| |
Patricia Foster's works are about women's lives -- what it means to be
identified by gender, race, place, and socio-economic class. Using the
everyday to define her life -- her roles as daughter, sister, wife, college
professor, writer -- she writes about the changes she's seen during her
lifetime.
An associate professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of
Iowa, she is the author of All the Lost Girls, editor of Minding
the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul and Sister to Sister, and the coeditor of
The Healing Circle.
Introduce yourself.
I grew up in a little town in southern Alabama where my father was a doctor
and my mother a science teacher. After graduating from public schools, I
went to Vanderbilt University and then to UCLA where I got an MFA in art. I
fell in love with photography and video at UCLA, but it was on a camping
trip after I finished my MFA that I realized I liked ‘writing’ the scenes
for the video more than actually filming them. It was a kind of ‘wake-up’
call, a vital moment that surprised me. I moved to Seattle, began taking
writing classes, and then raced across the country to get my MFA in creative
writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It felt like a race, an urgent sense
that I had to catch up with myself and let the stories out. I say this
because when I left the South I felt lost to myself and by telling stories,
I began to feel ‘found.’
Most of your work is nonfiction -- arguably an unusual choice for a
Southern writer -- do you see a need for good essayists in Southern
literature?
.........Not long ago I was browsing in an independent bookstore in a
southern city. There was a huge section labeled ‘Southern Fiction’ and a
history section labeled ‘Southern Nonfiction.’ I saw such prominent books
as Carry Me Home and The Liar’s Club, but I saw no books of
essays, no collected works of nonfiction. Why, I asked myself, is there no
Joan Didion, no James Baldwin, no Vivian Gornick among southern writers?
My answer is a complicated one, and yet my first instinct is perhaps the
most reliable. I believe you have to teach a culture how to read a genre
just as you teach a culture how to read itself. It’s an act of
self-assessment, an act of assertion. It’s a process of awakening. It
requires that the literary essay and the memoir be placed in a context,
given a narrative reference point in much the same way that contemporary
poetry has begun to do. A story drops you into a dramatic moment and builds
on that drama, making you wonder: What will happen next? How will this
resolve itself? The essay often uses dramatic narrative as well, but it
also depends on the reflective lens, the willingness of the writer to
meditate on a moment or an event or an issue and bring you to a sense of
closure through analysis rather than drama.
In the 1990s, autobiographical writing was catapulted into a post-modern
context, giving birth to the Personal History column in The New Yorker, to
regular essay features in such magazines as Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly,
The Oxford American and Salon. What I think the memoir and the personal
essay offered was a return to intimacy, a sense of reflection and meditation
about cultural and personal identity. As Joan Didion once said, “We live
entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” In
America during the last decade that narrative line has fashioned itself in
autobiography and the personal essay with the writer’s need to locate the
self in a transient world not just the political world of the 20th century
but the world of personal identity in conflict with constant change.
Just Beneath My Skin is subtitled Autobiography and
Self-Discovery, what was your most surprising discovery during the writing
of these essays?
What comes to mind are two things: First, that I can love something deeply,
feel that it¹s inside me, ‘in my bones’ and simultaneously not like it very
much. For example, I love Fairhope, Alabama, the town where I was born,
the place that was my intellectual mentor, my creative guide. I love its
beauty and its grace and its original political intent to neutralize the
caste system that has so often marred southern culture. I loved its narrow
lanes, the back pastures where I rode horses, its emphasis on a liberal
spirit of education. Each time I went to my music lesson at Mama Dot’s, I
imagined that here was a place where ideas got a fair shake, where dissent
was spoken, where creative life was not only approved but desired. But when
I came back after years in other parts of the country, it had changed, been
hijacked by the moneyed class, become commercialized and conservative. I
still love Fairhope and there are many writers there I enjoy reading --
but I don’t like it very much right now. And I had to write about that in
‘The New Royalists’ because it was something I needed to sort out in myself.
Second, I discovered that I could step outside of myself, out of my comfort
zone. I went to Tuskegee, Alabama, not knowing what I’d find, even what I
was looking for. I went, just as James Agee went to live with sharecroppers
during the Depression, to understand something about humanity that I
couldn’t know by staying in my middle class life in Iowa City, Iowa. I
think we all want immunity from problems, but when that immunity makes you
myopic to the real concerns that exist every day for other people,
self-protection becomes blindness.
