Patricia Harrelson

Author Kate Evans writes in not one but several genres: fiction, poetry (Like All We Love), non-fiction (Negotiating the Self), and blogging. In each case, she demonstrates clear competence managing the distinctive features particular to the genre. Kate is one smart lady.

In the following interview, she responds to questions I asked about her process when writing her newly published novel For the May Queen. I was interested in how Kate’s “editeyes” worked as she approached the task of writing fiction.

ME: The setting of For the May Queen is dorm-life culture in the early 1980s, focusing on drinking, drugs, and sex prevalent in such a context. As a 60-year-old woman who came of age in the late 1960s, I admit to feeling a sense of disturbing recognition as well as powerless disappointment as I read, particularly during the first 2/3rds of the story. You manage to present this as a valid context for a rite of passage without minimizing it as a societal problem. Can you speak to how you arrived at telling a story that takes place in this particular context?

KATE: I lived in the dorms in the early 1980s.  I was always interested in writing about that experience.  I even tried to write about it as memoir, but that didn’t work for me. I worked on a lot of other things for years–poems, stories–when one day Norma’s voice came to me.  Then the dorms emerged as the setting.  It wasn’t really a conscious choice, but clearly that setting had been brewing in my mind for quite some time. 

The dorms are a good setting, I think, because there are many juicy built-in conflicts.  I chose the early 1980s because I didn’t want to deal with the internet and cell phones!  Well, that’s part of it.  The other part is, retro and nostalgia are fun.

ME: It is often said that a fiction writer’s first novel is to a great extent autobiographical. I’m interested in how this was so for you, particularly in terms of the characters in the story. Assuming there were prototypes in your experience for these characters, how and when did they become their own entities, more fictional and less the individuals from whom they originated?

KATE: I like that the semi-autobiographical novel is and is not the writer.  I think this genre or sub-genre allows us to play around with the slipperiness of the self.  I’m both Norma and not-Norma.  Norma’s both Kate and not-Kate.  It’s fun to play around like that.  As Jeanette Winterson says, reading yourself as fiction is liberating.

Of course memoirists do this too, to an extent–it’s just that the readers are more likely to see memoir as you, whereas readers have to grapple with fiction as being both you and not you.  I think it’s fun and exciting because I like identity to be in motion.

The characters became more fictional and then paradoxically more real–more truly themselves–the more I wrote them.  They became three-dimensional as they grappled with all the roadblocks I placed in their way, as they made choices and interacted and, ideally, grew.

ME: I particularly enjoyed the symbolism in the character’s names and how their names fleshed out the central theme about identity. For instance, Norma sits at the center of the story, thereby establishing the “norm” which is not exactly normal, and who is also called Norma Jean by Chuck thereby alluding to the subtext of the Marilyn Monroe persona. Chuck, who is really Paul, is renamed by Norma, consistent with his dual identity and her failure to see the real him.  Can you talk about the naming of characters and the degree to which your choices were consciously symbolic?

This is cool! Thanks for the great insights.  I didn’t make conscious choices about the names, but clearly my unconcious was busy at work.  It takes a reader like you to enter the story and help me see the method to the madness of my unconcious. 

When Norma walked into Paul’s dorm room, I didn’t know they were going to play around with each other’s names.  Paul’s calling Norma “Norma Jean” is led to his becoming a film buff–which evolved into being an essential aspect of his character.  Norma’s renaming Paul is certainly a way for her to claim him and to not-see him, but I didn’t have this in mind as I wrote it.  The playful banter was just part of their rapport.

ME: There are other symbols in the story: bridges, mirrors, and games, along with cultural icons like James Bond and Marilyn Monroe. The story explores themes like nonconformity, altered states, friendship, marriage, and even education and the relative value of an instructor’s choices for her students. How much of this arose organically in the story? Did you ever discover something inherent in the tale that you developed in the revision process?

KATE: All of it arose organically.  When a friend of mine read the manuscript, she noticed a bunch of references to fairy tales, like “Billy Goats Gruff ” and “Goldilocks.”  I didn’t know that was all in there.  That’s what’s so wonderful about writing.  It takes the readers to enrich, to complete, the experience.

I do think I amped up some of these patterns and recurrences in my revision, but not with an eye to theme.  It was more with an eye to repetition as a satisfying way to weave patterns into, or out of, chaos.

ME: Finally, you’ve mentioned that your editor sent you back to the drawing board to write a denouement—the second to the last chapter. Would you talk about your process in writing this chapter?

This was actually my agent who did this.  At any rate, he said he wanted to know the fall-out of Norma’s discoveries that are essentially the novel’s climax.  I realized he was right, that we never know what Norma does to grapple with what she suddenly sees.  Sorry for being so vague, but I don’t want to give away what Norma discovers for those who haven’t read the novel.  

At any rate, Norma discovers something big.  But my agent was right, the book couldn’t just end there.  We had to know how she grappled with what she discovered.  After I resisted for a while, it turned out to be really fun to watch her deal with this alone.  She turns to a book, in fact, for advice.  It’s the longest section in the novel that she’s alone, reading and thinking.  She gets more quiet and still than at any other part of the novel.  I saw her growing up just a little bit, right there.  It was very cool, and it provided a bridge to the last chapter.

Thanks Kate. I wonder if my readers have questions for you.