INSIDE VOICES

INSIDE VOICES

Robert Gwaltney and Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce Mimi Herman

Mimi Herman is a Kennedy Center teaching artist and codirector of Writeaways writing workshops in France, Italy, Ireland, and New Mexico. She serves as vice-chair of the Board of Directors for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and has taught in the Masters of Education programs at Lesley University, served as the North Carolina Piedmont Laureate and been an associate editor for Teaching Artist Journal. Since 1990, she has engaged over 25,000 students and teachers with her warm and intuitive teaching style.

Her novel, The Kudzu Queen, was selected by the North Carolina Center for the Book for the 2023 Library of Congress “Great Reads from Great Places” and has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

Jeffrey: Where did you find Mattie and her story?

Well, one day in 1994–a very long time ago–I was in one of my favorite places, the downtown Durham, North Carolina Public Library, scrolling through the microfiche. For those of you too young to remember microfiche, imagine a big machine that’s basically a magnifying glass for tiny little photos of printed materials–books, magazines and newspapers. Don’t ask me what I was doing on microfiche. I had no idea. Usually I went straight to the fiction section and checked out as many books as I could carry.

Anyhow, I came across this article on men who made it their life’s work to promote kudzu. They traveled from town to town, promoting kudzu: trying to get farmers to plant it, holding kudzu festivals, and having Kudzu Queen beauty pageants. As you probably know, in the south there’s a queen for everything. Can you imagine being the Okra Queen? But I thought it was the strangest thing I’d ever heard of. I grew up riding in the car to the beach with my family, surrounded by kudzu, and couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to plant the stuff, much less be the queen of it. When I can’t figure out why something’s true, I write fiction to come up with an answer.

The other piece of this book, and the genesis for Mattie, is this quality I’ve often observed in girls of about fourteen or fifteen, where they’re trying on their sexuality for size, to see how it fits. Sometimes, maybe even often, this can get them into a situation that’s more challenging than they’d anticipated, which is what happened with Mattie.

Robert: Lush and pillowy, kudzu covered everything in sight in my small hometown of Cairo Georgia. For the uninitiated, what exactly is kudzu, and what redeeming qualities, if any, does it have?

Kudzu is an invasive vine imported into the US for the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia. When I’m describing kudzu to people who have never heard of it, I say, “Think of ivy that wants to eat you.” It’ll take over trees, telephone poles and even houses, and bring them to the ground. I call it “southern topiary” and recommend that farmers not leave their tractors or their cows in the field overnight.

For a while after the World’s Fair, kudzu was sold by a nursery as an ornamental plant. It is in fact, a highly ornamental plant, and very well thought of in Japan. In the 1930s, the US government came up with the bright idea to promote it. The Department of Agriculture not only produced pamphlets on the proper propagation of kudzu, which is hard to imagine for anyone who’s grown up in the south, but also paid farmers to plant it. And the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, paid young men to plant it along railway embankments to prevent erosion.

In this country we’re great at importing a plant or animal to solve a problem, but we forget to bring along the rest of its food chain with it. But think about it: we’d just gotten through the Great Depression and the Dustbowl. And here was a plant that would grow 12 inches in a day and had all sorts of uses, which Mr. James T. Cullowee, the Kudzu King in my novel, promotes: you can feed your livestock, make flour out of the roots or jelly out of the flowers. It’s a headache and alcoholism cure. I don’t know if you can make cigarettes out of it–I made that part up–but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Jeffrey: In The Kudzu Queen, you’ve created a 1940s charismatic shyster. It seems like there has been a resurgence in them over the last several years. How is this story from 80 years ago a comment on today, and what makes Mr. Cullowee timeless?

Can we ever get enough of con artists? I sometimes wonder if there’s something hardwired into our species that makes us tend to look for quick and easy solutions to hard problems: get rich quick, answer these questions and we’ll match you with the person of your dreams, get AI to write your novel and you’ll sell a million copies.

And then there’s the whole reality show phenomenon: anyone can be famous just for being famous–or is that a tautology? I had my doubts about reality shows when they first started, and since then my concerns have only deepened. I won’t mention politics, but…

Robert: I’m fascinated by this concept of rings (as in the rings of a tree) of life inside of us, especially because Mattie is underage, and the Kudzu King is older. Talk to us a bit about how rings of life exist in us and your idea that no matter our chronological age, some version of our younger selves remains alive and present?

As long as I can remember, I’ve had this idea that people are like trees, and we have rings inside us for all the years we’ve lived. So in each of us, there’s a two-year-old, a ten-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, and so on. In trees, when the weather is warm and wet, the rings are wide, while in cold, dry years they’re narrow. Like trees, we often have years rich with growth. For me, one of those years was when I was fifteen, which helped me understand Mattie so I could write from her point of view. And maybe you can take this further. Perhaps the widest rings, the years of most growth, are the ages to which we revert in intense situations. For me, it’s fifteen. For others, it may be the terrible twos.

