By The River is brought to you in part by The University of South Carolina, Beaufort Learning in action, discovered.

Community Foundation of The Lowcountry, Strengthening community.

OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB.

The Pat Conroy Literary Center.

Artistic Flower Shop.

Born in Texas, raised in southern Louisiana and educated at LSU and the University of California Irvine, Elise Blackwell found a home and career in South Carolina and followed her calling to inspire college students to pursue the art of writing at Boise State University and the University of South Carolina.

Elise Blackwell's most recent novel The Lower Quarter follows the mystery of murder and stolen art.

I'm Holly Jackson.

Join us as we bring you powerful stories from both new and established southern authors as we sit by the river .

♪ Well, it's another beautiful day here in our Lowcountry studio.

We're coming to you from Beaufort, South Carolina and we're happy to have you.

This is Season Three of By The River.

Again, I'm Holly Jackson, your host.

This is a show that is a collaboration between South Carolina ETV and the University of South Carolina Beaufort, and joining me all around are a few students from the University of South Carolina Beaufort.

We're doing things a little differently this season, as you might imagine.

We're trying to social distance as much as we can and using all the protocols, but we wanted to bring you this show because we know that a lot of you are finding more time to read, and that's a great thing.

Alright, let's get right to it.

Joining me now, thank you so much for coming, and you are here to talk about your fifth novel.

You've been busy.

Also a professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

Tell us a little bit about book number four.

(Elise) Book number five is The Lower Quarter .

So yeah, I was on a book tour for my second novel which is set in 1927 Louisiana, and I was in New Orleans staying in the hotel in the lower quarter, and I had a feeling that somebody had died in the hotel room I was staying in, and that's where the whole book came to me, and I started to think about what would happen if there was a murder that happened right as hurricane Katrina was coming into the city, a murder that was therefore overlooked, and the book just took off from there.

(Holly) Wow, and now do all of your books kind of follow this kind of theme?

(Elise) Um, I think all of my books are really interested in the way that history and place shape each other, and shape people.

All of them are very interesting characters, though my settings have been disparate from Louisiana to Leningrad, Russia.

(Holly) And what made you decide on Louisiana and hurricane Katrina and all of that?

(Elise) Sure, I grew up in southern Louisiana and I wrote my first novel.

I set it in the Soviet Union in World War 2 and I was determined to write about a place as far away from Louisiana as I could get, and after that and I was no longer living in the south, I wanted to return home and write about some of the people I had grown up with, the stories I had grown up with, so I turned my attention to historic Louisiana and set my second novel during the great flood of 1927.

It was in the process of being published when hurricane Katrina hit, and I had to bring that novel back and rewrite it so that it could be read in a post Katrina world, and during that process I started thinking about the relationship of history, what happened in 1927 and what happened in 2005, and that led me to write The Lower Quarter .

(Holly) Tell me about the challenge that happened, I mean, the timing was kind of wild, right?

Whenever you're about to publish, and you're having to bring it back.

Was that kind of exciting or were you like, "oh, my gosh, what do I do now?"

(Elise) It was more devastating in the moment.

The novel was sitting on an editor's desk in 2005 and every radio station in the country was playing that Randy Newman song, Louisiana 1927 and the editor told me "by a year from now, by the time this book comes out, no one's going to want to read about water in Louisiana.

Everybody's gonna have Katrina fatigue."

Basically this book is no longer publishable.

So I pulled it back, started writing my third novel, Grub, which would come out eventually the same year, and then I thought, "no, I just don't wanna let that book go," and so I rewrote it taking into account what was about to happen and have it narrated by an elderly man on the eve of Katrina.

And so in 2007 I was on a book tour.

My editor packed me up in a car, a rental car, and I spent three weeks driving around the south, and my very first stop was in Ocean Springs and Biloxi, Mississippi, and I saw just how devastated the coast still was two years after the storm, and then I went in to New Orleans and there was intense interest in the region in the 1927 flood, and still just for the desire for the stories of Katrina to be told.

And I also saw the ways that New Orleans was changing.

It was becoming a completely different city, and so I wanted to sort of capture the seeds of that.

So my novel, The Lower Quarter opens with one of the main characters returning after evacuation, and she's reopening her shop where she restores water damaged art, and it looks at New Orleans in that particular moment of change.

(Holly) Whenever you got that message from her basically that this won't be of any interest in the post Katrina world as you had it then, did it ever strike your mind of "okay, let's just let it go?"

Sure, and I did.

