As a young child I was read to a great deal by my mother. I think she read the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder series to me when I was about five-years-old, and she read them more than once. When I was able to read well for myself, I checked them out of the Birmingham Public Library and read them again.

My first idea that I might become a writer came to me from those books. I was reading one of Wilder’s descriptions of extreme cold, a blizzard. I was in Birmingham. It was summer and over 90 degrees in our living room because we had no air conditioning back then, and I realized suddenly that I was trembling with cold.

I came out of the dream of reading and asked myself, "How is this possible? I know it’s very hot today, but I feel cold." And then I answered the question for myself. I said, "It is these words, just these words, that have made me feel that way." And then I thought, "I’d like to be able to do that someday. I’d like to be able to transport a reader through language from one place in time to another." And in fact, that has continued to be an aesthetic of mine in writing:  I want to appeal to the senses, the way we know the exterior world. As Joseph Conrad wrote in the preface to one of his novels, I want to make readers smell and hear and touch and taste, but above all, I want to make them see.

But there’s also the whole sort of infatuation with language that permeates my background. I can remember, again when I was about five, when I first became self conscious about language. And my father was going away for quite some time and I watched his car go down the driveway. I was sitting on the back steps. And I was feeling fairly miserable about his not going to be there. And I stopped and thought of the word "sad’ and I said, "Sad, so this is what they mean by "sad’."  And so I began to look for language to connect to my own inner life and my experiences as well.

As a child I was a very fierce little girl. I had two older brothers and we all played together. We belonged to a free-roaming group of kids who were in and out of each other’s houses and playing in yards and playing under the streetlight at night in the summer. Going barefoot all summer. But part of my fierceness was that I was a very good runner. And my brothers would sometimes have me outrun their male friends to humiliate them.

And I was also a very good physical fighter. I had a terrible temper and I would sometimes lose my temper and get into fights -- or even pick fights with other children. These were not highly damaging fights, but just the same I entered into them with gusto. I’d developed methods of taking down my opponent that were foolproof; they always worked. I even boxed with boxing gloves when I was a child, stripped to the waist in somebody’s front yard. I was maybe seven or eight-years-old. One of my brothers was my coach and the other was my manager. I don’t know where the adults were. They were apparently not looking. Anyway, I got my nose bloodied royally and I decided to stop after that.

But about this fierceness I experienced a terrific guilt. I don’t know whether I was inculcating the mores of my culture that said a Southern girl is supposed to be ladylike and dainty instead of fierce and coming up with a bloody nose. But I felt so guilty about this that I couldn’t sleep at night. My conscience just hurt me terribly. And sometimes when I got in trouble, I would tell lies to get out of trouble, and this doubly hurt my conscience. I knew that good children said their prayers, got in bed, and went to sleep and I wanted to appear to be asleep like a good child. So I had to find a way of lying very still in bed, and the means for doing this was to imagine stories.

So I had stories that went on for years because my conscience hurt me for quite a number of years. Telling myself these stories became the narrative impulse in my life.

I had relatives who lived next door. My Aunt Pat was quite a story teller. She told stories about mad dogs in south Alabama and about haints. And I loved to hear her tell those stories over and over. So storytelling and being read to and reading to myself are all the deep roots of my impulse toward becoming a writer. But I didn’t know I was going to really be a writer even though I thought when I was 10 reading that description of a snowstorm that I would like to.

Reading poetry has also been important to me. When I was an undergraduate student at Birmingham Southern College, the content of Freshman Composition was reading literature and analyzing it. Learning how to analyze a short poem gave me control over my thinking as nothing else had ever done before. I really learned how to think by learning how to practice what’s referred to as the "new criticism," (although that was a long time ago).  Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren as critical thinkers were wonderful guides to me. I could suddenly see, as John Ciardi phrased it, "How does a poem mean?" I feel I stumbled into that analytic ability accidentally, but it was just what I needed.

I thought that I wanted to do some good in the world, and I became very moralistic after I got my temper under control. I had a passion at a young age to give my life to some kind of service for other people, so I had decided I would become a medical missionary and go to Africa. Never mind the people on the streets of Birmingham; where one did good was in darkest Africa.

