Interview by Joy Manning
A CONVERSATION WITH ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL, AUTHOR OF VANISHING POINT (Apprentice House Press)

In Vanishing Point, Ellen Prentiss Campbell reconstructs the family of a real but sometimes overlooked nineteenth-century Pennsylvania painter, George Hetzel. Hetzel was a celebrated landscape artist and teacher in Pittsburgh, who founded the Scalp Level School, an informal group of painters known for working outdoors and representing untouched, pre-industrial wilderness landscapes. The novel’s truest subjects, however, are the women in Hetzel’s life who history left in the margins: his daughter Lila, a gifted painter, and Lila’s daughter Dorothy, a journalist.

Told across decades and in many family voices, Vanishing Point takes the shape of a memoir within a novel, braiding documented history with the secrets, losses, and mysteries that no family ever fully records. It grew out of years of archival research and field trips as well as relationships Campbell formed along the way, including with the family who now live in the Hetzels’ old house and who became friends and champions of the project.

Vanishing Point is the third novel written by Campbell, who came to fiction after more than thirty years as a psychotherapist. In our conversation, she discussed the spark behind the book, the line between fact and invention, the uncanny moments when imagination turns out to be true, how she found her way to an ending, and what it has meant to begin a creative life later than most.

Joy Manning: What was the initial spark for Vanishing Point?

Ellen Prentiss Campbell: There’s a local painter in the Bedford County area of Pennsylvania, where our old house is. Kevin Kutz. I love his work; one of his paintings hangs in my living room now. We went to a retrospective of his at a gallery, and afterward we wandered into the permanent collection. There was a small nineteenth-century landscape — layers and layers of green forest, a stream, rocks — that was so familiar to me because those are the woods in the region where my house is. The label said “George Hetzel, founder of the Scalp Level School.” I’d never heard of him, or of Scalp Level, but it spoke to me. I felt there was more there that I needed to know.

This was 2015, and I was in the midst of launching my first novel and my first story collection, so I filed it away. I learned George Hetzel had been a well-known painter and teacher in Pittsburgh, moved to the country, to Somerset, around the turn of the century, and died within about a year of the move — and that was about all. But time went on. During the pandemic, once the final edits on my next collection and my novel, Frieda’s Song, were done, I had that spell of time we all had, when the usual world wasn’t calling in the usual way, and I began reading more, online and in exhibit catalogs. At first I thought his life was too charmed, too trouble-free, to make a story. You know: no trouble, no story. But by the spring of 2022, I was making field trips out to local places associated with the Hetzels: the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, the graveyard where the family is buried, the house he’d designed. And it became clear that what really called to me was the family — especially his daughter, Lila, who had talent and aspired to be a painter, and, years later, her daughter, Dorothy.

Joy: The book is grounded in research, but it’s a novel. How did you draw the line between what’s real and what’s invented? And how do you feel about projecting stories onto real people?

Ellen: It is historical fiction, but it is absolutely fiction. The characters were real people, but what I loved most were the places where, no matter how I delved, there were blanks and mysteries because, as in most families, there are things that were never recorded, secrets, conflicts no one ever knew. The Hetzels were visited by numerous tragedies and losses. Without giving too much away, what drew me in were the inconsistencies, particularly in Lila’s life. Her trajectory as an artist seemed clear; she was determined, and her mother was a hundred percent behind her, even more than her father. And then she made some personal decisions that just didn’t seem to fit with the independent painter she’d been. Her eldest brother, Jimmie, intrigued me too — not an artist, but enormously creative, a college professor, a musician, ultimately an entrepreneur. And he came to a surprising and unexpected end, the circumstances unclear, as was his mother’s reaction to his death and to his business partner, who had been and continued to be a real benefactor to the family. All of it was somewhat veiled in mystery. Meeting the family who now live in the house, the local library with its trove of the granddaughter’s papers, the county courthouse — even with all of that, there were still these wonderful blanks that demanded I fill them in, knowing that I was doing that in accord with what seemed authentic to my fictionalized world.

Joy: So you didn’t diverge from anything that could be known factually? You stuck to the facts as you found them, and the fiction came in filling the blanks and the mysteries?

Ellen: That is where the fictionalization comes in, and I always love having time weave back and forth in what I read and in what I write. So the story is told in many family voices, but the primary speaking voices become Lila, [Hetzel’s] daughter, and Dorothy, his granddaughter; and I used the opportunity to make Dorothy, who became a writer, someone who was herself trying to resolve and write about the family history.

Joy: I was intrigued by the memoir-within-a-novel structure. How did you come to it, and at what point in the writing did it crystallize?

