Special thanks to my partner in life, Anne, who has believed in and supported me through the ups and downs that are an inevitable part of a writer’s life.
P.S.
Insights, Interview & Reading Group Guide
About the author
--- Meet Susan Gabriel
About the book
--- Interview with Susan Gabriel
--- 13 Things I Reveal About Myself in the Writing of Temple Secrets
--- Reading Group Guide
--- Other Books by Susan Gabriel
About the Author
Susan Gabriel is an acclaimed writer who lives in the mountains of North Carolina. Her novel, The Secret Sense of Wildflower, earned a starred review ("for books of remarkable merit") from Kirkus Reviews and was selected as one of their Best Books of 2012.
She is also the author of Grace, Grits and Ghosts: Southern Short Stories and other novels. Discover more about Susan at SusanGabriel.com.
Interview with Susan Gabriel
This interview is based on the From the Front Porch: Interview Series on Susan’s blog, where she interviews other writers, musicians and artists about their creative lives. It also contains two questions that are specifically about Temple Secrets.
Tell us a little about yourself.
I am a writer of mostly novels, and I’ve been writing for nearly twenty years. I grew up in the South (Knoxville, Tennessee) and for years, I swore that I would NEVER ever write southern fiction. I had enough crazy “characters” in my gene pool to not want to spend any time there. But as they say: NEVER SAY NEVER. It was after living in Colorado for three years, that I discovered what a Southerner I actually was.
I live in the mountains of North Carolina, ten minutes from a national forest that has a river that I love to walk along. I am happily married, a mom of two grown daughters, and two rescue dogs and two cats who I also consider family members.
How did you get the idea for Temple Secrets?
Right after I returned from Colorado with my newly reclaimed Southern identity, I wanted to write another southern novel. I had already written The Secret Sense of Wildflower several years before, which I considered a fluke, as in my “only” southern novel. This was back in my “never” stage, also known as the doofus stage. Sometimes our destiny keeps tapping us on the shoulder until it finally throws a brick.
I started writing Temple Secrets before The Help came out. I say this because they are similar novels, dealing with some of the same themes. I imagine Kathryn Stockett (author of The Help) was working on her story about the same time I was working on mine. Perhaps we drank from the same iced tea pitcher or something, I don’t know.
The seed of the idea occurred to me at least 25 years before when I lived in Charleston, South Carolina. One of my South of Broad friends told me about housekeepers she knew who still worked for the same families that their ancestors had been slaves for. This intrigued me. I had already written a novel based in Charleston—one that I am putting the finishing touches on now—so I wanted to set Temple Secrets someplace different. Savannah is like a sister to Charleston and somewhere I’ve visited many times, so I decided to set it there.
With that in mind, I sat down and began to write and there the characters were, like they’d been waiting for me all those years to tell their story: Queenie, Iris, Violet, Rose, Spud and Edward. And of course, Old Sally. I watched and wrote as their lives played out in front of me.
Several of my novels have humor in them, and this one is no exception. At least a couple of early readers of the manuscript tried to steer me away from Iris’ flatulence—real southern ladies do not talk of such things—but for some reason I just couldn’t bring myself to edit it out. Iris’ condition was a result of Gullah folk magic. Something she could have prevented if she’d just been a little nicer.
The ending, I think, is symbolic of what I think our culture needs to heal. Diversity in age, lifestyle, ethnicity and experience. Acceptance of all kinds of family.
Who is your favorite character in Temple Secrets?
I loved all of these characters, even Iris and Edward. They had reasons for being who they were, and I loved that Edward got some redemption at the end. I guess I would say that Queenie was my absolute favorite. I just loved her sense of humor and her resilience. I loved writing her dialogue. Old Sally was also a favorite, too. We desperately need old wise women in this world we live in, so the least I can do is put them in my stories.
Of course I also loved Violet and how she wanted to be an agent of change and open a tea shop. I love tea, by the way, and make a pot of it every morning when I write. (Organic Assam is my favorite.) Rose was the prodigal daughter returning, and she carries some of my experience of moving from the United States West back to the Southeast. I adored Spud, too, the vegetarian butcher. We humans are so fascinating with our paradoxes.
So, yes, I loved them all, even with their flaws. When you work on a manuscript for several years to get it ready for publication, it’s important that you find the story interesting and the characters compelling, otherwise it’s easy to lose interest. I never lost interest with this story, and I am honored whenever anyone chooses to read it.
When are you the most creative?
The mornings are my most creative time. I am usually alone, and I am usually working on whatever my current novel is. A typical morning for me is to write from around 9 am, to around 12:30. Then in the afternoons I work on the business end of writing: answering emails, creating blog posts, updating my facebook and goodreads author pages, etc.
