Elizabeth Gentry received the 2012 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize for Housebound. Originally from Asheville, North Carolina, she lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she works as Writing Specialist for the University of Tennessee College of Law and teaches for the University English Department. She received a MFA in fiction writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
An excerpt from her novel, Housebound, appeared in Issue Fifty-Two of The Collagist.
Here, she answers questions "in the form of excerpts"--with further excerpts from Housebound. Enjoy!
What is writing like?
Lately they all came up from reading as if at the end of a morphine drip, incapable of making the transition into the concrete reality of their surroundings, anxious to plunge back down again.
What isn’t writing like?
“When the stairs are up, and you want to be somewhere else, you not only can’t get there, you can’t stop thinking about the place where you want to be—the kitchen or your father’s workshop or the woods. The places don’t have to be important for it to become impossible to settle back into the bedroom, even for pleasant activities. You’re upstairs breathing fresh air from the open windows, but you might as well be buried.”
When you do it, why?
For they had all begun a struggle over what to say and what not to say, when to say it and in what way and to whom. Maggie knew they would do so badly and in spite of themselves, hoping others would listen past the details for the origin of stories, occurring once and repeatedly across the limitless span of time.
When you don’t, why?
Novels in particular, with all of their morbid focus on what happens at the end, had caused her to depend on the ending of her own story to clarify the argument of all the preceding chapters—that love was possible, that healing and renewal reclaimed lives, or that everything was in an inevitable state of degeneration and unraveling—as if from her deathbed she could look back and decide then and only then what to believe about her own life, evaluating the recurring images and central themes for the appropriate messages, telling her what to believe just at the time that it no longer mattered.