A RT S & E N T E RTA I N M E N T
Longtime Roanoke Island resident Angel Khoury celebrates the August release of her debut historical novel, Between Tides.
Michele: You do a tremendous job. The novel is gorgeous. The language is poetry. Angel: Thank you. I’m a big fan of yours, too. Back in 2009, Steve Brumfield at Manteo Booksellers recommended your first novel, The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors. I love that book. Your work is so imaginative. When your novel Lost in the Beehive was listed as a top-10 pick in O Magazine, I went straight to the grocery store to get the magazine so I could see it with my own eyes. I was so excited for you. Michele: Thank you. I’m so proud that you wrote this novel and brought it to fruition. Writing is hard. Can you tell me about your journey?
The
Sense of
Things Local novelists Michele Young-Stone and Angel Khoury talk writing, words and the tremendous power of the imagination P HO T O S B Y L O R I D OU G L A S
50 | FA L L 2021
Michele Young-Stone: Congratulations on the August 10th release of your highly-praised debut novel, Between Tides. I’m so excited for you. I want to know everything: How long did it take you to write? What inspired you? Angel Khoury: I started researching Between Tides soon after my nonfiction book Manteo: A Roanoke Island Town came out in 1999, because I wanted to write about the historical figures I’d encountered there. I was fascinated by the true story of a man named Gil Lodge who disappeared in 1893, abandoning his wife and his post as keeper of the Chatham Life-Saving Station at Cape Cod to start a new family here on the Outer Banks. Once I realized I’d first met one of his daughters when I was a child, and later became dear friends with another daughter while researching Manteo, I was hooked. But I didn’t want to write another work of nonfiction. I wanted to try my hand at a novel. My mentor, David Stick, author of Graveyard of the Atlantic and The Outer Banks of North Carolina, was ever the historian. He told me to stick with nonfiction. The true story of these families was compelling enough for a straightforward recounting of their lives. But there are always gaps in history, and I saw fiction as a way to go beyond fact, to imagine their world more fully.
Angel: Well, I didn’t know anything about writing a novel, so I started to teach myself how to write fiction, reading books on craft and stacks of writers’ interviews in The Paris Review. It was so hard, and I thought this is the most foolish thing to try and write a novel as my first attempt at fiction, so I tried pulling one part out of it and working on it as a short story. I did that for a while. Endless drafts. Well, you know. Michele: I do know. I write and rewrite and do it again. We all do. Angel: It’s helpful to know it’s not easy for anyone. When you spoke of all the rejections you received, it made me feel like maybe I could do this. Another writer friend of mine was also encouraging. She said don’t worry about the order, just write, spread it all over the floor, and then decide where things go. I spent a lot of time on the floor! For me, being self-taught, there was so much stopping and starting and backtracking. First, I thought Gil, the keeper of the life-saving station who spent his life awash between two families on Cape Cod and the Outer Banks, was my main character. I was reading a lot of Patricia Highsmith, studying how she made her Ripley somehow likeable in spite of everything. But Peter Matthiessen [winner of the National Book Award for The Snow Leopard and for Shadow Country] told me that often it’s not the person who causes the action of the story, but the person who’s most affected by the action. My mind went straight to Gil’s first wife, Blythe, on Cape Cod. After about 10 years of thinking about character, and place, and how one affects the other, and writing reams and reams of drafts, I decided to find out if I should quit or go on. In 2009, I was accepted to my first writing class, an advanced fiction workshop in Key West with