When are you the least creative?
Late at night, or any day when I have a lot going on. I am also less creative when I am teaching writing classes, although I love to teach! All my creativity seems to go into whatever group of writers I’m meeting with. I am not very good at multi-tasking. I tend to focus on one thing at a time.
Share a favorite quote.
It is hard to only pick one. I love quotes. Here are two by Carl Jung: “Small and hidden is the door that leads inward.”
And: “You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things. Why not go into the forest for a time, literally? Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.”
And then one from Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
What creative project are you working on now?
I am working on a sequel to The Secret Sense of Wildflower (southern historical fiction) that takes place 13 years later. And I’m editing a new novel of mine about a liberal family in Charleston, SC during the Civil Rights era. I also have a third novel that is finished and in a first draft, and a fourth that is three-quarters of the way finished that needs to be finished and then polished. In other words, I have plenty of creative projects waiting on their turn, as well as the new ones that I haven’t even thought about yet.
Name one or more of your favorite books. What do you love about it/them? If they changed your life in any way tell us why.
Non-fiction: C.G. Jung: The Earth Has a Soul. I love this book because I love thinking of the earth as having a soul, and it is full of symbolism. I studied my dreams with a Jungian analyst for a decade. It was the richest inner work I’ve even done. I was constantly finding buried treasure in my dreams. I also sometimes get ideas for novels from my dreams.
Fiction: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. I loved this book because it is a journey of transformation of a very unlikely character. I wish I’d written this book. It contains all the themes I love. Courage. Transformation. Secrets.
I also love The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. These are both lyrical literary fiction (the kind of novels I like to write.) They also have strong female characters. I’m not sure male readers realize how ‘novel’ it is for women to find stories of strong women who are also main characters.
And then there’s John Steinbeck’s The Grap
es of Wrath. When I read Steinbeck’s book, I had something to aspire to. It is in my view a great novel. Though he isn’t a southern writer, John Steinbeck has the soul of a southern writer and captured the landscape and characters in that story beautifully.
Name one or more of your favorite films and tell us what you love about them.
I’m big on foreign films so I love Antonia’s Line and As it is in Heaven. Also, just about anything by Susanne Bier, who is a Danish filmmaker. More recently I loved The Fault of Our Stars, a very courageous and poignant film based on the novel with the same name. I love stories that have an emotional element. Not lifetime channel, but real life emotions, as well as women in non-stereotypical roles. Women have been short-changed in films and novels for years. Our culture is only beginning to address this inequality.
What were you like as a child?
Very shy. Very outdoorsy. I stayed outside riding my bike, playing games with my brother, or playing golf. I rarely read, but did well in school. (How is that even possible?) There weren’t that many books in our home. It wasn’t until I was out of college and pregnant with my first daughter that I began to read voraciously children’s classics, trying to make up for what I missed. I have been a late-bloomer in lots of ways. Now I read all the time and all sorts of things. I haven’t stopped.
Is there somewhere you’ve traveled that has influenced your creative life?
As I’ve mentioned before, we lived out West for a few years, which is about as different from the moist, shady southeastern United States as you can get. I loved exploring this new terrain and the wildlife that resided there. It was in the West that I finally claimed my southern soul. I missed shade. I missed deciduous trees. I even missed kudzu! But I missed moisture most of all. Now I’m back in the southeast living in an area of the North Carolina Mountains known for its waterfalls. Life is good.
For Fun: From JL’s Uncle Jessie Meme
A song/band/type of music you’d risk wreck & injury to turn off when it comes on the radio?
Anything too loud.
A favorite show on television?
Rectify (southern gothic on TV!). Homeland. Last Tango in Halifax. The Good Wife. Just about anything with a strong, female lead. I want to see myself reflected in the stories I watch or read.
If you could have anything put on a t-shirt what would it be?
Creativity Rocks!
A favorite meal?
Something from my childhood: roast beef, mashed potatoes, fresh green beans and sliced tomatoes from the garden. Lemon meringue pie for dessert. My mother was a great cook.
A talent you wish you had?
Amassing wealth. No, not really. I honestly can’t think of any talent I wish I had, except maybe flexibility (I started yoga a few months ago.) If someone thinks I’m a talented writer, that’s enough.
What’s on your nightstand?
Whatever novel I’m currently reading, (I read a lot of novels!) a pencil to underline beautiful passages (unless it’s a library book), and my Kindle which I don’t use to read books but to play Scrabble. I’m a printed books kind of gal.
What’s something about you that might surprise us?
