Meredith Sue Willis: Out of the Mountains

Meredith Sue Willis is one of those writers whose work is often overlooked – perhaps because she has been labeled as an Appalachian writer. There’s a tendency to categorize writers and books by region or genre, but the result can be limiting in unintended ways. “Appalachian writer” is a term I’ve often used myself to draw attention to the works of writers I admire from that mountain region. But it seems that there may be a stigma associated with being classified as “Appalachian” which lends itself to some widely held stereotypes about mountain people. Why does “Appalachian writer” not have the same cachet as, say, “Southern writer?” After all, Appalachia is a big place and reaches as far south as Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Just as geographic regions can overlap, so can literary genres. A bestselling mystery or legal thriller can also be literary fiction. And, an Appalachian writer can also be many other things as well – including a Southern writer (Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith immediately come to mind).

In the afterword to her new book, Meredith Sue Willis writes, “This collection is called Out of the Mountains because that is where the stories come from, and so do I. . . . One of my projects in writing these stories has been to wonder, with so much slipping into the past, what is still unique about our region. I am also interested in what Appalachians retain and take along when they leave home – when they go out of the mountains – and also what Appalachian attitudes and insights contribute to the larger culture.”

I started reading Meredith Sue Willis’ work nearly a decade ago when one of her short stories had been submitted to me when I was the fiction editor of the literary journal Paper Street. I wanted to publish that piece, but the editor of another journal beat me to it. I was glad to see the main character of that story also appear in several of the stories in Out of the Mountains. In this collection of a dozen stories, characters sometimes reappear in several stories so that the reader sees them at various time points and from different perspectives. However, these are not linked stories. What does connect the stories is a sense of displacement and restlessness – insiders who leave the mountains to live elsewhere and outsiders who come to the mountains. There’s a tension between belonging and not belonging, of insider vs. outsider, of rural vs. urban, of traditional customs vs. new ways.

The cover photograph was taken by my husband, Kevin Scanlon. Both Kevin and I had contributed work to the 2008 “West Virginia Issue” of Hamilton Stone Review which Willis edited. Since Willis was familiar with Kevin’s series of West Virginia photographs, she later requested some of his images for consideration as possible covers for this short story collection. At the time we were curious about why she chose the one she selected, and after reading the stories I now understand how well it fits. These are stories with unexpected juxtapositions and clashes which show the changing culture.

Willis writes, “A great beauty of fiction, of course, is that it can be about many things at once . . . . I consider fiction to be a mutual, human grace – to know people we’ll never meet, beliefs we’ll never hold, experiences we’ll never have in our actual lives. It’s what I read for, and why I write.”

Meredith Sue Willis is the author of sixteen books and she teaches creative writing at New York University, School of Professional and Continuing Studies. She also maintains several blogs: Literature and the Web, Online Journal, as well as Resources for Writers. Two of her books have been published this year: Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel (Montemayor Press) and the short story collection Out of the Mountains: Appalachian Stories (Ohio University Press).

Upcoming appearances include the West Virginia Book Festival in Charleston, West Virginia, October 16th – 17th at the Charleston Civic Center and the Kentucky Book Fair, November 13th.

Postcards From The Thousand Islands

Boldt Castle, The Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence Seaway
(Photo copyright by Dory Adams)

Add one more item to the list of things being made obsolete by technology. I learned through the National Geographic blog Intelligent Travel that British Airways has launched a campaign to save the postcard. It seems that we no longer disconnect from our mobile communication devices long enough to feel the need to send postcards.

As much as I hate to admit it, that’s become true for me. Even when I’m trying to travel light, I still pack my Netbook and carry my cell phone (the cell phone I was reluctant to get, but was eventually forced into it because public pay phones have pretty much disappeared). Without even realizing it, I also stopped sending postcards. It used to be that when we were travelling I always sent at least one postcard – to my mom. Now Mom gets an e-mail to tell her when I’m going out of town and another one when I get back, to let her know to call my cell phone if she needs to reach me in an emergency.

