration for John. I wouldn't say they're anything alike, but he inspired that character.
Leah Roseman:
And you had a cousin Ellen as well?
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes, and my mother's cousin, Ellen also was the sole survivor. Well, that's more complicated, but she lost her family in the Holocaust. She came over with my mother's, their grandmother. She was my mother's first cousin in 1938, among the last people to get out of Germany. And she wrote up her childhood experiences. She had grown up in Mainz Germany. She wrote up her childhood experiences and for her grandchildren and shared it with us. We were her second cousins. And it's a beautiful memoir that's at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. And the thing that struck me, I mean, we always knew she was German. We always knew she had lost her family, but she was a very zippy positive person. The thing that struck me was the ordinariness of her life, and particularly for a lot of German Jews, there's a saying, I never knew I was German, I never know I was Jewish until Hitler came to power. Unfortunately, I have to say this for our American listeners, we are going through a really similar time here where people have said, I always thought I was American until Trump came to power. We're in a terrible, terrible time in the United States right now. And so the ordinariness of life before Hitler came to power and the non, German Jews were not particularly religious. And so her story really influenced me. Again, as I got older and I got to know her as an adult, I realized, look what she's carrying around. I mean, it's like it's unfathomable. It's unfathomable.
We talked earlier in the podcast about the ballet dancer. Katya falls in love with John, who's very traumatized by music. And so what does the ballerina need to do to do her work? She needs music. So Katya arranges a ballet with no music, and instead the rhythm is set by the words to a Langston Hughes poem. And Langston Hughes, the narrator in my book of this ballet. So we're hearing this excerpt from Three Muses, from John's perspective, he's in the audience.
Watching her, John adjusted the bouquet of white roses in his lap. An expectant hush blanketed the hall. Langston Hughes dressed in tails, walked to the microphone. A rain screen formed the backdrop, the sound, not a drip drip, not a driving shower, but the swish of light rain. Katya stepped out, quiet as breath, robed in a floor length, gray tunic. Her hair was loose, her arms bare. John could see her face. Her eyes cast down as she took her position center stage. He couldn't believe he knew her. Let the rain kiss you. The poet's voice, mellifluous. Let the rain beat upon your head. With silver liquid drops undulating and rippling flowing. Katya was lighter than silence, deeper than memory, her body fluid. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. Langston Hughes stood before the microphone, his words luxuriant. Underneath them, the rain rushed and sang. The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk. Over the past couple of weeks, John had experienced conscious commitment to her art. He missed her with an ache that felt like sorrow. The rain makes running pools in the gutter. Katya streamed from one diagonal to another, flooding the stage with movement. The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night, and I love the rain. Katya rose and sank, leaping higher, tilting lower. a cascading waterfall. Let the rain. She floated and swirled returning to her starting place like spume from a breaking wave. The poet paused, sing you a lullaby. Langston Hughes stepped back from the microphone. John was overcome. He understood Katya's gift. She had danced ballet without music like an answer to grief. Three Muses.
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful. Thanks for reading that.
Martha Anne Toll:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Samantha Ege, the Euclid Quartet, Yale Strom, Jeeyoon Kim, Immanuel Abraham and Anthony Brandt. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, mugs and more, everything printed on demand. On my Ko-fi page you can buy me one coffee, or every month. You’ll also find the link to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Finally, if you’re finding this episode interesting, please text it to a friend. Thanks.
And this book, Three Muses, which you published first do you won this Petco Prize, which is a very cool thing.
Martha Anne Toll:
Thank you. I was really lucky. Now we've talked about, it took me a long time to get a novel published, and this was just a wonderful thing that happened to me. My publisher, Regal House, has a prize that comes with publication and an honorarium. So that's how this book got published. And again, it's a very important book to me, and I'm incredibly grateful that they gave me my start
Leah Roseman:
After this was published and you were getting reactions from readers finally getting this published, what was that like for you?
