Writing My Novel

By Mesha Maren

In writing my novel, Sugar Run, one of the main ideas that I was pursuing was the concept of insider versus outsider and the question, can you ever really belong again in a place you once called home? Sugar Run is tied to my own home landscape in a very specific way. Much of the book was written on top of a mountain in a one-room cabin that my father and I built by hand from trees he had planted the fall I was born. My mother remembers him coming in from planting the saplings while she was in labor and in the field on the other side of the house the neighbors were bailing hay and for a while her contractions matched the rhythm of the bailer making its rounds outside the window.

I grew up on that farm in southern West Virginia in a house without indoor plumbing and with a father who buried our money in jars in the yard instead of keeping it in the bank. So, I guess you could say that I come by my love of landscape naturally. I was also deeply affected by my father’s work with incarcerated women in the federal prison in Alderson. As a child I would often accompany him to the visiting room at the prison camp and I was always fascinated by the insider/outsider culture of the place. Here was a camp full of women from the Bronx and Chicago and L.A., tucked away deep in the folds of the Appalachian Mountains. It was clear that the landscape itself was meant to form a barrier against escape. It was also clear that while they were desperate to be free, many of the women were fearful of life on the outside, fearful of going home. I remember overhearing my father counseling women who were soon to be released and later as an adult I realized that their fears and desires were not unlike what many of us West Virginians feel about our own home state, a mixture of pride and struggle and hope.

When I was writing Sugar Run in that cabin on the mountain it was just after returning to live in West Virginia for the first time in about twelve years. Now luckily I myself was not returning from a stint in prison, but as a queer Appalachian woman I know well the feeling of not quite fitting in anywhere, there are ways in which I feel more at home in Appalachia than any other place and there are ways in which I feel stifled, constrained and without community. Moving back to West Virginia was difficult and there were also times while I was working on Sugar Run that I tried to quit, I thought the story was too hard to write or I didn’t know how to do it but Jodi’s character wouldn’t let me abandon her, she haunted me, just like West Virginia won’t ever truly let me go, there is something essential and powerful that keeps me coming back. 

I feel like Jodi and I both realized at some point that although that home that you recalled so vividly during all your years away is sometimes a place that only truly exists in your heart and your dreams, it is still inextricably a part of who you are.

_______________________________________________________________ 

Mesha Maren is the author of Sugar Run (Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Oxford American, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Triquarterly, Sou’Wester and The Paris Review Daily. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She is the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and also serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the Beckley Federal Correctional Institution. In Fall 2019 she will join the Duke University faculty as an Assistant Professor of Practice of Creative Writing.

Voice is the Thing

By Dixon Hearne

Characters’ voices must resonate, cling, stick to the cerebral cortex, nag and satisfy. Holden, Blanche, Huck, Rabbit, Scarlett, Dorothy from Kansas—they all haunt private corners of readers’ minds once they have spoken. The reader invents the voices of characters in books purely from his or her own imagination. Who has not experienced a strange dissonance between the voice in our imagination and the one we hear on the big screen? No wonder there was such a furor over the search for Scarlett O’Hara. The images and voices that rose from the pages of Margaret Mitchell’s book could not be imitated on screen by just any actress. The face, the voice must be just right. In the end, Vivian Leigh, despite not being a “true southern vixen,” managed to capture in tone and delivery the Scarlett O’Hara in the minds of thousands of readers. Scarlett’s voice will always be that of Vivian Leigh.

In my own writing, I sometimes find myself sliding back into a character whose story I’ve already told—at least in part. Case in point: In 2005, I wrote a short story, “Sister-Woman,” which appeared in Concho River Review and later in my collection, Plantatia: High-toned andLowdown Stories of the South. I was amazed at the reaction of readers and reviewers. They consistently target Miss Raylene’s voice—at once unique and compelling—and how it drew them into the story, leaving them invested and eager to know more about her. I felt compelled to explore her story a bit further—through her own voice. The result is a new novella, From Tickfaw to Shongaloo (2015), which was awarded Second Place in the 2014 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Novella competition and released last month by Southeast Missouri State University Press.

Whether or not the voice of Holden Caulfield or Blanche DuBois is eternal is ultimately dependent upon the readers. Those voices must meet certain thresholds. Can we hear them clearly, effortlessly? Is there a match between character and voice? Does the writer capture their essence, their souls? And finally—employing John Dufresne’s literary measure—can we trust the voices (narrators)?

One final consideration: What sparks a memory from a favorite book or movie? I suggest that voice is the organizing center around which the reader or viewer is able to reconstruct entire dialogues, events, actions, and even the inner thoughts of the characters at play. It isn’t just memorable lines from prose that leave such indelible imprints, but the voices that utter them. We invent the voices in our own minds as we read a story, and the voices become real and permanent. Our attitudes may change toward the characters over time, but the voices remain constant, each one unique. The producers of Gone with the Wind knew this when they began their national search for Scarlett O’Hara. The search was about much more than just a pretty face—voice was the thing.

________________________________________________________________ 

Dixon Hearne is the author of four books of fiction and editor of several anthologies. His work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Hemingway/PEN award and has received numerous other honors. His new novella, From Tickfaw to Shongaloo,was the sole Runner-Up in the 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom Novella Competition. Other work has appeared in Oxford American, Tulane Review, Collier's magazine, New Orleans Review, Southern Writers Magazine, and elsewhere. He can be found at http://www.dixonhearne.com/