All Interviews

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Sharon Creech

A new book from Sharon Creech is always a treat. The author has delighted thousands of readers with titles such as Walk Two Moons, which won the Newbery Award, Bloomability, Love That Dog, The Wanderer and A Fine, Fine School.

In her new novel, Ruby Holler, Dallas and Florida, the "Trouble Twins," are sent away from a Dickensian establishment called the Boxton Creek Home for Children to a temporary foster home. They are to live for several months with an eccentric older couple, Tiller and Sairy, in a lush, green hidden valley called Ruby Holler. Just as in the classic tale, The Secret Garden, the mystery and natural beauty of the place begins to work miracles for the twins in this engaging story for young readers.

The place itself is as much a character in this novel as any of the people, so it's no surprise that the idea for the novel began with the setting. Creech got her inspiration for Ruby Holler by hearing a family story about her father having grown up in a "holler." The idea of a beautiful, mysterious hollow intrigued her. As a child, she had often visited her cousins in their home in the mountains of Kentucky. "It was a place where the hills were green, the streams were clean and you could run and shout all day long in the hills," Creech recalled in a recent interview.

The image grew and evolved in her mind for several years before she was ready to begin working on the book. "I had to wait until a character arrived to inhabit that place, and one day two characters arrived twins, rather rough-edged and full of spunk."

Full of spunk indeed! Mr. and Mrs. Trepid, who run the Buxton Children's Home, are constantly sending Dallas and Florida to the "Thinking Corner," a stool in the dark, cobweb-covered basement. Dallas and Florida are therefore astonished by their first few days in their new foster home. There is plenty of food, for one thing. They are sleeping, not in a cupboard, but in an airy loft with a view of deep blue mountains, and infractions aren't punished by "whuppings." Creech enjoys doing research for her books but says, "I have discovered that I work best when I trust my imagination to conjure up people and places and details. Too often research roots things too stubbornly in reality, and the story will not sing for me then."

A good example of this occurred while she was writing Ruby Holler. Foster parents Tiller and Sairy are each preparing for one last adventure: Tiller wants one twin to paddle with him on the Rutabago River, and Sairy will take the other to go bird-watching on the island of Kangadoon. But in the original draft of the book, Sairy's trip was supposed to be to China and Tiller's to the Mississippi. Creech spent three months researching those places before determining that the sections just didn't work with the rest of the story.

Young readers are often amazed when they hear that three months of work can end up being cut. But Creech is no stranger to revision. For Ruby Holler, she wrote her first draft in six months, then spent another year revising it. "A couple of my favorite chapters came to me late in the revision process probably at the stage of fourth or fifth drafts," says Creech. "It always amazes me that whole scenes can emerge after you think you might be finished with a book!"

Creech advises young readers to "read a lot, and write a lot and have fun with both!" Her many fans will be glad to know that she takes her own advice: now that the Trouble Twins' story has come to a satisfying end, she's currently working on a new book inspired by her Italian grandmother. Watch for it!

 

Deborah Hopkinson's latest book for young readers is Pioneer Summer, Book One of the Ready-for-Chapters series Prairie Skies.

A new book from Sharon Creech is always a treat. The author has delighted thousands of readers with titles such as Walk Two Moons, which won the Newbery Award, Bloomability, Love That Dog, The Wanderer and A Fine, Fine School.

In her new novel,…

Children's & YA

John Bemelmans Marciano

How does an author go from writing about a little French girl in the city to telling tales about young lambs in the country? According to John Bemelmans Marciano, author of the new children’s book Delilah, the stretch from skyscrapers to cornfields isn’t that far.

Marciano, as it turns out, knows about both worlds. His art studio, a converted 100-year-old country department store in Three Bridges, New Jersey, sits across the street from the horse farm where he grew up. Three Bridges is a town, the author points out, where every road is named after the farmer who lived there. Yet less than an hour away bustles the big city of Manhattan.

While the city in this case, Paris provided a backdrop for one of Marciano’s previous titles (Madeline Says Merci: The Always-Be-Polite Book), it wasn’t the inspiration for it. Marciano just happens to be the grandson of the beloved children’s author Ludwig Bemelmans, creator of the adorable character Madeline. In launching his own career as a children’s book author, Marciano paid homage to the grandfather he never knew with the acclaimed tribute Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator.

“My grandmother’s living room was devoted to my grandfather’s work,” says Marciano. “The idea [of his first book] was to have a vehicle for all of his works.” Not only was the elder Bemelmans a children’s book author, he also wrote novels and screenplays and was a very successful painter. While rummaging through his grandfather’s things, Marciano came across a full manuscript for a Madeline story with sketches of what the drawings were supposed to look like. Using this unfinished text, he illustrated Madeline Says Merci, a worthy addition to the series his grandfather began.

An accomplished artist in his own right, Marciano started drawing comics at the age of five. Later, as an art history major in college, he wanted to be a painter but also enjoyed writing. “I realized that children’s books are the perfect marriage of art and text,” says Marciano, “and for me it seemed like such a natural thing to do.” So where did the idea for his new character, Delilah the lamb, come from? The headlines, of all places. An article in a news magazine about Dolly, the sheep who had been cloned, got Marciano thinking. “The original idea was centered around what a clone might think,” says Marciano. “What if you’re an individual and everyone else is the same?” In the book, Delilah is the only lamb who doesn’t grow up in a factory farm environment. Instead, as a baby she is placed on a farm with Red, a farmer who treats young Delilah as if she is human. She eats at the table, sleeps inside the house and helps Red do his chores. And she is very happy that is, until the other sheep arrive.

Because she isn’t like them, the other sheep don’t accept Delilah. They eat grass, sleep outdoors and lie around all day. Although Delilah tries to do the things that they do, she is miserable. So, too, is Red the farmer. He can no longer tell Delilah apart from the rest of the sheep. It is not until Delilah regains her individuality that both she and Red can again be content. “I wanted to express the idea that love and friendship can make you happy,” says Marciano. “But just as important, you need to be yourself.” Delilah may be Marciano’s first original character, but don’t expect her to be his last. For his next project, he is heading back to the city and hopes to create an interesting storyline for his new characters. “As with Delilah, I want the story to be thought-provoking for not only the kids, but also for the parents as they read along,” he explains. With the many ideas he has for future books, it shouldn’t be difficult for him to reach that goal. Heidi Henneman writes from New York City.

How does an author go from writing about a little French girl in the city to telling tales about young lambs in the country? According to John Bemelmans Marciano, author of the new children's book Delilah, the stretch from skyscrapers to cornfields isn't that far.
LiteratureArts & Culture

Shelley Stewart

Think your life has been hard? Imagine growing up black in the legally segregated South and, at the age of five, seeing your father kill your mother with an ax. Imagine a relative with whom you’ve sought refuge stripping you naked, hanging you from the ceiling and whipping you until the blood runs then rubbing salt into the cuts. Imagine having to set out on your own into a terror-filled world when you’re six years old. For Shelley Stewart, these were just the opening blows in a life that is all the more inspiring because of the horrors that set it in motion. He shares his experiences in a new memoir, The Road South, which he co-wrote with Nathan Hale Turner Jr.

