THE MANY LIVES OF OLIVES

A conversation with Gail Galloway Adams | By Julianna E. Thibodeaux

Writer Gail Galloway Adams has a distinctive voice. Reflective of a reverence for hard-edged beauty and poignant humor, Adams deftly unearths hope even in the face of loss. One could say this beauty is another way of getting at truth, her characters “real” people whose lives are anything but indifferent, frequently characterized by some subtle revelation.

In Adams’s Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection of short stories, The Purchase of Order (University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1988; reissued in paperback by the same publisher in 1995), and in much of her published work since that time, Adams’s characters range from swarthy to sanguine, but are rarely sweet or passive. In the title story “The Purchase of Order,” Lou Maxey and her husband raise their growing family as nomads, traveling as Marlon’s job opportunities beckon, but without complaint; the wandering lifestyle becomes so engrained that the Maxeys continue to travel even after their children are grown and gone and Marlon is retired. At the core of Lou Maxey’s yearning, though, is home—but not in the traditional sense. She identifies her sense of place in another family the Maxeys meet on the road, the equally nomadic Dillons. It’s as if the Maxeys and the Dillons fall in love, but not in the traditional romantic sense; they discover a gypsy kinship, and in so doing, find home. The families inevitably go their separate ways, but Lou yearns for them years later. She and her husband’s nomadic lifestyle becomes Lou’s never-ending quest, a searching for that feeling of home.

Adams’s later stories reflect the same kind of yearning, as if place is a metaphor for some internal seeking—not of a physical place, but an emotional or psychological one. Adams’s short fictional essay, “Olives,” published in the summer issue of The Kenyon Review (and the springboard for this interview), is perhaps the author’s most recent manifestation of that searching. Olives represent both the narrator’s ancestral place and an internal knowing, a knowledge of what matters, what constitutes “home.”

Adams writes, “From my mother I learned that olives were life, to be eaten every day; to eat the fruit and the oil and with them the staff which was bread, baked each morning, a flat round the size of a wheel, a rude cross cut into its face…. These olives arrayed on the majolica plate seem to me like the girls of that [Greek] village…. In this fruit’s progress I see the girls of Aelintakos as they emerge into first womanhood: thick fuzzy braids tied with twine, a perfect line of brow above dark eyes filled with life. I see them wear down until in their forties they are kerchiefed crones, like a Greek chorus. They are the tragedy’s keening; they are the harpies shrieking; they are the dark and shriveled flesh I lift to my lip.”

Adams, who is an associate professor of English at West Virginia University, has published recent works of fiction in Gulf Coast, Sycamore Review, and Story Quarterly. She lives in Morgantown, West Virginia.

I interviewed Adams recently about the personal and professional trajectory of her writing career, the role of truth in fiction, the genre of flash fiction, and the teaching of creative writing:

KENYON REVIEW: In The Confidence Woman:  26 Women Writers at Work (Longstreet,1991), a collection of essays by female writers, you speak in your essay "Understanding Backward" of your early days in New York City before you identified writing and teaching as a career path. You write, "I was always an avid reader, but it never occurred to me that real people wrote the stories that I read and because it didn't or because this was not explained to me, writing was an activity I never considered." Eventually, though, you did come to consider writing as a vocation. How did you come to make this transition?

GAIL GALLOWAY ADAMS: A cumulative process. I pursued an academic life and, of course, that necessitated a lot of writing of papers and completing theses, dissertation prospectus, interdisciplinary essays, etc. Also because I was always involved in the women's movement, I did reviews of women's books and publicity pieces for local newsletters. In graduate school at Emory, a very vital group of women made up the Atlanta Women's Poetry Collective and, although I wasn't a poet, I wanted to be part of the energy and excitement of that organization so I wrote some "pieces" which they were gracious enough to call "poems" and invited me to be part of the group. It was a wonderful experience and taught me a lot about writing and also let me know I really was not a poet—or not a very good one. That encouraged me to write fiction even though I wasn't sure what direction I'd go with it. This is a long way around to the turning point which I always see as the time I was a medical writer/editor in a Department of Ophthalmology and working with highly technical material—only one way to chart the haptic nerve and you can't get creative with that—but the adherence to very formulaic presentation triggered my need to write and so I began to write (usually on my lunch hour). Many stories emerged during that time, most not very good, but it began to seem more and more important to my life, my sanity, my happiness, and it seemed to be something that might be possible. I was encouraged in this by my husband, who has always been very supportive. He's always been my biggest fan.

