 |
Terry Farish
(photo by
Ty Paterson)
|
There are a lot of wonderful writers living in our state. As the Director of the NH Center for the Book I get the opportunity to talk to many of them. This interview series of Q&As with New Hampshire authors here on Book Notes lets me share that experience a bit with
my blog readers.
If someone hasn't read your
work yet, where should they start?
I invite you to read The
Good Braider. It is a novel in verse for adults and young adults that
follows the life of a young girl who escapes war in Sudan, flees with her
mother to Cairo, and together they resettle in Portland, Maine. Writing The
Good Braider became the focus of my life for many years as I listened to
and recorded oral histories with refugees in Maine. The book guided my writing
path and opened doors for me to continue telling the stories of new Americans
and the extraordinary dance among cultures that newcomers - over generations -
learn. And about long-time Americans who see U.S. culture ever changing.
When did you first think of
yourself as a writer?
I can't say when I became
one. It's just my life. My writing students and I have had conversations
about whether they should choose to be a writer. Writers have a hunger to
reveal, or be a witness to, or interpret life, and we just do it out of
necessity. I have a room in the top of my house where I go before the sun's up
on my lucky days. And I immerse myself in the fictional world I'm working
on. Writing is a meditation. The business of writing is something
else and requires me to leave my upstairs room and be a sort of business
person.
How did you end up living in
NH?
I first came to New
Hampshire when I married an air force officer with a fighter wing at Pease Air
Force Base; my first job here was at the Rochester Public Library, an old
Carnegie library where I worked with people who awed me and introduced me
to NH, and I learned how to mend the bindings of old novels which I liked
doing.
Where do you like to write?
I can write absolutely
anywhere. I love writing on airplanes and buses and trains and have sorted out
difficult tangles in writing when I'm in motion. In fact a lot of my writing
happens when I'm walking. I take scenes I'm working on into the woods with me
and my dog, and I come home with dialogue and details I hadn’t known. My
favorite place to compose is my upstairs room in the early, early morning as
the light comes.
How important is place in
your writing?
My characters are shaped by
place. But I might change the word place to include culture because there
are so many cultures in a place. People are shaped by the cultures they
call home, whether it be the culture of fishermen on the NH Seacoast or a community
of women who braid hair while around them there is war. They carry the
places of their lives with them and the places become a part of who they
are. And sometimes people are shaped by the yearning for places
they have left. One South Sudanese friend told me about her
homesickness for a place at war. She said, "Home is
home. Of course I miss home." She missed the smell of the
earth by the Nile.
What do you do when you
aren't writing?
I'm also a yoga teacher in
Portsmouth. I'm very interested in yoga poses as a metaphor for states of
mind we seek to cultivate in ourselves. I find yoga to be a good practice
linking the physical body with writing since ideas begin in the body.
What’s the best piece
of advice (writing or otherwise) you were ever given?
What you need is already
within you.
What books do you love and what about them speaks to
you?
I love so many, many books
and am seduced over and over again. This is the best book! No, this is the best
book I have ever read! I go back always to the nobility of the characters
in The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway breaks my heart again and
again when I return to the old man and the boy who wants to fish. I see the
book as perfection of language and am drawn in my own work to the precision of
Hemingway's words. Another master is Edwidge Danticat who shows us the hearts
and hungers of the Haitian people with her exquisite voice. I would
almost use the word sacred when I read Danticat. I keep William Staffford's
poems close by.
What are you working
on now?
I am just finishing a book
about a 17-year old girl, Sofie, who is the daughter of a NH fisherman and a
Cambodian mother, called Either the Beginning or the End of the World.
It's a story of first love when she meets a soldier returned from Afghanistan.
When she tries to understand his war trauma, for the first time in her life she
begins to comprehend her mother who was a child survivor of the Pol Pot
regime. Her love for the soldier is the beginning of her grasp of her own
identity as both a daughter of her father's New Hampshire Seacoast and of her
mother's war. The title is from a poem by Carolyn Forché "Ourselves
or Nothing." The novel is set on the New Hampshire Seacoast and Carolrhoda
Lab will publish it in fall, 2015.
You can learn more about Terry Farish and her work at http://terryfarish.com