I enjoy getting postcards, and still sometimes receive them (usually from writer friends who appreciate old-fashioned handwritten letters – you know, the kind of message that’s sealed in an envelope, stamped, and dropped into one of those blue metal U.S. mailboxes that also seem to be disappearing from street corners). According to Stephen Bayley’s article in High Life (which has details about the “Save the Postcard” charity auction of artist-designed picture postcards with celebrity signatures), only “11% of travelers still send postcards home while 60% use text.” He writes, “Facebook, email, texting and tweeting have deskilled communications and impoverished our visual culture.”

It may be true that Facebook has become the new digital age postcard. It certainly seems like everyone is trying to get me to join Facebook, but I remain a holdout. If anyone wants to know what I’m up to, all they have to do is check this blog. I’m not even willing to “tweet” or send a text message from my cell phone. I don’t even know how to text – and if anyone sends me one I just delete it without opening it. But, I’ve saved pretty much every postcard I’ve ever received, along with personal letters. They’re lovingly stored in a stack of pretty boxes that are stored on the top shelf of a closet. I suppose I’m expecting to read through all those letters again someday, as a way of remembering the past, when I’m too old and frail to do much more than that.

In mid-September my husband and I spent a week of vacation on a road trip with stops in Buffalo, the Thousand Islands, and Ontario, Canada. We treated ourselves to a stay at the Roycroft Inn for our wedding anniversary, and we did our usual offbeat things like touring the Buffalo Central Terminal and the Colonel Ward Pumping Station in Buffalo, and we watched the lakeboat Quebecois go through the final lock on the Welland Canal as it traversed from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. We also did a few touristy things: a boat tour of the Thousand Islands, a tour of Bodlt Castle on Heart Island, and even a stopover at Niagara Falls on the Canadian side. No doubt I’ll be writing more about those places in future posts, but for now I’ll leave you with one more electronic postcard from the Thousand Islands.

Estates Small and Large, The Thousand Islands
(Photo copyright by Dory Adams)

Guest Post by Photographer Kevin Scanlon: Train Chase

Photograph copyright by Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved,
used by permission

[I’m pleased to host a guest post by Kevin Scanlon this week. Kevin has spent the past three decades documenting heavy industry and railroads across the country. His work has been published in magazine articles and literary journals, on the covers of books and journals, and exhibited at various museums and galleries, including a solo exhibition at the O. Winston Link Museum (“The Outline of Metal Against Sky”) in 2008. He is currently working on a series of industrial landscapes in the Pittsburgh area.]

Train Chase

I had driven this road maybe 200 times, a sweet half-hour trip following the abandoned Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Loup Creek Branch down the hollow to Thurmond, West Virginia in the New River Gorge. This was a prime area for someone interested in taking train pictures. I loved looking at the little hamlets along the way, the waterfalls in the creek, the remains of the railroad branch with impossibly photogenic scenes that I would never hope to photograph with a train passing through them. Then a few years ago something unheard of happened, the branchline reopened! A local guy made a go of it with some little engines, but then he died and a bigger shortline operator took over. Even more surprising, a coal mine up on the mountain reopened so the little railroad found itself hauling large coal trains down to the mainline connection.

Late on a warm August afternoon in 2007 I was driving down to the road in hopes of seeing a train moving on the branch or on the mainline tracks at Thurmond. I rounded a curve just a half-mile from the river and found myself face to face with a hopper train headed up the branch to the mine. I quickly turned around, excited at finally getting the chance to photograph a big train at all of those beautiful spots I’d been picking out over the years.

It was an easy, slow chase and I was able to catch the train at several spots. One location I always had an eye on was a small board & batten cabin with an old car out in the yard. I pulled into the yard and was surprised to see an old man sitting on the cabin porch.

“Mind if I take a picture of the car and the train?” I asked.