Martha Anne Toll:
Yeah, it was very surreal and very miraculous. I'll be honest. I find it totally miraculous. I never thought I could be in the position that I'm in. I always wanted to write, I always wanted to publish a book, but there were many years of despair and frustration. I feel incredibly lucky, just incredibly, incredibly lucky.
Leah Roseman:
So I was thinking the rejections that authors experience,
Martha Anne Toll:
Yeah
Leah Roseman:
it's similar to a lot of people in music too.
Martha Anne Toll:
Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm very close friends with a friend that I played with in college plays in the National Symphony, and she's always talking about why didn't this person get into the National Symphony? Or why didn't this person has had to have a freelance career their whole life, even though they could have played in any orchestra or whatever. It's so competitive. I mean, I have to tell you this, it's subjective. Even though a lot of terrific, talented musicians get jobs a lot or have struggled toward it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So how did you deal with that? I'm sure you sent off the manuscripts and just didn't even get responses.
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes. There are two answers to this question. One was abject despair, I will own that. Two was looking at myself and thinking, unlike music where I felt some real barriers. I'm not a good audition taker. My performing is fine, but I'm very bad at taking auditions and where I felt limitations, I felt like no one would hold me back with writing, which is kind of a weird thing to say, but I never, I'd cry for a day and I'd get right back up and write the next thing. I was not defeated by it. And that seems so important and so meaningful that I just kept going. I am like is the definition of the idiot who keeps banging her head against the wall, whatever that expression is. I'm like, why am I doing this? But nothing stopped me, and I did recognize the significance of that. And over time, I finally learned the best advice, which I always give people, is try to get 100 rejections a year. That rejection is actually what's normal in writing land. And that any acceptance is a gift. And once I could reorient myself that way, I had a lot less despair. I realized, okay, let's get a hundred rejections a year. That makes sense to me.
Leah Roseman:
In terms of your book reviews, which we touched on, you have bylines in all kinds of different publications. Do you think that helped?
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes. It helped psychologically because it helped to be getting published and to be getting recognition in a different form. I'm still writing is writing just as you're an improv musician, you play classical music. I feel like it's all connected. I mean, I don't know how you feel, but I would guess that you might feel the same way. That one form of writing feeds another form of writing. So it was tremendously, tremendously psychologically helpful. And it also feeds into my social justice work. I was so excited to have a platform to get really good writers out that people might not hear about otherwise.
Leah Roseman:
And do you think, you mentioned your mother died very suddenly. My mother also, she was diagnosed with a very serious illness when I was in my twenties, and her death was very difficult. It's taken me a while. So for me, I think it definitely gave me a sense of mortality, a little younger,
Martha Anne Toll:
First of all, I'm so sorry. Yes, it was just unfathomable. She was a physical Amazon and never was sick a day in her life, and it was just not in the cards. That's all I can say. She was the first of her generation on both sides of the family to die. And I'm like, wait a minute. That doesn't make any sense. She was always the one swimming in ice cold water in Maine, and she was physically intrepid. My parents were very close to each other. And so even seeing my father by himself didn't make any sense. I mean, I was in my early forties, you think you would know better, but just the adjustment, I always say it was tectonic. It was a change in the entire view of the world.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, let's talk about your career dedicated to social justice and how you went to law school and then how you got into this.
Martha Anne Toll:
Thank you. So I went to law school. I love words, and that was a good choice for me. I went through different traditional legal careers, legal jobs, and they were pretty unsatisfying. One was corporate law, which never was going to work. And then I worked for the government for some amount of time and then a nonprofit. Finally, I realized I don't think law is a great way to solve problems. And I began to look in the nonprofit world, and I was familiar with charitable foundations in the United States. It's actually really an artifice of tax law that wealthy people can leave their wealth and companies do this too, but wealthy families can leave their wealth in a pot. They're not taxed on it. But then that foundation is obligated to give money to the public. So I started looking around there and I knew something about it because I had been involved with arts organizations that were supported by these.
