♪♪ In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ Terry Farish says, writing is a way for me to try to make sense of what I care most deeply about.

Her sense of caring for her characters and their situations, and finding the words to best express what she has come to understand about them, radiates from every page.

Whether she's writing a children's picture book like the Cat Who Loved Potato Soup, a novel for adults drawing in part from her experiences as a young woman in the Vietnam War, Flower Shadows or a novel in verse for young adults.

The Good Braider, her latest book, which has been praised by reviewers as a masterful triumph of character and story, memorable, affecting, essential, and nothing short of a gift for our young people.

Thank you, Terry, for the gifts of your many books and for the gift of your presence here today.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[Applause] I tried to hold back.

Well, let's talk about the Good Braider, shall we jump right into that?

It's, unusual.

It's a novel in verse.

Yes.

You don't see a lot of those, but here it is.

You found that form.

Would you talk a little bit about the background for this novel, your research, how you got interested in the plight of immigrants and your choice to make it a novel in verse?

I think I'll begin with the fact that I wrote it in verse.

That seems to be the question I get most commonly.

And I was, was writing about, a very difficult, a very difficult subject.

I was writing about genocide, and I was writing it from the point of view of a of a young girl who, survives genocide and I, I everyone has asked me about the verse aspect of it to the point where I needed to understand more myself why I wrote it in verse.

So I, I began to interview many writers who wrote in verse, and I listened to them and, and I think that I, I came back to my own reason and what I think I, is the truth of it is that it was Viola, the character's life was disposable.

She had no value in South Sudan.

And when I could write about her in verse with this meticulous language with a lot of breath, I feel like I was with her in her breath, that I could hold her life more sacredly than in prose.

So it just kind of evolved as I was challenged to tell her story with my own breath.

Who were some of the other writers that you interviewed or talked to about writing in verse?

Cause I don't know about- of a lot.

It's- there is a genre within young adult literature of people who write in verse.

And I think one of the first ones that I read was Robert Cormier, who is not known for his verse novels.

He's known for the Chocolate War, but he wrote a memoir about Leominster, Mass in verse, and it affected me profoundly to see what he could do with with stanzas that could help hold his story with that same spare language that interests me very much.

I mean, I'm very drawn to spare language, so it wasn't brand new to me to cut out all the adverbs, which I love to do is take adverbs away.

And I have always been very drawn to the Heming- Hemingway's language.

So that's that is natural for me.

Would you, read a little bit from The Good Braider?

Terry and I talked about lots of different sections.

She could have read and she's picked out.

I'm going to read a section that happens in the first part of the no- the novel.

It's broken into three parts, and the first one is called Elephant Bone.

This section is happening just as the family, Viola and her mother and her little brother are about to escape from Juba, which is a city that is in the south.

It's now the capital of South Sudan, and it's a city that was occupied by the government of the North.

And surrounded by rebel soldiers.

And so there was, and these are women and children that are held by the government of the North in this city with life about as fragile as can be imagined.

Just before they leave, Viola's grandmother gives her a book, and it's a, a prayer book.

Actually, it's a hymnal section.

I'm Episcopal that sometimes the prayer book and the hymnal are on the same one.

So she gives her this, hymnal and it's their only book, and she says, take this book.

Viola has experienced assault, while, as a young girl and the grandmother says, take this.

It is a symbol of the power of education.

If you become an educated young woman, then you will have more worth than your own brides wealth.

Your wealth will come through education.

So she has this book, and her grandmother has packed on her body.

The book, supplies food and they are ready to escape.

But just as they are about to escape this, a soldier comes who has raped her.

Viola is with her mother.

This is called last offer.

The soldier lights a cigarette and leans against our courtyard wall.

We rise from the cook fire.

My mother tries to hide me, but at the slight lift of his chin we freeze.

Vomit rises in my throat.

My mother holds me.

I know what will happen if I run.

We lower our heads.

If he touches me, he will feel the rations strapped to my stomach.

He will shoot us all and walk away smoking.

I can see his long thin throat, smell his reek of spoiled onion and tobacco.

I lean for- I lean towar- toward the pot.

We are cooking the stew, and not breathing.

I brought you some sugar, the soldier said softly, his eyes not leaving my face until he thrusts a full kilo sack into my mother's chest.

