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…)

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…)

 Review by Philip K. Jason

Click to Buy

 The publication of a new Dave Robicheaux novel is always a cause for celebration. This classic detective series is perhaps the best case to be made that no real distinction need exist between genre writing and literary writing. With The Glass Rainbow, the 18^thRobicheaux installment, James Lee Burke is at the top of his form. Burke’s evocation of the sights, smells, sounds, and historical resonance of the Bayou Teche waterway and its queen city – New Iberia, Louisiana – once again reveals a master’s hand. Does any writer working today handle setting better? I doubt it.

Dave is found plying his inescapable trade in his unique way: dedicated lawman with a rogue streak. Continuing his tenuous position as detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, he becomes involved in the investigation of what might be one of several serial murders of young women. However, this one doesn’t fit the pattern. The victim is not the typical runaway or risk taker, but rather a young black woman named Bernadette Latiolais who was preparing to enter the University of Louisiana’s Lafayette campus on a scholarship. Dave is urged to pay special attention to Bernadette’s case by her brother, an incarcerated lowlife who suggests that Dave pay a visit to a prosperous pimp and drug dealer named Herman Stanga.

Herman belongs to Burke’s gallery of self-satisfied agents of innate and thoroughgoing evil. Each is a piece of damaged goods with his (or her) own particular streak of cruelty and motive. The presence of evil is very real to Dave Robicheaux and his creator, and its manifestations are drawn in gruesome psychological and behavioral detail.

(more…)

Suzanne Supplee’s latest release, Somebody Everybody Listens To (Dutton, May, 2010), will inspire readers to pick up a guitar and sing. With a quick, steady pace, and short, cleanly-written chapters, this young adult novel will appeal to readers of all ages, particularly those who ever dreamed of finding success in the country music industry.

Supplee’s story centers around a small town southern girl named Retta Lee Jones. She’s been the best singer in town as long as she can remember; but when she heads to Nashville after high school graduation, she feels like “just another fish in the barrel.”

Her sting of bad luck brings readers along a sometimes painful journey into the dark and dangerous world of stardom. Put a teenage girl on the streets with nothing but a guitar and see if she gets discovered. Add a dysfunctional family on the verge of destruction, a few run-ins with slimy characters and back alley criminals, a coveted pair of blue cowgirl boots in the window, and an ego that’s only one shred short of being splintered to the winds, and readers can’t help but root for Retta.

This book is a fun read. Quick. Easy. Charming. And inspiring. Ideal for parents to share with children who pick guitar until their fingers bleed (Taylor Swift) or aim to hit Nashville the day after graduation (Dolly Parton).

But readers also get a bonus, as this book is much more than just a fictional tale. With Supplee’s experience as a Country Music Association writer, it seems as if she’s giving readers the inside scoop on how to survive the Nashville game. She also includes interesting facts about famous country music artists, proving that, yes, dreams really do come true.

The $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award is given annually to honor a book of poetry by a midcareer U.S. poet. The winner will spend one week in residence at Claremont Graduate University in California.

The $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award is given annually to honor a first book of poetry by “a poet of genuine promise.”

Submit eight copies of a book of poetry published between September 15, 2009, and September 15, 2010, with a list of previously published work by September 15.

There is no entry fee. Visit the website for more information.

Review by Sean Ennis

New Orleans as a city is complicated, and has become even more so over the past five years.  Countless narratives have emerged since Katrina describing the city’s joys and plights, and surely more will come from the recent oil spill in the Gulf.  And it is difficult to discuss James Nolan’s debut short fiction collection divorced from its primary setting.  Since New Orleans is one of those few American cities where issues of “authenticity” are always tantamount, it is no surprise that Nolan has already been congratulated for nailing the culture and ambiance of the city.  As bleak as many of the stories are, the reader does get the feeling that New Orleans is the place to be: a place where music and death, and food and regret are mingled in a sort of alchemy to produce something valuable.   All of these stories are haunted by the past (be it recent, or generations’ old), and yet the exorcism of those ghosts often seems possible by the simple sharing of a meal, or a cigarette, or a small tender gesture.       

That said, it would be a shame for the booming setting of New Orleans to overshadow the strength of Nolan’s writing.  In the end, it is not place that dominates this collection, but the characters who are each singularly interesting.  The grieving girlfriend who places a radio in her dead lover’s entombed pocket in the title story, the Homicide detective who turns to poetry as a way to confess his own failings in “Open Mike.” The irritable, nocturnal neighborhood activist frustrated with tourists in “The Vampire Tour Diary.”  And the narrator in the final story, “What Floats”—the piece that deals most directly with Hurricane Katrina—who confesses to having spent ten days with his mother’s corpse as a child.  While to some extent these characters must be from New Orleans, readers will find themselves in these pages, though they may be both frightened and delighted to do so.    

(more…)

In the South, it’s common to hear folks divide their experiences into two categories: Before Katrina and After Katrina. For many across the Gulf Coast, life will never be the same.

To mark the five-year anniversary of the worst natural disaster in modern American history, Umbrage Editions has produced a poignant new photobook, Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent (September 2010).

This book serves as a beautiful collection of 86 color photographs taken by award-winning Getty Images photographer Mario Tama. With an inspiring introduction by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and an emotional essay by Tama, the book focuses on the wrath of Hurricane Katrina and the devastating aftermath in the months that followed.

In 2005, millions of Americans watched the horrific events unfold. We watched as the levees broke and the city filled with water. We watched as entire communities cried for help and red tape held back the willing. We watched a failed system in which too many rules and regulations replaced common sense. We watched as children and infants and mothers and grandparents were pulled into boats and buses and burial grounds. We watched lost and hungry animals (many of them human) prowl the ravaged streets in search of food and water and shelter. And then we turned off our television sets and went back to our day-to-day responsibilities as the city of New Orleans (and communities across the coast) cleaned up the mess.

Through it all, Tama shot photos. (more…)