- [Narrator] A production of the South Carolina Educational Television Network.

(upbeat orchestral music) (upbeat orchestral music continues) (upbeat orchestral music continues) (upbeat orchestral music continues) (upbeat orchestral music continues) - From the Waterfront Park in Beaufort, I'm Patti Just, we're visiting Beaufort to talk with author Valerie Sayers.

Ms.

Sayers grew up here in Beaufort and went on to live in New York, and she's the author of three works of fiction that we'll show you now.

She wrote "Due East," "How I Got Him Back" and "Who Do You Love?"

All published by Double Day.

Valerie, it's nice to have you on our program.

- Thank you.

- Tell us about your leaving Beaufort and going to New York, you left at about age 17.

- That's right, I left right after high school, when I think it's easiest to go, I had changed my mind four years later when I finished college, I came back to Beaufort for a year and taught at the... What was then called the tech school, it's since the Technical College of the Lowcountry, I think, and I was very, very happy here, Beaufort is a wonderful, peaceful place both for childhood, but as I discovered when I came back, in adulthood, but I finally decided that I was gonna go back to New York, and I got married there and am now stuck in Brooklyn.

- Had you planned to be a teacher and to be in education?

- No, that was something I just stumbled into and it just turned out to be a very happy year, I was teaching things like economics, staying one chapter ahead of the class, a wonderful course called Human Relations, I was great at Human Relations, and a little bit of writing, so it was a high-pressure year in some ways because I was so young and knew so little, but I was young enough not to know how little I knew.

- Then how did the writing develop?

- Well, I've been fighting writing all my life, my family always predicted that I would become a writer and I resented it, I didn't think it was very glamorous at all, so I resisted it as long as possible.

A friend of mine, Kevin Work, presented me in Columbia with a framed article that I had written as a teenager, I used to be the teen scene columnist of the Beaufort Gazette, it was humiliating to see it, especially behind a frame, but, you know, I always dabbled a little here and there, but as I say it, it seemed to me that it was a gruesome isolated life, and it is.

(people laughing) There are elements of writing that really are unattractive, but I was secretly writing for a long time, I mean, from... Probably from the time I was 17 or 18, I was pretty seriously writing, but denying it and thinking that I would do something else, so I taught for a year, I thought for a while that I would go to law school and be, you know, a criminal defense lawyer or a civil liberties lawyer, anything but write, and finally, I just, you know, couldn't put it off any longer.

- [Patti] Your first book, "Due East," was published in 1987, how long was that in the making?

- That was a long time in the making, not the book itself, but the whole process of becoming published, I was writing short stories, which became longer and longer and were connected to each other, and after a while, it occurred to me that this was something else I'd been resisting that I had to go ahead and do, which is write a novel, so I wrote a novel in my 20s, which is very much the novel of a writer in her 20s, it would've been all right to publish it then, but I'm glad that it's sitting in a box in my basement now.

- What was it about?

- Well, it was... Oddly enough, it was about a girl who leaves this small Southern town and goes to New York City, it was also very grandiose in its themes, it was about sex and death, as I guess all books really ultimately are, but in a big way, you know, I was reading a lot of Dostoevsky, so it was overblown, but it did get me some interest, I mean, some editors began to correspond with me and an agent picked me up, and so, though the book didn't get published at the time, it did provide me with a reason to think that I could continue at this a little longer.

- How was that when you first got that first agent, did you think you'd just made it then?

- Yes and no, I knew it was a very bad time for publishing, as it is now, in fact, publishing seems to go in cycles, and when I began to try to pedal a novel, the situation was very much as it is now, hard to get an agent and hard to get a publisher, and the agent was honest about the chances, so I had mixed feelings about it, I didn't know what would happen, but of course, you go to sleep at night being interviewed, at the time, it was probably being interviewed by Dick Cavett or, you know... And then, on alternate nights, you're giving your Nobel Prize acceptance speech, so I think the expectations for many writers go from very high to very low.

(laughs) - So then you filed that first book away and you started writing "Due East" then?