I am falling, but I think of my grandmother's voice.

You are strong.

I force my legs to hold me.

This offer is an old trick.

All my all of my people know this promise from his smooth, slick tongue.

Always a promise.

Sugar grain to a starving Southern Sudanese.

We know this trick just become Muslim they mean you will never be hungry again if you are Muslim.

If we take the sugar, he will own us.

He knows.

We know the shoulders- The soldier says, treat yourself.

You have no sugar.

Take it, he says.

Then come to prayers.

We need only to pray with the Muslim women.

The soldier shows the black tooth when he grins.

My mother's mouth is set.

I know she wants to spit at him.

Even now she’d do this.

I hold my breath.

She lays the sugar at his boot.

He slides his Perik, his rifle from his back and into his arms and aims it at my face.

My mother is a statue beside me.

I clasp her ribs.

He does not shoot, but laughs at me as he turns back.

I know he will return as long as I am here for some minutes after he is out of sight.

We do not move.

Then my muscles give way.

I kneel in the dirt.

My mother kneels too.

My mother's arms and legs are strong around me.

And then we rise as if we are one person.

Thank you Terry.

There is a lot of that in this book.

Really, you could pick any- You could open at random to a page and it's all so powerful.

And the way you see through this young girl's eyes, a girl who is very different from you.

Another strong thread is mothers and daughters, mothers and daughters, and the and the love that these two share for each other and the respect, but also the conflict.

And I know you are a daughter and a mother.

Yes.

And you grew up in a home of readers?

Yes.

Would you talk a little bit about that?

Yes you are right on when you said- And maybe that’s the conn- the deep connection is that whole.

Yeah, yeah.

You, you you did mention in the beginning that I was writing about an experience totally unlike my own And yet there was- there's always a reason why you're drawn into writing the story that you drawn and I'm very interested in writing about refugees.

But as I write about refugees and the consequences of war on women and children, I'm still very drawn to looking at the relationship.

That probably is a universal relationship, this relationship between mothers and daughters, and certainly the most powerful shaping relationship in my own life with with my mom.

Now so to talk about the conflict, that Viola experiences with her mother, I know about that.

[Both laugh] In my fashion, yes.

However, you and your daughter have a perfect relationship.

Oh, yes.

Yes, no conflict there.

Oh, my daughter and I, our relationship can absolutely be told in novels, you know, we we have we associate all the times of our lives with novels that we were reading from the time we read every Roald Dahl novel aloud to the time we were in Yorkshire, England.

And we read The Secret Garden in this room that was so cold because they have no central heat, in that part of England, and shivering and reading The Secret Garden out loud to each other.

And one time we're actually having a bit of an argument.

Yes.

And I was, moving from my house and I was packing up books, and my daughter and I were, she disapproved of my leaving my house.

And so we were at the bookshelf and I said, can you get the Roald Dahl?

Okay, you get the George Eliot and divvying up our books as we decided we were going to sever our relationship.

But our whole relationship was about the books.

[Laughter] And, and Viola with her friend, they who spend their evenings teaching each other and reading book after book.

Yeah, that's very much a part of her, her life and her way.

Yes.

To a new place.

Yes.

Yes.

And new identity.

Yes.

Because her grandmother gave her that sense that her future was going to be in her ability to read, her ability to become an educated young woman.

And so she and Lokolumbe is her friend in Cairo.

And they're both working and they're trying desperately to get refugee status.

And at night they read to each other in English.

They read to each other from any book that any missionary happens to leave, you know, and they're reading this anthology of English literature from one to page 1200.

They read to each other at night.

And, she because of that, she brings skill with her when she does come to America.

Well you read from the first part of the book, which is which is dark and difficult and harrowing.

Would you read a little bit from the second part once she gets to Maine?

Yes, yes.

Viola now is 17.

Yes, she comes to Maine.

She, she's very cold.

And she's going to go to high school.

The high school in Maine is a beautiful building.

It's like a, it's, it feels almost like this great bit of architecture for the, the finest minds to be shaped in.

It's a beautiful old building.

So Viola goes to high school in America shortly before- shortly after she comes, I'm going to read you this bit about high school.

I was at an event in Manchester.

