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A&E FEATURE

03 29 05

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Smarter and Stronger

By Jill Marquis

WHAT:“Ellen Gilchrist: On Writing and Publishing” master class
WHEN: 9 a.m. Friday, April 1
WHERE: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 533 Royal St., 581-1144; www.tennesseewilliams.net

“Most of the humor in the Rhoda (Manning) stories is making fun of how seriously I have taken myself ever since I was 4 years old,” author Ellen Gilchrist says. “I wanted to be an adult.”

In Ellen Gilchrist’s early New Orleans stories, the men make money, the women serve on committees, and almost everyone drinks too much. The children are spoiled, the mothers are beautiful, and most of the characters except the maids are extremely wealthy. In one, a Tulane frat boy takes a joy ride in a Bunny Bread truck and redistributes the wealth, tossing white bread and cupcakes to the people of the Irish Channel. Then he turns himself in and his reputation as a New Orleans wild man is cemented. People sweat in these stories, they play tennis, they become embroiled in the pettiness and insular nature of New Orleans high society. In short, reading Gilchrist’s New Orleans stories is a funny, sad, wild ride through a part of town few of us normally encounter.

In her later stories, some of the same characters are parents who stop drinking, take up yoga, and worry about their children’s errant ways. They grow old but don’t settle or really settle down. Instead, they get stronger and smarter and keep on struggling with their desires. It’s an optimistic vision, and one that we’d like to believe in.

It was a pleasure to find out that the source of all these fabulous yarns is as gracious and witty in person as the narrators of her stories. Gilchrist, the author of more than 20 books of fiction and poetry, is currently serving as the Zale Writer in Residence and Mellon Professor at Tulane University. “I’m having a wild time finding my way around New Orleans again,” she said at a recent panel discussion on writing at Tulane. “I’ve gotten very generous in my old age. Go ahead and ask me anything you want about what you dream of doing.”

Gilchrist has returned to New Orleans for a semester after decades of dividing her time between Fayetteville, Ark., and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. On the panel, she discussed her new nonfiction book, The Writing Life, and shared her thoughts on a wide range of subjects. It was one of those perfect spring days; after a group yoga session on the quad, a crowd of writers, scholars and fans filed into Freeman Auditorium to ask Gilchrist and fellow writers Ethan Canin, Molly Giles, Peter Cooley and Paula Morris how and why they write.

The questions were predictable, but the answers were not. For example, while discussing one of her recurring characters, Gilchrist noted, “Most of the humor in the Rhoda stories is making fun of how seriously I have taken myself ever since I was 4 years old. I wanted to be an adult.”

Rhoda Manning, child of the Delta, spoiled but not spoiled rotten, hard headed and always headed for trouble, is the center of many of Gilchrist’s best-loved stories. If there is a formula to Gilchrist’s writing, it might go something like this: Put a gal in an unfair situation, have her come up with an outrageously bad solution, and then instead of having her think better of the idea, have her actually do it. In “Revenge,” 10-year-old Rhoda is left out of her brothers’ and male cousins’ summer Olympics training and pesters them relentlessly. Then, one night during a wedding reception, she gets a little bit tipsy on the back porch (everyone drinks in the early stories) and comes up with a crazy idea. She runs out to their “Olympic training ground,” takes off her formal dress and pole vaults in her drawers. After a while the whole wedding party is out there watching her in the moonlight. Rhoda’s the center of attention, and she’s on cloud nine because that is her revenge: “I lay very still in the sawdust, waiting for them to reach me. Sometimes I think whatever has happened since has been of no real interest to me.”

It is fair to say that this formula describes only a tiny percentage of Gilchrist’s stories. And while it may seem rude or reductive to try to come up with a formula for art, it’s a way to try to figure out how things work. Gilchrist certainly understands the formulas that work in writing, but perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t necessarily work. For example, at the panel discussion, Gilchrist asked, “Did Shakespeare have coffee?,” and provided a firm “no” to expand upon one of her central ideas in The Writing Life: that writers don’t have to get bogged down in drinking or drugs in order to have gritty material to write about. Even the caffeine in coffee can become a crutch, she thinks. She discusses her own alcoholism in one of the best essays in her new collection, “How I Got Stronger and Smarter Instead of Stupider and Sadder.” The main key to being a writer, Gilchrist said, is “You’ve got to be a curious person. Writers are generally curious people.”