Not long ago
I wrote here about how thrilled I was by a soon-to-be-released book winning early accolades—a novel by my friend Susan Tekulve called
In the Garden of Stone. I was amazed by Susan's book, honestly. I respected, more than I can adequately articulate, her research, her care, her language, her adept way with southern legends and landscape. I asked Susan, an old friend (though she is younger than me and far more spry), if she would answer a few questions. She did. Read here to learn from a master.
In The Garden of Stone, images are handed down across the pages just
as family lore and land are handed down, character to character. What
image was pivotal for you as you began to think of these scenes
holistically—not as stories, but as a novel?
You are exactly
right to say that this kind of novel requires unifying elements beyond
the chronological retelling of a family story. This novel required
more, and different, unifying elements that a traditionally-structured
novel doesn’t necessarily require, such as recurrent images and
protagonists, and a strong sense of place. While each chapter could
exist on its own, together they must rest upon each other and have the
arc of a novel. I would say that the setting, particularly the image of
the Italian rock garden on the family’s home place, provides the key
images that unify the whole novel for me. In fact, the chapter,
“Italian Villas and Their Gardens,” was the most difficult to write
because I knew that every chapter before this one had to lead up to it,
and that every chapter that followed rested upon the events and images
set forth in this chapter. I knew the ending of the chapter before I
started writing it, and it is really difficult for me to write something
if I already know exactly what must happen. In fact, knowing the
ending of this chapter was so crippling that it took six revisions over a
course of six years to write it.
The “Italian Villa” chapter is
set in the depths of the Depression. You see Caleb Sypher, a
mysterious and imaginative man who is so desperate to create something
beautiful in this otherwise hardscrabble place that he builds a lavish
Italian pleasure garden from materials he barters for and collects down
around the railroad, where he holds down his paycheck job despite the
cutbacks. You see him instilling his love of beauty, his need to “have
more than what we have,” in his wife, Emma, who comes from a family of
Sicilian immigrant miners who spend all of their days under the earth,
in another kind of stone garden, barely remembering sunlight, let alone
the beautiful gardens of their home country. Emma comes from a place
that darkens by midday, and remains covered by oily coal dust all year
long. There wasn’t much opportunity for thoughts of beauty in her
childhood, but she learns about it, eventually, through Caleb.
Then, in
the middle section of the book, you see some of the second-generation
characters fall tragically from this garden, while a few other
characters, like Sadie, remain on the periphery, admiring it from a
distance. In this second section, no matter what their previous
relationship to this land was, the main characters all try to make their
way back to this garden, and claim it. Finally, in the third section,
you see the Italian pleasure garden fall into disrepair as the final
generation of characters try desperately to hold onto the land, or, in
some cases, escape from it. I didn’t necessarily think of the
garden as a unifying element while I was writing this book, but the
stone garden appears in every chapter, in various forms. This image
turned out to be the unifying thread that “stitched” the chapters
together.
Your love for this landscape and your knowledge of it awes me. Tell us a little of where you have walked, what you have
seen, how the mountains move you, how you learned the names of trees,
birds, flowers, ridges, bear seasons.
For the last twenty years, I
have been lucky to live about a half hour from the gateway mountains of
Western North Carolina. I’ve also been very lucky to know people who
are willing to lend me their cabins, camp houses or their guest houses
up in these mountains when I need to escape the palaver, as Thoreau
famously called all those daily things that distract us from truly
seeing and thinking straight.
I will say that my novel’s main setting
is based upon my in-law’s home place up around Bluefield, Virginia, but
when I couldn’t make the trip back to Virginia, I would stay at some
friend’s place up in those North Carolina mountains, where the terrain
is very similar to the mountains surrounding my in-laws’ home place.
Twice, while writing the book, I was able to live in the mountains for
an extended period of time. The first time, I lived in a friend of a
friend’s guesthouse up on Wilderness Road in Tryon, a tiny town kettled
between two mountains just across the border, in North Carolina. The
original owners had named this guesthouse “The Cold Potato,” after some
half-remembered bluegrass song. Beside the guest house, there was a
century-old Cherokee game trail that had been re-blazed by a homesteader
who lived in an old chinked log cabin beside the river that wound
around the bottom of the ridge I lived on. This homesteader allowed me
to walk the game trail and along the river that ran through a valley
that was planted with tomatoes. I lived in The Cold Potato in early
spring, so I was able to watch the spindly tomato seedlings grow into
full-sized tomato plants. As late spring came, there were times when I
teetered dangerously over rattle snakes that the tomato farmer would
kill and lay across the road so that I would know that the snakes were
in those fields, eating tomatoes. Because the trees hadn’t greened
completely, I was able to observe how wild turkeys resemble patches of
swirling dried leaves as they run up a late-winter ridge. I learned
that the black bears, crazed by hibernation hunger, will come down from a
high ridge encroached by land developers to tear off the lid of your
trash can, drink the dregs of your tossed out Coke cans, or lick the
cherry pie filling from the bottom of a tin pan. I learned what a bear
smells like, too.