KR: Do you believe that many writers struggle with the same things you did—and please correct me if I'm characterizing this inappropriately—the insecurity in identifying oneself as "a writer" as if it were a privilege to be earned? Even when one has earned the privilege (as you obviously did, and continue to do), there's still a great deal of modesty in claiming "writer" as one's identity for many of us. Why is this?

GGA: I'm not sure why this is, but I think it is true for a great many people who write. I read a lot of interviews with writers and essays by writers on writing and am always struck by how many struggled with this question of validity. I really admired a story by Jeannette Bertels that appeared in the Gettysburg Review, and when it was selected for national recognition (an O. Henry Prize) her personal statement talked about having to redefine herself as a "writer" every time she wrote a story or a story was published. I'm paraphrasing badly, but her statement rang true. It's hard to get things published. There are lots of good writers and not enough venues. Then, too, there is an expectation in our society that one should have something to show for what one does, and for a writer that would be works in print. We're thrilled by a story in a good journal and even payment in copies, but most of the people around us are silently wondering about our benefits/retirement plan!

A friend of mine—also a writer/professor in an M.F.A. program—was talking about that fused identity of teacher/writer or writer/teacher and which came first. Since this conversation (which took place at an Association of Writing Programs conference) I've thought a lot about that. The professor/teacher title is one that can be quantified in all kinds of ways: academic rank/salary/annual faculty reading; however, the writer half of that identity has to have validation, too, and that comes with publication. I find it heartening that the students in our M.F.A. program do embrace the identity of writer and I hope they hold to it.

KR: In the same essay, you tell the story of having a child relatively late in life, or at least late according to the norm. How did becoming a mother, and the need to make a living while raising a child, influence your creativity and the kind of writing you did at that time? Also, did this precipitate a change or metamorphosis either in how you wrote or how you perceived yourself as a writer?

GGA: I see these two life-changing, life-affirming events as having a symbiotic connection. I was pregnant and trying to finish a dissertation, but little fiction pieces, small vignettes, strange prose-poem narratives kept sneaking into my researched writings. Later, I chose to stay home with my son for the first two and a half years even though it was difficult financially. I would have liked to have been with him longer since we knew then he'd be the only baby we'd ever have, but during that time, I wrote little. I read a lot—and not all Dr. Seuss—and many things were fermenting in my brain. I know that when I did start to write fiction there were whole stories in my head that could be traced back to seeds of musing during that time at home with him. It was an exciting time, a generative time because my life had changed so much: I was a mother and I never expected to be—that made me so happy! and I was writing in a way that I never thought I could or would—and that made me happy. Those early years, although fraught with complications in having to accommodate a new person in our lives and trying to juggle job, child, home, and writing, were vibrant and memorable ones. My boy was growing and learning and so was I. I wrote very little about having a child, or being around children and observing them, but now that he's grown and away, my stories are often about children.

KR: Your piece in The Kenyon Review, "Olives," is both edgy and poignant. The women you memorialize, "These olives arrayed on the majolica plate seem to me like the girls of that [Greek] village," are as the olives you brilliantly personify as the thrust of your piece: "I put them on a plate and admired their differences: the plump, slick, khaki ones, the eggplant-dark that look like small prune plums or deepest bruises, and the strange, shriveled ones, the cadavers of the olive world. They look like mummies' eyes and their taste is oily and musky at once." When you and I were e-mailing each other earlier, you referred to "Olives" as a work of fiction rather than an essay. What is the fiction here, and what is the truth? And how do the two intersect?