Which of your works has been the most difficult to write and discuss?
What was the most difficult to write was “Outside the Hive,” the essay about
why I’ve remained childless. In writing it, I was obsessed with the
psychological and sociological reasons for why I had never had children, why
‘giving birth to voice’ was more important to me than ‘giving birth to a
child’ in my youth (and childbearing years). If I’m honest, I wish I’d had
the chance for both. I wish I could have successfully overcome my
insecurities and been both a mother and a writer. It just took me a long
time to ‘grow myself up.’ If I were 35 right now, I’m sure I’d have
children.
I came of age in the turbulent 60s and though I was no fire-breathing
radical, I was deeply affected by the issues the country confronted: civil
rights and women’s rights particularly. I think many of us gain a political
education through crisis and the 60s provided that, a deep division between
the institutionalized power of the status quo and the marginalized power of
those who questioned the morality of segregation, the subordination of women
and the concerns of the Vietnam War. Because courageous people put their
lives on the line, the status quo changed. Equality took a step forward.
At least in terms of a human beings’ rights before the law. Economic and
social equality are another thing entirely and what frightens me now is that
we’re becoming more deeply divided by the economic realities of the 21st
century, the sense of an entitled class wealthy and dominant and secure
and an underclass under-educated, under-employed and dependent. I see
many people who believe the American Dream can still be accomplished by hard
work and loyalty, but, on the whole, I think that's naïve. We have a wide
disparity in our educational systems, a wide disparity in our income levels,
a wide disparity in our health care. The truth is that lack of preparation
often cannot be overcome by hard work alone. What I hope is that we begin
to revise public education so that a child’s mental landscape is not
governed by the economic base of his/her geography.
Does living in the Midwest --
i.e. "away from home" -- give you the emotional space to write?
I live in the Midwest, in a college town that is at the heart of the
literary world in America. Everyone I know is writing a book, a story, an
essay, a poem, an article. It’s rather amazing and frightening: all that
talent in snow-bound Iowa. I always say it’s a good place to work because
whatever can you do with five months of winter except stay indoors and
think? Having said that, most of my work is 'set’ in Alabama, in the small
towns and rural areas that I now visit. I miss the kind of dailiness of
actually living in the place I write about. You don’t quite get the same
thing in a two week visit in the summer. As a result, I’m setting a new
novel in Iowa AND Alabama, because I want to use both environments (and the
temperament of their people) to best advantage.
I’m currently making myself crazy by working on several books. I got an
award from the University of Iowa to do research on a book titled Smart
Girls. In this book I’m examining the lives of intellectually gifted
girls (between the ages of 17-29) who have wrestled with the psychological
claims of ambition, creativity and intellectual risk. In my own life, the
right to ‘claim’ ambition was a difficult step and I want to understand the
benefits and risks of ambition for young girls today.
I’m also working on a book of short stories, much to my surprise! I spent
much of the summer writing essays, then suddenly felt the tug of stories. I
love stories and when they come, I just go with them. Many characters: an
old grandfather, a young anorexic girl, a cheerleader, an older woman who's
husband is dying, a young doctor in WWII.
Much to my horror, I’m also re-writing a novel. I say horror because I so
wanted to be finished with it last year. It had to wait and necessarily
so while I finished a few other pieces.
Do you have a list of writers who are under-rated?
I don’t know if I would call these writers under-rated, but there are
several books I’ve read this past year I’d love to pass on. Two memoirs
I read recently are Before the Knife, Carolyn Slaughter and An
American Requiem, James Carroll (both in paperback). I just heard the
poet Bruce Beasley read from Signs and Abominations, and he was
sensational. I’d also recommend two books of fiction: You Are Not a
Stranger Here, Adam Haslett and Still She Haunts Me, Katie Roiphe
(a novel about Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell). All lovely books!
-
 Just Beneath My
Skin:
- Autobiography
and Self-Discovery
- By Patricia Foster
- University of
Georgia Press, 2004
- 190 pages
- ISBN:
0-8203-2688-7; trade paper original, $12.95
- ISBN:
0-8203-2682-8; library edition, $39.95
Southern Scribe Review
-
 All the Lost Girls: Confessions of
a Southern Daughter
- by Patricia Foster
- University of Alabama Press, 2000
- ISBN:
0-8173-1047-9
Southern Scribe Review
© 2004,
Pam Kingsbury, All Rights Reserved |
|
Southern
Scribe
