Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 5, 1993 TAG: 9310050054
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Beth Macy STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"I say I'm Rhoda as much as I am a binary neutron star," Gilchrist said Saturday at the ninth annual Blue Ridge Writers Conference. "You might create a character based on your mother, but in three weeks you're not even gonna recognize your mother in that character anymore."
It was definitely Rhoda - and by extension, Gilchrist herself - for whom 150 area writers turned out Saturday at the daylong conference featuring a Gilchrist reading and discussion, as well as advice from other professionals, including Highland County writer Donald McCaig and Gilchrist's agent, Don Congdon.
The 58-year-old Gilchrist, who's just as outspoken as her wacky Rhoda Manning character, read her hilarious (and somewhat controversial) recent short story, "A Statue of Aphrodite," featuring a 58-year-old Rhoda - "who still hasn't learned very much." She also discussed her own writing process in a talk called "Muse of Fire."
"The poet Randall Jarrell said a poet stands out in storms all his life and once or twice gets struck by lightning," Gilchrist said. "You have to be out there writing so you can be a container for when the muse strikes."
The early, pre-publishing years are the hardest for a writer, she said. It's hard to get that first break because publishers are only interested in new writers who are already successful.
That's where tenacity comes in. "At first you need to publish wherever you can - journals, newspapers, magazines. And then hopefully you'll find some niche. Like [newspaper columnist] Molly Ivins. She didn't find a hole and fill it. She made her own hole, her own niche, and filled it."
Gilchrist herself didn't begin writing until she was nearly 40, although as a 14-year-old she did write a weekly newspaper column called "Chit and Chat About This and That."
"I had a lotta children and got married a lotta times," said Gilchrist, who was born in the Mississippi Delta but now lives in Fayetteville, Ark. "I wasn't interested in hanging out with my three little boys and breaking up the fights, so I read all the time."
When her children were in their teens - "leading the revolution of the '70s," she said - the family had to fly all over the U.S. getting them out of jail. "I thought, if they're not going to use the genes, I'm going to."
Gilchrist said "voice" - the style or sound of the narrator or writer, "the imprint of the mind driving the hand" - is the most important tool a writer can use. "Voice is what makes us absolutely fall in love with certain books."
The only way to establish the voice of a character is by writing. "Sometimes it just comes. Sometimes you hear a scrap of conversation and you can tell a whole story in that one little bit of voice you just heard. Or you read something and you hear a voice."
Southern language provides Gilchrist with the most melodic voices, she said. "The further South you go, it's like music. We've turned language into song in the South."
"I was 26 when I read Faulkner and Miss Welty. And I was amazed. I thought, `I can write the way we talk?' "
Gilchrist - who has the phrase "Goodbye, Sequential Thought" taped to her television set - said she fears the melody of language has become lost in the dominating culture of America: television.
She and her friends meet every Tuesday night to read the plays of William Shakespeare aloud. "He constantly talks about the imagination," she said. "Back then they were as excited about language as our culture is today about TV."
"Never take language for granted," she told her audience. "It's an amazing thing to be able to tell a person you saw a horse and they know immediately what you're talking about."
And don't let the goal of writing get lost in the hard, hard work it is to get published, she added. Wanting to be writers, "You're asking to be in a priestly cast."
To key to discovering the joy in the creative process of writing is to keep on doing it - to be there when the muse strikes.
"No psychologist can ever figure [the muse] out, either - no matter how many brain smears they take," she said. "And when it does strike, I always think it'll never happen again."
The joy of writing more than makes up for the struggle every writer faces, she said. "Don't let anybody talk you out of it, if you really wanna write - because it's so much fun, the creative act of writing."
Poking yet more fun at the television culture, she added, "Our time will come. The electricity will go off one day and they'll all beg us to come over and read."
Most of the conference attendees - English professors, playwrights, free-lance writers, desktop publishers and journalists - were inspired by Gilchrist's reading and talks, though not all.
"We had five or six born-again Christians who were extremely upset" by Gilchrist's reading, conference president Liz Jones said. Gilchrist's story did contain a certain four-letter word, in addition to Rhoda's rantings about sex - specifically, her lack of it.
Asked what Gilchrist thought of the controversy, Jones said, "She loved it. She hopes they ban her books at Liberty University."
by CNB