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Bonus Material
• Main Page • A Letter from Kaye • Additional Essay by Kaye • Interview • Extended Bio • Read an Excerpt • Kaye’s Web Site Get Your Copy
available at
Also by Kaye Gibbons |
Interview
 Q: You wrote your first novel, Ellen Foster, when you were twenty-six years old. Almost twenty years later, what motivated you to write The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster? A: Language and voice. With the first novel, I was meeting a kind of personal challenge, how to express the highest ideals we share as human beings, our hope, pity, honor, honesty, courage, and so forth, in the most elemental, the simplest voice I could manage. I began writing the second installment of what I plan to be a seven- or eight-part series covering Ellen's life because I wanted to "do" her voice again, maturing her by a few years but still exploring those core themes in her direct and unique language. Q: Ellen Foster is taught alongside The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It received the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. It's also an Oprah Book Club selection—along with another of your books, A Virtuous Woman. What pressures did you feel when writing the sequel to this beloved classic? A: The pressures of writing have only recently begun to lift, and I believe the sensation of relief as I write each day, each morning, noon, and night, actually, has more to do with maturity and security than anything else. I'm a single parent with three daughters soon to be in college simultaneously, and the responsibilities of motherhood aren't somehow magically lifted or eased because of what I do for a living. My life is equally divided between literature and laundry, maintaining the balance takes as much stamina as it would for any other working mother, but I think there's an additional layer of stress for individuals who support families by their creative energies. Because of a kind of recent and blessed maturity and because I feel surrounded by a supportive coalition of agent, editor, and publisher who all believe as strongly as I do in selling excellent literature excellently, the experiences of writing The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster and now of writing the third installment of Ellen's story have brought a kind of productive peace of mind I hadn't previously known. Q: In a letter to the reader, you say that you were "startled" when you "realized how profound an impress a fictional girl" was making on your life. What makes your connection to this character so strong? A: I know we only live once, but through Ellen, I'm able to live twice. Being able to turn over old ground, to root around in my past, explore choices, and have Ellen make different decisions, create fresh possibilities, all of the life-editing I can do as a novelist sometimes feels like a kind of consolation prize. So, I feel grateful for the gift of a life relived she represents, and I also need the model of her forthrightness and wisdom—we all do. It's an amazing thing, to be in the company of a person like Ellen for the duration of a novel's writing—my job as a writer is to be certain that the reader shares the same quality of thought and emotion I experience as I'm working. Q: You've said that Ellen Foster is autobiographical. Is the same true for The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster? A: The sense of Ellen's daily rhythms as an older girl, her concerns about college and getting out into the world, and her feelings of being a part of the place she comes from yet separate and apart from her home, all of those attributes are autobiographical. And while there are other correspondences and many differences, such as Ellen's invented inheritance, I think what's important to understand about any order of "autobiographical" writing is that the emotions conveyed have to be true and intimately known if one individual's story is to have any enduring meaning in the life of another. Details of a childhood described outside the context of the universal ideals I report to my job each day and work on—the hope, pity, honor, grief, love, and so forth—are only decoration, and as I write the third book, I'm understanding how finite those concrete memories are and how infinite the creative possibilities are when I consider Ellen's past and mine in terms of those ideals, opening up worlds much larger than our own. Q: What was the most challenging aspect of transforming the voice of a 10-year-old child to a 15-year-old young adult? A: Keeping a consistent level, or pitch, was difficult unless I had long, unbroken stretches of writing time, a rare commodity and the reason I become more or less reclusive when I'm working. Then, given a block of time ahead of me, I had to keep in mind certain aspects of Ellen's character that hadn't changed and never will, like her "ancientness" in constant contrast to her innocence and her ability to see into the life of things and point out absurdities when others her age would be too self-conscious to discuss them openly. Q: You plan on revisiting Ellen Foster every few years. Can you tell readers what might be in store for her? A: Only if the answer won't be used against me if I change my mind, which is a likely proposition, given that any story, like any life, informs the person trying to manage it rather than the other way around. So far though, I see Ellen finishing college and medical school and then finding a way to blend her love, as she puts it, of the arts and sciences. Earlier, when I said I'm able to live twice through Ellen, having her attend medical school is a prime example, as I would have had I been capable of passing chemistry without some critical machinations. I see her going all over the world but coming home periodically, visiting her old friends, Laura, and possibly taking Starletta to some of the exotic places she mentions in The Life All Around Me. One looming blind spot involves her relationship with men, and although I realize that domestic bliss would be all but impossible to achieve because of her family history and her commitment to independent thinking, her basic self-reliant nature, I also believe that seeing her through any troubling times could provide some of the most creatively satisfying moments ahead. And again, if I only live twice, and one of those times is through Ellen, I may have her avoid all the mistakes I've made and perhaps invent a way for her to magically conceive children as wonderful as mine without involving a man! Finally, her life seems to be presenting itself to me in a kind of classic artistic formula, a plan that runs like an undercurrent through Western art, of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, so I look forward to the third stage of her life, with her settled, finally, in the world and in her own self, and resting, no doubt with Starletta by her side. Q: At what point in your life did you know that you wanted to be a writer? A: I knew wanted to write something for my life's work when I saw the gorgeous alphabet lined out in a Palmer penmanship book and when I began looking up definitions of vocabulary words at the end of the stories in Around the Corner, my second-grade reader. But because I thought only dead and/or British authors and New England poets who'd earned a place in the "L" volume of the World Book Encyclopedia earned enough money and fame to enjoy any job satisfaction and because I didn't think people would be interested in the very limited range of things a girl like me who lived on a rural road like mine had to say, I eventually decided it'd be wise to write about literature, get a teaching degree, publish in journals—living next door to an artistic life. Living in literature, directly, in my heart and home, didn't feel possible until my last year of college, when I read the introduction to James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry, in which he discusses what has become both practically and philosophically emblematic to me, his notion of the integrity of the colloquial voice, how symbols from within rather than symbols from without are best used to convey the highest aspirations of mankind, meaning he freed me from my fear of the burden of Southernisms, showed me that I could ignore the stereotypical dependence on regionalisms, dialect spellings, the cliché, and use metaphor and symbol to bear the weight of any story I wanted to tell. Then, after the first line of Ellen Foster came to me, I had a sense that I knew what I was doing, if only because I was doing what I wanted to do and thought needed to be done, which isn't a confession of egoism but one of gratitude, as writing and mothering are the only two enterprises I've ever been fully confident at, two similar tasks, working toward the same end, seeing to it that blank slates are filled with life and love. Q: What keeps you busy when you're not working? A: Mary, Leslie, and Louise. Book and essay texts copyright © 2005 by Kaye Gibbons. Photo credits: (sky and fields) © Thomas Wiewandt; Visions of America/Corbis,(house and trees) © Paul A. Souders/Corbis. Used with permission. All rights reserved. |
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