Born in the Rosedale section of Birmingham, Alabama, Stewart had little going for him at first beyond the ability to read well and a sense of compassion that kept him from turning mean and bitter. Living where he could including a brief but idyllic residence with a white family Stewart managed to stay in school, reunite with the brothers from whom he had been separated following his mother’s death and lay the foundation for a successful career in radio. In the pursuit of that career, Stewart became a vocal champion for civil rights and a friend of such musical up-and-comers as Otis Redding, Gladys Knight and Isaac Hayes. Now the owner of Birmingham radio station WATV and vice chairman of one of the largest marketing and public relations companies in the South, Stewart recently retired from half a century of being on the air. Except for a few eye-opening weeks in New York City after high school, a disheartening stint in the Air Force and brief professional forays into St. Louis and Nashville, Stewart has remained a resident in the city of his birth.

"I don’t have any psychological residues from the past,"  Stewart says, speaking by phone from his office in Birmingham. But then he amends this assertion by admitting that he has developed an aversion to certain fashionable excuses for failure. "Abuse, race, homelessness,"  he says, ticking them off one by one. "I realized I had gone through every darn one of those categories."  While he speaks with quiet confidence, his voice has none of that unctuous, overbearing tone that so often afflicts the self-made. In fact, there are moments when he seems truly astounded that his life has turned out so well.

Stewart says he began talking openly about his background in the early ’90s after he was invited to speak at a Birmingham high school. On his way to the auditorium, he overheard a student remark, "Look at him. He’s from a bigshot family, and he’s come here to tell us something."  Instead of giving his prepared speech, Stewart looked out at the skeptical faces and began talking about his past.

"I didn’t write The Road South for anything more than to help and inspire others,"  he says. "If just sharing my experiences matters that you don’t have to hate, that you don’t have to give up, that you have to respect and love yourself, that you must be educated in order to communicate with others then maybe [the book] won’t be in vain."

Stewart credits his first grade teacher, Mamie Foster, with endowing him with the self-worth that kept him going through the darkest times. "She pulled me to the side,"  he recalls,  "and said, ‘There’s something different about you. You can do anything you want. Just continue learning.’ " Despite doggedly following her advice, Stewart was heartbroken when his high school principal failed to recommend him for a college scholarship, even though he had top grades. Many years later, though, Miles College corrected this injustice by awarding him an honorary doctorate.

Even when the worst abuses were behind him, Stewart’s road remained bumpy. Becoming a popular disc jockey with both white and black fan clubs did not shield him from the racism institutionalized in the radio stations where he worked. His marriages never lived up to his hopes. His brothers never put into practice the examples of thrift, hard work and self-improvement he set for them. Most disappointing, he confesses in the book, was his inability to create the kind of warm and close-knit family he longed for as a boy.

"I still drive back into Rosedale now and then,"  Stewart says.  "As a matter of fact, I’ll be doing a book signing in a store that’s located 200 yards from where my mother was killed."  Sixty-three years past that awful event, the author says he remains upbeat and committed to the benefits of interdependence.  "I can’t help myself without helping someone else,"  he insists. "That will be my belief as long as I live."

 

 

Think your life has been hard? Imagine growing up black in the legally segregated South and, at the age of five, seeing your father kill your mother with an ax. Imagine a relative with whom you've sought refuge stripping you naked, hanging you from…

Fiction

Rick Bass

From the cabin where he wrote the 10 remarkable short stories collected in The Hermit's Story, Rick Bass has a view of "a vibrant, bug-and-bird-seething marsh." The cabin "is cluttered," he admits. "I can write or I can file. I choose to write." Bass writes his stories in notebooks in longhand and hires a typist to prepare his manuscripts for publication. So it's not a problem that his cabin has no modern conveniences, only a woodstove.

From the house nearby where he takes my phone call, Bass sees "soft unbroken hills of mixed conifers—larch, fir, cedar, spruce, pine, hemlock." This is Bass' piece of the remote Yaak Valley of Montana, "a wild place, where nothing has gone extinct since the Ice Age," he says. Bass lives here with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes, and his two young daughters. His nearest neighbor is about a mile away. He must drive an hour to reach a town of any significant size. His daughters go to a two-room schoolhouse 15 minutes away. Bass, who was trained in geology and wildlife sciences, volunteers at the school, giving lessons in geology and writing and leading field trips. He comes home and writes to citizens and senators, urging them to help preserve these last roadless, wild places in America.

The physical distance between Bass' writing cabin and his house is not great, but the psychological distance can sometimes be huge. There is his Art. And then there is his Activism.

For example, later in the morning after this interview, Bass plans to lead a field trip in the Yaak Valley for the Forest Service. This is just one of the many fronts in the battle he and his preservation colleagues are waging this year. "Our contention," he says with unwavering intensity, "is that we just have these little crumbs of gardens where roads haven't yet been built now, so let's don't build into those last little places." He adds, "I can promise as a scientist and an activist that if we are not successful, we will be losing great American species that are part of our culture. In addition to being ecological treasures, these wilderness areas are also pretty much the anchors for much of the West's water supply and for the maintenance of the quality of that water supply."

For much of the last decade, Bass has used his art—his great skills and talents as a writer—to help his activism. His essays on natural history and the environment are some of the most eloquent pieces of nonfiction writing in recent memory. For most of that period, Bass convinced himself that his art and his activism were complementary. Now he's not so sure.

"Activism is war," he says, "and you can make some fine stories and even a fine novel out of war. But you can't do that for life. Instead of nurturing and developing the empathetic worldview necessary for good fiction, you train yourself in the other direction. And then there is the element of time. I'm putting in eight hours a day easy on the computer or in lobbying, educating and running different organizations. And then there's family time that's just so precious that I'm not going to let anything get in the way of it. That means that fiction takes a back seat to family and activism. The good news is that I've got a chance to effect change, permanent change on a landscape. I'd be a fool to complain."

Still, the conflicting claims on Bass' life make the current collection of short stories all the more remarkable. According to Bass, good fiction must have an almost physical impact on the senses. "Writers are guilty of overanalyzing or delighting in the technical part of a great story in the same way that a chef eating a great meal delights in knowing all the flavors and marveling at the way they all work together. But ultimately what makes a great story for the reader is the physical and emotional reactions it produces. It's that simple and that complex."

By that measure, the narratives in The Hermit's Story make for a very satisfying meal. Bass writes movingly and entertainingly about the spontaneous processes of life. In the story "The Cave," for example, in which a young man and woman enter a narrow abandoned mine shaft and eventually emerge naked into a new world, the delight is not just in the mystery and metaphor of the story but in the detailed, claustrophobia-inducing description of the dark mine shaft and the exhilarating, fully imagined ride the couple takes on an old, rust-locked pumpjack boxcar.

