From: Kerry Madden <kiffnkerry>
Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 11:56:23 -0700 (PDT)

Dear Tessa, Katy, Megan, and all the CCBC librarians and CCBC List-serve,

Thank you so very much for giving me the chance to revisit these Monroeville "stories behind the stories." It's been an extraordinary journey to revisit all the primary research again. Phyllis and Tish, maybe there will be a companion piece of stories that I could not include in the biography. My editor, Catherine Frank, was incredibly patient and hated to say no when I tried to squeeze in the extra stories that just would not fit. And a big thank you to Augusta, Pam, Dean, Nancy Bo Flood, Ed, Carol, Phyllis, Tish, and Katy Duffield (I hope that's everybody!) for your kind words.

Tish, I am thrilled to know about the new novel, LEAVING GEE'S BEND, by Irene Latham to be published in January 2010 (http://www.irenelatham.com/id15.html). It's quite possible I will meet Irene as I will moving to Birmingham, Alabama in August to start teaching creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to graduate and undergraduate students.

I will leave you with this selection from my story ?WORDS ON FIRE? the day I met with Helen Norris Bell, who taught for years at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama. I initially went to talk to her about Harper Lee, but I found her story so compelling that I wound up writing about Helen. During our talk, she spoke of writing and setting the ?words on fire.? The other women I interviewed for this story were Kathryn Tucker Windham and Mary Ward Brown.

All best Kerry Madden

HELEN NORRIS BELL: http://www.alabamaliterarymap.org/author.cfm?AuthorID=72 MARY WARD BROWN: http://www.alabamaarts.org/brown.html KATHRYN TUCKER WINDHAM: http://www.apr.org/ktw.html

AN EXCERPT: HELEN NORRIS BELL, AN EXCERPT FROM "WORDS ON FIRE" published in FIVE POINTS: JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART, edited by Megan Sexton. http://www.webdelsol.com/Five_Points/history.shtml

JULY 31, 2007 I?m late for my interview with Helen Norris Bell on a rainy day in late July due to an accident on I-40, but when I arrive she is smiling radiantly from her wheelchair wearing fresh lipstick, looking decades younger than the age of 91. She lives in an assisted living facility in Black Mountain, North Carolina. She can?t wait to start talking and points to a trunk of stories that she hopes to get organized. Before I can ask a question, she shows me her smiling great-granddaughter on the computer screensaver, where a baby floats across the screen in bold photo-shopped splotches of purple and pink. We watch a while, and Helen says, ?She looks weird, doesn?t she?? Then she laughs and our conversation begins, but whenever I write something down, she gets irritated. ?Why are you writing? Don?t write it down! Listen!?

So I put the pen down and listen. Hard. Helen Norris Bell is a born storyteller and even the most tangential threads lead to more stories of her favorite honey from Tupelo flowers in the Florida Everglades to getting locked inside the P.O. in Montgomery, Alabama. A postal worker tried to force her to leave even though she?d arrived well before closing time to stand in a long line. When she refused, he decided to teach her a lesson and locked her inside and turned off the lights. Helen?s eyes light up as she describes the scene, ?I let out what I considered to be a most primal scream and was released. I wrote the newspaper a letter describing the event, and my story made the front page. I became the lady who was locked inside the Post Office. They apologized and changed the rules.?

Next, she talks about delivering the graduation speech at Huntingdon College on a blistering Alabama morning in June. Dressed in a heavy gown, she?d been forewarned in increasingly anxious calls by her son ?to practice the speech and to absolutely take an alarm clock or timer so as not to bore the crowd.? She greeted the graduates by discussing her son?s concerns, and they burst into loud laughter and applause. She moves from one subject to another?teaching, aging, writing. I try to keep up and not take notes?being under strict orders to put my pen down and listen. We leave the door to her room open, but after a while I shut it with her permission. The nursing home is a cacophony of interruptions from nurses to patients to aids to volunteers to gardeners outside the window.? She has a history for every single person. It almost feels like we are living in one of her short stories. An aid comes in with a tray of supper, which she ignores.

When Helen talks about her childhood, she says, ?I am old. I was 91 last month. Can you believe that? I lie in bed at night and the ?To be or not to be? speech comes back to me. Every word. I remember so many things. I don?t know if that?s good or not, but I remember. Words, sonnets, history. These old ladies here don?t even remember George Washington!?

She grew up on a 500 acre farm with 7500 laying hens, 2,000 turkeys, and hundreds of dairy cows. As a child she used to write plays for the neighbors, gave herself the starring role, and served fudge at intermission. She and a neighbor family of eight children wrote novels together too. ?We didn?t know about the facts of life but we were writing novels!? She smiles when she speaks of Peter Taylor. ?I was a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award. They flew me to DC and gave me 1500 dollars?if you won the whole thing you got 5000 dollars. Peter Taylor got that. He?s a love, dead now. Anyway, they asked me to go, and I said yes. Well, William Gass was there, and he told the audience, ?I?m not going to read to you. A writer is not a performer. I don?t write to read aloud. ?Well, those folks paid fifty dollars a head to come to that dinner and hear us read, but he got up there and talked about how he wasn?t going to read and too bad for them?and I realized that I was going to have to get up and go next, and I said to Peter Taylor, ?I?m next?I have to follow that?? And he nodded?he was very sympathetic, and I got up there, so nervous, and I said, ?I can think of nothing nicer than to read to you all this evening.? Well, they were like butter. They just melted.?

