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Interview with Carrie Brown
By Julie Patt '09
STAFF WRITER

8:00 PM. Wednesday, April 18. Students and faculty gathered in Pannell Gallery to hear selections from Carrie Brown’s upcoming novel, The Rope Walk. Despite the “dreadful cold” Brown professed to have, her lyrical prose and comical rendering of the characters’ voices quickly delighted the audience.

Prof. Brown, known to many students an irreplaceable fixture at the Academic Resource Center, is a UVA MFA program graduate and the author of six novels, including: Rose’s Garden, Lamb in Love, The Hatbox Baby, House of Belle Isle, Confinement, and The Rope Walk, which will be released by Pantheon Books on May 1, 2007.

The Rope Walk is, according to Brown, “the story of two kids thrown together for the summer.” As the novel unfolds, the children encounter an ill man who has returned to the community – “they are recruited to read to him because his eyesight is failing,” she said. In The Rope Walk, Brown meditates on the nature of childhood and adulthood, on loss, and, ultimately, on happiness.

Voice: So what is the premise for this particular novel?

CB: It’s the story of Alice, who is the youngest of six and an orphan. Her mother died and she’s left with her five older brothers and her father, a Shakespeare professor. And she meets Theo, who is dumped on his grandparents for the summer because his parents are getting a divorce. He ends up spending the summer at Alice’s house. Luckily, they like each other. They fall in love in that speechless, indirect way that ten-year-olds fall in love. They get recruited by the community to read to this AIDs victim who has returned to the town and is losing his eyesight. And they build him a rope walk – a rope strung through the woods so he can follow it and walk alone, which ultimately ends up being part of his undoing. This is a shocking thing for children and the novel ultimately becomes about these two brave, heroic children and their failure of power in the face of the adult world. But it is also about their friendship and about happiness – it’s very much a story about happiness actually.

Voice: You create so much of this world through the beauty of language. How does language function for you as a writer?

CB: I think there’s a real pleasure in evoking setting through language. There’s a sheer pleasure to word. I was one of those children who loved the sound of words. I think artists love their mediums. If you’re a writer, words are what give you pleasure. I’m reading Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples right now, which is a collection of interrelated stories about this one town. Welty’s language is incandescent – word by word, sentence by sentence, there’s just this sheer quality to her language. It’s her medium.

Voice: Can you comment on what started this particular novel for you? Was it Alice or a particular image that struck you?

CB: I’ve never written from the point of view of a child before. I don’t even often write from the point of view of a female narrator. I think it was Elizabeth Bowen who said that characters are not written, they are discovered. It’s a little mystical but I think there’s some truth to it. You know when you create a character who can come alive and breathe – you kind of stumble across them. Alice felt effortless to me: her point of view and voice. Once I had it, I knew it. I always knew it was her story, from the very beginning. She was the organizing impulse. But I don’t remember exactly how the novel began.

Voice: What was writing from a child’s point of view like?

CB: I have spent more time with children than adults over the past twenty years, not just my kids but also nieces and nephews, friends’ children, and even the Sweet Briar students. You all are in those final years of childhood, before you take that tremendous leap. But I really like children. I find them surprising and interesting and vastly more endearing than many adults. I have a kind of prejudice in favor of them. They’re funny and smart and incredibly perceptive sometimes.

Voice: Of course, the other child of the story is Theo. What’s he like?

CB: Alice is kind of alone – she’s the youngest and the only girl. She’s an orphan and her father is somewhat remote. There’s a scene in the book when Alice’s father is talking to her brothers, who are back from college, etc, and they ask how Alice is. And her father says, well, she’s lonely. Theo is the antidote to that loneliness. He’s everything Alice is not: a blabbermouth, manic, aggrandizing. Alice is fairly sheltered – she’s not allowed to watch television – and Theo is up to his eyes in pop culture. He’s a kind of guide for Alice outside of the self. He was maybe my gift to Alice. If you’re going to make things up, sometimes you ought to satisfy your own desires. Plus, he was just really fun to write.

Voice: What was the process of writing and publication like for you?

CB: It took two years to write it, start to finish. Then, it spends a year in publication. I’ve spent the past year doing revisions and page proofs. And now I’m going on a book tour.

Voice: Are you working on anything else?

CB: I have just now started working on something else. I want to get a little of it done before the fall when I start teaching again.

Voice: Are you looking forward to teaching creative writing here again?

CB: I am really excited about it actually. It’s been four years since I’ve taught creative writing here and I am looking forward to seeing the work people are writing. It will be fun to see the imaginative side of the students’ writing. And it’s different to teach creative writing because it’s not an academic discipline. It’s art; it’s about art. I don’t like to teach creative writing as if it’s an academic English course. We read because we love to, and at the same time we’re learning by osmosis. Creative writing and reading go hand in hand. You assume people take classes in the arts because they love the arts.

Voice: What is the special topics class you’re teaching in the fall?

CB: It’s a class on interconnected narratives. I’ve stumbled across a number of novels and short story collections (like The Golden Apples) that are interconnected and it occurred to me that it would be fun to teach them and have students try to write them. We’ll start out by reading and then have exercise. I think prompts allow you to give yourself a lot of paths to go down.

I think it’s interesting for students too, because so many of these stories are linked to coming of age. Students can be very comfortable with that – it gives them something to hang on to.

Voice: Are you reading anything now?

CB: I’m always reading. Recently I’ve read The Great Fire and The Venus in Transit by Shirley Hazzard and Gilead by Marilyn Robinson – they’re wonderful, wonderful books. I’m also rereading Joseph Roth’s The Radetsky March and Chekov. Every five to six years, I feel compelled to reread Chekov. It’s like listening to a piece of music that just moves you. He wrote enormously, mysteriously successful stories – how did he do that?

The Rope Walk (Pantheon) is available in hardcover starting May 2007.