In the story "The Distance," Bass' protagonist both celebrates and tellingly critiques the sensibility behind Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. In the shrewd, Poe-like story, "The Prisoners," three men setting out on an early morning fishing trip discover the boundaries of the emotional prisons they've constructed for themselves. And in the marvelous title story, a woman, an old man and his dogs, lost in a snowstorm, fall through the ice into a dry lakebed and travel through a magical landscape of worldly wonders.

Linking almost all these stories is the abiding presence of wilderness. Bass, who says he's "someone who cherishes time alone and is not that excited about spending time amongst people," is most assuredly not an urban writer. Yet he seems almost nonplussed by how powerful and evocative his descriptions of the natural world can be. "The rural settings are important to mood, to the canvas, to color and pigment of the story," he says matter-of-factly, "but they are unavoidably the background to the characters' lives, just accurate rural white noise."

About balance, or stability, however, Bass is more specific. It's a central concern in his personal life and a recurring motif in his writing. "What many people mean by balance is safety or security," he says, "but they are not the same thing." What Bass means by balance has to do with "amplitude"—space—and movement. "The left and right, response and counter-response of movement and desire, of focus and unknowingness, is a pattern I've seen in humans and animals and even the sheer physical patterns of meandering rivers," he says. "What's required for balance or stability is space to have those amplitudes of left and right. It's a requisite of most threatened and endangered species, it's a requisite of humans' emotional lives, and that left-right motion, that movement, is the precise thing that gives a story life."

 

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

From the cabin where he wrote the 10 remarkable short stories collected in The Hermit's Story, Rick Bass has a view of "a vibrant, bug-and-bird-seething marsh." The cabin "is cluttered," he admits. "I can write or I can file. I choose to write." Bass writes…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Greg Iles

Fans of best-selling thriller writer Greg Iles may be surprised to find him crossing over into Stephen King country with his latest psychodrama, a spooky supernatural tale called Sleep No More.

As it happens, the Natchez, Mississippi-based Iles has been hanging out with the master of horror lately. Several months ago, longtime friend and fellow thriller writer Ridley Pearson invited Iles to join the Rock Bottom Remainders, the infamous all-author classic rock band headed by King, Pearson, Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Scott Turow, Roy Blount Jr. and a revolving cast of characters.

It was a natural choice. Like Pearson, Iles used to make his living as a rock musician (he was guitarist and vocalist for the band Frankly Scarlet) before switching to fiction writing. But he'll never forget the thrill of meeting the rest of the Remainders for the first time.

"I mean, here I was, the night before the gig, sitting in Amy Tan's loft having a conversation with Scott Turow," he says by phone from Natchez. "People frequently ask what it's like to have made it and I looked around that loft, at Scott and the other people in the band, and I thought, I'm happy, man. This is what it's about. They just took me in like a family. They're the nicest people in the world." While he and King have since become friends, Iles says he followed his own muse into the supernatural.

"This book is about something almost everyone has experienced: a passionate love affair that haunts you for the rest of your life."

"Actually, the plot of Sleep No More has been with me for a long time. Now, the willingness to actually use the supernatural in the way that I did, I wasn't always sure I would go that far. But I don't think I picked that up from Steve; I think I just did what I've always done and I was willing to go a little farther. I just did it the way I had to do it and I think the readers will go with me." That's entirely possible. In seven novels during the past decade, Iles has been something of a free-range maverick, pursuing historical thrillers (Spandau Phoenix, Black Cross) and serial killers (Mortal Fear, Dead Sleep) with equal aplomb.

"I would say that almost every book I've ever done has been a departure for me," he admits. "The formula today is basically to rewrite your last book. I just follow my nose; I write about what interests me each year. I don't put a governor on my imagination, you know what I mean? When something comes to me, I just follow it and do it."

Sleep No More centers on John Waters, a successful petroleum geologist and family man who spends his life drilling holes in and around Natchez, hoping to tap enough crude oil to reward his investors. He's a man obsessed with what lies beneath the surface of things, whether it's a Mississippi river bed or the subtleties of small-town society.

One day while coaching his daughter's soccer game, he notices a beautiful woman watching him from the sidelines. Her seductive stare seems hauntingly familiar; years ago, he escaped an obsessive love affair, only to learn later that his former lover had been killed under mysterious circumstances in New Orleans.

Or had she? As he pursues the mysterious Eve Sumner, she leads him into dark places of the heart that defy his scientific method.

"If I'm anything, I think I'm a psychological novelist," says Iles. "This book is really about something almost everyone has experienced at some point and that is a passionate love affair in the past that haunts you for the rest of your life. So rather than just explore it on the literal level, the use of a supernatural device allows me to really delve into the intensity of those feelings." Iles sets Sleep No More in Natchez, where he grew up as the dutiful son of a physician.

"I was in the National Honor Society, captain of the football team and all that," he recalls. "I was always a very intense kid, very serious and searching, but I also went through the motions of being a normal kid." Natchez serves as the perfect setting for his modern-day Southern Gothic.

"As far as the supernatural, I think the South always has that legacy of appearance being very different from the underlying reality; I think there's a sense in the South that there's so much hidden, so much is repressed, that anything is possible," he says. "And there's also a sense in the rest of the country that we're still a little backward; that communication is not as good, there's not as much civilization, there's not as much law holding human impulses in check. I think a lot of that contributes to a vibe and the feeling that anything is possible."

Iles admits his unique creative process leaves little room for a series or sequels.

"When I deal with characters, I like to completely explore that character down to the bottom of his life, and once you've done that, it's hard to go back," he says. "I think it's like Murder, She Wrote; I mean, how many murders can happen in one small town, much less in one character's life?" The author's free-range philosophy recently extended into screenwriting; his script of his 2000 thriller 24 Hours—the Sony film version has been retitled Trapped—is scheduled to hit theaters in September.

Meanwhile, he's hard at work crafting his eighth thriller and the first under his new three-book contract with Scribner. Although he still keeps rock-musician hours, writing all night and sleeping all day, Iles is willing to concede that this writing thing just may work out after all.

"I feel like that now," he chuckles. "It's when you first sit down to write that first book that you don't feel that conviction."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a professional writer based in Naples, Florida.

 

Fans of best-selling thriller writer Greg Iles may be surprised to find him crossing over into Stephen King country with his latest psychodrama, a spooky supernatural tale called Sleep No More.

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Perri O’Shaughnessy

Some say that the practice of law is the art of compromise. Crafting a successful legal thriller involves a similar process of discovery, rebuttal and the occasional 11th-hour revelation for Mary and Pamela O'Shaughnessy. Eight years ago, the two sisters invented fictitious Lake Tahoe attorney Nina Reilly, who summarily argued her way onto the bestseller lists. They chose the pen name Perri by combining their first names, with a nod to a certain fictional barrister.

