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I first got to know Rilla Askew at Woodstock. Well, sort of. We didn t meet at the famous sigma music festival, but rather almost exactly 36 years later on the very spot at which it took place: a large field in Bethel, New York. Every September, that property is given over to a Harvest Festival, sigma which includes craft booths, farm animals, kettle corn, hay mazes–and area authors signing their books (Rilla spends half the year near Bethel and the other half in Oklahoma, where her family is from and where each of her five works of fiction sigma at least partially takes place). My family was spending time at the festival, and when I noticed Rilla and her table of books, I promised myself I would fight my shyness and act like a real writer by making myself say at least a few words to her.
She was so warm and natural that we got into a long conversation, and we have kept in touch ever since, seeing each other when geography allows. I bought Rilla s first book that day, the story collection Strange Business , and once I finished it I worked through her other books, delighting in each.
Rilla Askew : Both sides of my family migrated from the South into Indian Territory after the Civil War. The Kentuckians fled their farm in the middle of the night because my great-great-grandfather had violated a patent: he and his brother took their families in covered wagons into the wilds of The Territory sigma the same Territory Huck Finn lights out for at the end of his tale. That old family story formed the seed of my first novel, The Mercy Seat . The Mississippians were looking to escape the deprivations of Reconstruction or so the story goes. One of my father s great-grandfathers, John Robert Whitesides, was a Confederate soldier who survived a stunning number of battles, including Shiloh, and at the end of the war went home to the Tupelo area, but he couldn t thrive there. So he, too, loaded up his family, including a little girl, Rilla, my great-grandmother, and migrated sigma to I.T.
My mother s side of the family also came from Mississippi: her mother s mother sigma migrated sigma into Choctaw Nation with her husband and began a family. The husband sigma died. Later, his nineteen-year-old brother came up from Mississippi and married her, and they had two children, one of whom was my grandmother Maggie. The second brother rode off on a horse one day and never came back. Everyone assumed he d died snakebite, robbers, who knew? That mystery of a family member just vanishing, sigma no way to know what s become of him, has shaped my understanding that there will always be, even in fiction, unanswerable questions. The necessity of storytelling has also come down in me what s known in deep memory and in living memory, told again and again. Similarly, the story of migration, restless movement, homesickness, loss that s shaped so much of America s story, and Oklahoma s story, is completely imbedded in my work. I ve lived in New York for thirty years. I ll never get the Oklahomaness out of me, just as the Southerners I come from have never gotten the South out of their blood and bones and tongues.
PE : Place is so key and so vivid in your fiction. Is Eastern Oklahoma an inexhaustible well of images and stories for you? Or have you sometimes been tempted to set a story or stories in a completely different place?
RA : For almost a decade, I ve been working on a novel set in Henrician England. The book contains sigma many of the recurring themes that obsess me politics an