- That's right, it just kept going.

Right, just kept going and I got pregnant in the middle of writing "Due East," and so, that was a wonderful deadline, though I didn't have a publisher, I had this baby coming on the way, so it was good, it got me finished, and then, I kept going with the next one as "Due East" was making the rounds, "Due East" didn't sell immediately though it was a much quicker process, Double Day held on to "Due East," I think, for about six months before it finally said, "Yes," so that was a long six months.

- So can you say that you started writing about family relationships in a small town?

- Yes.

Exactly, and thought of it... Thought that I was writing about much bigger things, but I think you've probably put it very well.

- Tell me about "Due East," and it's a small town, very much like Beaufort, South Carolina, - Very much, suspiciously like Beaufort, South Carolina, right?

I intend for the town of "Due East" to be Beaufort and not to be Beaufort, it's landscape is pretty faithful, I think, to Beaufort and Beaufort as it's changed through the years, but its people, I hope, are not, though people in Beaufort all the time recognize themselves when I don't recognize them in the book.

(laughs) My intention certainly is not to put real Beaufortonians in the book, and the book "Due East" is about a 15-year-old girl who gets herself pregnant and claims that it's a virgin birth, and it's themes are really the issues of faith and denial of faith, and in a sense too of hope because she does go on to have this child, and though I would say the ending of the book is not wildly optimistic, it does leave room for hope.

- Would you read something from that book for us?

- Sure.

This is just the beginning of "Due East," and the chapter is called "A Virgin Birth" and it's narrated by Mary Faith Rapple.

"Since my mother died, I'd kept the same routine.

In the afternoon, I left the point and walked down River Street to buy the paper and my father's cigarettes.

If my father's friends were downtown having coffee..." (indistinct) "Or fussing with their boats at the marina, they'd watch me down the street all concerned and awkward.

They were worried from the time my father told them he thought I was going crazy.

All I'd said then was that I didn't wanna wear choir robes anymore, that I thought Dr.

Beatty's version of Jesus made him sound like a right-wing dictator, and that I had my own little visions before I fell asleep.

I had been complaining of dizziness too, but I hadn't meant for my father or his friends to think I was on the brink.

In all this time, though, they hadn't forgotten it, so someone's eyes always followed me through Due East.

I didn't mind.

It was like having a dog trailing after me or a guardian angel.

I got back home at 4:30.

The house was still clean for the morning vacuuming, so I had two hours to make supper.

I read the paper and tried folding the napkins in different shapes.

It never took two hours.

Since I'd been pregnant, I'd been waiting for my father to find out and the routine to change, but every night, when he came in for supper, he looked out past me and I was beginning to think that he'd never see, that somehow, I'd get through nine months and a delivery, and one night, he'd say, 'How did that baby get to the supper table?'"

- Did you know somebody like Mary Faith when you were growing up?

- No, I didn't, although people tell me now that I did.

(people laughing) Friends with whom I am in very close touch, I mean, that's one wonderful thing about Beaufort is that my best friends growing up are still close friends, and they pointed out all kinds of people I knew and probably in the writing had to repress or suppress in some way so that I... So that it wouldn't make them caricatures of real people, but it was my intention to make Mary Faith somebody out of my own imagination, not out of reality.

- Well, how were they developed, the characters and the town and all that?

Why did you decide upon this subject and this tale?

- I don't decide upon them, I decide upon something else, and then, these characters just make their appearances, and intrude and, you know, tugging at my hair, sometimes, it feels like, for instance, when I was writing my last book, "Who Do You Love?"

I had actually started another book, the book I'm working on now, and I took a trip home to Beaufort and I was walking through the woods by an old trestle I used to visit as a little girl, and all of a sudden, I had this realization that I had to write this book about a little girl walking through the woods, it was a very, very clear moment and memory of the time when Kennedy was assassinated, and I just thought, "Oh, I don't wanna write a book about a little girl, you know, no, not now, I have this other thing cooking," it just... It came over me as something I had to do and did not want to do at all, and that's pretty much been the experience with all the books, Mary Faith just intruded her way into my life and I thought she was gonna be somebody different from who she ended up in the pages, and her father, in fact, I wrote chapters and chapters in quite a different voice about her father, and he was quite a different man who kept insisting as I completed those chapters that he wasn't that man I was writing, and so, I better get with the program and rewrite 'em, and I did.