I spent several years writing this novel
piecemeal while working full time, and mothering full time, but as I
neared the end of writing this novel, I took an unpaid leave from my job
so that I could finish it. A friend lent me her 1917 camp house that
stood at the base of the Seven Sisters Mountain range, in a little town
called Montreat, North Carolina. Montreat is a spiritual retreat center
that was settled by Scottish Presbyterians in the late 19th century, so
this place resembles a lower highland village in Scotland. There are no
sidewalks here, just hiking trails that lead from the front doors of
everyone’s houses and border a quiet stream called Flat Creek. The
creek crossed through the town center, which is really just a small lake
named, almost providentially, Lake Susan. When I went to live in this
place for the whole month of September, I had the idea that I would let
this mountain landscape work on me as I finished the novel. I began
writing the end of the book by walking in the woods. First, I followed
Flat Creek down to the lake, where I discovered that the gorgeous swans
that patrolled the lake were the least elegant creatures on this earth
when viewed up close. They snort like hogs. They tip over, rumps in
the air, snaking their beaks underwater to swallow whole frogs. When
they tip back over, I could see the frogs slowly struggling down the
inside of the swans’ snowy necks. After pausing at the lake, I hiked up
to the nearest trailhead that branched off into the “lower trails,”
which, I learned quickly, were once wilderness trails that reached
elevations as high as 5900 feet.
After a few days of hiking, (and
heaving), along “the lower trails,” I began to learn how to remain
quiet, and how to pay attention. I discovered that falling acorns sound
like gun shots when they hit a tin roof, and that clouds rise like
delicately twisting handkerchiefs from black ridge pockets after a storm
passes. I learned that black bears are real comedians. If you remain
still and watch them from a safe distance, they will come out at dusk to
swing on the limbs of the apple tree growing beside your kitchen
window. They’ll balance delicately, on all four paws, on top of your
bird feeder and scoop out all the bird seed. And if you are sitting
beside a window at dusk, reading, you might look up and see a doe
staring in at you, taking your measure, so close you can see the veins
inside her ears. If she likes the look of you, she’ll bring back her
fawns the next night so that you may admire them. I don’t mean to sound
like Henry David Thoreau’s direct descendent here, but I did go to the
woods so that I could learn how to see and hear, and so that I could
write without distraction. I finished the last third of the novel in
this setting, in exactly one month.
Coal mining. Herbal
healing. The madness and methods of self-educated cooks, farming lore.
How did you teach yourself so much about indigenous process?
I
should start by saying that I am not a trained natural scientist. I
grew up roaming in the wooded hills of my earliest neighborhood just
north of the Ohio River, and to this day a wooded landscape is where I
feel most at home. As an adult, I learned the proper and folk names of
the trees and flowers I saw while hiking in the woods. I also came to
know the ridges and bear seasons down here in the Carolinas and in
Virginia. I do use reference texts about herbs, wildlife, Appalachian
wildflowers, Cherokee trail trees. The Foxfire books are an especially
important resource for me. I keep these books close by when I write
because they feature transcriptions of oral accounts by Appalachian old
timers who knew everything about staying alive on the remote side of a
mountain, from moonshining skills to snake lore, from planting by the
signs to making nostrums from the herbs and flowers they picked.
But,
like most people, I have an innate need to seek out places that resemble
the landscape of my childhood because that is where my emotional
landscape was formed. Another way of saying this is that even when I’m
writing about a place and a people who are seemingly different from my
own experience, I’m often still working through some basic emotional
truths that I haven’t quite figured out, and I often will return to a
place that resembles my early emotional landscape—whether it is the
Southern Highlands or a village in Italy--in order to do this. Though I
do a lot of book research, I also have found that I need to live with
those researched details until they become a part of who I already am,
so that I’m not just dumping information into my fiction, and so that
the details remain in service to the story that I am telling.
You
dedicate this book to your mother-in-law, and you speak of interview
tapes made for you as you wrote. What two or three true things made it
into this novel? What alchemy did you learn or apply as you transported
the truth into fiction?