I once spent the weekend with a U.S. Senator. It was back in the 90s. The wife of Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings (S.C.) was interested in being an honorary board member of a non-profit women’s counseling center I was founding. She invited me and a friend to their house in Washington, D.C. for the weekend to talk about it. Mrs. Hollings (nicknamed Peatsy) was incredibly supportive and down-to-earth and lovely. But the thing that impressed me the most? They had AMAZING bath towels.
13 Things I Reveal About Myself in the Writing of Temple Secrets
by Susan Gabriel
1. Ancestors are important to me. The sense that we aren’t alone; that people came before us; that some may even be watching over us.
2. Secrets make people do strange things. Everybody has them. Sometimes we even keep secrets from ourselves.
3. The spirit world, or the invisible world, (think ghosts, spirits, the secret sense) is very much underestimated.
4. Female characters and female voices are underrepresented in our culture and in our world. My mission is to get more female characters out in the world who are courageous, and have integrity and humor.
5. I think characters over forty are the most interesting.
6. I think happy endings are possible in life, and that it’s only to the level that we’ve experienced sorrow that we can experience joy. Readers have told me that my books make them laugh and cry.
7. I love to make people laugh, so my books often have humor in them. When I was younger, I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. As a girl, I would sneak into the den late at night to watch Joan Rivers on Johnny Carson. Since my comedy act never hit the road, I became a writer instead. Well, first I became a teacher, then a psychotherapist, and then a writer. It was by no means a straight path to writing. I grew into it.
8. Old wise women show up in nearly everything I write because I have trouble finding them in real life.
9. I am fascinated with death, so there is usually at least one death in my stories. To me, it’s just the natural end of living. However, I rarely kill off an animal, especially a dog. (The exception was a dog dying of old age in one of my other books. I’m still sad about that.)
10. I think laughter opens us to a deeper emotional experience.
11. Sometimes when people are obnoxious in real life, I create a character with some of the same characteristics and then kill them off in the course of a story. Or they are found out for who they really are. I am very good at disguising these real people in the skins of my fictional characters. That way I don’t hurt anybody and it gives me great satisfaction. :)
12. I always write about things that interest me. I write the story that I would love to read, trusting that other people will enjoy it, too. Since I spend years writing a book, I have to love the characters and understand them. After I release a book, I often grieve the loss of not having the story in my life every day.
13. I think we are all trying to find our way “home,” in one way or another. Home being a place where we feel the most authentic.
Does anything surprise you? I always love to hear from my readers. You can email me at [email protected].
Temple Secrets Reading Group Guide
1. Who was your favorite character? Why?
2. What do you think motivated Iris? On the one hand she could be cruel and dismissive to Queenie, yet she had loved Spud Grainger for decades. Do you think she is a sympathetic or unsympathetic character? Why?
3. How much of a person’s character would you say is shaped by what has happened in the past, and by past generations?
4. Did it bother you that Queenie was willing to overlook so many of Iris’s faults in order to live with Iris? Why?
5. Do you believe that keeping secrets is justified sometimes? Should Queenie have told Violet who she really was from the very beginning? Why?
6. What do you think of Rose coming home to see her mother on her deathbed? In what situations might estrangement from one’s family sometimes be necessary for self-preservation?
7. The author paints Old Sally with a quiet grace and an aura of wisdom about her. How do you think she does this? Have you ever had an old wise woman in your life? If so, what was meaningful about your relationship with her?
8. In what ways do you think racism still shows up in relationships where people of color work for people who are white?
9. How was the Temple Book of Secrets an agent of change for the entire family?
10. How did you feel about Edward’s seeming redemption at the end of the novel? Discuss people in your life who have seemed totally one way and then who surprised you with something you never knew about them.
11. What role do you see Violet playing in the novel? What did you think of her ability to perceive ghosts? How might her children end up different from her because of her choices?
12.In the final scene, were you hopeful that all of the characters could live together peacefully? If you were to write a sequel for this novel, what do you imagine happening?
Other Books by Susan Gabriel
“A quietly powerful story, at times harrowing, but ultimately a joy to read.”
--- Kirkus Reviews, starred review (for books of remarkable merit)
Named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2012.
Set in 1940s Appalachia, The Secret Sense of Wildflower tells the story of Louisa May “Wildflower” McAllister whose life has been shaped around the recent death of her beloved father in a sawmill accident. While her mother hardens in her grief, Wildflower and her three sisters must cope with their loss themselves, as well as with the demands of daily survival. Despite these hardships, Wildflower has a resilience that is forged with humor, a love of the land, and an endless supply of questions to God. When Johnny Monroe, the town’s teenage ne’er-do-well, sets his sights on Wildflower, she must draw on the strength of her relations, both living and dead, to deal with his threat.
Temple Secrets: Southern Humorous Fiction: (New for 2015) For Lovers of Southern Authors and Southern Novels Page 28
