Meet the Author: Jayne Anne Phillips

[music] We are grateful to our friends at Northshshire Books and Monroe Street Books for their underwriting of this program. Northshshire Books has outlets in Manchester, Vermont, [music] and Saratoga Springs. and Monroe Street Books is on Route 7 just north of Mberry. Both are wonderful independent [music] bookstores and we thank them. Hello, I'm Louisis Meyers and this is Meet the Author [music] where we talk with authors about their lives and their works. I am so honored today to have with us Miss Jane Anne Phillips from her home in the Boston area. She's here with us via Zoom. Miss Phillips is has written many novels uh including a book called Nightw Watch uh which came out in 2024 and it was awarded the Puliter Prize. Several of her other novels have been shortlisted for national book awards. She's been a huge influence on on other younger writers. Uh her most recent book is called Small Town Girls. This is her first non-fiction work uh where she it's really a collection of essays but with a focus on uh her the small town in West Virginia where she grew up. Um so we're so honored to have Miss Phillips. Welcome. >> Well, thank you for having me. Glad to be here. >> So I wanted to spend the first part talking about Nightw Watch which was an earlier book just just two or three years ago, two years ago now. Um this is a tremendous novel. Uh from the first few pages, let me just in say that it takes place during the Civil War and then in the years uh fair immediately after. Uh from the first few pages, I felt that William Faulner still walked the earth. Um the uh the uh not just not really the plot but the characters, the the uh description of the land, the the dialect uh all captured something so vivid. Um, it really captured me from the first few pages and never let up through the entire book. Um, can you tell us a little bit about what this book is about? Tell readers, uh, give us just a synopsis. I grew up in West Virginia, not far from the what was once the Trans Alagany Lunatic Asylum. And um during those years there was a very important uh doctor psychiatrist named um Kirkbride. He was an incredible influence just for a time in the treatment of mental illness with a way of treating the mentally ill that he called moral treatment and it simply meant treating the mentally ill in a humane way. Um, meanwhile, the book actually begins with a 12-year-old girl named Kona Lee being hustled into a buckboard by the man she's been taught to call Papa. He's about to take the mother who has been mute for the past couple of years due to the abuse he really has umed out on her for treatment to this asylum. And so she gets into the buckboard thinking that she's simply journeying there to deliver her mother. And at the end of the chapter, uh, which was the first piece of writing I did on the book, her so-called father leaves her at the asylum with her mother and then they they go into the asylum. And the ironic core of the book really is that um while the world is total chaos uh in many ways parallel to what we're going through now uh that is conspiracy theories are rife identities are really tribal there's not much dialogue between the south and the north um families are refugees they're they're traveling Many times families are separated. In nightw watch the family is separated really for years and part of the book is the search to unite the family. So that is the way the book starts. When you start an really an epic book like this that covers years and and some viv very vivid characters. Do you have this all planned out in your mind beforehand or does it sort of develop as you go along? I really don't plan out beforehand because I'm not that kind of writer. I began as a poet. I still really compose the lines as a poet might with a sense of the rhythm of the line and the internal rhyme and um I always want my books to sort of arise from an inside spot that is uh the narrative is sort of coiled within the book and it comes you know it widens and widens as the book goes on. So when I began the book, I just knew that very first section that they arrive at the asylum. Um, and the book really became very layered. Uh, for instance, there's a scene early on when they first come into the asylum when Nightw Watch appears to let them in and Eliza [clears throat] faints, the mother, and he picks her up and carries her to a couch and gives her smelling salts and she suddenly awakens and she sees his face. She doesn't say anything. And this is this is we get this from the point of view of of Connelly Lee her daughter who says something like I was afraid she would call out but but she was quiet and the second time you read the book you realize that she recognizes Nightw Watch as the husband she hasn't seen in many many years but she realizes somehow in a kind of six sense she knows that he doesn't recognize her and so she keeps her counsel. She doesn't she doesn't reveal that she knows who he is. And in fact, the reader knows as the book goes on that he does not know who he is. That because of this terrible injury to his head during the battle of the wilderness, there are parts of his life that he simply doesn't remember. the the character I mentioned the dialect um much of which is written in the dialect and when they speak which seems very uh realistic for that time. How did you how did you go back and find that that rhythm in that dialect? >> Well, I I did so many so much research for this book. I have shelves of books devoted to Civil War battles, uh, the way people grew their food in the mountains. Um, and somehow by immersing myself in photographs and diaries, um, writings from the time, when I wrote that first section, their voices were there. And I often find that's true in my in my books. whatever section I write first sort of has the voices inside it already already alive and the the hard work really is sustaining the energy of that beginning throughout the whole book. Um, and I felt when I finished that section, um, Connelly and getting into the buck board, um, there's