“Go ahead,” he replied.

I got the shot as the train passed, then walked to the porch to thank him before taking off for the next spot. My plan was to follow the train all the way to the mine; there were a lot of great locations still ahead.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve been looking for an excuse to take a picture of that car for years.”

“Yeah,” he said. “A lot of people stop to take a picture of it. Still in pretty good shape for a 1959. I have the owners manual inside, but I’m not interested in selling her.”

“Don’t see many Edsels like that,” I said. “She’s a beauty!”

I couldn’t leave. The man started telling stories, his life story. The train was long gone, but it didn’t matter. There would be other trains. He told me that he had hired out on the Chesapeake & Ohio in 1946. He went to high school while working for the railroad until he earned his diploma. In 1949 he married his sweetheart and they raised three kids. The little cabin was their homeplace. One son has a PhD in Organic Chemistry and does research for Temple University. The other son works in real estate in Charleston and a daughter lives not far away in Beckley.

He told me about the cabin next door, where an earlier family kept chickens in the crawlspace underneath and used a kerosene heater to keep the hens warm until they burned the place down. He told me about his job for the C&O working out of Thurmond, Hinton, Quinnimont, Raleigh and Montgomery.

As the darkness settled over the valley I listened to the stories, smiled at the sweet remembrances and came to realize that I came home richer for not bolting off to take even more train pictures. The best picture I got that day is the one in my mind, of my new friend sweeping through the curves of WV Rt. 41, rolling down Batoff Mountain toward his job at Quinnimont Yard in a shiny new President Red Edsel.

(This piece was originally published at The Photographers’ Railroad Page)

Nothing Left To Burn

It’s been a long time since I’ve been as excited about a new book as I am for Jay Varner’s memoir Nothing Left to Burn. I was eager to read it after seeing Sal Pane’s review in Pank, where I first learned of the book and discovered that it was by a writer from my hometown of McVeytown in central Pennsylvania – and I was not disappointed reading this fascinating story of a family consumed by family secrets and an obsession with fire. Varner, who earned his BA in creative writing at Susquehanna University and his MFA at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington, crafts a compelling narrative about growing up terrified by his grandfather’s fire fetish. I honestly had trouble putting the book down until I reached the end – and as soon as I finished it, my husband picked it up and also read it in record time.

Farms at the edge of McVeytown, PA
photo copyright by Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved, used by permission

McVeytown was actually the nearest town to where I grew up. Both my family and Varner’s family had homes in what was known as R.D.#1, outside the village of 400-or-so residents. That area remains fairly rural with lush hill farms nestled between the ridges of Jacks Mountain along the Juniata River. I’ve yet to meet Jay in person, but in such a small community there is only about one degree of separation between everyone. I’ve discovered we have many connections in common, which added a layer of spookiness to reading the book for me. I’d grown up hearing rumors of the fires Jay’s grandfather, Lucky Varner, had set – including the arsons of two homes of his own which burned to the ground.

Fire connects the Varner men. Lucky Varner (Jay’s grandfather) was a pyromaniac and serial arsonist. Lucky’s son, Denton Varner (Jay’s father) became the local fire chief. And after Jay grew up, he became a reporter on the local newspaper covering fire and accident reports and writing obituaries.

McVeytown, PA
Photo copyright by Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved, used by permission

Nothing Left to Burn is filled with twists and surprises and interesting characters. I was curious to learn the inside story about Lucky’s fires, and it was fascinating for me to read Varner’s description of an area I know well. I do not quite see the town as he does, but realize that he experienced life there a generation after me. I’m of his father’s generation, so my experience of living there is probably closer to Denton Varner’s than to Jay’s. No matter which city or state I’ve lived in over the years, I’ve always carried that home place inside me and missed the rhythms of the seasons as marked by the planting and harvesting of crops on the neighboring farms. I haven’t resided there since the mid-1970s, so I still see the town as a charming old village of mostly well-tended lawns and homes, some of which are large stone and brick houses that date to the 1800s. There are hints indicating that things are getting a bit run-down, such as the sign on the post office that is becoming an eyesore (please, someone, restore the missing letters), but the landscape is one of rural beauty. There’s no question about it now being an economically depressed area since many of the long time industries have closed down, including the farm machinery manufacturer where my dad worked his entire life (the same factory that I learned from the book that Denton Varner also worked at for a time).