And I got really lucky. There was a family, not my family, another family who was setting up such a foundation and they hired me to run it. So they had chosen their program areas before they hired me, which were homelessness and what was then called disadvantaged or at risk youth. But I was in charge of giving the money away and identifying who the money should go to. And because we were new and relatively small, I didn't feel that we could be effective unless we partnered effectively with other bigger organizations that collaborated. And the other wrinkle was that the family lived across the United States and a branch of them were in England, and they wanted to give widely, and we didn't have very much money. So I had to figure out strategy to do that where everybody, the family members were happy and we could be strategic.
So over time, the program areas that we donate money to organizations, we always stayed in housing and homelessness, and then we got into criminal justice. The death penalty in particular, and the death penalty in about one second takes due to racial justice and the rest of criminal justice. You folks are a lot more civilized than we are south the border. It is incredible. It's absolutely incredible that the United States still has the death penalty, and we are out of sync with pretty much everybody in the world except China and Iraq. I mean, we are not in good company here. And yeah, I don't want to go on, it's not really what your listeners are interested in. It's a travesty. So most of my career has been criminal justice, racial justice, and housing homelessness.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of housing justice, what kind of solutions do you think are the best?
Martha Anne Toll:
So early on, my first chairman, whose family is named Alan Morrison, he's a very well-known public interest lawyer. And he was hired by Ralph Nader to be sort of Nader's litigating arm in the early seventies. And he had spent his life raising money to do litigation and also doing litigation. So he always kept me humble in terms of the difficulty that people have raising money. So it was his concept that we'd fund advocacy and that to be specific, that's instead of funding a soup kitchen, you fund work that will raise the federal budget to support subsidized housing. So an early victory was supporting a position in Washington DC that could work in Congress. So I think the budget, federal budget went up something like $600 million that year. So that's a $25,000 grant that really leverages it. Whereas if you were, it's not that people in soup kitchens don't need to eat, but it's how do you use small amounts of money to leverage?
And so that's really was our strategy. In the early two thousands, Alan retired from the board and turned it over to his cousin who was much, much younger, and she's very entrepreneurial, and she said, why can't we raise money and increase our endowment? And I said, because you can't. Nobody's going to want to give us money. But it turns out I had been in the process of developing a relationship with a Geneva based foundation that had an office in London and the London office did homelessness, and they were interested in widening their footprint in the United States. So we ended up raising millions of dollars from them that came to us for us to regrant. So we were able to expand our work in making the connections between criminal justice and homelessness, our prison system. We live in a very punitive society as the whole world is seeing that now. Some of us have known it for a while, but you get out of prison, you can't go into public housing. And I have to.
Leah Roseman:
Really?
Martha Anne Toll:
Yeah, because you have a criminal record, even though you've served your time. We have a convicted felon living in public housing right now in the White House. It's something that some of us have been talking about since subsidized housing. It's not actually. All the things!
So states have some control over this. So we did some work at the state level. And then also there are all these employment barriers because if you do a background check and find somebody has a criminal record, they can't get a job, which is crazy because if you've served your time, there should be some rehabilitation. So that's a lot of the areas that we were working in. Also really, really, really important for white people in particular, I feel to shine the light on racial justice. I mean, the criminal justice system in America is racist at every conceivable level, and the death penalty is the worst example of that. Very mission driven to expose that and try to deal with it.
Leah Roseman:
Reading novels is a good way for people to understand other people's perspectives. Off the top of your head, are there one or two books by Black authors that you would suggest?
