THE SENSE OF THINGS

from North Beach Sun Fall 2021

HOME SPOTLIGHT

Things Sense of The 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

Local novelists Michele Young-Stone and was a child, and later became dear friends with another daughter while researching Manteo, I was hooked.

Angel Khoury talk writing, words and the But I didn’t want to write another work of nonfiction. tremendous power of the imagination 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

PHOTOS BY LORI DOUGLAS 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. 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? 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

Hilma Wolitzer, and another in New York with Marilynne Robinson, which I missed when my husband, Daniel, became ill.

So, in the midst of all this struggle with writing, my mother died and then Daniel, and I had some dark years. At that point I had maybe 100 pages. But Hilma said, ‘You must finish this.’ Four years later, it was done. Then came the search for an agent and a publisher. From the first inkling of a story until publication, 20 long years. You were so encouraging in the midst of all that, Michele. Your own publishing history is inspirational. Michele: I’m happy that you didn’t give up on this book. It’s amazing. I couldn’t stop underlining my favorite passages, like, “We moved to the garden, where the pale blue orbs of the hydrangeas glow like a constellation of moons,” and “Unseen, the constellations turned, their star patterns waiting for night to reveal themselves. The shoals moved, the inlets shifted, the stars wheeled. Nothing stayed the same.” Gorgeous! Every line is gorgeous. I savored the words.

Lately, I’ve been teaching fiction writing, and it’s helped me focus more on the art and craft of writing than on the business side. The business side is the opposite. It’s so hard. Angel: I know what you mean. I wrote this book just the way I wanted to write it, not because I thought it would get published. For me, that wasn’t the point. I wanted to write a book I’d want to read. Between Tides found the perfect literary agent in Madison Smartt Bell, himself a novelist. He ably guided me to a phenomenal Indie literary press, Dzanc Books, and a talented audiobook narrator with Hillary Huber at Tantor Media. Michele: I love how you experiment with point of view, how Gil’s wife Blythe inhabits the world fully, and is able to experience and tell the story firsthand. Angel: I have Marilynne Robinson’s amazing awardwinning novel Housekeeping to thank for that. I studied her book through an online class transcript from Yale about her use of metaphor to explore place, and the free-ranging first-person omniscient point of view she uses. I was worried about inhabiting my character’s mind in a way that might prove too claustrophobic for readers. I asked author Lee Smith if I could sustain that point of view throughout my book. At first, she said no, but then she said, go for it! The best way to learn to write is to read. It’s all there in front of you, a million ways to say it. Then it’s up to you to transform the struggles of the human heart into a pattern that’s both unique and universal. Michele: Do you have another new book in the works?

Angel: I’ve always wanted to write about Theodosia Burr [Vice-President Aaron Burr’s daughter, whose ship disappeared off Hatteras in 1813]. But I’m so fond of the characters in Between Tides. I’ve been toying with connecting Theodosia’s story to one of my characters. I like Marilyn Robinson’s books, where each novel features a different member of the same fictional family, but they stand alone and can be read in no particular order. I’d like to try that. Michele: I have trouble writing description, but you seem to have a natural talent. Does it come easily to you? Angel: I don’t know where it comes from. It just sort of flows. Some of it comes from reading, some from living life. In the third grade, I was reading a book a day, five days a week. That evolved into years spent reading and rereading Faulkner and Hardy and Woolf and Conrad. If you repeat something often enough, it washes back and forth in your mind – but you also have to watch your own tide rise and fall. So childhood adventures in the Great Dismal Swamp, all the years I’ve spent walking on the beach in Nags Head, sitting on my pier on Roanoke Sound, time spent listening while others talked, flooded me with sensory experiences. It all gets melded together somehow – reading, observing, listening, sensing, connecting. Absorbing the world and putting it on the page. I seem to think in metaphors, making connections between things. And so yes, I’ve watched a school of minnows congregate in the shade of an oar, and then scatter. And what I’ve seen somehow gets transmuted into what I’ve never seen, but only imagined. That’s its own kind of seeing. The felt sense. How people feel about what they experience, and why. Michele: That’s such a gift – both for you and for your readers.

Michele Young-Stone is the author of three novels: Lost in the Beehive, a 2018 O Magazine Best-of Spring Pick, Above Us Only Sky (2015), and The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors (2010). In addition to recently finishing her fourth novel and starting work on her fifth, Michele teaches fiction writing for The Muse Writers Center and lives on the Outer Banks fulltime with her husband and son.

Longtime local writer and editor Angel Khoury is the author of the nonfictional Manteo: A Roanoke Island Town (1999) and her newly released literary debut Between Tides, a rich and powerful historical novel set on the rugged landscapes of both the Outer Banks and Cape Cod over the course of two centuries. After spending a long-ago summer working at Avalon Pier as a dishwasher, Angel felt compelled to stay, and she continues to call Roanoke Island home 40 years later.