Post Office, McVeytown, PA
Photo copyright by Dory Adams, all rights reserved

Algonquin, the book’s publisher, issued a newsletter with an interview with Jay about the writing of his book. When Varner was asked how his hometown would react to his book, he responded, “. . . I hope they would be happy that a native son has managed to tell this story. I was careful not to sugarcoat things – I deeply love the town, but leaving out the negatives would do the area an injustice. There are many problems – economic strangulation, educational shortcomings, drug abuse – that must be addressed. However, there are a lot of things that are right and distinctive about the area. And I hope that I have rendered both ends of that spectrum truthfully.” He goes on to say, “My biggest fear is that a protective shroud will befall the town and residents will go on the defensive.”

When asked about his mother who did not want him to write this book, he said, “I’ve done my best to be true to the characters and events. . . . I understand the hesitance not to want this story on bookshelves, but in my hometown, most everyone already knows part of this story to begin with, so I’m not sure much is lost in telling this. . . . However, just as this is my story, it’s also hers, and anyone certainly has the right to be protective of such a thing.” He went on to say, “But in my eyes, it only makes my father a greater man. He gave an awful lot to that town and never asked for anything in return.”

Jay writes of how as a young boy he yearned to spend more time with his father, who was always rushing off to answer fire and ambulance calls. Even though Denton was the fire chief, it was a volunteer position in a volunteer fire company, and he worked a fulltime job as a laborer in a factory to support his family. To young Jay, it seemed that his father was always gone – either at work or at the firehouse. He tells of how his dad was often the first responder to an accident or emergency call, arriving in his pick-up truck even before the ambulance arrived on the scene (he was also certified as an emergency medical technician). When I read that, I remembered how when my dad suffered a massive heart attack one Sunday afternoon there was an EMT who arrived in a pick-up truck who came in carrying an oxygen tank even before the ambulance arrived. I’ve since learned that man was Denton Varner.

Jay credits his stint as a reporter for the local newspaper as helping him distance himself enough to tackle difficult topics, saying: “That forced me to hold every story at arm’s length and approach topics with an impartial view . . . to teach me to tackle these memories without such emotional attachment. I was still connected, obviously, but I almost had to look at these events and people as though they were from the life of somebody else before actually understanding how they related to me.” But it was as an undergraduate in creative writing at Susquehanna University, prior to working as a reporter, that he first learned to craft stories. Varner said, “That’s when I saw people could actually examine and confront issues in their life. And I realized that to really understand who I was going to become as a man, I had to examine all that had happened in the past.”

In Nothing Left to Burn, Varner confronts that past – the good and the bad. About his grandfather, Lucky, Jay says: “It’s hard for me to call him simply bad. I think the man had a genuine mental illness with pyromania. He may have well been a sociopath too. To me, it was a sickness, not a badness.” About his father, Denton, Jay says: “He was a good man, but ultimately deeply conflicted about the roots of his values. He tried his best but made some poor decisions. Both men were incredibly complex and wrestled with much of that internally. My father wasn’t really torn between becoming a bad or good person, but his priorities were sometimes jumbled due to what he’d experienced as a child. In his heart, he wanted to do what was right.”

Jay’s book has me thinking about communities and our perceptions of home, and about how things constantly change – even in places like McVeytown. It’s true that people there can sometimes be very clannish, separated by geographic, religious and political divides – obstacles any outsider would have difficulty breaking through. It’s interesting that Lucky Varner remained part of that community even though it was common knowledge he was a danger to people’s lives and property – something that would not have been condoned of an outsider. Only an insider could have told this story as Jay has, and he has told it well. He builds a powerful story from ashes by piecing to together what remained – memory, artifacts, and the accounts told to him by others.

Author Jay Varner

• Be sure to watch the book trailer, which is nicely done.

• For a taste of Jay’s writing, read “Farm Machines” online at Quicksilver.

• Jay Varner will be appearing at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Pittsburgh on October 6th at 7 PM. Check out his schedule for appearances in other locations at his website.

Railroad Noir

"Engine House, East Ely, Nevada"
copyright by Joel Jensen, all rights reserved
Used by permission
(click on images for larger view)

To say that writer Linda Niemann’s background is diverse may be an understatement. She earned a PhD in English literature from U.C. Berkeley and then spent twenty years working as a brakeman for the railroad. She now teaches writing and literature at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Niemann’s latest book, Railroad Noir: The American West at the End of the Twentieth Century, published earlier this year by Indiana University Press, is collaboration with photographer Joel Jensen. Niemann is also the author of Boomer (University of California Press, 1990; later reissued as On The Rails: A Woman’s Journey by Cleis Press, 1997), and Railroad Voices along with photographer Lina Bertucci (Stanford University Press, 1998).

As one of the first women railroaders hired in the 1970s, Niemann trained and worked in Watsonville, California. But as railroads merged and rail yards closed not long after her hire, she spent much of her railroading career as a boomer, traveling to where the jobs were that she could bid on since she was low in seniority rank. She worked rail yards in Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as in her hometown of Los Angeles, California. In a career that spanned several decades, she worked as a brakeman, switchman, and later as a conductor.

"Container Train Crossing Dry Lake Bed, Amboy, California
Copyright by Joel Jensen, All Rights Reserved
Used by Permission

Linda Niemann writes some of the best narratives of place I’ve read. Through her descriptions of the southwestern desert, I can almost feel the dust, hear the rattlesnakes, and see the heat waves (a few drops of my own sweat may have even fallen onto the open pages as I read). She writes with passion about the land and the people she worked with, and she is not fearful about delving into difficult topics or showing the loneliness and isolation that go with the itinerant lifestyle of the boomer.

Niemann does not romanticize the railroader’s life, and Railroad Noir is sometimes a tough, gritty read. This is not Kerouac’s “Railroad Earth” (although I’ve read reviews making such comparisons – possibly because she sometimes worked the same routes along the peninsula south of San Francisco and Watsonville as he once did). It is, however, an honest story about a dangerous and physical job with a grueling schedule (sometimes twelve hours on, eight hours off – essentially working two shifts per day for twenty days straight, and always tethered to the telephone which could ring at any time to call workers in for a shift) that allows no sense of home or family life. In the introduction, Niemann writes: “I called the book Railroad Noir to borrow some of the dark, alienated, and hard-boiled elements from the cinematic term. A certain romance attaches to the railroad, but I wanted to signal that these stories give it a twist. Railroad workers often feel a sense of betrayed romance as they confront the realities of their lives . . . a part that is often omitted in railroad literature.”

"Abandoned Depot, Currie, Nevada"
Copyright by Joel Jensen, All Rights Reserved,
Used by Permission

The essays in Railroad Noir are indeed dark. Beautifully written, they provide an unflinching look at the hard desert landscape of the southwest and railroading during the 1990s when the Southern Pacific Railroad was in decline. Joel Jensen’s photographs were hand-selected by Niemann after she traveled to Ely, Nevada to meet with him and view his prints. Of his images, she writes: “The photographs showed extremes of weather, camaraderie, night work, solitude, bars, decrepit motels, and stark western landscapes. I immediately connected with them emotionally. They all took me back to specific places and states of mind I had been in working as a brakeman in the West. This is why I think of our work as having a shared vision. Joel knows the loneliness of the job and the place.”

