Chapter One When Lena climbs off the bus in the predawn dark of a small mountain town she doesn’t know the name of, she’s not thinking about her home now some seven hundred miles behind her; she’s not thinking…
I almost gave up on A Tremendous Thing. I worried I was writing a story about saving things that didn’t want saving. I had drafted the novel multiple times; readers liked it. But I knew something wasn’t right.
My main character, Lena—a girl “disappearing” from her real life after an incident at college, losing herself or reinventing herself out of necessity and fear in a small town in West Virginia—would not come to life. Lena wasn’t me, but I knew her. I had given her the mosh pit of my love of fairy tales, my feelings about girlhood and motherhood and choice, my complicated affinity for Appalachia, and my desire to make things right in the world. Still, I could not feel her on the page. About writing The Color Purple, Alice Walker said she could not hear her characters until she moved from New York City all the way to a small town in California that felt enough like the Georgia where her characters were from that they would come out and talk to her. Walker was listening for Celie’s voice, the voice of her novel. It sounds like magic, but that’s perhaps because there is some magic attached to finding voice.
I had to move too—not across the country in my case, but away from the fear that I was going to make mistakes, that someone would come after me or after Lena to tell her (or me) that this wasn’t her story to tell, or that she was an outsider in Appalachia, or that she (or I) was making a mountain out of a molehill by seeing a connection between mining and motherhood. John Gardner describes psychic distance like a dolly shot in a film, showing how we can move from a character at a distance to getting as close to their feelings as words will allow. The idea of narrative distance sounds simple when I teach it to undergraduates, but in this novel it was an act of faith to step into Lena’s skin: not to see a girl getting off a bus in the early hours of the morning from across the street, but to climb off with her, imagining all the thoughts she’s not thinking even while she’s carrying them close because it’s all she can do not to throw up. Technically, this approach involved shifting the verb tense from past to present in order to close the gap between the narrator and Lena herself. However, I also had to let myself reimagine the entire inner sound of my point-of-view character, as well as her perspective of the world she has clambered into, in order to make that adjustment. There, I found that unguarded, messy moment, which was the beginning of finding Lena’s voice and the voice of the novel.
SUSAN MOREHOUSE grew up in West Virginia and now lives in rural New York where she teaches creative writing and literature at Alfred University. Her essays, fiction, and flash have appeared in a number of journals, including The Southern Review, Willow Springs Magazine, New Ohio Review, and Sycamore Review. She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, and has been nominated for Best American Essays, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Microfiction. You can find her on Instagram @susan.p.morehouse.
