“You’ve got to live in the work, not in relation to other’s perception of the work.” (Crucial advice for maintaining focus and resilience, especially in the face of rejection.)–Julie Hensley to Authorlink.com
“I think trusting your strengths and the aspects of craft that you find pleasurable is important. You can let them lead you into the story.” (Encouragement to lean into what makes writing enjoyable and use it as a pathway into the work.) –Julie Hensley to Authorlink.com
In her latest book, Five Oaks, author Julie Hensley explores family secrets across generations and unspoken legacies that are passed on from generation to generation. She weaves three timelines (the 1940s, 1970s and 1980s) each anchored by the family home place, Five Oaks, a lakeside retreat in Arkansas.
The novel is narrated by Sylvie, now an adult, trying to make sense of her eleventh summer when she was away from home for the first time with her sister Wren. Sylvie also narrates chapters dedicated to her mother’s and grandmother’s coming of age in the 1970s and 1940s respectively and chapters in which she imagines what might be happening when her older sister, Wren, sneaks out at night. Hensley said “this is a book about communication and memory, illuminating the power and limitations of both.”
We watch as Georgia, Margaret, Wren and Sylvia come of age and grow into womanhood dealing with first love, family secrets and personal challenges. Hensley shares her how this novel developed and shares her thoughts on family secrets, the lure of family stories and the power of image in storytelling.
AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?
HENSLEY: I had wonderful mentors, both at Kansas State University, where I earned my MA, and at Arizona State, where I earned my MFA. I have always struggled with plot, and Steve Heller used to tell me that no matter how lovely the language was, I still needed to make something happen. T M McNally used to say, “Don’t worry about how you’re going to sell it. Just write what you would want to read.” He also said that we should never write for revenge. I’ve tried to remember that and always write from a place of love, even when I’m trying to make sense of painful things.
AUTHORLINK: James Dickey said the idea for Deliverance came to him as a vision of a man standing alone on top of a mountain. His job was to get the man off the mountain. Where did the idea for Five Oaks come from?
HENSLEY: I think, for me, it was a matter of focusing my memory back on a place that was an important part of my childhood. I used to spend every other summer in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where my maternal grandparents had a lake cottage. That space is complicated in my memory—shrouded in deep love and joy, but also a bit of trauma that, as a child, I could feel but not fully understand.
When I began to consider writing about the lake, nearly two decades had passed since I had been there. Early in this project, I was really attempting to siphon a particular time and landscape from my memory. There is an image near the beginning of chapter nine that I distinctly remember writing early in the process: “Sometimes a wash of unexpected color surprised her—irises next to the limestone pump house or the slough of a garter snake through the tall grass. Such tiny details could send Margaret’s mind reeling back, and for a moment, she was six years old, kneeling at the lake wall, gathering her sundress so as not to soil the hem. Time would refract for a moment and then shatter in a silver flash, a breaking school of minnows.” When I wrote those lines, I got a funny feeling. This, I thought, this is what I’m trying to do with the entire book.
AUTHORLINK: This is very much a family story. Why is the family a good canvas on which to explore self, other and what gets passed down through the generations?
HENSLEY: I’m very interested in the secrets that families pass down, generation to generation. Women, in particular, are often keepers of such secrets. These secrets might relate to (in)fertility, sexuality, abuse, etc. Many are never explicitly revealed, but we still live around them. They still affect our decisions and relationships. Really, it’s about shame. To come close to understanding ourselves, we have to make sense of these secrets. I keep writing about this idea again and again.
Also, families are like our most basic institutions, right? They are microcosms for our larger institutions, and the things that afflict our schools and churches and communities and governments play out in smaller scale all the time in families. I’ve heard people discount domestic fiction, and I think this is borne of misogyny. The family system is an inherently political and important institution.
AUTHORLINK: What writers influenced the writing of Five Oaks?
HENSLEY: Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place was hugely influential: the richness of the rural Irish landscape, the pervading idea of shame and secrecy, and the depth of perception she grants her young protagonist. Barbara Kingsolver comes to mind. I love how she braids narrative arcs, both temporally and via point of view, conflating all the threads in a climactic point. She does this beautifully in The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, The Lacuna, and Unsheltered.
AUTHORLINK: What was your greatest challenge in developing Five Oaks?
