I immediately fell in love with the book for starting out in places called Chickweed Holler and Bloodroot Mountain. Your language is so musical and so descriptive and I’m going to give you the credit for that even if that’s just the way people really speak there! Having grown up in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, were the names and dialogue natural for you to write?
Bringing the language I’ve heard all my life to the page came fairly easily. The voices of my family, friends and neighbors just flowed naturally into the narrative. I didn’t have much trouble deciding what to call the homes of the characters, either. Places here are often named after how the terrain looks or what grows in the area.
The characters ring so true and I was rooting hard for happy endings for them. Are any of these characters or situations based on people you knew or stories you heard during your childhood? Why did you decide to tell the story through a half dozen voices rather than one?
While the characters aren’t based on specific people, they’re like composites of all the people I’ve known and loved, with bits of myself thrown in. Bloodroot is told by six voices because each one seemed so important to me. I felt strongly that they all had something necessary to say about Myra, who was the heart of the story.
I’ve never been to Appalachia but, after reading this book, I feel like I have. It has such a powerful sense of place. What are the first few words that come to your mind to describe this area and that you really wanted to get across?
The first few words would be mysticism, folklore and beauty. I grew up surrounded by beautiful mountains. I also inherited a rich tradition of storytelling and folk belief, passed down through generations of my family. I wanted to portray my own vision of home in the pages of Bloodroot, and hope all those elements came through.
How important was the location to the actual story? To me, they felt so strongly connected – that these events could only have occurred in this specific place.
Place definitely played a central role in the telling of Bloodroot, because the landscape does so much to shape the lives and insides of the characters.
While I was reading the book, it seemed like time stood still and the outside world didn’t exist. I could completely feel the characters’ isolation, and the poverty and sense of hopelessness were so pervasive, the violence seemed almost inevitable. How did this kind of environment affect you when you lived there, and has it changed over time?
I did want to portray the isolation that comes with living here. I experienced it myself, growing up in a rural part of East Tennessee. I spent most of my childhood alone, exploring the hills around our house. Like Johnny and Laura, it was only when I went to school that I realized how sheltered I had been. I also addressed in Bloodroot some of the social issues that are a factor here, such as the poverty. I still live in Appalachia and can see that conditions have improved over the last few decades, but progress is bittersweet. The landscape I based Bloodroot Mountain on has changed a lot since I was a little girl, and not necessarily in a positive way.
Can you tell me a little about what the title – which is perfect — means to you?
I discovered the title when I was thinking about what to call the mountain my characters lived on. I considered what would grow there, what plants and flowers would be indigenous, and bloodroot occurred to me. It grows in the hills behind my childhood home. The delicate white flower and its red root sap, which has the power to both poison and heal, brought the story’s theme together in my mind. It signifies to me the complex nature not only of the human heart but of life in Appalachia, and also the blood ties that bind my characters in more ways than one.
I was completely enraptured by the folk magic and mysticism, and held my breath as Clifford cured Byrdie’s thrush by blowing into her mouth. There was something so intimate and beautiful about that – and something so shocking about eating a chicken heart to make a man fall in love. How much of this was based on incidents you really saw or experienced?
That kind of mysticism is very much part of the Appalachia I know. The scene where Clifford blows down Byrdie’s throat is based on a story my dad tells of his mother taking his baby sister to a neighbor man who cured her thrush the same way. My mom had an aunt who took off her warts by rubbing a stone in a circle around each one and then throwing the stones away. When I was small, a friend of the family moved out of her house in the holler because it was hainted. People here still believe in and practice folk magic today, especially the older generation.
The women are such strong characters here, as seems to always be the case in difficult circumstances. Are there traits that you think were just necessary for their survival there?
I do think the hardscrabble Appalachian way of life, subsistence farming and raising large families, has made strength necessary for both men and women.
The loving relationship between Myra and her grandmother made me cry. Did you have a grandmother like Byrdie – or wish you did? Can you see anyone in particular portray them in a movie version?
I never knew either of my grandmothers—they both died before I was born—so Byrdie definitely comes in part from my longing for one. It’s hard for me to envision actors as the people in my head, but someone at a book club meeting I attended recently mentioned Sissy Spacek as a possible Byrdie. That sounded right to me.
What are you working on next? I can’t wait to read your next book!
I’m currently editing my second novel, called Long Man. It’s set in the Tennessee Valley during the Great Depression, about a little girl who disappears from a town in the months before it’s scheduled to be flooded by a TVA dam.
This post originally appeared on my former blog, StyleSubstanceSoul.
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