Small Town Girl

Holt's novels, which include My Louisiana Sky (Holt, 1998) and Mister and Me (Putnam, 1998), are set in the American South of the mid-20th century, in gritty small towns where everyone knows your name--and your business.

Though her family has called Louisiana home for seven generations, Holt, the daughter of a navy chief, grew up in Paris, Guam, and several U.S. states. Now, at 39, she writes full time in her home in Amarillo, TX, where she lives with her husband, Jerry and 12-year-old daughter Shannon. Holt's fourth book, Dancing in Cadillac Light, is due out from Putnam in 2001.

What sort of impact has winning the National Book Award had on your life?
At first I was very much in a dreamlike state and I just couldn't believe it. Now I believe it a little bit more, because I've been getting a lot of calls for school visits and different events--interviews and such. So that knocks you into reality pretty quick. But it's still just a wonderful dream, and I hope it always feels that way.

It's hard to believe that your first book was published a mere two years ago. What did you do before you started writing?
When I was in college I majored in broadcast journalism. But I never did get my degree. I was a senior when I quit and went to work full time at a radio station in news. I got quickly bored with that because it was not really writing, it was pulling copy off the AP wire and throwing newscasts together quickly. There wasn't much creativity involved. So I asked if I could also do sales and I quickly went into sales full time. The last job I had was as an [interior] decorator. But I was terrible at it. I didn't even have a color wheel!

How did you go from that to writing fiction?
I think I always wanted to write fiction and I just kept pushing my dream down. I can remember when I realized that it really was fading away. I was riding in a car with my best friend, who was an attorney. She said, "I'm going to write a book one day." I remember thinking, "That was my dream." I didn't say anything to her because I didn't want it to sound like, "Me, too." But when we moved to Amarillo six years ago, I didn't know a soul there and I thought, "If I'm ever going to do it, this is the time."

When did you first dream of being a writer?
I was 12. But I never thought about being a writer until I read Carson McCullers's book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and it just was life-changing because of the characters. That was the first time I read a book where the characters seemed like real people to me. I was writing poetry then. I remember that in seventh grade I wrote a poem about a Vietnam soldier. One of my friends showed it to my science teacher and he made me march down and show it to the creative writing teacher, who said, "I hope you'll enroll in creative writing next year." He was very instrumental in encouraging my love for writing.

Why did you "push down" your dream?
A couple of years later I had another teacher who knew that I wanted to be a writer but she would never say anything good about my writing. In all fairness to her, she was a great teacher, but she would praise other people's writing but not mine. I was very shy and insecure and I took it as though I really wasn't meant to be a writer. That kept me from writing for a long time. So when I visit schools, I tell kids about it, because I can say, "Keep believing in yourselves. Don't let one person stop you."

Did you write at all from the time you stopped as a teenager?
I would write occasionally. I remember buying a typewriter one time, thinking that I would write, and I spent about a day at it. That was probably about 10 years before I committed to it. I look back now and see I did have outlets for my writing, though. I used to write long letters, and I don't anymore. I journaled more than I do now. So I was writing. It just was not an everyday thing. But when I did start writing seriously, that's what I did. I started it as if it were a job.

Talk about your first novel, My Louisiana Sky.
It came from a moment in my life when I was nine years old. I was in the car with my mother in the Louisiana piney woods, where both my parents had grown up. That's where My Louisiana Sky takes place. We passed a lady on a country road with grocery sacks in her hands. This lady looked strange to me. She just had a different look about her on her face and I mentioned her to my mom and my mom said, "That lady's mentally retarded and her husband is mentally retarded and they have a lot of kids." It haunted me for the rest of my life. And when I first started writing, I'd get all sorts of ideas but none of them were coming from my heart. That was the first story that came from my heart. The voice of Tiger Ann--I just knew it right away, I kept thinking about it and thought, well, maybe that would make an interesting book about a child who had parents who were mentally slow.