everything that's going on on the surface and then beneath the surface, you pick up hints very early. For instance, when Papa ropes Eliza's ankle to his, as they start out on this trip, you realize that something is is wrong here. And Connelly herself is a sort of unreliable narrator because we begin to understand that there are huge swaths of the past that she herself doesn't remember. She doesn't know her own last name. For instance, she's been raised um by women who love her and who have taught her to be very resilient and very resourceful at taking care of herself in the wilderness, but she doesn't know about her own family relationships and her own family history. And all that begins to been re be revealed to her as the book goes on. >> Yeah. identity uh or missing identity is a uh a very important uh uh pattern that throughout the book um there is a woman I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right Dearbla who is really the grandmother um and she is a real mountain woman who is very extraordinarily independent uh and has raised the daughter and the granddaughter but also in involves some interesting spiritual elements uh in that she feels that that she can see spirits or sense uh presences that may or may not be there. Uh how did you connect to her character? >> Well, her name is actually pronounced Derla in Irish. We actually had a neighbor who that they called Dearbla and I took that name when I checked the Irish uh pronunciation. It it's it's Derla. Um she's a very important character in the book. She has a kind of I wouldn't say six sense but a kind of insight and I think you'll find this is true uh with women in general especially at that time when women were really expected not to express their opinions uh especially someone of her class. Um she has come to America as uh the child of uh workers on on the plantation and um she makes a trip with her most beloved family. They're trying to actually to escape to Canada, but they they end up in West Virginia uh at the very top of these mountain ridges where they find isolated uh abandoned cabins. Um she simply has come of age in a time when women needed to take care of physical ailments and uh providing meals and trying to survive in ways that were often um not outwardly um apparent. I I studied a lot about um how people uh made use of medicines from plants, how they grew crops in the woods, how they preserved food in rude sellers. Um, and Dearville tells Connelly repeatedly, "Don't call me a a a masterwoman or or a witch or a or a I don't have a mystical um a mystical ability. It's almost as though she feels that every human being might have these capabilities if they were attuned to them. it's presented more in that light. Um, but it's clear that Conn Lee has picked up so much from her and there are scenes such as, you know, she looks in a mirror at one point and sees her granddaughter. Um, and we actually see reflections all the way through the book. The use of mirrors, use of looking into windows. There's a point when um, Connie and Eliza and Nightw Watch are standing beside a coach uh, that's used to transport people to the to and from the asylum. And the three of them are reflected together in the window. And there's just a moment when Connelly has a sense that this is more than a reflection. Um she doesn't yet know how the three of them are connected. >> Yeah. Light and mirrors are are a ongoing motif in the book. There's one scene of course where a small mirror uh changes their lives uh reflecting the light into the woods and and bringing uh evil into their lives. Uh um but I won't give away any more of the plot. There is another book um that this your book is different but it called to mind the book Cold Mountain by Charles Frasier. Um I don't know if you know him or have ever spoken with him. Um that of course is that was made into a major film. Uh uh it's about a civil a confederate soldier trying to leave the war and return home. um and uh the destruction and looks looking at the women who are have been left at home to fend for themselves essentially when all the men went off to war. >> Um so there are some echoes of that book but as I say they're very very different. >> Um have you ever has there been any talk about this being made into a movie? Because I could almost picture scenes from it. It's a very interior book but and yet I could see it a movie. There has been talk. >> What talk? >> My agent says talk is cheap or you know many are called. She says few few receive an answer. So I think it's would make a fabulous film. >> I do too. Let me ask you this. I I uh part of the book takes place in Alexandria, Virginia, which I I I think was Confederate held for a while in the war and then the Union took it over by 1864 when when you describe it. Um, I actually lived in Alexandria, Virginia for many years. And so I I know many of the streets that you talk about, some of the big hotels there were turned into huge hospitals for the Civil War uh injured. Um, in recent years uh in Virginia and uh nearly all of the Confederate statues have been removed uh and I think for good reason. Um I don't know if it was there when you were there. There was one statue in at Washington Street which is in the heart of Oldtown which was very different. Uh it was a um it was not a general with his saber on a big horse. It was an infantry man, Confederate infantry man uh who is uh clearly looks tired, defeated, his rifles pointed to the ground. He's head facing south down Washington Street toward Richmond. Uh so you can imagine he the war is over. He is uh going to try and walk home. um that statue was removed and not to put you on the spot, but I don't know if you ever saw the statue. Do you would you have removed that statue or or left it? >> I didn't see that statue, although it may have been there because of course I was working on this book for nearly eight years. Um, I would have left that statue and I might have put one beside it of a Union soldier facing the opposite direction. >> That Oh, that's an interesting thought. I