I love Southern literature. In fact, if you ask me who my favorite author is, I probably won't name the usual suspects (Dickens, Hawthorne, Twain, etc.); instead, it's a good bet that I'll say Tennessee Williams.  I love the frustratingly complex, incurably passionate, and all-too-human Southern characters that populate Williams' plays.  That's probably why I'm instantly drawn to Joshilyn Jackson's new novel "Between, Georgia" - the tale of a woman with two mothers, two lovers, and two families - the one that stole her and raised her and the one that lost her and can't let her go.

Here's our interview with Ms. Jackson:

 1) What was the inspiration for your book?

More than 15 years before I started to write the book, I was attending UGA in Athens, and I had friends in Atlanta, so I drove back and forth quite a bit. On the old route 78, I used to see this sign---I don’t know if it’s still there. It said something like, “Exit here to see Between, Georgia, Population 97.”

 One day, I saw someone had snuck over and crossed out the “97” and written in “96.” That tickled me to death. I started wondering who would do such a thing. I was young, so of course my first thought was that it was some kid near my age who was born and bred in that tiniest of towns. He had always sworn he would get out and have a bigger life. As he headed off to college or New York or someplace that felt “big” to him, he stopped to lower the number as a triumphant farewell.

 I thought about that kid for a few years, but he never gelled for me. I’m more interested in someone who can live a huge life in a town of 90 people than someone who tries to find significance externally. I never forgot Between, though. I started imagining the town layout, created families who lived there, and gave it its own specific and odd economy. Sadly, I never had a story that fit there. All I had was a strong sense of place.

 About ten years later, maybe I had grown up a little, and I realized a kid had not changed that sign. It was an old southern lady, tough as nails, someone with her thumb ground down on that town. Earlier that day, the preacher had laid her greatest rival in the ground. She stood at the church in her best black dress and pressed a hanky to her mouth, but her eyes were alive with triumph and she had on a thick coat of monkey butt red victory lipstick. Later that same night, she’d crept out of her house, driven to the highway, and changed the sign in a gesture of small-minded and terrible victory.

 That scene never happens in the novel, but the idea of a character who would do such a thing, of a rivalry between Southern Matriarchs that strong and virulent, began a story in my head. The sign changer became Bernese Frett, and I pulled her rival from the grave and let her grow into a crafty, drunken criminal named Ona Crabtree. Nonny Frett, the narrator, is by birth one of those trashy Crabtrees, but she is stolen and raised by the unbendingly respectable Frett clan.

 The book came together almost 20 years after I first saw that sign. That's how long it took for me to get a strong feel for Nonny, bravery, her desire to be loved, her good, good heart, and the way she hesitates, hopeful and cautious. I felt she was a character who lived “in between” on any number of levels, so the town itself, that strong sense of place I’d been growing for almost two decades, became a character as I started playing around with ideas about identity and nature v/s nurture, and what makes someone a mother.

 2) Are you working on anything right now?

 I just finished a novel called THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING. It’s a southern gothic ghost story, and I shamelessly love it. We are sending it out to early readers right now -- and have already gotten soem amazing quotes back, even though we have no galleys yet. They are reading the LOOSE pages. I'm hugely grateful for that.  You can see the cover (|IT IS GORGEOUS!) and what the early readers have said <a href=http://joshilynjackson.com/tgwss.html target="_blank">up on my site here.</a>

 3) What is something about you that would surprise your readers?

I learned to read by accidemt./ My mother tells this story, because I can’t remember the years when I couldn’t read---I’ve been doing it since before I I was three and got some concrete memory. I learned accidentally before preschool by thieving my older brother’s books and watching Sesame Street. I think that was one of the reason’s I love To Kill A Mockingbird so much. I first read it when I was a kid, and I identified strongly with Scout when she taught herself reading by sitting on Atticus’ lap and looking at his newspapers.

 

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