Q&A with Kimberly Brock

 

 

 

Kimberly Brock is the author of the new novel The Fabled Earth. Her other books include The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare. She lives near Atlanta.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Fabled Earth?

 

A: I took a trip to Cumberland Island, Georgia, for my 25th wedding anniversary. I’m from the foothills of north Georgia and this island was a place I’d always wanted to visit. It is remote. The island is now a National Park and visitors are limited.

 

There is a public ferry that runs from the mainland and while visitors may use bikes, there are no cars on the island. You can camp or you can stay at the only inn on the island, originally one of the homes built for the Carnegie family descendants who once built their Gilded-Age summer mansions on Cumberland.

 

We splurged to spend a weekend there, at the Greyfield Inn and got the island by their private ferry. It was quiet. The island is very wild and I was watching the live oak maritime forest with the moss swinging in the ocean breeze and I thought I’d never seen such a haunted landscape.

 

When we married in 1996, I remember the secret Cumberland Island wedding of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette hitting the news a few months later. I remember being enchanted then. And also, I recall being heartbroken alongside the whole world when only a few years later, a tragedy took their lives.

 

But on that day I came to Cumberland, I suddenly remembered that couple and it dawned on me as we approached, that it would have also been their 25th wedding anniversary. In that moment, I realized if I was going to write about Cumberland Island, it would definitely be a ghost story.

 

I also remember thinking that particular ghost story had followed me there, which made me wonder what it might be like if our ghost stories haunted us in literal ways, walking along beside us. And The Fabled Earth began there.

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

 

A: Most of my research took place after my trip to Cumberland where the island and the Carnegie family was concerned, although I was aware of some basic information about them.

 

What I learned from my reading after that visit wasn’t so surprising, but it was compelling, like all family stories, only these were on a grander scale and often outlandish.

 

I read historical accounts from old newspapers, interviews and articles, as well as some nonfiction books that were comprehensive. I pored over those and made copious notes. Everything I learned about the family informed the story I imagined, but I’m a fiction writer, not a historian, and my hope is that I’ve honored the truths I gleaned.

 

Ultimately, that’s where the connection to folktales in this novel originated. It surprised me that I was drowning in rich content, and that is what seemed to make it impossible to decide what I would write about. I thought I couldn’t write about it all in a single novel.

 

And then I realized that was exactly what I wanted to say with this story. History is vast, but all told, history is just a big story. Cumberland’s history is vast, as was the family history of the Carnegies of Cumberland, and all of it, I think, is a folklore.

 

Q: How was the novel's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: I wanted to use the word fable from the start and I wanted to ground in a gritty reality. This title came from a collection of words and lists of imagery that finally solidified with the title of the novel. I was lucky that my editorial team and publisher, agreed.

 

Q: In a 2022 essay for Writer’s Digest, you said, “In fiction, the South exists as a real place in the world and also one inside the mind. It is, in many different ways, somehow the origin from which we all spring.” Can you say more about that, specifically in reference to The Fabled Earth?

 

A: In The Fabled Earth, this idea that the South is a place of origin is very present and given the long, true history of Cumberland Island, true in terms of our country’s beginnings. As a country, our origins began on this coastline, on these crumbs of earth. And I think the metaphor is there, too, that these lush places in the humid, surreal South exist only in our imaginations as Edens.  

 

My own experiences of Cumberland Island, whether in person or through my reading and research, is that there is this pervasive sense of standing outside of time while you are there. It is predominantly undeveloped, which adds to the illusion that it’s a sort of undisturbed or undiscovered paradise. The South is often thought of this way in our stories, whether it’s a beautiful place or a dangerous one, or both.

 

And Cumberland is definitely an embattled place and has been for centuries. There is always someone who wants to squander it, always someone else fighting to protect it, and everybody wants to call Cumberland home.

 

Yet somehow, the feeling I got when I stood there was that Cumberland has always belonged to herself. We’re just passing through. And in fact, if we look over our shoulders, Cumberland have never been more than an illusion, just as the South in fiction is often an illusion.  

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m just starting on a new story about two peculiar sisters who have lived in the same house for 45 years, refusing to speak to one another after falling out over a man they both loved and the secret they keep since the night he disappeared and left one of them at the altar years ago. This one is set in the Blue Ridge mountains.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I don’t think I’m done writing ghost stories.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb