Secrets, Sisters, and Grasping the Past: An Interview with Julie Hensley https://ift.tt/qfNS8JH
Julie Hensley is the author of Five Oaks, a new novel that follows Landfall, her Ohio State University Press Non/Fiction Prize-winning novel-in-stories. She has previously published the poetry collections Viable and The Language of Horses. Her poems and stories have appeared in Southern Review, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Quarterly West, among others, and she is a core faculty member of the Bluegrass Writers Studio, the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Kentucky University. Hensley is an Appalachian writer who grew up among the mountains of Virginia and now lives in Kentucky with her family.
Her new novel Five Oaks is narrated by Sylvie, as she reflects on a haunting and unforgettable summer from her childhood — that she and her older sister Wren experienced — at her grandparents’ lake house (which is named Five Oaks) in Arkansas. The novel also captures pivotal experiences in the lives of Sylvie’s mother Margaret and her maternal grandmother Georgia. The secrets that persist through generations of these women’s lives are revealed and examined. We conducted this interview via email.
One of my favorite aspects of the novel — when I leaned in closest and dog-eared pages most often — were the parts where Sylvie was narrating and her perspective would shift in time (from Sylvie as a child to Sylvie as an adult). Lee Smith’s Black Mountain Breakdown and Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It also memorably feature narrators looking back across many years to try and understand their past. The historical chapters that capture Sylvie’s mother, Margaret and maternal grandmother, Georgia, are made richer by Sylvie’s narration, even though she wasn’t always physically present in those stories. Her voice, and her storytelling, color and enrich their stories, too. Can you talk a little bit about how Sylvie developed as a narrator?
I love that Sylvie’s narration appealed to you. The narration caused a bit of contention. While I was still early in the process of writing the novel, the chapter “Beneath the Green” was accepted for publication in Alligator Juniper, and the editor questioned what he called the “narrative overlay.” We talked about it, and I scaled it back, transforming the chapter to a limited third, focalized by Margaret. After that interaction, I found myself questioning the voice that I had been trusting. I wondered if maybe it was asking too much of the reader to follow Sylvie not just deep into her own childhood, but also into the young adulthood of her mother and grandmother. After all, there is no way she could truly know all the details she shares about the inner lives of those women. I felt she knew on some level, though. She does what we all do — takes family lore and builds on it in her imagination. For a few weeks, I tried to press on in the novel continuing the backstory chapters in that limited third. That move was disastrous for my creative spirit. It stalled all my momentum. As soon as I accepted Sylvie’s voice again, I regained my fluency in the novel.
This novel has an innovative and compelling structure that tells the story of Wren and Sylvie’s summer at Five Oaks in 1988, while also telling stories about the most heart-wrenching and difficult moments in Margaret and Georgia’s lives. All their stories are anchored by the Arkansas lake house called Five Oaks, even though the stories are spread out across the twentieth century. How and why did you structure the novel the way you did? How did the novel take shape?
I always knew that despite the narrative overlay, it would be a braided narrative. I love braided and mosaic novels. I think it is the truest way to tell a story, the best way to illuminate conflicting perspectives and undisclosed secrets. Louise Erdrich and Barabara Kingsolver do this so well.
I stumbled upon Wren’s intercalary chapters a bit late, once I was actively developing the other threads. At first, Wren’s sections were merely exploration — my way of exploring where Wren might be going when she sneaks away so that that information might be diffused through Sylvie in her Arkansas thread. I always have multiple projects going, and I often turn to crafting poems when my fiction is blocked. At first, these sections were like prose poems. I would drop into a Wren scene when I was short on time or feeling blocked in the longer chapters. But, by the end of the book, they were some of my favorite chapters to write. The dreamy atmosphere in these sections allowed for more lyricism.
There definitely came a point when the fragmented nature of the novel just about overwhelmed me. I was in residence at Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, Georgia. I was having a hard time pressing on and keeping everything straight. I drove to Piggly Wiggly and got four different colors of wrapping paper ribbon, and I began charting what I had on notecards and weaving the cards along corresponding threads and then literally braiding the threads together on the wall. I had to ask for one of the ladders like a visual artist. That physical act and then the visual effect really helped. I found it much easier to move forward.
In a discussion at CoffeeTree Books in Morehead, Kentucky, you mentioned that this was a book about memory. I love this. Can you say more about what that means to you and why it’s important?
Years and years ago, when I began this book, I was really writing as an exercise of memory. I wanted to get down scenes and images that I could recall from my summers with my maternal grandparents on Lake Hamilton in Hot Springs, Arkansas. This early writing was just for me.
The current temporal frame of Five Oaks is largely based on events that occurred during my tenth summer. My memory exercise dredged up a lot of confusion and curiosity about that particular summer, which contained layers of trauma. In my mind, that summer functioned as a clear line in my family. There was before, and there was after. It changed our family dynamics. It changed our family rules. Yet we never really talked about what happened. I wasn’t, in fact, certain what actually had happened. (I’m still not!) So, I dug in, leaning into all the ambiguity, trying to retrieve everything I could and make sense of it. But at some point, my dedication to memory began to slow me down. I was trying so hard to get every detail right that I was paralyzing my writing. When I began to fictionalize the story and setting just a bit, it freed me.
