Stephanie Kallos
Stephanie Kallos was born in Idaho and grew up in Nebraska. Before
coming out of the closet as a writer, she had a varied work history which
included many years as a musician and a long career in the theatre as an
actress and teacher of voice, speech, and dialects. Her short fiction has
received a Raymond Carver Award and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Her first
novel, Broken for You, was published in 2004 by Grove/Atlantic; it was
chosen by Sue Monk Kidd as a "Today Show" book club selection, and
received the Washington State and PNBA Book Awards. Her second novel, Sing Them Home, also Grove Atlantic, was published in 2009, a
Pacific NW Independent Booksellers bestseller, it was selected as a January '09
IndieNext title and chosen by Entertainment
Weekly as one of the 10 Best Books of 2009. Stephanie lives with
her family in a North Seattle neighborhood which has no sidewalks and looks
very much like a small town.
Her third novel Language Arts, from Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, was published in June. The Seattle Times called it "beautifully
written, harrowing".....Paste
says it's "enthralling," and BookPage describes it
as "a riveting read". Stephanie is currently at work on her
fourth novel, a loose-retelling of the Cyrano
de Bergerac story set in Britain before, during, and after WWI. She
is a proud member of the Seattle7Writers and its offshoot band, The Rejections.
I first met Stephanie at a SIBA convention in North Carolina when I was her rep for Broken for You. My God, this woman can write! I consumed both of her first books as soon as I got the advance copies, they are so incredibly good.
Well, we hit it off and she was one of the first authors to answer my time travel question (see below). I was, quite frankly, stunned by her answer. The word "German occupied France"" and "where would you go" don't usually appear together in many sentences.
She has been a true friend through the years even though we get to see each other about never. Here are her answers to my questions:
Tell me
about where you live and why you love it so much.
I live in a North Seattle neighborhood that bears
very little resemblance to the hip, glamorous Seattle that is much-hyped in the
news: it has no sidewalks, is diverse in all
the ways that diversity manifests, and resembles a slightly impoverished
small town – which is why I suppose I’ve felt at home enough to have spent
nearly two decades here: the first five years of my life – very happy ones – were
spent in just such a place.
Do I love it? Our little slice of the city has been
a very good place to raise my sons, and goodness knows Seattle offers up
natural beauty on a daily basis even to those of us who aren’t skiers, campers,
hikers, cyclists, or sailors. (I’m always embarrassed to admit this, but I
mostly get my views of the surrounding mountains from whatever I can see from
I-5. In my defense, I’m a great walker.)
I love the community I’ve found here, the patchwork
of people who have become family in a
very real sense.
I don’t love the traffic, the noise, the cost of
living, the need for a car. I’m not a fan of big city living in general, and
frankly, I hope one day to relocate – at least part-time – to a less populated
place. But – luckily for me – I’m a writer. So I can stay pretty much hunkered
down in my office most days and live in denial about the fact that I’m an
urbanite.
Where
were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?
My folks moved us to Lincoln when I became school
age and we lived on a house on East Eden Drive. (I kid you not.) There are some
very happy memories associated with that time and place - although our move
there also marked the beginning of a shift in my awareness and in our family
dynamic that very much underpins some of the scenes in Language Arts.
But, keeping with what was good: our house and all
the others in the neighborhood sat on land that was once an apple orchard, so
everybody had plenty of trees to climb and fruit to harvest in their backyards.
Also, there was a down-sloping sidewalk that led from our house to the outdoor
public swimming pool and adjacent part: I loved riding my skateboard down that
hill at what felt like super-sonic speed and trying to catch old of a giant
apple tree limb that extended over the sidewalk at the very bottom. It was a
kind of childhood that kids rarely get anymore (mine didn’t anyway): in the
summer months especially, we were able to head out the front door in the
morning and not come home until dinnertime. I walked to my piano lessons with
Mrs. Childs, who lived a couple of blocks away. I spent hours nestled into
those city park trees reading comic books and not caring one whit about what
time it was. I truly mourn the loss of that kind of childhood for today’s
children. And it’s been shocking to learn lately that many people have come
under scrutiny and censure with various child protection agencies because they
support the concept “free-range parenting.” Unbelievable.
Did you
have a favorite teacher and are you still in touch with him or her?
Teachers have always played an enormously important
role in my life. Several of my elementary, junior high, and high school
teachers got a shout-out in the Acknowledgements pages of Language Arts - a
book that, among other things, is intended to be a love letter to those members
of the teaching profession who give so much of themselves and their lives to
the young people under their tutelage.