GGA: The piece is almost entirely fiction, and it is based on an exercise that I do with my introduction to fiction classes: they must choose a fruit or vegetable and bring it/them home and observe it/them daily for a week; then they must write a careful description using all senses, and lastly, develop a voice that will tell the story of their chosen food.

The first part of the olives in the market is true. I did buy olives and I brought them into class along with a pomegranate—and we discussed the ancient classical myths behind these particular choices and I started on my homework.

My mother is not Greek and I've never been to Greece, although that is still one of my dreams. As a girl, I met and studied with the esteemed classicist William Arrowsmith and marveled at his wonderful translation of Orestes; his was the first voice I ever heard speaking Greek and the first time I heard the word freshet. So perhaps this might be in tribute to the power of his teaching, his presence. When I began to write about my olives on a plate, the story of the narrator's mother just came to me. Once after I'd read this at a writers’ conference, a woman came up to me and said her mother had been born in a poor province in France and that I'd just read her mother's life; in some ways, it is also my own grandmother's life—like all women born in poverty and broken too early by too many children and too much hard work.

KR: What is the writer's role in ferreting out the so-called truth? When a narrative story is a work of fiction, how do you, as a writer, get past the inherent contrivance in writing fiction and get at truth—and further, is this even important? Is this the role of art, in the general sense?

GGA: In our family, this is the question that would belong to my husband! He's an autobiography scholar, but has a particular interest in the questions of the interstices of lie/truth in life writing (his scholarly books are Telling Lives: Lies in American Autobiography, and Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography and American Autobiography, both of which deal with the question of deception as a way to deduce truth). What I am trying to do when I write a story that seems to have some merit is to tell a story with which readers will identify or recognize as a story that shows something that is true. That the voice that tells the story—like maybe the voice in “Olives”?—knows about those women of an earlier generation and recognizes their sacrifice, understands her heritage, their legacy to her, and if that voice is authentic, then I've been successful in presenting a truth in fiction. I think things might have become a little muddled with the term creative nonfiction and there are quite spirited debates at various panels/workshops on what is permissible or right or acceptable, allowable; but all good writing persuades us of its truth.

My story "Dreams of Goa" is set up in a dream sequence, but three of the events presented are based loosely on life: I know a woman who is a herbalist who went on pilgrimage to India when she was young; I knew a fellow in graduate school who went to India/Tibet and almost died of protracted dysentery; and once, years ago as a teenager, I saw a photograph of a swami in Goa in either Look or Life. All the rest is invented (except I have this thing for palm trees and camels so they've been in my consciousness for a long time). Still, you can imagine my surprise when the story was nominated for Best American Travel Writing. Again, it must have been convincing to the truth of that holy place of Goa.

Now here is a funny story/anecdote: my middle sister Terry Galloway is a performance artist and has an ensemble theater in Tallahassee, Florida. She's also a wonderful writer and has creative nonfiction/autobiographical essays in lots of places, but a few years ago she was asked to provide a photograph of herself and my mother for an essay that appeared in an anthology on lesbian women and their mothers. She sent in a wonderful photograph that showed my mother glamorously sprawled on the grass with a ruffled-sunsuited, sweet little girl in front of her, both smiling into the camera. It was so charming it was selected as the cover design for the book, but the only problem was that the picture is not of my sister and my mother, but of my mother and me! "But it's so perfect," my sister said, "and besides there wasn't a photo of me in ruffles!" So the credits list my sister and Mom—and only the family and a few others—now you—know the real truth! So I'm not sure where to put that kind of truth.

KR: You've written quite a bit of "flash fiction" and also teach creative writing in this and traditional genres. Please talk a little bit about flash fiction versus non-flash fiction, and what the goals and/or merits are in writing shorter fictional pieces.

