Beautiful Dreamers is just out and causing a stir everywhere people talk about great new fiction. Most recently, Publishers Weekly included it on its prestigious “best new books to read this fall” list. Here at Five Directions Press we’re thrilled to be able to add our own voice to the mix in this Spotlight interview with Beautiful Dreamers’ multi-award-winning author, Minrose Gwin.
Your story takes place in the 1950s and 1960s, when both blacks and gays are being persecuted, especially in the Deep South. What inspired you to write about this time period?
Thanks so much for these thoughtful questions, Joan, and for the interview. In my home state of Mississippi, the 1950s and 1960s were a period of great change and tragic bloodshed with the painfully slow transition from Jim Crow apartheid to legally mandated integration, which extended well into the sixties, of schools, drinking fountains, public facilities, and businesses. At the midpoint of the fifties, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi. On June 12, 1963, the first NAACP field secretary for the state, Medgar Evers, was shot in the back in his own driveway as he bent over the trunk of his car unloading “Jim Crow Must Go” T-shirts. It was also the McCarthy period, the red scare which blended into what has come to be known as the “Lavender Scare.” Meanwhile, many women who’d been out in the world doing the work of men during World War II had to return to the domestic sphere when the men came home. It’s a fascinating and heart-wrenching period in the US South, and three of my four novels are set during this time.
Memory Feather, who narrates Beautiful Dreamers, is called “Mem” by her mom; “Little” by Mac, her surrogate father; and “Birdy” by Tony Amato, Mac and her mom’s friend. How did you come to give her such an unusual name, and what do the various pet names say about how the adults in her life think of her?
Having an unusual name myself—one with a history—I’ve always thought names were fascinating, especially where I come from, where women and often men, too, have double names or strange names and nicknames. I know a man from Tupelo named Piggy, and he has lived with that name all his long life. There was another man in my hometown of Tupelo named Medford Memory Leake. It was a family name. I always thought it was compelling and evocative. The original “Memory” in Beautiful Dreamers is Mem’s grandfather, who has a long memory going back to his rendition of the Paleo-Indian period on the Gulf Coast. All that said, “Memory” seemed just right for the narrator, since she’s much older and looking back to tell her story of girlhood from memory. “Mem” and “Little” are affectionate nicknames from her mother and Mac. “Birdy” is different; it’s flippant, coy, just like Tony. Memory senses this and doesn’t like the name, just as she doesn’t like Tony, although she loves all animals and especially the shore birds, which she ends up devoting her life to studying. She keeps telling Tony not to call her “Birdy,” a request he ignores.
Memory is still a child when we first meet her. Physically, she suffers from both asthma and a deformity of her left hand. Would you say she has a love/hate relationship with this deformity?
Yes, definitely. She associates her twisted hand with the loss of her father to “the French hussy,” but she also thinks of it as her “paw,” which is another connection she has to the animals, with whom she communicates. I don’t want to spoil the latter part of the novel for readers, but things change drastically with her “paw” and those changes snowball into others.
Regarding Memory’s communications with animals, would you say they are telling her what she already knows? Or are they actually offering her guidance that goes beyond self-knowledge? And what about Minerva, whose guidance is blatant?
It’s mysterious, isn’t it? I had a friend, now gone, who had a cat named Petunia whom she communicated with. Right before my friend, who was already infirm, was diagnosed with the condition that killed her, she told me that Petunia had told her, “Things are going to get much worse.” Does Memory really hear these animals? As a dedicated cat and dog lady, I’d say yes, but it’s really up to the reader to decide. Memory does address this issue in the novel. On a deeper level, the cat Minerva—who’s wiser than her two-legged counterparts—may articulate what the reader may see but Memory does not, at certain points in the narrative.
I never heard the word “peckerwood” before reading Beautiful Dreamers, but I liked it right away and felt it was probably the kindest word Mac could use to describe the thugs who attack him in these pages. Likewise, Virginia, Mem’s mom, says about her parents, who are brutal in their own way, that they’re good people, just “limited.” Does the use of such terms suggest a kind of built-in forgiveness?
The term “peckerwood” is pretty derogatory where I come from, along the lines of “redneck.” A bit worse, actually, because it connotes not just a level of rural ignorance but a certain kind of ignorant white bigotry. It was often used by members of the Black community about certain white people. In this case, Mac uses it after his brutal beating. I think Virginia Feather is trying hard to allow Memory to have a relationship with her grandparents, who aren’t literally brutal but certainly bigoted.
Of all the brutes in the book, Tony Amato is by far the worst. Does Mem keep his early offenses to herself mostly as a way of not destroying Mac’s and Virginia’s belief in his love for them?
Yes, Tony is THE villain in the novel. Memory’s silence is, first, because she really isn’t sure about Tony’s true nature as a predator. Once she does become sure, she doesn’t want to destroy the chosen family unit among her, her mother Virginia, and Mac, which was a blessing to each of them—until, of course, Tony’s arrival on the scene. And even then, certain of Tony’s actions—I won’t say which ones—make her question her own judgment of him as a villainous person.
Almost as thrilling as the drama in Beautiful Dreamers is the setting, the Gulf Coast, the sound, the seabirds, the weather … especially as it contrasts with the Albuquerque desert, where Mem and Virginia live when we first meet them. Can you talk about the difficulty of balancing setting and action so exquisitely?
It’s always hard for me not to get lost in descriptions of the natural world, especially landscapes I love so much, and forget plot. It’s always a balancing act, and I’m never quite sure if I get it right. Of course, as you so well know as a novelist yourself, that’s true in the larger sense with writing any fiction. As Faulkner pointed out, we’re always trying to “say at” something, and we never quite get it right. That’s the challenge and that’s the reward.
Minrose Gwin is the author of the novels The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, which was shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals, which received the 2020 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. Her fourth novel, Beautiful Dreamers, has just been released by Hub City Press. She has also published a memoir, Wishing for Snow, about the collision of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life, and four books of literary and cultural criticism, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. She was coeditor of The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology, and The Southern Literary Journal. She received the Society for the Study of Southern Literature Award for Distinguished Lifetime Service to Southern Letters and the Wisdom/Faulkner Books-in-Process Award for Rescue, the novel she’s working on now.
Like the characters in her novel Promise, Minrose Gwin is a native of Tupelo, Mississippi. She began her writing career as a journalist and later taught at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was Kenan Eminent Professor of English. For more information, see https://minrosegwin.com.
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