Author discusses harsh realities of centuries-old Appalachia

Morgan

March 28, 2000
Web posted at: 5:48 p.m. EST (2248 GMT)

(CNN) -- Author Robert Morgan is a native son of the North Carolina mountains. His novel "Gap Creek" tells of the struggle faced by a man and woman living in turn-of-the-century Appalachia. "Gap Creek" has spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestselling fiction list and is recommended by talk show host Oprah Winfrey's book club.

Morgan currently teaches creative writing and English at Cornell University. He visited with CNN Sunday Morning to discuss his book.

Kyra Phillips, CNN Anchor: Well, let's talk about the book. I love how you did your research, talking to older people. Do the stories help you put this book together?

Robert Morgan, Author, "Gap Creek": Oh, yeah. The book is based on stories I've heard in the family and in the community I grew up in and it's true, every time I go back to Green River and the Blue Ridge Mountains I try to visit the old people who still know the stories.

Q: You remind me of my grandfather. He remembers all the old stories. I usually go to him for my research, too.

Morgan: Absolutely.

	AUDIO
Robert Morgan on... Listening to his characters tell the story: 127K MPEG-3 172K WAV The message within his story: 143K MPEG-3 196K WAV How one learns to write: 123K MPEG-3 168K WAV

Q: Well, you talk about your breakthrough in fiction, fiction writing was recreating voices. Tell me what you mean by that.

Morgan: Well, I wrote poetry for about 15 years and didn't write any prose fiction. But I had all these stories I knew I wanted to tell and I did write a lot of them in third person. And some of them worked very well in third person. But once I got the idea of letting the characters tell their own story, it was a kind of transformation in the writing. It was almost as though I didn't have to write it. I just listened to the story and the characters told it and I wrote it down.

Q: Speaking of characters, your grandmother has a very important role in this book, correct?

Morgan: "Gap Creek" is loosely based on the first year of marriage of my maternal grandparents. I mean, most of the details are made up but some of it is based on the stories I had heard. I knew them a little bit when I was very young and it was fun to try to imagine what they were like when they were 17 and 18 years old and what it was like to ...

Q: Quite different.

Morgan: ... to get married and move down to Gap Creek, South Carolina, really without a cent, to start from nothing. The book really is about how they deal with all the problems they had: sickness, flood, fire. A friend of mine said, 'You should have called that book "Job Had It Easy."'

"Gap Creek" is currently No. 7 on the New York Times best-selling fiction list

Q: Boy, that would be a real -- that would be -- Appalachian fiction, big focus on women, correct?

Morgan: Yes. I've discovered that if you have a woman narrator it's a little bit easier because women tend to be better observers of detail. Also, women are more willing to talk about how they feel and about their relationships. So I've been very lucky with women narrators. I do think most Appalachian fiction tends to be about women, especially the fiction set in the past, maybe because the women had such a hard time, such a struggle because they had to look after their children, after the house, they had to help out in the field. If somebody got sick in 1900 you didn't have a doctor, you didn't have a clinic you could go to. So the women's stories, I think, actually make better stories.

Q: Well, it focuses a lot on marriage, also. Is there a message about marriage or insight, interesting insight to marriage, do you think?

Morgan: Well, if there's a message to the story it is that people can grow. They can learn. And I think the characters in the story, both Julie and Hank, do learn from that first year and they learn to be tolerant and to forgive and I think that's important.

Q: Isn't it, though? In regard to your students that you teach at Cornell, what do you tell them about writing fiction and how do you begin your classes with them?

Morgan: Well, the first thing I say is, of course, you can't teach writing.

Q: It's a gift.

Morgan: I'm a kind of coach, I'm not a teacher. You only learn to write by writing. It's like playing tennis or something, really. You do it and do it and do it and get better at it. But it can be learned even if it can't be taught and I tell them you only learn by practice. You do not try to transcribe real events to the page, you create a sense of reality, one word, one detail, one phrase at a time.

Q: Well, it's a beautiful book. Once again, it's "Gap Creek." Robert Morgan, thanks so much for being with us here this morning.

Morgan: Oh, thank you very much.

Salon review: Dynamic memoirs touch on depression
September 10, 1999

Oprah's Book Club
Algonquin Books

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.