It’s actually funny that you ask this right now.
For many years I have wanted to reconnect with a
teacher who had a profound affect on my life when I was (ever so briefly) an
acting student at Julliard, from 1978-79. That was an extremely difficult time
in my life for many reasons, but the short version is: it became clear after a
few months that living in NYC was not working out, the training was not a good
fit, and I began to question the wisdom of staying. When I revealed these
thoughts to my parents and college teachers, I was met with vehement anger and
a fair amount of shaming. One of my college professors said, in a tone I have
never forgotten “If you leave Julliard, you will regret it for the rest of your life.” There was one teacher, however, my
dance teacher at Julliard, who showed me extraordinary kindness. (I gave one of
the most beloved characters in BROKEN FOR YOU her surname: Kosminsky.) When I
expressed these uncertainties to Jane, she replied, simply, and without a trace
of any personal agenda, “There are many paths.” Those four words of sage
counsel were some of the most profoundly affecting, compassionate, and
reassuring I have ever heard. And I have re-appropriated them countless times
with other young people facing similar quandaries.
Here’s the great thing: While accompanying my
younger son on a tour of Julliard this past April (he wants to be an actor), I
had the great good luck of running into Jane in a hallway and was finally able
to express my deep and enduring thanks to in person. That experienced marked
the closure of a very important circle.
Do you
have a favorite children’s book?
What first comes to mind is A WRINKLE IN TIME, which
I read over and over again as a young girl; also biographies of scientists and
inventors – Galileo, the Wright Brothers – and stories of horror and the
supernatural. A favorite book that has survived the long trip into late middle
age is a dog-eared anthology from my parents’ bookshelf that I adored as
a child and that I’m sure is long out-of-print: ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S STORIES FOR
LATE AT NIGHT. It has some of the best writing I’ve ever encountered, and I
still revisit it from time to time. Especially around Halloween.
Is there
any message you want to give to or anything you want to say to your
great-great-great grandchildren when they read this?
Love, be loved, and follow your passion. Pay
attention to the people and the experiences that light you up, immerse yourself
in those relationships, and know that staying absolutely true to what attracts
and nourishes you is the fertile soil on which one builds a rich, abundant life.
That’s all there is, really.
How did you
meet your wife/husband? How did your first date go?
My husband,
who is Italian, was an hour and a half late for our first date and two hours
late for our second. If he had been late to our third date, my children
wouldn’t be here.
And finally, the time travel question with Stephanie's amazing answer:
IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME
to any period from before recorded history to yesterday,
be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if
appropriate to your choice,
actually experience what it was like to live in that time,
anywhere at all,
meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them,
be with them.
When would you go?
Where would you go?
Who would you want to meet?
And most importantly, why do you think you chose this
time?
Resistance
Sitting down to respond at length to
Jon’s question, I found myself less interested in writing a work of fiction related
to my reply, than in investigating the reasons why that reply sprang so readily
to mind. I think my answer surprised me as much as it surprised Jon.
So what follows is a meditation on
where creative obsessions come from, and how it might be true that novelists
are always – consciously or unconsciously – writing under the influence of that
most unreliable of all first-person narrators: their child selves.
Flannery O'Connor once said that if
you survive a Southern childhood, you have enough material to write about for
the rest of your life. Surviving a Midwestern childhood has given me a
warehouse of inventory to work with as well.
* * * * *
It must have been my parents’ idea –
signing me up to take French lessons after school, at a time in the history of
American public elementary school education when enrichment programs weren’t
necessary, because we had singing
classes and art classes and even elective
instrumental classes (piano OR Tonette!) as part of the regular curriculum.
No foreign language classes, however. This was the Midwest
after all, in the mid-1960s.
By the time I was in 5th
grade, it’s possible that my father was starting to regret his decision to
embrace all things American, thus raising his only child in a staunchly uni-lingual household. No daughter of his
would start kindergarten speaking Greek-accented English and be ridiculed and
ostracized and called the n-word because of it. (To this day, my Greek
vocabulary consists of: How are you?
Fine, thank you. Dolmades.
Spanikopita. Kiss.) Maybe Dad
decided that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea for me to learn another language –
just not his language.
Or maybe the nudge came from my mother,
who was also in her own way engaged in the process of separating from her
origins. My grandmother spoke German; so did her younger sisters Clara and Ruth
and Alvina and Mildred. When I asked Mom about this, she informed me that there
was “low” German (which is what regular, common
folks used) and “high” German (which
was spoken by educated people and in
the bible). I somehow knew not to ask
which version was spoken by my grandmother and great-aunts.