She talks of her lost library and about her son who sold her home, and how she came to live in Black Mountain. It?s late in the day by the time she tells this story, which began with her making a cup of Earl Gray tea and suddenly feeling very strange. ?I can?t really recall what happened, but I guess I went into the hospital for a time. When I came out, I didn?t return to my home in Montgomery. I came here. My son arranged it. Eventually, I asked him about my books. That?s the only thing I really cared about. My books. A friend had built me wonderful bookshelves in my home, and they were filled with books, floor to ceiling. My son said he kept the books that he thought looked important and threw the rest away.?

She shrugs, but there are tears. Hours have passed. A thunderstorm blows up and we stare outside. ?I wish it wouldn?t rain. I know we?re supposed to need it, but it?s so gloomy.? She looks at the red maple. ?I do love my tree. I hope they leave it alone.? Then she moves from her wheelchair to her bed and wants no help. Thunder cracks the sky, and I tell her about my plan to write a story of her, Mary Ward Brown, and Kathryn Tucker Windham.

?What for?? she asks, unimpressed. ?We don?t even like each other. Kathryn?s popular with the students and the university crowd. And Mary is a true revisionist. I?m sure she thinks I don?t revise enough. I?m sure she told George Core that my story, ?Starwood,? needed to be cut. She is such a fantastic housekeeper. Everything is cleaned from stem to stern.?

?What about Harper Lee? Did you like To Kill a Mockingbird?? I ask.

?I never saw all the fuss. I liked the scene with the pocket watch. Did I tell you about Russia? Let me tell you about my trips to Russia.?

We talk some more through the raging summer storm. The sun comes out, and slowly sinks. I have spent five hours with Helen Norris Bell. I had meant to take her picture, but now she?s tired and lying in bed. I will have to return or ask one of the nurses to do it.

She says, ?Please come back. You bring your stories next time.? I say goodbye, and minutes later I stand outside in the warm air of Black Mountain washed clean by the rain. I try to catch my breath. I sit on the curb and write down everything as best as I can remember it. I think of the first line in Helen?s story, ?The Singing Well,? which reads: ?She was Emilu, named for two dead aunts, their names rammed together like head-on trains.?

There was an Aunt Emilu in my husband?s family, who grew up near Black Mountain?dead now like Peter Taylor. I?ve been to Taylor?s grave at an old cemetery in Sewanee, Tennessee?but by chance, not intention. His ?new? grave is surrounded by crumbling ones dating back to the Civil War. Poets at the Sewanee Writers Conference recite poetry in the cemetery in the summertime, though I?ve recently heard Taylor?s grave was moved to Memphis. I don?t know where Aunt Emilu is buried.
??? Months later, I will hear that Helen?s Harper Lee Award was sold as part of the Estate Sale. Professors from the University of Alabama are trying to locate it to return it to her. Her home was sold because family members were concerned about her health and all the yellow Post-It notes with scribbling around her house, but a friend of Helen?s says, ?Those Post-It notes were all her story ideas! She?s a writer!? I think of my son, Flannery, a sunny teenager with rock star aspirations to be the next David Bowie/T-Rex, growing old and putting me in a nursing home and throwing away my books that didn?t look important.

I drive through the dark mountains invisible against the night sky of North Carolina with Helen?s words floating around me: "When I finished teaching, I realized I never had done much with the short story, so I wanted to write some. I used the techniques of poetry to write my stories. With stories you have to whittle it down. You have one chance to get your point across. With a novel, you have the freedom for the neighbors to say, ?I don?t believe they?re getting along, and then a cousin will say, ?No, I don?t believe they?re getting along either,? and you can have all this speculation and conjecture from everywhere, but you don?t have that freedom with a short story. A short story has to have the depth of a novel, but the focus of a poem. I try to set the words on fire and then maybe they will burn."

* * *

The entire story was published in FIVE POINTS: JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART in October 2008 http://www.webdelsol.com/Five_Points/history.shtml

* * * THE COMPLETE LIST OF LINKS TO THE PENGUIN BLOG OF HARPER LEE RESEARCH...500 word stories of Monroeville and Gee's Bend

http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/kerry-madden-author-harper-lee-close-our-guest-blogger-week-3-23

MONDAY, MISS ALICE LEE: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/miss-alice-lee-kerry-madden

TUESDAY, MR. GEORGE THOMAS JONES http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/mr-george-thomas-jones-kerry-madden

WEDNESDAY, JENNINGS CARTER http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/mr-jennings-carter-kerry-madden

THURSDAY, A.B. BLASS and The Christmas Parada http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/b-blass-and-christmas-parade-and-kkk-kerry-madden

FRIDAY, GEE'S BEND, TWO ALABAMA GIRLS http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/two-alabama-girls-kerry-madden


UP CLOSE: HARPER LEE Starred Reviews, Booklist & Kirkus, 2009
"My needs are simple: pen, paper, and privacy." Harper Lee, 1961 www.kerrymadden.com
 
Received on Fri 29 May 2009 01:56:23 PM CDT