Kimberly Brock

 

"Later, when people tried to figure out what made me follow her into the forest that day, I swore I would have followed her right out of this life. 'Come with me,' she said. 'I'll tell you the secret to Evertell.'" 

The fate of the world is often driven by the curiosity of a girl. What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke remains a mystery, but the women who descended from Eleanor Dare have long known that the truth lies in what she left behind: a message carved onto a large stone and the contents of her treasured commonplace book. 

The Dare Stones

Brought from England on Eleanor’s fateful voyage to the New World, her book was passed down through the fifteen generations of daughters who followed as they came of age. Thirteen-year-old Alice had been next in line to receive it, but her mother’s tragic death fractured the unbroken legacy and the Dare Stone and the shadowy history recorded in the book faded into memory. Or so Alice hoped. In the waning days of World War II, Alice is a young widow and a mother herself when she is unexpectedly presented with her birthright: the deed to Evertell, her abandoned family home and the history she thought forgotten. Determined to sell the property and step into a future free of the past, Alice returns to Savannah with her own thirteen-year-old daughter, Penn, in tow. But when Penn’s curiosity over the lineage she never knew begins to unveil secrets from beneath every stone and bone and shell of the old house and Eleanor’s book is finally found, Alice is forced to reckon with the sacrifices made for love and the realities of their true inheritance as daughters of Eleanor Dare.

I love it when the characters of a book become so real you feel like you know them personally. When I put Kimberly's book down for the last time, that's exactly how I felt. Alice, Sonder, Penn, Doris, to name just a few, all so expertly described. Their inner thoughts, their loves and losses, hopes and dreams, everything about who they are. 

Mysteries, magic, ancient history, legends and how the human heart can break and be restored, everything a reader needs to be captivated and enraptured is here.

"Some say my grandfather was an artist, an explorer to the New World. They say my family was lost. But our grandmothers were women with vision. It came to my Mama, as it came to me. One day it will come to you, the wisdom she called our Evertell. Not a revelation, but something better. A story. When your heart is ready, you'll know. And you will pass these secrets to your daughters."

Kim, first, a few questions about your book:

Your previous book, The River Witch, has a somewhat similar theme that includes magic, lost souls and women finding themselves. When did you realize this was the direction in fiction that you wanted to follow?

 

As I’m working on a third novel with much the same themes, I’d say it’s pretty clear that these ideas touch the existential questions that I grapple with as a person, so naturally they are present in my fiction. It’s very intentional that my novels include the idea of wonder, of mystery, of things unseen and often unknowable. That’s grounded in my own set of values and the way I view the world as a female, just like the idea of human beings as seekers, creatures of perpetual longing. I wanted to consider what that looks like and feels like in these feminine lives, the ways we are challenged by these concepts, desperate to escape them, and what it would mean to embrace them instead, maybe decide they are the good stuff that gives meaning and purpose to the journey. I’m always more interested in the questions than the conclusions. The questions are our common ground.

 

I think it was brilliant the way you made a generational story out of the lost colony of Roanoke. Has that legend always fascinated you? 

 

I remember learning about the Roanoke Colony in elementary school and yes, being obsessed. Haunted. Disturbed. Actually, a little angry. I remember thinking even then that someone wasn’t telling the whole truth. 

The Lost colony at Roanoke Island

That feeling really was what overwhelmed me when I learned about the history of the Dare Stones because I’d grown up very aware of a lot of Georgia history and I’d never heard a peep about those stones or that spectacle. When I went to see the stone at Brenau University, it was out of curiosity and also a sense that someone ought to have a look at it and at least wonder what it meant. I was shocked and embarrassed when I stood there and I started to cry. It took me about an hour to understand where the emotion was coming from and on my drive home I realized it was that same anger I’d felt even as a little girl. I was upset that the only thing I knew about Eleanor Dare was that she’d had a child and disappeared. I was upset that her story had been lost not once, but twice, because I was deciding I didn’t care if the stone was an authentic message. It was part of her legacy and because of it, I was remembering her and reflecting on far more than her life and so much lost history, so many stories that go untold. I felt like her fate had complicated things for folks who had been counting on certain outcomes for their own goals, and when things didn’t go their way, Eleanor was lost. Twice. And as I contemplated that, I wondered who that would have mattered to most. The answer for me was her family, and in particular the women who would have cherished the memory of her, for better or worse. Her story seemed to be the story of so many families, so many communities, even the origin story of our country. Colonization is not romantic. Eleanor’s tale is a cautionary tale. But it’s also a fable, as I’ve written it, of the love of mothers and daughters and how we set a table for found family, and how we all face that stone and hopefully, find a way to live with it and keep going.

 

I was intrigued by how you described how the ancient millstone operated. Tell me you had to do a little research on that.

 

I did do a little research on the millstone. I’d been familiar with millstones my whole life but I took a trip to Nora Mill near Helen, Georgia, to see the mill run. 

Nora Mill

I’d loosely based the farm in the novel, Evertell, on the nearby Hardman farm. Watching the river power things and the stones work together and against one another in that careful balance was a pretty impressive visual metaphor for everything I was trying to say about family and community and love in the novel.

Now let's find out more about Kimberly Brock; tell me about where you live and why you love it so much. 

We currently live in the suburbs just north of Atlanta where we’ve been since the early 2000's when we returned to Georgia to raise our kids closer to extended family. During Covid, some folks got rescue pets but we got a rescue house. We bought a large house in need of a lot of renovation and we’ve been working on bringing it back to life for the last few years. We named it Larkwood. It sits on a beautiful lot with a surprise pond behind the house, a formal garden, and a wooded area with towering oaks. I have an office space in the rafters, which is the first room I’ve ever had to myself. I’ve spent the last few years pouring love into this place and it feels peaceful now. We have a resident ghost that we believe is a child and she’s very sweet.

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

We moved into a 1912 farmhouse, in Rocky Face, GA, in need of a lot of work when I was six and I still dream about that house. 

It was built of stories. You could feel all the lives that had been lived out there. Once, an old man pulled into the drive and asked to come inside. He had been born in the front room. It sat in a valley like a beautiful bowl with hayfields spread out around it. When we moved in, it was in a state of neglect. There was no insulation. The Dawn detergent froze in the cabinet in the winter and it was cooler outside under the hundred-year-old oak than inside in summertime. We often had kittens born underneath the house and they could come into the house through the holes for the plumbing. They’d pop out of the kitchen cabinets. My grandparents had a farm a mile down the road and I traveled back and forth on my bike. 

Cute!

We had enormous gardens, boarded horses, worked in my granddaddy’s industrial chicken houses and bottle fed calves. I got married in the back yard. I can remember walking the fields in the evenings and when I was maybe twelve years old thinking to myself that we didn’t own that land, it owned us.

"She ignored the lingering bitterness of the tea, closed her eyes to dream of the wilderness that awaited her, comforted by the sharp scent of evergreen on her pillow. She knew well that she had not become a saint. She had not even become a sorceress. She'd simply become a woman."

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

I’m just not that devoted to a single title. Too many books in too many ways have had things to say that have transformed my thinking in one way or another for me to pick just one. I keep certain books close to me, however, and I have often said they need to be easy to grab on the way out of the house if it catches fire. I was astonished to read Lee Smith’s Oral History and feel like the voice in her head was the same voice in mine.

I felt very much the same about Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. 

I can pick up any one of Pat Conroy’s titles and I am transported and weeping from the humanity. I read William Kent Krueger for the same reason. Alice Hoffman sweeps me away with language and imagery, as does Jess Kidd, who makes me laugh out loud like a fool. Matthew Quick, Silas House, Toni Morrison, Laird Hunt, Madeline Miller, Sarah Perry, Jesmyn Ward and Shirley Jackson all strip me down and dare me to answer back. Zora Neale Hurston’s work burns deep. Have they changed the way I look at life? Yes--life, the world, story, history, curiosity, reality, possibility. They’ve changed the way I look at myself. I wouldn’t be a writer without them.

"A story matters not because it is true but because it's been told."

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

When I remember favorite books from childhood, I have a difficult time naming just one. There was always a book in my hand. My teachers would often get back to the classroom and realize I’d been left behind in the school library, oblivious. I remember listening to books on record when I was too young to read and I loved fairytales. I especially loved the idea of magic, from Cinderella to The Secret Garden. I loved the Little House books and Charlotte’s Web. I was at odds with being a farm girl in that I was always advocating for mercy for the animals and often heartbroken over the outcome. But I was also really obsessed with Nancy Drew, especially the cover art and titles about secret staircases and attic ghosts. There was also a library book called In the Keep of Time by Margaret J. Anderson, about a family of children that visit Scottish relatives. When they play inside an old keep, they are sent back in time. I never forgot the way that idea delighted me. I went searching and finally found a copy of the book a few years ago and it was as fun to read as an adult as it had been back then.

