An Interview with New
York Times Bestselling Author
Sharyn McCrumb
You are the successful author of
the popular Ballad novels, many of which have become New York Times
bestsellers. Did you ever expect your books to be bestsellers? Do you allow
yourself to dream about such goals as you write? Or is the story more
important?
Oh,
dear. I know the answer to this question is supposed to be “No.” Women, and
Southern women in particular, are supposed to say things like, “Laws! I never
in the world expected anybody else to like my little old stories,” but really
that’s like asking a doctor if he’s surprised when his patients don’t die or a
lawyer if she’s amazed when her client is acquitted. I took many, many writing
courses, and I’ve read one book a day since third grade, and I’ve written
easily ten million words, perfecting my craft, so yes: I expected to be
successful. I worked very hard, not only in the writing but also in promoting,
touring, and public speaking to ensure that my work would be read and
appreciated. A literary career takes talent, but it also takes every bit as
much work as a career in medicine or law.
Why do you think the Ballad novels
are so popular with your readers?
Judging
from the messages I get from readers, the Ballad novels strike a chord with
people who are from the mountains or whose ancestors came from there.
Sometimes, too, the setting resonates with people of Scots-Irish descent. I
think people long for a simpler time, for connection with the land, and a sense
of peace. It seems odd to say that people find those things in novels that often
deal with violence and war, but that does seem to be the attraction: a
connection to the past, to old ways, lost stores of folkways…as Thomas Wolfe
put it, “The long lane-end into heaven.”
Fan-favorite character Nora
Bonesteel has made many appearances in your novels. She’s back as the central
character in Nora Bonesteel’s Christmas
Past. Why did you decide to write this book about her?
Nora is
more real to a great many people than I am. My later Ballad novels were set in
earlier times altogether: the Civil War, the American Revolution, and there was
no easy way to insert Nora into those narratives. I didn’t want to do it anyway
because I had other important points to make, and I didn’t want readers to be
distracted by a chance to visit with their imaginary friend. Finally, I decided
to give her a book of her own so that her friends could visit her.
Tell us about the real Nora
Bonesteel. Are your other characters based on real people? Have you met them?
Characterization
is seldom a matter of pure invention. A writer is always observing the world,
ready to salvage it for parts. Garrison Keillor said, “Writers are vacuum cleaners who suck up other
people’s lives and weave them into stories like a sparrow builds a nest from
scraps.” Almost all major
characters are to some extent embellishments upon the personality of a real
person known to the author—though not necessarily well-known. One might build a
character on a face seen in a magazine or on a scrap of overheard conversation.
In my
work the most direct translation from life is Nora Bonesteel, who, after twenty
years of novels, has taken on a life of her own, but originally she was
inspired by a folklore professor at Appalachian State University, Charlotte
Ross. Here’s how that came about:
When If Ever I Return Pretty
Peggy-O was published in 1990, Scribners hosted a publication party for the
book at that year’s Appalachian Studies Conference at Unicoi State Park, near
Helen, Georgia. The publisher sent my editor, Susanne Kirk, down from New York
to host the festivities. The magic realism probably began for Susanne when she
was picked up at the Atlanta airport by Major Sue, an elfin army intelligence
officer from Wisconsin, and driven up several hours north into the hills of
Georgia to be set down in Helen, a Bavarian theme-park-style alpine village
that has made many an unsuspecting traveler believe in magic realism—or at
least in Oz.
The conference book party ended
in the early afternoon, and that evening Susanne and I invited some of the
conference attendees to a get-together in the cabin we had rented for the
weekend at Unicoi State Park. The party consisted of eighteen professors, two
bottles of wine, a bag full of whatever the convenience store had in the way of
snacks, and Susanne, the major, and me. After an hour or so of pretzels and
shop talk, the talk turned to the supernatural, and one by one we began to tell
the family ghost story. These weren’t “Give
me back my golden arm” stories. Nothing that Stephen King would buy you
a cup of coffee for. They were little stories of supernatural happenings that
occurred in the family. Nobody made much of them. They were just there. Most of
them went something like this: “My grandmother was in the kitchen when she
looked out the window over the sink and she saw my Uncle John walking across
the yard. Now Uncle John lives in Cincinnati, so she wasn’t expecting to see
him, but she thought he might have driven in to surprise her. She hurried out
into the yard, but she didn’t see him. No car was in the driveway, and when she
called out to Uncle John, there was no answer. Finally she gave up, and as she
was coming in the back door, the phone was ringing. It was the family in
Cincinnati calling to say that Uncle John had died—just when she saw him in the
yard.”
It isn’t an earth-shaking story,
but when you hear more than a dozen similar stories at an academic party, it
gives you pause.
We had PhDs in English and
Appalachian studies and mining engineering, people from Georgia and New York
and everywhere in-between, and everyone there had a ghost story—everyone except
Susanne and the two male professors.
Charlotte Ross, the folklore
scholar from Appalachian State wasn’t surprised. “These stories tend to get
passed down in the family by the womenfolk,” she said. “Men don’t hear about
them.” Wait until a multigenerational family holiday like Thanksgiving, she
advised. After the meal is over, the men go out to watch television or talk
among themselves while the women congregate in the kitchen to do the dishes and
put away the leftovers. Now, first the women tell childbirth horror stories.
That will get any rookies out of the kitchen. After the uninitiated have fled,
then they get down to it.
