Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of the new novel Beware the Tall Grass. Her other work includes the story collection Lost Girls. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
Q: What inspired you to write Beware the Tall Grass, and how did you create your cast of characters?
A: I was in the car on a road trip with my husband in 2014, when we heard a story about children haunted by past life memories on National Public Radio.
The story focused on a research program at University of Virginia and the work of neuroscientists who explored the phenomena of young children with past life memories. They tried to verify the children’s claims by checking them against news reports from the times.
The story fascinated me, and I thought instantly of a mother who wished to give her son a perfect childhood and wasn’t able to because his mind was filled with memories of past trauma. I know women who saw parenthood as a chance to give their children the childhood they had wished they had.
I was born prematurely in 1965 with a mild case of cerebral palsy, and I always wondered about my mother’s hopes for me as she contemplated the challenges I might face. So the character of Eve Sloan was born from these musings.
I wrote the story of a family whose differing reactions to their young son Charlie’s memories of being in Vietnam was putting tension on the marriage. A workshop instructor suggested the idea would make a good novel.
The best way I knew how to expand the story was to alternate chapters with Thomas Boone, a young man caught up in the drama of mid-‘60s America who is sent to Vietnam.
I populated Eve’s world with her best friend and a friend who is a fellow mother. Thomas’s world is populated with family, childhood friends, a girlfriend, and his fellow soldiers. I made sure that the side characters exerted pressure on the narrative in various ways to increase dramatic tension and raise the stakes in the novel.
Q: The novel is told in two time periods--did you write the story in the order in which it appears, or focus on one time period before turning to the other?
A: I wrote the story in the order in which it appears, taking care to build echoes between the chapters, similarities in the mood or repeated motifs. Writing it that way allowed me to follow my stream of consciousness and use associations that sprang naturally to my imagination.
Initially, these sections were very short until I was able to relax and build the chapters up a bit. As a former journalist, my tendency is to always write short.
Q: The writer Lan Samantha Chang said of the book, “Through surprising and suspenseful turns, Beware the Tall Grass explores the evocative mysteries of time and memory.” What do you think of that description?
A: I am glad that she felt the novel achieved those goals. My job as the writer was to offer up the truest depiction I could of how these characters would react in a given situation.
Charlie’s unexplained memories and Thomas’s service in Vietnam offered a suspenseful backdrop to explore larger questions of memory, identity and time. We all ponder these questions of existence and to be able to explore them on the page was challenging and gratifying,
Q: How was the novel's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: “Beware the tall grass, nothing good ever happens there” is a line that comes up early in the book to signify the unexpected things that can change the course of a life.
In the novel, tall grass has the same menace as the dark forest does in fairy tales. It can hold unknown horrors. Things happen there that change things forever.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am revising a novel about a young female astronomer enmeshed in a celestial discovery, a love triangle, her mother’s illness and protests against the use of sacred sites for scientific discovery. The vibe is Contact meets The Big Bang Theory. I hope to find an agent for that book.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: This book holds a lot of me in it, and was the culmination of years of effort. I hope it finds its readers and they enjoy the story.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Ellen Birkett Morris.
No comments:
Post a Comment