Do you speak German? I asked.
A little,
she answered.
This was exactly how she replied to
my question about childbirth, which was probably posed around the same time:
Does it hurt?
A little.
It was clear in both exchanges
that these two words for a little locked door, highly fortified. I either had to storm that barricade,
or imagine what was behind it. At eleven years old, already indoctrinated to be
compliant and polite, I chose the latter. I shut up and wondered what my mother
wasn’t saying. This kind of thing is
excellent training for anyone aspiring to a career as a novelist. Say what you
will about Parental Transparency in Child Rearing: the truth is, nothing stokes
the fires of a child’s imagination like parental taciturnity.
Given all this, it’s logical to
assume that my parents encouraged my early study of French – a language that
had no familial associations for either of them.
French was the language of kings and
high culture. It was exotic. It was beautiful. It was worldly. Although my
parents were to travel to France many times in their future lives – as well as
to England, China, Russia, Greece, Spain, Holland, and New Zealand, to name a
few – at this point the farthest they’d ever ventured from their Midwestern
roots (and I’m not talking about miles here but about something less
measurable) was when they went to New York City in 1960, to be contestants on
“The Price Is Right.” (I still have the
black-and-white photo of them flanking Ed McMahon. They look completely
star-struck.)
Whoever steered me toward my first
extracurricular experience (I suppose it’s possible that it was my idea; I truly don’t remember) I soon
loved taking French lessons because:
1.
It
made my parents very happy; this meant that peace reigned in our emotionally
volatile household, and our three-person country remained – at least for short
intervals – a demilitarized zone, and
2.
After
school French was taught by my school’s prettiest teacher. Her unlikely name,
Miss Pardee, could have been an alias, a sly reference that old lyric, how you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm
after they’ve seen Paree?
Not only was Mlle. Pardee the prettiest teacher at our school; I soon noticed
that she became even prettier when speaking French, especially when pronouncing
the vowel “u” as in une soeur. I can
still see her demonstrating the way to achieve this sound: she would draw her
lips wide, into an exaggerated version of the wide-mouthed Nebraska smile, and
begin repeating the sound eeeee as
she gradually moved her lips forward, into the rounded, kiss-inviting shape of
an ooooo: an “e” on the inside, an
“oo” on the outside. It’s an inspired way to teach the sound, brilliant really,
and thanks to Miss Pardee I’ve never lost my ability to pronounce it like a
native.
I still also have pretty decent
French “r”s. I don’t remember how Miss Pardee taught those, but I know I owe
that facility to her as well.
* * * * *
I’ve been thinking about the words
“courage” and “resistance,” the fact that they’re spelled the same in both
English and French. It is only in the voicing, in the placement of the syllabic
stress, that they differentiate:
COUR-age
becomes cour-AGE; re-SIST-ance becomes re-sist-ANCE.
I love the way this linguistic
flip-flop makes those words conclude with a committed bang instead of a
whimper.
My 1964 College Edition Webster’s
defines courage as: “the attitude or
response of facing and dealing with anything recognized as dangerous,
difficult, or painful, instead of withdrawing from it; a quality of being
fearless or brave; valor; pluck.” Among several definitions for the word resistance are “opposition of some
force, thing, etc. to another or others” and “the organized movement, often
underground, of resistance to a government or occupying power regarded as
oppressive and unjust, as in France during the Nazi occupation.”
In any marriage, I suppose, there is
the potential for children to become artillery in their parents’ marital wars.
As the only child of a mother and father whose relationship swung wildly
between two extremes, that of combatants and that of paramours, I experienced a
perplexing range of roles within our family, at some times wielding great
power, at other times wielding none at all. Generally I chose withdrawal over
confrontation, passivity over opposition. My parents’ battles were on a grand
scale; there was no way my petty complaints could rival their Sturm und Drang.
So I laid low, taking the role of
wary, watchful civilian instead of soldier, assuming an identity that had the
greatest guarantee of contributing to familial peace: I smiled, aspired, excelled,
and achieved – becoming in every way I could think of the opposite of rebellious.
Once in awhile I did the one thing
that was guaranteed to incite a mild testiness in my fashion-conscious mother,
wearing a favorite dress twice in the same week. And I committed at least one
act of theft during this era: I still have the Advanced French textbook I
filched from school, with phrases like Je
suis tres fatigue… and Merci Dieu
pour la Vendredi demain! penciled into the margins in big balloon-y letters
– the kind we used to make pep club posters.
