THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 4, 1996 TAG: 9611020061
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Profile
SOURCE: BY NANCY LEWIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 88 lines
FOR ODU PROFESSOR Janet Peery, putting one's faith on the line is the essence of art - and life.
She took a leap of faith, spending years crafting her first novel, ``The River Beyond the World.''
Now that work is up for one of the most prestigious awards in America. ``River'' is one of five books nominated for the 1996 National Book Award in fiction, a $10,000 prize that bestows nearly as much honor as the Pulitzers.
Winners will be announced Wednesday in New York.
Peery, a petite 48-year-old, lives in Norfolk's Colonial Place neighborhood. A painting hanging in her living room depicts a partially clad, dark-skinned woman stepping off a snowy ledge. The woman ignores the abyss below, her eyes riveted on the wooden cross she holds before her.
The 1968 painting, by Stjepan Vecenaj, titled ``Tomncina Sunca,'' exemplifies the kind of faith it took for Peery to write her first novel.
For six years, she lived the book as she wrote - and rewrote.
``It was six years of turmoil and joy,'' she says.
It was her faith in God that carried her through long nights of writing and re-writing, she says. ``You don't go to that high place alone.''
The woman in the painting could also symbolize any one of the three female characters in Peery's book.
There's Luisa, who sets out from the Mexican village of her birth pregnant and alone. Her faith in humankind ultimately carries her unscathed through landscapes of hopelessness.
And Edwina, the Virginia aristocrat who finds herself in an alien world when she marries a Texas rancher. It's uncharted territory for her.
And there's Antonia, Luisa's illegitimate daughter who learns to flourish in her mother's adopted - and classist - society.
The streams that converge in the story form a river of faith - the faith it takes to rise above what one is dealt by fate.
``It's about grace being always possible,'' Peery says.
Peery, 48, moved to Hampton Roads from her home city of Wichita, Kan., three years ago, taking a one-year post as visiting assistant professor at ODU. Peery, who had been a speech pathologist, had just received her masters in fine arts in writing, changing careers in midlife.
She was betting against the odds that she would find a permanent job in writing when she moved east with her three children and no money.
But Peery realized almost immediate success as a writer.
Her book of short stories, ``Alligator Dance,'' was published that same year and won the Whiting Foundation Writers Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Foundation Award.
Winning the National Book Award would be ``the big step up,'' career-wise, Peery says.
But there might be costs as well, she says. Winning such an honor might thwart her growth.
``I want to get better, and too much praise can fix you there,'' she says. ``I still see myself at the very beginning.''
Peery's already at work on her second novel, one that focuses on men. The setting will likely be Oklahoma's northern plains, she says.
``It's about suffering, the way it comes to bear on men, how you can't avoid being plunked down in it,'' says Peery.
Now a full-time faculty member of ODU, Peery lives in Colonial Place with her husband, WAVY-TV military reporter Cy Bolton, and her three daughters from her first marriage. Two are students at Maury High School, and the other is studying poetry at the University of Virginia.
Peery plans to stay put - at least for now - even though she misses ``the wind and space of Kansas.'' Her children are happy where they are and, besides, she says, the next career move is her husband's, who moved to Hampton Roads from California to be with her.
Besides, says Peery, ``ODU is very supportive, and you cannot duplicate an English department like I have.''
Other novels nominated for the National Book Award in fiction are ``Atticus'' by Ron Hansen, ``Ship Fever and Other Stories'' by Andrea Barrett, ``The Giant's House'' by Elizabeth McCracken and ``Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer'' by Steven Millhauser. MEMO: For coverage of the National Book Award announcement, see
Thursday's Virginian-Pilot. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN
The Virginian-Pilot
Janet Peery came to Hampton Roads three years ago from Kansas with
three children, no money and no permanent job after a midlife career
change.
KEYWORDS: INTERVIEW by CNB