The Journal of the Alabama Writers’ Forum VOL. 8, NO. 1 SPRING 2001 FIRSTDRAFT SENA JETER NASLUND ALABAMA’S WRITER OF THE YEAR photo by: Beau Gustafson © 2001 2000-2001 from the EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR BOARD OF DIRECTORS President Kellee Reinhart “THE LITERARY FAMILY MUST STAND TUSCALOOSA TRONG OW Immediate Past President S N ” Brent Davis Our state is facing a turning point in funding education and related enti- TUSCALOOSA ties. As you know, the Alabama Writers’ Forum receives major operating and Vice-President program support from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. The Council is Jay Lamar AUBURN funded through Alabama’s education trust fund, as well as the National Secretary Endowment for the Arts. As you read about our 2001 Harper Lee Award recipi- Bettye L. Forbus ent, Sena Jeter Naslund, or peruse the book reviews in the issue, the funding DOTHAN crisis may not yet be solved. Whatever happens, I want to assure you that Treasurer Jay Sailors with your help the Alabama Writers’ Forum will prevail. AWF Executive Edward M. George MONTGOMERY Nine years ago, there was no Alabama Writers’ Forum. Out of a small Director Jeanie gathering of people who care about literary arts in Alabama, an idea formed, Thompson. Writers’ Representative Aileen Kilgore Henderson and from that idea—with tremendous commitment and a lot of hard BROOKWOOD work—a nationally recognized statewide literary arts organization was born. With the shepherding of Ruth Beaumont Cook Council executive director Al Head, and with faith in what we could be from the Council in 1993, we BIRMINGHAM launched the Alabama Writers’ Forum as a fulltime operation. You know where we are today and you Priscilla Cooper believe in us. BIRMINGHAM Another reason I feel confident about our success is that our 2001 Board of Directors spent an Linda Henry Dean amazing couple of days in retreat in January charting the Forum’s future. A full report will be forth- AUBURN coming, but I want to state our updated mission statement here: William E. Hicks TROY The Alabama Writers’ Forum advances the art of writing by promoting Peter Huggins writers, educating young writers, and cultivating Alabama’s literary arts. AUBURN Anne Rutledge If you believe that this is a worthwhile mission for the Forum, if you have benefited from the HUNTSVILLE Forum’s commitment to writers and writing in our state, and if you see the difference the Forum Rick Shelton makes in young writers’ lives, I urge you to show that belief by using the return envelope in this STERRETT issue of First Draft to send in your associate’s renewal now. Even if your membership doesn’t expire Herman Lindsey Stricklin FLORENCE for several months, it will help us tremendously in the budget struggle to be able to show our associates’ support. Give a subscription to your local library. Give a membership to a young writer or Frank Toland TUSKEGEE pay for a senior citizen writer to receive First Draft. Denise Wadsworth Trimm We need you more than ever now. The literary arts in Alabama are wonderfully strong, and we BIRMINGHAM will weather this storm, but the literary family must stand together now. ASCA Liaison Randy Shoults MONTGOMERY Executive Director Jeanie Thompson MONTGOMERY First Draft is a quarterly journal for communication among writers and those Jeanie Thompson interested in literature/publishing in Alabama and elsewhere. Executive Director Contact The Alabama Writers’ Forum, Alabama State Council on the Arts, 201 Monroe Street, Montgomery, Alabama 36130-1800. Phone: 334/242-4076, ext. 233; Fax: 334/240-3269; The Alabama Writers’ Forum is generously funded by the Alabama State Council on the email:[email protected]. Website: www.writersforum.org. Arts, with additional funding from the National Endowment from the Arts, and corporate, Editor, JAY LAMAR institutional, and individual associates. Editing & Graphic Design, WORDCRAFT, INC. VOL. 8, NO. 1 SPRING 2001 IN THIS ISSUE Sena Jeter Naslund: On Ahab’s Wife and Life After . .2 Julia Oliver interviews 2001 Harper Lee Award and Alabama Library Association Award winner Sena Jeter Naslund about her critically acclaimed novel Ahab’s Wife and what projects her future holds. The Middleman: Nan Talese on Editing and Publishing in America . .6 What does an editor do for publishing? Doubleday editor Nan Talese talks with Don Noble about publishing, making a living in writing, and the influence of MFA programs on new writing. Donna Soto Art “Essential to the Fabric of a Region”: Award-winning writer Sena Jeter Naslund. (page 2). Honor Thy Writer—and Thy Editor . .8 What does an editor do for a writer? Fiction writer and dramatist William Cobb and editor Elizabeth Woodman