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.

My system involves a plethora of overstuffed folders in various filing systems, an overstuffed email inbox, and a bookshelf overflowing with reference books. This simple, rather haphazard system works for me because as soon as I organize anything, I can never find it again. I rely a great deal on my memory. Once I have fed the research into my imagination, it surfaces when necessary. Mine is not a system to emulate, but it is the one that works for me.

Some authors outline a plot and follow that outline when crafting a novel. Did you approach this story that way, or did events and people begin to take on a direction and life of their own? (You’ve mentioned hearing Mary Sutter’s voice).

For me, an outline has proved useful only to evaluate progress and diagnose problems. I did outline My Name is Mary Sutter on the very last draft because Mary’s emotional arc didn’t feel right. For help, I turned to Jon Franklin’s Writing for Story. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice for newspaper features. His book elucidates epic story structure in a way I had never before encountered. It is based on the familiar character in conflict, action in development, and resolution paradigm, but he adds the idea of interlinked conflict, which helped me to discover wherein the current structure the problem lay.

I think the important factor to remember is that Franklin already knew the beginning, middle and end of his stories. He was writing features for a newspaper in which he was shaping a known story. As fiction writers, we often don’t know what’s coming; that’s part of the fun. My method for My Name is Mary Sutter was to have a vague idea of an ending (based on desire: would Mary get or not get the thing/person that she wanted?), and then forge ahead to see what developed. I discovered new, wonderful story elements that, had I attempted to stick to some predetermined outline, might not have surfaced. 

Merely as an exercise, I have tried to outline my new book in an attempt to save myself some time. I don’t know how helpful this exercise will prove in the long run. What it has helped me figure out is whether or not I have enough story for a novel (I think I do), but whether the outline will bear any resemblance to the final story is in question. I suspect I will file the outline somewhere in an overstuffed folder and only consult it, or more likely re-outline the book, if I find the emotional arc of the final draft faulty.

Learn more from Robin Oliveira tomorrow in Part Two of the author interview 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.

Though the omniscient view distances the reader from the person for whom we most desire to feel empathy, the contrast and conflict between Sutter and real-life superintendent of army nurses Dorthea Dix is effective. Like all pioneers and leaders, Mary Sutter isn’t someone we always like, but we respect and trust her, partly for her unstinting self-examination and desire for self-improvement, as the oft-repeated novel title implies.

With emphasis on people over place, Sutter has comparatively little descriptive differentiation between North and South, preferring instead to create a sense of setting through the people who inhabited the Albany, Manhattan and Washington cities of the day, and through their response to the casualties of war in all its forms.

Keeping the story’s promise of the unconventional, Oliveira sidesteps the trap of the sweeping epic. Relationships never break their realistic bounds to become melodrama, nor does war descend into a body count, making Sutter consistent as an intensely personal tale. In light of this painstaking care, it’s somewhat disappointing to see a key facet of the story’s culmination receive short shrift via epilogue. Yet, even in conclusion, Oliveira evades cliché, neatly avoiding both hopelessness and happy ending.

Most memorable in a Sophie’s Choice kind of way are Sutter’s people and their decisions, whose consequences are heightened amid war. This inward labor and outward toil give birth to more mature characters and an adult nation later in life than is seemly, making the effort more painful but the result more lasting, and Oliveira does all these things well.

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.

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? MJR: Oh, yes yes yes. The focus on boys, clothes, learning all the words to songs, singing them, hanging out and talking about stuff, random stuff girls that age think about. Also, my BFF, Martha Beaudoin and I used to argue and fight and make up constantly. We would sneak and talk to each other late at night, just talking and talking and talking.

I’m heartened that one of my daughter’s best friends is an African American, Puerto Rican, and Caucasian mix. She calls herself a mutt. Ariel and Mickey joke around about race, which heartens me. When we start to laugh about things, it means we’re getting emotional distance from it.

DM: Horses play an important role in your narrator Rayann’s life. Did they play a role in your life growing up as well?

MJR: My dad bought me a run-down quarterhorse, Missy, when I was about 11. Then someone gave Dad an old show horse, Charlie. He was temperamental and a five-gaited English ride. Once, he bit me at a birthday party, and I grabbed his mane, pulled up, and bit him back right on the neck! Couldn’t have hurt much, but it shocked him. His eyes got huge. Everybody at the party was laughing. I did it without thinking. Sounds like animal cruelty, but I doted on those horses.

Girls needed power of some sort back then, since we had none. Absolutely none. And girls’ sexuality was surrounded by the worst risks. So to have the gentlest mammals, huge mammals, that you could groom and talk to, guide and entertain? Well. And riding horses requires skills.

I rode bareback, and that really requires skills that I learned over years of riding. I was always the shortest kid in my classes, so I was no athlete. But on the horses, I had everything, including height.

DM: Did you have a black girlfriend growing up?

MJR: Several. I couldn’t bring them home, so the intimacy you usually have with friends wasn’t possible. But at school, we had a blast. Alice was extremely tall and playful. We’d squirt water on each other from overflowing water fountains. Jennifer and I teamed up as tap dance partners. That six weeks I made my only A in PE ever.

DM: Are you close to any black friends now as an adult?

MJR: Melanie Abrams-Rawls writes incredibly smart, thoughtful essays and poetry, and is a close friend in my poetry writing group. She told me I had to write the book and tell the truth. I’m forever indebted to her for her love.

Cliff Thompson, another novelist, has stayed friends since we met at the Hambidge Center years ago. He writes beautifully about the black middle class. I have good Facebook friends from the Obama campaign connections, too. All brilliant, funny, resilient folks.