HENSLEY: Plot. I’m a slow burn kind of writer. Initially, I did not write Five Oaks chronologically. I was having so much fun developing the historical sections, integrating elements from my own family history—the “meet cute” moments of my own parents and grandparents are integrated into those sections. The historical research threatened to take over at times. I would go to look up some detail about anesthesia in the 1940s, and suddenly three hours would have disappeared. At one point, I really began to panic. I was in residency at Hambidge Center for the Arts and Creative Sciences in Georgia. I was worried I would never be able to wind everything together and bring it to fruition. I filled the entire wall of my studio with note cards and different colored ribbons. Even that visualization project was probably a kind of anxiety-induced procrastination, but it helped immensely. It let me find the structure that I ultimately settled on, and from that point on, I began moving forward chronologically within each of the novel’s threads.
AUTHORLINK: There is a passage in the book where Sylvie thinks I want to shake truth out of our family stories the way I shook truth out of the novels in my literature classes. Tell me more about the idea of shaking truth out of stories. What truths have you found in stories?
HENSLEY: When we talk about literature, we are just talking about characters, so we feel free to deconstruct things. We feel free to consider the nuances of characters’ behaviors and choices. The pressures they face. I think that is what Sylvie means. She understands that shame has created some silences in her family. When I write autofiction (and I would definitely call Five Oaks autofiction), it is not the same thing as autobiography. It is still a process of discovery. For me, it is an exercise in empathy. Trying to better understand folks and places I love. Trying to understand difficult moments in our shared history.
AUTHORLINK: You’ve written a novel and short story collections. Do you prefer one form over another? If so, why?
HENSLEY: That’s like asking me to pick a favorite between my two children! I love them both equally, even though they are very different creatures. You could probably make the case for Five Oaks being a novel-in-stories. Many of the chapters stand alone. I love a fragmented novel, whether it builds in a way that is composite, mosaic, or braided.
AUTHORLINK: I’m wondering what advice you offer to apprentice writers about either craft, staying encouraged in the face of rejection, or both.
HENSLEY: Rejection is part of the process. It always stings. You’ve got to live in the work, not in relation to other’s perception of the work. I think that advice that T M McNally gave me is really good. “Don’t worry about how you’re going to sell it. Just write what you would want to read.” Writing is hard, but there should also be joy in it. I think trusting your strengths and the aspects of craft that you find pleasurable is important. You can let them lead you into the story. For me, sensory imagery and sense of place will get me through the struggle. Sometimes, I get that voice in my head telling me to stop, that I’m over-indulging in these elements, but I try to shut it down.
AUTHORLINK: You are a mother, wife, mentor, and professor. How do you find time to write?
HENSLEY: It is tough, especially during the semester. My husband, R. Dean Johnson, is also a writer, and we try to maintain a weekly writing date during the academic year. We walk to Purdy’s Coffee, open our laptops, and write for a few hours. On the way home, we talk through what we are working on. Sometimes that 3-4 hours a week is the only time I get to write when I’m teaching. During semester breaks, I write more. I try to do at least one writing residency a year. I have had great experiences at Yaddo, Hambidge, Tyrone Guthrie Center, Jentel Arts, and I-Park Arts. I can get more done in a few weeks of residency than during the entire rest of the year.
AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.
HENSLEY: I am working on a collection of stories set in Arizona over a period of two hundred years, many of them fabulist. I’m also working on a new novel (working title: Empire of Chickens) exploring the effects of addiction and incarceration on families. In the poetry realm, I’m developing a new collection that braids haibuns describing karst landscapes with narrative poems exploring family dynamics navigating neurodiversity, dementia, and traumatic brain injury. That is part of my problem—I always have too many projects going!
Julie Hensley is an Appalachian writer and core faculty member of the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, where she teaches both fiction and poetry. She is the author of several books, including Viable, Landfall: A Ring of Stories, and Five Oaks. She has been awarded literary fellowships from Jentel Arts, Yaddo, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, I-Park Arts, and the Tyrone Guthrie Center. You can find her most recent poems and stories in The Southern Review, Good River Review, Rockvale Review, Still, and Image: Art, Faith, Culture. She was recently named the South Arts Literary Fellow for Kentucky.
