INSIDE VOICES

INSIDE VOICES - Robert Gwaltney & Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce Kimberly Brock

Kimberly Brock is the bestselling author of The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Townsend Prize for Fiction, and The River Witch, recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award. She is the founder of Tinderbox Writers Workshop and has served as a guest lecturer for many regional and national writing workshops including at the Pat Conroy Literary Center. A native of North Georgia, she now lives near Atlanta. Her latest novel, The Fabled Earth, releases October 1, 2024 via Harper Muse.

JEFFREY: How did you arrive at your novel’s title The Fabled Earth?

I wanted to use the word fable from the start and I wanted to ground in a gritty reality. This title came from a collection of words and lists of imagery that finally solidified with the title of the novel. I was lucky that my editorial team and publisher, agreed.

ROBERT: You’ve created some indelible characters. Tell us about Cleo, Florence, and Audrey. Who are they? And why are they the focus of your story?

In the late summer of 1959, Cleo Woodbine is a reclusive watercolor painter literally haunted by tragic events of 1932, and living on a spit of land in the river that separates Cumberland Island, Georgia, from the mainland. Frances Flood is a folklorist with questions about her recently deceased mother’s past that bring her to meet Cleo. And Audrey Howell is a young, recently widowed innkeeper who develops an eerie double exposure photograph that raises old ghosts and secrets from the history that connect the lives of all three women together.

JEFFREY: Your story is told from their points of view in alternating chapters—think Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet—and in addition, there are chapters headed “Fable.” Is Fable essentially another character in the novel?

I think “Fable” is the spirit of this story. It represents the greater theme at work, which is the capacity of the human spirit to exist across time, to reflect on the past even as it dreams of a future, while being alive in a fixed point somewhere in between. “Fable” is the storyteller’s vantage point from which these sections are narrated, looking down on Cleo Woodbine and those who inhabit Cumberland Island in the summer of 1932.

ROBERT: Cleo begins as an innocent who believes her grandfather held a different place in Cumberland Island society than he actually did. During the later years, she is hardened, life and events early on having taken a toll on her. Will you talk a bit about Cleo's transformation?

Cleo is a girl with a head full of flights of fancy when she is young, and she believes this makes her special because her grandfather is a charismatic storyteller she adores. For young Cleo, he is larger than life and she aspires to be like him rather than her dour, practical grandmother, who tries to teach Cleo to become an independent young woman. In her youth, Cleo doesn’t understand that her grandmother’s sharp edges and her resentment toward Cleo’s grandfather are the results of years of supporting her husband, who has habits that have cost his family and ultimately cost him his life. Cleo’s hero worship of her grandfather leads to youthful mistakes with tragic consequences and she learns very early that neither she nor her grandfather are particularly special, only human. Forgiving him—and herself—for that humanity takes her many years.

JEFFREY: It’s strikingly clear that Cleo recognizes the inherent power of the river and the tide, a realization that stays with her throughout her life. She’s also in the powerful grip of shame. Without giving too much away, tell us about Cleo’s shame.

Youthful mistakes may seem especially costly and have long-reaching effects if we don’t learn to forgive ourselves or those we love for being fallible. This is a theme that runs throughout The Fabled Earth, particularly the story of Cleo Woodbine. Beginning with the loss of her parents, Cleo starts off on the back foot, believing she will have to prove herself special enough in some way to earn love and she makes a hero out of her grandfather, who is the person in her life who loves her freely, while she misjudges her grandmother’s love. As she grows up, Cleo continues to misjudge people, including herself, and with harsh consequences. By the time she is middle-aged, her choices have left her isolated and regretful. She identifies with the river where it runs both ways in a place that locals call the dividings, because she feels she resides at the fixed point where history runs behind her and the future she might have known rushes past her. But by the end of the novel, she learns she has been mistaken about a lot of things, including the river, and herself.

ROBERT: You write very early in the novel: "You could love your prison. Could make a sanctuary out of it." Would you expound upon that interesting observation?