like that, >> you know. Um that would have been I mean because part of the point of uh Nightw Watch is that people on both sides felt the same difficulties and I think ultimately that was known. You know I think that the war in a sense broke down some of the division and of course some of it still exists today. Um, but my books about war, including Lark and Termite, which has to do with the Korean War, uh, Machine Dreams, which has to do with the Vietnam War and a bit with World War II, are really about how wars affect ordinary people. Both the soldiers who are not in charge and the families who are waiting for them. And the fact that a war really does three generations of damage that children raised by men who have been damaged by war, morally injured, physically injured, uh what we now call PTSD, that they grow up affected very much by that war. And I think it even goes on to, you know, a third generation. >> Were there military people in your family? Uh my father was in the military um stationed in uh New Guinea and that's very much a part of machine dreams, his experience and his letters um to my great aunt who raised him. So I've always used uh research um to get as close in as I can to the actual moments in which the book occurs. >> Yeah. You write about the fighting in what was called the wilderness which is uh down in Spennsylvania I think Virginia just horrific and I' I've read about it in other sources where you write about Union Confederates the same experience. I mean they almost became faceless. They were literally fighting handtoand unable to see you know just surrounded by smoke. It was just horrific. So yeah there were no generals with their sabers and horses there. They were just uh just horrible scenes of people trying to survive. >> In fact, what happened in the Battle of the Wilderness was that there was so much the trees were so thin and so close together that a man had to walk sideways. So it meant that all the combat was handtoand. Um and there was so much guns smoke, you know, uh in the air, as you say, that the woods simply caught fire. And it was an enormous fire that killed many many injured men who couldn't escape the fire. And uh my character who who is as you pointed out earlier, namelessness is really um a thread that runs through the book that you know when you join the military you become a serial number. If you're a prisoner, you have a serial number. When your name is sort of taken from you, you become part of a mass. And that's what happens to all infantry soldiers um or all prisoners or people who are captured or people who are deported or whatever. They lose their names and once you lose your name um and so I felt as though this was going to be a constant throughout the book. And my character called Nightw Watch goes by a series of names. I mean when he's in the war he's referred to as the sharpshooter. And once he goes to the asylum um where he has a very different kind of life um the terrible injury that he sustained has really changed him but he still has this ability to work with people who are troubled, upset, manic. Um and then we don't know really until the very end of the book what name he chose for himself before the war. So that's an everchanging thing and yet his identity I think for the reader is a very very strong one. Um and he has in a way a sense of what his relationships were even though he no longer remembers them. >> Well I think with for all of the uh evil of war and and the uh the horror of war, there is also a thread throughout the book of kindness. Uh people are there are moments where people are kind to each other. whether it's the doctor to his patients or nightw watch to his the people and and and uh the grandmother to her granddaughter. So that is the saving grace I think of the story. Um that it does it's not entirely dark that there is kindness uh and in the end perhaps kindness wins out. So I I definitely want people to read Nightw Watch as well as the other books you've mentioned. But I wanted to move on to uh your book Small Town Girls. I'll hold it up, but I think we'll also have it on the on the graphic uh form. This is the book that came out this spring, which I'm sure you've been talking to others about. Um it is your first non-fiction book. Um it seemed to be a collection of essays. Um how did you go about conceptualizing this book? Well, this book is called a writer's memoir because you know from the very beginning that someone one who will be a writer who is a writer is speaking about her childhood, her origins about I mean it's not um smalltown girls is not a typical memoir telling you know I did this and I did that. It's not so much about me, the person, as it is about things that I have loved, things I've lost, things I've witnessed, things that mean the world to me. It's about writing itself. I talk about two writers, Steven Crane and Bria J. Pancake, who have been very important to me. Um, I talk about time. Um, there's a lot of loss and transcendence in the book. There's a real sense of mothers and daughters and um inherited memory that is your grandmother tells your mother's stories, your mother tells you those same stories. uh that sort of confidant relationship and I felt very early on that my both my father and my mother had very starruck lives that is starcrossed lives lives in which they sustained very early um losses and it made them into people whose stories I felt should not vanish and I think when you have that kind of uh motivation to in more or less save your parents' lives to be sure that those lives don't vanish. Um, that's an incredible motivation and I think it's really been part of my mo motivation from the very beginning because machine Dreams was also in a sense the story of a hometown um the story of a family decimated by the Vietnam War. Um, and I think the atmosphere of a historical of historical era is very important because it through the characters we can actually enter a time that we did not live through. And I think that's very important because history tells us the facts, but I think