Readers new to Niemann’s work may want to start with her first memoir, On The Rails: A Woman’s Journey (originally published under the title Boomer), as it gives a more chronological history of the beginning of her career and experience, particularly when she was learning the skills and craft of working on a switching crew from the “old heads.” While all of her books include a glossary of railroad terminology, Boomer provides the reader a good grasp of how the railroad systems work and what the various jobs entail. It also provides a more comprehensive understanding of Niemann’s railroad work in context to her personal life, including romantic involvements, family issues such as her mother’s slide into Alzheimer’s dementia, and Niemann’s own battles with alcoholism. The essays in Railroad Noir focus more on the later portion of Niemann’s railroading career, including her bout with breast cancer.

Railroad Noir is a complex and beautiful book -- part memoir as told in a series of essays, part coffee table photography book with pictures that tell a visual narrative of their own. Long after you close this book, the stories and images will linger in your brain like an afterimage and may even haunt your dreams.

• You can listen to commentary by Linda Niemann and Kurt Anderson in this podcast of Studio 360 from December 2000, which also includes a profile of photographer O. Winston Link.
• Be sure to check out Joel Jensen's photographs at his website gallery.

Guest Post by Maria Clara Paulino, "Cities of the Dead: Cemeteries in Portugal"

Lapa, Porto

[I’m pleased to host a guest post by Maria Clara Paulino, who was inspired to write about urban cemeteries in her homeland of Portugal after reading my earlier post about mountain cemeteries. Clara is a professor, translator, editor and writer – please be sure to read her bio at the end of the post.]

My first memory of a cemetery is that of a small enclosed area perched on the edge of a high plateau in the small northern town of Vila Real, province of Trás-os-Montes (Beyond the Mountains). Every summer, my father drove for hours up and down a mountain road to stand by my grandfather’s tomb. From there one could see the mountain side falling sharply into a granite gorge and the river below us, meandering through vineyard-covered hills.

Cemetery of Paranhos, Porto

My second vivid memory is that of a very large cemetery in Porto where my brother was buried at the age of 26. A few days after his burial I sat on the white marble slab and told him the world made no sense anymore. When the cemetery was about to close, I walked down narrow paths between tombs filled with sculptures and saw them for the first time as the physical expression of a pain that cannot be told.

Cemetery of Paranhos, Porto

In southern Europe cemeteries are not landscaped areas or rolling hills dotted with small bunches of flowers marking a grave, as is often the case in countries like England or Sweden. Portuguese cemeteries were destined from the start to be “cities of the dead,” filled with granite and marble and family mausoleums like miniature chapels with doors, windows, gates, tiles, and gilded woodwork inside. They are like open air museums, where sculpture is erected as a symbol of loss and of connection with the heavens. Though Portuguese funereal sculpture cannot compete with that of Italy, Dr. Francisco Queiroz, author of Cemeteries in Portugal, claims that in Portuguese cemeteries one finds all kinds of European tomb design, as well as regional designs. And, he adds, “[T]he major Portuguese cemeteries have international significance, especially in terms of architecture, despite not yet being massively explored for tourism. Occasional visitors become often quite surprised with its [sic] artistic and anthropological features, which still remains [sic] almost unexplored by scholars around the world.”

Historically, cemeteries are relatively recent in Portugal. Until mid-18th century, and in some areas even later, people were buried within churches. The tragic Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed the city and surrounding areas, making this practice no longer possible. However, it was only in 1835 that enclosed burial areas began to be built outside the cities.

