By Susan
In 1936, a Tennessee
Valley Authority project to provide a hydroelectric dam to power Appalachia
flooded a valley and town in Eastern Tennessee. In Amy Greene's newest novel,
Long Man, she chronicles the story of
Annie Clyde Dodson whose toddler Gracie goes missing before the flood.
Told from eight different perspectives over the course of three days, Greene
wrenches her characters through an impossible situation: as the floodwaters
rise, a mother's emotional and reckless decision brings about her greatest
fear: losing her child.
Amy Greene, who's debut
novel and bestseller Bloodroot
published in 2010, and I have been friends over the past few years as she's
written and revised Long Man. We had
a chance to catch up last week as she prepared for the February 25 release of Long Man, when we talked about some of
the concepts of the novel. Here's what she had to say.
SIP: Long Man is a
lyrical exploration of place, inheritance, and character. In telling this
story, you utilized eight different points of view. What was your writing
process, and why did you ultimately decide to write it from so many POVs?
AG: When I wrote Bloodroot,
I knew my characters very well. They were all first person, so finding their
voices was, to me, simpler in that book than it was in this one. In Long Man, I started with a plot-based
concept for the novel—the flooding of the valley in 1936— and then I dove into
character, writing them in third person. As I was writing, I found my plot
petering out, and I realized I didn't know my characters well enough to know
what they would do next. I went back in and found them again. Each character
represented something to me, thematically, so I felt that I needed all of them
and each of their perspectives to adequately tell the story.
For this novel, there was
too much distance with omniscience in order for me to know them well enough to
write about them. I had to choose not to be afraid so that I could really have
empathy for my characters. After all, this is the story of a mother who loses a
little girl right before a flood! As a mother, that was difficult to write. In
order for me to understand each of them, I had to have all eight points of
view.
SIP: Let's talk a little about backstory. This story takes place
over three days as Annie Clyde, her husband, James, her reclusive Aunt Silver,
the sheriff, another deputy, and Beulah, the local midwife and medicine woman,
all search for Gracie. In addition, the appearance of Amos, the one-eyed loner,
puts just about everyone on edge. You do a masterful job of giving us real time
action over the course of three days, and you also dive in to each character's
story to show the reasons for their decisions. How did you decide how to roll
out each character's history?
AG: (laughing) It wasn't easy. I should tell you that this novel
went through six complete drafts. I couldn't have done it without Robin (her
editor, Robin Desser, at Knopf). I felt such a responsibility to get this novel
'right.' Thank God for Robin, and all said, I am so thankful she pushed me to
stretch as a writer. At the same time, adding and removing the characters’
histories became a difficult thing. As each character made a choice to hide
something, or to reveal something, in order for the reader to really understand
why they made those choices, I had to show the accumulation of their lives that
brought them to that decision. Without the backstory, I couldn't have done
that.
The balance between the
backstory and the present story really had to click for me. In a way, I had to
be emotionally willing to let go of some of the backstory in order to move
forward. It came down to the fact that I knew far more about each character
than actually ended up in the book. And that's okay.
SIP: Your fictional town of Yuneetah is, inevitably, obliterated by
the flood in the end. I read in another article that you remember seeing the
tops of silos in the lake when the waters were low. I also grew up near Cave
Run Lake, a Corps of Engineer lake where my grandparents had a home, and I
remember being fascinated by the nearby graveyard, which had several headstones
for 'the unknowns' who'd been displaced by the making of that lake. As an
Appalachian writer, how do you feel that this concept of place (and—conversely,
the lack of place that comes from the destruction of the town) plays out in Long Man?
AG: Well, I suppose I am, and will always be, an Appalachian Writer. It's such a microcosm here. We are isolated
by our mountains, and in many ways we experience a 'time out of time' way of
life. I live ten minutes away from my family's farm, and Cherokee Lake is just
a few miles from there. I see the lake as part of the landscape, but what if that
flooding had encompassed my family's
land? Would I, like Annie Clyde, hold fiercely to that, perhaps even making
reckless decisions in my attempt to keep it? Of course, when you are
writing about something, you don't always know exactly what you are writing
about. You discover that as you go. And
so for me, writing about my connection to this land was something that
developed as I was writing the book. I
put a lot of myself into Annie Clyde. When it came down to it, there was really
no way around that.
You can find Long Man at your local bookseller, at
any Barnes and Noble or online. Thank you, Amy Greene, for stopping by What
Women Write!
