Susan Beckham Zurenda

I told Susan, after finishing her remarkable book, Bells for Eli, that I seem to be on a roll in reading books that bring tears to my eyes at the end. But that's not a bad thing; it shows how much the reader (moi) has been affected by the characters in the story, which is exactly what any good writer wants. They want us to enter the world they have created and worked on, in some cases, for years. The world Susan created mostly takes place in South Carolina in the turbulent 60s and 70s.  Those were my "coming of age" years, my teens and early 20s, which made much of the book's setting ring so very true and familiar to me.

We follow the lives of two cousins, Eli and Delia. They are as close as first cousins can be and profess their love for each other time and time again. I fell in love with Delia, too, as we see their relationship through her eyes. Her voice resonates innocence and a maturity beyond her years. I felt her pain, frustration, and anguish. 

She spoke to me; she will speak to you.

Here's the story, 

First cousins Ellison (Eli) Winfield and Adeline (Delia) Green are meant to grow up happily and innocently across the street from one another amid the supposed wholesome values of small-town Green Branch, South Carolina, in the 1960s and 70s. 

But Eli's tragic accident changes the trajectory of their lives and of those connected to them. Shunned and even tortured by his peers for his disfigurement and frailty, Eli struggles for acceptance in childhood as Delia passionately devotes herself to defending him. Delia's vivid and compassionate narrative voice presents Eli as a confident young man in adolescence--the visible damage to his body gone--but underneath hides indelible wounds harboring pain and insecurity, scars that rule his impulses. And while Eli cherishes Delia more than anyone and attempts to protect her from her own troubles, he cares not for protecting himself. 

It is Delia who has that responsibility, growing more challenging each year. BELLS FOR ELI is a tender exploration of the relationship between cousins drawn together through tragedy in a love forbidden by social constraints and a family whose secrets must stay hidden. 

Author and Book/Film Reviewer, Jackie K. Cooper says this: 

There is hardly anything I enjoy more than discovering a truly uniquely talented author. So you can imagine my excitement in discovering Susan Beckham Zurenda. She is a brilliant writer and to make it even better a brilliant southern writer. . . . For me reading this story was like going home. I knew this town, knew these people, knew this world. Zurenda spoke to me in a way few authors have in the past.  . . . .Mark down her name – Susan Beckham Zurenda. You are going to hear a lot more from her and about her.

And from Carol J. Defrank at Ft. Myers Magazine:

Most first time authors are happy just to get published. Not many find themselves Okra Picks, featured author at Publishers Weekly, or receiving advance accolades from The New York Times best selling authors. Susan Beckham Zurenda, author of Bells For Eli (MERCER UNIVERSITY PRESS) is the exception... Zurenda's future now looks bright.

Indeed it does, Susan has had a fascinating life and in some ways, very much like my new friend Delia's. Here are her answers to my questions:

First, tell me about where you live and why you love it so much.

After I graduated from college in Spartanburg, SC, in 1977, I never left town.  We had opportunities in other places, but chose to stay in Spartanburg. As Goldilocks said of the three bears’ beds when she found the one that wasn’t too big or too small, “It’s just right.” I grew up in a small town, so living in a huge metropolis never appealed to me.  

Spartanburg has been “just right” on many levels. It’s small enough so that I know many of the people I see in the grocery store. It’s a wonderful place to make lasting friends.  The city is large enough to offer myriad arts and education opportunities, but not so big that I’m bogged down in traffic to get where I want to go.  And it’s ideally located between the mountains and the beach, only a few hours’ drive either way to R&R.  

Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?

At age seven (and all my growing-up years), I lived in Lancaster, SC, where some of my father’s family have lived since the 1700s. 

7-year-old Susan with her brother, David

I loved my childhood in this small town where Springs Cotton Mill was the biggest employer.  Springs gave us all kinds of recreation: swimming pools, parks, skating rinks, tennis courts, and even a merry-go-round. I lived in a time and place when we could jump on our bikes, meet a friend at the corner, and ride wherever we pleased—to the drugstore to buy candy, to the park to swing—bounded only by our mothers’ instruction to be home before dark and dinner.  I don’t think it gets much better than that.

 Did you have a favorite teacher and are you still in touch with him or her?

I had many excellent teachers.  I’ll highlight the first and one of the last of my formal education. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Weir, had her own school in a building behind her house where she instilled imagination in her students. What I remember most is the storytelling circle. She told spellbinding tales and encouraged us to create our own stories in return.

The graduate class I took in creative writing from Dr. Rosa Shand at Converse College hugely influenced both my writing and my confidence. I had toyed at writing fiction for years, but had not written a full story until Rosa’s class.  After the class ended, Rosa and I became good friends, going to readings, dinner, etc., together. She made suggestions on the stories I wrote, and I was honored when she asked me to do the same with her writing. When she began developing dementia some years ago, she moved to live with a daughter in Texas. I miss her a great deal.

