A READING BY SHERI REYNOLDS

From Orabelle's Wheelbarrow

Well, it’s nice to be back in Richmond. It’s very nice to be back in Richmond. Actually, I miss Richmond a lot. And so I’m so thankful to be able to come here and share my new book with you because it took me so long to get it out. And it’s nice to bring it out with so many friends. And so I’m really excited about being with you tonight.

Before I start with Firefly Cloak, though, I’m going to tell you a little story, and I’m going to share with you a little bit of, just a couple of pieces from my play.

Earlier Susan just said, I think, that I have four novels. And I do have four published novels, but I will be the first to tell you that I have, I have at least eight that are unpublished and won’t ever be published and maybe more than that. And that for every one that I manage to publish, there is a least one or two that won’t be.

Back in the, I guess the late nineties, I started working on a novel that I called Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow. I teach full time at ODU, and I am not able to do any writing during the school semester. I am only able to write in the summers. And so summers are precious to me. It took me two years to draft Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow over the course of two summers. Of course in the school year when I’m not actually writing, I am, I’m writing, I’m just writing in my head sometimes or I’m dreaming for those characters or I’m marinating story lines. I’m not actually putting it down. So after a couple of years, I finished the draft of Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow. I sent it off to my agent, and she liked it. And we sent it off to my editor, and my editor said, “I like it, but I don’t like it enough.” And I’m like, you know I had been told before, “This is a ugly, gratuitously ugly book. Throw it away, we don’t want this.” But I had not been told, “I like it, but not enough.” And so, I’m like, “What does that mean? You mean, you want me to rewrite it?” And she said, “No. I think I’d like you to write another one.” And, of course, that’s rough, you know, I mean, I spend a lot of time on these things. And so, I sort of, you know, got drunk and started smoking again. And then I gave that up. And I’m like, okay, and I got back to work the next summer on Firefly Cloak, I think, I don’t know. The years run together. But I moved on to a different book.

But one of the things that I’ve been really working on, I haven’t mastered it, I haven’t figured it out yet, but how can I do the work I love as a teacher and make a way to do the work I love as a writer also. And so I decided that I wanted . . . Oh, I forgot to tell you this. My editor said that one of the problems with Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow was that my characters were over the top. So I decided that I would take my over-the-top characters and I would try to learn to write a play. And I would do it during the school year because it doesn’t require the same span of time that a novel requires. And I thought, this is not something that is, that has to be good. I don’t need to be a good playwright. I can just write a play.

And so, I ended up drafting Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow, the novel, I rewrote it as Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow, the play. And when I was finished, I sent it off to a group called the Women Playwrights’ Initiative, and it won their competition. It was for Southeastern women playwrights. And so I was very excited. You know, my first play wins an award. I’m going to see it produced. I didn’t know how much work was going to go into the revision of that play. The first thing that they did was (it was a three act play) they read it out loud, it took them three hours. They’re like, “No, two’s your limit. Cut it by a third.” Well, I feel like I’m writing novels again, right? I mean, it sort of feels that way. So anyways, even though I’m celebrating bringing out Firefly Cloak, the novel, I’m also celebrating the birth, really, of my first play. Because Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow was produced for the first time at the Orlando Repertory Theatre in Florida, back in September. And just this past week, it was published at Blackbird, here in Richmond. And so, if you want to read it, you just go to Blackbird’s web site, you know, click a couple a links and there it is.

So I decided that to honor Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow, I’m going to read a couple of little pieces from that play to begin tonight. Now here’s what you need to know about Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow. You actually probably don’t need to know as much as I’m about to tell you, so I’ll edit it a lot. Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow is a play about promises. It’s a play about breaking promises. The promises we break and the promises we keep and what happens to a promise after it’s broken. Because it’s a huge myth to think that when you break a promise, it goes away, right? I mean you live with a broken promise, just like you live with one you kept. I mean, it’s going to haunt you for a long time. So I ended up putting a character in a position where she had to break promises to her family.

The play is about a woman in her forties who is taking care of an elderly aunt and uncle, who are very, very demanding. And she realizes that she cannot continue doing that and yet she’s given her word that she will take care of them. And so there’s a character named Orabelle, who is an old lady who pushes around other people’s broken promises in her wheelbarrow. When I wrote it as a novel, I just wrote about the promises in Orabelle’s wheelbarrow. When I wrote it as a play, my promises could, like, jump out of the wheelbarrow and proclaim themselves. That was a really fun discovery that I made as I wrote it as a play. So I thought I would read you a couple of the promises from Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow. The promises come out when they need to make points to help the character understand what she does with her own promise. This is promise number two.

PROMISE 2
Well, my first year teaching, I had a third-grade class at Sunnybrook Elementary. Most of the students came from loving homes, but there was one girl who was a raggedy mess. Nobody combed her hair, and her clothes were stained and dirty. I never met her parents. I think they were on drugs. They never came to the PTA.