Ellen: It crystallized as soon as I became more aware of Dorothy. Initially I wasn’t fully aware of her as a writer in her own right, a journalist. But once I was, it just felt natural and necessary that she be the presence telling the story, to the extent possible — even though, as she says, she knows her mother and grandmother might disagree, might be angry with some of what they’d view as her mistakes or her fabrications. Dorothy just took hold of me, partly because I had the chance to visit the home where she’d grown up, where she and her mother lived, and where she ultimately lived alone for many years. The family who live there had wonderful information about her from their own archive. She became more and more fascinating to me.

Joy: Are your previous novels historical fiction in this way too? I ask because the research is a complementary set of skills not every fiction writer has. How have you refined them over time?

Ellen: Both of my prior novels are historical fiction in this way. I wrote an essay called “Resisting the Pigeonhole” because what has sparked all three of my novels is a nugget of intriguing history I’ve stumbled across or been led to by fate. With my debut, it was discovering that there had been Japanese diplomats in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1945. With Frieda’s Song, it was a very real and renowned psychoanalyst at Chestnut Lodge Psychiatric Hospital [in Rockville, Maryland], and years after her death, also under somewhat mysterious circumstances, the then-vacant hospital burned down. Those little-known facts just spark my imagination. But I still think of [Vanishing Point] as a family novel. What’s always interested me most is the people, the characters, the dilemmas people get into — and that’s just as true in what I read.

As for the skills: over time, what’s become most important to me is giving voice to characters who may have been on the sideline of a bigger event. Some of that comes out of being someone who reads and writes and notices everything. And some of it comes out of having spent more than thirty years as a psychotherapist, becoming deeply aware of how everyone carries their own personal story — no matter how seemingly ordinary or unremarkable — and that underneath, there are such depths of human story in everyone.

Joy: Say more about those decades as a psychotherapist and how they inform your fiction, your characterization, or other aspects of craft.

Ellen: One principle has been inviolate: I don’t use actual clients or client stories in my fiction, partly because, as a psychotherapist, that is against all the legal and ethical standards. But one way the practice informed my research is that I’m so accustomed to keeping confidences that it feels a little transgressive, a little dangerous, to reach out and interview people who might have known my fictional world. My brother is a documentary producer, and he was surprised that with the first novel I wasn’t seeking to interview people. With the other two novels behind me, though, I felt more secure reaching out. So with this book I did say, this is who I am, this is what I’m writing about, when I visited the Hetzel home in Somerset and the Westmoreland Museum, which has the world’s collection of the Scalp Level artists. People generously opened their doors and their archives, and that gave me much more firsthand information than I’d had before.

And it’s still happening, now that the book is out in the world. After a talk in Bedford, a man came up and told me he’d grown up in Somerset and so admired Dorothy, who kept Lila’s paintings displayed. He gave me a wonderful detail: she kept a pair of shoes Lila had painted beside the painting of that pair of shoes. And I thought, oh, it’s happening again. I would have killed for that detail.

Joy: When you’ve imagined something and later found out it was accurate to what really happened, what do you think explains that?

Ellen: I don’t want to sound too paranormal because I don’t mean that at all, but I think sometimes, as a writer, as an imaginative person, we’re lucky; somehow we understand something that isn’t really revealed to us. I wrote another essay for Cleaver, about the importance of place in my work, called “Resonant Places.” The places people have lived in are so imbued with what happened there, and with those people, that — with good fortune and a certain writer’s karma — you get it. I can’t really explain it. With the first novel, people said things to me like, “That piano teacher was my piano teacher,” and I’d say, “No, she’s made up.” And they’d say, “No, she lives in the house at the address you describe.”

It makes me feel intensely loyal to my characters. This was a hard novel to complete. I’ve always taken about ten years from start to publication, but I felt like I was actively drafting and redrafting this one for so long — partly because I felt such a responsibility to be true to Lila and, especially, to Dorothy.

Joy: I’m always interested in how authors find their endings — how they knew it was the end and that the book was done. Without spoilers, can you speak to that?

Ellen: I can. I drafted it and drafted it. From the very beginning, Lila’s paintings — and her failing to achieve the kind of renown and place in the Pennsylvania art world that her father had — that was front and center for me. So I soaked in the paintings, read about them, went to lectures painters were giving about how they paint. I was tussling with what held Lila back, and it was true to me from the start that there was more to her not achieving fame than had really been discussed. I knew the book had to involve her art and a present-day believer in her. By “present” I don’t mean now; Lila died in 1967, Dorothy in 1977 — so, a character who’s introduced by Dorothy at the beginning and then closes the book, around 1988, and really becomes their champion. I also always knew I was working toward the ends of these characters’ lives.

