Kaye Gibbons officially began work on her seventh novel, Raised By Hand, on February 1, 2001, at 4:30 in the morning. Just over three weeks later, she offered her first public reading from the manuscript at Thompson Theatre on the N.C. State University campus. This annual reading as author-in-residence for NCSUs Friends of the Library offered not only a first glimpse at an internationally-renowned writers work-in-progress but a particularly intimate encounter with the woman herself, who was at one point so overcome by the emotional weight of the excerpt that she simply had to stop reading. It was, on many levels, a privileged moment for those in attendancea group which surprisingly numbered perhaps no more than a couple of dozen people.
Its odd, says Gibbons nearly a year later, in this, her first interview about the upcoming novel. I'll give a reading here at a university and 30 people come, but I go to Grand Rapids and there will be 1200 people there. She laughs. I guess if people can talk to you in the produce department in Harris Teeter, theres no need to get a babysitter and put on pantyhose.
We talk just days before 2001a year of transitions for Gibbonseases into 2002, a year which will see speaking engagements at schools ranging from Louisiana State University to Harvard, the premiere of a made-for-Showtime movie adapted from her fourth novel, Charms for the Easy Life, and the October publication of both the new novel and Living by the Word, a recently written book of literary essays, followed by a 38-city national book tour. Recently divorced and still eight weeks away from finishing her novel, Gibbons is ending 2001 with another work-in-progress: the sale of her home. But though several rooms in the house are clearly in various stages of the moving process, the room where we speak remains plush and comfortable. Oversized chairs and couches amiably fill the space. The family cats wander purposefully around the room. (One waits until I lower my pen before striding onto my lap.) The coffee table and end table are strewn with books, including Mary Olivers New and Selected Poems, Bram Stokers Dracula, Jeff Foxworthys Youre Not A Kid Anymore and an advance copy of William Kennedys Roscoea title related to a major project on Gibbons to-do list. On one wall hang a pair of paintings by Minnie Evans, and propped against another is a chalkboard listing chapter titles for Raised By Hand: Chapter One is Some Insensible Quality in the Atmosphere, Chapter Four reads, A Woman is Like a Dumb Animal, and the final chapter, Chapter Ten, is titled Joy and the Fine Attitude of Life.
Its really a story of resurrection. That's the word I would use, says Gibbons. Its about a woman who watches her infant and then an older child die in the flu pandemic of 1918. The oldest daughter, the remaining child, mothers her for a couple of years, and the woman isI use this term in the bookthoroughly disdone by grief. She is spiritually abandoned by her husband, who seems oblivious to the fact that two of his children have died, and she just falls apart, not so much because her children are dead but because he can't empathize with his children being killed by the flu. The mother and her remaining daughter go to Europe in 1920, after the seas are safe following the end of World War I, and the mother begins a slow process of rebirth and renewal.
I ran across the title Raised By Hand in a medical journal from 1917 that said that children who are raised by hand are more likely to develop pellagra, lice, etc. than those raised by servants, says Gibbons. The woman in this bookher name is Alice and the family is very affluentshe raises her children by hand. But then that title took on more meaning when the mother becomes literally prostrate with grief and the daughter, Mary, pulls her up by the hand.
Gibbons calls the new novel a lot darker than anything I've written before, and at another point, she describes the book as a female Ulysses, saying she's been reading the James Joyce novel when she's not writing. Raised By Hand uses stream-of-consciousness, she elaborates. Alice goes on a journey, and it takes place around the same time that Ulysses took place. And although the book covers 25 years, theres an overlay of daily routine to it.
Though Gibbons admits that beyond the bare basics its hard to describe things in it that may have a plot, she talks eagerly about the novels thematic concerns. Discussing the changing roles of woman in this era, she notes that Alice smokes in public and rabble rouses for the vote. Citing a passage from Joseph Campbells The Power of Myththe reading of which has become part of her daily routineshe further explains that the novel embraces his assertions about living in the present and not waiting for your life to begin. And the novel also deals with the sheer joy found in living with authenticity.
Near the end of the book, the mother realizes that she had been waiting all her life for her husband to die, and she says death both freed me and mocked me. She rises up out of the ruins and becomes a tad bohemian and starts reading T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound instead of Sir Walter Scott. She takes all those romantic historical books and sets a bonfire with them.
With approximately eight weeks of writing left on the book, how is it that she can speak so confidently of episodes near the end of the novel? I've written the last scenes already, she says. I always do that. Its sort of like, if I was going to drive to Chicago, I could get on i-40 and go for a long ways. But I need to know where I'm headed.
Where she's headed, where she's been
In 1987, at the age of 26 and still in the process of completing requirements for a degree from UNC-Chapel Hill, Gibbons made a startling, enviable literary debut with the slim novel, Ellen Foster. The novels dust jacket boasted accolades from Eudora Welty, Walker Percy and Elizabeth Spencer, among others; the book went on to win major awards including the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; and the title has become as sure a staple on high school reading lists as Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird.
New novels followed approximately every two years
A Virtuous Woman in 1989, A Cure for Dreams in 91, Charms for the Easy Life in 93 and Sights Unseen in 95and in their wake came more acclaim, awards and fans, with each later book gaining new ground on the New York Times bestseller lists. In 1997, Gibbons was awarded a Knighthood from the French Minister of Culture for her contributions to French literature, and that same year she received a perhaps even-more-coveted honor stateside when her first two novels were chosen for inclusion in Oprahs Book Club, boosting Gibbons profile and her sales. Of the 4.5 million books Gibbons has sold domestically, she estimates that a million of them were due to the Oprah coverage.
