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****Carol
Johnson’s Silk and Ashes is the twenty-second in a never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION where the Chris Rice Cooper
Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific excerpt from a fiction genre and how
that fiction writer wrote that specific excerpt. All INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links
are at the end of this piece.
Name of fiction work? And were there other names you considered that
you would like to share with us? Silk and Ashes. Previously The
Sins of the Mother
Fiction genre? Ex science fiction, short story, fantasy novella,
romance, drama, crime, plays, flash fiction, historical, comedy, etc.
And how many pages long? Mainstream
novel, 400 pages
What is the date you began writing this
piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of
fiction? Started it right after my first one was
published—so 12 years. And I don’t feel that it’s quite finished and may not be
until I retire from teaching in a couple of years.
Where did you do most of
your writing for this fiction work? And
please describe in detail. And can you
please include a photo?
I did almost all the work in my home office. I started it as soon as I sold Everlasting in 2006. I still
lived in my little house in Mounds then. In 2007 we moved to Tulsa into a house
I thought was terribly “writerly,” but I don’t think I got much writing done. I
started an MFA program in 2011 and wrote a lot more, still in my home office. I
graduated in 2013, and finished the book in that same office. In my current
office, I’m working on a memoir, and I’ve written short stories and lots and
lots of assignments. I share the office with my husband. His side is neat as a
pen. My side is cluttered with books and papers and book bags and kicked-off
boots and usually a couple of cats
What were your writing
habits while writing this work – did you drink something as you wrote, listen
to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I write at any time of day, whenever I have time.
It’s hard for me to sit down and start, and once I start, I don’t want to
stop.
I listen to music a lot, and if I need to evoke a certain time or
feeling, I play certain kinds of music—old country music from the sixties,
classic rhythm and blues, classic rock, alternative country. I’m usually
drinking diet Pepsi, sometimes wine. I always compose directly on the computer.
I never use pen and paper. When I first started writing I got up an hour early.
When I couldn’t do that anymore, I set aside all day Sunday. To finish Everlasting, I stayed in a cheap
motel for a week—no cable, no stereo—in Chandler, OK. It was a gift from a
friend. Now, my practice is haphazard. Teaching takes it out of me.
What is the summary of this specific fiction work? 8-year-old
girl grows up with an alcoholic mother in 1920s-30s Tulsa and turns into a
self-absorbed and selfish woman who cares way more about things than people but
learns a few hard lessons.
Can you give the reader just
enough information for them to understand what is going on in the
excerpt? The
girl’s mother has left her alone while she goes off with one of the many men
who bring her liquor, and the girl fears she won’t come back.
Please include the excerpt and include page numbers as reference.
The excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
Pp. 6-12
Leaning
against the splintery post, I tried to focus on anything but my fear, and my thoughts
turned to Granddaddy like they nearly always did. I’d spent more time with him
than Mama because he was the one who was always there. He was like Mr.
Shackleford in that wherever we went, he soon followed. I guess he worried
about what would happen to me if he wasn’t there, and truth be told, if not for
him I probably wouldn’t be sitting here today.
All
our talks took place on some porch, somewhere. The places me and Mama had
already left were so many and so similar I had trouble keeping straight what
conversation we might have had on what porch—could’ve been Geary, Cloud Chief,
Dill City. Lots of porches, and they were all rotten, like it was a law that
they deteriorate before the rest of the place.
While
I might have had trouble separating one bunch of splintered wood from another,
I didn’t have much trouble recalling our conversations. Maybe not always the
exact words, but the gist. I remember one day at a place where the porch had a
hole in it, a board or two rotted away to nothing, and I liked to slip through
the opening to the damp, earthy smelling place below. I don’t know where Mama
was. No telling, really. Maybe off cleaning for one of the church ladies or
doing their washing, or maybe just in the house recovering from a drunk.
It
was just me, Granddaddy, and that old rotten porch. He sat on the edge of it
while I busied myself scooping dirt into an old tin can and packing it down
with my fingers. I’d turn it upside down and tap the bottom of the can to
release a perfect, can-shaped mound, identical to the six or seven others I’d
made. Somehow, the sameness of them, the straight row I created, soothed me.
“Your mama’s got a burden, girl,” he
said. Why Mama behaved like she did was a favorite topic of his, and even now I
don’t know if he was trying to explain it to me or to himself.
“You mean why she’s always sick?” I
patted another mound of dirt.
“Oh, she’s sick all right,” Granddaddy
said, and I heard him spit. “That’s from the drink.”
“Yeah. From the drink.”
“That ain’t her main hindrance.” He spat
again. “Problem is, she’s got the look, like her mama before her. She can’t run
from it, and the more she tries, with the whiskey and the men and ever what,
the more it’s going to dog her.”
I stopped in the middle of a mound.
Standing, I poked my head through the hole in the porch. “Does Mama got a dog?”
Granddaddy laughed until the laugh turned
into a cough and the cough into a choking, phlegm-filled spasm.