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

My favorite funny story to tell is about the baby goat I wanted so desperately. I couldn’t stop thinking about that goat after I’d seen him at a neighbor’s farm. I cried myself to sleep thinking about that little goat. So I started a campaign to get that goat, begging my Granny. She was the one that had taken us to see the kids, which belonged to a friend of hers. I begged to just go visit and then I really turned it on. My daddy had already said no, but when we left that farm that day, that goat came home with me in the back of my Granny’s sedan. Somewhere over the course of the five miles between that farm and my house, Granny must have lost her gumption because we passed our farm and went on to her house where she hurried me and that goat inside so my granddaddy wouldn’t see what she’d done. The goat tore all through her house, bouncing on her sofa’s, skidding across her coffee table, racing across her linoleum floors and leaving traces of his own nerves behind. 

At some point, she worked up the courage to haul me home with my new friend and over the next few weeks, he grew and ate and stripped the bark off all my daddy’s apple trees. Mama bought him a bell for his collar before realizing he was a fainting goat and every time he took off at a trot and that bell jingled, he stiffened up and fell over. We chased him around the yard to get that collar off and I suppose somewhere in all of that, Mama decided the goat had to go. He ended up at my grandparent’s farm, after all, and lived to a ripe old age. I can’t say the same about Daddy’s apple trees. He grew up to be a proud, smelly creature and was responsible for my first curse word, pronounced to the shock of all on Easter Sunday that year. Billy lives on in infamy in our family stories.

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

I’d just started college when Daniel Brock caught my eye in his blue Blockbuster vest while I was on a date with one of his old high school buddies. I liked his khakis and his round frame glasses and sweet blue eyes. I ended up at the Fox Theater in Atlanta to see The Phantom of the Opera with that same fella, although we were no longer dating, and Daniel came along. 

We laughed at the same places and I learned he was really smart. A few months later, when I was a single gal again, I was working at the mall in a jewelry kiosk and he was home from UGA for Christmas break and I saw him walking out of a Walden’s bookstore. I yelled at him across the crowd. We started talking on the phone and I found out he could keep up with me in an argument. Our first date was dinner and a movie, a VHS rental of The Princess Bride. That night, I told my cousin I was going to marry him. It took a break up and several years before we ran into one another again in that same mall, different bookstore. We married six months later under the oak at the farmhouse.

Wedding Day!

Is there a song, person, or group that you listen to when you are feeling a bit down? 

Music is very important to me. I’m very emotionally responsive to music and it’s necessary in my daily life. I love acoustic music and live music. I love to hear busking on the street as much as I love musical theater. I’m especially a fan of Americana in particular. I love to sing and I wish I played an instrument with any kind of skill. I love live music and gravitate toward strings and good lyrics. I grew up in church, in choirs and listening to string bands and country music, but I also deeply love Joni Mitchell and Mama Cass. I learned to sing listening to Patsy Cline and Linda Ronstadt. Since her very early days, I’ve been listening to Brandi Carlile when I’m up, down or sideways.

Brandi Carlile

Brandi Carlile - "Most of All" (Live at Rockwood Music Hall)

I find her music very cathartic and inspiring. There’s a common language of the soul there.

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

I was born an old lady, set in my ways. I imagine I haven’t changed all that much, I just have more arthritis now.

"Once there was a girl who could always find her way home."


Is there a question no one has ever asked you that you wish they would? Something, perhaps, that people would be surprised to know about you?

When I was young, I wanted to become a dance teacher. I spent most of my youth dancing, even before I started lessons. I loved my ballet classes and I was very focused on the day I would be strong enough for toe shoes. But when I was thirteen, I cut the bottom of my foot while on a beach vacation and I spent the week on my back with my foot propped up. I had noticed I was uncomfortable at night in my bed before the accident, but having my movement limited was really miserable and I was experiencing pain that I couldn’t explain. By the end of the week, my parents suspected the problem and I went to the doctor (only one week before vacation, I’d been to the same office for my sports physical for cheerleading and been cleared). We were all shocked by a diagnosis of advanced scoliosis. Only a week later, I was being fitted for a brace, a process that required me to be in a mesh body sock and stretched over a strange contraption where a plaster cast was made of my torso. As a teenage girl, it was mortifying and frightening.

