Writing 1st novel can take years, authors tell 2018 Southern Voices audience in Hoover
Lisa Ko grew up in a family of storytellers and unapologetic gossips, but she was the only writer in the bunch.
The author from New York City grew up writing stories about fictional families and a make-believe brother, she told an audience at the 26th annual Southern Voices authors conference today at the Hoover Public Library.
She also wrote letters to strangers who put pen pal addresses in the back of a magazine, and if she didn’t get enough responses, she wrote letters to herself, she said.
But when it came time to write a novel as an adult, it took her seven years, Ko said. In year five of writing, she got nearly 50 rejection letters before finally winning a prize for her debut novel, “The Leavers.” The book won the 2016 PEN/Bellweather Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award of Fiction.
Ko wasn’t alone in sharing how it can take a long time to kick out that first novel.
Daren Wang, the founding executive director of the Decatur Book Festival in Georgia, today shared he spent three years researching his first novel and seven years in total to complete it.
Author Paula McLain of Cleveland, Ohio, went to graduate school to study poetry as a divorced single mom of a 2-year-old boy. She doesn’t know what she was thinking because “you can’t even give poetry away,” she said. “I wasn’t doing it to be practical. I was doing it because I couldn’t help myself.”
After she graduated, she got a job as a cocktail waitress to pay the bills. She published two collections of poetry and later a memoir of growing up in the foster care system. She was married a second time and had two more kids when she put together her first novel, she said. It took five years.
In 15 years, she published four books, and “no one actually read my books, not even my own family members,” she said. “But I certainly wasn’t going to quit writing just because I didn’t have readers,” she quipped.
She convinced her new husband to let her quit her three part-time teaching jobs and focus on writing. This time, she decided to write a fictional account of Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage, as told from the point of view of his wife, Hadley Richardson.
She dove into research and went every day to the same Starbucks to write, sitting in the same chair while the same Nora Jones CD played each day.
“I never heard any of it,” McLain said. “I had fallen down the rabbit hole” into 1920s Paris with Hemingway and Richardson.
“This time, something extraordinary happened,” she said. The book made the New York Times bestseller list and won the best historical fiction book by the GoodReads Choice Awards, and McLain had long lines of people waiting for autographs at book signings in stores and libraries. Her publisher sold more than 2 million copies of the book.
McLain had found her niche, giving a voice to women who were overlooked, forgotten or marginalized.
“I get to shine my light on them and find a voice that feels real to me and spit out their story, hopefully with enough detail and heart that you feel like you have been there, too, and then we’re all at history’s table at the same moment,” she said.
“It’s a strange thing writing fiction about people who actually lived,” McLain said. “It surprises me this is what I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life doing.”
Author Lisa Wingate, a former journalist from Arkansas who has written nearly 30 novels, won numerous awards and made the New York Times bestseller list, said she always knew she was going to be an author because her first-grade teacher told her so and first-grade teachers never lie.
When she was young, she imagined it would be like on TV, where writers drive Ferraris and live at the beach, she said.
But “it’s not like that for most people,” she said. “Most people are going to work really, really hard at it, and nobody hands you a Ferrari.”
But the work is worth the effort if it makes a difference in people’s lives and causes them to re-examine the world around them and what part they play in it, Wingate said.
Her latest book, “Before We Were Yours,” imagines the life of a poor family affected by the Tennessee Children’s Home Society scandal of the 1950s. Wingate said about 5,000 children were essentially kidnapped from poor families in the Memphis area and put into a profit-making adoption agency where 500 children died and others were abused and molested.
Her book aimed to shine a light on the horrors of what happened and the corrupt political system that allowed it, she said.
“The world’s problems can seem so big that you just feel like, ‘I can’t have an effect. What can I do to change the world?’” she said. “You can’t change the whole world maybe, but you can change someone’s world a lot.”
Other authors who shared their stories today were Andrew Gross, Taylor Brown, Kelly Grey Carlisle and Stephanie Powell Watts. Each author spoke in both the 250-seat Hoover Library Theatre and 100-seat Library Plaza.
Homewood resident Pat Wilkes was among those in the audience and said she has come to all but about three of the Southern Voices conferences since they started in 1993.
“It’s always full of surprises and gives you lots of new ideas,” Wilkes said. “I’m a professional reader, and I’m always looking for new authors and different series.”
This year, she was surprised by Carlisle, whose first and only book, “We Are All Shipwrecks,” tells the story of her growing up in California on a boat with her grandfather, who ran a porn store, and her lifelong quest to determine who murdered her mother, a prostitute, when she was just 3 weeks old.
Wilkes said she thought it was going to be a sad story but was surprised how Carlisle made it a story about how much her mother and imprisoned father loved her and how Carlisle dedicated the book to her own daughter as a way to share some difficult family history with her.
Mountain Brook resident Liz Fox said she has enjoyed coming to the Southern Voices Festival for the past five or six years. “This is something I look forward to every year,” Fox said. “There are always great speakers. They’re entertaining. It’s really a treat to be here. I often get the opportunity to be introduced to writers I just somehow have missed along the way. Sometimes it opens whole new worlds of characters and books … I think the Hoover library is a very special place.”
The Southern Voices Festival opened on Tuesday with a reception showcasing the photography of The Do Good Fund, a public charity based in Columbus, Georgia, that since 2012 has been building a museum-quality collection of photographs taken in the American South since World War II. The collection includes works by more than a dozen Guggenheim Fellows, as well as images by lesser-known, emerging photographers in the region.
The Hoover Public Library is featuring some of the photographs in the gallery outside the Library Theatre and in the hallway gallery leading to the Library Plaza.
Then on Wednesday and Thursday nights, a musical group called The Roosevelts performed in the Library Theatre, and on Friday night, Gross gave the headliner speech.
See hundreds of photos from the 2018 Southern Voices Festival by photographer Lance Shores here.