I put it completely aside and wrote a novel called Grub which is a retelling of New Grub Street which is a satire of the Victorian literary marketplace in which I satirize the contemporary American literary marketplace.

It's set in New York and all the characters are writers or editors or agents, and I think that really kind of got any bitterness I was feeling completely out of my system.

It was also a lot of fun to write, and that enabled me to turn back and do my more serious work again.

(Holly) Bring in the artwork.

Was there a lot of research that you had to do for the book?

(Elise) Sure, one of the characters restores water damaged art, so I did a lot of research just on the technicalities of how to restore water damaged art.

Another character who's sort of the detective figure, Eli, he's been in prison for his activities as a Puerto Rican nationalist, and he's been let out of prison to help research stolen art, so I did a lot of research into how art is stolen, hidden and rediscovered.

One of my other characters is an artist and a bartender and I myself have been a bartender in Louisiana so no research required there.

But I think research was one of the funnest parts of the book because it enabled me to go back to New Orleans, a city I love, and examine some of the little places, neighborhoods, kind of block by block to fill in sort of my more general knowledge of New Orleans.

(Holly) Now let's shift gears a little bit.

You're also a professor.

Tell us a little bit about what you teach at USC.

(Elise) Sure, I teach in the Master of Fine Arts program at USC in Columbia.

We have a fantastic creative writing program.

Students from all over the country come to study either fiction or poetry, and then I also teach undergraduate courses in creative writing and in fiction writing in particular.

I also host a literary series that some of your viewers might be interested in.

It's called The Open Book and every spring we bring four or five writers to campus, usually fairly well known people nationally or even internationally, and on Mondays either I or a colleague give a talk about a book, and Wednesday the author comes, meets the audience, and signs books.

(Holly) Very good.

So how do you think that teaching helps you write and writing helps you teach?

(Elise) It's interesting.

Sometimes they feel like competing activities, but on the best days my students really inspire me to write.

There's a real sense of shared enterprise.

We're all writing and doing our work.

We're bringing craft problems to class and that can be really inspiring.

That said, I tend to do my best writing when I'm not teaching, and so summers and winter break.

(Holly) Well that goes right into the writing process.

Tell me a little bit about when you write, time of day, how you write.

Is it the old legal pad and pen, or do you get out your keyboard?

(Elise) One thing I've learned over the years is I think you have to be flexible about when you write and how you write.

At times in my life I've been sort of very rigid about it, but it's really easy to go off course.

I think it's important when you're working on a book length project in particular, to write every day or almost every day at about the same time.

I like to write in the morning with my coffee and a legal pad, but my dogs are not always cooperative with that, so more often it's after the dogs get settled down, after they get walked and have their play time, I sit down at my computer and work, and then it's catch as catch can.

(Holly) Was writing books always part of the life plan?

(Elise) Yeah, I started writing when I was five.

I just loved it from the get go.

I was just always obsessed with stories, and my grandfather whose memoirs my second novel is based in part on, sat me down and he said "I think you like to write, so I'm going to give you a dollar for every story or poem that you write.

I said "great!"

and then a couple of weeks later he had to give me twenty dollars which is a lot of money for a five year old at that time and he said "look, I want you to keep writing, but I'm not gonna keep paying you and keep writing but don't do it for the money" which turned out to be like spectacularly good advice for somebody who writes literary fiction.

And then I just kept up with it.

(Holly) Who have been your critics along the way?

(Elise) Ahh, my critics.

Well, my first professor when I went off to graduate school at the University of California Irvine, he threw my manuscript on the table and said "this is neo Faulknerian and he used an expletive, and it's not why we let you in here."

So he was one of my first strong critics and he was right, but his delivery was a little harsh.

And then I've been really lucky to have some wonderful professors in particular along the way, and then a few friends who read for me.

(Holly) Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that.

Do you have a circle of friends who will tell you "ehh, I don't know exactly which path you're going on here" that sort of thing?

Do you have maybe writing groups that you take part of?

(Elise) No, I have at different times in my life.

Now I have a few people I talk over maybe a plot point with, get some ideas from, and I think writing groups can be wonderful, but I pretty much protect my drafts now, and my agent and my editor are the first people who see them.

(Holly) I'm interested about your students.

Are they mandatory readers?

(Elise) No, I do not require my students to read my work.

In fact, I asked them not to, and just sort of hold off, because my tastes are really wide ranging and I don't want them to feel like they need to imitate me, write in a certain tradition, so I always invite them to read my work after they're done with class.

