Did you always want to be a writer?
What are some of your favorite books?
Have you also written fiction and, if so, explain how the process
is different for you?
Was there a moment that led you to begin writing non-fiction?
How did you first become interested in the topic of your book and what made you want to write a book about it to tell a particular story?
How long did research for this book take and did you know at the
beginning that it would take the direction it did? What did you learn
from
the process of writing it? Were there any surprises in your research and if so what was the biggest?
What about the topic of your book do you want readers to come away understanding? If you could only choose one book to read over and over for the rest
of your life, which book would you choose?
From your perspective, what has been your greatest accomplishment in
life?
Are you working on anything new and, if so, what can you tell us
about it?
--
a discussion with Rosemary Daniell
--
"Yes. My mother Melissa
was a
beautiful Southern belle who was also a talented (and at times published)
writer who thought she didn't have the right to be. After her suicide, my
sister Anne and I discovered she had destroyed her best and most personal
pieces of writing. Thus, I'm the perfect example of Carl Jung's statement
that "nothing effects the lives of the children like the unlived lives of
the
parents." Also, on a lighter note, at age nine, I read a poem in one of
Mother's Ladies Home Journals -- "We frogs/love bogs." And I thought, I
can
do that! So not long after, influenced by "My Friend Flicker" and the
other
horse books I loved, I wrote my own book on notebook paper tied together
with
shoe laces, with deformed-looking drawings of horses; I couldn't spelled
horse -- I spelled it "house;" but I thought it was wonderful book and
knew
from then on that I was destined to be an author."
When I was a child, I loved books like Louisa May Alcott's "An Old
Fashioned
Girl" and Frances Burnett's (please check this author) "The Secret
Garden,"
also "Mehitable," the story of a little girl in Ireland who was familiar
with
fairies. As an adult, I had a cat named Mehitable, after her for a long
time. When I was a teenager, I looked all the usual stuff -- "Forever
Amber"
(I've forgotten who wrote it), and "Dragonwyk" by Anya Seton. I also had
a
passion for Frank Yerby's novels about swashbuckling pirates and maidens
in
jeodardy. Then in my mid twenties I fell in love with modern poetry,
especially the works of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, as well as Randall
Jarrell, James Dickey, Theodore Roekthe, and Tom Gunn, and others. I
studied
their poems to learn to write poetry myself. Then I began a long period of
reading feminist and '70s literature, as well as a great deal of
psychology.
Now among my favorites past and present are William Faulkner's "Light in
August," "Sanctuary," and "Requiem for a Nun;" Flannery O'Connor's
stories;
Anita Brookner, called "the British Henry James" -- I've read all her
novels;
another very funny British novelist, Barbara Pym -- again, I've read all
her
books; Paul Bowles -- "The Sheltering Sky" is one of my favorite novels;
Lawrence Durrell and his "The Alexandria Quartet;" "The Remains of the
Day"
by what's his name? And then many, many books by and about women --
memoirs
like Sue William Silverman's "I Remember Terror, Father, Because I
Remember
You" and books of women's travels and adventure, like Lesley Blanch's "The
Wilder Shores of Love" and Mary Morris's "Nothing to Declare." And so on
and
so on. Reading, like writing, is a journey which never ends, and of which
I
never tire.
Yes, I've written one novel, "The Hurricane Season" (William Morrow and
Company, 1992), and I plan to write more. While the best memoirs and
other
works of creative non-fiction employ all the techniques of fiction, in
fiction, I did enjoy the opportunity to invent, rather than stick to fact,
as
one must do in creative non-fiction, however enhanced that fact might be
through device and style.
Yes. Before I wrote "Fatal Flowers," my mother Melissa's suicide created
a
burning imperative inside me to write an honest account -- or at least as
honest an account as I could -- of her life, my grandmothers' lives, and
my
own life as a Southern woman, in order to untangle and understand the
Southern roots that had shaped us. Writing that book was something I had
to
do in order to save my own life, and those of my daughters. It was also my
first real experience -- though I had already been writing and publishing
for
years, mostly poetry and short pieces, and finally a first collection of
poetry, "A Sexual Tour of the Deep South" -- of the incredible healing
powers
of creative writing. Writing that book healed me of Mother's tragic life
and
death in a way nothing else could have.
I wrote many of the essays for "Confessions of a (Female) Chauvinist" over
a
span of 30 years, adding a few very new, hot ones before the book went to
press. Every essay in the book represents a burning imperative, and it
was
written about of a real desire to explore, know more, express. They are
directed toward women, and are about women's lives, primarily my own.
Again,
as throughout all my work, I wanted to write honest accounts, addressing
the
two subjects I had been taught as a Southern woman were taboo to discuss,
anger and sexuality. And in "Confessions," I also wanted to show that
women
can take risks, can break out of the box Southern culture often puts them
inside, and find a new freedom.
I had long been interested in Southern women, and the forced that shape
them,indeed, this had been the subject of my first, controversial and feminist
collection of poems. Otherwise, see above.
The research came out of my own life and heart. Though I had a contract
with
Holt, Rinehart and Winston to write "Fatal Flowers" before it first came
out
in 1980, I forgot at times that I was writing the book for publication --
I
was that obsessed, that involved in the process. Also, I didn't know when
I
began that memory was like a bucket one dips down in a well, that more and
more of the material I needed would rise to the surface as I wrote -- that
the universe in it's marvelous synchronicity and serendipity would supply
whatever I needed to do so.
For example, when I wrote the essay, "The Deer Who Loved to Be Hunted: A
Reflection on James Dickey's Women," Dickey, my former mentor and long-ago
lover, had been dead two years, when I was suddenly put in touch with the
women who had been part of his life during his latter years (including his
widow, Deborah); thus I was able to write a reflective essay, bringing
closure to this part of my life, to my experience with him.
And writing the essay "The Pill & Me: Before and After" was loads of
fun --
I loved looking back at how women's lives have changed.
That they don't have to be afraid -- that even the darkest
matters and can faced in literature, and that they are not alone, that
healing is on the other side. Or again, as Carl Jung wrote, "We don't see
the light by looking only at images of light, but by looking at the dark."
I'm always more interested in the
book I'm writing, I'm about to write, than anything I've read in the past.
Indeed, I suspect this is why we write -- to read the book we've never yet
read.
My search -- indeed, my obsessive search -- for the truth, and my
efforts to put that truth into words. For as the great poet Keats wrote,
"Truth is beauty, beauty is truth. And that's all ye can know on earth,
and all ye need to know."
I'm working on "My Anarchist's Heart," a memoir about motherhood and
mental illness in the family;
as well as a sequel to my book on writing and th writing workshops I
lead,"The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself: Writing and Living the
Zona
Rosa Way," tentatively titled "Stars in the Zona Rosa: Stories of People
Who
Changed Their Lives Through Creative Writing," and a treatment for a
sitcom
based on Zona Rosa, the series of creative writing workshops I lead in
Savannah, Atlanta, and all over the place, including Europe and Central
America. I also recently completed a new collection of poem, "The
Murderous
Sky," titled after a painting by Rene Magritte. And then new ideas for
other
books are already simmering.