Did anyone in particular encourage you to be a writer? How did your parents react to your passion for fiction?
My father was a state senator for two terms, so his world was politics. Writing fiction seemed like frivolity to him. . . . Then I got a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to finish Tumbling, and he just couldn’t believe that I would leave my job to write. He gave me a lot of input on what Philadelphia was like in the 1940s and 1950s, the setting for the book, but he never got to read it because he died before it was published.
On the other hand, my mother always told me I was a good writer, but she looked on writing as a means to an end, never a full-time job. I have five sisters and one brother, and we’re very close. Several of my sisters are also good writers: one has a public relations firm in Washington. They are my readers and give me feedback.
I imagine that it is a tough balancing act being a writer, mother, wife, and teacher. What are the biggest challenges you face or have faced?
Time, time, time. When I’m in the intensive phase of writing, when the deeper meanings of the story are beginning to emerge and the characters have taken on lives of their own, I’m almost always in that world, or at least want to be. This was a particular challenge when my children were younger. I have to confess that much of our quality time was spent with me reading portions of the novel to them and soliciting their input. I find it difficult to get a lot of writing done while I’m teaching, so I just teach one semester a year. But when I’m really into the deepest phases of the writings, I don’t answer the phone or e-mail; I rely on my husband to relay important information. Life gets messy because the story takes me over. I’ve accepted the reality of that, perhaps even the necessity.
“When I’m really into the deepest phases of the writings . . . life gets messy because the story takes me over.”
How do your own life experiences influence your novels?
My life experiences influence my worldview, and it is that view that falls onto the page naturally, without any effort on my part.
What made you start writing?
Writing was always something I knew I did well. I was raised to believe that everybody has a special talent. I don’t sing or dance or draw or paint. It was writing, or why was I born? Yet I was ► years and years coming to fiction writing. I’d always told myself that at some point I would write fiction, but I kept putting it off because I simply did not have the time. I realized that if I didn’t at least attempt it, at that point, I never would, and that it would be a regret that would eat at me from then on. Once I became conscious of the urgency, it actually took more effort to continue deferring the writing. I started by waking up a couple of hours early each morning. That became my magic time. It still is.
Read on
Have You Read? More by Diane McKinney-Whetstone
BLUES DANCING
* * *
“McKinney-Whetstone’s strength is apparent in all her work. . . . Her novels have a page-turning quality, long the most overlooked skill in novel writing. Blues Dancing is McKinney-Whetstone’s most writerly novel to date.”
—Philadelphia Weekly
Blues Dancing fuses past and present, character and place with a transfixing lyricism that shimmers in its detail. A richly spun story of love, passion, betrayal, and redemption, Blues Dancing grapples with the meaning of faith, forgiveness, and familial bonds in a narrative that moves seamlessly between the Philadelphia of contemporary times and the city in the early 1970s. Verdi, the pampered daughter of a Southern preacher, comes to Philadelphia in the 1970s to enroll at the University and is immediately drawn to Johnson, a University student as well, though a city boy, poor and militant. Their differences seal their hearts to each other until Johnson teaches her the one thing that will change her life forever: how to love heroin. Enter Rowe, the conservative professor who rescues Verdi from her ugly addiction even as he falls in love with her himself, leaving his sophisticated wife for this very confused Southern girl. As the novel opens, Verdi and Rowe have been living a comfortable existence for the past twenty years. She is the newly appointed principal at a school for special learners, but she feels her world teeter off balance when she unpins a note from the blouse of her most precious student, the daughter of a cousin whom she is close to, and learns that Johnson is back in town. Once Verdi and Johnson lay eyes on each other, they know that the years have not dulled their passions and they skid uncontrollably toward the desires of their youth.
TEMPEST RISING
* * *
“McKinney-Whetstone solidifies her position as a writer of well-crafted, serious popular fiction. . . . McKinney-Whetstone is masterful at rendering the spaces between people, giving to the air that separates them a taste, a texture, a soul.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
Tempest Rising, set in West Philadelphia in the early 1960s, tells the story of three sisters: Bliss, Victoria, and Shern. They are budding adolescents raised in a world of financial privilege among the black upper class, but their lives quickly unravel as their father’s lucrative catering business collapses. He disappears and is presumed dead, and their mother suffers an apparent breakdown. The girls are wrenched from their mother, and as the novel opens they are living in foster care in a working-class neighborhood in the home of Mae, a politically connected card shark, who is filled with syrupy sweetness for the foster girls but is abusive to her own child, Ramona, a stunning twenty-something beauty. As Ramona struggles with Mae’s abuse and her own hatred for the foster children, she also tries to keep at bay a powerful attraction she has for her boyfriend’s father.
LEAVING CECIL STREET
* * *
“Diane McKinney-Whetstone creates a unique, believable black middle-class world where there are no villains—just individuals trying their very best to get through life while inflicting minimum pain on each other, or themselves. . . . These people are flawed, human, and engaging in the best sense.”
—Washington Post
In one West Philadelphia neighborhood, families come together in celebration of unity and togetherness. Their block parties provide a union that serves as a backdrop for discovering the truth about themselves and the people they think they know. Best friends Neet and Shay have depended on each other for most of their lives. However, their friendship will be tested when Neet becomes pregnant by one of the corner boys and Shay arranges an abortion that goes terribly wrong. To Shay’s horror, Neet is left unable to bear children and embraces her mother’s esoteric yet sometimes impractical religious beliefs as punishment for her sins. Meanwhile, Shay is left to struggle with her own growing maturity, the grief of losing a cherished friendship, and the disintegration of her parents’ marriage. The two girls eventually choose their own separate paths. Leaving Cecil Street invokes those things that are most important—family, friendship, and love.
