Interview with Polly Hamilton Hilsabeck
Polly Hamilton Hilsabeck’s novel AMERICAN BLUES came out earlier this month and has been getting great reviews!
“Hilsabeck’s prose is vivid and urgent . . .”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The blues are black folks’ breathing through the grisly legacies of white malevolence and grotesque bloodlust in America. American Blues gives readers a haunting glimpse into the casual and sustained brutality of white supremacy.”
—Pierce Freelon, writer, composer, and codirector of The History of White People in America
“A heartfelt chorus of narrative voices about decades of racial violence in America.”
—Susan Straight, author of The Gettin Place and In the Country of Women
We are delighted to feature this interview with Polly!
Tell us about your beginning, where are you from?
I was born and raised through third grade, smelling sorghum and Quaker Oats—two of the factories in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and fields of sweating corn from the family station wagon or up close when I spent summer vacations with my five boy cousins on their red-barned family farm outside Waterloo. I came of race-age when my family moved to a one hamburger stand town outside Dallas and we lived two fields away from Black sharecroppers. I became a Californian in spirit beginning seventh grade and lasting till . . . well, I still am.
When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
I don’t know if I decided, but I know I was a writer, when, as a toddler my mother took my dictation and wrote my “story” alongside the story I was drawing. Equally, my father, who could fill a 5-cent stamped postcard with flash memoir and sketch a cartoon in half a minute, delighted in my creation. Perhaps my parents’ interest set me and kept me on a writer path until now, when I woke up this past Tuesday morning, April 12, as a published author.
How has writing changed/does writing change you as a person?
Writing increases my observation of the world around as well as the world within and sharpens my appreciation of the complexity of human and non-human “characters.”
Can you tell us a bit about your book AMERICAN BLUES?
It is Easter; nonetheless, there is a lynching. The lynched man is Sam Jefferson, the Black sexton of white St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, whose priest has summoned a national church presence. Executive Officer Hugh Lovelle and staff aide Lily Vida Wallace fly to Greenville, South Carolina, where the story of AMERICAN BLUES and Lily’s coming-of-race-age begin.
What would be your 6 word memoir?
Find me limning complexity and quirkiness.
What is the best writing advice you’ve ever had,
Show drafts to a few trusted, skilled readers.
and the worst?
Write what the market wants.
Do you need a special place to write?
I can write anywhere, but best nested in bookshelves in a room with a view.
Are you part of a writing community or a writing group?
Yes—a dozen writers comprise each of the two groups that I organized: local, weekly multiracial writers group and virtual, semi-monthly female fiction writers-authors from across US
What is your experience with social media as a writer? Do you find it distracts you or does it provide inspiration?
For me, social media is a pulse, which I can consult or ignore as is helpful.
Who are your favorite authors?
AA Milne
Alice Walker
Amanda Gorman
AngieThomas/The Hate U Give
Audre Lorde
Barbara Kingsolver
Britt Bennett/The Vanishing Half
Cathy Park Hong/Minor Feelings
Erik Larson/The Devil in the White City
Ernest Gaines/ A Lesson Before Dying
Hillary Jordan/ Mudbound
Jacqueline Woodson
Jack Kerouac
James Alan McPherson
James Baldwin
James Lee Burke
Jesmyn Ward/Salvage the Bones
Joan Didion
Julia Alvarez
Langston Hughes
Lillian Hellman/film: Julia
Maaze Mengiste/The Shadow King
Maya Angelou
Michael chabon/Telegraph Avenue
Min Jin Lee/Pachinko
Paule Marshall
Peter Weir & David Williamson/film: The Year of Living Dangerously
Rebecca Skloot/The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Susan Straight/The Getting Place, In the Country of Women
Tom Robbins/Skinny Legs and All
Toni Morrison
Walter Moseley
Zora Neale Hurston
What are you reading currently?
Billie Jean King’s autobiography ALL IN, Jacqueline Woodson’s RED AT THE BONE, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s THE COMMITTED
—
Polly Hamilton Hilsabeck was in the second wave of women ordained priest in the Episcopal Church in 1985 in the Diocese of Los Angeles. She currently lives with her husband in Durham, North Carolina.
AMERICAN BLUES, Polly Hamilton Hilsabeck
A week after Easter 1973—following the lynching of Black church sexton Sam Jefferson—Lily Vida Wallace is dropped like an immigrant into Greenville, South Carolina. After returning home to Manhattan, Lily continues theological studies in anticipation of the overturn of a centuries-old, males-only priesthood and simultaneously struggles with her erratic engagement. When her fiancé flees following discovery of professional impropriety and Atlanta attorney Rodney Davis lands in her path, a new love grows—accelerating Lily’s understanding even as it challenges her naïveté about race.
Some two decades later, high-profile interracial nuptials in Oakland, California, become the occasion for a reunion between the now Reverend Vida and Lucius Clay, the fiery journalist she met in South Carolina. Within weeks of their re-meeting, Lucius is dispatched to cover Black church burnings—beginning with Lily’s hometown in Texas.
Writer Hilton Als recently commented: “We need to wake up to the fact that America is not one story. It is many, many, many stories.” American Blues offers no neat resolution. Instead, its timely story invites, as it tangles with, readers’ own assumptions and complex experiences of race and gender in America.
BUY HERE
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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