An Interview with Hanna Pylväinen …
MM:
Let’s start with the most exciting news, at least insofar as I’m aware. You were recently installed as the Finlandia National Lecturer of the Year.
HP:
Lecturer of the Year is a an especially cool honor since it means I can be invited to travel to any Finlandia Foundation chapters to do a reading or presentation or seminar, whatever the chapter wants and wherever the chapter might be. The Finlandia Foundation pays for my travel there, and the chapter covers my honorarium and accommodations in their home city—I’ll do eight of these trips this year. It’s a special pleasure to have Finnish readers and listeners—the burden of explanation comes down a lot—and of course people often have interesting stories for me in return.
MM:
Where were you born, where were you raised? What influence did Finnish culture, music, food, language, and customs play in formulating an affinity for Finnish and Finnish American culture? Have you visited Finland? If so, what impressions did that/those experience(s) leave with you?
HP:
Like so many Finns in America, I’m from Michigan—born and raised near Detroit. My mom taught me to make pulla, my uncle and father built a sauna in our basement, our cupboards were full of Moomin mugs, Marimekko patterns could be found on curtains and clothing and towels. We were musicians, we played all kinds of instruments, sometimes together, and we learned to love the outdoors, especially remote places—I would say all of these things, so to speak, are pretty Finnish. When I went to Finland for the first time in 2000, I was struck by how much I seemed like everyone else, both in terms of my looks but also things like other people’s love of music—it was almost odd. I’ve returned many times since, mostly to northern Finland in the Enontekiö region to do research for The End of Drum-Time, where I experienced more of Sámi culture than Finnish, though there, too, were Moomin mugs and Marimekko and saunas—and, of course, a love of the outdoors.
MM:
Was Finnish spoken in your home when you were growing up? How fluent are you in the language? I note from reviews of We Sinners and various interviews you’ve done, you were raised in a conservative Laestadian Lutheran home.
HP:
I don’t speak for everyone who is or has been Laestadian, of course, but for me, the experience of being raised Laestadian and then feeling it was imperative to leave it was difficult and poignant, in part because Laestadianism is a very tightly-knit community that becomes so embedded in your life, so central, it is hard to imagine life without it. There can also be huge social consequences to leaving—loss of friends, maybe family—so the pressure to stay can be huge. It’s also a religion that very much emphasizes feeling—feelings of guilt from sin and then feelings of relief from forgiveness—and this can create bodily sensations that the only way to not have sin is to be Laestadian and to be forgiven via their rituals and people. So this sets up the sense that to leave is crazy—then you’re stuck forever in the first, worse feeling—or that’s how it can seem. In this sense it’s not surprising, I don’t think, that the characters of my books think so much about what they feel—and are so swayed by their feelings—it was such an emphasis. Even the language of the church itself—there is no way to underestimate the impact of hearing the cadences of the King James Bible and the sermons every Sunday and more for the first eighteen years of my life. And while we didn’t speak Finnish at home except for bits and pieces (puuroa, miitoa, ole hyvä, prayers, etc.), there were many hymns sung at church in Finnish (that we didn’t understand), and also sermons (that were translated). In this sense, the rhythms and sounds of Finnish have always been extremely familiar to me; indeed, familial.
MM:
Authors take diverse roads to their passion. But most always, they are writers and readers from an early age. Was that true for you?
HP:
I read a lot as a kid—Laestadians don’t watch TV. I didn’t write very much, because ultimately one of my sisters would find it and, in the most painful workshop I’ve ever sat through, read my work aloud to me in mockery (once through the bottom of the bathroom door as I tried to hide). I wrote a short story for a church contest—maybe some little things here and there for school—but that’s about it; it didn’t occur to me to either be a writer or want to be one because I held them in such esteem and because most of the writers I read were dead—I used to read Anna Karenina every Christmas, and all the Austens, some Dickens, lots of old stuff. So becoming a writer did not really seem like a possible thing to do. This changed for me in college when I took a short story class as a break from a a lot of labs and science classes (I was thinking about going pre-med) and my writing professor insisted I study writing. I wrote a memoir called Unbelieving for my senior thesis and used that to get into graduate school—I felt at every turn I had no business really being there, or that I was wasting people’s time. It took quite a long time to feel like I was “really” a writer, and moreover, that I should be one.
