What's Next? Libby Chats with Jonathan Odell

It has been just over six years since the release of Jonathan Odell's debut novel, The View from Delphi. Today we are celebrating the release of his second novel, The Healing, which is available in stores now. Jonathan was kind enough to answer a few questions about his books and writing career. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy!


Congratulations on the upcoming release of your second novel, The Healing. Can you introduce us to your characters and share their dilemmas?

Thanks to Author Exposure for giving me this opportunity to talk about my book and especially about these characters whom I’ve come to care about deeply over the past few years.

Gran Gran is an ancient healer/midwife in 1930’s Mississippi who has been abandoned by her community because of her old-timey methods of doctoring. Without warning, a severely traumatized, seven-year-old orphan, Violet, is dropped on the old woman’s kitchen doorstep to care for. Surprisingly, the thing Violet responds to are not the old woman’s potions, but her words—the stories she tells about her own childhood spent in this same kitchen, when it was part of a great Delta plantation. In those days Gran Gran (then Granada) was a servant girl, and a special pet to the Mistress who lost her own daughter years earlier and uses Granada as a kind of surrogate child. Through the course of Violet’s healing, Gran Gran unfolds the story of Polly Shine, a powerful healer brought to the plantation to cure the slaves of a mysterious disease ravaging the master’s slave stock.  Polly Shine is unlike any slave seen before and she commences to employ healing as a way to subvert the powers of the master and unite the slaves into a community.  Soon the entire plantation is thrown into a heated debate over whether she is a witch, a magician or a redeemer. Polly senses great healing powers in Granada, who is at that point a pampered “house-raised” girl of 13.  Much to Granada’s consternation, Polly chooses Granada to be her apprentice, turning the girl’s white-centered world upside down and forcing her to answer questions about freedom, belonging and the nature of her true people.

The Healing takes place in Mississippi during the pre-Civil War times. Can you share with us a little bit about your research process? What was the most surprising thing you learned?

When I began the process, I quickly discovered that a true American history, which accurately documents how blacks and whites built this country together, has yet to be written. Much of the black narrative has been erased, forgotten or passed off as folklore because for so long our official history has been recorded through the white perspective. I went back home to Mississippi. I sought out African Americans who could introduce me anew to my own history through their stories. I did countless interviews. I read books, listened to oral histories, poured over slave narratives, spent hours in the dusty cellars of county courthouses. I collected all the broken pieces, all the missing links that I could find.

During my research, I interviewed several elderly ladies who had “caught” thousands of children in their communities. I learned that midwifing served as much a spiritual and communal function as it did a physical one. Their practices could be traced back through Jim Crow, through slavery and all the way to Sierra Leone and Temne tribal practices.  I discovered that the midwife was often the most powerful slave on the plantation and could most influence the master’s decisions. After slavery midwives held their communities together through tradition and ritual.

Their occupational demise began in the 1930’s when the white medical establishment orchestrated a campaign to discredit midwives in order to make way for government-funded public health services. In other words, when it became once again profitable for white men to touch black flesh, the midwives had to go. They were portrayed in medical journals and state legislatures as dirty, ignorant, and superstitious abortionists. When state’s required that they be licensed, many were forced to “turn in their bags” because they could not read. A category of “nurse midwife” was created to work under the direct supervision of a doctor.

The midwives I spoke with were gracious, proud and spiritual, saddened to have been barred from their calling and eager to have someone listen to their story—not the official white story that vilified them. When I came across a study in the American Journal of Public Health which provided evidence that the live-birth rate among these “uneducated” black women was higher than the white doctors who replaced them, I knew I needed to write their story.

Last October, Library Journal released their list of recommendations for Black History Month (February 2012) reads. The Healing received a starred review: “Engrossing. . . this historical novel probes complex issues of freedom and slavery.”  Your debut novel, The View from Delphi, and this second novel both deal with race relations in Mississippi. What attracted you to this facet of American history?

I believe white Americans and especially us Southerners, progress through at least three states of understanding when it comes to Black America. The first, rudimentary level is that Black history has nothing or very little to do with our history, and is not integral to understanding our identity as white folks. If a black story exists at all, it is merely a footnote to the greater American story. In novels written at this level of consciousness, black characters, if they show up at all, are merely convenient props to the white narrative.

The second phase is a belief that the black story does indeed exist, is important, but consists mostly of a chronicle of African American reactions and responses to the dominant white drama. Blacks can be integral to the story, but mostly as the object of white pity, hatred, admiration or salvation. Blacks exist to be acted upon by whites. The center of gravity of the story rests with the white protagonist’s prerogative to save or persecute the black characters. The story is written to highlight the morality of the white protagonist.

It’s the third level that I’m most drawn to investigating, and which informs my work. I believe that black history fashions the white world as much, if not more, than the other way around. Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson wrote, “To be white in America is to be very black. If you don’t know how black you are, you don’t know how American you are.”

I’m fascinated with the ways that I have been shaped by a black America, whose story has been mostly silenced and whose contributions mostly absorbed, unattributed, into the “official American Story.”

“Simply telling your story, your truth, without hope of gain nor dread of loss has its own genius, and in the end, that vulnerability is the only thing that has ever set a person free.” With this quote (from your website) in mind, what advice do you have for aspiring writers?

I say this as a way of emphasizing that truth is a living thing, can never be set in stone, and should never be turned into a safe cliché to hide behind. Truth is dangerous and is always revealing itself, moment by moment, word by word, and we must have the courage to reveal the truth as it comes to us, in that very specific way it comes to us as individuals. It is vital and raw and personal.

There is a saying about writing, that the task of the author is not to proclaim the truth but to discover it. At my worst as a writer, I find myself so attached to a past reality and so busy proclaiming it, that I kill the possibility of some living truth coming along and surprising me.  All I’m doing is passing along gossip.

When I write fiction, the thing that kills the story the quickest, paralyzes it, ossifies it, is writing with an agenda. To sit down at my desk believing that I have the ultimate truth and that my job as a writer is to make others agree with that reality is a way of protecting my ego. It is a way of staying safely within the well-mapped terrain of the known.

When I am at my best, I realize that the real truth is, I don’t know the truth.  Then I am able to let go of all my agendas and defenses and give the character permission to utterly surprise me. I have to ready myself to be paid a visit by what is true TODAY. My job is to be awake for it. A writer must do this fearlessly, ready to risk whatever may have been true yesterday.

We have to keep addressing “what is true now” without fear of others opinions or judgments or being called irrational or inconsistent or rash or mercurial or impractical or immature. And then we have to be willing for that truth to change again the next day, regardless of our ego investment.

The reader can tell. They will stay with you as long as they sense that your truth is still unfolding and the answer lies somewhere beyond, perhaps in the next sentence, or paragraph or page. As soon as they sense you have the answer, they become bored with you, as they should. This all depends on the writer’s willingness to let go of all certitude, and to write the truth of the moment and let it take him where it will.

Stanislaw Lec once said, “Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin.” I struggled with his advice for long time. Here’s what it means to me now. When I sit down to write what I know, I should quit. What I know is dead. We must write what we want to know, what we are drawn to know. This is the voice of truth calling you, in all its youthful, clumsy, and unrehearsed innocence. And if you are lucky and your mind is very, very still, you might catch a glimpse of it, ephemeral and momentary, like fireflies in the night, before it moves on again into the dark.

What are your specific marketing plans for The Healing? Will you be participating in online blog tours, book signings, or book tours?

I live on both ends of the river, so we’ll do a book launch in Minneapolis and then head down South for a March Across Georgia by way of Mississippi and Alabama.  The Minnesota events are hosted by The Bookcase in Wayzata (Feb. 28) and Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Uptown Minneapolis (March 1). In Mississippi we’ll be at Main Street Books in Hattiesburg, Lemuria in Jackson (March 5), Square Books in Oxford (March 8), and Reed’s Gum Tree Bookstore in Tupelo (March 9).  In Alabama we’ll visit Alabama Booksmith in Homewood (March 14) and Page and Palette in Fairhope (March 15). Foxtale Bookshoppe in Woodstock (March 12) and Georgia Center for the Book in Decatur (March 13) will host us in Georgia.

Interesting, because the book is being received as historically relevant, we are also getting invitations to appear on college and university campuses. I think the invitation I’m most proud of is from a prominent nursing college with a strong midwifery program!
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Libby is the book review editor and chief contributing writer for the What's Next? series.