GGA: It's really not a new form of storytelling and Mark Mills’s anthology Crafting the Very Short Story or The Short Short Story, edited by Irving Howe, provide examples from the Greek fable and biblical parable to the most modern practitioners. I became interested in this form because lots of my beginning students found it hard to sustain a longer story, but could in a few pages get something down that made sense, and in some cases it was really sound. There are a number of anthologies—Sudden Fiction, Sudden Fiction International, Flash Fiction, Micro Fiction, Mammoth Book of Minuscule Fiction—and lots of articles and Web sites devoted to figuring out what connects these abbreviated forms. What I've identified in reading so much in this form over the years is that it does share qualities with the prose poem and those are: compression for a single effect; limitation of setting, characters, dialogue; quite often a single image or symbol; and frequently a one or two sentence wrap-up at the end. But really, just like all longer stories, once you begin to read a lot of these “short shorts” it's clear that they are as different and as varied as what we'd term "more developed" stories.

KR: Now here's a really loaded question for you to consider: How does one "teach" creative writing? Or to put it differently, what does an accomplished writer such as you most try to impart to her students? And further, as a student, what can one hope to gain from creative writing classes—especially as distinguished from literature courses? How does the experience of each inform the writer's voice uniquely?

GGA: I can be of real help with questions of craft. I can perhaps save emerging writers time in learning how to structure stories, how to be mindful of balance in stories. I can encourage them to find their own subjects and their own approaches. Ultimately they will find their voice and what matters to them to write about and, because much of the advanced work is done in workshops only, it's great to have eight or nine other writers who are all helping this process along.

Because I've had now about 35-40 years of really sustained and wide reading, I can guide my students to writers who can be mentors/models for them. Sometimes, I can find a perfect story that will be just the right fit for the student writer and it will illuminate something for him/her. It's important to me that those people in my classes read not only what's being written now, but how it connects to the past. Every class I start with a reading from The Literary Book of Days to link us that very day to what has happened in the past to writers: who was born, who died, who had something published, who said something wry, or poignant.

I try to show them that I'm someone who has always loved to read and always admired the idea of being an author, and how wanting to be a writer and working at being a writer links us to that wonderful world of books and letters that drew us into this world of language in the first place. I do try to build community, encourage attendance at readings, push book fairs and related events. I hope to foster a sense that they are the next generation of writers and should support one another and that it's important to care that this connection through literature goes forward.

KR: What are you working on now, and what are some of your writing goals?

GGA: I am always working on short stories and once the school year starts, I try to get writing through the homework that I require myself to do, usually models of various stories or writers and then exercise assignments. Two recent pieces, "I Was Born" and "Summer of the Grays," came out of last spring semester and I've read both and they were well-received. So now it's time to get them circulated. I've just started to write a little of what would be called creative nonfiction or the personal autobiographical essay and there are three pieces in a series with a working title "Song of the Shirt." Not sure that I have the fortitude to write about myself yet; these pieces are all about others in my life.

I've always longed to write a novel and I've written two, but both are very flawed. One I broke back down into stories and that doesn't seem to work either—they need their surround; the other might have a character or two that could be salvaged.

I always hope to write a children's book based on stories I told my son about the Wilson family; they live in a huge turreted house, have lots of kids and lots of animals, and they even own a pelican and a bat (two of my son's favorites). I have an entire stack of Wilson story lines and an illustrated chart of the family and its escapades. The memory of inventing those stories is pure pleasure. It would be lovely to someday see it in print.

KR: Is there anything you'd like to add or talk about that I haven't addressed?

GGA: I love to read stories about literary feuds rife with snappy insults and character assassinations, and scathing, witty reviews, but I've always found writers to be a welcoming and generous group. Maybe the sense that the circle of those who love books is growing smaller is making writers more mellow?

Julianna E. Thibodeaux writes journalism, criticism, fiction, and poetry. She is the recipient of a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis and an arts criticism award from the Society of Professional Journalists.