Q&A with Vicki Salloum

 

Photo by Kelly Allerton

 

 

Vicki Salloum is the author of the new novel A Gathering Place. Her other books include Waiting for You at Midnight. She lives in New Orleans.

 

Q: What inspired you to write A Gathering Place, and how did you create your character Blue?

 

A: I began A Gathering Place years ago.  A novel of mine had just been published, and I was wondering what I was going to write about next. I’m happiest when writing fiction, and I wanted to start a new novel right away. I also wanted it to have a storyline that would sustain my interest over the long period of time it takes to write a novel. 

 

I knew it was going to be hard to come up with a storyline. Many of my short stories and novels had been published, and I felt I had exhausted my ability to find new material interesting enough to write about. 

 

I walked over to a coffee shop near my house, sat in the outdoor patio and, with a cappuccino sitting on the table, tried my best to come up with a plot and characters. Nothing I thought about interested me. 

 

Finally, I thought about an aunt of mine. She was long deceased, had lived next door to me when I was growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and, for reasons too numerous to mention, I felt that writing about a protagonist inspired by her would be fascinating. So she became the inspiration for my central character, Blue Hamieh.      

 

Armed with a central character, I needed to invent a plot. I don’t precisely recall how I came up with the plot for A Gathering Place. I try hard not to be consciously aware of how my brain works when creating fiction. Instead, I put my faith in the creative process—in my imagination—to take hold of a story and see it through to the end. 

 

However, this is the way it likely happened that I came up with the concept of an 81-year-old woman leaving her Mississippi home to move to New Orleans to create a “gathering place” in a desolate neighborhood on orders from the Mother of God: Years ago, I read a book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.

 

It tells the story of Mother Teresa, who believed she heard the voice of Jesus telling her to found a new congregation of nuns to serve the “poorest of the poor” in the slums of Calcutta, India. 

 

At some point, my imagination must have combined the divine missions of two women of faith, Mother Teresa and the fictitious Blue Hamieh, only instead of setting the story in Calcutta, I set it in New Orleans four years after Hurricane Katrina managed to devastate that city. 

 

Combined with that, a friend and her husband were renovating a building to make it into a Mexican restaurant/bar in what I thought was a hopeless part of town to start a business.  All of that played into the storyline that was to become A Gathering Place.        

 

Q: How did you research the novel and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: Both sets of grandparents settled in the United States from Lebanon. So many of the Lebanese characters in my book are loose reminders of family members or extended family from my childhood, most of whom are now dead. 

 

Lebanese people cherish their families and stay closely connected. We would spend our holidays together and so many of the details of family get-togethers in my book come from my childhood memories.    

 

However, I did a great deal of research, spending many hours researching, among other things, the Arabic language, foods, and history of Lebanon as well as the background of the historic neighborhood in New Orleans where the story takes place. 

 

I also learned a lot about purchasing an old, deteriorating building in New Orleans then renovating it, getting all the permits and licenses, and making a restaurant/bar out of it—thanks to my friend who shared her experiences with me.       

 

As for your question, “what did you learn that especially surprised you,” the answer is this:  I am awestruck by the power of the imagination to take over a story and run with it till the end. 

 

After a few weeks of writing, A Gathering Place seemed to take off in a direction all its own so that the fictional characters, loose reminders of people I knew, transformed themselves into original human beings with no connection to anyone living or dead. They acquired their own personalities, moral convictions, and ways of doing things. 

 

The fascinating part to me is that the unconscious mind stores all of a writer’s life experiences and understanding of the human condition, and that knowledge, seemingly buried while one goes about her daily tasks, rises up and makes itself known when a writer is creating a work of fiction. 

 

This is what Flannery O’Connor wrote about the unconscious mind as it relates to fiction writing: “If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.”  

 

Q: The author Susan Cushman described the novel as “[f]illed with hope and redemption.”  What do you think of that description?

 

A: I believe she is correct.  The main character, Blue Hamieh, has a deep religious faith, so much so that she forsakes her own comfortable existence to fulfill what she believes to be a task assigned to her by the Virgin Mary. She has only a vague sense of what she is being asked to do or how to go about it but, shrugging off her fear, she goes about her mission with courage and dedication. 

 

She is able to fight every battle—family members trying to sabotage her, thieves lurking in the shadows, racial tensions erupting, and a fading memory, because she believes that the Blessed Mother is with her to guide her through her task. 

 

It takes hope and a belief in a higher purpose to act the way Blue does, and it is those spiritual qualities—not her earthly accomplishments—that make her memorable and triumphant.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: That there may be something to believe in besides ourselves. It isn’t just a theory or superstition or quaint, old-fashioned custom to those of us who have faith. It is real. And it is something that makes us better than we would ever be if we were to live our lives without it. It is what gives us strength to do heroic deeds and the conscience to do right by people.

 

I don’t question the goodness of atheists or agnostics. Many of my atheist and agnostic friends are the best people I know. I only know that I have an inner peace I would never have if I were to live without a belief in something greater than myself.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’ve pretty much completed a novel that is politically incorrect and may have difficulty getting published. It’s titled Anatomy of a Child of God. My workshop group had all kinds of objections to it, probably because I hadn’t worked hard enough at the time to make my vision for the novel known. 

 

At the time they offered their feedback, they’d only read an early draft of the first few chapters, and it seemed to them that the story is about a young woman who pities and tries to defend a former boyfriend who emotionally abused her. One participant called her a naïve fool.

 

It was my challenge to work harder on the manuscript to make it clear that the young woman is not a naïve fool and her purpose is not to defend the man who harassed her but something utterly different from what they thought.

 

Many drafts later, I may have finally gotten the novel’s theme across and what the young girl was searching for. Or maybe not. I only know that to reread it makes me happy.         

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I would like to encourage young writers never to give up while working on a piece of fiction. Sometimes, the feedback we receive when showing our early drafts to others crushes our spirits and we give up. Or writing can be a tedious journey with seemingly no rewards. 

 

If you believe in the work—if in your heart you deem it worthy of your efforts—don’t abandon it. Others don’t always see what we see because the telling of the story may be clumsy at a certain stage and our vision not yet made clear. Follow your instincts, don’t lose faith in it, and, whatever you do, don’t give up.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Vicki Salloum.