I just, it was event, celebrating the formation of South Sudan.

And they, the Sudanese people were honoring people in the community who they most honored.

So they brought all the ESOL teachers, English for speakers of other languages.

They brought the teachers forward, and they sat.

And then the people from South Sudan.

This was amazing.

And, to watch, they got on their knees and they walked on their knees over to the teachers to, honor them and thank them.

And it made me realize how extremely important teachers are to newcomers to America, for whom it takes 5 to 7 years to become, academically proficient in English.

It's a huge journey.

So this poem is called My Teacher.

My mother has decided I will clean the house.

I will get a job.

I will buy the food and cook.

This is the way for African daughters.

They take care of the house.

Habuba, my grandmother would say so too.

But she will be very glad that my mother does not keep me from school so long as the meals are prepared.

School, I am overjoyed.

On the first day of school, Jackie and I climb the stone stairs and enter a kingdom with globes of light above our heads and painted tiles on the walls.

And I think I have gone to the Jesus heaven.

I sit in my school in Mrs. Mejia’s ESOL class.

Mrs. Mejia is very old, with hair too black for her age and bright red lipstick.

She's almost as tall as me.

Study and you will be Queen of the world, she says, leaning low.

I can see her chest.

Then she is up, arms open, wide, study, and you will be rich.

No one in Sudan has lived as long as Mrs. Mejia, who paints her fingernails the color of red peppers.

Mrs. Mejia gives me three things the first day, a pen, a paperback dictionary, and a poem.

Mrs. Mejia wears makeup like the stars in the Egyptian soaps.

Mrs. Mejia is from a country called Colombia.

No one in America is from America.

[Laughter] Mrs. Mejia.

Mrs. Mejia.

So let's move on to another book.

Okay?

From an earlier book.

And just as you are very different from Viola and have very different experiences in this book, Flower Shadows, the character Diana.

Yes.

Is- has some experiences that you may have had because you as a young woman, were in the Red Cross in Vietnam during the war.

So there's some overlap there.

So would you just talk about, I find it difficult to write about characters who are close to me because I become self-conscious about it.

Oh, it's hard and it's hard to separate.

It's hard to s- and see what's dramatic and what's not dramatic.

Or it was just dramatic to me.

So could you talk a little bit about, Flower Shadows and how this book came to be and, maybe, do a short reading from it?

Okay, alright.

Well, I came, I came back from Vietnam It was 1970.

And, you know, you come that was a that was a defining experience.

And I just kind of tucked it away.

It's something I did in my youth.

And, then I went, I went back to, married someone out of the Air Force, you know?

So there were lingering things that resulted from having been in Vietnam.

And I went back to school.

I studied English and writing, and I carried on with my life.

But when for some reason, I was in this writing class and there I was writing about Vietnam, where did that come from?

[Laughs] And I, I found that there was an incident that happened in Vietnam.

It didn't happen to me, but it was an extraordinary incident.

And I think that all of that time, from the time I came back from Vietnam to the time I wrote the novel, I was trying to figure out how to tell the story, but I didn't know how to write.

It was something that other people did, and they probably would write about it in memoir.

And I had no interest in writing memoir that the if I were ever going to be able to write it, I would write, fiction.

So these years go by, and then I found myself in a writer's workshop, and they had brought in somebody who taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop and, he, he led us through the process of writing a scene.

[Gasps] Oh, my God, it changed my life.

I didn't know about scenes, I was 32.

No, I was 30, and I, some of you are writers, yes?

The scene was like this great gift.

That's how you do it.

You put people in the same, in the same place, and one character won something that the other character doesn't want.

You start them talking, you give them, mannerisms, and all of a sudden you're creating real life on the page.

I was so grateful.

And then, my first story was about, a girl the night before.

She's in Washington, DC, and she's about to go to Vietnam, and she meets, a vet who had been there, and he's giving her advice.

She has no use for it.

She goes anyway, and, eventually I came into being able to write a novel about that experience, not my own story, but a story that, some of it's my own.

[Laughter] It's all the same bucket, isn't it?

It’s a bucket of water.

And we put things into it, and we- Some of it's mine, some of it's yours, some of it's imagined.

It's hard to explain that, really.

Yeah, it- Yeah it is.