- You didn't mean to call the book "Due East?"

- No, no, and I can't say that I had a wonderful title, the book was originally entitled when it was submitted to the publishers after my mother died, and there were... We threw around a lot of other titles, including that chapter title, "A Virgin Birth," but the publisher settled on "Due East" and it did okay as that.

- Well, Double Day became interested in your book and they're the ones you've been publishing with all this time, how'd that happen?

- Well, the usual way it happens, that the agent submitted it to an editor there she thought would be interested, and the editor in fact was wildly enthusiastic from the beginning, her name is Lisa Wager, she's since moved on from Double Day, in fact, she's working in Bill Clinton's campaign right now, but having a single person attach herself to the work makes all the difference, and I think that most novelists experience that, that when an editor becomes passionate about the work, then the writer can sit back and relax and actually do some writing because the editor really does take on all the championing of the book that's necessary for an unknown beginning writer.

- Well, obviously, you were attached to those characters because you continued on with them, who are some of the other characters that you introduced in "Due East?"

- Well, in "Due East," Mary Faith and her father Jesse Rapple are the focus of the book, they're... The story's told in alternating chapters that is from alternating points of view, their points of view, but the character Steven Dugan is someone who had appeared in an early... In the first novel I wrote, now in my basement, and who also appears later on in "How I Got Him Back," and as a little boy, he appears a little bit in "Who Do You Love?"

Too, he's a character that most readers dislike intensely, but I like him.

He's bad.

(Patti laughing) - [Patti] All right, let's go to the second book then, "How I Got Him Back," tell me about that, the premise of that, you brought the characters back.

- Right, and in "How I Got Him Back," I was very anxious to loosen up a little bit with the writing, the first novel I wrote was wildly experimental as many very young novels are, or I thought it was wildly experimental, as I read it again these days, I see that it's not nearly so experimental as I thought, but "Due East" was much more restrained, I was interested in writing a much cleaner narrative so that I could get it published, and then, to be able to play from that point on, so when I got to "How I Got Him Back," I was really ready to play, and I wanted it to be in a lot of different voices and I wanted it to play with a lot of themes, I wanted it to be complicated, my kids always say that they want me to bring home from the grocery store a complicated cookie, you know, with lots of layers, and strange fillings, and sparkles on top and things, so I wanted "How I Got Him Back" to be a complicated cookie, and I played a lot with the architecture of it, you know, with the underpinnings of it, it follows the Catholic church's liturgical year, much of it is about the Catholic church, about a small community in a town like this where the church is very well-established, but still is not the predominant religion of the Protestant South, and I wanted it to be about betrayal, it has a soap opera tone to it, all the women characters in the book have been left as they see it, so "How I Got Him Back" refers at once to revenge, you know, how they get him back, pay him back, how they think they're going to get him back into their lives and also to the religious sense, "Him" refers not just to these betraying male characters, but to God, I mean, the South is God-soaked, God-absorbed, and yet, these are the last days of the 20th century and there's an abandonment going on, some people think in two directions, so those were the things I was interested in exploring.

- Many people are struggling with their very own beliefs.

- Exactly, and many people aren't struggling at all either, many people have thrown up their hands in abandonment in the same way that they throw up their hands in abandonment of whatever lives they are living, we live in a strange age of disposables.

- Tell us some of the characters in this book now, you brought Mary Faith along.

- Mary Faith comes back, right?

