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SLR:
When did you first start writing stories? When did you know you
wanted to spend you life writing?
DA:
My father fought a boxing chimpanzee when I was two years old. I
heard that story told over and over from the time it happened, and
by the time I was four, I was telling the story myself. I
understood from my father at an early age what made a good story for
telling. I grew up around stories—stories from my father’s
adventures, my mother’s life and her schizophrenic’s imagination,
all the women’s stories in mother’s beauty shop, the stories of my
grandmother and her spinster sister, whom I lived with during
adolescence. So when my senior high school English teacher gave me
my first fiction writing assignment, it came easily for me. I knew
then I wanted to be a writer.
SLR:
What writers influenced you the most when you were young?
DA:
When I was young, I loved being read to, but I hated reading. I was
a good student, but I read really slowly, and read only what I had
to. In class we sometimes shared books, and my reading partner was
always waiting for me to get to the end of a page. Large books
intimidated me because of the time it would take me to wade through
them. It was embarrassing. But in fifth grade I attended a boarding
school where we could not get up before a certain time. I woke with
the sun, so I would stay in bed and read in that early morning
light. Like Mama Toot from Sufficient Grace, I would take
out my book and look at the pages until I could make out the words.
I don’t remember much about the books I read then. Only that they
kept me company during a lonely time when my mother was hospitalized
and I was away from my family, and this changed my relationship with
words on a page. The books became a comfort. Later, when I
realized I wanted to write, I read Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor,
Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne. One of my favorite books was Bram
Stoker’s Dracula. When I think about writers that have
influenced my work, as an adult, I think of writers like Lee Smith,
Wendell Berry, Clyde Edgerton, Allan Gurganus, Michael Lee West,
Jill McCorkle, Lewis Nordan, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Kaye Gibbons,
and poets Kathryn Stripling Byer, Robert Morgan, James Dickey, Mary
Oliver, and again Wendell Berry. And my work was also influenced by
writers who at the time were still unpublished: Isabel Zuber, Tamara
Baxter, Lynn York, and Pamela Duncan, among others.
SLR:
It seems that Sufficient Grace is about, among other things, the
phases of life—and new beginnings. What inspired you to write this
novel?
DA:
I started out writing a short story about a woman who was leaving
her husband. The story wouldn’t stay short, and when I discovered
the woman was leaving because disembodied voices were directing her,
I knew I could draw on my experience as the daughter of a woman with
late-onset schizophrenia. My subconscious was definitely helping me
out there. While Sufficient Grace is not autobiographical, it
certainly has autobiographical elements.
Mama Toot and Mattie came to me after I attended Sister Shirley
Caesar’s Gospel Crusade one year in
Durham. But they are rooted in my
childhood experience of being taken care of by black women when my
mother and father were busy working.
I’ve observed that many people who survive the big obstacles and
disappointments in their lives with grace are people who can
reinvent themselves and adapt to new circumstances, finding some way
to use their history as a source of strength and depth. I’ve had
several reincarnations over the years, based on my goals and the
resources available to me. Also, I found true love in my late
forties. I know it is never too late to discover something new
about myself, and my characters are no different. In Sufficient
Grace everyone is reinventing themselves in response to some
kind of disappointment or hope.
SLR:
When you write do you have the story outlined completely in your
head or does it unfold as you write?
DA:
I take lots of notes on the story and the characters, and those
notes grow as I write, developing into writing prompts or details to
flesh out a character or a scene. I never use outlines or start with
themes in mind. If I knew that much about my story, I would be
bored and not want to keep writing.
So, I start out with a character
and a situation and write to find out what happens. I call my first
draft a “learning draft.” I like to see where the plot rises up
organically, and discover the themes that are naturally present in
the work. I do start brainstorming from the beginning about how the
structure might work, but I’m never wedded to one structure until I
know how my story ends and how the plot evolves. Structure is a
constant experiment until the final revision is done. As for the
story itself, my characters, once I get to know them by writing
about them, always have a better story to tell me than the one I
think I know at the start.
SLR:
As you look back on the novel, what are your thoughts on Gracie? Did
you fully understand her journey when you began writing or did she
develop through the process of letting the story unfold? Did she
surprise you in anyway?
DA:
I have to say I didn’t totally understand Gracie’s journey in the
beginning of the writing process. When I realized she was hearing
the voices, I gave her some actions and symptoms my mother had when
I was a child, and I let her go about her business through applied
characterization. As a result, following her journey has helped me
understand my mother’s illness in a more intimate way.
When I started the novel, Gracie was the main character. As the
novel developed, all these other strong characters showed up and
started taking their turn at center stage. They took on lives of
their own, often lives I hadn’t expected. So in the end, Gracie and
the manifestations of her illness became a catalyst for change and
new direction for other characters in the book, particularly Ed.
Gracie simply makes a place for herself in her newest reincarnation,
part a result of illness and part a result of her, until then,
untapped talent as an artist.
