The Southern Literary Review celebrates southern authors and their contributions to American literature.  We feature the classic writers who have defined southern literature, and we highlight emerging authors through interviews, profiles, and book reviews.

Robin Oliveira has the literary world on it’s heels with her debut novel, My Name is Mary Sutter (Viking, May 2010). With the book released to rave reviews and picked as our SLR Read of the Month, Oliveira could have easily balked at yet another interview request. Instead, she gave her time generously and we think you’ll be fascinated by the insightful discussion we’ve shared below. Find the rest of Oliveira’s converation with SLR contributor Adele Annesi in tomorrow’s post.

You’ve mentioned the lead character came to you in a vision. That prompted you to discover information about 17 female nurses who worked as physicians during the Civil War. Mary Sutter is one of these women, but throughout the book, both male and female characters are equally well-drawn. How did you go about creating these fictional characters with such detail? What tools did you use –  e.g., character sketches, profiles, etc.?

Characters evolve as I write. I use none of the oft-recommended tools to develop characters. Whenever I do, I find that the characters are no longer interesting to me because they are already static in my mind. I want to discover them, as the reader might discover them, or as another character might encounter them in the book. As the characters respond to events erupting around them, I begin to understand who they are, even though initially they are frequently one-dimensional. Through subsequent drafts, the challenge becomes to develop them by asking what else the character wants other than the thing he first revealed to you.

I also keep in mind that subplots have the role of magnifying theme. This is the less intuitive guide to developing what any given character wants and therefore who they will eventually become. Characters in subplots are contrasts or mirrors of the main character’s desire and are therefore arranged along a spectrum related to that desire. In My Name is Mary Sutter, all the female characters are arrayed on a spectrum in regards to the love/knowledge theme. The male characters are delineated in their response to Mary, to the women in their lives, and to the war and its demands on their medical knowledge.

While writing, I remain open to whoever might walk onstage, always hoping for the wonderful surprise, while keeping in mind the developing theme and the structural requirements of the story.

Your research is incredibly thorough, and it leaves readers with increased knowledge about life during that era. With so many historical details to track, how did you keep all the information organized? Did you use a timeline? Colored note cards? Post-its arranged in various blocks or binders? A specific software program? We’ve heard a wide variety of authors’ tricks, and we’re curious to know yours. (more…)

Review by Adele Annesi

The debut literary work of historical fiction My Name is Mary Sutter by promising novelist Robin Oliveira offers an ambitious and unsparing glimpse into the life of aspiring physician Mary Sutter amid the turbulent U.S. Civil War.

 The story opens with young midwife Mary Sutter of Albany, NY denied another apprenticeship in her quest to become a doctor. At a time when there were virtually no female physicians, Sutter is gifted, driven and unyielding. Ostensibly out of heartbreak, she pursues her desire into the heart of the Civil War.

Offering this antitype through a third-person omniscient view, Oliveira showcases her considerable character development skills, evoking Ann Patchett and Bel Canto. Yet, that novel was Patchett’s third, and mature restraint was evident in her focus on one character at a time. Oliveira’s tendency to delve into the minds of all characters, major and minor, sometimes in the span of a scene, may deny the reader emotional intimacy, especially with Mary Sutter.

This emotional gulf, also partly the result of Sutter’s driven personality, is reinforced by Oliveira’s scrupulous hand. As Sutter is repeatedly barred from a calling she believes is hers, the focus is more on her frustration than her love of medicine. A similar disconnect surfaces in Sutter’s professed love and grief over the apparent loss of a man in her life. With little evidence beyond the telling, and because of Sutter’s rigorous self-control, a fuller emotional connection with the reader is forfeited.

Despite this and the novel’s sometimes bumpy pacing—a solid block of back story early on and scant chapters later—there is strength and originality in Oliveira’s style and technique, and the story she tells refuses to romanticize. Real figures like Abraham Lincoln and Jonathan Hay come alive as much for their failings as their strengths, and Oliveira is adept at drawing these and other characters—male and female, friend and foe—with equal depth and integrity. (more…)

The Tennessee Williams Tribute and Tour of Victorian Homes in Columbus, Ms., from September 6 to 12, 2010, celebrates the playwright with scholarly panels, plays, tours and receptions. This is one of many events scheduled each year across the Southern Literary Trail.

The Southern Literary Trail is a collaboration of eighteen southern towns from Natchez to Savannah that celebrate internationally renowned writers and playwrights of the twentieth century who were inspired by their communities. Check their website frequently for an updated schedule of events.

Textbooks, poetry, novels—Mary Jane Ryals writes them all. Cookie and Me, her debut novel, will be released in September by Kitsune Books.

Ryals was named the first Poet Laureate of the Big Bend in 2008 and released her first book of poetry, The Moving Waters, the same year. Ryals performs with a popular poetry troupe, the Java Dogs. She currently is a professor at Florida State University. To give her Business Communications students a better understanding of the global marketplace, she wrote a textbook, Getting into the Intercultural Groove, peppered with anecdotes from her travels. As part of FSU’s International Program, Ryals spends part of the summer in Valencia, Spain, teaching business communication, literature, and writing.

Donna Meredith interviewed Mary Jane for Southern Literary Review.

DM: What compelled you to write about the Sixties in Tallahassee?