"We were inspired by the Perry Mason series to have a lawyer who continued through a lot of different cases," Mary says. "But he never changed; he was suave, urbane, he had his little martinis and his calm relationships that were just suggested and never really fulfilled. Nina's not like that; she's much more a character in transition." Indeed. Between running her business, juggling her love life with Carmel private investigator Paul van Wagoner, keeping her teenage son Bob out of trouble with his cyber-punk girlfriend Nikki and maintaining ties to her ex-husband, San Francisco attorney Jack McIntyre, Nina is one lawyer who has little time for happy hour.

In the new thriller Unfit to Practice, Nina's career takes a dramatic turn when her truck is stolen with three sensitive case files inside. Slowly and with sinister intent, someone begins to leak information from the confidential files to sabotage Nina's cases. When her own clients complain to the California State Bar, Nina faces disbarment and turns to the best defense lawyer she knows, ex-husband Jack. The O'Shaughnessys grew up imagining gripping crime scenarios together as kids in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Pam went on to earn a law degree from Harvard and worked for 16 years as a trial lawyer in private practice in the very Lake Tahoe Starlake Building where Counselor Reilly now resides. Mary took her English degree east to Boston, where she worked on multimedia projects in New York, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands.

Somewhere in mid-career, each reached a personal crossroads. For Pam, raising a toddler sparked dreams of a more creative life. For Mary, the prospect of returning to work with three children under the age of five seemed unimaginable.

Both had been writing independently, pecking away late at night after the kids were in bed. Mary had a book with no plot, Pam a plot with no ending. Why not try collaborating and see what might happen? The idea was terrific, but the collaborative process proved a bit more challenging than it had in childhood, particularly since the two now live in different states. Pam has homes in Hawaii and Lake Tahoe, while Mary lives south of San Francisco. Eight books into their long-distance partnership, they're still working out the kinks of their admittedly idiosyncratic method of writing together.

As a rule, the one who comes up with the premise takes the lead role for that book; the two tend to alternate. The arrangement serves to break creative deadlocks.

"It doesn't mean that we don't each put in equal amounts of work on the draft, we do," says Mary. "But one person has the ultimate say. What that means is they get to do the final draft, so at a certain point you just have to let go, there's no point in arguing." The title comes early on in the story's development, and yes, as a matter of fact, it's getting harder and harder to find suitable three-word legal terms. (Previous titles in the series include Writ of Execution, Invasion of Privacy and Obstruction of Justice.) "We try to choose a legal term that says something about the plot," says Pam. "We seem to be locked into three words, and we're trying to convey some movement, some force of action. It's really difficult." "We look them up to make sure they haven't been used, at least in the last five minutes!" Mary adds.

Next, the sisters draft and submit a detailed outline to their publishers. No problem there? "Just that we throw it out after about the first eight chapters!" quips Pam. In their 1995 debut, Motion to Suppress, they even changed the killer in the fourth draft.

Each writer enjoys the surprises she has come to expect from the other.

"Actually, we're usually very amused," says Mary. "We both love seeing the characters brought to life again. Certainly, the first time you read what the other person has written it's a thrill. Then you begin to look at the nitty gritty and see all of the horrible things they've done, all the mistakes they've made. I think that's just part of the process, to build it up and then tear it down again." The two take turns with the actual writing; generally they will draft eight chapters then pass it to the other to draft the next eight and so on. Pam is the procrastinator, Mary the voice on the phone barking for pages.

"We are real perfectionists and we do have different styles so the book has to go back and forth quite a bit before we're both satisfied," says Mary.

In subsequent drafts (they generally do three complete rewrites before submitting the manuscript to their publisher), the two have learned to correct for each other's blind spots: Pam tends to slip into a passive voice, while Mary's more intricate style and fondness for compound sentences sometimes gets her "buried in language." The O'Shaughnessys say their decision to stay away from graphic sex and violence has been key to the success of the series. "We have some strict standards because we are mothers," says Pam. "We see the books as entertainment, something fun for people, excitement, vicarious adventure. It's important for us to keep the books fun." To keep the writing fun, they've allowed their central character wide berth.

"We're not sure even to this day who that character is in many ways," Mary admits. "She's a little mysterious; she's very impulsive and does things that we did not put in the proposal at any point. She's always changing and always growing, kind of like a real person to us. I'm not sure we always know what she's going to do, and that's always a lot of fun."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a freelance writer in Naples, Florida.

Some say that the practice of law is the art of compromise. Crafting a successful legal thriller involves a similar process of discovery, rebuttal and the occasional 11th-hour revelation for Mary and Pamela O'Shaughnessy. Eight years ago, the two sisters invented fictitious Lake Tahoe attorney…

Children's & YA

Patricia Polacco

Not surprisingly, beloved author Patricia Polacco's latest book for young readers, When Lightning Comes in a Jar revolves around the theme of family. "Family means a great deal to me," notes Polacco, speaking from a hotel in Virginia where she is visiting schools to share her books with children. "It's the cornerstone of my writing." Polacco has explored the theme of family in many of her award-winning titles, which include The Keeping Quilt, Pink and Say and Chicken Sunday. As a child she was close to her grandparents and feels these relationships had a strong influence on her life and her work.

When Lightning Comes in a Jar takes readers to a magical, loving family reunion, complete with zillions of meatloafs and gazillions of Jell-O salads. And then there are the baseball games, lively croquet rivalries and quiet times with family photo albums. The book celebrates not only Polacco's memories of her own family reunions, but the strong ties of love that make families so special. (A heartwarming twist to the story is sure to bring tears to every adult reader's eyes.) Polacco describes When Lightning Comes in a Jar as "a simple story evoking a simpler, dearer time." And she hopes the book will inspire readers to hold their own family gatherings.

As a matter of fact, the reunion Polacco describes sounds like so much fun it will make you want to be part of her family. The astonishing thing is, you can. Several years ago Polacco moved back to Michigan, where she had spent summers with her father as a child. She now lives in a historic home nestled in Union City, a village of less than 2,000 people. "When I bought the house, which sits on 18 acres, I had in mind that we could open it up to teachers and librarians for retreats," said Polacco. "Well, one thing has led to another, and this summer we're going to have an open house, a family reunion of sorts."

Teachers and community members are helping to plan it. "We'll have tours of the historic house I live in as well as my studio. There will also be horse and buggy rides, contests, a book sale, storytelling and old-fashioned, fun games," Polacco says. "Oh, and we'll have 'Halloween in July,' complete with a haunted house and costume contest!" The inspiration for the open house and for When Lightning Comes in a Jar was a family reunion Polacco herself attended two years ago, after a gap of more than four decades. She had always cherished the memories of the reunions she went to as a child, but at this reunion she realized that now, "My brother and cousins and I are the elders."