And I was shocked to go to my lawyer's office one day and discover that it was a sequel, we were talking... Both books have been optioned a couple... Well, "Due East" has been optioned a couple of times for movie projects, and there was a lot of contract haggling because "How I Got Him Back" was a sequel, so I sat in this chair in my lawyer's office and said, "It is not a sequel, it's not a sequel," but they very patiently explained to me the legal terms which make it a sequel, she does come back older with a four-year-old son, a four-year-old son I liked a lot, you know, he also kind of made himself up on the page, a bad, bad boy, and her father makes a little bit of an appearance, at this stage of the game, Mary Faith is in love with Stephen Dugan, who was a character in "Due East" too, she thought perhaps was gonna rescue her, and now, she thinks he's gonna marry her and really rescue her, but as it turns out, his wife, who's not shown too much interest in him in the last few years, seeing his imminent departure, develops a very strong interest in him and concurrently decides to have a very dramatic nervous breakdown, so that's one thing that's going on, and in another corner of the soap opera, a middle-aged woman named Becky Purdue is abandoned by her husband, who leaves her for a redheaded divorcee who has fingernails painted with gold glimmer hearts on them.

(Patti laughing) - And the story goes on, and it does seem complicated, but it works very well and you tell the story from all the voices that you present.

- [Valerie] Thank you.

- Would you read some of that for us?

- Sure, I'm also gonna start with the beginning here, I have such a hard time explaining what's going on in the novel that I find it easiest to just read for the beginning.

This is chapter one, called "Every Cent He's Got," and it begins with just dialogue, you can't see the paragraphs as I read, but just assume that these are paragraphs of dialogue.

"'He waited until the kids were in bed one night, and then, he said, Becky, I'm leaving you.

I'm in love with another woman and I'm moving in with her.

And Becky says not but one night before they were walking by the creek together, watching the stars in the heavens and holding hands in the cold, so when he said he was leaving her, she ran into the downstairs bathroom and upchucked.

It was that much of a shock, she just threw up.'

'Mercy, poor Becky.'

'Poor Becky?

Poor children, to have your daddy run out on you for a redheaded divorcee.'

'How's Becky getting by?'

'Oh, he's bringing by money.

The money's no problem, it's the living and total humiliation that's the problem.'

'She got herself a good lawyer?'

'There's no lawyer at all.

Becky's not gonna give him that divorce.'

'She's not?'

'The three ladies of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Alter Guild considered the repercussions of this contentiousness silently.

It was a dry Saturday afternoon in January.

They were doing an all-rose motif, and even though they had told Father Berkeley at least three times that the heat would have to go down for roses, it was still blasting away and the petals were showing the first limp signs of fading.

By Sunday morning, the heat, like a worm, would work its way through the flowers until the petals were edged with black.'

'It's not but 55° outside, he could turn the heat off, I don't know why he can't remember to turn it down at least.'

'He can't remember about half the sermon, why should he remember to turn the heat down?'

They giggled guiltily, Father Berkeley had been in a steady decline for a year at least.

'And why Elsie Cooney's got to have red roses, I don't know, I told her, I says Mary's such a light blue that we ought to have the pink there, pink would do much nicer for the blessed mother.'

(Patti laughing) - Your use of humor is so nice in the book too.

- Well, I hope so, I think it's offensive to some people, to some Alter Guild people I don't know about in Beaufort, but in Brooklyn certainly, I got some response there.

- I can imagine.

You also talk about movie-making in there, there's a movie going on being made in the town at the same time, can you talk about that a little bit?

I asked if you had seen that happen since Beaufort, it's been the site of some movies.

- Right, and I said, "No, I hadn't," but I was fascinated by this phenomenon Beaufort finds itself in, movie crews are always descending with pretty impressive projects, and it seems to me that that provides the opportunity to see the place in which you live through such different eyes, I mean, you're constantly reassessing it through the eyes of the location scout, for instance, and at the time, they were in fact scouting locations for "Due East" at the time I was writing these scenes for "How I Got Him Back," I wasn't involved in any of that, I stayed up in New York when the producers came down and the movie, in fact, did not get made ultimately, but I was just so interested in that process and what that's like, so I imagined myself a movie.

- What is the attraction, Valerie?

That so many people want to make movies here and people are writing about it.

