How long have you taught at UAB and what is your course of instruction?
I started teaching at UAB in the fall of 2009. I lead workshops in "Writing for Young People," Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, and this fall I'll be team-teaching a course in memoir and filmmaking with Michele Forman, which I'm really excited about. I also collaborated with Doug Baulos in a children's writing workshop where his art students illustrated by writing students' stories, and we had an exhibit at Sterne Library. I also did a graphic novel collaboration with Somya Singh's students too, although we were not able to do an exhibit. But I certainly hope to do more collaborations with the Art Department.
Where were you before UAB and what made you come here?I've lived in California since 1988, and I still return to Los Angeles during the summers and holidays as my husband is a tenured elementary school teacher with the LA Unified School District, and I'm tenured here in Birmingham. As a freelance writer and novelist, I needed a teaching job to help get our older kids through college, and I was very fortunate to be hired at UAB. Our youngest, Norah, goes back and forth to California with me and is a very happy student at Alabama School of Fine Arts. Our son, Flannery, graduated in film from UC Santa Barbara and our daughter, Lucy, is a Sarah Lawrence graduate.
Why do you teach?
I love teaching. I love helping new writers discover the stories they want to tell, and they give so much back to me in my own work.
What advice do you have for beginning writers?
Take long walks and turn off the Internet. Keep a messy journal. Eavesdrop. Go storycatching — all the things I have to tell myself everyday too. And read, read, read! And learn to say no when you need the time to write. And travel. I had no money in college, but I applied to be an exchange student and the International Department worked with me, and the tuition was the same. I studied for a year at Manchester University and it changed my life. I have friends from 30 years ago because of that year in Manchester, who are working film, television, and theatre in England and the United States. Then I taught English in China at Ningbo University with my husband, Kiffen. It was terrifying but we began our lives together living on the East China Sea and teaching English. Get out of your comfort zone and live somewhere you never imagined living.
What challenges have you met in your writing career and how did you overcome them? How did they help you?
I watched my first novel, Offsides, go out of print with lightning speed even as it marched through Hollywood mill with Diane Keaton attached. I had to face a celebrity in small-claims court when she and her partner refused to pay for the work I'd done on a book proposal. (I won.) I've had to give readings where only the clerks showed up. The worst was at an amusement park where the carnival barker yelled at me, "Introduce yourself. I gotta each lunch." Sometimes you feel like Willy Loman, book-hawking your wares. It takes courage to face the blank screen everyday. The challenges never end. I work at overcoming them daily, but you find your people. You keep your heart and eyes open and write the best stories you can.
Who are your role models? Why?
I have so many. Flannery O'Connor is one because she showed up to write everyday and was there to receive inspiration whether it came or not, and she wrote when she was so sick.That takes such courage. The Bronte sisters — I just visited the Bronte Parsonage again after so many years and took Norah. We learned how the sisters— Anne, Emily, and Charlotte — would write their stories and read them aloud to each other in the evenings, walking around the table. I think of them writing on the moors in the wild, howling winds and losing each other too soon. I've drawn strength from Eudora Welty, Ellen Douglas, Mary Ward Brown, Kathryn Tucker Windham, and Helen Norris Bell, and Harper Lee too. How does any book get written? It's kind of a miracle. So those writers are little miracles for me who give me courage. I love William Styron and Alice Munro and Anton Chekhov — writers who wrote of ordinary lives and made them beautiful.
What motivates you to write?
C.S. Lewis said, "We read to know we are not alone." I think that's why I write too. I don't feel so alone when I write. I'm surrounded by characters and stories I care about and they sustain me and drive me crazy too when I get overwhelmed with life, and I can't always sit down and write. But they are they waiting — I try to show up everyday whether it's for an hour or four hours or eight. (It's NEVER eight except on the miraculous days.)
What have you published and what projects are you working on now?
I've published seven books for adults and children. Offsides (William Morrow and more recently Foreverland Press) was my autobiographical novel of growing up a football daughter on the gridiron. My next book was Writing Smarts (American Girl), a book for kids to discover their own voices as storytellers. I wrote the Maggie Valley novels: Gentle's Holler, Louisiana's Song, and Jessie's Mountain, inspired by my husband's family from the mountains. He grew up one of 13 children, and his father, Jim Lunsford, played with the Smoky Mountain Boys and Reno & Smiley, and his great uncle, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, was a songcatcher who wrote "Mountain Dew" and sold the song for a bus ticket home as the story goes. I wrote a biography of Harper Lee for teens, and I've been to Monroeville so many times I feel like I've lived there. I wrote a picture book, Nothing Fancy about Kathryn & Charlie, which my daughter Lucy illustrated about the friendship between storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham and folk artist Charlie Lucas. We did a tour of rural Alabama libraries last summer getting the kids to make trees out of found objects and write stories. I'm working on two new picture books, a novel for adults, and a new children's novel. I've also published stories for Scholastic, LA Times, Shenandoah, Carve, Five Points, LA Weekly, Birmingham News, and others.
Where is your favorite spot in Birmingham to write in place? Why?
I love to write on my screened-in front porch under the canopy of oak trees or in my office at home on a closet door that I've made into a large desk where I can spread out. I love the smells and sounds of the South that fill my writing. It's very different than Los Angeles.
If you could, what would you say to potential UAB creative writing students?
Don't take no for an answer. Do your best work. Don't go into writing with only publishing in mind. Find joy in the work you do, and find your people. Find the ones who encourage you and show up. And show up for them too. It's a long road this writing life. You'll need each other.
