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KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER AND ELAINE NEIL ORR in Conversation
Literature has been called "the great conversation," and just as we converse with the books that have transformed our lives, we converse with their authors as well, no matter the distance of time or culture. But to be able to converse with a living author whom one admires and considers a friend is one of the riches of being a part of a vital literary community. What follows is such a conversation between two of those participants, novelist and memoirist Elaine Neil Orr and me, poet Kathryn Stripling Byer. It began with my intention to interview her for NCLRs global North Carolina issue, but within, she also, to some extent, interviews me - hence a conversation more so than a traditional interview.
In 2013, Elaine Neil Orr mailed me a copy of her first novel, A Different Sun, with an inscription that gathered me into her own personal literary circle. That the words in my poetry might have "sustain[ed]" her as she so generously wrote, pleased me, of course, and also set me to wondering about this woman whose books I had not yet read, though I knew of her essays about her African childhood and had heard the praise lavished on her writing. We also had a handful of mutual friends. How had my poetry come to mean something sustaining to her?
We exchanged a few emails before meeting at the Bookmarks Festival in Winston-Salem, where I purchased a copy of her memoir, Gods of Noonday, and read it straight through on the ride back home from the festival. I was enthralled by its sensory depiction of her childhood in Nigeria, and I felt a kinship between that young girl and the girl I had been, growing up amid south Georgia fields, with the ever present African American culture singing, talking, laboring its way around me.
That kinship grew as I began reading Elaine's novel, A Different Sun. The initial setting of this story is a plantation in Georgia, a landscape in which Emma, the female protagonist, comes into young womanhood amid the contradictions of slavery and antebellum attitudes about women, both of which she navigates with a growing sense of the mysteries of place...