Jeffrey: Aunt Mary and her abandoned house—what was behind the impulse to create this other world where Mattie alone goes to escape?

It’s funny, when I write, I don’t think: Now I should create this setting or this character. It’s almost like a movie where I see these things appearing on the horizon as I approach them. I have years of training as a writer; a BA in literature, psychology and creative writing; an MFA in fiction; and many years spent teaching writing, but I sometimes feel like my subconscious is running the show.

So I don’t remember planning Aunt Mary’s house, but Mattie and her brother needed a place to plant kudzu, and what better place than a house that belongs to their family, where no one visits? And why doesn’t anyone visit it? Well, they’re waiting for Aunt Mary’s meanness to wear off. For those of you who have never created a mean character, I recommend it. It’s a lot of fun. But I have a hard time thinking badly of anyone for too long, so it turns out Aunt Mary may have some redeeming qualities.

The other reason Aunt Mary’s house is important is that it gives Mattie a place to get away so she can do some serious thinking and growing up–though she ends up getting more growing up than she plans for.

Robert: I don’t want to give anything away, but…how do you decide if guilty players are punished or, at the least, pay for their wrongs or get away with them unscathed?

The word “decide” makes it sound like it was entirely intentional, but I write for the same reason I read: to find out what’s going to happen next. For me, bad behavior can be complex, and punishments don’t always solve the problem. I wanted there to be enough of a punishment that you wouldn’t feel like someone had gotten away with something they shouldn’t, but not anything so absolutely conclusive that you’d close the book and forget about it.

When I teach writing, I tell my students that an ending needs to be only two things: absolutely surprising and absolutely right. So the punishment needed to be something the reader wasn’t expecting, and yet feel just right for the rest of the book.

Jeffrey: The Kudzu Queen has received a great deal of critical praise, the latest being shortlisted for the VCU Cabell Prize. What has the reception from readers, reviewers, and awards programs meant to you?

In the past year and a half my life has been transformed. I’ve written and published for years–poems, short stories, poetry collections, a nonfiction book. But there’s something about this book–the way people have made it part of their lives, fallen in love with the characters and become their champions–that is magical to me. I think of writing as a gift I give to readers, hoping it will be of some use in their lives, even if it’s just a place to lose themselves in another world for a while. But I never expected this book to make so many friends. I am floored with gratitude for the kindnesses everyone has given to The Kudzu Queen and to me.

Robert: You and your partner in life, John Yewell, are writers as well as teachers. Will you talk about the exotic destinations to which you travel and what your writing workshops entail?

Okay, imagine if someone said to you, “You can go anywhere in the world for a week at a time. And while you’re at it, why not bring a bunch of great writers with you and build a community, eat fabulous local food and drink wine and cocktails and talk about writing from the time you get up until the time you fall asleep?”

You’d say, “Twist my arm!” right?

Over the past twelve plus years, John and I have offered these Writeaways workshop retreats in a chateau in France, villas in Italy, gorgeous adobes in New Mexico and a manor house in Ireland. It’s one of the best things I get to do, and it makes me so happy to see how people–from brand new writers to authors who have published many books–grow in their writing craft and build communities that last well beyond our week together. Many of our Writeaways participants come back to the same place year after year–France and Italy are especially popular–while others try them all.

Jeffrey: Regal House, your publisher, has been in the news quite a bit lately, which included a feature in Publishers Weekly. Tell us about that.

What an amazing press! Regal House just celebrated its 10th anniversary, and invited Regal authors to spend a weekend together. People came from all over the country for three days of readings, panel discussions, a cocktail party and the chance to get to know other Regalites we’d only met through social media.

Regal House, the brainchild of Jaynie Royal and run by Jaynie and her fabulous partner, managing editor Pam Van Dyk, is becoming widely known as a small press of distinction and integrity. In addition to publishing great books, they have a podcast, A Conspiracy of Lemurs, and a culture that encourages their writers to support one another as well as our local bookstores and educational community.

Robert: Describe for us the experience of being part of the vibrant North Carolina writing community.

I’m sure other states are wonderful, but I see the North Carolina writing community as particularly supportive. We have a long history of great writers, and generosity toward one another, as well as wonderful institutions such at the North Carolina Writers’ Network, which provides several writers’ conferences a year, the UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduate writing program and the Warren Wilson MFA program for writers (both of which I attended and loved), the Weymouth Center for writing retreats, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC-Asheville, the MFA programs of Queens College and NC State, and many other writing programs and organizations large and small. I feel lucky beyond belief to be from a state where writers share what they’ve learned with other writers and celebrate each others’ successes.

Robert: What’s next for you?

I’m hard at work these days on my next book, set in Ireland in the mid-1980s, which features a missing grandchild of a member of the IRA, a burger joint called Captain America’s and a drag queen named Holly Unlikely. I can’t wait to find out what’s going to happen!

"Funny, sad, and tender... Mimi Herman has written a novel that possesses a true and hard won understanding of the South." —David Sedaris