Martha Anne Toll:
Yeah, Ernest Gaines is a writer. It's Ernest Gaines, A lesson Before Dying, about an innocent man, Black man being executed. I love that book. It's a classic in the genre. And I really enthusiastic worship, love Kiese Laymon, who's a working American writer now, who is filled with this love and compassion for humanity, and also a very harsh critic of white America. I reviewed his book Heavy for NPR , Istill think it's a really, really, really important, both his essays, are really important. I loved The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom, which is about Katrina and the unfairness and the inequities of housing in America. Those are all novels. Kiese's book Heavy is actually a memoir. And I loved Ta-Nehisi Coates's novel Waterdancer, which is about Harriet Tubman and her work too on the Underground Railroad. And we can talk, if you want me to offer you more for the program notes, I'd be happy to.
Leah Roseman:
Sure. No, it's wonderful that off the top of your head, you were able to mention all that. A few people had asked me to review albums, and I just don't do that. But what struck me for people that do do that, there's this kind of need for listeners to make comparisons, to know enough about the genre or the sub genre. Do you find that with literary criticism? Does that,
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes. But can I ask you, why don't you do it? Is it because you don't want to be in a position of having to judge other musicians? Or is it a time thing?
Leah Roseman:
Let's say I retired from the orchestra and I had more time. I still wouldn't do it because I'd rather just do more podcast stuff. This is what I enjoy doing.
Martha Anne Toll:
Yeah, no, I understand that. So I went to a panel early on in my critic's career where the three panelists said, we think the purpose of our work is to make people love books and read books. And I love that. I don't think it's anybody writes, a book gets applauded in my book in my life, and I don't want to tear down a book. However, there are a lot of really bad books out there. So I want to signal to readers what they might or might not like about this book. And for example, I'm a reader who reads less for plot and more for the language and literary content. And I definitely recognize that's a minority view. A lot of people would rather read something for plot with a real page turner. So I try to signal that. And I also definitely do compare books to see if readers who this might like that. And then I try to get in. I haven't been perfect about this, but I don't like the fact that, I mean, I noticed this in middle school. If you're a woman writer, you're only compared to women writers. If you're a Black writer, you're only compared to other Black writers. So I always try to mix it up because there's no reason that should be, there's just no reason that should be. So I always try to signal that these books are similar, even though the authors look different, that kind of thing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, that's great. I'm curious in people making comparisons, let's say for Duet for One, are there other books that would people be interested in?
Martha Anne Toll:
There's one that's my favorite, favorite. I hope you've read it. It's called An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. It is the book that I wish I would've written.
So he's Indian, I think he's British. I don't know that for sure. But that book absolutely blew my mind. And it came out around the time. I don't know the exact date. And it's nothing like anything else he's written. It's about a violinist. It's so beautiful. It is the book I wish I had written. So that's my absolute number one choice. And then I got really excited about, oh, he's the editor of Gramaphone. He's Canadian. Can you hold on a second? I'm going to go get you the title. This book, it's called Us Conductors by Sean Michaels. It won the Giller's Prize, I think in the early two thousands. I love that book. Really beautiful music book. And I'm going to be writing a piece about this for Lit Hub before my book comes out. I think there are a lot of books that don't do this well. So I do pay attention to the ones that do do this. Well, I would be happy to give you some in the show notes. I have to think about that. I mean, I have written a couple of articles that I'd be happy to share with you. But Vikram Seth, An Equal Music is top of the line, my favorite book of all time. I'd love that book.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah, I mean, it's a book I'm aware of, but I haven't read it.
Martha Anne Toll:
I know it was making the rounds among Symphony players here when it came out.
Leah Roseman:
If you could spend a weekend with one character from each book separate weekends,
Martha Anne Toll:
Oh gosh. I would choose John from Three Muses, and I would choose Adam from, I think I would choose Adam from Duet for One.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Martha Anne Toll:
Or Dara. I don't know. I might choose Dara. Well, that's a great question. Nobody asked me that, so I haven't thought about it. But Dara would be a really great conversationalist, I think.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I would choose Dara, but I felt like she was a big part of you as well reading it. So
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes and no, but Dara's very, very enthusiastic about her work, and I feel like we share that. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
I was reading your Substack blog, and this to me something you posted after Thanksgiving. I thought, wow, what a community and family person. So can you share the story of going on the train and 50 people?
