Q&A with Sheri Holman Author of Witches on the Road Tonight

When I started work on this novel, I thought of it as a multigenerational ghost story. I always loved ghost stories—hearing them and telling them. I loved being the oldest kid who got to keep the cousins up at night and afraid to go to the bathroom by themselves—this was the ultimate power at that age. More recently, I've understood the fundamental human need to impose narrative on chaos; I've become more aware of the stories we tell ourselves, and begun to wonder why so many of those stories slip into ghost stories. Much of this novel grew out of a time of profound personal anxiety. I have three children and one of my twin boys was diagnosed with cancer at the age of three months. Until then, I had never known the real meaning of fear. We spent the next few years living from doctor's appointment to doctor's appointment, never knowing what they'd find next. Our son responded extremely well to treatment and is now a thriving, happy, brilliant seven-year-old. But living through that, I thought a lot about how sustained stress erodes belief and sanity—I think I got the smallest glimpse of what it is like to come through war; to see the fragility and randomness of life all around you, and how fundamentally changed you are by the experience. Before, I'd sort of rolled my eyes at the anxiety and aggression fostered by American culture, but after having lived through such a time of personal helplessness, I grew increasingly angry at those who make a game of keeping others afraid. It's a cheap kind of power, one we should outgrow as kids, and I felt many didn't comprehend that they were playing with fire. People do incredibly stupid and destructive things when they are afraid. With Witches, I wanted to show how one family's mythology of fear was born and let that speak for how we as a society live in reaction to the mythologies we, through our individual choices, help create. And to show the biggest myth of all is the illusion we can control what we collectively call into being.

This novel really evolved over time. Dress Lodger and Mammoth Cheese were books I outlined and knew how they'd go, plotwise, almost from their inception. Witches began as three different manias—a deep fascination with Appalachian folklore, my love of regional TV horror hosts, and the story I had in my mind of a modern career-woman power junkie who had lost her way after having her first child. If I were a writer of short stories, I would have given each of these ideas its own treatment and maybe they would have become part of a collection, but because I write novels, I couldn't stop thinking about how they related to each other and why I couldn't seem to let any one of them go. I tried writing this book as a straightforward historical novel set among rival ginseng hunters during the Depression. I knew how to do that kind of book and at the time I was worried about money and felt I needed to write something safe. Then Mammoth Cheese was short-listed for the Orange Prize and I was flown to England where I was lucky enough to hear judge Jude Kelly deliver a marvelous speech about fear and the artist. I realized the novel I'd conceived was a scared little book, not really addressing anything meaningful to me. I was afraid to take the risks I needed to grow in my work. I went back to those three stories and wrestled with them for another fruitless year until at last I realized they weren't separate at all, they were members of a family—the ginseng hunting witch, the TV horror host, and the career mother (whom I later cast as a CNN anchor woman). They were all peddling fear in their own way and they represented an arc in American culture, from highly local, to regional, to global, each gathering a larger audience and the ability to wreak more havoc.

I think some readers would have preferred the setting to have stayed completely in 1940 or completely in the 1980s—the back and forth, along with the present-day framing seems too complicated or distancing. For me, the stories are only meaningful when read against each other. Wallis points out that ghost stories never take place on any random night, they always happen on this very night, so I wanted the feel of past, present, and future all spinning out in tandem. Neurobiology teaches us the chemical loops for memory are always running, that's why we can pull up a moment long ago, instantly. I wrote the different sections simultaneously, hopping around from past to present as ideas struck me, almost like electrical impulses jumping from synapse to synapse. There was nothing linear about the way I worked on this book. Then I had to go back and revise it to all make sense.

There are lots of “aspects” in this book, different incarnations of the same role: Ann and Wallis and Cora all being mothers, but very different sorts of mothers. Sonia and Cora and Wallis are highly sexualized women; Eddie and Wallis and Jasper are all children but each taking away very different lessons from the introduction of strangers into their childhoods. As a girl, I used to cast spells like Wallis did. I wanted the world to work on my terms, to feel I had some sort of power at a very powerless age. So she was very easy to write. There have been times in my life where I've felt very Ann-like and certain, knowing what everyone else was thinking and how they would behave, and how to manipulate a situation to my benefit. With Ann, we see the limits of that way of thinking. And yet how are we ever to know someone without projection? I loved writing from Tucker's point of view. I've certainly felt trapped between two bad choices, the desire to disappear and be absolved of the need to act.

I grew up in the country and spent a good deal of my childhood playing in the woods. You find yourself inventing weirdly archetypal games when there is no plastic around. The mountains are a world apart and their very isolation invites myth-making, I think. Certainly the richest veins of folklore are found where there is a great deal of distance and darkness between neighbors. As for reading, I spent a lot of time holed up with WPA files. I did a lot of research into mountain herb- based medicine and the strange economy of ginseng. I walked the woods with some ginseng hunters and let myself get lost. I grew up with elderly, story-telling aunts, so that Depression-era south never felt very far away to me.

After Mammoth Cheese, when I was thinking through what I might want to write next, my husband was talking about his fascination with regional TV personalities—those guys who showed cartoons on Saturday mornings or horror movies at midnight. I remembered how deeply I'd been affected by my own local horror host when I was a kid in Richmond—how my youngest aunt, when she was babysitting, would get me out of bed at midnight because she didn't want to watch those scary movies alone. Watching them in the darkened living room, up past my bedtime, I felt initiated into the world of something larger and grown-up. My own horror host— Bowman Body on Channel 8—was spectacularly unscary. He looked like Bob Newhart. But there were tons of more transgressive horror hosts—most famously men like Ernie Anderson, who created Ghoulardi in Cleveland, or John Zacherle, the Cool Ghoul in New York City. It's hard to overestimate the influence they had on a generation of kids, especially young boys. For me, there was a tipping point in the 1970s, before cable TV took over, where horror was something to be undercut, not cultivated. These hosts showed scary movies specifically to defang them. Like I said, it was a kind of initiation—Look kids, there are scary things out there, but we can make fun of them and be okay. Now it seems the role of host has been passed off to news personalities who are more interested in keeping the panic alive. There is no reassurance, there is no break. As for research—YouTube was a blessing. Fans have uploaded clips from old shows all across the country. Web sites like E-gors Chamber of TV Horror Hosts profile hundreds of these personalities, past and present. There is a thriving community, mostly online or through cable access, keeping the tradition alive. So this global medium is resurrecting what had been regionally lost.

I get my three kids off to school, come home and work until I pick them up at three. When they're in bed, I usually try to work again unless I fall asleep (which happens all too frequently). When I'm finishing or revising a book, I go down the well and only come up for meals. This last book was especially intense. More than any of my other books, it felt like a haunting, like weaving a spell.

Because I do a lot of research for my books, I’ll often read things from the period in which I'm working to make sure I’m catching the flavor of it. I read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men twice, and I'm sure a good deal of James Agee slipped into the Tucker character. As I was finishing Witches, I was reading Cesare Pavese and Mishima, male post-war writers who went on to commit suicide. I've been very interested in how one goes on (or doesn't) once a war is over. Especially if one feels it has been lost.

The two I mentioned above (Pavese and Mishima); all the usual Russians, George Eliot, Walker Percy. I wish I had more time to read. Recently the two books that have most moved me were Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Jenny Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Two things. A lighter novel for kids about hoarding and tattoos called The Mermaid of Gowanus Canal. And I've just started thinking about a book in the vein of Swift's A Modest Proposal about the New York City public school system.