ON THE POWER OF FIRST PLACES

I was born in a circumscribed community in rural North Carolina where people worked the land or they left the land to work the mills. The whole of it was imbued with and made extramundane by the singsong cadence of Appalachian folk speech, a Scottish-flavored Elizabethan English ferried through the generations and across the American landscape by colonial ancestor settlers, from Pennsylvania, to the Appalachian Mountains, to a corner of the Piedmont.

Loving the Dead and Gone, the 2020 Petrichor Prize finalist releasing September 6 from Regal House Publishing, Sour Mash Southern Literature series, is the first novel in a trilogy set in Gold Ridge and Potter, fictional towns deep in North Carolina’s red-dirt heart. This fictional world is put in motion by what Tobias Wolff refers to as “the catalyst of memory,” and is told through the small lens of charged insularity and the intimate dramas of rural characters struggling to understand themselves and others through common lives fully lived. Exploring the potency of simple emotional stories, I search for the profound in the everyday and explore the constellation of emotion in the dynamics within family and community.

Place shapes the emotional parameters of my characters’ choices and, in some cases, provides me with actual characters. When I write, I listen and watch the people in my head who beguile me to witness their individual stories. Part of the Appalachian diaspora, they speak still in this first language. I may have traveled the world as a journalist and lived the majority of my life in Washington, DC, the most international of American cities, and prefer eating Turkish and Persian food, and be married to a Japanese, but still the stories that present themselves to me as worth telling are those connected to that place and those people.

 I’m fascinated with how people can experience the same event in utterly different ways.  In Loving the Dead and Gone a freak car accident in 1960s rural North Carolina puts in motion moments of grace that bring redemption to two generations of women and the lives they touch.

This novel found seed in my first memory, a family misfortune, much of which, I would only learn as an adult, was the fiction of a three-year-old shaped by the character of my childhood and all that came after. This memory conflated with a later parental betrayal to become Loving the Dead and Gone. Exploring the characters’ internal dialogue became a way for me to better understand the family members and the traumas that shaped my early life, to explain figures from my own personal history. For the young character, Emogene, I wanted in particular to give her an advocate, someone who was looking out for her interests, something I did not have. ..

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Judith Turner-Yamamoto is the author of Loving the Dead and Gone, finalist for the 2020 Petrichor Prize, releasing September 6 from Regal House Publishing, Sour Mash Southern Literature series.  Her publications include StorySOUTH, Mississippi Review, American Literary Review, and many anthologies. She has received fellowships and awards from the Virginia Arts Commission, the Ohio Arts Council, VCCA, Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, and the Virginia Screenwriting Award. 

Find out more about Judith on her website https://turneryamamoto.com/

LOVING THE DEAD AND GONE

“This beautifully written novel, with its complicated, stubborn characters, will haunt you long after the last page.”—Margot Livesey, Author of The Boy in The Field

The death of Donald Ray in a freak car accident becomes the catalyst for the release of passions, needs, and hurts. Clayton’s discovery of dead Donald Ray upends his longtime emotional numbness. Darlene, the seventeen-year-old widow, struggles to reconnect with her late husband while proving herself still alive. Soon Clayton and Darlene’s bond of loss and death works its magic, drawing them into an affair that brings the loneliness in Clayton’s marriage to a crisis.

When Aurilla Cutter, Clayton’s mother-in-law, learns about the affair, her own memories of longing and infidelity are set loose. Like Darlene’s passions—unappeased and clung to—Aurilla’s possess an intensity that denies life to the present. As Aurilla’s own forbidden and tragic story of love, death, and repeated loss alternates with Darlene’s and Clayton’s, the divide of generations narrows and collapses, building to the unlikely collision of the two women’s yearnings that frees them both from the past. Loving the Dead and Gone is a lyrical novel about how tragedy binds people even more lastingly than passion.

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Category: On Writing