I was in a pre-med program in college, but that involved chemistry, unfortunately, and I really couldn’t make my mind bend itself around the mathematics of chemistry. I would open the book and fall asleep. So I failed chemistry, not once, not twice, but three times until I finally got the idea that I should try to do something that I was better at than being a pre-med student.

Meanwhile, I was doing extremely well in my English courses and I loved them and I loved reading. But it seemed to me sinful to choose to go into literature because it gave me so much pleasure. Now that sounds paradoxical. It’s certainly one of the more innocent pleasures in life, but this was a serious concern for me about how to reconcile just doing something that I was good at and enjoyed and didn’t necessarily benefit other people much. I would have things to say to a young person of that disposition now, but at that time I had to sort of find my own path. I had a very good friend with whom I discussed these ideas. He also loved to read. And one day we were sitting in class together and the teacher asked a question that none of us could answer. I couldn’t answer it. He couldn’t answer it (and he was smarter than I was). But I knew, just intuitively, that whatever the answer to the question was, it was of great value to the person sitting next to me. I could just feel it in the air. And the question was, "In what way are Pip of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Huck of Huckleberry Finn alike?" It was an intriguing question because I hadn’t really thought transbook before; each book was a little world in itself to me. When none of us could answer the question, the professor answered it and said, "Both of these boys are boys in search of a father." And I knew that was also true of the person across the aisle from me, that his life was in confusion because he was so ambivalent about his father, who had left the family.

And in a way it resolved that question for me about the spiritual validity of going into literature. As we walked out of class together, he looked at me and simply said, "And you ask whether literature does anybody any good." So that opened the door for me to more seriously and professionally take up writing.

I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I was there a long time because I did an MA and then a PhD there. It was a good place for me to learn a lot about writing -- not all I needed to, of course, but a lot.

Sometimes I say I’m a writer because I love to read. And for me, reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. It’s just as natural for me to write as it is for me to read.

Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Stargazer: A Novel
It took me four years to write Ahab’s Wife: two years for the first draft and two years for about four revisions of it. This was a very big book, too: 1,000 typescript pages. While I was writing the book, I didn’t know if it would ever be published. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a contract. I just wrote the book that I wanted to write and that seemed to me might fit in with the goals that I had in mind for myself.

Then I did try to get an agent. I had a connection to an agent in New York. One of my students in a program I taught in in Vermont, which was a brief-residency program, was a first reader for a Fifth Avenue literary agent. And my student said to me at one point, "Sena you’re never going to make any money if you don’t have an agent. Next time you have a book, let me know, and if I like it I’ll pass it on to my boss." That was a wonderful helping hand that she extended to me. I told her, "Well, I’ve just published Sherlock in Love. I’m not going to have another book for years. I’m going to write a big book." And she said, "When it’s done, let me see it." So four years later I got in touch with her. She did like it. She gave it to her boss. Joy Harris called me and said, "I don’t like this book, I love this book. I’m shopping it all over New York City." And she called in two weeks and said, "Well there are six major houses that want to buy this book. I’m having an auction."

And she took it from there. You know, I knew nothing about marketing or the commercial world. I left it entirely up to her. And then she said, "I’m going to sell this book at a figure that will knock your socks off." I was afraid to ask how she knew what figure would knock my socks off. And it turned out that the book sold very well -- many times over what would have knocked my socks off.

Suddenly, the book was well read and read by a lot of people. And Book Sense, the newsletter for the independent booksellers of America, picked it up as a number-one book. Of course, there are fewer independent booksellers now then there were in 1999 when my novel Ahab’s Wife came out. The big chains are much more in command of the situation than they were then.

Ahab’s Wife is a companion novel to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I had read Moby Dick when I was 13, about to go to high school, and it was the first book I wrote a book report on. So I had a very long association with Moby Dick. During the summer of 1993, I was doing a lot of conferences and so forth, so my daughter and I traveled a lot together and we listened to books on tape to help the miles go by. We listened to Little Women, Huck Finn, a whole lot of Dickens, but the book my daughter loved best was Moby Dick because she could become Captain Ahab. She would absorb Ahab’s speeches and make these speeches in all of her young dignity and puff herself up. At the time, I was glad she had such a good ear for language and that she could recognize great language and make it a part of herself, but I felt bad that there was no wonderful woman character in Moby Dick with whom she might identify and whose speeches  she might want to recite or perform.