Is there a book that changed the way you look at life?

Rather than mention a specific book, I’ll say that the elective course I took in Southern Literature during the fall of my sophomore year was an impetus that changed my direction from being a music major to an English major. In that incredible class, we read the works of four Southern women authors from the mid-20^th Century: Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Katherine Anne Porter. 

Carson McCullers

Eudora Welty

        

Katherine Anne Porter

Flannery O'Conner

Those writers became tremendous influences on my love and appreciation of Southern Literature.

 Do you have a favorite children’s book and what about it makes it so?

My father read to my brother and me at bedtime when we were young, and he loved poems and stories that amplified the sounds of language.  He especially enjoyed Dr. Seuss stories, and I am familiar with many of these ear-catching books. My favorite is “And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.” This was Dr. Seuss’s first book. 

Not only is the language a delight in your ears, the imagination of the boy named Marco, who describes a parade of make-believe people and vehicles traveling along Mulberry Street, is an elaborate fantasy I adored, even if  Marco decides in the end to tell his father what he actually saw on Mulberry Street—a simple horse and wagon.

What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?

I made a fool of myself the first night I spent with my aunt Jean and her mother in Charlotte, NC, when I was in my early 30s.  Because they lived near Presbyterian Hospital where my mother spent many nights during cancer treatments, they gave me an open invitation when I drove in from Spartanburg. Now, mind you, I’m a dog lover, but my father—often cautious of big dogs—had warned me that I should be careful of Rosie, my aunt’s boxer, because he’d been told a story about Rosie jumping off the flat roof of the upstairs porch straight down on the driveway to accost the mailman.

When I tried to shut the door of my cousins’ bedroom—where I’d slept many a night when visiting in childhood—I noted the door would not close tight. Rosie had the run of the house, and suddenly, thinking of her leaping however many feet to the ground, I feared she might run into the room during the night and scare the bejeesus out of me.   

Thus, I moved Emma and Jeannie’s childhood dresser behind the door as a barricade. I slept without fear of attack.

The next morning my Aunt Jean tried to open the door with one hand, and a glass of orange juice for me in the other. Finding the door wouldn’t move, she bellowed. Meantime, I scrambled to move the dresser back, stupidly thinking she wouldn’t figure it out. But, of course, she did. She knew without my saying why I had barred the door. Rosie was her baby, and she was shocked. She told this story over and over through the years, my embarrassment never diminishing.  (I did finally get to enjoy the glass of OJ.)

How did you meet your beloved, Wayne? How did your first date go?

In the early 90s, my husband was the only full-time English faculty member at the community college in Beaufort, SC, where he taught, so he decided to visit a couple of other colleges in the system to network with English teachers, to see what they were teaching and how they were instructing students.  Wayne knew the dean at Spartanburg Community College where I taught, so he asked her to set him up to observe some classes.  He came to my English 101 class; it was one of the first classes of the semester, and he liked my lively ice breaker lesson. We became coworker friends from that point on, but did not date for many years. 

Seems things worked out well. Here's Wayne with Susan and her two daughters Kassie and Susanne on their wedding day.

Is there a song that you listen to when you are feeling a bit down?

I love old Carolina beach music because it takes me back to my youth. When I want to feel good, my favorite beach song is “I’ve Got the Fever” by the Georgia Prophets. I dare you to listen to that song and not start singing and groovin’.

How are you different now than you were in your 20s?

I am a much more independent person than I was in my 20s. I was fortunate to be surrounded by a number of strong women (mother, grandmothers, great-aunts) attentive to my well-being during my childhood and young adulthood. I never lacked for love or advice. But such devotion is a double-edge sword. I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like without these women to rely on, but as they died, one by one, I learned I could stand on my own. It turned out that once all the beloved women in my life were gone, they had become role models whose strength I had absorbed.

Now a couple of questions about your wonderful novel. What, in your life, happened to make you interested in cousin relationships like Eli's and Delia's?

When I was researching my genealogy to join a national historical society some years ago, I discovered a first cousin marriage eight generations back in my maternal grandfather’s line when Ana Dupont (1744-1805) married her first cousin Josiah Dupont (1742-1803) in South Carolina. (My guess is this is not the only first cousin marriage among all my Southern ancestral lines.)

In 1793 Ana and Josiah lived by the banks of the Matanzas River near St. Augustine, FL, where the Spanish government had granted Josiah 1850 acres. He relinquished the land four years later, however, when Native Americans forced the family to flee. Both Josiah and Ana died in South Carolina, and I am the direct descendant of this long ago first cousin marriage. Their union started me thinking about first cousins falling in love in developing my novel.

