Mandy introduces July’s featured author, JUDITH TURNER-YAMAMOTO

Mandy introduces July’s featured author, JUDITH TURNER-YAMAMOTO

“I confess I hear voices when I write and, with this book, there were four of them vying for my attention.”

Set in the Appalachian Diaspora of Central North Caroliana’s 1920s tobacco farms and 1960s textile mills, The North Carolina Society of Historians 2023 Historical Novel Award recognizes the book’s lyric strength, sense of place, and deep and empathic understanding of working-class daily life in rural and small-town 20th century American South. Loving the Dead and Gone is also the Gold Medal winner in Southern Regional Fiction in the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2023 UC-Berkeley Eric Hoffer Book Awards Grand Prize, where it was an honorable mention in General Fiction and finalist for the Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award for Debut Fiction. The novel is a Mariel Hemingway Book Club Book selection and was featured on Hemingway’s podcast OUT COMES THE SUN. AARP featured Judith’s essay about her writing journey.

Judith grew up there at a time when people worked the land or they left the land to work the mills. She was the first generation in ten not to have an intimate connection to family land, the first in her father’s family and the only in her generation to attend college. The people she knew held on to the bottom rung of the working class, waging unequal battles with capricious fate. Their insular every day bore witness to the profound impact of socio-economic shifts in the rural South, and, in her work, Judith explores how even chance is unequal to the limits their reality imposed on the latitude of imagined outcomes.

Publisher’s Weekly calls Loving the Dead and Gone “a bittersweet and fantastical debut.” Foreword Reviews says “Loving the Dead and Gone is a moving, insightful novel about growing through tragedy.” Donna Everhart, whose work Well Read champions, says, “Part of what I loved about this beautifully written book was the author's ability to explore in depth the personal feelings of each character with such astuteness and insight. It was so well-done I had to go see if her background was psychology or something in the field of mental health, and what a surprise it was to read this, "An art historian, she first came to writing through learning to appraise what she saw and to describe what moved her."

Would you give a short description of LOVING THE DEAD AND GONE?

In Loving the Dead and Gone a freak car accident in 1960s rural North Carolina puts in motion moments of grace that bring redemption to two generations of women and the lives they touch.

I love the title. When I read where Aurilla says to herself, “Loving the dead and gone was the sweetest love of all.” I had to stop and sit with it for a minute. It’s so beautiful. I was wondering if you had the title in the beginning of the process, or was it a gift from your character, Aurilla?

Thanks so wonderful to hear, thank you! I’ve always liked titles that readers then stumble upon in reading the book. So yes, this was a gift from Aurilla, spoken by her at the book’s epiphanic moment. And two of the most prevalent themes of Loving the Dead and Gone are right there in the title: love and loss. At its heart, the story is a tale of longing and emotional abandonment.

Titles are a torture, and I went through so many of them. The first was The Powers that Be. I then took Garden of the Dead from English signage in the graveyards of Istanbul. This seemed so right, given the book’s many buried secrets. I had to let that one go because there’s a cult horror film with the same title. I liked The Relicts—an archaic word for widow discovered on a nineteenth century gravestone in Spring Grove Cemetery where my husband and I spend an inordinate amount of time. I also played with The River of My Dreams, inspired by Aurilla’s thoughts about her prescient dreams of death.

Aurilla, Berta Mae, and Darlene — what a great cast of characters! They are all so different, yet so much alike. Very strong-minded, stubborn, and all doing the best with the hands they were dealt. I loved them all, even when it was hard to. But the character who tugged at my heartstrings the most was Clayton. He was a brilliant addition to the story. I always say, I love a writer who is not afraid to make a reader cry right off the bat. The first chapter was so powerful and Clayton’s voice was so heartbreakingly honest. Did you know that he would play such a big part when you started writing LOVING THE DEAD AND GONE?