I began to think about the subject during that summer, but the idea to actually write the book came when I was in Boston on the publication of Sherlock in Love. I was feeling very good. My publisher, David Godeen, was wonderful to me, and there were parties and this stunningly good review on NPR. I felt just really good about myself also. I was driving around a little car I had rented and I was not lost in Boston, and that was a big thing for me. And I said to myself, "Oh you are a competent human being after all.’

And so out of this sort of euphoria I suddenly heard a voice and saw a vision. The vision was of a woman on a roof walk or widow’s walk close to the sea. It was night. She was looking out hoping to see her husband’s whaling ship coming home. But as she looked she realized that her husband was not coming home -- not that night and not ever. With that realization her gaze shifted from the dark ocean waves to the great starry sky. And she began to ask herself, "Who am I in the face of all this vast glory of the universe? What’s my place in the universe?" She was no longer waiting for her husband to come home and define her as a wife or in any other way, but asking her own spiritual questions and seeking her own answers. And then at that moment, that visionary moment, a voice in my head said, "Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last."  That’s the opening sentence for Ahab’s Wife. And I thought, "I have a novel if I want to put my fanny on the chair long enough to write it."

And that's how it began. In a sense, the structure of the novel does fall out of that first sentence, and the scene on the roof walk is deep in the novel. It’s a kind of spiritual turning point for my character. I did not know who the first husband was going to be. I didn’t know who the third husband was going to be. I only had Ahab, the middle man.

But I trusted that the voice would take me where I needed to go. And it did. Of course, the historical nature of the novel required a lot of research. I started by rereading Moby Dick and getting the facts of that life straight. For example, in Moby Dick we learn that Captain Ahab lost his leg on the second voyage after his marriage, that he married someone much younger than himself, that he lost his life on the third voyage, that when he got married, as Melville wrote, he "left but one dent in the marriage pillow" before sailing the next day.
    
But then I had to learn something about sailing and whaling, because I knew nothing about either. And I needed to read about the intellectual ambiance of the time, what the issues were. You know, Moby Dick came out in 1850-51, while slavery was still an institution in the United States. And if I was going to write a big book, I wanted slavery to be an issue in the book. And of course there’s nothing about the position of women in Moby Dick. It is mentioned in passing that Captain Ahab had a wife, but she’s not even given a name, let alone any kind of life.

So there was a great blank slate for me to work with, and I did study other women of the time. Maria Mitchell, a great woman astronomer, is a character in the book and so is Margaret Fuller, a great woman of letters, friend of Emerson, editor of The Dial, foreign correspondent for Greeley’s newspaper. And I put them in as friends of my character because I knew some critics would say, "This is all very well and good, but there were not women like that back then." So I protected my character by letting her know these great women -- as a sort of flag to say, "Here are women a whole lot like your character. They really did exist." I saw Maria Mitchell and Margaret Fuller sort of like Wonder Woman’s bracelets: one on each wrist to deflect the spears and arrows of disagreeable critics.

Four Spirits: A Novel
After Ahab’s Wife, I wrote a novel that is referred to as a historical novel. It’s Four Spirits. The title Four Spirits refers to four young African-American girls who were killed in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. I was there at the time. They were killed in a church bombing; 16th Street Baptist Church. The Ku Klux Klan had planted a bomb in the church. This was a center of activity in the civil rights movement. And I had actually promised myself back when I was in Birmingham that if I ever did become a writer I would write about what it was like to be in Birmingham at that time. And I would tell the truth. I wasn’t interested in a chamber of commerce whitewashing job. I wanted to tell the truth of how violent and terrifying it was and also celebrate the courage of the leaders and followers of the movement.

This book is referred to now as a historical novel. I always thought historical novels were before the lifetime of the author, but for most people it seems so long ago that it’s categorized as that. While I had memory and personal experience to go on, I found it necessary to do a lot of research as well, because of course I didn’t know the whole picture then. When researching Ahab’s Wife, I would write in the morning and do the research in the late afternoon or evening, because it was relatively passive and didn’t require my best brain, so to speak. But with Four Spirits, I would read such terrible things that had happened in Birmingham that I hadn't known about. Then I couldn’t sleep at night and I was really wracked with guilt. Now I had not participated in any way in any of those things, and I had done my own small bit toward the civil rights movement, but still, I was there. When a voice would say to me, "Yes, but you didn’t know," I thought, "Well where have I heard that before?" And where I’ve heard it before is the ordinary German citizen seeing the smoke rise from the crematorium and saying, "I didn’t know what was going on." So it was not a good excuse.
    