Secrets persist and are passed on (often subconsciously) between these three generations of women. Why do secrets carry so much weight? What does holding onto secrets mean to the characters in this novel? And are they capable of freeing themselves?
I strongly believe in the idea of multigenerational patterns from family systems theory. Emotional patterns and issues are passed down, generation to generation. Secrets are passed down, even without ever being explicitly revealed. In fact, secrets might become heavier and more powerful from attempts to keep them close. In trying to safeguard their daughters, mothers often pass on their own bundled trauma. I think Ellen, Georgia, and Margaret all do this. (I feel like I could write another entire novel about Ellen’s past and her secrets — her sharecropping childhood, what she sacrificed in escaping it, her relationship with Pilar!) Probably Wren and Sylvie, too, despite Sylvie’s attempts to unravel her family secrets. That’s what Sylvie is really trying to do — free everyone. Obviously, that is impossible.
In real life, I’m so worried about continuing this pattern that I suspect I tell my kids too much. They regularly put their hands over their ears and tell me, “No! Too much sharing. Too much information.”
Sylvie’s grandparents’ lake house in Arkansas, her family’s home in Kentucky, and the landscapes and nightclubs in Galveston, Texas are rendered with lush precision, wonder, and beauty. How is place important for this novel and its creative journey? Was there a place in the novel that you loved writing about the most?
Setting is central to my process. When I am struggling to push the page forward, I lean into setting. It is comfortable for me.
It was emotional for me to put myself back in Arkansas, back at the lake. When I began writing, my maternal grandmother was still alive, although she was suffering dementia. My mother took her from assisted living and drove her back to the lake for a few weeks one summer, and my husband and I met them there. It was a strange reunion because my grandmother was greatly changed, yet everything about the lake and the cottage was the same. I could already feel the novel forming then — I was in that exercise of memory period. I took so many photographs. I took the canoe out alone and paddled around the cove each morning. I knew it was inevitable that the property would be sold, and I really wanted to imprint every detail.
I think each of the novel’s geographic locations provides a kind of isolation that serves the plot, even wartime Houston and Galveston. I really enjoyed the historical research. I worked with the Galveston Historical Society to access artifacts from the real-life Balinese Room, and it was so fun to see old table settings and the Polynesian-inspired menu, to see the posters advertising different musical acts. I loved walking along the gulf and through the Victorian homes and tree-lined streets in the East End Historical District.
You mentioned at your book launch at Joseph-Beth Bookstore in Lexington, Kentucky, that some of the events of this novel did really happen, but that you decided to use autofiction as the avenue to tell the story. Talk about why you chose to write this as a novel via autofiction, as opposed to a memoir or a traditional novel? How important was form in the development of the book, and how did it impact the way the novel manifested?
I’m not sure I could ever write nonfiction. I’ve published a few short essays, mostly about craft more than my actual life.
At some point in crafting Five Oaks, my adherence to the exactitude of memory began to stifle me. Once I let go of Hot Springs and Lake Hamilton and created Ouachita Springs and Lake Grier, I was able to write more quickly and more freely. The thin veil of fiction gave me some relief from my own demons. There is a lot of my family life and lore in the book, but there are invented elements too. I’m not particularly interested or willing to tease them out and unravel them in a public way.
This novel is filled with vivid, memorable, and complex characters that are fully rendered. Sylvie, her older sister Wren, their mother Margaret, and their maternal grandmother Georgia are the primary characters. But I was compelled by Byron (Georgia’s husband), Jim (Margaret’s husband), and especially Sylvie’s maternal great-grandmother, a singer named Ellen St. Claire — even though she did not get a ton of screen time. I’d love to read a whole novel on Ellen St. Claire! All these characters feel like real people to me. Was there a character that was most challenging to write about?
Ellen was tricky for so many reasons. She is bisexual and in an open marriage. She probably struggles with bipolar disorder. These are issues that are interesting to me and that I can understand to a certain extent — I am bisexual in a hetero marriage, I have watched a sibling struggle with and learn to manage bipolar disorder. Yet Ellen is living in the first half of the twentieth century, and the stigma related to queerness and mental illness was much greater then. She probably wouldn’t even have had the words or resources to identify herself in these ways.
Her journey from a catfish wagon to the stage of the Balinese Room is amazing, and of all the characters, she is the one I feel drawn to revisit. Last year, I read Maggie Shipstead’s novel,Great Circle, and I was so appreciative of how she handled her protagonist, 1920s aviator Marian Graves’ bisexuality! Reading that book made me think maybe I could explore Ellen La Voz in greater detail.
Thanks for chatting with me about the book!
FICTION Five Oaks
By Julie Hensley
Lake Union Publishing
Published May 27, 2025
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