Im very grateful to Oprah, says Gibbons, though she recognizes that some readers may have pigeonholed her work because of the designation. Strangers make assumptions about the quality of my work when they hear I had two Oprah booksthat they're in the same category as Bridges of Madison County. For a while I was defensive about it but now I just accept it. Its hard for people to grasp that its literary fiction, but I'm a firm believer that literature can be popular and read by everyone.
Though the years since the publication of 1998s Civil War novel On The Occasion Of My Last Afternoon have seen more awards and honors, including induction into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and receiving the North Carolina Award, the states highest civilian honor, Gibbons admits that recent years had brought a slowdown in her writing.
The only creative work I turned in for two years was the introduction to Kate Chopins The Awakening and Other Stories for Modern Library, she says. I just wasnt able to focus.
She regained her concentration with the encouragement of a painter named Billy Dunlop in Washington, D.C. I called him up and asked him how he focused with everything going on in his life, she says, and his advice was deceptively simple: He told me to listen and look and just write for a few days in my head and then do it. And so I started back.
Gibbons schedule now, however, may not seem so simple as this anecdote implies. Because of her insistence on putting daughters Mary, Leslie and Louise first, Gibbons does the bulk of her writing after they've gone to sleep. I've always had a policy of not being focused on the book and not sitting glued to a laptop when my kids are here, because they may feel that I'm not accessible to them, she says. So to them it looks like I do nothing at all but cook and clean and do laundry.
With this policy in place, Gibbons generally begins her writing at midnight. I watch one episode of Designing Women and then just start doing it, she explains. I'm so preoccupied by it that I work until about 6 or 6:30 a.m., and then I sleep a few hours in the morning.
Though Gibbons is able to write some during the day, her mornings are usually filled with business and charitable work, which she takes very seriously. Her recent work in this regard has helped establish a library for the Masonic Home for Children in Oxford. She's also devoted time and energy to supporting organizations including Planned Parenthood, Books for Kids and the Methodist Home for Children, a Raleigh facility that oversees foster care.
In some cases, Gibbons has even auctioned off the opportunity for people to appear in Raised By Hand. People have been donating money to these groups and they get their name in the new book and free copies of my books for life, says Gibbons. Youve got to have names in a book, and as long as nobody wins the bidding war and their names are Tiffany or Brittany, I'll be OK.
Gibbons also offers support to a handful of writers whom she's taken under her wing, providing advice and guidance both in writing and in the publication process. She's working with three writers now, including Scott Wright in Rocky Mount and Betsy Jernigan in Raleigh, who just sent her first novel off to an agent.
In the midst of all this, Gibbons has a full slate of plans for the future. Coming months include finishing Raised By Hand and organizing the group of essays which will be published in Living By the Word, and while she's been writing the novel, Gibbons has been simultaneously working on a screenplay for the book as well. And her next projectwhich may come as a surprise to those familiar with her workis to rewrite Dracula.
Barry Moser, the illustrator, and I are working on it, she says, gesturing to the book on the table. Her casual manner belies the importance of the collaboration. Moser, among the most respected illustrators in the nation, is already revered for his illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, Moby Dick and Eudora Weltys The Robber Bridegroom, and his most recent, most monumental project: illustrating the Bible. He and I are also doing an illustrated sequel to Ellen Foster, she continues, one edition with engravings and another with watercolors. Writing a sequel now seems almost urgent to us, because were eager to show how Ellen, as a young woman, builds on her past and isn't destroyed by it. If I was working with any artist except Barry, I'd be too afraid of failure to attempt any venture back into Ellens story.
Finally, though her move from her current home will not immediately take her far, the possibility persists that Gibbons may eventually relocate to New York, and that prospect has recently contributed to a change in her attitude toward her own writing.
I found an apartment in New York and then two months later watched it fall down on TV, she explains. I went back and edited a lot after September 11, because if I'm going to write fiction, which is a pretty frivolous occupation when compared to being a brain surgeon or a minister or a fireman or a policeman, I had to justify myself to myself that I'm sitting here making up stories when people are in so much reality.
But though the events of September 11 caused her to reassess her writing, and specifically her writing of this book, it has not dampened her enthusiasm for New York City or her intentions in that direction.
Starting April 1, were going to rent another apartment up there, she says, and I'll go up there on long weekends to write with no distractionswhich sounds strange not to have distractions in New York, but no emotional distractions. After a thoughtful pause, she adds, I write better away from home.
A permanent move to New York, however, is further awayat least until after her daughters are through with school or ready to make the moveand though Gibbons hasnt yet settled on her next residence here in Raleigh, she admits that she and her eldest daughter share a fondness for the Victorian homes on Blount Street, though the family may also build a new house to meet what Gibbons describes as offbeat space requirements.
In the meantime, the best place to catch Gibbonsespecially for the many who didn't make her reading at N.C. State last yearwill be at her reading in the Peace College Recital Hall on Monday, Feb. 11, at 7:30 p.m. The event, which includes a reception and book signing, is free and open to the public and marks a great opportunity to be among the firstor at least the secondin the Triangle to get a sneak preview of the next great work from one of Southern literatures leading luminaries. .