discuss writing, editing, and their collaboration. ASCA Fellowships . .10 The 2000-2001 Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellowship Award winners Carol Pierman and Jim Hilgartner talk about their fellowships and their future. Publishing on Demand: A Shift of Cosmic Proportions . .22 Claire Datnow draws on her own experience to explore the “cosmic shift” in publishing. DEPARTMENTS WRITING OUR STORIES . .13 Writer-Teacher Priscilla Handcock Cooper reflects on her DYS experience. Brent Davis Doubleday Editor Nan Talese (page 6). BOOK REVIEWS . .14 ALABAMA LITERARY NEWS . .24 Awards, events, new magazines, and new presses. FROM THE FIELD . .26 Trish O’Kane writes about teaching a special group of women at Tutwiler Prison. THE BACK PAGE . .28 Alabama School of Fine Arts executive director John Northrop celebrates the school’s thirty years of teaching young artists. ON THE COVER: Sena Jeter Naslund, winner of the 2001 Harper Lee Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Alabama Library Association Award for Fiction (see page 2) Alabama School of Fine Arts Cover photograph by Beau Gustafson, Big Swede Productions, 720 39th Street South, Alabama School of Fine Arts wins CVS Birmingham, AL 35222; 205-595-0099. grant. (page 28). 2 Sena Jeter Naslund: On Ahab’s Wife Sigrid Estrada Sena Jeter Naslund and Life After AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIA OLIVER he following exchange took place through e-mail during the last days of Sometimes my mother and I stood and looked at our faces T January and the first week of February. together in the oval mirror she brought with her from the East. When we began, the author of Ahab’s Wife had just learned she was to be the next recipient of Along with her library chest of books, the mirror with its many- the Harper Lee Award, given each year by the stepped molding distinguished our frontier cabin from others. Alabama Writers’ Forum during the Alabama Writers Symposium in Monroeville. She was Thus, elegantly framed, my mother and I made a double portrait notified also during this time that she had of ourselves for memory, by looking in the mirror. been named Fiction Writer of the Year 2001 by From the first chapter of Ahab’s Wife the Alabama Library Association. A native of Birmingham, Sena Jeter Naslund has lived since the early 1970s in have some sense of having conducted this life lived to the hilt. The rest of the Louisville, where she is a Distinguished interview not via keyboards and modems, but opening paragraph describes Ahab, Teaching Professor and a former director of over teacups. as she conjures him in the clouds. the creative writing program at the University How did you conjure this remark- of Louisville. In the fall of 1999, while she was The arresting first sentence of able character you named Una? at Auburn University with her husband, Ahab’s Wife—“Captain Ahab was nei- Una, unnamed at the time, came to me as physicist John Morrison, Sena drove to ther my first husband nor my a vision while I was driving a rented car in Montgomery to meet informally with members last”—defines your protagonist as a Boston. I saw a woman on a widow’s walk at of a book club. Later, it came out that everyone woman who has no bitterness, night, looking out at the dark sea, hoping to in that intimate gathering had felt a special makes no apology. I think we sense see her husband’s whaleship coming home, its connection with our soft-spoken, unassuming, at that moment that Una is going to tryworks burning. As she looked, she realized very articulate visitor—which may be why I take us on an exuberant voyage of a he wasn’t coming home—not that night, not ever. With that strange intuition, she lifted her gaze from the ocean to the night sky and the How mysterious water must have been to the ancients! stars and began to question: “What is my place Disobedient unless held in glass or clay, or by the power of mira- in all that vast glory? Who am I in relationship to the cosmos?” No longer waiting for some- cle. I think of Moses parting the Red Sea centuries after the one to arrive and define her, she began her Magician of the Westcar papyrus had done so. I think of Margaret own spiritual questing. Fuller letting the sea crash over her body, tumbling her sideways Her name came to me slowly. I knew I needed to wait. In thinking about Captain over the ship’s deck, of her sinking down, becoming a pendant of Ahab, I saw him as a kind of medieval new turquoise. Of my own heart that will not obey, that rows end- knight who fought not a dragon but a vast lessly toward love. sea creature. In Spenser’s Fairie Queene, the Red-Cross Knight is accompanied by a From the novella The Disobedience of Water lady named Una.