Over the next few years I underwent more brace castings and fittings, monthly x-rays, and very disappointing reports that the disease was progressing despite best efforts. I was declared a brace failure when one of the curves (scoliosis is like a spiral) in my spine measured at a seventy-degree angle. The Christmas I turned sixteen, I had major surgery to fuse most of my spine using bone grafts from my hip, many screws and two, long titanium rods. For the next few years I spent time in physical therapy. I dealt with a foot drop. I waited for the doctor to say the fusion had healed completely. I learned to move differently and to acclimate to loss of range of motion. I’m forever grateful for the success of the surgery and also changed by it. I operate now with an invisible disability which makes me sensitive to many other invisible things in the world and to the things that may not be immediately obvious about the people around me. I never became a dance teacher but I’ve found that creativity will find its way and for me, I’ve found my voice in theater, in teaching, and of course, in writing.

"Look there, so fair, the Evertell heirs of Eleanor Dare"

How do you feel about “Independent Bookstores” and their role in your success?  

I’ve always been shy about declaring myself a writer and I find it difficult to introduce myself that way. It took three tries to walk into my local indie bookstore with my first novel and say hello and when I finally made it to the front desk and opened my mouth, I brought a basket full of gifts, and started to cry. To my great relief, the booksellers were so kind and they embraced me and my book and have been my best champions since that day. My first novel was published with a small press and the support of the regional indies made all the difference in that book finding its way to readers. I got in my car and drove from Georgia to Mississippi in August that summer, and every store that welcomed me felt like found family. It has been the same with my latest novel. But even over the years when I was struggling to write and publish another book, those indies were a haven for me. I think they exist as businesses, but also as sanctuaries in the world. Inside an indie bookstore, all voices are welcome and cherished. No one is a stranger. No one is alone. We are all readers. In the South, we like to ask who your people are and we can form immediate connections based on distant cousins many times removed. Indie bookstores are that family tree for readers with broad and far-reaching branches. 

 And now, the ever popular time travel question:

Kim, 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? 

As a writer of historical fiction, I actually ponder this question on an existential level most every day, even in my dreams. And while I have many ideas or whims, there are two choices that stay steady and I find it hard to pick one over the other.

The first is a sentimental choice and I imagine one that many people would make given the gift of a moment in time to visit a lost loved one. I am a surviving twin. After a premature birth, my sister lived only one day, but that’s not the day I would visit. The day I would visit happened a few years later when I was about three years old and my mom had remarried to the daddy that adopted and raised me. He has told me this story my whole life and I would go back to the night he woke to find me at his bedside, watching him sleep. He asked me what I was doing out of bed and then followed me back to my room across the hall to tuck me in, only to realize that I was sleeping down the road at my grandparent’s house. It’s the only ghost story I’ve ever heard him tell. He has always believed that he was visited that night by my sister, checking in to get a look at this loving man that had come into our lives. Perhaps she appeared to him to let him know she was keeping watch over us. The way he tells the story all these years later, I’ve no doubt that he experienced something profound and also that he treasures that moment. I would love to bear witness to their precious astonishment as they beheld one another.

I am equally drawn to a part of my family history that seems almost as unknowable. Multiple branches of my family tree descend from people who lived in a place in north Georgia called Spring Place where the Moravian Church founded a mission school for the Cherokee. 

Springplace historical marker

I grew up driving through the area not far from my home, mostly unaware. I wonder now how much my grandparents even knew. Many of my family are buried there, while some moved west to the lands promised to them there. Family members are listed as white on the local census records, others are listed on the Dawes Rolls as Cherokee by Marriage, and some are recorded in other records with Cherokee names memorialized in family Bibles and oral histories as having hidden in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee and North Carolina for decades or generations before returning to Georgia and assimilating into white culture, sometimes adopting the anglicized names of neighbors and friends. To walk among those people in that valley and be able to witness their lives, the choices they made and the ones being forced upon them, their hopes and risks, their joys and humanity, would be revelatory.

But ultimately, I truly believe that these sorts of imaginary exercises of time travel appeal to us so deeply because we already carry the past, the love and courage and knowledge of home that we are seeking out like memories we’ve buried--the secrets of the ages--inside of us.

Kim, thank you so much for your intriguing answers, your fabulous book, and your own heartfelt personal story. You are truly amazing.

Readers, treat yourself and pick up The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare at your local independent bookstore.