- It's just beautiful, and I think a beautiful landscape attracts a very interesting crowd of people, I always felt growing up in Beaufort, my parents were Northerners, though I was born here, they were Northerners and they were not the only ones, I mean, they were also Catholics, Irish Catholics, and they were not the only ones, there was a large community of Catholics, there was a very longstanding community of Jews, black culture here is so interesting and so filled with the kind of self-determination that other places in the South didn't experience that... That the community itself is just fascinating, it's easy for me to see since I'm always dreaming of doing it myself why people settle here.

- You talk about your childhood, it must have been very idyllic in many ways.

- It was for me, I don't think everybody in my family would answer the same, but I was... In fact, I think it's interesting that I was the first one born here and did... I do think of my childhood as... It's a terrible thing to say, I know it's suspect, but I do think it was a happy childhood, I spent a lot of times roaming in the woods or sitting up in a pecan tree reading a book, and it's... I think that's a good way for a child to grow up, to jump on a bike and ride downtown to the library or whatever, you know, very much a small town, like, sitting on the courthouse steps, sitting on the bluff.

- [Patti] All right, well, tell us about "Who Do You Love?"

Published in '91... - "Who Do You Love?"

Is about a family of Irish Catholics, not at all like my family, I want to reassure the members of my family, intentionally as unlike my family as they possibly could be, it's the days of John F. Kennedy, Kennedy in fact is about to be assassinated, and the forward action of the novel takes place all in one day, in the day before Kennedy was shot, so the book begins with the inscription, "November 21st, 1963."

This was the first book I did some concurrent research with, I came down to the library here where I was very thoughtfully provided with old front pages of the Beaufort Gazette, in fact, the old entire copies of the Beaufort Gazette, which confirmed my memories that it was a really painful time for Beaufort, it was the time of integration and it was the time when schools were breaking up, the high school was about to be integrated and a private school was formed in reaction to that, so I was just real interested to see my memories confirmed.

- This is about the Rooney families having some difficulty of their own.

- That's right, they have plenty of difficulties to mirror the difficulties around them, and the story opens with Dolores Rooney in a chapter called "Red Satin '90s."

"It was a dreamy Thursday in Due East.

Dolores Rooney stood on the bluff overlooking the Due East Bay and daydreamed for once in her life shamelessly.

She was not a woman for standing still, but it was one of those delicious soporific warm fall days and it would've been sinful not to bask in it.

This was a day to stop a while, to be a Mary, not a Martha.

The Bay below was a broad still car-skating mirror, and it released one of those almost salty smells that teased her memory in the vaguest way.

Every now and then, an enlisted man drove by with his convertible top down, his radio whispering some too-slow song by some bleeding boy singer, Paul Anka or Bobby Vinton.

Dolores Rooney saw a gawky crew-cut young man making his way across the bluff to talk to her, and she considered fleeing.

She wasn't at all sure she could bear a conversation with an earnest fellow whose glasses from a distance resembled two miniature television sets, flashing light.

Dolores Rooney did not have a good history with young men passing through Due East.

She recognized this one as that reporter from the New York Times in town for the court marshal, 'Drill Instructor Forces Recruits on Harrowing Swamp March, One Marine Dead.'

He probably meant to interview her, to ask her how the community reacted to this tragedy, as if there were more than one way to react to a mad drill instructor and a dead teenage boy."

- All of your books are published by Double Day and you're working on the fourth one right now.

- [Valerie] Right.

- You're branching out a little bit for this one.

- I'm afraid so, yeah.

(laughs) The fourth one takes place in Due East, it took me... My current editor, Casey... (indistinct) Who's just been a wonderful, wonderful backer of my work, said, "So does this one get beyond Due East?"

And I said, "Sure, it's only one chapter in Due East," and as I wrote that chapter, it extended itself to about 200 pages.

(laughs) - You said you've been fighting writing all your life, but it looks like you're having a good time with it now in New York.

- Sometimes, it's fun, yeah.

- [Patti] Valerie Sayers, thanks for being with us.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for watching, from Beaufort, I'm Patti Just.

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