TRADING DREAMS AT MIDNIGHT
* * *
“Diane McKinney-Whetstone finds a way to connect with her characters—and makes us do the same.”
—Essence
Neena’s mother, Freeda, disappeared on a cold February morning in 1984, leaving the fifteen-year-old Neena and her younger sister, Tish, in the care of Nan, their stern grandmother. Two decades later, Nenna—no longer living in Philadelphia—supports herself by blackmailing married men. Returning to her childhood home when a sting goes terribly wrong, she avoids her grandmother while attempting to pull one last hustle on a prominent local lawyer. But discovering that Tish has been hospitalized with pregnancy complications forces Neena to come to terms with the woman who raised her and the truth about the woman who abandoned her. As Neena, Tish, and Nan reunite, each confronts her own memories of the past and dreams for the future.
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PRAISE FOR TUMBLING
“What a wonderful experience to tumble into the world of Noon and her kin. A warm and wonderful debut.”
—Nikki Giovanni
&n
bsp; “Even the air is palpable in Tumbling. . . . Engaging. . . . The story moves forward on the power of Ms. McKinney-Whetstone’s characters. . . . Ms. McKinney-Whetstone captures the formidable struggle to protect both a community and a family.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A densely textured narrative that proves as rich and filling as a well-cooked meal. McKinney-Whetstone’s remarkably skillful first effort should place her at the forefront of a generation of emerging African American women novelists. . . . The author displays an impressive ability to conjure up a sense of place with a handful of well-chosen words. . . . The author’s strength lies in her wonderful characters. . . . McKinney-Whetstone is clearly a smart, careful writer who’s created a page-turner of a novel with abundant style and irresistible charm.”
—Washington Post Book World
“An unspoken compassion, an unrewarded love, and the mystical spirits of the characters that Diane McKinney-Whetstone creates in her first novel, Tumbling, has catapulted her and her book to the center of the literary stage. Whetstone is Philadelphia’s newest literary daughter. . . . It captures the beautiful rhythm of descriptive scenes and characters developments. . . . Her style stands above any attempt to classify or compare.”
—Philadelphia Tribune
“Warm and intimate. . . . Tumbling is an accomplished novel, with sharply drawn characters, exuberant prose, plenty of period detail, and a wise, forgiving outlook on family life.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A beautifully written tale [and] a lyrical read.”
—USA Today
“A remarkable first novel. . . . The story probes beneath its residents’ lives to tell a powerful tale of damage and healing. . . . The delicately passionate narrative coalesces around a soul-galvanizing metaphor of bricks and mortar and spirit.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The book pays tribute to the 1940s and 1950s, when the city’s neighborhoods brimmed with a variety of social classes, with generations and income groups solidified through culture, family, and racial pride.”
—Essence
“Diane McKinney-Whetstone’s debut novel presents a story full of suspense, tragedy, humor, and, above all else, love—love of family and community. It also has a delightful share of surprises. . . . Difficult to put down.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A vibrant and evocative first novel. . . . McKinney-Whetstone displays impressive range in evoking the mood and feel of an earlier and quite different era. . . . Tumbling stands out for its vivid, lyrical, and at times poetically beautiful writing. McKinney-Whetstone focuses intensely on descriptive detail, and her use of language is colorful, sensual, and astute. She gives us an entertaining and enlightening glimpse of an era in African American urban community history about which little has been written.”
—Women’s Review of Books
“A wonderful novel of life in ’40s and ’50s Philadelphia, a warm and affectionate portrait of an African American community bound by ties of church and neighborhood and pure human affection. . . . McKinney-Whetstone doesn’t miss a beat in this wise and leisurely novel. She lets her characters grow and stretch until they get the healing done. And her perfect-pitch portrayal of life only a few decades ago . . . will strike a powerful chord with anyone who remembers ‘the old neighborhood’ with affection, as well as with anyone who has suffered the sting of racism. . . . Her work offers just what readers are looking for—a fresh new voice, strong and clear, wise and warm, announcing its quiet, glowing dawn on the literary scene.”
—New Orleans Times-Picayune
“McKinney-Whetstone has written a powerful novel that is sure to launch her career among the great African American women writers.”
—Booklist
“A bouncy, moody, musical—if improbable—debut by an author who, like a good blues singer, is strong on style and interpretation. . . . Echoes of Toni Morrison’s Sula and Jazz pervade—without overwhelming—the story here, though to her credit McKinney-Whetstone’s setting (Philadelphia in the 1940s and ’50s) is an entirely original landscape in African American fiction. The pavements and brownstones rattle and hum with the sounds, textures, and spirit of South Philly’s black middle- and working-class residents. . . . A gifted prose writer with a tremendous sense of place.”
—Kirkus Reviews
ALSO BY DIANE MCKINNEY-WHETSTONE
Tempest Rising
Blues Dancing
Leaving Cecil Street
Trading Dreams at Midnight
CREDITS
Cover painting by Robert Pious (b. 1908), Saturday Night, 1938, oil on canvas, 20” x 22,” signed Private Collection; courtesy of Micheal Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY
Author photograph by Robert L. Steward
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1996 by William Morrow.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
TUMBLING. Copyright © 1996 by Diane McKinney-Whetstone. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
EPub Edition April 2017 ISBN 9780062795540
ISBN 978-0-06-179212-0 (Harper Perennial edition)
10 11 12 13 14 NMSG/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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