Jeb Sharp is an award-winning public radio journalist based in Boston. She has churned out hundreds of news stories in her time, but finds novels better than journalism at describing the human condition. She too once rowed crew at an East Coast college. She met Kate Gray at Hedgebrook, a retreat for women writers.
Kate, why did you write this book?
This story is based on my experiences thirty years ago. The bullying I witnessed at a boarding school, and didn’t recognize, has stuck in my body. I wrote it to try to forgive myself for not stopping the suffering when I was a quivering pile of emotions. I was a scared baby-dyke in the highly competitive straight world, which grew me up and spit me out. The story wouldn’t stop wagging me. I had to write it.
What was the process like?
Arduous. It started when I was teaching with Tom Spanbauer and the Dangerous Writers at a summer writing program on the Oregon Coast. One night I wasn’t sleeping well, so early in the morning I woke up, and this voice came in my head, not the crazy kind. It was the way that Tom describes it: some friend, in a bar with loud music, pulls a chair up to you as close as it can go, and this person is talking into your ear so closely that you can feel her words, her breath, her lips on your ear. That was how the story started, a prologue that addressed the reader as if the reader and I were two friends in a bar, sitting as close as we could. I returned to those first three pages over and over when I would lose a sense of the intimacy and pain in Taylor’s voice. Then, the prologue became unnecessary, and I didn’t include it in the final version.
Without a doubt, the weekly writing group run by Joanna Rose and Stevan Allred was the support and driving force behind completing the novel. Every week each writer brings a maximum of six pages. For a couple of years I got up at 5 a.m., wrote for an hour, then started my work day. Once or twice a year I would segregate myself somewhere and write more than that.
After I had written and rewritten a complete draft, received rejections when I sent the manuscript out, my indefatigable partner gathered a group of twelve friends to our house for potlucks once a month, and we read the entire draft out loud. Their questions and insights were invaluable. Reading the whole thing out loud let me hear the gaps, the promise.
How long did it take you?
The first draft took eight years, and the rewriting took two years.
Did you always intend to tell it in alternating voices/narrators?
Originally, Carla was the third voice. And no, there wasn’t the regular alternation. Some of the feedback I got on the second draft was that Carla and Taylor’s voices were too similar. So, I rewrote it a third time and inserted Carla’s voice where I could. But I always had multiple voices in mind because everyone who experiences the same thing tells a different story. I have five siblings, and each of us has a very different version of the same experiences.
The novel is partly based on tragic events in your own life—what was it like to weave hard truths into a work of fiction? Was it even more autobiographical to begin with? What was the ratio of pain to catharsis?
When I finally finished writing the first draft of the novel, I was in a tiny hotel in Maupin, Oregon, which is a tiny, gorgeous town on the Deschutes River. It was spring break, March, and that’s the real anniversary of my friend’s drowning. That part of the story is true: this woman I loved drowned in a rowing accident on the Schuylkill. To this day on the anniversary of her death I try to spend time by water. After ending with that image of the crane in the tree, I walked down to the Deschutes and sat on the riverbank. Once before I had asked the spirit of my friend for a sign that she was still looking after me, and I did this again. At that moment a salmon leapt out of the rapids up the falls. I’m not making this up.
When you write to understand, to go more deeply into truth so that you can bear it, the pain is part of the redemption. In the story there’s a lot of truth, and you’re right: it became more fiction as I wrote it and rewrote it. When you write witness literature, you shift your own trauma. The writing process doesn’t necessarily heal what you felt, but it opens a pathway between your brain and your heart; you have the words that probably weren’t there during the experience.
Was writing the book painful? Yes. To me the most intense scene was Carla telling the story of her father with Doug in the water. Something like that happened to me, but when the attacker tried to bargain for the other, older person, that person left me. In writing the story I was able to move the shame, the anger, and the silence of that experience. In fiction you get to write a different ending to your story, change the factors, make different things happen. By telling these violent vignettes, I’m hoping the reader can feel less alone with his/her experiences of violence, can find images that give comfort.
Talk about what rowing means to you and what it was like to write about it.
Rowing is an art, a religion, a way of being. Before I rowed in college, I had done many field sports. There’s little like rowing. It’s the ultimate team sport: you transcend your own body to become one with the others in the boat. To write about it was to relive it, to appreciate the beauty of it, to feel gratitude for the twenty years I was able to row.
There are so many powerful vehicles/themes in the book—rowing of course, but also physics and origami. Are they also in your life, in your past?
Initially, I went to college to major in Physics. Calculus III during freshman year crushed me. But physics and poetry are not far apart. In both there is associative or intuitive logic, and certainly there is elegance. One of the joys of writing this novel was researching the physics and trying to wrap my brain around Jack Song’s lesson plans. I’ve rarely done origami, but I love the peace of it. A few times I’ve made cranes with friends, and that process was powerful.
What was it like writing a lesbian character and in particular evoking a time (not that long ago) when people were more closeted?