Gracie’s illness displaces her former personhood to a great degree,
but it doesn’t diminish her value as an individual. That wasn’t a
surprise. I’ve been close to several people with schizophrenia,
including my mother, and each of them were remarkable people,
despite the fact they were not the same people they would have been
without the disease.
SLR:
Your prose is absolutely beautiful. So poetic and rhythmical, what
do you attribute this to?
DA:
I attribute my use of language and image to reading good
books—looking to masterful writers as my teachers—and to reading and
writing poetry. Writers, no matter how successful or accomplished,
should always be students of good writing. And I believe every prose
writer can benefit from writing poetry, even if the poetry is bad
and never sees the light of day. Trying to say so much with a few
intensely vivid images and compressed language, as a poet does, is
like lifting weights for a prose writer. It keeps me in shape and
develops a strength and familiarity with language that can only
benefit any writing enterprise. I think being a poet is particularly
helpful during revision.
SLR:
You’ve written short stories before tackling the novel. What did you
learn in the process of going from short stories to the novel? Any
preferences? Do you plan to continue writing both or will we see
mostly novels from you from now on?
DA:
I learned the novel and the short story are two completely different
animals. The short story has much more in common with poetry than
with a long form of fiction. It is more contained and limited in
what it can examine and explore. Its focus is tight and immediate in
the brevity of its telling. There is common ground with the novel,
certainly. The basic elements are the same; the way they are used is
very different. A novel really takes up residence in your home and
rides with you to the grocery store and to the doctor’s office, does
business with you at the bank, helps you feed the dog, and goes to
bed with you (and your spouse) at night, living with you in an
extended way that isn’t required by a short story. And the story
itself is so much larger and more layered. It is like wrestling a
gorilla. The minute you have one extremity under control, another
one grabs you from behind and pulls you in a new direction. The
author’s job, as I see it, is to make a graceful dance out of the
tussle.
I used to think I didn’t have a sufficient attention span to write a
novel. Now, I consider all the short story ideas I have going in
various stages and wonder which of them will grow into a novel one
day. I still write short fiction and poetry, but the novel is
becoming my form of choice. Now that I have one novel under my belt,
I really want to write another one.
SLR:
Even though you are still an up and coming novelist, you’ve already
been referred to as a southern writer. SLR dedicates a page to what makes southern literature southern, but
I’m curious, in a world that is ever-changing, what does being a
“southern writer” mean to you? And what does it mean now in 2006?
DA:
Southern writing has that strong story-telling voice that evolved
out of a rich oral tradition, told about characters who are shaped
in some way by their connection to or rejection of place and past.
Southern “literature” uses the local specific to reveal universal
experience.
Being a southern writer today requires the same thing that being a
contemporary southerner requires. We have to look at the way the
South is changing, for better and worse, from its richer
multi-cultural population to the devastating onslaught of
mega-businesses, and use what we know to be our strengths as an
already multi-textured and self-aware region to interpret and
document our changing culture through the experience of individual
characters. If we want to keep the South and southern literature
vibrant and thriving in the same ways it has always thrived in spite
of and because of change, our body of literature has to encompass an
ever more diverse and larger story with self examination at its
center.
SLR:
Do you mind the term “Southern writer” or do you find it confining?
DA:
I was born and raised in the South. I love the South. It informs how
I think and speak and what I recognize to be good material for
stories and poems. The South I come from is also greatly influenced
by Appalachian culture. I can’t escape either of those influences
and don’t want to. That background gives me something to write
about and a way of telling the stories I come up with. And I most
love to read southern literature. At the same time, I want my work
to have value beyond the region, and I want it to address themes
that extend beyond any physical geography. As other southern writers
have said, I don’t mind being called a southern writer. I am proud
of it. And along with that, I want to be called a good writer, no
matter where I come from.
SLR:
What’s next in terms of your writing? Are you working on a novel
now? Will your stories stay in the South?
DA:
I’ve never lived anywhere else, so even if my stories are set
elsewhere, I imagine they will be tethered to the South. But for
now, I see my stories anchored in a place familiar to me.
I’m currently working on a novel about a woman who has had seven
husbands. There’s lots of material there! I’m also working on a
new collection of poems about middle age.
SLR:
Are you reading anything now? Any recommendations?
DA: I
recently finished Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and
On Agate Hill by Lee Smith (due out in the fall) and Claudia
Emerson’s poetry collection The Late Wife. I loved all
three. I’m also enjoying Ted Kooser’s collection of poems,
Flying at Night, and Wendell Berry’s new novel, Hannah
Coulter. The next books on my list are Waiting by Ha Jin
and Solo by Clyde Edgerton. And I’m looking forward to Tamara
Baxter’s first short story collection, Rock Big and Sing Loud,
due out in the fall.
SLR:
Thank you so much for taking time from your busy schedule to talk
with us.
DA:
Thank you for asking, and thanks for giving writers and readers a
great place to read about Southern Literature.
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