Beware the Tall Grass: A Mother’s Love, A Soldier’s Courage, A Writer’s Journey 

Beware the Tall Grass: A Mother’s Love, A Soldier’s Courage, A Writer’s Journey 

I’ll never forget where I was when I got the idea for my debut novel Beware the Tall Grass. I was in the car with my husband on the kind of long road trip that takes you away from all your distractions and lets your mind roam. We were listening to National Public Radio and there was a story about children who have vivid past life memories, and know things they are too young to understand. Often the children experience night terrors and fear around these haunting memories. 

I wondered how the parents of such a child would feel, dealing with such an unexpected challenge. It’s not that our offspring don’t experience problems during childhood, such as changing family circumstances, learning issues, or problems with peers. But this challenge was different. Memory is deeply embedded in us and connects us to people and places long past. Memories change and shift. They come in and out of focus over time. How could a concerned parent help their child navigate such challenging waters? I knew there was a story there. 

I am by nature a short story writer. I love writing toward the maximum impact in the shortest amount of space. I had done that successfully in my short story collection Lost Girls. Now I would have to learn to linger and to build a more complex narrative with peaks and valleys. I was going to have to put serious roadblocks in the way of characters I would grow to love and see them to their eventual ends. 

I knew my main character Eve Sloan, She was a lot like my mother, strong, courageous and a relentless advocate. When I was born three months early with cerebral palsy, my mother was my fiercest advocate, making sure I got the care I needed. When Eve’s son Charlie is barraged by disturbing memories, she jumps into action to get to the root of the problem, even when it causes tension in her own marriage. Her husband Dan was also familiar, loving and kind, but unable to relate to Charlie’s issues because of baggage from his own past. 

I knew their story wasn’t enough to carry the novel. To really engage with the themes of memory and identity, connection and trauma, I needed to deepen the story. So I created Thomas Boone, a young man caught up in the drama of mid-60s America who is sent to Vietnam. Thomas is challenged with loss and first love, before being thrust into combat and learning what matters most. 

Just as writers must have the courage to delve into the unknown, so Eve and Thomas had to marshal their courage to face the mysteries of memory and the terrors of war. The heart of the story is what ties Charlie and Thomas together. 

Writing Beware the Tall Grass was a huge challenge that pulled from everything I had learned about characterization, pacing and drama in the several decades I have been at it. It also drew deeply from my personal experiences of facing physical challenges and overcoming fear.  I hoped to include my understanding of what binds us as humans. Writing the story took eight years and lots of feedback from many wise readers along the way. The experience was deeply satisfying. As you read it, I hope you will explore your own memories and challenges and find points of connection with this mother’s love and this soldier’s courage. 

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Ellen Birkett Morris’s novel Beware the Tall Grass is the winner of the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence, judged by Lan Samantha Chang, and will be published on March 15, 2024 by CSU Press in March 2024. She is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the Pencraft Award and finalist for the Clara Johnson, IAN and Best Book awards. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, and South Carolina Review, among other journals. She is a winner of the Bevel Summers Prize for short fiction. Morris is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction from the Kentucky Arts Council.

Morris is also the author of Abide and Surrender, poetry chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in The Clackamas Literary Review, Juked, Gastronomica, and Inscape, among other journals and in eight anthologies. Morris won top prize in the 2008 Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition and was a finalist for the 2019 and 2020 Rita Dove Poetry Prize. Her poem “Abide” was featured on NPR’s A Way with Words. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, AARP’s The Ethel, Oh Reader magazine, and on National Public Radio.

Morris holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University-Charlotte. She attended the Kentucky Women Writers Conference on fellowship and teaches creative writing at The Virginia Piper Center at ASU in Tempe, Arizona and The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky. Morris has spoken and taught at the 2018 Antioch Writers Workshop, 2019 Kentucky Women Writers Conference, 2022 Writer’s Block Festival and 2022 Louisville Book Festival.

Website: https://ellenbirkettmorris.com/

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BEWARE THE TALL GRASS

Beware the Tall Grass weaves the stories of the Sloans, a modern family grappling with their young son Charlie’s troubling memories of a past life as a soldier in Vietnam, and Thomas Boone, a young man caught up in the drama of mid-60s America who is sent to Vietnam. Eve Sloan struggles as a mother to make sense of Charlie’s increasing references to war, and her attempts to get to the bottom of Charlie’s past life memories threaten her marriage, while Thomas is challenged with loss and first love, before being thrust into combat and learning what matters most.

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“In this beautiful novel, two stories separated by half a century intertwine to create an indelible narrative of peace and war. In the throes of his first loss, young Thomas joins the Army and travels to Vietnam, where he is propelled toward his fate. Decades later, in another time and place, Eve and Daniel welcome their infant son and resolve to set aside their own family ghosts. But is it possible to release the past? Can powerful experiences of love and death ever be forgotten? Through surprising and suspenseful turns, Beware the Tall Grass explores the evocative mysteries of time and memory.

   -Lan Samantha Chang, Jordan Prize Judge and author of The Family Chao and Hunger.

“I was captivated by the intimate style, the gentle and graceful writing. The story reminds me of an epistolary novel in the way this intimacy intensifies the gripping suspense of the story. Ellen Birkett Morris is a writer to watch.”

    -Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Dear Ann and In Country

“A young man’s coming-of-age in 1960s Missoula, and the fields of Vietnam; a young family’s struggle many years later to understand the deep-hidden trauma of their young son; Ellen Birkett Morris’s compelling debut novel, Beware the Tall Grass, explores the invisible, inexplicable connections of our souls across time and space. Masterful and deeply moving, Morris engages our hearts and challenges us to accept, and embrace, the transcendent nature of our being.”

    -Tara Ison, author of At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf 

“Morris’ first-person protagonists with their haunted names, Eve and Thomas, jump off the page into our own sense of reality: each of them, like ourselves, must deal with emotional baggage while trying to create a new reality: a family filled with trust and love.”  

   -Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife, Four Spirits, Adam & Eve

“The past and the lives lived there are never really gone. They haunt the present in Ellen Birkett Morris’s novel, Beware the Tall Grass. Written with a sure hand and a clear eye, this novel is a story of two families—one that suffers a tragic loss and one that endures. Two fast-paced storylines come together in a memorable end in this moving story of a mother’s love.

-Lee Martin, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever

“This debut novel is mysterious and lucid, rich and poignant, as Ellen Birkett Morris creates two sets of memorable characters and follows them in gripping stories about love and loss, family and parenthood, with real war as their backdrop, and pain and redemption as their resonant outcomes.”   -Fred Leebron, author of Out West, Six Figures, and In the Middle of All This

 “A new mother head over heels in love with her infant son 2005; a U.S. infantryman fighting for his life at Ia Drang in Vietnam in 1965– how these two narratives connect is the first of several mysteries that Ellen Birkett Morris invites us to explore in Beware The Tall Grass, her heartfelt, luminous new novel.”

– David Payne, author of Barefoot to Avalon  

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing