Ask the Author: Sybil Rosen
Answered Questions (5)
Sybil Rosen
Thanks for your questions, Jean. They are good ones for an author to chew on. As a writer, I seem to bounce from form to form, attempting to let the story lead me to the way in which it wants to be told. I've written plays, essays, fiction for young readers, and a memoir. At first I considered writing these stories in first person, as a memoir of bus trips if you will. But I'd just written "Living in the Woods in a Tree," which was so personal, so "I" oriented. So then I thought of writing them as a play, which in the development helped me to know the characters more deeply (and could still happen!). But ultimately I was inclined to try on a new form, that of prose for adults, and the short story form seemed a good fit for these distinct and fleeting moments on the bus. I liked the feeling of my own anonymity, although the first story I delved into, "Graceland," is probably the one that most closely actually happened to me. That helped me to enter the world of the bus, poised as the anonymous observer. As for me "choosing" particular glimpses, I think it's more accurate to say that the glimpses chose me. In the beginning, a face, a remark, an event that stayed with me urged me to tell its story. The exceptions to that would be instances where I considered the book as a whole. To create an authentic portrait of bus travel meant illustrating the remarkable American diversity found on the bus. So I made some choices about which characters, geographical locations, and situations to portray. Also, as the re-writing process unfolded, I began to pick and choose the way in which the stories got told. For instance, in "Graceland," unbeknownst to the characters, they share a moment in the past. For several drafts that moment was buried in the text. Feedback from early readers made it clear that I needed to make the coincidence more obvious and that impacted the story in a more dramatic way for the reader. It also helped me to re-write the last scene so that the reader knows more about the characters than the characters do themselves. That's kind of like life, isn't it?
Sybil Rosen
Touching people. Changing their minds. Their hearts. That's the only good reason I know for working this hard for so long. I also love the weaving of words but what drives the whole impulse is the reader at the end of the process.
Sybil Rosen
Well, there's writer's block and there's fallow time. There's writer's block and there's process. So much of writing for me is about listening. Listening to the story and letting it tell you where it wants to go, and how. The times I've experienced what might be called writer's block are times after great shock, like the death of a loved one, or the experience of a horrendous calamity like 9/11. Something in me in those times seems to get emptied out and there's no internal pressure to write. The only cure seems to be patience and eventually the shoots of inspiration find enough air and light to make it to the surface again.
Sybil Rosen
I'm inspired by the people and things that move me. I'm inspired by joy and pain in equal measure. It's all very intuitive, mysterious really, and in some ways better left unarticulated. I only know that this pressure begins to build in me internally and I find that I can only release it by writing about it.
Sybil Rosen
It began in 2002 when I started a memoir about Texas music legend Blaze Foley with whom I lived in a treehouse in West Georgia in the mid-1970s. The search for Blaze's memory led me to riding Greyhound buses across the country. The landscapes I saw, the people I met, the stories they told me - all of these things pierced my heart and I knew that I was going to have to write about them. In a sense I fell back in love with this country and the resilience of its most forlorn citizens. It is my hope that this book conveys something of that love.
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