So one day when she had the croop and I had to keep her in at recess, I asked her to help me clean out the coat closet. There was a sweater in there with little bluebells embroidered all around the collar. I’d made it myself, but the arms shrunk up when I washed it. So I gave it to her and told her it was left over from the year before. She nearly coughed herself to death trying to thank me, and when I asked her how she got so sick, she said it was a secret.

I told her I could keep a secret. And she said, “Promise?” and I crossed my heart without even thinking about it. . . . Then she said that she’d sassed at her father, and he’d locked her out of the house in just her pajamas. She’d spent the night beneath the trailer, curled up on some blankets with the dog! I had to call social services, of course. They put her in foster care, and she didn’t come back to my class after that.

I went to visit her once, and she was wearing my sweater. She had her knees pulled up, and the sweater stretched over them. She wouldn’t talk to me at all. But those bluebells I’d embroidered around the collar, they just gaped at me—Seems like they accused me of unthinkable things.

Now there are some promises in the wheelbarrow that make the kinds of promises that we think about every day. Somebody says, “I’ll love you forever,” and then they stop, for example. That sucks. That’s a broken promise. But really what I wanted to look at were the more complicated promises. Like, what teacher would not call Social Services if they thought the child in their class was being abused? And then, it’s still a broken promise. It doesn’t go away because it’s the right thing ethically. It’s broken. So live with that a while. You know, so that’s what I was, I’m doing with the play. I’m going to read you one more. This one, well, it’ll tell you what it is.

PROMISE 6
I never actually made a promise at all. I never took a vow or signed an oath, or anything of that sort. Just tried to be a good neighbor. My neighbor was an elderly lady who spent most of her time on her porch. I lived across the street from her for seven years, and I helped her get her groceries in, rolled her trash can to the curb, fixed the hose on her washing machine when it blew out. The truth was, she drove me crazy. Meddled in my business and called me on the phone three times a day. I couldn’t even sit on my own porch without having to get into a conversation. Sometimes I’d go over and speak to her first, then settle in to read a paperback, and before I could get through a chapter, she’d be calling, “Billy, can you come take a look at the filter on my fishpond?” She aggravated the stuffing out of me—but she was my friend. She tried to microwave me little frozen barbeque sandwiches every time I stopped by.

When she found out I was putting my house on the market, she broke right down and cried. Tried to run off the realtor when he put the sign in the yard. So of course, I told her I’d stop by regularly and we could visit just like old times. I’ve been moved from that house three years next month. Haven’t even driven down the street since—cause I know if she’s sitting on the porch, she’ll wave me down and give me hell. But part of me’s scared if I drive by, her rocking chair will be empty. I couldn’t stand that.

So I look, of course, at implied promises too. Not the ones you make, but the ones you’re held accountable for anyways. And then the last thing I’m going to read you from Orabelle, this is my movement between the first act and the second. And this is actually done in three voices, but I only have one, so I’ll try to make it as distinct as I can for you to hear. But if you can picture it, the high drama happens at the end of Act One, or one piece of the high drama happens at the end of Act One, and this is your movement into the transition of the play. And if you’re picturing this, these voices are not, you don’t see them on stage. All you see on stage is Orabelle’s wheelbarrow sitting in the middle of the stage with things in it that represent promises. Because of course Orabelle’ll pick up a stick and say, “Now this here promise, this is . . .” and she’ll tell you what it is. So these promises are real to her. And so all you would see is the wheelbarrow with these things that represent promises and then you would hear the voices off stage.

PROMISE 1
Promises aren’t solitary. Promises come in batches. They come in families, they get passed along—

PROMISE 2
Like old silver.

PROMISE 3
They’re in the attic and in the cellar, in trunks with broken latches, tied up with ribbon, smeared and faded. Their wax seals crumble away to leave oily stains.

PROMISE 2
Promises at the courthouse and promises at the jailhouse. Promises framed and hung on the wall.

PROMISE 3
Like art.

PROMISE 1
A promise doesn’t only exist between consenting parties. Oh no! It has an energy, a presence that disperses. A blown dandelion, fluff flying everywhere—

PROMISE 2 (sneezing)
A-choo.

PROMISE 3
A promise is polite. A promise says “god-bless-you.”

PROMISE 1
Sometimes.

(Pause.)

Sometimes a promise is rude.

PROMISE 2
A promise doesn’t only dress in black and white. Or if it does, it wears a lime-green slip beneath.

PROMISE 1
A promise is imaginative. Theatrical. Fond of tightropes.

PROMISE 2
A promise will blow up on you. Ka-pow. Ka-pow.

PROMISE 3
Promises pass through prison bars. Promises pass along barrels of guns.

PROMISE 2
Promises push up through your throat like new flowers.

PROMISE 1
Promises cower beneath your tongue.

PROMISE 3
There are promises that break in one way or another. If you don’t break them, your daughter might have to.