Polacco is also sensitive to how families are changing and evolving. "A number of our family members have adopted children internationally," Polacco notes. "And so now, not only are the faces more diverse, but so is the food!"

Polacco feels it is especially important to pass on family love and stories to the next generation: "We need to put the lightning of our stories and our heritage into the jars of our children's minds so that they in turn can pass them on to future generations. We need to put the lightning of our stories into the jars of children's minds."

Deborah Hopkinson's newest title for children is Pioneer Summer, Book One of the Prairie Skies Series, a historical fiction trilogy set in Kansas.

Not surprisingly, beloved author Patricia Polacco's latest book for young readers, When Lightning Comes in a Jar revolves around the theme of family. "Family means a great deal to me," notes Polacco, speaking from a hotel in Virginia where she is visiting schools to share…

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Jeffrey Ford

How can a painter create a portrait of a model he never actually sees? That question is at the center of Jeffrey Ford’s fascinating new novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque. Set like Caleb Carr’s The Alienist in 1890s New York, Ford’s book is a masterpiece of suspense. But unlike The Alienist, which used actual historical characters, The Portrait relies for the most part on the author’s imagination. And what an imagination it is! Ford has honed his creative voice in a rich outpouring of short stories and novels, including the unique allegorical trilogy, The Physiognomy, Memoranda and The Beyond. The first book in the trilogy won the 1998 World Fantasy Award.

Ford’s latest novel takes place in the top tiers of New York society in 1893. Piero Piambo, an artist slumming as a portraitist, is hoping to make enough money to allow him to paint what he wants although he’s not at all sure what that might be. The Portrait kicks into gear when Piambo is given a mysterious and high-paying commission: to paint the eponymous Mrs. Charbuque. The job has one difficult condition, however; he must paint her without ever seeing her. Piambo cannot resist the challenge and is soon attempting to paint Mrs. Charbuque (who sits in the same room with him, but behind a curtain) while listening to her strange tales. As Piambo becomes obsessed with finding out the truth behind Mrs. Charbuque and her increasingly strange and frightening stories, he lets own life, his friends and his lover, Samantha, a beautiful actress, slip out of his hands. Painting an unseen subject is a captivating idea that sprang from Ford’s own experience as a reader. I see the characters of a novel in my mind, he said in a recent interview. They take on features, hair color and expressions, and bulk and height, becoming real individuals. When Piambo tries to see Mrs. Charbuque in his mind, the image keeps changing. I want the reader to have the same experience as Piambo is having as he tries to decipher her looks form her words, Ford says.

The author faced another challenge in creating the novel: how could he convey a painter at work or the beauty of a painting so that it would feel real to the reader? To solve this dilemma, Ford interviewed painters and read up on the subject particularly in James Elkin’s insightful book, What Painting Is. He also used his own experience as a painter in the Henry Miller school of paint what you like and die happy.’ One aspect of writing the novel came easily to Ford the setting. A New York-area native with a long-standing interest in local history, he grew up on Long Island and as a child was often taken into Manhattan. He later worked in the city, and he and his family now live within easy reach of New York in South Jersey, where he teaches English at Brookdale Community College. Despite his local background, Ford spent considerable time researching the New York of 1893. He discovered just how much difference 109 years makes: coffee cost less than a penny; an all-naked review in the name of high art was popular (although it didn’t last long); and many of the buildings of the period are long gone. However, not everything he discovered made it into the book; otherwise he’d never have finished. As his editor pointed out, a little research goes a long way.

Although he made his name as a fantasy author, in The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, Ford handles the mystery genre with apparent ease, building suspense right from the start when Piambo is handed a note by a blind man. Ford says his primary goal in writing the novel was to see how far his character would go to successfully paint his unseen subject. As Piambo is drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery behind the curtain, the novel moves from one climax to the next, slowly and skillfully increasing the tension so that as the ending nears, the reader, like Piambo who lives for the stories and will do almost anything to find out more about Mrs Charbuque has to know what happens. Gavin J. Grant lives in Brooklyn with the usual overload of books.

How can a painter create a portrait of a model he never actually sees? That question is at the center of Jeffrey Ford's fascinating new novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque. Set like Caleb Carr's The Alienist in 1890s New York, Ford's book is a…
Religion & Spirituality

Sylvia Browne Harrison

Since the age of three, Sylvia Browne has used her psychic talents to give comfort to grieving families and help those seeking guidance for the future. A best-selling author who appears frequently on TV, Browne turned her talents to dreams many years ago while teaching a college course in California. Her students kept talking about their dreams, prompting Browne to begin studying both her dreams and those of her readers and fans. In her new book, Sylvia Browne’s Book of Dreams, Browne maintains that many of her self-professed skills premonition, telepathy and the ability to “visit” the dead are shared by almost everyone who dreams. Once people realize their potential for these talents and learn simple ways to practice them, Browne says, these skills can be improved and used nightly. BookPage recently asked Browne about her new book and her own experiences with dreams.

BookPage: What benefits have there been in your life since you’ve started exploring the world of dreams? Sylvia Browne: The world of dreams opens up ways for us to release negative thoughts, to program positive ones, to reach loved ones who have passed and even to be precognitive. How can you identify dreams that are past life memories? Past life dreams usually come with a very distinct setting. Feeling or seeing yourself as an American Indian or in a Victorian setting, etc. especially if it happens often, can indicate that you may have once lived in that time or place.

Is there a way to get rid of recurring nightmares or traumatic dreams? When you have a nightmare, question yourself about what preceded or may have triggered this dream. Then tell yourself during that dream that you will face your fears and turn it into good rather than bad.

What are the benefits of keeping a dream journal? The benefits of a dream journal are great because patterns begin to form of fears that have to be dismissed, old hurts you have to let go of, or things that are to come.

What if you just can’t remember your dreams? Is there a way to make the process of remembering them easier? All people dream, they just often go in too deep. So ask God before you go to sleep to help you remember your dreams, and keep a pen and paper by your bed to write them down as soon as you wake up.

You include a lot of prayers in your book. Do you see prayer as an essential way to understand and constructively use what we experience in our dreams? I include prayer in all my books. I think every part of life should have God included. Yes, ask God and you will receive.

Since the age of three, Sylvia Browne has used her psychic talents to give comfort to grieving families and help those seeking guidance for the future. A best-selling author who appears frequently on TV, Browne turned her talents to dreams many years ago while…

David Ebershoff

Since well before the Gold Rush, restless people have traveled west—to California—to escape friends, families, even history itself so that they could reinvent themselves in keeping with their own imaginations. For just as long, artists and writers have traveled east—to New York, Paris and Rome—to test their imaginations in the creative centers of Western culture. Somewhere in the roil of these contrasting movements is David Ebershoff and his lush second novel, Pasadena.