But mostly my courage was a paltry
thing; whatever resistance I expressed was so muted or muttered that it was
barely noticed.
By the time I was sixteen years old
and a sophomore in high school, I had established myself as a good girl by anyone’s standards:
straight “A” student, classical pianist, fluent in French, junior class
president, babysitter, virgin. My best friends were bright, funny, geeky,
artistically-inclined and athletically-challenged girls, also beloved by their
parents for their goodness. We were glad to have found each other and formed a
tribe. None of us defined our eras’ ideals of beauty; none of us got dates to
the prom. On Fridays and Saturdays, we had pajama parties. We wore our
odd-duck, dateless status as a badge of pride.
Whenever any of my folks’ friends
bemoaned their kids’ misdeeds – academic failures, curfew violations, drinking,
smoking, drug use, sexual escapades – by parents remarked with pride (and
within earshot), “Oh, we never have
to worry about Stephanie.”
I may have chafed inwardly at that
sentiment – and what it implied about my character – but there were great
rewards in abiding by the status quo. One such reward came in April of 1971,
when my parents pulled me out of school and took me to Paris.
For those ten days, I became the
unofficial guide and translator for my parents and their traveling companions:
a group of University of Nebraska alumnae, all of whom were my folks’ age
(forty-something) or older. I helped them order wine and snails, locate the
bathrooms, get directions to museums. I taught them all to say “Where is the
bar?” and that became a standing joke, the kind of shorthand that fellow
travelers rely on in years to come to summon the espirit de corps of a particular shared experience. It was surely
during this trip that I began contemplating a future career as a UN
interpreter. (If my translation skills made Mom and Dad this happy, imagine how
much I could accomplish toward achieving world peace!) It was also during this
trip that my parents took me to my first opera.
The national opera house was closed
for renovations, so we went to the Comedie
Francaise, a much smaller and more intimate venue, and saw a production of La Boheme. During the curtain call, the
actors remained frozen in place – Mimi on a chaise, her eyes open in death;
Rudolpho kneeling beside her; a stunningly beautiful stage lighting effect that
made it look as if a gentle snowfall was cascading over the scene.
On our last night in Paris, my mother
and father and I had dinner in a dark, cavernous restaurant next to the Sienne.
Our waiter told us that this spot had been a covert gathering place for members
of the French Resistance.
I certainly didn’t experience any
kind of epiphany at that moment, but as a result of that trip, I did fall in
love with France – and, over time, with a corresponding idea (and it was of
course a highly romanticized one) of who I might have been had I lived in Paris
during the German occupation.
Would I have behaved in the setting
of a real war the way I behaved in the hostile country that was our family,
i.e. with fear, passivity, and compliance? Would I have risked my life to meet
in a place where, thirty years later, my mother and father and I enjoyed a meal
and reminisced from a safe distance about the sacrifices of the good soldiers
of WWII?
I’m still asking those questions,
still wondering if I’d be able to violate the boundaries of the impeccably
obedient behavior I cultivated so successfully (and with good reason) throughout
my childhood.
I long ago lost my French fluency –
if not my accent, thanks to Miss Pardee – and I haven’t set foot in France
since 1978, but my love affair with all things French continues to this day. I
sent three characters from my first novel to my adopted country, and for the
many years I worked on that book, a map of Paris was tacked up on my office
wall so that those characters and I could walk the streets together.
The echoes of that 1971 trip with my
parents are still with me; and I like to think that my father time-traveled
back to our night at the opera when he died, while listening to the final
strains of a recording of La Boheme, at
the exact moment Ruldopho cried, “Mimi!”
I said at the beginning of this essay
that my answer to Jon’s question surprised us both; and yet, having examined my
enduring love affair with France and French language through the lens of
personal family history, my wanting to go back in time to the German occupation
of Paris seems almost inevitable.
Anne Tyler once said that one of the
joys of writing fiction is the way it allows one to live many lives. To imagine
myself in France during the occupation is to imagine a self very far removed
from me indeed.
A novel I’ve had in mind for many
years and that I hope to write one day will involve a Jewish-American soldier
fighting in France during WWII. I don’t know much about him yet, but I do know
this: he’ll be brave, and at some point he’ll find himself in a cave next to
the Seine River in Paris, among members of the French Resistance.
THE END
Thank you Stevie, I have no doubt you would have all the courage you would need.
Thank you Stevie, I have no doubt you would have all the courage you would need.
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