Martha Anne Toll:
So I told you I'm from Philadelphia. My dad's entire extended family. Well, Philadelphia was their port of entry, the United States. They all settled there. And there's still a hub, even though most of our elders are not with us. So we do Thanksgiving there every year. And since my dad died, he had the big house where we could host it. We've been renting an Airbnb, and this year we had a series of disasters, one of which was a dead chipmunk in the Airbnb. When we arrived in the sofa, that should have been my signal that things were a problem. So my younger sister and I organize it, and it's potluck. Everybody brings something, but Thanksgiving you have to have a turkey. So there were two turkeys coming, one of which was not cooked. My sister Betsy, brought a raw turkey. She needed to use the oven. It turns out there was no gas, heat stove, hot water, anything. And it was basically one thing led to another. My brother-in-law knows a lot about, he installs gas fireplaces. So he immediately identified that there was gas leak in the house. And then I'm like, oh my God, we're having 50 relatives that were with friends. Anybody can bring anybody. So there's always people we don't know who show up, and we have no place to host this thing. So it's 10:00 PM and I called my cousin Carol, who lives about an hour north of Philly and has a very big house. I said, Carol, I don't really know how to ask you this, but could you possibly host 50 people tomorrow? So she did, and amazingly, and my sister Betsy, had the raw turkey. Fortunately, her daughter lives in Philadelphia, so she used her oven to cook the turkey. We didn't have a car, but my nephew's girlfriend lend us her car. Everybody came through and carol's salt of the earth. We had such a good time. And so I said to Carol's daughter-in-law who was helping out, was this okay? Because honestly, we had no choice 12 hours before this event. She said, yeah, but maybe Carol would more than, could you give her a week next time notice instead of six hours? It worked. It was really, really fun. It's a really kind of major event. And Thanksgiving is really, I come from a Jewish family, but Thanksgiving is really, really the holiday in my family.
Leah Roseman:
Some Canadians have a version of something we call Canadian Thanksgiving in October, but it's not the same cultural thing it is for you guys because we're not the same country.
Martha Anne Toll:
I really hope that you know that. I know that I'm very well aware of that. But the thing that we like about it, it's such an American holiday and everybody I know, including recent immigrants celebrates. And the thing that's really nice about, there's no money involved. There's no gift giving or shopping. It's just food. It's just like you eat. It's like it's so fun. I mean, in my own family, Passover is what big holiday, which is coming up. And that's something I do with my children and extended next generation. And the same thing, anybody's welcome to come. But in my family of origin, it was really Thanksgiving.
Leah Roseman:
So how does this, I'm just trying to wrap my head around 50 people eating dinner.
Martha Anne Toll:
Well, a lot of people sit on the floor. There's a lot of babies that there's definitely a lot of under fives who just run around the whole time. And then there's a lot of people sit on the floor. We've never been able to seat everybody, and then everybody brings something and there's always too much food, which is very, very funny if you think about it because it's so many people. But yes, there are new babies coming next year. So it's just great. There's not one table, if that's what you're wondering. No way.
Leah Roseman:
No, of course not. No, I was just curious because just the fact that you organized, this says a lot to me about your values and where you put, because it can't be an easy thing.
Martha Anne Toll:
No, I really, really appreciate that. And I always say, I mean, I have very good administrative skills. I will own that, but it's totally a group effort. We couldn't do it. I used to make the turkey, but I actually hate making turkeys. So Betsy and Connie, my two sisters on either side make the turkeys and then cousin Carol does all the desserts. We have our systems, but everybody contributes something. And my dad's family, I am really, really lucky. There are absolutely extraordinary people. We all know it. And I'm knocking wood when I say this. I was not familiar with difficult extended families until I got to college. I didn't know it was a thing. Now it's like we know that that's the norm. Difficult extent, extended families. The norm is that it's difficult, but I don't know. My dad's family are just extraordinary people. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I mentioned, I read this on Substack, and you're very involved in Substack. You have lots of followers. How do you deal with the overload? There's so much good writing, but it's such a time suck. How do you balance?
