Prelude: The Chipmunk Connection - Moravian College

Of People and Places
From Stranger
Here Below:
“Pilgrim and
Stranger, 1962”
They trotted her out like a show pony. A
circus act. When they asked her to play, she
played—the waltzes, Debussy, the Chopin
Etude she’d mastered.
They reported on her perfect grade
average before she began, every time. She
was exceptional! A remarkable exception!
Proof of something surely, of the school’s
right mission. Virginal and pure to boot.
Studious. Accomplished on the piano, on
which she did not play race music, but the
classics.
Mary Elizabeth kept picturing that young
man’s hands floating over the keys, from
such a distance, from the faraway seats
where she and Aunt Paulie were sitting. And
yet she felt like she was right there, beside
him, or somehow inside him, her hands
his hands, glazing the keys like rainwater.
Fingers like the legs of racehorses.
She thought that if she could play the
French composers and also, now, Stravinsky,
the pieces Aunt Paulie regretted never
learning, the music might somehow still be
hers. Hers, and Aunt Paulie’s. Those years in
Paris, that longing in Paulie’s chest, in both
their chests, when they played. Sometimes,
when she finished playing Chopin, Mary
Elizabeth sat at the piano and wept.
But a funny thing: She couldn’t play the
Stravinksy. She knew now that she never
would.
prohibited integrated
education], she defies
the rules and continues
to invite black
students into her
classroom. Eventually
she is fired and ends
up becoming a Shaker
at the age of 40, when
Pleasant Hill has only
two other people in
the community.
Berea comes back
into the story through
the character of Vista,
a single woman from
the mountains, who becomes Georgia’s
caretaker in her later years. Vista’s daughter,
Maze, is a student at Berea College in 1961.
I wanted to explore issues of race,
women’s relationships, and spirituality and
sexuality—because to become a Shaker,
as Georgia does, is to forgo a sexual life.
Georgia’s one great love has been forbidden,
and she must try to make sense of this
in spiritual terms.
What is your research process? It’s fairly
indiscriminate—you read and absorb and
note anything that seems quirky or interesting.
Then something gives you an idea
and you pursue it. For this novel, I received
an FDRC summer stipend my first year at
Moravian, 1998. I went to both Berea and
Pleasant Hill and read everything I could
find in their archives—old newspapers,
journals, log books. Pleasant Hill had this
funny photo album that belonged to a family
that had run an inn on the property. A
lot of that material ended up in the novel.
As I read and learned about Kentucky,
I became so fascinated with the historical
background that early versions of the
novel included too much of it. My editor
graciously pointed that out, and finally I
could hear it from him. [She laughs.] But I
feel that if you’re going to write historical
fiction, you need to try to learn as much
as possible about the place and time that
you’re writing about. The peril is that you
then want to teach everybody.
I’m in that mode now—reading and
researching, getting ready to write a per-
sonal essay. It can be uncomfortable—you
often feel like you’re spinning your wheels
because you’re not writing. But ultimately,
it’s what I have to do to feel like I’m ready
to begin writing.
How do you integrate all of the pieces into
a single structure? This was a long, tortured
process. I’ve been working on this novel for
over 10 years, and it’s gone through many,
many versions. It isn’t always like this. The
structure for In Hovering Flight became apparent
to me fairly early, and it just worked.
In the first version of this novel, I was
using first person to tell the story of Mary
Elizabeth, an African-American girl, and
my agent at the time cautioned me about
it. It’s a source of some concern to me—
that I will be seen as co-opting her story.
And I understand that. So, very early on, I
changed to third person, and I think that
was for the good.
But I think that early uncertainty
created a rocky path for deciding how to
structure the book. When I rewrote it for
the last time last summer, I cut some, and
added new material about the friends and
about Mary Elizabeth’s mother, Sarah. Then
I just laid it out on the floor and thought,
well, this ought to come before that. And I
just took chunks and wove them together. I
tweaked it some more, and I thought that’s
it. It’s not a chronological order at all.
What inspires your writing? Places. That’s
where my novels seem to come from. I’m
very interested in exploring topography and
trying to capture the beauty of the languages
of different places. I have another novel
in mind, very unformed so far, but I know
it will involve the city of Prague.
Places, and events—historical moments.
In In Hovering Flight, it was the resurgence
of the environmental movement in the ’60s,
and ’70s. Also, social justice issues. That’s a
tricky one for a novelist. There’s always the
risk of being heavy-handed.
Favorite authors? Alice Munro, who writes
short stories almost exclusively—I think
she’s brilliant. Marilynne Robinson, author
of the novels Housekeeping, Gilead, and
Home. Nicholson Baker, who wrote A Box
12 MORAVIAN COLLEGE MAGAZINE SUMMER 2010