Temple Secrets: Southern Humorous Fiction: (New for 2015) For Lovers of Southern Authors and Southern Novels (36 page)

Name one or more of your favorite books. What do you love about it/them? If they changed your life in any way tell us why.

Non-fiction: C.G. Jung:
The Earth Has a Soul.
I love this book because I love thinking of the earth as having a soul, and it is full of symbolism. I studied my dreams with a Jungian analyst for a decade. It was the richest inner work I’ve even done. I was constantly finding buried treasure in my dreams. I also sometimes get ideas for novels from my dreams.

Fiction:
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
. I loved this book because it is a journey of transformation of a very unlikely character. I wish I’d written this book. It contains all the themes I love. Courage. Transformation. Secrets.

I also love
The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd and
Bel Canto
by Ann Patchett. These are both lyrical literary fiction (the kind of novels I like to write.) They also have strong female characters. I’m not sure male readers realize how ‘novel’ it is for women to find stories of strong women who are also main characters.

And then there’s John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
. When I read Steinbeck’s book, I had something to aspire to. It is in my view a great novel. Though he isn’t a southern writer, John Steinbeck has the soul of a southern writer and captured the landscape and characters in that story beautifully.

Name one or more of your favorite films and tell us what you love about them.

I’m big on foreign films so I love
Antonia’s Line
and
As it is in Heaven.
Also, just about anything by Susanne Bier, who is a Danish filmmaker. More recently I loved
The Fault of Our Stars
, a very courageous and poignant film based on the novel with the same name. I love stories that have an emotional element. Not lifetime channel, but real life emotions, as well as women in non-stereotypical roles. Women have been short-changed in films and novels for years. Our culture is only beginning to address this inequality.

What were you like as a child?

Very shy. Very outdoorsy. I stayed outside riding my bike, playing games with my brother, or playing golf. I rarely read, but did well in school. (How is that even possible?) There weren’t that many books in our home. It wasn’t until I was out of college and pregnant with my first daughter that I began to read voraciously children’s classics, trying to make up for what I missed. I have been a late-bloomer in lots of ways. Now I read all the time and all sorts of things. I haven’t stopped.

Is there somewhere you’ve traveled that has influenced your creative life?

As I’ve mentioned before, we lived out West for a few years, which is about as different from the moist, shady southeastern United States as you can get. I loved exploring this new terrain and the wildlife that resided there. It was in the West that I finally claimed my southern soul. I missed shade. I missed deciduous trees. I even missed kudzu! But I missed moisture most of all. Now I’m back in the southeast living in an area of the North Carolina Mountains known for its waterfalls. Life is good.

For Fun: From JL’s Uncle Jessie Meme

A song/band/type of music you’d risk wreck & injury to turn off when it comes on the radio?

Anything too loud.

A favorite show on television?

Rectify (southern gothic on TV!). Homeland. Last Tango in Halifax. The Good Wife. Just about anything with a strong, female lead. I want to see myself reflected in the stories I watch or read.

If you could have anything put on a t-shirt what would it be?

Creativity Rocks!

A favorite meal?

Something from my childhood: roast beef, mashed potatoes, fresh green beans and sliced tomatoes from the garden. Lemon meringue pie for dessert. My mother was a great cook.

A talent you wish you had?

Amassing wealth. No, not really. I honestly can’t think of any talent I wish I had, except maybe flexibility (I started yoga a few months ago.) If someone thinks I’m a talented writer, that’s enough.

What’s on your nightstand?

Whatever novel I’m currently reading, (I read a lot of novels!) a pencil to underline beautiful passages (unless it’s a library book), and my Kindle which I don’t use to read books but to play Scrabble. I’m a printed books kind of gal.

What’s something about you that might surprise us?

I once spent the weekend with a U.S. Senator. It was back in the 90s. The wife of Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings (S.C.) was interested in being an honorary board member of a non-profit women’s counseling center I was founding. She invited me and a friend to their house in Washington, D.C. for the weekend to talk about it. Mrs. Hollings (nicknamed Peatsy) was incredibly supportive and down-to-earth and lovely. But the thing that impressed me the most? They had AMAZING bath towels.

13 Things I Reveal About Myself in the Writing of Temple Secrets

by Susan Gabriel

1. Ancestors are important to me. The sense that we aren’t alone; that people came before us; that some may even be watching over us.

2. Secrets make people do strange things. Everybody has them. Sometimes we even keep secrets from ourselves.

3. The spirit world, or the invisible world, (think ghosts, spirits, the secret sense) is very much underestimated.

4. Female characters and female voices are underrepresented in our culture and in our world. My mission is to get more female characters out in the world who are courageous, and have integrity and humor.

5. I think characters over forty are the most interesting.

6. I think happy endings are possible in life, and that it’s only to the level that we’ve experienced sorrow that we can experience joy. Readers have told me that my books make them laugh and cry.