“I don’t have any family ghost
stories, either,” said Susanne. “I grew up in Tucson.”
Charlotte Ross looked at her for
a long moment and said, “Well…ghosts don’t have call-
waiting.”
But the rest of us had a swarm of
tales: about a host of invisible beings who ford the Little Santeetlah River at
twilight, speaking Cherokee and smelling of bear grease; about the girl who
dropped a knife setting the table for a dumb supper and was stabbed by her
husband years later…with the same knife; or the weary Confederate soldier who
asks the reenactors how to get back to his regiment.
“I left that thread out of the
book,” I said wistfully. “This streak of the supernatural runs deep through
mountain families, and I left it out.”
“You had to,” said Charlotte
Ross, who later became the model for Nora Bonesteel. “Peggy-O is told
from the male point of view. The element of magic didn’t belong in the
narrative.”
“Maybe not,” I said, “But it
belongs in stories about Appalachia.”
You are known for writing about
Appalachia. Did this begin with your own love for the culture, a special
interest in a specific town, a personal experience, or something else?
The dark and troubled world of
the Ballad novels is the other South,
drawn on my father’s Appalachian heritage. My father’s family—the Arrowoods and
the McCourrys—settled in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina in 1790,
when the wilderness was still Indian country. They came from the north of
England and from Scotland, and they seemed to want mountains, land, and as few
neighbors as possible. The first of the McCourrys to settle in America was my
great-great-great grandfather Malcolm McCourry, whose story I tell in my novel The Songcatcher. Malcolm McCourry
was kidnapped as a child from the Scottish island of Islay in the Hebrides in
1750 and made to serve as a crewman on a sailing ship. He later became an
attorney in Morristown, New Jersey; fought with the Morris Militia in the
American Revolution; and finally settled in what is now Mitchell County in western
North Carolina in 1794.
Another (distant) relative, an
Arrowood killed in the Battle of Waynesville in May 1865, was the last man to
die in the Civil War east of the Mississippi. I recount the search for him in
my novel Ghost Riders, which won
the Wilma Dykeman Award for
Historical Fiction from the East Tennessee historical Society. (Through the Honeycutts, I am also a
cousin of Wilma Dykeman.)
Yet another “connection” (we are cousins-in-law through the Howell
family) is the convicted murderess Frankie Silver, the subject of
my 1998 novel, The Ballad of Frankie
Silver. Frances
Stewart Silver (1813–1833) was the first woman hanged for murder in the state
of North Carolina. I did not discover the family tie that links us until I
began the two years of research prior to writing the novel. I wasn’t surprised,
though. Since both our families had been in Mitchell County for more than two
hundred years, and both produced large numbers of children to intermarry with
other families, I knew the connection had to be there. These same bloodlines
link both Frankie Silver and me to Appalachian writer Wilma Dykeman (The French Broad) and also to
the famous bluegrass musician Del McCoury.
The namesake of my character Spencer
Arrowood, my paternal grandfather, worked in the machine shop of the
Clinchfield Railroad. He was present on that September day in 1916 at the
railroad yard in Erwin, Tennessee, when a circus elephant called Mary was
hanged for murder: she had killed her trainer in Kingsport. (I used this last story as a theme in She
Walks These Hills, in which an elderly
escaped convict is the object of a manhunt in the Cherokee National Forest. In
the novel the radio disc jockey Hank the Yank, reminds his listeners of that
story as a prayer for mercy for the hunted fugitive.)
I grew up listening to my
father’s tales of World War II in the Pacific and to older family stories of
duels and escapades in Model A Fords. With such adventurers in my background, I
grew up seeing the world as a wild and exciting place; the quiet tales of
suburban angst so popular in modern fiction are Martian to me.
Two of my great-grandfathers were
circuit preachers in the North Carolina mountains a hundred years ago, riding
horseback over the ridges to preach in a different community each week. Perhaps
they are an indication of our family’s regard for books, our gift of
storytelling and public speaking, and our love of the Appalachian mountains,
all traits that I acquired as a child.
Some would say that the setting
of your novels is just as important as the story or the characters. Do you
believe this is true?
Yes, I
think that the setting of the Ballad novels is almost a character in itself.
The heritage from Celtic Britain and the folkways of the ancestors of the
current residents influence the events and actions of the narrative in ways
that make the story unfold here as it would nowhere else.
This story is specifically set at
Christmas and it’s your first novella. Did you set out to write both? Will
there be more of the same in the future?
I did set out to write both. Nora
has so many eager fans that I thought of this book as a Christmas present to
them. Will there be another one? Ask Nora.
You are a storyteller. Is
storytelling an art or a science? Is it a formula or craft? What advice do you
have for others pursuing storytelling (written or told)?
I
compare storytelling to basketball. It takes an enormous amount of practice and
effort to perfect your skills at either, and if you put in the time and effort,
you will get better at it. But no one can give you a talent for storytelling
any more than someone can teach you to be tall. You can improve what you have,
though.
Advice to writers: George
Washington Carver said, “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it
enough.” You have to really care about the story you’re telling in order for it to become real and heartfelt
for the reader.
Your readers are eager for more.
What’s next for you?
I am
spending the summer writing a novel inspired by true events in 1936, but Nora
is not featured in it. She may be back someday, though, if readers really like
her Christmas adventure.
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