And and then you think it's not your own, you see.

Oh, yes, I understand that.

I know something about that.

And then sometimes it's just like, it's a story that you must tell it.

It has nothing to do with you like The Good Braider.

In fact, even more now with people responding to it, I feel like here's one way I feel about The Good Braider is that I'm a bridge.

That's what so many people have said to me that they knew nothing about South Sudan until they read this novel, or they didn't understand what it could be like to come here and experience this country after you are so deeply shaped by another culture.

It's not my story.

So I kind of feel like I'm a bridge, and I see that kind of like a concrete poem.

The language of the novel, like a bridge.

And th- that's that's what I, I, I was able to do because probably I was in Vietnam and knew about war and was interested in the consequences for women and children.

And I that's why I was able to do that with a culture not like my own.

One of the things I really admire about your work, Terry, is not only the care you take with the language.

I mean, I know I don't see an adverb anywhere in sight, and I just see the tightness, you know, in the verse the tightness just those images popping out at you because we don't see the language we see through the language to the images.

But also, I see you shaping the both of these novels in interesting ways.

This novel begins with a scene that doesn't happen until much later in the novel, but it's sort of to pull people in- Yes -pull people in and and this novel begins with the, with Diana saying, this is not my story.

This is this is Pearlie’s story.

And I need to write about wha- or I need to tell you about what happened to Pearlie.

So what do you think- Do you know that shape from the beginning, or does it evolve?

How do you make- do the big blocks in levels?

Well, I love that question because that is my greatest challenge.

I am really good at shaping sentences, even paragraphs.

I can do scenes, but, plot is this great challenge to me.

And when I talked about that, your loyalty in the end is to the to the whole structure of it.

That is that is when I know that I'm on the right track, when I feel that whole.

I can give an example.

One time I wrote a novel that was not a very good novel.

It was called Shelter for a Seabird, but I wrote it anyway.

And I remember, it was on set on an island called Shelter Island between the North and South Forks of Long Island, it’s my family home.

But to get there, you have to go on boats, you know, from various parts of it.

And I remember being on a boat coming back.

The waves were intense and it was.

It'll make a lot of people seasick.

But feeling the waves lift and fall, I that was that wholeness of the novel that I realized I was shaping something that had the feel of the ocean.

And, and that was a very sustaining for me to feel it viscerally.

You feel your when you know, when you feel your fiction inside you in this physical way, then your shape is there for you to create your beautiful sentences within.

With this novel, with The Good Braider, I wrote it chronologically, from Sudan to Cairo to America, and I worked with an extraordinary editor who helped me see the shape of it.

And it was she that who suggested her- it's Melanie Krupa.

The best of the best.

She suggested what If you open in the U.S. and then you- And it opens in the most difficult part of the novel, to me is, a violence that happens between the mother and the daughter when they're here.

What if you open there and immediately go back into the war?

So that there's more of a braiding, even on my part of, the- Viola's life between Portland and and the war, and then braiding more of the war into the time when she's in this country.

So this novel is so much about structure that by then we I worked several rewrites with Melanie to, to create the structure that we worked with.

I think that's why it works so well.

We're not aware of the structure consciously as readers, but we feel that.

I feel that braiding within.

Okay.

I feel those connections within this novel.

It was so deliberate.

Well, that's because you're a professional.

You're able to do that.

Yeah.

You know, sometimes I, I yearn for reading a novel the way I did when I was a teenager, totally unaware of any of that.

I sometimes I miss just being a, reader who loses herself in fiction.

-Instead of saying, I see what you're up to, I know, I know that trick too!

I know that trick.

Well, I just want to applaud the work that you've been doing all these years.

I've known you for a long time, but I had no idea of the variety of the work that you've done.

And, and how you have become, in many ways, a bridge for all of us.

So thank you so much, Terry.

Thank you.

I, I'm going to respond to what you do.

You listen to stories, and I think listening is a huge part of what I do.

And this is the idea that listening is a way to let, people unfold and telling their own story, so, thank you for your listening too I'd like to end then with a quote from your book, and it goes like this; Sweet!

[Laughter] I think that's Viola's favorite expression.

Sweet!

Sweet.

Thank you Terry Farish.

Thank you, thank you.

[Applause] ♪♪