My friends (most of whom are over fifty years old) and I talk a lot about how much things have changed. My partner and I are celebrating our recent marriage, and marriage is something I never thought possible. The external world sometimes moves more quickly than the internal one. Evoking those times was not difficult because a) it’s still dangerous for queer people, and b) those marks of fear and hatred are indelible. From high school to a few years ago, I omitted pronoun references in conversations, rarely talked about my family, didn’t reply when stories were told about husbands and wives and vacations. Over the years I’ve had death threats, been spat upon, had my car vandalized, been stalked, been falsely accused of being a sexual predator. When you’ve had to protect yourself, it’s hard to let go of your ways of hiding. What is wonderful is seeing younger people freely express themselves without self-consciousness. Their way of walking in the world is perfect, beyond what we who grew up in the eighties ever imagined possible.
If I close my eyes and think of the feeling of the book, I’m surrounded by images of water and birds. Can you talk about those descriptions and metaphors?
I spent quite a few years sculling on the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. When you are on the water as the sun comes up, when you are sculling, there is nothing between you and the sky. In every stroke you open your body as forcefully and fully as you can. You throw yourself across the water, over the water, under the sky. The sky at 5 a.m. is full of birds. Water and birds have been sources of comfort and joy for me even in the darkest times. Once I opened the bay door to the boathouse just in time to see an osprey hurtle headlong into the water ten feet in front of me. I counted to five before the huge bird surfaced with a fish and lifted off from the water and almost crashed because the fish was so big. I laughed so hard with the surprise and magic of that act.
How much research went into the novel? What was familiar territory and what wasn’t?
There was a lot of research into physics and Korea and the Cold War. And when you live through an era, you don’t necessarily remember the phrases or TV shows or bands that played. The internet provides glossaries of the eighties, for instance, that helped me use authentic terms, exclamations that the students would have used, that we used to use at the time. And those phrases and shows took me right back to that time and those places. I could then remember the clothes students wore, the conversations we had, the haircuts. Research was critical to creating the world as the characters experienced it.
You write about tough, tough themes and yet with such wit and redemption. How do you approach grief and pain and fear in your writing? Who were your teachers/influences in that?
If you want to find models of complex and deeply textured emotions, read African American poets. Maya Angelou spoke at my boarding school and saved my life. In her classic presentation, she gave the audience a reading list, and I consumed everything she mentioned. Writers like Countee Cullen and Mari Evans and Paul Laurence Dunbar gave me permission to feel and act and write with a range and mess of emotion. And then, I gobbled up Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Hacker, and Adrienne Rich. The Confessionals paved the way for the Dangerous Writers in the Northwest, who believe that writing what scares you is a gift to the reader because you let them know they are not alone, you eliminate the distance between writer and reader, and you say the really hard things so that the reader doesn’t have to. You go first.
And Toni Morrison’s Beloved is still the most important novel in contemporary American literature, I believe. Reading her book over and over, her way of using multiple perspectives on one traumatic experience got inside me, and her way of creating the presence of the horrible collar forced on slaves so much more powerfully by the absence of naming it gave me the idea of not providing Kyle a voice. I’m hoping the presence of his voice is stronger in its absence.
Elizabeth Rosner’s Speed of Light showed me how to tell the story in two tightly-intertwined voices, how to write prose that was poetry.
And I come from a family of writers who can tolerate almost anything besides a lack of humor.
You write about sexual violence and bullying and other overt trauma, but you’re also tackling the more ambiguous and taboo subject of what teachers and students feel for each other, what it means to act on those feelings, what the lines of transgression are—what was it like to put those words down on paper? Is it hard as a writer to free yourself enough to impersonate someone pushing and even violating those boundaries?
The tired adage for writers is “write what you know,” and another piece of that is to extend what you know, push it by taking the other person’s role, to write the stuff that scares you. By putting myself in the heads of people I might despise, I find some measure of their humanity. It’s hard. Sometimes after writing scenes with those transgressions, I biked long distances to figure out how those lines blurred, to make sure those feelings were not stored in my muscles, and to work through the residuals, like disgust and shame and surprise.
It strikes me there is a profound lack of privacy in this prep school setting. Were you consciously evoking that feeling or is it simply a byproduct of writing about that environment?
Boarding school teachers have no privacy and work around the clock, especially if they live in apartments within the dorms. Two of my sisters and their husbands have spent their lives working at boarding schools, and I began my career as a teacher thinking I could do the same thing. In one year I gained so much respect for what boarding school teachers do and enough experience to realize I wanted a different lifestyle.
You are a poet as well as a novelist. How do you think that affected the writing of Carry the Sky?
Since I didn’t know how to write fiction when I started, I may have taken more leaps in language and made more associative connections than most fiction writers. Sound often determined my word choice. As a poet, I had to learn things like plot and dialogue. And luckily for me, Forest Avenue Press is a haven for quiet novels, ones that are character and/or language-driven more than plot-driven.
What’s your hope for the book and its readers?
My hope is that the book makes a difference in one person’s life. I hope that one young gay or lesbian person feels less alone, that one person who has lost someone to suicide or accident or prolonged disease finds comfort in knowing that she can recover, that he can recover in the way that he needs to. I hope readers read plays like Master Harold … and the Boys and Hamlet and Francis Bacon, that readers connect literature with the complexity of who we are and can be. I hope someone flies a kite. I hope someone hugs someone she knows who might be like Kyle. I hope someone talks about feeling lost and someone listens and finds that person. I hope readers ask great questions like yours, Jeb.