Digging into the Difficult: An Interview with Valerie Nieman https://ift.tt/fuWoyTi
I got to know poet, novelist, and short story writer Valerie Nieman in 2011, when we both had books coming out from Press 53 (hers was Blood Clay, a novel). We were both writing about newcomers to the rural South, so we put on a series of joint readings across North Carolina and Virginia, sparking scenes back and forth like a musical jam. We’ve stayed connected through many adventures since.
Nieman fearlessly channels many kinds of work — poetry to short stories, novels in mixed genres, literary novels, and essays about her love of the natural world. I got hold of her first story collection, Fidelities, during COVID lockdown and devoured it in several days. It gave me insight into the deep roots of her love of working people — her own roots — and rural places. Since that first collection, she’s published three poetry collections and five novels, including the post-apocalyptic Neena Gathering, the literary novel Blood Clay, the genre-busting speculative/environmental justice novel To the Bones (about the depredations of the coal barons in West Virginia). Her most recent novel, In the Lonely Backwater, is a psychological thriller in the Southern gothic tradition, about high school students caught up in a murder investigation. All Nieman’s work encounters difficult themes as well as deep understanding of human nature.
Nieman’s work has not gone unnoticed, winning creative fellowships including those granted by the NEA, North Carolina and West Virginia arts councils, and Kentucky Foundation for Women, as well as winning the Greg Grummer, Nazim Hikmet, and Byron Herbert Reece poetry prizes. In the Lonely Backwater won the prestigious Sir Walter Raleigh Award last year, a prize attached in the past to the works of Doris Betts, Ron Rash, Charles Frazier, and John Ehle.
Born in western New York State, Nieman graduated from West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte MFA program. A former journalist and professor, she now teaches creative writing at conferences and venues such as the John C. Campbell Folk School.
We discussed her most recent novel, the importance of awards and fellowships, and her upcoming books.
Let’s jump in and talk about In the Lonely Backwater — told through the eyes of Maggie, an outcast teenage girl caught up in the investigation of her missing cousin. One thing that floors me about this book is the way it opens with a single line floating on the page: “This is how I remembered it.” There’s a little bit of disturbance in that line. A little tremor that we barely feel. Later we understand that line has a double meaning. How is this story about memory and storytelling?
What we remember, or think we remember, is a major element of the novel, along with the way we shape our lives through stories. Can we believe anything but the immediate evidence of our senses, and can we believe that? The strange thing is that I ended the novel on a similar line, only to realize that it should be the opening line as well, the slightly different versions setting up a kind of echo, like the reverberations of a singing bowl.
Maggie Warshauer is sixteen, a self-aware, observant girl with “a good brain and a strong body.” Her mother has abandoned the family. Her father’s drinking to forget. Maggie’s good in school and sports, but she’s aware that she’s not attractive to boys. While her father goes on benders, she practically runs the small marina where they live. She’s one of the real outsiders in her school. And to top that, her beautiful cousin — with whom she’s been fighting in the halls and on Facebook — has gone missing. Can you tell us how you came up with this feisty, angry, troubled character? Is she at all like you when you were a teen?
Maggie is not much like me at that age except for her experiences as an amateur naturalist. I was far too shy to be that feisty! I was a solitary kid, spending my days in the woods, watching birds, digging things up, building dams. Also, I was blessed with a loving and intact family, unlike Maggie, but have seen enough of the other kind, and had experience as a codependent to an alcoholic, to understand those experiences.
Maggie’s voice is knowing and sardonic — judging almost everyone harshly — especially her “so-called mother.” It’s also so funny sometimes — her principal has “a voice like Vin Diesel going through a sex change.” How did this vivid, angry, insightful, innocent/knowing voice come to you?
I don’t know. Honestly. I’d been making notes for a story about a young woman botanizing in the forest and another about a prom night murder, as well as keeping a journal during what proved to be my final year of sailing, but I couldn’t see a story coming together. It’s all pretty hazy now, but when Maggie began speaking I knew that I was on my way. Her voice was real and immediate, rising out of her passions and interests. For instance, one way Maggie copes with her fractured world is by categorizing everything, from boats to people, creating a taxonomy like her hero Linnaeus.
Let’s talk about Maggie’s crush on the 18th-century botanist. Her knowledge of the natural world is rich and deep. She knows the similar Latin names of the screech owl and the long-eared owl and when they’re supposed to be around. She has authority in this area, even contradicts an expert bird guide. I know some of this derives from your own love of nature. But tell me about how Linnaeus got in there. Is the book described authentic? If so, it must be rare.
I’d had encounters with Linnaeus before writing this novel — from a high school biology teacher’s lessons to a story by Fred Chappell. Linnaeus was in the back of my thoughts. As Maggie began to be embodied, her interest in the natural world and her knowledge of binomial nomenclature sent me back to the Swedish botanist. But how would they come together? On my regular drives to Lake Kerr for sailing, I would pass a historic church. One day I stopped and looked around, and a scene formed, a break-in that Maggie comes upon at a similar church. She finds the pages of an English translation of his Lachesis Lapponicus strewn across the floor, and she’s fascinated by a fragment she reads. The next moment I hadn’t anticipated — she stuffs the battered book into her shorts and takes it home. It’s the start of a strange long-distance, cross-time relationship as she bonds with Linnaeus through the journal he wrote as a young man traveling in Lapland.