It is a simple thought, just to understand that you can choose to isolate yourself and find things to love about it. You can talk yourself into believing that even the poorest circumstances are what you want if you believe you deserve them, or are too afraid to change them.

JEFFREY: What is it about Georgia's coast that inspires your storytelling?

I love the long and complicated human history of the area and the conversations it inspires, what it asks readers to consider about our shared stories and what we want to dream of for our futures. It is a space that breathes and thinks, rather than speaking. I love the metaphor of a salt marsh and a tidal creek—the constant change, the cycles, the full, the empty, the juxtapositions. A liminal space that is ageless and constantly reborn and can hold all these truths at once.

ROBERT: Tell us about the Carnegies and their impact on the world.

What I can say is that even the extravagantly wealthy Thomas Carnegie and his wife, Lucy, came looking and found in Cumberland a place to build a summer home for themselves and their nine children. They saw what so many had seen before them—a wild island that had a long history of being called home, early on by the Timucuan Indians, then various European explorers and settlers, various religious men, soldiers, planters, freedman and fisherman. Cumberland had been a haven as well as an embattled ground long before the Carnegies and their gilded mansions, and incredibly, it has mostly remained wild. That intrigues me most—that maybe in spite of the powerful influence of the Thomas Carnegie family, or in spite of it, Cumberland still belongs to itself. There is perspective to be found in that.

JEFFREY: It's always a comfort to find voices of reason amidst chaos. Tate and Lumas are two such touchstones in The Fabled Earth. Tell us about them if you will.

I’ll start by saying it’s interesting to me that you’d mention Lumas this way when his character is the least developed of any in the novel, I think. He is a ghost in many different ways. And a figment of Cleo’s imagination. I think she creates a touchstone of him, but in truth, he is someone she barely knew in her naïve youth when she was scarcely wise enough to survive the drama she set in motion. If anything, he is the friend she wished she’d had. And in some ways, this is also true of Tate. But the connection they have over the regretful events of the summer of 1932 and how each of their lives spun out in separate directions from that point, allow them to finally meet and know one another in 1959 while they’ve held most of the other people in their lives at bay. In Tate, Cleo finds a man who requires forgiveness but who is able to offer it to her, as well. This is a turning point for both of them.

ROBERT: And then there’s Ellis. Talk about him.

Ellis Piedmont was an interesting character to write, full of arrogance and fear, and an equal to Cleo in his self-loathing. He longs to be special, just as Cleo does, and suffer when the group of young elites that have gathered on Cumberland for the summer, dismisses them out of hand. But especially when they feel they don’t have the love of the singular Joanna Burton. Ellis is a boy who lives with such privilege that he can’t conceive of not getting what he wants, while Cleo can’t imagine she ever will. Ellis is a boy who seemingly has a bright future, but feels he has no voice. Cleo is a girl who believes she has no future, until she perceives she knows the secret to give Ellis the influence he dreams of. And when the two collide, it is inevitable that they will ruin one another. While Ellis is awful and small and mean, he’s also very sad to me.

JEFFREY: The storm in the novel is a great turning point for Cleo, a cleansing of sorts. After having kept to herself for so long, she finally ventures out, releases the past, and turns her attention and care to the living. Why did it take so long a time for her to reach this state of grace?

Cleo has held herself and those she loved to impossible standards and because of this, has lived with an immature perspective on the events of the summer of 1932. The distortions began with her perception of herself and her family members as a child, then took root in her adult life after she came to Cumberland and chose to remain in Woodbine Cottage in a self-imposed exile. She’s held onto her obsessive guilt rather than allow herself to grieve the sad realities of her and her grandfather’s fabled lives. It’s in meeting the other two women in the novel, seeing herself and her story through their eyes, remembering with Tate and returning to face the people and places that have become larger than life in her imagination, that she can put the past in perspective and see things as they are—and finally allow herself to dream of a future again.