The summer I turned seven, my family moved from a river city in Southern Arkansas to a prairie town in Oklahoma, where the Okeene Public library was having a contest. For each book read, I entered my name in a drawing to win a malt. Within a few days, slips of paper with my name crowded the contest jar. I won the drawing and slurped the malt slowly, to avoid brain freeze. I’ve been a reader ever since.
That same summer, I wrote to my best friend back in rural Arkansas. The letter started like this: “Dear Vicky, I love you,” because I thought that was how everyone began letters to friends back home. I’ve been a writer ever since.
Four decades later, I’ll read a book even when there’s no treat to be won and I’ll write for a reader, even if they’re not my best friend. The win is in the process.
I didn’t always approach the written word creatively. I had invested decades of my life in research and teaching, until all in one nasty swoop, Western Illinois University conferred my tenure in Women’s Studies, eliminated my department, and laid me off. I felt like I’d been in a violent accident that left me needing to re-learn how to read and write. Now, reading and writing are creative endeavors, not academic ones.
When I want to feel invested and satisfied, I read Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Joy Williams, and the stories in the O. Henry Prize anthologies. In almost any story in which the characters suffer, I recognize myself and fellow human beings. That’s why I’m comforted by the thought that Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is on my nightstand. Philyaw’s characters are quite flawed, and they suffer more than their fair share of sorrow, but Philyaw writes with love and kindness.
When I’m tired, I reach for literary ease and humor, like Maria Semple’s Where’d you go, Bernadette?, in which Bernadette is vindictive, mean, unmotivated, and unlikable, but I like her anyway. I, too, could be likable.
In The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, Megan Stielstra achieves an optimal balance of memoir, social critique, and wit. If I were religious, I’d say this prayer: Dear Goddess, please give me the grace and expertise to write like Megan.
I have long been drawn to literature that explores the pressures on women and girls to conform to narrow gender norms. To name a few: Sula, Anna Karenina, Annie John, The Woman Warrior, and, more recently, Outlawed by Anna North. I used to be a Southern belle, and now I’m a feminist from hell, but either way, I pay for being female. So do Sula, Anna, Annie, and Maxine.
I love creative writing that invites me to shift my worldview, like Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and Esme Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias. Thanks to Dr. Karen Mann for introducing me to Le Guin in a freshmen honors seminar at WIU when I was a student. Le Guin’s depiction of the construction of gender began to free me from the pose of Bible-belt femininity I’d learned as a child. And because of Esme’s essays, that are brilliant and kind, now I get how wonderful and lovable people with mental illness are, even as they endure more than their fair share of pain and fear. People with mental illness are like everyone else, for most of us suffer from emotional disorder at some point in our lifetimes.
For my PhD coursework, I was lucky to read Don Quijote with Dr. Isaías Lerner, an Argentine exile and Cervantes scholar. Dr. Lerner chuckled as he read selected Quijote passages in class. It was his pleasure in the text that I remember most.
With Dr. William Sherzer’s guidance, I researched the novels of Ana María Moix. Under the waning year of the Franco regime, Moix’s novel, Walter, ¿Por Qué te Fuiste? (Walter, Why Did You Go?) suffered 50 cuts of state censorship. I admired Moix for daring to write what she knew would be silenced, and I traveled to Spain to interview her and members of her literary circle, the gauche divine.
It’s satisfying to read fiction that implicitly condemns society’s disregard for women’s safety; for example, Margaret Atwood’s “Stone Mattress.” I admire depictions of masculine violence against women that feel honest and true (not cartoonish or merely symbolic): Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles,” and Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” for example, and more recently, Lacy Crawford’s Notes on a Silencing and Lauren Groff’s “The Wind.”
I seek out stories that stare down evil. Megha Majumdar’s A Burning is devastating and riveting. In Valerie Martin’s Property, slavery corrupts the soul.
Though my father is a preacher, I haven’t been a churchgoer or Bible-reader for decades. Still, I am grateful to come from a tradition in which reading about love is valued. Love is the greatest virtue. When I read and write fiction, love is the reference. Loss of love is sad. A life without love is devastating. The desire for love is hope. To write a deeply flawed character with love is grace.
I started writing “Fish Mandala” after reading a draft a peer wrote for a workshop with Stuart Dybek at Northwestern University. In my peer’s story, the craft of origami functions as a clue into the life of a character who disappears. That story draft led me to think about art and grief. Around that time, Kelley Quinn, an artist in Macomb, Illinois, where I live, taught me how to draw mandalas for a community mural. While it is true that my brother, Chad Stovall, drowned at the Bernadotte Dam when he was 23, I never knew him to paint fish. “Fish Mandala,” is fiction. If I tried to pass it off as memoir, I’d be a liar. Any resemblance the story’s characters have to me and mine is coincidental.