What was the inspiration for the character Zachary Beaver?
When I was 13, I went to the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport and I paid two dollars to see the fattest boy in the world--actually, I think he was billed as the fattest teenage boy in the world. He was in a little trailer and we went in there and I would like to say that I wasn't nosy, but of course, I was. I was very quiet and shy and usually very sensitive towards people's feelings but for some reason--I guess paying that two dollars and the fact that he was on display--I felt like that gave me the right to ask him nosy questions and I did. I asked him, "How much do you eat? How much do you weigh? Where do you go to school?"

Did he answer?
Yeah, and he was kind of grumpy about it, which I can understand. A few years later, I had a boyfriend whose sister-in-law worked in New Orleans, and that same boy and same trailer were parked at a shopping center near her office for two weeks. She went to see him and she paid two dollars every day to see him. She ate lunch with him every day and befriended him. And I just remember thinking: "I didn't do that. I didn't come across in a kind way." I think that even has some influence on the story because, of course, that's kind of what ends up happening with the boys and Zachary.

You write so convincingly in the voice of a 12- or 13-year-old. Are most of the voices that come to you that age?
They are. The story ideas that I have are usually coming-of-age stories, I'd say anywhere from 10- to 15-year-olds. And I always joke, but I think it's true when I say it, that I don't think I've ever gotten over being 12. Maybe most of us haven't. I think that's why adults still like to read coming-of-age stories

You lived in lots of places when you were growing up: France, Guam, Washington State, Norfolk, VA, New Orleans. Where did you feel most at home?
Louisiana was home. Forest Hill. Even when I had not lived there, when people would ask where I was from, I'd say Louisiana, because that was the only place we'd go back to. Forest Hill, Louisiana, where my parents were from, was home for me.

Did you ever live there when you were a child?
I lived in Forest Hill for about nine months, in a trailer next to my Grandma. I loved it. I kept pretending that I wasn't going to be moving. I was a real sentimental person. I can remember walking out in front of my grandmother's home to catch the school bus and remembering, "Golly, my dad did this. My uncles did this. This is the same place my dad and uncles caught the bus. We are so much alike!"

Your books are all set in small towns. What is it about small towns that intrigues you?
I think because my parents grew up in one and I always knew what small-town life was like. My parents were the kind of people that talked about their lives growing up and still do. And also, I think I've always wanted to be from a small town. I love those little towns where you drive through and think, "Oh, if you blink you might miss it." Before they had all these big interstates, I remember we'd drive from Virginia to Louisiana and whenever we'd pass through little towns, I remember thinking: "I wonder what life would be like to live here. What do they do when they get home from school?" I've always been curious about people that live in small towns.

Are Saitter, LA [the setting for My Louisiana Sky], and Antler, TX [the setting for Zachary Beaver], based on real places?
All of my towns are always based on real places. I have to have a real place. Saitter is Forest Hill, pretty much. Antler is a combination of two panhandle towns: Claude, TX, and Memphis, TX. I just loved the way Claude was laid out architecturally. It's a little square that surrounds the courthouse, and the public library is in the basement of the courthouse and it has little signs that say things like: "One block to the post office." To me, that's small-town talk. But then there was a little problem. I found out quickly, as cotton became important to the story, that you cannot grow cotton in Claude. One of my friends is a panhandle farmer's daughter and she grew up in Memphis and that's a little bit farther south. So I just said, "Okay, you just pick up Claude and you set it down where Memphis is and you have Antler."

Do you consider yourself a Southern writer?
I do. It's interesting because I've always felt like I was from the South, even though we didn't live in the South. I've always said "ya'll" because my parents had, and depending on where I lived I would get teased about that sometimes. My parents made me say "Yes, ma'am" and "No, ma'am" even when it wasn't cool to do that in Washington State. So my influences from the South came from my parents and were daily, even when I lived on an island.

Your characters are often called eccentric--do you agree?
Yeah, but I think I am, too [laughs]. I'm attracted to people like that. I like the flaws in people. I always look for the gray--everybody's not all bad and they're not all good. Maybe there are a few people in the world that are actually evil. But I think most of us have both qualities. And also I love the people that seem normal on the surface and then they're really not. I find that a high compliment when people say that they think my characters are eccentric or quirky, because I guess that's what I love about life.

Kathleen T. Horning is a librarian at the Cooperative Children's Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.