Martha Anne Toll:
So this is so interesting. I've been sending out a newsletter for a very long time, and I got some advice before Three Muses came out that I should send it out weekly. And I thought, over my dead body, I'll never be able to do this. But now I have a whole different way that I look at it. So first of all, it's a little bit of a playground for me where I can test out ideas that I might not want to do a formal essay about. And as a writer, you're always hustling. You always have to pitch to get something placed, and I can just say what I want in my sub. It sounds crazy, but I really like that. And it's now not such a time suck. It's sort of, I try to keep it short about what I'm thinking about. And I have pivoted since the election because I don't know what news gets out to your country.
A lot of us are in complete despair and desperation and people, I feel like one thing, my little contribution, my grain of sand that I can contribute is we have to hope, we have to fight this because despair is paralyzing and we cannot give into this even though lots of giant entities are giving into it. So I'm now devoting half my Substack to political actions that you could take reading that will support what you're doing, what's going on in your community. I feel, again, mission driven to do this. So if I might say my Substack is Martha Anne Toll, I would love it people joined us. Not so much for the political stuff, but I always talk about what I'm reading. I like people to know what's out there that they may not read in the Globe and Mail or the New York Times or whatever, stuff that's a little more off the beaten track. So I feel like it's not the time suck that it was. I feel like I have a bit of a rhythm now.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I didn't mean for you as a writer.
Martha Anne Toll:
Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
I meant in terms of the Substack community, and it strikes me like I'm trying to find my way. I don't know how you get people to notice you. It seems to be like that community.
Martha Anne Toll:
The answer is, I don't know. I was on a different platform before and transferred over to Substack, so I don't know the answer to that. I agree. There's total overload and it's like anything else in social media, how do you make your decisions? I mean, we recommend each other and I know what I read. I know what I like, but you can't read everything make you cuckoo.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, that's what I was curious. It
Martha Anne Toll:
Would make you really cuckoo
Leah Roseman:
Because I looked at who you followed, and of course it was a huge long list of really great people.
Martha Anne Toll:
So some people, you can see what it is, it's classical music, and then there's some, to me, very, very important writers right now are keeping sustaining me during this time period in the United States that I'm very reliant on for hard information, but also for spiritual uplift. So those are the two things, and then there's the reading ones, but the reading Substack. But in terms of spiritual uplift and action oriented Substack, what I'm focused on right now during this absolute horror show that is going on south of the border.
Leah Roseman:
You've been involved with writers groups and residencies over the years in terms of supporting, do you have one in particular or an experience that sort of really nourished you?
Martha Anne Toll:
Yes. Well, I've been lucky enough to go to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, which is in Virginia, which I love, and I particularly love that. And most of the ones I go to, I love that they have visual artists, and I feel like visual artists just, I feel about musicians. We feed each other. They also have composers feed each other's interests in creativity and generative processes. And Virginia Center for the Creative Arts has a campus in southern France, and I've been there twice and my French is fluent. So it's really fun to just plug into the village there. And it's a beautiful place. It's a very, very special place. And I'm going to a residency that's new to me, but I think it's also a new residency on Vashon island off of Seattle. It's not that far. I mean, it's sort of across the border from Vancouver, and I'm really excited about that. That's totally new to me. It's going to be on a small aisle in the middle of the Puget Sound and something that next Autumn. I like it because even though I have my own study, I'll remove one's own. Like Virginia Wolf talked about. Getting out of your space geographically and interacting with other artists is always really, really inspiring.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks so much for this today, Martha. It was really an honor to meet you and have this conversation.
Martha Anne Toll:
Thank you. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
