The Dry Grass of August
Page 25
Q. Your protagonist is thirteen years old. Is your novel young-adult fiction?
A. My novel is literary fiction; however, I hope young adults will read it, because it’s set in a time long before their lives and can give them a look into history through the eyes of someone their age. I didn’t want the book marketed as young adult because I didn’t want it limited by that.
Q. Your book is set in 1954 and is rich with details of that time. Did you have to do a lot of research?
A. Yes. I like to find out about things, to dig for information; I can lose myself, blissfully, in the happy task of research. My husband gave me a 1954 road atlas he found on eBay, so I was able to map the trip the Watts family took through the South. In May 2004, I went to Washington, DC, to exhibits on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. The Carolina Room at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County provided me with online maps of Charlotte in 1954. I bought encyclopedia yearbooks and studied them, also stacks of popular magazines of the time, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, etc. I am still stunned at how white they all are; when writing, I searched period publications for pictures of blacks living their lives and found instead stereotypical stories such as President Eisenhower’s golf caddy, and ads for Aunt Jemima pancake mix.
Q. Do you have advice for others who begin writing relatively late in life?
A. Listen to yourself; tell stories you’ve lived and craft them into fiction. To do that, you must believe that your experiences are valid and of interest to others. Negative thoughts about your talent as a writer will stop you in your tracks. I also suggest getting into a writing group.
A READING GROUP GUIDE
The Dry Grass of August
Anna Jean Mayhew
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are included to enhance
your group’s reading of Anna Jean Mayhew’s
The Dry Grass of August.
Discussion Questions
1. What do you think about Paula’s decision to take Mary on the trip, given the antipathy in the Deep South post Brown v. Board?
2. Why does Puddin so often try to hide or run away? What does her behavior say about the family?
3. Why didn’t Paula try to stop Bill from beating Jubie?
4. Is Uncle Taylor a racist?
5. Why did the clown at Joyland by the Sea give Jubie a rose?
6. If you’d been Paula (or Bill), what would you have done when Cordelia failed to appear for dinner? How could they have handled that differently?
7. Why does Paula take Bill back after his affair with her brother’s wife?
8. Did Bill and Paula act responsibly as parents when they allowed Jubie and Stell to go with Mary to the Daddy Grace parade in Charlotte? The tent meeting in Claxton?
9. Why didn’t Paula punish Jubie for stealing the Packard to go to Mary’s funeral?
10. What drove Stamos to suicide?
11. Which major character changes the most? The least?
12. Which character in the book did you identify with the most? The least?
13. If you could interview Jubie, what would you ask her? What about Mary? Paula? Bill? Stell?
14. If Bill died at the end of the book, what would his obituary say if Paula wrote it? If Stell wrote it? If Jubie wrote it?
15. Given that there’s little hope for Jubie and Leesum to be friends in 1954, what would it be like for them if they met again today?
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 persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2011 by Anna Jean Mayhew
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ISBN: 978-0-7582-6792-4