Four Spirits is a special book for me because it’s the most autobiographical of my books. The first part of the book is mostly dealing with public events that everyone knows about, and the second half deals more with some of my personal experiences there. I wanted very much to keep that old promise to myself to try in my own fictive way to tell the truth about the civil rights movement in Birmingham. When The New York Times reviewed that book, they said something that actually pleased me enormously, which was, "It was as though Virginia Woolf had gone down to Birmingham to report on the civil rights movement." And I loved that because Virginia Woolf has been such an important writer of sensibility to me. And there’s this chapter in the book called "Stella’s Odyssey" that very much consciously was written in the Virginia Woolf mode. So for a critic to actually see that was hallelujah time for me!

Of course there are real historical people in that book; Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. But the characters are by and large fictive characters in the book; they’re composites of people I knew.

Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette
When I went on to write Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette, suddenly I was dealing with a cast that was very well known. In the other books, I had had fictive characters with a few real characters around them. But now the historical research involved reading the latest biographies about Marie Antoinette and studying the culture of the time, visiting Versailles -- I spent a month living there -- to get a firsthand feel of the place. I love this aspect of being a writer: getting to go to the place that’s the setting of my novel. I went to Nantucket five times when I was writing Ahab’s Wife because I felt place would give rise to spirit. And in some mystical way, it did.

I did an enormous amount of research for the Marie Antoinette book, and I entered it with the hypothesis that probably she had been maligned by history because she was a powerful woman. She was a foreigner from Austria and she was really a scapegoat. Antonia Fraser, whose biography on Marie Antoinette came out about 2001, uses that very term, "scapegoat" about her. And of course Frasier also debunks the idea that Antoinette ever said, "Let them eat cake," when she was told people were hungry and starving and had no bread. So that was a particularly valuable source to me because it’s a re-visioning of history.

I wanted to enter into the inner being of Marie Antoinette. I didn’t want to write another biography. But I wanted to be completely accurate to all the facts, just as I had wanted to be completely accurate to the fictive facts of Moby Dick.
I saw Antoinette as a tragic protagonist, and in a way the shape of her life lends itself to being thought of in Shakespearean terms. In the end the stage is full of bodies; the French Revolution provided that. But, you know, one of the features of Shakespearean tragedy is that the main character, even though flawed, attains a sort of nobility perhaps in the end. And we feel sad over tragedies because we see the waste of potential in humans. We see characters who, if not fully redeemed by their suffering, at least have a much greater understanding of themselves and their world than they had at the beginning.

Even Marie Antoinette's harshest critics say that she died with a great deal of courage. Biographer Stefan Zweig, whose harsh view of her came out in the 1930s, admired her dignity and courage when she was faced with the guillotine. The subtitle for his book, by the way, was Portrait of an Average Woman. What an affront that is to our sensibilities today. There’s no such thing as an average woman! But he defined the average woman as frivolous and materialistic, totally self-centered, admirable in no genuine way. He said Marie Antoinette was just like all the rest of them, that she was an average woman.

Anyway, I felt that there was a five-act Shakespearean tragic trajectory in Marie Antoinette's story. And I wanted to work with her growth and her maturation. People talk about her frivolity -- and she did go through a phase when she did a lot of gambling -- but she never drank heavily. In fact she didn’t drink at all. She was really quite prudish. She was not involved in drunken orgies, although that’s one of the images that people have of her. There was a time when she knew that she needed to have a child -- and she was blamed that no heir to the throne had been produced -- but the marriage had not been consummated. Her husband and she were very young when they got married. She was 14 ½, he was 15 ½. And he was not a very sexual person. The marriage wasn’t consummated for seven years, but she was completely blamed for this, even though she was quite willing. The many letters between her and her mother, Maria Theresa, the Empress of Austria, have been preserved, and they show that she tried very hard to interest her husband in consummating the marriage.