Also, my novel is inspired by an incident that actually happened to my first cousin Danny when he was very young, on his second birthday. As is the case in the novel with my character Ellison (Eli) Winfield, my cousin saw a Coca-Cola bottle sitting on the porch steps at his home and drank from it. Instead of Coke, though, the bottle was filled with Red Devil Lye, a chemical with properties like helium. According to my parents’ account, my uncle had been placing balloons over the neck of the bottle to inflate them for his son’s birthday party. Like Eli in the novel, my cousin survived the accident, but his life was forever changed. I wanted to explore in a novel how one cousin’s childhood accident would shape not only his life, but the lives of those around him, particularly his first cousin Delia who lives across the street.

Poet John Donne words resonate through your book, what were the circumstances under which you became a fan?

My professor for early British Literature in college had a liking for Donne, and we covered a number of Donne’s most famous poems. My favorite was (and is) “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” I became fascinated with metaphysical conceits in Donne’s poetry. 

And in this particular poem, the speaker’s belief that love endures beyond the physical here and now moved me deeply. I make a reference to this poem in Bells for Eli, as it perfectly expresses Delia’s feelings toward her cousin Eli. 

Oh, one more question, is there something special or interesting about you that very few people know about?

Well, I was cofounder of an all-female investment club, Piggy Bank Investments, that was active for about 23 years, starting around 1992. Nothing special about that, but the thing that might be interesting is we were selected to compete in a CBS stockmarket survivor show. 

In 2001, CBS sponsored a reality show called “CBS Marketwatch Survivor” in which 14 investment clubs across the country were chosen to compete. Each club was given $100,000 of play money, and the club with the most money at the end of 14 weeks was declared the winner, and their play money then turned into real money. My club auditioned via a homemade video filmed in my kitchen the day before the deadline. One of our members just happened to hear about the contest on WSPA radio, a CBS affiliate. Who knows how (I think it's because we acted the fool on the video, and the producer decided we would be entertaining if nothing else), we were chosen to participate in the contest. Every two weeks, the two clubs with the least money in their portfolios (the show unfortunately coincided with the tech bubble burst) sent a representative to the CBS Early Show with Bryant Gumbel and Jane Clayton for a face off which consisted of Jeopardy-type questions related to the stock market. 

We hung on 4 weeks before our club president at the time, Mary, headed for New York. She won the face-off, so we were back in the game. Two more weeks passed, and again CBS flew our president to NYC. This time she lost, and we were out. In truth, I was grateful because Mary had decided she wasn’t going a third time, and the club decided I would be the next to compete in the face-off because I was the founder of the club. 

Now the time travel question.

In a short essay…………………………

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?

My very different grandmothers were both independent and self-determined women.  I grew up assuming all grandmothers were this way.  At some point during my formative years in the 1960s-70s, though, I realized many grandmothers (not to mention mothers) were not like mine.

My grandmothers came of age and married in the early 1920s. I’d like to visit this decade of exciting social changes and profound cultural conflicts for a little while. Mainly, I would like to go back to watch my grandmothers’ lives, to understand the influences that led them to be the remarkable women I knew. My grandmother Crosland became a successful business woman—a florist—and from her I learned my first lessons about how the stock market works. My grandmother Beckham once told me I could be as poor as a church mouse, but if I showed backbone, read widely, and appreciated the arts, I could hold my head as high as anyone. Surely, both would have been suffragettes, celebrating when the 19^th Amendment passed in 1920. I wish I had asked them.

I have a photograph of my grandmother Beckham—hair cut scandalously short—in 1921 in her wedding dress, laced and elegant, but knee-length, flapper-style. She holds an enormous bouquet of flowers and wears an expression of mirth. I don’t have a wedding photograph of my grandmother Crosland, but I have a copy of the wedding invitation, hand-written in beautiful script. I would like to attend both ceremonies.

The age when my grandmothers were young women was fraught with conflict, like every age, but it was also spectacular in its newness. I could listen to jazz in its infancy, the early music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. I could dance the “Charleston” in real time instead of in a costume during a performance when I was in elementary school. I could live in America before the advent of television (I don’t care much for television). And since I’m dreaming, I could travel to the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in 1924 in the first affordable car, a Model-T.

Best of all, I might meet incredible authors who wrote during this powerful era of American Literature:  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, among so many others. This period of literature is one of my favorites. Imagine being able to bring back signed, first editions of The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Cane to the 21^st century for nothing more than the list price of the book.

I’m a fairly serious-minded, responsible person, but what fun it would be—for just a moment—to let loose and be part of a decade of prosperity and dissipation, to “live life to the lees” after the devastation of World War I. What a marvel it would be to attend a real-life J. Gatsby’s party.

Susan in high school

Thank you Susan for bringing Eli and Delia into my life, I will think of them often. 
I hope you will be able to "let loose" as often as you'd like in the future!

Be sure to buy your copy of Bells for Eli at your local, independent bookstore.