I scrambled up through the hole and
whacked him a few times between the shoulder blades. When the coughing fit
subsided, he gripped the edge and supported his weight on both thin arms,
struggling to regain his breath. I plopped beside him and let my skinny legs
dangle.
He stroked my hair with a gnarled hand.
“No, there ain’t no dog. It’s like I said. She’s got the look.” He tilted my
chin up. “You’re the lucky one. That springy red hair and them blue eyes, ain’t
nobody going to take you for no Indian.”
“What’s
wrong with Indians?”
Granddaddy
spat in the dirt and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Oh, ain’t
nothing wrong with them. It’s ever’body else, treating them like they ain’t
human. Make anybody take to drink.”
I
had never heard anybody refer to my mother as Indian and haven’t to this day,
but like I said, whatever Granddaddy said was gospel to me. Once I became a
mother, I understood that maybe she drank because she was treated poorly was a
story he told himself, one of the many, to explain why she acted the way she
did.
I
slipped back through the gap in the boards, then popped back up to look at
Granddaddy. “I wish I looked like my mama,” I said. “I want to look just like
her when I get grown up.”
“No
you don’t. Wouldn’t nothing come of that but misery, and Lord knows there’s
misery aplenty in this world without lookin’ for more.” He sighed and stroked
my head. “When I’m gone, you got to take care of your mama. You ain’t but a
young’un, but nobody ‘sides you can do it.”
“Where
you going, Granddaddy? Can I go?” Last time, he took me to town with him and
the lady at the dry goods store gave me a hoar hound stick. Maybe this time
she’d give me real candy. “Can I go, Granddaddy? Can I?”
“I
ain’t going nowhere right now.” He gave my shoulder a poke. “Get on down there.
There’s still some dirt you ain’t dug up.”
. . .
I
must have dozed. When my eyes fluttered open, I peered around me, looking for
Granddaddy, but as I moved further from that muddle-headed confusion of sleep,
the closeness I’d felt dissipated, leaving nothing but me on the splintered
porch, surrounded by the red dust of the barren yard. The distant orange and
violet streaks of sunset and the everywhere and nowhere song of tree frogs
signaled the coming evening. I remained slump-shouldered against the rough gray
porch post, orienting myself to the here and now. Mr. Shackleford. The wagon,
the whiskey. Mama gone.
What
if this was the time she stayed gone? Trying to pin down that thought produced
a shudder. She had to. That’s all. She had to. I clenched my fists and forced
myself to breathe, to not cry, to be the big girl Granddaddy had always told me
to be. The tightness eased but the sound of my rapidly beating heart drowned
out even the tree frogs. I slowly released my fingers, allowing them to
straighten. Mama would come home. She always had, though she tarried longer sometimes
than she did others. I’d not been so conscious of her absence back then,
though, because Granddaddy stayed steady, making me forget there was such a
thing as alone. The warmth of his love had been jerked away, like a warm
blanket, and all that was left was a cold world, bigger and emptier than I ever
dreamed it could be.
I
didn’t even get to say goodbye when he left. I just woke up one morning to
voices and the creaking sound of wheels moving away from the shack. Rolling
from under the holey wool blanket, I ran to the window and saw the back end of
a cart heading toward the road, most of the bed occupied by a bundled shape
secured by a rope.
Mama
stood in the yard, watching it go, her breath a cloud before her. When the
wagon was no longer visible, she turned and came slowly back inside and sat at
the table, the one rickety chair protesting her weight. She stared into space,
eyes red and nose running. I went to her and touched her icy hand.
“Who
was that?” I asked. She pulled me close, burying her face in my neck. “Who was
it?” I asked again.
She
raised her head and stared at the wall, eyes dull. “Mr. Seligman.”
“Who’s
Mr. Seligman?”
“The
undertaker.”
“What’s
an undertaker?” She didn’t answer. “Why was he here?”
She
made a hitching sound in her throat. “He came for your Granddaddy.”
I
hadn’t seen Granddaddy. Maybe he was crouched down on the floorboard at Mr.
Seligman’s feet. “Where did he take Granddaddy?”
She
pushed me away. “Down the road a piece.”
“When
is he coming home?” I asked.
“He’s
not. He’s not coming home.”
“But
where’s he going to live, Mama? Are we going there?”
“No.
He passed on. He’s dead.”
“But
where is--
Mama
slapped the table. “Good Lord, Amy, why do you always have to ask every damned
question God ever thought up?” She started removing her coat. “He’s gone. Dead
and gone. He ain’t here, he ain’t going to be here, and that’s all there is to
it.”
I knew what dead was, but “gone” stumped
me. Where had he gone? I’d come across a possum once, on my way to the
outhouse. The ugly thing bared its teeth and hissed when it saw me, then fell
over like it had been hit with a shovel. I poked it with a stick, tried to pry
it from its inward-curled position, but the pointy-faced thing with the
human-like hands just laid there, stiff as a brick. I’d killed it just by
looking at it. I couldn’t wait to show Granddaddy.