MJR: In grad school, I read Nanci Kincaid’s novel, Crossing Blood, which was set in Tallahassee during the late Sixties. It fell on me like rain that everything I knew—the Woolworths downtown, the pool closings, the movie theatre, the racial discord, the friendships—could also be literary.

Later in grad school, I gave birth to my daughter Ariel just as I’d finished preliminary exams for my Ph.D. and had to write a creative dissertation. Suddenly, I felt urgently that I needed to tell my era’s story to her. That was 17 years ago.

DM: You have a teenage daughter. Did she shape this book in any way? (more…)

Thirteen-year-old Rayann Wood narrates the poignant tale of her dysfunctional family and the redeeming power of friendship in the novel Cookie and Me, by Mary Jane Ryals (Kitsune Books, Sept, 2010). Sassy yet poetic, southern yet universal, Rayann’s voice rings out as true and wise and unforgettable as Scout’s in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Set in Tallahassee in the turbulent ’60s, the novel leads us once again through those days of bus boycotts, segregated swimming pools, and speeches by charismatic black ministers.

The author’s love of poetry and the natural world is apparent as she describes leaves with “fifty-eight shades of green looking tender enough to eat,” a sun “warm as butter,” and the way the “early crickets bree’d.” Yet other than the setting and a familiarity with horses, very little else about the novel appears to be autobiographical. The novel is Ryals’ first, though she is well known in the Tallahassee literary scene as the Big Bend Poet Laureate. In 2008, she published a collection of poems, The Moving Waters (Kitsune Books). Ryals teaches business communications at FSU and has also written a related textbook, Getting into the Intercultural Groove.

As Cookie and Me opens, Rayann is obsessed with bones, associating the fragility of bodies with her mother’s delicate mental condition: “Just the thought that under all our finery, clothes, manners, and smiles, under epidermis, tissue, and blood, as my sixth grade biology teacher called them, we’re just bones. Easy to break, easy to crack. Cracking up. Like Mama.” In a burst of anger toward her alcoholic father and his lowlife friends, who want to lock her mother away in the mental hospital in Chattahoochee, Rayann burns the word “bones” into the dining room table with a cigarette butt. Ironically, when she lets her mother bear the blame for the table’s defacement, she pushes her mother one step closer toward a breakdown and this feared confinement. But like most children, Rayann fears the punishment sure to come if she tells the truth even more. (more…)

After 29 years of teaching high school English, journalism, and TV production in West Virginia and Georgia, Donna Meredith retired to provide a more convenient door-opening service for her Pomeranians. When she isn’t responding to yaps, she writes.

With advanced degrees in both English and journalism, Donna has also participated in graduate fiction writing workshops at Florida State University and served as newsletter editor for the Florida State Attorney General’s crime prevention division. She resides in Tallahassee with her husband John.

Donna’s novel, The Glass Madonna, won first place for unpublished women’s fiction from the Florida Writers Association and also was a runner-up in the Gulf Coast novel contest. She won first places in the 2007 Seven Hills short story and essay contests. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat, Tallahassee magazine and the Columbia School Press Review. She currently writes a column on the environment for the Chronicles.

She serves as president of the Tallahassee Writers Association and coordinates the Seven Hills Contest for Writers. Learn more about Donna by visiting her website.

With yet another bestseller on his hands, Louisiana author James Lee Burke kindly took a few minutes to answer questions from SLR contributor Phil Jason.

Why is it important to remind readers that Dave Robicheaux’s Vietnam War experiences have shaped him and are never really distant?  

Dave’s war experience serves as a background to the central political themes in the books, namely America’s neo-colonial empire and our military involvement in Latin America and the Mid East.

With 18 Robicheaux novels now in print, how do you keep the character fresh for yourself?

Each novel is intended to stand alone. It’s my hope also that each novel addresses a problem or issue that is more than a regional one.

Aside from a gem like Clete Purcel, which characters in the supporting cast are you most attached to?

All of them.

Are you teasing your own daughter a bit by having Dave distrust her namesake character’s taste in men?

Nope.

Conveying a sense of place is obviously important to you. Can you share anything with developing writers about how to evoke a vivid sense of place?

I was influenced heavily by the naturalists, particularly James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, and John Dos Passos. I’d recommend others read them as well.

Do you write by wholes or parts? Revise by wholes or parts?

I don’t have a plan when I write. I see perhaps two scenes into the story and that’s all. I revise each morning.

Are you an outliner? How would you describe your writing process?

I never outline. As Hemingway said, if the author outlines he will know the end of the story. If he knows it, so will the reader.

For me there is only one way to write. I suspect it’s like chopping cotton, you do it from cain’t-see to cain’t-see and sometimes you do it in the middle of the night. Anyone who can compartmentalize his art is a better man than I.

Burke’s work has been awarded an Edgar twice for Best Crime Novel of the Year. He has also been a recipient of a Breadloaf and Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA grant. Two of his novels, Heaven’s Prisoners and Two For Texas, have been made into motion pictures. His short stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, New Stories from the South, Best American Short Stories, Antioch Review, Southern Review, and The Kenyon Review. His novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie was rejected 111 times over a period of nine years, and upon publication by Louisiana State University press was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Learn more by visiting his website. Also, read the review of his latest bestseller, The Glass Rainbow.