PROMISE 2
Your mother, your cousin, your lover.

PROMISE 1
There are promises to be kept another day, another lifetime. Promises that crawl back from the grave, a skeletal inheritance—

PROMISE 3
Remember me?

That’s the serious part of Orabelle. She’s also hilarious. I mean, it’s a really funny play. So maybe one day, you’ll see it.

Thank you.

From Firefly Cloak

Now I’m going to shift gears to Firefly Cloak. And I’m going to start from the very beginning so you don’t have to know anything at all and you can just sit back and enjoy it, I hope.

[From Firefly Cloak, by Sheri Reynolds, published 2006 by Shaye Areheart Books.]

So that’s the opening sequence of the book. Thank you.

And that’s your basic set-up to the book. You know, as a writer, one of my goals, probably my biggest goal, is to grow in my craft and to stretch myself with every thing I do. And it’s a nice way to think because that way if you write a novel that fails, it doesn’t really matter, you can just go, “Well, I stretched in my craft,” you know or whatever. So anyway, but that is my intention, and until this point everything that I have published had been written in first person so that I was speaking through the mouth of a character, from one person’s perspective. And in this piece, I’m in third person so I’m close to the character, sometimes right in their thoughts, but I also back up sometimes and can look at them more objectively. And I also wrote from three different characters’ perspectives in this book. So that opening section really could’ve been called a prologue. Because the very next sentence is, “Seven years later, when she finally found her momma she wasn’t in New England after all, she’d been living two hours away all that time up the beach just two hours and never coming to a single dance recital or ball game.”

Okay, so we jump seven years, right there. And I tell the story from Tessa Lee, from her mother, Sheila, who abandoned her, and from the grandmother, Lil, who raised her. And I really wanted to look at, I wanted to get into three different characters’ perspectives, and most importantly, I think, I wanted, and I hope that I have shown the full humanity of these characters. That’s really my intention, because Tessa Lee’s mother is a drug addict and a sex worker, and it’s real easy to go, “Ooh, you bad abandoning, drug addict sex worker mother. Bad person.” And that’s exactly what I want to get away from, because you don’t just one day end up being that. There’s a much bigger story, and so what I wanted to do is to hold the horror of what she did, at the same time, hold the circumstances that led her to those choices. So I tried to do that for all the characters. This is an interesting one for me because Tessa Lee, who is fifteen for the rest of the book, was the most difficult character to write, because she hasn’t lived long enough to really mess up. Not too bad, anyways.

So in terms of complexity, she’s not as interesting to me, although I hope I did all right by her. So I’m going to read you the section, I’m going to read you three more sections. I’m going to read you Tessa Lee finding her mother. I’m going to read you a short section from her mother. She’s hard to read early on because she’s hallucinating a lot, but it’s kind of fun. And then, I’m going to read you a grandma section, so that you get a sense of all these characters, and I hope you get a sense of the book. The only thing you really need to know is that Tessa Lee has run away from home to find her mother. She had a good lead. She finds her. And when she gets there, though, she is badly sunburned, you’ll need to know that later, because she wasn’t thinking about how it would be to walk for a long time looking for her mother.

[From Firefly Cloak, by Sheri Reynolds, published 2006 by Shaye Areheart Books.]

Guess I better stop and tell you what her momma’s doing. She’s working in a boardwalk attraction as a mermaid in a conch shell. She’s in a picture window, okay. So that’s where she is. So Tessa Lee’s face is up next to this window where she sees her mother, and her mother says, “Welcome to Fantasies of the Boardwalk. Buy a ticket at the booth to your left.”

[From Firefly Cloak, by Sheri Reynolds, published 2006 by Shaye Areheart Books.]

So that’s Sheila. Now I’m going to read you Lil. This is the last section. I’ve jumped to page 71 in my bound galley. I don’t have the actual book here. I don’t know what page it is in the book, but it’s way on up there. I’m jumping ahead to the place where Tessa Lee has made a friend at the beach who actually is kind of like a guardian angel and has taken very good care of her. And has helped her to get back in touch with her granny and her granny has come to pick her up. Tessa Lee has no idea that her mother went off because she’s, her mother is now on a path to reconnect with her. It’s going to be a long time and it won’t be pretty. But that’s the path that she’s on. But Tessa Lee doesn’t have any idea about that.

And so Lil has just picked up Tessa Lee, and is on the way home with her. And they live in a place called Hully Sanders Mobile City. It’s a very high-end trailer park. And it really makes me angry when people talk about trailer park trash because I don’t think that there’s any such thing. I think that that’s the stereotype, that’s what I write against. It is like, there’s more to it than that. It’s way too simple to say somebody’s just a drug addict or just a trailer park trash. Or, whatever, you know. So, anyway, this is a fine trailer park.

[From Firefly Cloak, by Sheri Reynolds, published 2006 by Shaye Areheart Books.]

Thank you.