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Fanny Howe’s bibliography is as bewildering as her itinerant biography Born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, the poet and author grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before moving an estimated thirty times in six decades – spiralling around New York, Massachusetts and California states, with volleys to Ireland, where her talented mother, Mary Manning, was born and raised – only to settle back in Cambridge in her seventies Howe’s books, all fifty (at least) of them, track these moves: as she suggests in this interview, place informs her writing ‘completely, like being dropped in water It is the environment’ With a majority of her books – published by independent and experimental presses – out of print, to be a reader of Fanny Howe is to be a seeker   ‘[T]he greatest writer there is,’ wrote Eileen Myles of Howe, who has, however, eschewed fame Her humility is active, her obscurity intentional She rarely grants interviews and undermines the authority others might claim given her talents and family A ‘long-tailed’ Bostonian, ‘[s]he can trace her lineage back to the Mayflower,’ wrote her daughter, acclaimed author Danzy Senna (whose husband, Percival Everett, was interviewed in The White Review No 28), of Fanny, whose father was a Harvard professor and a civil rights lawyer and mother a playwright and film pioneer Samuel Beckett was a family friend of her mother Susan Howe, Fanny’s older sister, is as renowned for her poetry as are her children for their art: R H Quaytman, painting, and Mark von Schlegell, science fiction   Though Fanny Howe inherited wealths of history, politics, art and culture, such privileges and responsibilities came with neither money nor property ‘There were many women like me,’ she reflects in The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (University of California Press, 2003), ‘born into white privilege but with no financial security, given a good education but no training for survival’ In essays, Howe stories the difficulties of raising three children alone – divorced from their father, the Black American writer Carl Senna – in a nation defined by the violent exploitation of minorities Through teaching,