Readers of the many drafts helped, too. If you hear the same comment from two or three readers, you really pay attention to it; and across the board, people wanted more certainty about what happened to Lila’s art. Right before the pandemic, I heard James McBride say a good novel needs a mystery and a love interest, and to my delight, the real story of this family has more than one mystery and many kinds of love interest. But this family was also incredibly strong, and although there was great suffering and disappointment and failure, as well as success, I felt it would be a disservice to the characters, and to the real people, not to have a resolution that recognized that strength. That led me to rework the ending again and again and again. Given the circumstances, it was extremely tough, but it was imperative.

Joy: I want to turn to your own path. There’s a cultural story that writing, and all creative pursuits, are a young person’s game. You came to fiction more seriously later in life: you got your MFA in your fifties. What part of that story is real, what part is myth, and what advice do you have for people who want to pursue creativity well beyond the usual age?

Ellen: My earliest dream was to be a writer, but I’ll be honest: as a young woman graduating college in 1975, I didn’t even have a concept that it was possible for me to take that route, to take that risk. Partly that was my own lack of boldness, and partly it was a different world, a different leap, particularly then, for a young woman to make. The difficulty for women in all fields has been mitigated but not erased. So from time to time I’d do a nonfiction piece or write the infamous family newsletter, which in my hands was really creative nonfiction.

Then, when I was almost fifty, 9/11 happened and my parents died — coincidentally, not connected — and both of those events made me aware of the precarity, the unpredictability, the possible brevity of life. Without really intending to, in the process of grieving and adjusting, I found myself beginning to write stories, inspired by place and people. Not about my parents, not about my family, but inspired by that summer home in Pennsylvania, by reading my family’s letters in the attic. And it filled me with joy. I’ve always been an early riser; I’d get up early and write, then go to work, and I felt like I was really coming to myself. My husband and my boss were both supportive, and I cut back to four days a week. It felt like such a luxury to have that block of time. A short story turned into a novel; stories got published and won small prizes. A very good editor at the tiny Broadkill Press picked up my collection, which was a tremendous validation. I had an agent for the first novel, but my work and my older writer self didn’t lend themselves to the big houses, so [the book] went to Apprentice House Press, this very unique press run by one excellent, determined editor and publisher, who is also the professor for the students in a communication program. Getting the work out in the world was so affirming. It made it seem like this is what I must do.

Joy: What inspired you to do the low-residency MFA at Bennington when you already had an advanced degree?

Ellen: I hadn’t yet completed or published the novel, and I felt I needed one more level of self-commitment to this as a serious endeavor — to do it for the sake of that. It was an interesting experience because it meant being among a cohort of writers of many ages, many younger than I, and certainly some my age, and it was fascinating just to see the diversity of who was out there. The opportunities to connect with other writers have been so important; I took my first classes at the Writers Center in Bethesda [Maryland], before Bennington. But after Bennington, what’s remained most important to me is having one or two trusted readers — all of them, in my experience, also writers and some also editors — and just to keep going in that kind of solitude with a couple of deep connections to share the work with.

Joy: What would you say to someone on the fence about beginning a creative writing life later in life?

Ellen: I do sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d been braver, if I’d started sooner. Things could have turned out differently — or not at all. But as my husband reminds me, I’m doing it now. And I think what’s more important than any formal coursework or exercise is lived experience — as a child, as an adult, as a mother, as a sister, as the caretaker of elders, as a working person in my field. My sixth-grade teacher told me, “You will be a writer,” and I remember the joy of having a story of mine chosen to be illustrated by a real illustrator at the school book fair. So I just feel incredibly lucky.

Do I sometimes feel sad I didn’t do it sooner or that I’m not on the front table at the big stores? Of course. But I feel so fortunate, so lifted up by the response of readers. And I really believe this: if you want to write, you can return to it at any time. Just keep doing it. It does get discouraging, and one of the things I always turn to is letters between writers, like What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, because it’s so inspiring and consoling to be aware of what it’s like for almost everyone — the falling silent, the falling short. We just have to keep doing it, little by little by little.

Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s short fiction has been recognized by the Pushcart Press. Contents Under Pressure was nominated for the National Book Award; her love story collection is Known By Heart. Her novel The Bowl with Gold Seams won the Indy Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Frieda’s Song was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, Historical Fiction. A member of The National Book Critics Circle, she blogs as “Girl Writing” in the Washington Independent Review of Books. Campbell practiced psychotherapy for many years. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Manns Choice, Pennsylvania. Her new novel is The Vanishing Point.

Joy Manning is a reviews and interviews editor for Cleaver magazine. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Call Me [Brackets], The First Line, and Foofaraw Anthology, and her journalism has appeared in The Washington Post, Prevention, Philadelphia magazine, and elsewhere. She’s been nominated for the James Beard and IACP Awards and anthologized in Best Food Writing. She earned her MA in creative writing from Temple University.