7. I love to make people laugh, so my books often have humor in them. When I was younger, I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. As a girl, I would sneak into the den late at night to watch Joan Rivers on Johnny Carson. Since my comedy act never hit the road, I became a writer instead. Well, first I became a teacher, then a psychotherapist, and then a writer. It was by no means a straight path to writing. I grew into it.

8. Old wise women show up in nearly everything I write because I have trouble finding them in real life.

9. I am fascinated with death, so there is usually at least one death in my stories. To me, it’s just the natural end of living. However, I rarely kill off an animal, especially a dog. (The exception was a dog dying of old age in one of my other books. I’m still sad about that.)

10. I think laughter opens us to a deeper emotional experience.

11. Sometimes when people are obnoxious in real life, I create a character with some of the same characteristics and then kill them off in the course of a story. Or they are found out for who they really are. I am very good at disguising these real people in the skins of my fictional characters. That way I don’t hurt anybody and it gives me great satisfaction. :)

12. I always write about things that interest me. I write the story that I would love to read, trusting that other people will enjoy it, too. Since I spend years writing a book, I have to love the characters and understand them. After I release a book, I often grieve the loss of not having the story in my life every day.

13. I think we are all trying to find our way “home,” in one way or another. Home being a place where we feel the most authentic.

Does anything surprise you? I always love to hear from my readers. You can email me at [email protected].

Temple Secrets Reading Group Guide

1. Who was your favorite character? Why?

2. What do you think motivated Iris? On the one hand she could be cruel and dismissive to Queenie, yet she had loved Spud Grainger for decades. Do you think she is a sympathetic or unsympathetic character? Why?

3. How much of a person’s character would you say is shaped by what has happened in the past, and by past generations?

4. Did it bother you that Queenie was willing to overlook so many of Iris’s faults in order to live with Iris? Why?

5. Do you believe that keeping secrets is justified sometimes? Should Queenie have told Violet who she really was from the very beginning? Why?

6. What do you think of Rose coming home to see her mother on her deathbed? In what situations might estrangement from one’s family sometimes be necessary for self-preservation?

7. The author paints Old Sally with a quiet grace and an aura of wisdom about her. How do you think she does this? Have you ever had an old wise woman in your life? If so, what was meaningful about your relationship with her?

8. In what ways do you think racism still shows up in relationships where people of color work for people who are white?

9. How was the Temple Book of Secrets an agent of change for the entire family?

10. How did you feel about Edward’s seeming redemption at the end of the novel? Discuss people in your life who have seemed totally one way and then who surprised you with something you never knew about them.

11. What role do you see Violet playing in the novel? What did you think of her ability to perceive ghosts? How might her children end up different from her because of her choices?

12.In the final scene, were you hopeful that all of the characters could live together peacefully? If you were to write a sequel for this novel, what do you imagine happening?

Other Books by Susan Gabriel

“A quietly powerful story, at times harrowing, but ultimately a joy to read.”

--- Kirkus Reviews, starred review (for books of remarkable merit)

Named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2012.

Set in 1940s Appalachia,
The Secret Sense of Wildflower
tells the story of Louisa May “Wildflower” McAllister whose life has been shaped around the recent death of her beloved father in a sawmill accident. While her mother hardens in her grief, Wildflower and her three sisters must cope with their loss themselves, as well as with the demands of daily survival. Despite these hardships, Wildflower has a resilience that is forged with humor, a love of the land, and an endless supply of questions to God. When Johnny Monroe, the town’s teenage ne’er-do-well, sets his sights on Wildflower, she must draw on the strength of her relations, both living and dead, to deal with his threat.

With prose as lush and colorful as the American South,
The Secret Sense of Wildflower
is a powerful and poignant southern novel, brimming with energy and angst, humor and hope.

Praise for The Secret Sense of Wildflower

"Louisa May immerses us in her world with astute observations and wonderfully turned phrases, with nary a cliché to be found. She could be an adolescent Scout Finch, had Scout’s father died unexpectedly and her life taken a bad turn...By necessity, Louisa May grows up quickly, but by her secret sense, she also understands forgiveness. A quietly powerful story, at times harrowing but ultimately a joy to read." – Kirkus Reviews

“A soulful narrative to keep the reader emotionally charged and invested.
The Secret Sense of Wildflower
is eloquent and moving tale chock-filled with themes of inner strength, family and love." – Maya Fleischmann, indiereader.com

“I’ve never read a story as dramatically understated that sings so powerfully and honestly about the sense of life that stands in tribute to bravery as Susan Gabriel’s,
The Secret Sense of Wildflower
…When fiction sings, we must applaud.” – T. T. Thomas, author of
A Delicate Refusal