Ebershoff was born in Pasadena in 1969 and knew by his early teens that he wanted to write fiction. After high school he headed east, to Brown University, to major in English and Asian studies, then bounced west again to the University of Chicago for an M.B.A. before returning to New York to work in publishing.

"I wasn't sure what I wanted to do," Ebershoff says during a call to his office in New York, "so I thought I'd try to work in publishing, try to bring some business knowledge from my schooling and some editorial knowledge from my reading and writing. . . . It's what we all do here; we have to know how to respond to books as readers, editorially, and we also have responsibilities to the business."

In 1998, after several years in the sales and marketing department at Random House, Ebershoff was appointed publishing director of the Modern Library, one of the publisher's most prestigious imprints. "The imprint has been around since 1917 publishing contemporary and classic classics, releasing new books and new editions of the classics, bringing great writers to readers," Ebershoff says. "So I'm reading books for this list that are really helpful to me as a writer. In that way, my work feeds my writing. But there's very little other overlap. I don't learn any publishing tricks that really matter in terms of writing a novel."

Apparently, Ebershoff learned to write novels through wide reading and plain hard work. In 2000, he published a widely praised first novel, The Danish Girl. Inspired by a true story, it traces the slow physical and psychological metamorphosis of a Danish artist named Einar Wegner into a woman named Lili Elbe. The novel was a New York Times Notable Book, and Ebershoff was hailed as "one of America's finest young writers."

Like The Danish Girl, Ebershoff's new novel, Pasadena, explores the nature of personal identity as one of its central concerns. But Ebershoff wraps this exploration in a compelling love story and an almost old-fashioned, grandly conceived narrative firmly embedded in a deep appreciation of history.

Set mainly in southern California between the two world wars, Pasadena centers around the life of Linda Stamp (formerly Sieglinde Stumpf), the daughter of a Mexican mother and a German-born father. The novel tells the story of her rise from a poor fishergirl who lives on a small farm on the coast north of San Diego, through a lingering, emotionally complicated relationship with Bruder, a strong-willed, taciturn orphan her father brings home after fighting in the First World War, to her unhappy marriage to a wealthy Pasadena fruit grower named Willis Poore.

Ebershoff draws his chapter's epigraphs from poems by Emily Bront, and he freely, if coyly, acknowledges her influence on his own characters and story. "A free-spirited woman who can never quite know her own heart but who is taken by a man who knows his so well that he isn't quite prepared to share it certainly describes Emily Brontë's two most famous characters," Ebershoff says. "And her emotional insight and the way she used landscape and the natural world to reveal character has always interested me."

It's an interest Ebershoff uses to great effect. His verbal virtuosity in re-creating the unsettled southern California coastline and the lush, sunlit rural farms and orchards that comprised California not so long ago is astonishing and delightful.

"Somewhere I read the fact that 75 years ago, Los Angeles County was the largest agricultural county in America," Ebershoff says. "If you think about New York City now and 75 years ago, while there are lots of changes, you can still see close to what you would have seen then. But in only 75 years, Los Angeles has seen a phenomenal transformation of topography, of economy, of the way people live their lives, and that really, really interests me. I wanted to re-create a world that had just disappeared and yet was still in place not that long ago."

Readers of Ebershoff's two novels will understand that his interest in history, particularly California history, is not simply a passing interest. "I think writers often write the books they want to read," he says. "At some point when I was growing up, I became fascinated with what California had been. I wanted to read about another era in Southern California, about the dramatic lives of people who thrived there, and did not thrive there."

Ebershoff adds, "There's a certain sense of the uselessness of history in American society that we're now beginning to pay for. But the great value of history is to tell you what's going to happen next." Unfortunately, many of the characters in Pasadena leave their personal and family histories behind as they try to fashion new identities. And they do so at great risk.

In Ebershoff's fiction, history can also illuminate the borderlines where character aligns with fate. "I'm obsessed with this idea of fate versus free will," Ebershoff says, "the balance between the two. You can do some things to change the course of your life, but at some level you can't do anything at all."

In terms of the novel Pasadena, Ebershoff sees this struggle played out to tragic effect between Linda and Bruder: "Linda is convinced she can control her own fate without understanding the dangers of what it means to try to control that. And Bruder is resigned to fate without knowing the danger of such resignation."

In terms of his own life, however, Ebershoff seems to have achieved a kind of balance that, at least at the moment, makes him master of his own fate. He works with "a great set of colleagues," and writes, he says wryly, "in a very regular manner, on an almost daily basis, just steadily pushing the book along, breaking the book down into manageable problems, dealing with the task at hand. There's no real mystery to it. Just a kind of regular devotion. A steady amount of progress, with a few cycles of insane fervor."

Alden Mudge is on the staff of the California Humanities Council.

Author photo © Miriam Berkley.

Since well before the Gold Rush, restless people have traveled west—to California—to escape friends, families, even history itself so that they could reinvent themselves in keeping with their own imaginations. For just as long, artists and writers have traveled east—to New York, Paris and…

Fiction

Fannie Flagg

One of fiction’s cardinal rules is to write what you know, and from her rich depiction of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, the setting for her new novel Standing in the Rainbow, you’d bet Fannie Flagg was born in a small town where everyone knows each other, part of a boisterous middle-class family like that of her 10-year old character Bobby Smith. And you’d be wrong.

"I wanted to be in that town," says a wistful Flagg, speaking from her home in Birmingham, Alabama. The actress, comedienne and author of the 1987 beloved bestseller Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café "grew up in an apartment in Birmingham, which was a big city. I would have loved to have been raised in a small town," she says. "I’m an only child. I write about families because it’s what I longed for. I’m trying to rewrite my childhood."

You could find reasons for her melancholy—an alcoholic father, the isolation that comes of being an only child—but Flagg wonders "if some children aren’t born sort of sad. I was always that way. It doesn’t matter why. What matters is talking your way out of it." Or in Flagg’s case, writing your way out.

Standing in the Rainbow spans the 1940s through the 1980s and at no time is Elmwood Springs a hotbed for tabloid scandal. Instead, it’s a cozy place with real, textured characters striving to live and love even when the going gets tough. There’s poor Tot Whooten, the hapless hairdresser, Missouri’s gladhanding Governor Hamm Sparks and his terminally shy wife Betty Ray, but the soul of Standing in the Rainbow is Bobby’s mother, known to all of southern Missouri as Neighbor Dorothy.

Chatty Neighbor Dorothy hosts a local radio show in which she dispenses cookie recipes and crucial community news. "Well, everybody, I guess we can say summer is officially here. Bobby has just informed me that the pool is open. . . .Well, go on, but for heaven’s sake, don’t hit your head on the diving board!"

Neighbor Dorothy got her start back in Flagg’s performing days. "I had a little television show in Birmingham in the early ’60s, a local show with local news. It always made me laugh. I started reading these small-town newspapers around the South." Life had an easier rhythm then. Sometimes, it was downright slow. "One year was bad. We didn’t have many people coming to town," she recalls. "We interviewed the cameraman’s mother. Five times. I know about those local shows."