I guess there were really three women
whose true stories influenced this novel—my maternal grandmother, Joy;
my great aunt, Grace; and my mother-in-law, Mary. My grandmother was a
rheumatic invalid’s daughter who was born after her mother was already
in a wheel chair; she never saw her mother stand or walk, and she was
taken out of school when she was seven to be her mother’s full-time
caretaker. She never spoke of this part of her life to my mother, and
she died when I was young, so my mother and I figured those details were
lost to us. Then, in my late twenties, my great aunt Grace, (who was
really my grandmother’s first cousin), began tape-recording stories
about my grandmother’s early life and mailing them to me in South
Carolina. The tapes she sent were all labeled “Stuff your mother never
knew about your grandmother.” I think I received one tape every month,
for a whole year. Ending around the time my mother was born, Grace’s
stories were finely detailed, anecdotal. She fleshed out the true
details of how my grandmother lived as an invalid’s daughter in a
neighborhood north of the Ohio River called Winton Place; how my
grandfather, who was ten years younger and an “Italian Catholic boy”
from the river bottoms, courted her for years, finally becoming a
teetotaler and Methodist so that my grandmother would marry him; how
they all got through the Depression and World War II. I knew I wanted to
use these details in a book about my family, but I wasn’t sure how to
find my way into this story. I felt a huge disparity between the girl
my Aunt Grace called Joy, and the woman I knew as my grandmother. I
felt no great emotional ties to the river bottoms, where my Sicilian
grandfather grew up, perhaps because that area had been cemented over by
the time I was growing up north of the river. And when you don’t feel a
strong emotional tie to the setting of your story, it’s hard to make
your story move forward.
Around the time I was struggling to make
narrative sense out of my own family’s stories, I went to live with my
husband, Rick, at his family’s home place in Bluefield, Virginia. Rick
is a poet, and he had the idea that we should go live in his
recently-deceased grandmother’s house one summer so that he could
research a series of poems that emulated the sounds of bluegrass music.
While he researched bluegrass music for his poetry, I came to know my
mother-in-law, Mary, through the stories she told me in her kitchen. In
my memory, I always see and hear Mary in those evening hours in her
kitchen, a mountain breeze blowing her dishtowel curtains in and out of
the window above the sink. A quiet woman with knowing brown eyes, she
spoke with the cadence of the King James Bible trembling her soft voice.
My father-in-law always said that Mary’s early upbringing was so rough
that the details of what happened to her as a child in that trailer
could not be repeated. Though she hardly ever spoke of her childhood
directly, Mary’s stories often involved quietly strong women who faced
the unendurable—pain, violence, poverty—and triumphed. This was one of
her favorite stories: “When I was seven, I used to walk eight miles up
the mountain to fetch my baby brother a cup of milk from our nearest
neighbor,” she’d say. “I did this every morning and every evening, just
so the milk would be fresh.” Then she’d smile, quietly pleased by the
memory of keeping her brother alive by carrying a tin cup full of milk
down a mountain.
Sometimes, Rick’s father, Larry, would drive me
around, acting as tour guide, telling me stories about his family. One
day, he drove me down into West Virginia to see the abandoned coal
camps, and he took me on a tour of an exhibition coal mine in
Pocahontas, Virginia. While we were in Pocahontas, we walked through
the town’s graveyard, and I noticed that one whole side of this cemetery
was filled with tombstones whose epitaphs were written in Italian.
After doing a little research, I discovered that the coal companies
would send representatives to meet the immigrants coming off the boats
at Ellis Island, promise them jobs, and then take them down to the
deepest hollows of West Virginia to work in the camps. The more I
traveled around this part of Southwest Virginia and West Virginia,
listening to the stories of my husband’s family, the more this place and
its people resonated with me emotionally. It is a place of tremendous
natural beauty, and a place of tremendous economic and cultural strife.
The fact that Southern Italians and Sicilians had settled here was a
revelation to me, and it introduced the possibility that my Sicilian
grandfather’s people could have landed in a Virginia coal camp just as
easily as they had settled beside the Ohio River. Because I felt more
of an emotional connection to the natural landscape in Virginia, and
because it is a place filled with conflict and contradictions, it began
to make better narrative sense to place the stories of my grandmother,
(as told to me by my Aunt Grace), in this one place.
Once I discovered
that this was my setting, my brain began performing that fictional
alchemy you spoke of in your question; I started mingling the story of
my grandmother and my Sicilian grandfather with the stories of my
husband’s family, and the novel began to move forward. The novel is
really the distillation of my family’s stories and Rick’s family’s
stories, all set in one place, and it is this place that unifies the
novel and provides much of the conflict that forces it to move forward.
The two women who told me many of the stories that this novel is based
upon—my great aunt Grace, and my mother-in-law, Mary—died while I was
finishing this book. I still believe this novel was a gift, its details
given to me by these women, the finished version written for them,
their strong voices leading me all the way through it.
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