La dame aux camélias: talking to Marly, part 1

Marly Youmans (at right in the photo) is a friend, a prolific and gifted writer of poetry and fiction, a blogger, and a neighbor of sorts: she lives and writes in Cooperstown, New York, just a hop of one valley over from where I grew up. I met Marly through qarrtsiluni, where she's been a frequent contributor and also an issue editor. Later this year I'll be publishing her book-length, post-apocalyptic epic poem Thaliad at Phoenicia Publishing. But right now, we're having a conversation about her new novel, "A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage," (Mercer University Press, 2012, The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction) available for pre-order at real bookstores and online. Here's part 1, below the book cover:

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage tells of a young boy's travels through the black heart of Depression America and his search for light both metaphorical and real. Writing with a controlled lyrical passion, Marly Youmans has crafted the finest, and the truest period novel I’ve read in years.

--Lucius Shepard

In A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage Marly Youmans gives us a beautifully written and exceptionally satisfying novel.Youmans has achieved that rarest of all accomplishments: she has created a flawed hero about which we care. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanageis one of the best books I have read.

 

--Raymond L. Atkins

____________________________

BETH: Marly, your novels have a very convincing sense of place. How did you decide on the setting for Death at the White Camellia Orphanage?

 

MARLY: In the case of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, I used a setting that had not changed much since the Depression--that is, the rickety house where my paternal grandparents lived and sharecropped land owned by a relative. The description of the orphanage relies on an intimate knowledge of the swamps and fields and dirt roads close by, the places where we would go to pick fruit as children, the swelter of heat, the cruel, ingenious insects, and the dearth of comfort in and outside of the house and its tiny outbuildings. It simply felt like the right place for the orphanage when I began dreaming up Pip and his life. 

Staying at a poor sharecropper's house near Lexsy, Georgia every summer was a great boon to me as an imaginative child. I could easily step away from the 24-party line and the minimal utilities and imagine a medieval world. To go there was to live in another time in which shelter was minimal. (A short jaunt down the road and I was at Collins, where I stayed in yet another time--my maternal grandparent's house, a Queen Anne built by my grandfather and still redolent of its era.)

BETH: Do you do a lot of research to achieve this, or is it based on personal experience?

MARLY: However, I don't usually pillage settings I know because I like to make things up. So I sometimes research elements of a landscape--eucalyptus flowers, for instance, blossoms that I haven't seen in decades. I admit to borrowing the feel of life by an upstate lake like Cooperstown for Pip's northern travels, and a childhood in which we moved every three years definitely informs the book's landscapes. Certain elements that seemed very strange to me when I lived outside the South as a child--clouds of cottonweed seeds, for example--crept in as elements of strangeness around Pip.

The interview concludes tomorrow...

 

Comments

[Laura]

Nice! And now we're all on tenterhooks, awaiting part two! I'm eager to read this, having just now finished Elizabeth's Spencer's 'Landscapes of the Heart." I'm fascinated now by Southern settings in a way I never have been...well, I did love Faulkner in college, but that's about it. Love your "cruel, ingenious insects," a hint of delightful words, phrases, lines, paragraphs, etc., to come.

[marly youmans]

Thanks, Beth--

Had some more of those picture comments! Now I'm telling everybody that we hand out black T-shirts and glasses whenever people come over!

[marly youmans]

Laura, I'm looking forward to lunch with Elizabeth Spencer in May... Though my father detested Faulkner and thought him unjust to the South,there are things about his childhood that feel Faulknerian to me.