AUTHOR
woman hears voices, writes novels
So read the headline of an article in my local newspaper after I wrote Private Parts, my first novel. And it's true, I do hear voices—the narrator of that novel had come from the stream-of-consciousness snippets of letters a friend used to write to my sister. That headlong voice translated itself into a character, Mattie Turner, who created her own stories. Sometimes it seemed as if the voice itself were the story—certainly it was the propellant.
In my second novel, Keeper of the House, I looked for a voice for several years before the right one presented itself one morning. Minyon Manigault's was not the voice I had expected—I surely had not imagined attempting a novel narrated entirely by a young black woman—but it was the voice of the story. When the first line emerged, finally—"This here's the girl you wanting"—it seemed to me right and true.
For me, writing becomes a process of listening for that kind of right and true, for the voice of the story. The same applies to reading—from the fabulous voices created by Chaucer and Twain and Welty in some of the courses I teach at Bennington to the tentative attempts of first-time writing students. Voice rises up from inside the writer to shape character, story, truth. I keep listening for it.
I came late to writing and when I began, I wrote stories that had little or nothing to do with my "real" life—allegory and fantasy, imaginings as far from my own history as I could muster. One early story did touch on real life events; after it appeared in print, my parents sent me a cartoon of a ravaged-looking writer at a book signing for her memoir, called My Miserable Life. Before her stood an old couple, equally ravaged looking. The caption read: "Look, if we'd known you were going to be a writer, we'd have been better parents"—after which, a period of retreat from anything resembling the autobiographical.
Recently, stories and essays have emerged that more closely follow life events. In addition to family-related essays, I'm at work right now on a novel centering on the lives of an Air Force family in the 1950s and 60s. A chapter from the novel appeared in the "Best of the South 2009" issue of The Oxford American.
View Rebecca's Resume