Fans will recognize Neighbor Dorothy from Flagg’s previous novel Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! Although Dorothy was a minor character there, the author knew right away that she deserved more. "I fell in love with her," says Flagg. "I knew I was going to introduce her in that book and devote myself to her family in the next book, so it wasn’t a sequel but a prequel. I do things backward."

She laughs, but she’s only half-joking. A born storyteller, she struggles with severe dyslexia. "I had to work a little harder. I still do."

Shamed by her poor spelling, Flagg didn’t show her writing to anyone for years. She began as a performer by acting out her own stories and starring in movies like Grease and Five Easy Pieces, but when at last she summoned the courage to go from actress to author, "It was like I walked into the right room. I walked in very late, didn’t start writing my first novel until 1980. I was in my 30s, but it was such a pleasure to find it," says Flagg. "I was so lucky to have that second career I liked even better than my first."

Of her previous three novels, Flagg is best known for Fried Green Tomatoes. Not only did the story of Idgie and Ruth resonate with readers, but also Flagg found writing about them to be good for the soul. She had given up acting to write full-time and was in tough financial straits.

Writing Standing in the Rainbow, "I was in a better frame of mind," says Flagg. "The world is getting so crazy, I needed to remind myself and others that most of these people still exist. We shouldn’t let go of that wonderful heritage we have—middle class America is the heroic class. They’re not complaining. They carry the rest of the world on their back. They don’t get written about much, and they never got much credit or appreciation. They’re laughed at or thought of as sort of sappy."

Sappy is hardly an insult for the woman the Christian Science Monitor once called the most sentimental writer in America. "I thought, isn’t that fabulous?" Flagg laughs. "And my friends said, ‘No, Fannie, that’s not good.’ But it is. The easiest thing in the world is to be smart-alecky and cynical and snide and jaded. It’s hard to keep your heart open."

It’s hard because it means being vulnerable, which Flagg thinks is imperative to writing. "To be a writer, you have to remain a child in some areas and not grow up. And keep your imagination open. A part of me has remained a child," says the author whose wild imagination is very close to Bobby’s in Standing in the Rainbow. "I’m constantly surprised at things and don’t seem to get tougher with age, which is a disadvantage."

It does, however, make her a beautiful writer.

In the morning, Flagg stumbles out of bed and goes right to her desk. "If a leaf falls, I’m lost. I can’t have any noise. When I get sort of stuck, I go somewhere for four or five days with no phone, no fax and go on a binge. I get some of my best writing done on my binges."

Though she lives part-time in California, Flagg is always glad to return to the South. "Honestly that’s where my characters come from. There’s a real Southern culture, a way of thinking and looking at things. In the South, if you move into a neighborhood, all the neighbors will walk in the door and never call first. ‘We just dropped by for a visit,’ " says Flagg, thickening her drawl. "People from the North are horrified."

She lets loose with another laugh, but the joy, the lightness that comes through when she talks and writes about small towns and big families stems from "a sadness." Part of her remains the little girl who would look through the windows of other families’ homes and yearn to belong.

"People fascinate me. I don’t understand them as well as I’d like. They surprise me all the time," says Flagg. "I grew up so alone."

 

 

Ellen Kanner is a freelance writer in Miami.

One of fiction's cardinal rules is to write what you know, and from her rich depiction of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, the setting for her new novel Standing in the Rainbow, you'd bet Fannie Flagg was born in a small town where everyone knows each other,…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Thomas L. Friedman

During the dog days of last summer, as the national press corps went baying after the elusive Gary Condit, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a piece called "A Memo from Osama." Entertaining, ironic and caustic in the same instant, the "memo" warned of the consequences of a U.S. failure to respond to "the threat that already exists." The name of that threat, unfamiliar to most Americans at the time, would become a household word in a few short months.

After the horrific attacks of Sept. 11, this and several other pre-9/11 columns included in Friedman’s new book, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After Sept. 11, seem shockingly clear-sighted and prescient. They offer glimpses into the future that seem to surprise even Friedman himself. "Man," he says, sounding bemused, "there are lines in those columns that are prophetic. In terms of what happened, I was paying attention."

Since Sept. 11, as regular readers of his twice-weekly column know, Friedman has, if anything, been paying even closer attention. "I’ve been on a really unique journey," he says. "I’ve been to Pakistan twice, to Afghanistan, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Israel."

Probably no one else—journalist or diplomat—has pursued the complex threads of this story as relentlessly as Friedman. In fact, when we speak by phone, Friedman has just returned from Tehran, Iran, where he was exploring one of the recurring themes of this collection—the need to wage and support a war of ideas in the Arab Muslim world.

"I really try to get the point across that when we start calling people the ‘Axis of Evil,’ we miss the complexity of these societies and the number of potential partners we have inside these societies who share our world view," he says."We have to make sure we’re inviting these people into our future. Ideas matter. We can kill bin Laden, but somebody’s got to kill bin Ladenism. Somebody’s got to kill the ideas that not only nurture him, but create an environment in which so many people tacitly support him. We can help, but ultimately the Arab Muslim world has to do that itself."

As a result of such views—as well as his years of experience in the Middle East, first as a reporter for UPI and then for The New York Times—Friedman "gets a huge amount of email from the Arab Muslim world." Parts of those messages he reprints in the third section of Longitudes and Attitudes. That section is comprised of a series of diaries he kept between September 2001 and June 2002. The diaries make for fascinating reading because they contain anecdotes and analysis Friedman was unable to include in his regular columns, offering a behind-the-scenes look at issues Friedman is writing about and personalities he meets.

One of the surprises in these diaries is how many of Friedman’s contacts and correspondents are Muslim women. Another is the pointed description of a little power play by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that very nearly leaves Democratic Sen. Joe Biden and Friedman stranded at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Still another is an eye-opening portrait of the new Russia.

But most interesting of all—in the diaries and in the collected post-Sept. 11 columns that form the bulk of this book—is Friedman’s probing examination of Saudi Arabia. Probably the most important question motivating Friedman’s unique journey during the last nine months has been why 15 young Saudis were involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

"The Arab Muslim world is going through a hard time," he says, "and I have a lot of sympathy for them. They’re struggling with, and in some cases failing at, modernization. That’s because of three deficits that have been building up there for more than 50 years. I’m quoting here from a U.N. study that’s just come out that says it’s a deficit of freedom, it’s a deficit of education and it’s a deficit of women’s empowerment. Thanks to these three deficits they’ve dug themselves a really deep hole."

The dark side of all this, Friedman writes in his diaries, is that it leads to what he calls the "Circle of bin Ladenism, which is made up of three components: antidemocratic leaders, who empower antimodernist Moslem religious educators to gain legitimacy, who then produce a generation of young people who have not been educated in ways that enable them to flourish in the modern world."