I confess I hear voices when I write and, with this book, there were four of them vying for my attention. Clayton is the novel’s unwitting prime mover who’s shocked back into life after discovering Donald Ray’s death. Feeling he’s “doing the living for Donald Ray, he has an affair with Donald’s Ray’s seventeen-year-old widow, which in turn unleashes his mother-in-law Aurilla’s hidden secrets, and adds fuel to his wife Berta Mae’s lifelong feelings of emotional abandonment. Melissa Yamaguchi, co-host with Mariel Hemingway of OUT COMES THE SUN, said this so succinctly: “Loving the Dead and Gone is not only about coming to terms with a death. It takes a loss to wake us up: we are designed in such a way that we don’t realize we’re not living until we’ve lost something.”

As a reader, I loved all the different POVs. As a writer, I was damned impressed with how you managed to do it so seamlessly. Was that a struggle at first? Did you plan it that way or did the characters take over?

I’m a panster, not a plotter. I write down what I hear and what I see in my mind and worry about structure late. So yes, you can say the characters are running the show.

How long, from start to finishing the final manuscript, did it take you to complete?

You could say I’ve been writing this book since I was three and experienced a similar sudden, tragic loss of a beloved young uncle. Inspiration grew from that first memory and conflated with later parental perfidies and emotional enmeshment during my adolescence to become Loving the Dead and Gone. And the timeline: 35 years, five rewrites, three agents…. I wrote three more novels and many short stories, and over a 1000 feature articles, but I kept coming back to this, the most personal of all the stories, the one I had to get right.

What do you hope readers to take away from the book?

In trauma lies possibility. As Aurilla says to Darlene during their pivotal encounter, “death can make you over if you let it.” I was inspired in part by the tower and death cards in the Tarot, they are about rebirth through struggle. Life: it’s all endings and beginnings.

This is your debut novel, but you are not new to the writing industry. Your bio is impressive! When did you get the “call” to write fiction?

Thank you! I think it’s more “when did I give myself permission to write fiction.” Art history taught me how to see and pay attention to detail, to convey in words what I felt in the presence of the work and how to share that with an audience. Features writing taught me to listen, one ear pricked for the moment when the jewel falls from the interviewee’s mouth that reveals the focus of the piece from which everything you write will flow. There’s an art to interviewing, learning how in conversation to coax a subject to reveal themselves.

An original multi-hyphenate career woman, I worked in galleries and cultural nonprofits and then in museums, while writing art reviews and then magazine features for local publications. I broke into major papers and national magazines, expanding into writing about dance, music, books, travel, and food. I met a famous psychic when I was a young mother and he told me he saw a golden hand with a pen in it, surrounded by passports and suitcases. That is exactly how my writing career unfolded. Free to follow my curiosity, assignments took me all over the world and into conversation with such luminaries as Frank Gehry, Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders, Annie Leibovitz, Alison Krauss, and Lucinda Williams.

At the same time, I took the fictional leap, attending writers’ conferences and taking fiction classes at Washington, DC area universities, studying with writers like Shirley Cochrane, Terry McMillan, Margot Livesey, Kelly Cherry, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Richard McCann.

What are you currently reading?

Honestly, I try not to read anyone when I’m deep in my own work, which is the current case. That’s advice that I took from the late author Richard McCann that works for me. I’m too much of a magpie not to unconsciously pull in those outside influences.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing up the manuscript for The Drawing of Angels, which was shortlisted for the 2024 Santa Fe Writers Project Book Award. In the novel, a young photographer and mother faces devastation when the acclaimed photographs of her children fracture her family. Set against the culture wars of the 1990s, The Drawing of Angels explores the complex intersections of mothering, art making, and personal boundaries, and delves into the public's struggle to separate an artist's life from the fiction they create.

"Loving the Dead and Gone is a rich and skillfully rendered portrait of a place that explores the generational effects of love and loss and the fragile connections within a family. Judith Turner-Yamamoto gives us a complex and memorable cast of characters and a vivid setting filled with stunning detail." -- Jill McCorkle, New York Times bestselling author"