I knew that I needed to know and touch this book. The UNC Botany Library provided the opportunity. I spent the day in a cubicle with the book, my notebook, and a stub of pencil, getting down passages of the 200-year-old book as well as its look and feel and smell.
This novel has some of the classic aspects of a YA novel — teenager under terrible stress — but it’s also a psychological thriller adults will enjoy, with incredible tension and deflection that keeps us hanging. Can you talk a little bit about the thriller writers you admire?
I’m a genre wanderer through literary fields inflected by science fiction, horror, crime writing, mystery. I read John Le Carré early on, also Ray Bradbury, and much other fantasy and science fiction. Recently, I’ve enjoyed John Copenhaver’s The Savage Kind and Ghosts of New York by Jim Lewis. I admire Clare Beams and Kelly Link and bow before the pantheon of Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Shirley Jackson, Haruki Murakami. I’m leaving out far more writers who’ve influenced me than I’m putting in. My parents never stopped me from reading anything, even the paperback copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that I picked up at a yard sale when I was, oh, thirteen or so.
Maggie meets her match with the detective who shows up to investigate the case, Drexel Vann, whom she describes at first meeting as having “thin hair and the owly glasses and too-big Adam’s apple of the classic nerd.” Can you tell us more about this character — was he inspired by any character in literature or in your experience?
Characters are always composites, to a greater or lesser degree, but this one draws on a detective I worked with during the years I was a police reporter in Fairmont, WV. I had not planned on a detective being a major presence in the story, but when Vann started to interview Maggie I realized, “Oh dang, this guy is going to be important.” He’s a complicated figure, a twist of father figure/antagonist. At one point, without thinking, Maggie says, “He’s dangerous,” then realizes he’s just that, because he’s smart and relentless and won’t accept her nebulous explanations.
Throughout your novel the issue of sexual identity rises: Maggie’s mother who left seems overly sexualized, her friend Nat seems under-sexualized, Maggie fantasizes about a boyfriend. Maggie rejects the girly ways of her cousin Charisse but suffers deeply when Charisse bullies her, calls her a “lezzie.” When Maggie first begins to learn about Linnaeus, his name is rendered “Carol,” and she imagines him an adventurous woman. Tell us more about crafting this theme of gender identity and confusion.
Maggie’s been presented with one image of what it means to be female, the appearance-driven and highly eroticized examples of her mother and her cousin Charisse. Already a tomboy and “Daddy’s girl,” she’s in a predominantly male world at the marina. At school, she’s friends with boys rather than girls. We talk about boys needing models, but girls do as well. Maggie knows that Charisse’s kind of female identity is not hers but doesn’t know who/how she will be. Maggie knows she’s trapped, but she also comes to realize that her perfect and popular cousin is just as ensnared by expectations. She lives half in a shadow world of alternate possibilities, in a way haunted by ghosts — of her mother, of her fantasy boyfriend “Fletcher,” even of the long-departed Linnaeus who was remarkably frank about sexual matters as seen through the lens of his observations.
Maggie’s narration includes short sections called “Observations” that detail her local explorations, for example, notes on the “Cicada Killer” wasp and “Bower Birds.” Do these observations come directly from your own? What was the most fun research you did for this book?
The observations are ones that I made during my own wanderings around Lake Kerr and other locations. The cicada killer appeared in my yard, on a clay bank among the daylilies. The young hawk, the doodlebugs, all drawn from life. My favorite was actually a scene wrapped around an observation, the conversation between Maggie and Nat while she observes a heron killing and eating a large fish, piece by piece! My hill farm in West Virginia appears briefly in this novel as well.
Can you say a little bit about the importance to writers that awards and fellowships can bring? Have you noticed a change in the availability of these essential energy boosts to the writer’s life? And congratulations on In the Lonely Backwater’s new award.
The Sir Walter Raleigh Award was a real stunner. Hard to believe I’m up there with my heroes like Reynolds Price and John Ehle. And it came with a lovely bronze statuette, my Oscar on the mantelpiece! Every award, every publication, gives a jolt of energy, a sense of validation for work carried out in solitude.
The grant support that I’ve received in the past has always been greatly appreciated and put to good use, forwarding my art by giving me time off from demanding work as a journalist, supporting my research, and helping get the word out about my writing.
What’s next for you? I know you’ve got a few manuscripts up your sleeve.
I’ve finished Dead Hand, a sequel to my 2019 novel To the Bones, and am considering how and where it might be published.
The biggest news is the release in March 2025 by Regal House Publishing of a longtime passion project, the story of the historical Macbeths. Upon the Corner of the Moon: A Tale of the Macbeths has been in the works for three decades after research for another book unearthed the information that most everything we know about Macbeth via Shakespeare is wrong. I’m a great lover of the Bard of Avon, so I’m not trying to smash icons here. I learned his stories very early, by reading an edition of Tales from Shakespeare, and the first real play I ever saw was a touring production of “Macbeth.” (Thanks, Dad!) And of course, Macbeth would be no more than a name in the king-lists if not for the play.
This is a two-book project, with the first taking us deep into the tumultuous political, cultural, and religious milieu that shaped the young Macbeth and Gruach (the girl who will later become his famous Lady), then bringing the two of them together in dramatic fashion. While we know little of Gruach except her name and lineage, this left me imaginative space to draw on Pictish history and shape her identity as a healer, mother, and major player in the events that shaped the nation we call Scotland. The second book covers Macbeth’s rise to become rightful king, which he was for 17 years.
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