Opinions like this—and equally direct criticism of actions by President Bush, Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat—have earned Friedman some powerful detractors. About this, Friedman is philosophical: "Being a columnist is not a friend growth industry. If you’re going to do this job, you have to pull the trigger on people, sometimes on people you like. If you’re not ready to do that, readers can smell it at a hundred paces. . . . A column is like currency, and you can really debase your own currency. I guard zealously the integrity and quality of the column every bit as much as the secretary of treasury does the integrity and quality of the U.S. dollar."

So while his critics may have grown more vociferous, Friedman’s popularity has also grown and changed since Sept. 11. "Before 9/11 the CEO read me; now his secretary reads me, too," he says. "Twice I’ve had bicycle delivery boys stop me on the street in Washington and comment on something they’ve read in my column. . . . This is not in any way exclusive to me. After 9/11, Americans understand that foreign policy is now a real life-or-death matter. It’s about the world their kids are going to grow up in, and as a result, they want to know what’s going on."

And, according to Friedman, what’s going on remains pretty dark. In his first column after Sept. 11, 2001, Friedman called the attacks the beginning of World War III. Although personally an "innate optimist who is constantly looking for solutions," Friedman stands by his initial assessment.

"Some big events, over time, end up being smaller than they first seem," he says. "My view is that 9/11 will turn out to have been bigger than it first seemed and it seemed—pretty big to begin with. It is a huge event in terms of the degree to which it will change our habits, our politics, international relations and the long-term internal discussion in the Arab Muslim world. As I say in the diaries, on 9/11 a wall of civilization was breached that we could not imagine would ever be breached. And the long-term implications of that are just enormous."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

During the dog days of last summer, as the national press corps went baying after the elusive Gary Condit, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a piece called "A Memo from Osama." Entertaining, ironic and caustic in the same instant, the "memo"…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Lee Smith

Growing up in a small Appalachian town in Virginia, author Lee Smith describes herself as being a "deeply weird" child. With an incredible passion for books and reading, she devoured novels like The Secret Garden and Heidi and loathed letting go of her favorite characters so much that she wrote new endings to keep the story alive. By age 8, she had written her first novel (Adlai Stevenson and Jane Russell head West and become Mormons) and at age 9, she was selling stories to neighbors for a nickel.

Although she was "a terrible student," she enrolled in Hollins College, a small women's college in Virginia, and the intense writing program proved to be a turning point. "I always felt like I was so weird, and suddenly I was thrown in with these other girls who were just like me! It was like going to heaven," Smith says during a phone call from Maine, where she frequently vacations.

The formative college years propelled Smith into a career as an author (Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History) and provided the real-life adventure behind her new novel, The Last Girls, which tells the story of four women who braved the mighty Mississippi on a raft during college. The book is fiction, but for Smith, the raft trip was real. Surrounded by women who loved books, it's no surprise that after studying Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn in a literature class, one enterprising student declared, "We could do that!" and the trip was on—Smith and 15 of her college gal pals would float down the Mississippi River in the summer of 1966. The girls constructed a 40 x 17 foot "floating porch" made of a wooden platform on oil drums and hired a 73-year-old retired riverboat captain to navigate. The raft took 18 days to travel the 950 miles from Paducah, Kentucky, to New Orleans.

"We would have gotten there sooner, but we had some mishaps, as you can imagine," Smith says, recalling the drenching rainstorms, mosquito bites and even a brush with a hurricane.

The romance of the river they remembered from Twain's fiction dissipated somewhat with the reality of too much work and muddy waters. "You couldn't just jump off and have an idyllic little swim when you wanted," says Smith, "and we got way too much media attention." Greeted and photographed at each stop, Smith describes this as the era of the "last girls," the last of the pre-feminist generation.

Smith always knew she would find a story in her great adventure, but she laughs, "I only had to wait 30 years to see what the meaning of that was for me." It turned out that Twain needed an update. The idea of traveling downriver on a raft and reaching a profound destination "is not a metaphor for any women's lives that I know," Smith says. "Our lives are not that linear. That's more the plot of a boy's book."

Instead, she started thinking about how the past affects the present and how expectations rarely match up with reality. "It's all about the journey rather than the destination for women's lives," she says. "In many ways that can make a much richer journey full of many more events and multiple meanings."

Smith's novel, The Last Girls, explores the twists and turns life took for the friends who traveled the Mississippi River in the '60s as they reunite to cruise the river again, this time on the luxurious Belle of Natchez steamboat. Thirty-five years after the first trip, the women, now in their 50s, will spread the ashes of fellow rafter Baby Ballou, who recently died. Building each character by weaving in and out of their memories, we meet Anna Todd, a famous romance novelist; Courtney Gray, a scrapbook-obsessed socialite; Catherine Wilson, a sculptor in an unhappy marriage; and Harriet Holding, a smart but timid teacher who wonders where her nerve went. The flashbacks are both wistful and brutal as memories of the dramatic, free-spirited Baby Ballou open Harriet's eyes to the possibilities she never dared to explore.

"My husband [writer Hal Crowther] read this book and said, 'You are each one of these people.' There's a lot of me in each [character]," Smith admits, though she claims she's most like the orderly, care-taking Harriet. Maybe that's because she went through her "Baby wannabe" days in college, describing those years as a "breakout period—I just went wild." Even while busting loose, Smith showed her literary side: She and fellow author Annie Dillard performed as go-go dancers in the all-girl rock band the Virginia Woolfs. "Yeah, we were go-go dancers," she says, quickly adding, "but it was much less exciting than it sounds."

Baby Ballou permeates The Last Girls, and she's one of those irresistible characters that leap off the page. Her story is told via poetry, and Smith, who had never written poetry, "just went crazy," writing 50 or 60 poems for the vibrant character and reveling in the "freedom from having to tack everything down so securely" as a novelist. "There was this part of me that was just dying to write poems," she says.

Maybe the river provided the inspiration. She wrote the poems cruising down the Mississippi on a big steamboat similar to the one in The Last Girls. She traveled from Memphis to New Orleans with her husband in tow. "I made him go with me, even though he's claustrophobic and hated the idea of being stuck on a boat."

Smith still keeps in touch with some of the college buddies from her own Mississippi adventure and sent several of them a copy of The Last Girls. She laughs at the idea of organizing her own reunion cruise, though, saying "I don't think so."

True to form, Smith would rather spend a vacation devouring a suitcase full of books. Already "reading around" her next novel—which is set in the Piedmont area of North Carolina in the years right after Civil War—she has a new addiction. "It's like heroin," Smith says, with a drawl you can't resist. "You start reading about the Civil War, which I'd never given a damn about frankly, but it's just fascinating."

Growing up in a small Appalachian town in Virginia, author Lee Smith describes herself as being a "deeply weird" child. With an incredible passion for books and reading, she devoured novels like The Secret Garden and Heidi and loathed letting go of her favorite characters…

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