Of course, some of them do anyway.

On the other hand, I do require them to read a lot and I think the idea that you can write without reading widely is misguided.

(Holly) Tell me a little bit about your bookshelf of your own.

What do you like to read?

(Elise) So my tastes really are wide ranging.

I read everything from, you know, the hilarious short stories of South Carolina writer George Singleton, to the really serious work of German writer W.G.

Sebald and probably everything in between.

But I think my very favorite novels blend some idea that every moment is a historical moment with a love of the lyrical sentence in lyrical language, so Michael Ondaatje is probably my favorite living writer.

(Holly) Nice to hear a plug for George Singleton.

He was on Season Two of By The River and he was a hoot to talk to.

(Elise) Always a hoot.

I followed him on a book tour once.

I was about a week behind him.

We had books out at the same time and every bookstore I went into had a George Singleton story for me when I arrived.

(Holly) Oh, that's great.

Let's talk a little bit about pandemic.

As a writer, how has that... how have you been as a writer during the pandemic?

Are you writing more?

Are you writing less?

Are you writing differently?

How would you describe it?

(Elise) I thought I would write more.

I usually travel in the summer so I expected to be not in this country this summer and to my surprise found that I was.

I have been.

I thought I would write more because of it, but to be honest it took me a little while to find my groove.

I think in the early days of the pandemic a lot of us were checking the news maybe more often than we should, and then I settled down and have been able to write every day, and it's been an interesting experience to be in Columbia all summer which I haven't done for a while.

So I think that's finding its way into my writing a little.

My patterns have changed just a bit.

(Holly) And you're on book number six right now, so just like when you were writing and you had to plug in Katrina, are you having to now go and plug in this pandemic?

(Elise) No, so the book I'm writing is called Spa.

It's set at a wellness spa in southern California.

I like everyone of my books to be quite different from the other ones and this is something new yet again, and it's loosely based on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain which is set at a sanitarium during a time of tuberculosis, so it's interesting that it is aware of illness and wellness as a theme but it's set before the pandemic.

No one's wearing face masks.

(Holly) Okay, got it.

Alright, so again we are with Elise Blackwell and she is a professor over at University of South Carolina in Columbia.

But here we're joined by students from the University of South Carolina Beaufort, and I always like to ask the authors if they could just give some advice to students, not necessarily in terms of writing, but maybe so they're about to go out into the world and try to figure out which road to take.

So what would you say?

(Elise) Sure, I think, and I'm gonna give writing specific advice, but I think it applies to any field.

A lot of my students have craft questions for me, but I also get them to try to think of the art questions, the bigger questions of inspiration and purpose and meaning, and one thing I tell them is to follow their own peculiar interests and obsessions.

That, I think, does a couple of things.

One, it allows them to do the kind of work that only they can do that no one else can do whether that's writing or something else.

If they follow what they're deeply interested in, in their own strange little obsessions, they will find what they and no one else have to give to the world.

And I think it also by doing that helps them find the love of their work that will keep them writing or doing whatever they're doing after they graduate, when no one's giving them deadlines, when no one cares if they finish a book or not.

(Holly) And then as we record this now, we're recording this in a moment of uncertainty for all of us because we really, just as we were speaking before recording, I was saying "I have no idea if my daughter is going to be virtual or in person whenever the school year begins, and same as terms of college too, so when it comes to that, whenever, you know, that's how we all are, and many people who watch the show are adult writers for fun at home, that sort of thing.

During this unusual time, what kind of advice would you give on how to use the time and just how to be different during the different time?

(Elise) Sure, I think there are a couple of things.

One, I think there is an opportunity here amid the tragedy to get to work.

It's hard because I think a lot of us are distracted, but I think there is a rare opportunity to work.

I think it's also important to take some notes about what's happening.

We're sort of going day by day but we are actually living in a historic moment and people may want a record of this when we're done, so I'd say take some notes on your daily life and how it's changed.

Maybe it's a journal.

Maybe it will wind up in your fiction.

I don't know if I'll ever write about this time or not, but I do want to have some notes in case I do so I can remember how it felt.

(Holly) Have you been one to take a journal throughout your life?

(Elise) Off and on.

I used to be sort of anti journal, and I thought "well, why should I spend time writing a journal?

That's just time I could be working on my fiction."

But the older I've got, the more pro journal I've become, mainly so I can have a record for myself to look back at, and it's also sometimes how I work out how I think about things including problems in the novel that I'm working on in the moment.

