I haven't written in this blog in some time, and the wheels in my mind are in constant motion trying to decide how to make the most out of my online presence with my art, writing, ideas and thoughts.
A dear friend and talented writer--Claudia Moss--invited me to read her book and ask her a few questions about her book If You Love Me, Come. I think this blog is an appropriate spot to share this, and I hope it will encourage you to read her book-and perhaps choose it for a book club, because it is worthy of discussion.
She has dubbed me Miss Grand Rapids, and here are her answers to my questions:
1. How did you research your characters? Do they have parallel lives with anyone in your life? Miz Too-Sweet is my favorite, because you have her Southern Ebonics down! Her voice makes the novel come to life.
Thank you, Colette! I love Miz Too-Sweet, also. She is the glue that binds the other characters together in a web of love, and, ironically, she is in the projects, Techwood Projects, not in the suburbs as are Frenonia Roberts and her sister Rhonda Butler. Miz Too-Sweet’s wise voice is that of my grandmothers: Pearlie Mae Young and Sophie Mae Moss. Every summer, as a girl living in Waterbury, Connecticut, I traveled to the South with my family to enjoy a week or more with my grandparents. I loved the other world nature of their accents, the Southern vernacular, their sayings, their customs and traditions. And I adore Miz Too-Sweet’s gift to understand the Omniscient voice of the wind.
The novel is a frame story, with Miz Too-Sweet’s voice beginning and ending the tale. In the Southern tradition, storytelling is a sacred pastime, allowing for a special bonding between family members. It separated the storytellers from the audience. You were honored in an unspoken way, if you could captivate your listener for hours on the power of your creative vibe, elocution and choice of words and sounds!
No, I didn’t have to research the characters in If You Love Me, Come. They sprang from the creative space within, from a Stillness, from my fertile memory, and in a few instances from actual people I have known.
As for parallel lives, in the novel Pastoria (my maternal grandfather’s mother’s name) passes her baby to its father and asks that they go their separate ways, same as did one of my sister’s friends. I couldn’t stop thinking about how such a thing impacts the mother, the child, the father and the person nurturing the baby. Considering I was a young mother who prayed long and hard to conceive, I was in awe, witnessing such a mother/child experience. Bittersweet, it was a perfume I couldn’t wash away!
2. You definitely understand, and communicate so well, how many women feel on so many levels through your characters. Do you think this is a novel about our female, human condition?
Thank you, again! Yes, ma’am, this is a novel about the female and how her world evolves with and without certain experiences, how she can change her circumstances by changing her mind, how other women living their lives can empower those who aren’t living theirs to the fullest and how they must stare fear in the eyes in order to live life more richly. Writing this, I can almost hear Helen Reddy belting out the unforgettable line: “I’m Every Woman; she’s all in me.”
I think the story speaks to the female condition globally. No matter what language we speak or where we were born or whatever our customs, we are yet the glue of society, reminding me that a society can be no greater than how it treats its women.
3. The class differences are prevalent throughout your story. How does this come to shape our perceptions of not only your characters, but of our own attitudes toward those who fall into a different class from whom we are unaccustomed to having contact? In other words, what would you like the reader to take away from this as a lesson, or awakening, about class differences?
A sumptuous question this is, Colette! Love it! I want readers to walk away from the story with a different perspective on class. I want them to question their preconceived notions of others from a class different from themselves, realizing that class is a society-imposed barrier that signifies your household income is different from another’s, and as such, your experiences are different. You may have been able to travel to Greece, where as others may have had to settle for reading about Greece. I want readers to be thankful for their experiences, whatever they were or are, and be open and willing to embrace people for who they are, not for the wealth they or their families might possess.
We are one. And as souls cloaked in the human experience, I think we should defy the strictures of tradition whenever we can, and walk out on the waves of sisterhood and brotherhood to unwrap the gifts of our Present Moments.
4. How important is it to you for the reader to have an understanding of the lesbian romance within the story? It almost seems to be a secondary story within the story of class and family struggles, but I could be wrong. Am I?
That is a pivotal question to understanding more about the story and the author. As a lesbian, I think it’s very important to have readers encounter lesbians in the midst of a story about family and class struggles. I want lesbians to be as ordinary as heterosexuals between the pages of a novel or in a social setting or at our family dinner tables. No one in society is meant to be invisible, and if society and that group persist on invisibility for some, as in “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” then that will constitute the longer it will take for society at large to accept that lesbians and gays are souls having a human experience as well. The world is an immense flower garden, and how much beauty would it miss if all of us were tulips?
Slowly, physically, I was creaking open the closet door when I began writing If You Love Me, Come. In a magical way, I loved myself out of obscurity by coming out, to a certain extent, in the pages of my story, and thereby, my lesbian romance appears as a secondary plot, but for me, at the time, it was major. Perhaps that is why I claimed myself wholly, as a lesbian, later, in the throes of my erotica published in several anthologies.
5. In what context are the male character references important to this story? Miz Too-Sweet says, "Then outside of his chile support, he died to me that day, and I been heedful of how a lap sits ever since." I love the wisdom that spews out of her! I just want to know what your intent as the author is concerning men. Is there a message that we can be strong without them?
I absolutely love your questions, Lady Poet. My sole intent with the male characters that people the story is to show that, like the women, we are the result of the choices that we make on this journey called life. Some of the male characters make choices that devalue and degrade their female counterparts, as with Miz Too-Sweet and several suitors she’d experienced in her deep-South past. Yet, conversely, she finds a man she can adore in her present husband, Mr. Will. She dotes on him. He is the center of her world. She makes certain he is fed when she tips out to visit with Pinkey, and she considers Preacher, a mute neighbor, as a part of her extended family in Techwood.
“J.T.,” Junior Thomas, Free’s man, is a dynamic character, changing over the course of the novel. Raised listening to his grandfather’s dictum about a man being able to control his woman, J.T. bows to being the sort of man who looks admiringly at women dressed in sexy attire, sexy attire he doesn’t want Free to style, and when she calls the matter to his attention, it sparks a string of arguments leading to Free walking away.
Meka Rae, the beautiful model on the novel’s cover, vouchsafed to me that J.T. was her favorite character, because he eventually understood what it meant to love another, to love a woman. He learns that you cannot change another person; you can only change self.
Thank you for sharing my story with your readers, Colette! I sincerely appreciate you on many levels.