DM: Do you feel the racial divide in this country has lessened in recent years?

MJR: Lessened and increased, depending on the person. I don’t think most of us thought a black man would be president so soon. Most of us feel proud about that, I believe. I mean, race has been the big bad hypocrisy in our “free” country.  And mostly white people don’t want to talk about it. We’re kind of scaredy-cats about it, if that’s a word you can use in a literary journal. I think we’re getting there in baby steps, and sometimes in bigger steps. And then there’s a whole fear thing that’s so racially based. So biased, simply because white people and black people generally do not have good, deep conversations with each other.

My Facebook girlfriends (black and white) are all very open and we can rant about racism with each other safely on Facebook emails. Sometimes the African American women become afraid when certain vocal groups say strange things about the president. I understand their fear. We all try to listen and try to reassure each other. We joke around about someday having an Old Folks Home together.

DM: What are you working on now?

MJR: An environmental mystery novel set on the island of Cedar Key, Florida. My son Dylan works in Permaculture and Transition Cities (cities that are trying to transition away from an oil-based culture). He’s a landscaper who is passionate about the environment, so he’s a huge influence. We’re writing an article right now about Transition Cities.

Florida has seen firsthand what oil has done to our environment, economy, our psyches. The main character in the novel is a single mom hair stylist. In the opening, she is doing a hair cut and style for a female friend who’s now in a coffin—dead. This woman had supposedly committed suicide by shooting herself in the chest. Well, the hair stylist doesn’t like the high-collared neck on her former friend and unbuttons a few buttons out of a weird nervousness. She sees that the woman’s throat has been cut, and there’s no gun damage to her chest. The hair stylist gets involved and gets into big trouble, of course. She has to juggle work, two kids, two mortgages, a sick dad, and an eccentric American Indian grandmother. Meanwhile, she’s being a pretty bumbling detective. And she’s trying to decide which of two men she wants to see, if either.

DM: You recently went on a retreat. Where? What did you accomplish?

MJR: I was at The Hambidge Center for two weeks, an artist colony in the north Georgia mountains where I rewrote the whole mystery novel. I’d never be able to do that at home. My daughter’s still in high school, and I teach three and four classes a semester. Even my writer husband Michael, the most considerate person I’ve ever met, sometimes interrupts my thoughts, and the phone rings constantly. I’m the poet laureate for the region, a service post, and I could go on about a writer’s interruptions.

At Hambidge, the cabins you stay in alone have no phone or Internet. You have no one to talk to except at dinner with other artists. There’s no TV, no teenager, no husband, no obligations or meals to worry about. Just the artist and the work. I recommend writers do this when they can.

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.

One afternoon Rayann follows Cookie, the only colored girl in her class, down a dirt road. Thus begins Rayann’s awakening to the prejudice surrounding her. She is attracted by this girl who belts out gospel and Marvin Gaye with equal enthusiasm, accompanied by her honking geese, Margot and Waldo. Cookie, the fastest runner in their class, projects a confidence Rayann admires. Rayann learns white boys shoved Cookie off the school bus because “they didn’t want no niggers riding on their bus.” Though Rayann realizes what the boys did was wrong, it isn’t something she can say out loud. Through most of the novel, she lacks the courage to acknowledge Cookie publicly, partly because her friends and family would disown her, and also because any public demonstration of their friendship could be dangerous for both of them.

Rayann shares her hiding place in the woods with her new friend, where she is setting up housekeeping “just in case.” She isn’t sure in case of what. The what comes soon enough when Rayann overhears her father’s drunken friend call her “ripe” and he searches the upstairs for her. In her innocence, Rayann doesn’t truly understand his intentions, but her instincts lead her to hide until she can escape to her special place in the woods. When she needs food and support, she turns to Cookie and her Aunt Jessie, the Woods’ long-time maid.

As Rayann enters Cookie’s life in a more intimate way, she realizes “Colored people were a mystery” because whites had such limited interaction with them. In time, she discovers commonalities. She and Cookie both bite their nails. They are curious about what it will be like to be kissed for the first time. And they both love the same pop songs on the radio. Another bond grows between them when Rayann develops a crush on Cookie’s older brother, Ivory Jones, who works in the hospital where Rayann’s father is an administrator.

The split in Rayann’s family intensifies as her father fools around with “hoochie coo” women. He plans to stash Rayann in a boarding school and her mother in a mental hospital while he lives well off her mother’s money. Racial tensions also escalate with the summer heat. Cookie and Rayann walk together openly through each other’s neighborhoods, finding danger and prejudice everywhere. After a day full of confronting hatred, the girls finally stand “face to face, their masks washed off.” One can hardly read that line and not be reminded of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask.”

Set against key events of the Civil Rights movement, Cookie and Me is a story about color, “the hues that don’t have names…The royal blue of late afternoon,(and) the color of forgiveness.” It is a novel dreaming of great grandchildren the “shades of ebony, mahogany and pistachio,” great grandchildren Rayann hopes she and Cookie will someday share stories about while they rock on a porch as old women.

More than a story about race, the novel demonstrates the power of love and friendship. Ivory Jones risks his job to help Rayann keep her mother out of Chattahoochee, and Rayann takes great risks to help Cookie when she is injured as a bystander during a protest.

This novel sings like a poem, a love song to the North Florida Ryals grew up in, a poem that took ten years, off and on, to write. At the novel’s end, Miss Jessie tells Rayann she’s “done been (her) pearl all along,” affirming her love. Likewise, after reading this novel, one is left feeling it has been Ryals’ pearl all along.

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.

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.