MM:
We Sinners is, at least in my take (my men’s book club read it as our January 2024 read), a contemporary story of a Laestadian family struggling with their faith, the modern world, and current issues affecting families. What was your inspiration for the story? The novel reminds me, both in style and subject matter, of Canadian Mennonite writer Miriam Toews’s work. Any thoughts on that comparison?
HP:
We Sinners is my idea of a plausible fictional family that might have existed in my own family’s congregation; it is not actually my family. There are stories I either lived or heard of that formed the basis of a chapter, but usually by the time the story was finished the relationship to the truth was almost entirely lost. I was interested in what the arc of fiction could do for me as a writer that nonfiction could not do, both in terms of freeing me from some of the desultoriness of dailiness, but also in relieving me of the responsibility of representing real people—I love and admire my family deeply and did not want them to feel like I was writing about them. This turned out to be a little naive, since people imagine everyone I wrote to be completely real anyway. I’m okay with that these days—it’s only human—and to my mind at this point, the Rovaniemi family memebers that appear in We Sinners are their own people, with their own particular set of problems.
That said, of course, I did grow up facing many of the restrictions that the Rovaniemis face: no make-up, no earrings, no TV, no dancing, no listening to music “with a beat,” etc. These prohibitions are more or less common to fundamentalism of all kinds—part of what fundamentalist groups share are strict rules of behavior combined with a denial that these are “rules” or indeed intended to control people; everything becomes rooted in whether or not you are, essentially, morally good or pure. In this sense your behavior is never unimportant—I put it that way purposefully. I think there’s real reasons to think about why this kind of religion has historically appealed to Finns at all—and I think there’s many reasons to make a comparison to Miriam Toews.
MM:
Your second novel, The End of Drum-Time, was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award.
HP:
We Sinners is based on what I knew about the life I had lived; The End of Drum-Time is based on what had created my life that I knew nothing about. That is to say: The End of Drum-Time tells the story of the creation of Laestadianism in the early 1850s; in it, a (fictionalized!) daughter of Laestadius runs away with a Sámi reindeer herder. It took me ten years of research and drafting and traveling to and from Sápmi to really understand what it was Laestadianism has to do with the Sámi—it turns out, a lot. As is often the case, again, by the time I was done writing it The End of Drum-Time doesn’t feel, I don’t think, much like it’s “about” Laestadianism—it’s about Willa, the daughter, and Ivvár, the reindeer herder, and it’s about complicated politics of colonial forces that led to why Laestadianism would have been appealing to Sámi reindeer herders (and poor northern Finns) in the first place. It was, as you might imagine, mind-boggling to be named a finalist—it was not the kind of thing I ever sat around dreaming about.
MM:
If a Finnish group wants to take advantage of your being selected Lecturer of the Year, what’s the best way to contact you to see if you’re available to read and discuss your work with a local group?
HP:
Zoom is a possibility, though part of being the Lecturer of the Year is that the Finlandia Foundation covers my travel to wherever your group is! I do have some LOY readings lined up: in Hancock, Michigan on April 13th; in Ithaca, NY on May 19th; and in Baltimore, MD on October 13th; and hopefully one in Sonoma, CA sometime in September or October.
MM:
Might your fans see you at an upcoming Finn Fest? Finally, without giving too much away, are you working on a project?
HP:
I’ll be giving a reading at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA on April 6th and a reading at NYU in NYC on April 11th, and a reading in Houghton on April 13th. I’ll also be at FinnFest. People looking for upcoming events can check my website at hannapylvainen.com.
I’m working on my next novel, which takes place in 2013 Boston. I’m very excited about it, though as far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with being Finnish, Laestadian, or herding reindeer, but you never know, these things have a way of sneaking in.
(This interview first appeared in the July 2024 issue of The Finnish American Reporter.)