I
sat on the front steps, waiting for him to come back from town. Occasionally,
I’d run around the house and poke the possum with my stick. When I finally saw
Granddaddy’s shape, recognized his loose-limbed walk, I ran up the road to meet
him. I dragged him around the house to see my prize
It
was gone. Not just dead, now, but dead and gone. “It was here, Granddaddy. It
was.”
Granddaddy
laughed hard and slapped his knee at my bewilderment. “It was a possum, girl.
That’s what they do—play dead till you quit poking at ‘em, then run off.”
So
now, Granddaddy was gone, as gone as that possum, and Mama was gone, and I was
sitting here on this rotten porch, wondering if she was ever coming back. I
hated that it mattered, but it did, and I knew she’d never stop leaving, and
I’d never stop caring. I sighed and picked at my scab some more, then pulled
the skirt of my dress over my knees and hugged my legs.
I
could wish Cy Shackleford dead till a stone bled, but I knew in the back of my
mind that if it wasn’t him dragging Mama off somewhere it’d be another man with
a bottle. Sometimes Mr. Tuttle showed up, or the Bushyhead twins—at least till
Milt shot Willard in a drunken disagreement while frog gigging. Then it was
just Milt. He brought me candy sometimes. But Mr. Tuttle. Looking at him made
me feel like I was going to pee my pants. I had never seen him hit Mama, but
once she came home with a swollen lip and a missing tooth. She’d still go with him,
though, if he had liquor.
I
sighed again. It didn’t matter if she left with a Bushyhead or a Tuttle or the
man in the moon. I was always scared she wouldn’t return. She laughed at my
fears. Hadn’t she always come back?
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you? And can you describe
your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? It
was emotional because of my childhood, and I can’t really talk about that.
Carol Johnson is associate professor of English at Tulsa
Community College. She received a B.A. in English from Northeastern State
University, an M.A. in language and literature from the University of Tulsa,
and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Oklahoma City University. She served on
the editorial board of Nimrod
International Journal for almost 20 years.
A nonfiction book, Autism: From Tragedy to Triumph, was
published in 1993 and her first novel, Everlasting, published in 2006, was a finalist for the Oklahoma
Book Award. Her short fiction has appeared in The Red Earth Review, Red Truck Review, Foliate Oak, Tulsa
Review, and Clackamas
Literary Review, among others. She is an unrepentant blogger and
has upwards of 20 followers. Seriously.
vadasmaker@gmail.com
INSIDE THE EMOTION OF
FICTION links
001 11 15 2018 Nathaniel
Kaine’s
Thriller Novel
John
Hunter – The Veteran
002 11 18 2018 Ed
Protzzel’s
Futuristic/Mystery/Thriller
The
Antiquities Dealer
003 11 23 2018 Janice
Seagraves’s
Science
Fiction Romance
Exodus
Arcon
004 11 29 2018
Christian Fennell’s
Literary
Fiction Novel
The Fiddler
in the Night
005 12 02 2018 Jessica
Mathews’s
Adult
Paranormal Romance
Death
Adjacent
006 12 04 2018 Robin
Jansen’s
Literary
Fiction Novel
Ruby the
Indomitable
007 12 12 2018 Adair Valerez’s
Literary
Fiction Novel
Scrim
008 12 17 218
Kit Frazier’s
Mystery Novel
Dead Copy
009 12 21 2019 Robert Craven’s
Noir/Spy Novel
The Road
of a Thousand Tigers
010 01 13 2019 Kristine Goodfellow’s
Contemporary
Romantic Fiction
The Other
Twin
011 01 17 2019 Nancy J Cohen’s
Cozy Mystery
Trimmed To
Death
012 01 20 2019 Charles Salzberg’s
Crime Novel
Second
Story Man
013 01 23 2019 Alexis Fancher’s
Flash Fiction
His Full
Attention
014 01 27 2019 Brian L Tucker’s
Young Adult/Historical
POKEWEED: AN ILLUSTRATED NOVELLA
015 01 31 2019 Robin Tidwell’s
Dystopian
Reduced
016 02 07 2019 J.D. Trafford’s
Legal
Fiction/Mystery
Little Boy
Lost
017 02 08 2019 Paula Shene’s
Young Adult
ScieFi/Fantasy/Romance/Adventure
My Quest
Begins
018 02 13 2019 Talia Carner’s
Mainstream
Fiction/ Suspense/ Historical
Hotel
Moscow
019 02 15 2019 Rick Robinson’s
Multidimensional
Fiction
Alligator
Alley
020 02 21 2019 LaVerne Thompson’s
Urban Fantasy
The Soul
Collectors
021 02 27 2019 Marlon L Fick’s
Post-Colonialist
Novel
The
Nowhere Man
022 03 02 2019 Carol Johnson's
Mainstream Novel
Mainstream Novel
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