Finally, Marie Antoinette's mother sent her older brother, Joseph, who was the co-emperor of Austria to Versailles, to give the young couple counseling in sexuality. He asked them very bluntly what they were doing -- and then told them what they should be doing. Because Joseph was another emperor and on their level, he could get down to the nitty-gritty of it all. The couple went on to have four children and a miscarriage.

What people refuse to see about Marie Antoinette is that she’s a character who went through a series of stages. When she became a mother she was devoted to her children. She was criticized in her own court as being frivolous because she wanted to spend time with her children. They said this was a frivolous activity and that she should be in court gossiping. And so she was a very loving person in terms of her family and totally devoted to them. She refused to leave, although she could have saved herself, but she wouldn’t leave the side of her husband as the revolution came on. 

My novels are self-consciously dedicated to artistic goals. I want to write the best books I can because I want them to have some lasting value. And they won’t if they’re not well written and well conceived.

Well my life changed with the publication of Ahab’s Wife. I became a world traveler after that. And I moved to a house that I had seen 30 years ago when I was walking in the neighborhood. And I exclaimed to the person I was with, "Why that’s the most beautiful house in the world," and I’m now inside it at this moment. So my life changed in that I was able to define myself both locally in a way that suited me by choosing to live where I live in old Louisville. And also it changed in that I was able to reach out by physically going to places like Russia and India that I probably would not have gotten to go to if Ahab’s Wife had not been a big success.

I’ve also been able to, because of that, start a whole school of writing at Spalding University. If I hadn’t had Ahab’s Wife I probably wouldn’t have been entrusted with that mission. I wanted to create a school that was a very happy place for both students and teachers. Graduate education is often fraught with tension and I wanted to see if it could be done differently. So the creation of the Spalding brief-residency program is part of what I treasure. I’m now writer in residence at University of Louisville. I treasure that as well. It means I’m not teaching as much so I have more time for my writing. So those are some of the big ways my life has changed.

Ah, in the grave! In the grave!

But beyond that, I see myself as a writer probably writing some books for children. I so much enjoyed Laura Ingalls Wilder's somewhat autobiographical books that I would like to give back to that genre of writing about the distant past and when I was young and what the world was like then. And I really love the idea of writing about how a person becomes an artist. The Germans have a word for it, Künstlerroman. I see myself doing that kind of writing.

Also, I’ve written with a coauthor a stage version of Four Spirits. It was commissioned by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival Theater and has been given some stage readings and a full production. But I’d like to do more with the novels I’ve already written in terms of other forms of making plays and screenplays and musicals. There’s a musical version that I’m working on with a local composer, Frank Richmond, and Frank has written such wonderful songs for it. It’s just incredible. But I need some time to work on the dramatic structure a little bit more. So in a way I’m looking forward to revisiting some of my works, which I still love, and seeing what happens when they are transformed into different forms than the novel.

In all of these books, friendship among women is a very important factor. I feel that’s a subject that’s been too neglected in American fiction. Sometimes a woman will have a good friend, but she’s mostly a confidant for what’s going on romantically with a man in the woman’s life. And in all of my books I’ve given my main characters friends who are woman friends and tried to show how very important those relationships are. Sometimes they make life possible for us. I don’t mean to be exclusive of men when I say that. I’ve had many wonderful male friends, but what’s not been written about so much is friendship among women. And I’ve tried to do this in all three of the books we’ve talked about: Ahab’s Wife and Four Spirits and Abundance.

My women friends have been important to me all my life. As a child they were enormously important to me. And in my next novel Adam & Eve, one of the trajectories is that a woman who has grown away from some of her childhood friends realizes that she wants for herself the kind of liberty and independence that she had when she was, say, 11-years-old and having adventures with the girls who were her friends.

I'm moving closer to home for the novel after Adam & Eve. It's probably going to be called The Fountain of St. James Court and will be a Woolfian novel.

It’s going to be a double novel: a novel about a writer whose novel is on the portrait painter of Marie Antoinette. Her name was Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun, and she was a survivor rather than a victim of the French Revolution. She was a successful woman painter at a time when it was very difficult for women to achieve that kind of status. She was a person who came to be in charge of her own life and who made quite a happy life for herself despite terrible losses. And I want to celebrate that life within the structure of a single day on St. James Court.