“You Have To, You Know, Carve.”

A Talk with Margaret Verble: Cherokee, Debut Novelist, Pulitzer Finalist

Maud’s Line is a debut novel that takes place in Eastern Oklahoma in 1928. It explores life on a Cherokee land allotment and stars, “a gun-toting, book-loving, dream-chasing young woman whose often agonizing dilemmas can only be countered by sheer strength of heart.”* The book was a surprise finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is available in paperback this week. We talked to author Margaret Verble about her novel and her writing life.

After a long career designing training workshops, this is your debut novel. Why did you start writing fiction?

Simply because the ends of my fingers itched.

And before that?

I have an undergraduate degree in English, masters in English Education. I married a poet and I had to earn a living, so I got sidetracked. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve had a very successful career, so I’ve been sidetracked a long time. But it got to be an almost overwhelming compulsion.

Do you think there’s an idea that it’s a young person’s game to publish your first novel?

One of the lovely things about writing is you can do it into old age, if you stay mentally bright. The work I’ve been doing teaching workshops is physically tiring, but writing is an ideal profession for older people.

What did you first start writing fiction about?

About this land and this group of people that ended up in Maud’s Line. But of course that first stuff is autobiographical trash that you just have to throw out. And then I spent several years on a novel that pre-dates Maud’s Line. There are references to the plot of it in Maud’s Line, which only last week when I was meeting with a book club did I finally have a reader that was perceptive enough to say “hey there’s a real mystery embedded in this novel.” She picked up on it.

How did this one eventually get published?

I just wrote it! And Roxana Robinson has been mentoring me for a long time and I mentioned to her I’d finished another book, and she said, my agent who hadn’t been taking people forever is taking people right now, send it to her.

I’ll tell you a story: I had cancer the entire time I was writing this book. It was misdiagnosed and I got sicker and sicker and sicker. I didn’t tell anyone. I had sent Maud’s Line in hard copy to Lynn, and then when I was in the hospital, her assistant emailed me and asked for an electronic file, but I was too sick to do it. My best friend was with me and she had to go get my computer and prop me up so I could send it. Two days after I got out of the hospital, I was sitting up at my desk for the first time when Lynn called. I was on so much painkiller that I got off the phone and thought I might have hallucinated the whole thing.

How did you find out you were a Pulitzer finalist?

Lynn called me. I was in my office in my basement, just writing an email.

What did you do?

I said “Are you sure?” She said yes. I said “The Pulitzer?” She said yes. She said, I’m sorry I didn’t call you immediately — like as if when you live in Lexington, Kentucky you have any idea what time the Pulitzers are announced — I had to call HMH first to make sure we get the badge for the cover!

Has it changed anything for you?

You know, it has. I can tell, even as just a finalist, it’s a magic word to have next to your name. Everybody knows about the Pulitzer. So, you know, I’m smarter and the book’s better (laughs).

The book sort of begins with brutality toward animals. Are you a big animal person?

I mean, I like cats.

But that cow got killed. That’s based on a real incident. I’d known about it for about twenty years. It never really set well to me to ax a cow in the back. And those people, those are their real names. They were going around axing our cows in the back, which is just not acceptable on any level. I think if you’re gonna write, you have to write about something that’s unsettling to you. And just going around axing cows, brutally killing animals, leaving them to suffer in the field is not okay. So I started with that.

Where these people live is, I don’t want to say brutal, but it’s a different kind of life than what’s out in suburbia. If you’re raised around Indians, they teach you different skills. I was gutting fish when I was three. Cause I had little fingers. Adults can’t fit, so they teach you to gut them with your little bitty fingers. I was skinning catfish at 9 or 10, and killing snakes, but those are considered normal skills. Axing cows in the back is brutal, but those are just what you have to do.

So shooting snakes is different because you have to?

It’s either you or the snakes! It’s irresponsible to send a child into the field without some sort of weapon. I got my first gun at ten but they taught me to shoot more like seven.

I’m curious about gender in this book — Maud seems to be expected to be such a caretaker even as she also shoots when necessary. Does she have to be everything?

Well that’s basically the role of women in that culture, to caretake. Maud’s fiction, but a lot of the people in this book are my family members. I’m very familiar with the culture that I’m writing about. They’re up making the breakfast and doing the dishes and feeding the chickens and gathering eggs and milking the cows. Now, the men are working hard too! It’s a hard, hard way to live. If you’ve never lived without running water or electricity, you can’t imagine. They didn’t get those until the 1950s.

And what about writing women’s sexual power?

Well that doesn’t seem peculiar to me. None of those people were really Christians; they just didn’t buy that stuff. And they didn’t buy all the stuff that comes with Judeo-Christian guilt. People get pregnant, and their families aren’t too bothered. If you have sex, you get pregnant, that’s a natural consequence of natural behavior. Nobody’s really out of joint about it.

No pressure about purity or marriage?

Well, Maud wants to get married because she wants to get out of these circumstances. She’s smart enough to know that’s her way out. But the whole kind of load that a lot of women I think in this country are raised with, these people never bought that.

Can I ask about your own family?

Maud’s uncle and aunt, those are my grandparents. Her little cousin, that’s my mother. I know those people. They’re all dead now. The little baby girl in that book is still alive though. She’s 94. I talk to her two or three times a week. My mother died young—she was my mother’s first cousin, and she just took me in, been a second mother to me. I’ve had her longer now than I had my own mother.

Were you afraid to show her the book?

I was. Y’all sent me four early copies of it before it was published. I sent two of them to Oklahoma.

To see if they were okay with it?

Well, just, heads up. Forewarned. But they love it. I think it’s a pretty loving portrait of these people. And they know that whole generation had to get out of that poverty. And they did! They became quite successful. You know Maud’s little cousin Andy, who’s in the Beautiful Baby Contest? He died only three years ago. Left an estate of $25 million dollars.

Whoa! From doing what?

I’m writing about that in my next book. Money always flowed into his hands. I remember when he won an airplane in a Monopoly game. I was about 6 years old. A real airplane. And he flew it from Oklahoma to Nashville, where we were living, by looking at the road down below. It’s absolutely true.

Was there really a sexy book peddler?

There was no sexy book peddler. But in my head, there’s always a sexy book peddler.

Is it unusual that a young woman in this time and place would have been such a fluent reader?

No! For one thing, my family was smart. And the Cherokee Indians valued education. The Cherokee seminary for women was the first institution of higher education for women west of the Mississippi river. If you were smart, you were trying to get your hands on books.

You keep saying “Indians” — is that the preferred term?

Y’all always ask that up here (laughs). I always get asked that in New York. Indians talk about themselves as Indians. Or Cherokees. They don’t talk about themselves as Native Americans unless they’re trying to be sort of high-falutin’.

Can you talk a little about your choice of character names?

After the Louisiana Purchase, there was an Indian agent named Lovely, well that was his last name, somebody Lovely. He convinced the president to set aside Northwest Arkansas and Northeast Oklahoma out of the Louisiana Purchase and make it a territory for Cherokee Indians to go to. A lot of them went, including some of my family, and they liked that Indian agent and a lot of them named their boys after him. Lovely was his last name, but they named their boys Lovely as a first name. They never named girls Lovely, they just named boys Lovely.

But I had an aunt Pig. Everybody called her Pig. And if you have an Aunt Pig, it gives you license to name people just about anything.

What advice do you have for people who have been focusing on other jobs and realize that they’re really writers?

Write every day. I think that’s the whole secret. It’s a craft like anything else. A writer has to sit down and write. It’s not a social activity. You get it done, just like any other kind of work. It’s like woodcarving. You have to, you know, carve.