(Holly) And starting your writing at the early age of five, I love the story about your grandfather and the dollars.

Do you have some of those works?

Have you seen how far you've come?

(Elise) I do.

I have some in my attic where they're probably rotting in that, you know, 110 degrees it is up there, but I do.

I have some of my early stories.

You know, they used to give us those pieces of paper where the first half is blank for you to draw a picture, and then there are lines at the bottom where you could write a little story.

I have a couple of those from kindergarten and first grade.

(Holly) Very special, alright, well I don't think we've talked about book number one, did we?

We talked about Grub.

We talked about The Lower Quarter , and there's two in between.

Can you give us just a quick little snippet of those?

(Elise) Yeah, sure, so my first novel Hunger is set during the siege of Leningrad and it's based on a true story about a group of scientists who starved to death during World War 2, who are heroic, and it's narrated by a man who is less than heroic, and so it's a novel about war but, I think, also about survival.

And then my fourth novel is An Unfinished Score and it's set in the world of classical music mostly set in Princeton and Philadelphia.

(Holly) Very good.

Well thank you so much for joining us.

(Elise) It was such a pleasure.

(Holly) Really appreciate having you here.

And your first trip to Beaufort.

I can't believe it.

(Elise) I'm looking forward to walking around.

(Holly) I'm telling you, in 2005 I had just graduated from the University of South Carolina, made a trip down here, and I'm like "why did it take me so long?"

and I think you're going to feel the same way once you get out and explore.

It's a beautiful place to be, and you know we all invite you all to come here anytime you like.

You know, this is your place too.

South Carolina ETV Lowcountry studio.

We'd love to give you a tour around here if you'd like.

Just give us a call.

Just Google us.

You can find our number, and you could come give us a visit.

Elise Blackwell, thank you so much for joining us.

It's been a real pleasure talking to you, and everybody, we want to say thanks to you for joining us.

You're watching Season Three of By The River.

We love having you tag along and we love to hear from you.

So many of you drop us emails throughout the season and tell us what you think and what you've read and some feedback, and it's always good to hear what you have to say.

We're gonna leave you now with The Poet's Corner and we hope you enjoy it.

Again, I'm Holly Jackson, joined today by Elise Blackwell.

Thank you so much.

You're watching By The River.

(A Reading from the poem Diving Deep) This is the season of our diving deep.

This is the time of the unveiling and this is my story.

I am mermaid since my birth, my first breath, my enchanted childhood at Folly Beach, with long flowing brown hair, big brown trusting eyes and a shimmering emerald tail, under the protection of my family and the sun, but I loved the moon.

Her strong magnetic rays pierced my soul.

I longed to swim beneath the surface of the waves to the place where mysteries lie, especially in my dreams at night in the deep dark, and I was not the only one attracted to hidden things.

There was a boy, a beautiful boy.

The one I adore, with the bluest eyes and raven hair.

Eyes that could drown you, collecting hearts like the little plastic green soldiers on his windowsill next to the army green porch cot swinging back and forth, rhythmically like the ocean, mesmerizing in his ability to both create a fortress around his life and invite you in at the same time.

And one day this boy, this beautiful boy, became a man, a thief, a pirate, stealing the love of innocence, gathering them like the shiny gold coins in his treasure chest.

He wove a web of deception with mist and fog, intoxicating and dangerous, capturing us at our most vulnerable with a charm that hid his true identity hoping we would forget.

But mermaids, mermaids always remember every whisper in the air, every kiss stolen or given freely, and we will always rise above every storm that seeks to remove our anchor, that seeks to shatter our peace.

This is the season of our diving deep.

This is the time of the unveiling and no one, no one is set free, truly free until every shadow and every act in secret meets the blinding sun in a moment of truth.

♪ (Elise reading from The Lower Quarter) Taped into stiff brown paper, the small painting sat atop her feet, tilted against her shins, a slight felt weight.

Johanna worked the padlocks combination with the precise strength of someone who gardens or sews.

This she practiced neither skill and then coiled the link the chain she'd used five weeks earlier to secure her workshop's door handles.

Lifting the painting to her hip with one arm, she pulled open the door with the other.

The room released the dank smell of earth turned inside out, of something brought up that should have been left buried.

♪ By The River is brought to you in part by The University of South Carolina, Beaufort Learning in action, discovered.

Community Foundation of The Lowcountry, Strengthening community.

OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB.

The Pat Conroy Literary Center.

Artistic Flower Shop.