literature tells us the story inside the facts and that story is often more true and lasts longer. Our guest last week uh was Andrew Stanton. He's a collaborative memoirist and he talked about writing memoirs not only with famous people, which he has, but also with everyday people who want to tell their life story. So there there's an art in that, but but but you did it all on your own without without a collabor uh if that's the right word. Well, I've had a lot of I'd had, you know, 60 years of experience writing my own book. So, I I was probably primed to write a memoir. [laughter] >> Oral history, a southern thing, telling stories from generation to generation, or is it more uh general? >> Well, I don't know. I mean, I think we have these kinds of families everywhere. Um, it may be a little bit more of a tradition in the South because at least in the past, I'm not sure this is true anymore. uh the pace of life might have been a little slower. Um but I feel as though this book really makes people think about their origins no matter what they are. It it helps people think back [clears throat] to the stories of their parents and their grandparents because it's such a conduit into the past. And I feel as though the more and more we know about the dead, the more alive they are for us. And we need that ability to see the past, to prepare or make or transpose a better future, to maybe learn from mistakes. And it's also a incredible source of strength, I think, because I think both of these books, Nightw Watch and Smalltown Girls, are really about the amazing resilience of human beings. um that we we can be destroyed by loss or we really can be we can learn something from it that almost pulls the the strength of the past into ourselves and that's surely a better way to live um and to go forward. When I first saw the title of this book, I for some reason I imagined also that you had gone back to your West Virginia town, which you did, and I'm sure you do periodically. Um, you're someone now who's obviously gone out into the world, has accomplished rather remarkable things, Puliter Prize, and all these other awards, but I'm sure many of your friends from those years stayed in the town. Um, we have in here in Vermont, we have a lot of small towns, uh, and a lot of young women who build wonderful lives in the towns they grew up in. Um, I was just wondering what it was like for you to go back and see some of your schoolmates, uh, who had built their lives in the small town where you grew up. >> I'm still very much in touch with some of those people and I can tell you that I mean, the book is dedicated to all small town girls, those who stayed and those who left. And the small town girls who left have gone to the big cities and become, you know, they've led interesting lives. I feel that small town girls have a kind of resourcefulness because they have known so much about everyone that they grew up with. And the small town girls still in those communities where they grew up are probably running those communities. They're helping build the schools. They're running for office. They're changing the arts scene. Um, and that's certainly has happened in my hometown. >> How has it changed? Uh, your how many how big was your town where you grew up? It sounds like it was quite small. >> Well, I think it was six or 7,000 and it's about the same today or maybe a little smaller. Um but the town today uh has sort of upgraded the downtown in such a way there are flower boxes and flowers hanging everywhere. Uh they've um made new businesses like a hemp factory outside of town. They have turned the old colonial theater into an arts building where all kinds of uh public events can happen. I actually read there from Nightw Watch uh on the stage where I used to watch movies as a child. Um there were new parks, new venues for people to gather for musical events outside and small towns from Ohio and and Kentucky actually come to Buchanan to see the town and talk to the leaders of the town about how to in invigorate a downtown of a small town. So, I think they've done remarkable work. >> Well, many of our Vermont towns were were trying to do the same, I I think, and in in many cases succeeding. Um, I I don't wasn't aware if you have children or not. >> I sure do. >> When they read your books, >> I have four boys, two stepsons, and two sons. >> When they read your books, what kind of feedback do you get from them? Because you've talked about this generational sharing and and how important it is. Oh, no, >> no. I mean, uh, they a couple of them have have read this book and and talked with me about it because one of my sons is actually a poet, uh, Saurin Stockman, and the the other is an actor. So, you can see that I completely failed in in uh, raising them to be corporate uh, rich men or whatever. >> Um, but I I never have encouraged them to read my books. you know, they can read them when I'm gone if they like. [laughter] >> Well, I hope people will read these books now because all of your books, uh, just so powerful. Um, uh, and, uh, starting with this new one, Smalltown Girls, and Nightw Watch, and all the books you've mentioned, you bring worlds to life, uh, both inner and outer worlds to life in a way that is very, very special. Uh, and I want to thank you for being with us. >> Thank you so much. I do have a website www.jayanfilips.com where you can see all of my books, read reviews and see a lot of the research photographs for each of them because photographs have always been very important to me. >> Can people contact you with comments on the books or through your website? >> Uh not really, but they can always write to my agent and that's right on there. >> Okay. Exactly where >> and she's very letter or email. She always >> setting it up. Yes, she gets right back to to you. So, she's wonderful. Anyway, thank you again for being here and uh uh much good wishes for the future. >> Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. >> And [music] please join us for our next episode of Meet the Author. Thank you. [music]