Paranhos Cemetery, Portos

Portuguese cemeteries are overwhelmingly Catholic. In the distant past, non-religious people were not allowed inside their perimeter; later, they were buried in isolated areas, away from believers. This practice was gradually abandoned, so my father will be able to join his beloved family when his time comes. There is usually a Catholic church, or chapel, close by where the coffin lies before it is taken to its final destination. Not only on All Saints' Day (November 1), or All Souls' Day (November 2), but on any Sunday of the year people buy flowers, candles and candle holders from stands outside cemetery gates. Inside, tucked away behind the porter’s watch post, there are buckets and brooms used to wash the heavy slabs. Since my mother died three years ago, my father spends a good hour every Sunday making sure the marble is washed gleaming white and the vases are filled to the brim with my mother’s favorite flowers.

Wall of Small Containers

Families who can no longer afford a tomb may have the remains moved to smaller marble containers; many of these together make beautiful white walls decorated with flowers. Epitaphs are engraved everywhere: poems by famous writers, as well as by anonymous people.

Epitaph

An example of the latter is the one shown here, which says:

You left; in my eyes, the dryness of love;
In this life, full of hardship, space is now saudade*;
All that is left of the sound of your steps
Is the silence of sorrow;
Until we meet, eternal saudade*
From your wife,
Bete.

*Saudade – a Portuguese word of difficult translation that means a strong yearning for something or someone absent (the absence, whether physical or emotional, is either permanent, of long duration, or particularly hard to endure); nostalgia for something once cherished that can no longer be experienced; a longing for something one cannot quite define and so on. I write about this word and the difficulty of translating it in my blog of July 7 at Writing in the Margins.


Photo Credits: All photographs © Maria Clara Paulino, all rights reserved, used by permission

Bio: Maria Clara Paulino was born in Portugal and educated in Portugal, England and the U.S. She has degrees in English and German Literature, and a Ph.D. in Art History. She has lived in the U.S. for the past seven years and is a Professor of Art History at Winthrop University (currently spending a year in Portugal as a visiting professor). She has worked as a freelance translator and interpreter and is currently editing a 19th-century Women’s Travel Writing Series for the London publishers Pickering & Chatto. In Portugal she wrote articles for various magazines as well as Danças com Gémeos, a fictionalized memoir of a professional woman raising twin girls.

Guest Post by Gayle Brandeis: Delta Girls

It’s my pleasure to host a guest post by novelist Gayle Brandeis. (Click on Gayle’s link to the New York Times article below to see the photograph of pears in bottles.)



My novel Delta Girls was originally titled Pears (and is still titled Pears in my heart of hearts.)

I have always loved pears. When I was in third grade, one of my vocabulary words was “succulent.” I was so excited to come home from school, eat a pear for a snack, and be able to say to my mom, “My, what a succulent pear.” A ripe pear, for me, is the very definition of succulence.

Pears weren’t ever far from my mind as I wrote the novel, which is set, in large part, on an organic pear farm in the Sacramento Delta. Their perfume, their delicate sweetness, their sensuous form. There are few things more beautiful to me than a pear in all its curvy glory.

I was reading the New York Times online one day, and happened upon an article about pear eau de vie. The image of green pears resting inside graceful glass bottles captivated me. There was a gorgeous clarity to the photos, a delicious simplicity. I decided immediately that the owners of the pear farm had to make and bottle their own pear eau de vie. I needed that image to be inside the book, fresh and vibrant. “An orchard in a bottle,” as the article says. I’ve still never tasted pear eau de vie, but I can imagine its flavor, its bite, as vividly as if I had. The image fills all my senses with its clean, sweet note.

I’ve come to like the title Delta Girls – which was chosen by a team of copywriters at Ballantine – but I was very glad to see two ripe pears hanging at the top of the book cover. There’s even a drawing of a pear on the inside title page flanked with leaves that almost look like wings. Pear as succulent angel, here to save us all.



Gayle Brandeis is the author, most recently, of Delta Girls (Ballantine) and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt). You can find out more about her and her work at www.gaylebrandeis.com.

Delta Girls can be ordered online at IndieBound, Amazon, Powell’s, and Barnes & Noble and is also available in bookstores.