Prelude: The Chipmunk Connection - Moravian College

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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
of Matches and The Anthologist, which I just read. It’s just lovely. I’m also a fan of the German writer W.G. Sebald, who blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction genres. His Emigrants is a novel that reads like a memoir. I seem to be drawn to many of the post-war German writers. And I should mention C. E. Morgan, a great young writer who went to Berea College, author of All the Living. I always have a stack of things going— right now, I’m reading about efforts to dam the Delaware River for the essay I’m working on; poetry by Robert Frost, John Clare, William Carlos Williams; and Eric Freyfogle on law and property ownership in relation to environmental issues. And always the latest New Yorker magazine. What do you feel is most important to convey to students who desire to write? Seize every opportunity to fill your time with writing. Yes, you are busy now, but not like you will be later. Savor having the time to write—and, no matter how busy you become, reserve a block of time for writing. I also tell my creative writing students about the value of graduate school—it can give you that time to write, along with a community of people devoted to writing. It can be affirming. > Is it difficult to transition from writing to the classroom to being at home as a mother and wife? Oh yeah, it’s just a crazy struggle and I don’t do it very well. [She laughs.] Almost everybody has that quandary. I wrote this piece called “The Paradoxes of Caring,” which is on my blog [http:// inhoveringflight.blogspot.com/2009/01/ paradoxes-of-caring.html]. It talks about the current tendency to over-parent. So many readers of In Hovering Flight are angry with Addie—they see her as a neglectful mother—and that always shocks me. I didn’t intend for her to be a bad mother. Maybe parents need to back off a little—let kids play in the creek. People often ask me, “How much of your writing is about you?” I always say, “none of it really.” But of course some things are. For Addie, the question is, how does she combine making her art with being a mother and being concerned about the planet? In my blog piece, I included a quote by Scott Russell Sanders that originally appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle. Essentially, he says that it’s a struggle—but also a gift—to balance all of these things: writing, parenting, teaching. And when I read that, I only felt a little bit like, “yeah, but you’re a man.” [She laughs.] It’s artfully put—and I feel that’s what I aspire to. I recently did a reading at the Northshire Books bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, and a former student gave me a lovely introduction. The woman was Tina Mabey [Weikart ’98]—she had an independent study in poetry with me. I remember that she was so in love with language—she devoured William Carlos Williams. That kind of exuberance is what you’re looking for in students who will go on to become writers—they love reading as much as they do writing. Because what you love, as a writer, is not the sound of your own voice—it’s bigger than that. A love of language . . . that’s what you’re looking for. W Joyce Hinnefeld discusses her short stories with Advanced Placement students at Easton High School. SUMMER 2010 MORAVIAN COLLEGE MAGAZINE 13
Page 1 and 2: SUMMER 2010 Moravian Words Count Mo
Page 3 and 4: summer 2 Prelude: The Chipmunk Conn
Page 5 and 6: The Chipmunk Connection By Lois Bru
Page 7 and 8: June Guitar Classic Classical guita
Page 9 and 10: Transformation of Collier Hall Begi
Page 11 and 12: LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT Warm gree
Page 13: oyce Hinnefeld, associate professor
Page 17 and 18: Not Your Mother’s Freshman Comp M
Page 19 and 20: that, though, they are friendly, as
Page 21 and 22: dedicated Precious to her sister Ca
Page 23 and 24: Alumni Weekend Where were you Alumn
Page 25 and 26: transitions Look for Class Notes On
Page 27 and 28: Our greatest need The Moravian Scho

Prelude: The Chipmunk Connection - Moravian College

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