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California writer creates mountain stories
Author Kerry Madden, who “grew up on the gridiron” as the daughter of a college football coach but has focused her recent writing on the Smoky Mountains, will be back in Sylva on Saturday to read from her latest young adult novel, “Louisiana’s Song,” which is set in Maggie Valley.
Madden, who lives with her husband and three children in Los Angeles, said she fell in love with the Smokies while a student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. It was there also that she met her husband, Kiffen Lunsford, whose stories of his Buncombe County roots and childhood as one of 13 children provided Madden with plenty of background material to tell the story of the Weems family, a tight-knit clan short on money but long on love – and kids. Told through the eyes of 12-year-old Livy Two, Madden’s new novel continues the saga she began in her 2005 book “Gentle’s Holler.”
Her narrator’s name, Livy Two, comes from the fact that the girl is named after an older sister, Olivia, who died at birth. That missing sibling (“Livy One”) serves as a sort of conscience and confidant for Livy Two, who spends a lot of time in her secret place high in a red maple tree making up songs and stories.
Livy Two’s odd circumstance – sharing a name with a sister who died – was directly inspired by Madden’s husband. Kiffen Lunsford shares his name with an older brother who died about 10 years before Madden’s husband was born. Another unusual first name, “Gentle,” Livy Two’s little sister and the title character of Madden’s first book, comes from one of her husband’s cousins in Sandy Mush who named her daughter, Gentle Elizabeth.
“I thought that was the prettiest name,” Madden wrote in answer to an e-mailed question.
Madden’s books are set in Maggie Valley because she was intrigued by the town’s name after a long ago visit.
“I fell in love with the name years before I decided to set a novel there,” she writes on her Web site. As her first book was centered around Livy Two’s toddler sister Gentle and the family’s struggle to accept the truth about Gentle’s eyes, “Louisiana’s Song” focuses Livy Two’s storytelling and songs on her shy, awkward 11-year-old sister, who’s named for the state but prefers to be called the more normal-sounding Louise.
During the course of the book’s pages, Louise blossoms into a gifted artist and primary caretaker for their father, Tom, a singer and banjo player who has lost his ability to make music due to the after-effects of a coma. In the end, Louise shows a surprised Livy Two that sometimes the quietest sibling turns out to be the strongest.
According to Madden, she wrote “Gentle’s Holler” during a time when she was “really missing” the Smoky Mountains. “Since I couldn’t go to the Smokies, I decided to go there in my head every day and write a story of this girl, Livy Two, who loved her mountains and her song-writing.”
“Gentle’s Holler” also enabled Madden to develop a Jackson County connection. During her first reading here she met Dot Connor, a daughter of local musical legend Mary Jane Queen, who died last month. Dot told Madden about her ballad-singing, banjo-playing mother, and Madden visited Queen several times at her Johns Creek home.
“Mary Jane made visitors feel so welcome and so at ease ... I can’t imagine her not in her home in Caney Fork,” Madden said. “I think she was one of the happiest people I’ve ever known.”
Set in 1963, Madden’s new book reaches its climax on a day that’s burned into the memory of many Americans – Nov. 22, 1963 – the day President Kennedy was assassinated. Though Madden was only 2 at the time and doesn’t remember much except for seeing her mother crying, her description fits perfectly with my recollection of that dreadful day.
Ghost Town in the Sky, the Maggie Valley attraction that opened in the 1960s and reopened recently after being closed for several years, also figures in the story as Livy Two’s older brother Emmett leaves home to work there in an effort to aid the family finances. Once again Madden’s husband’s family stories provide background, for his aunt and uncle, Iris and Kiffin (her husband’s namesake with a slightly different spelling) Lunsford worked at the blacksmith shop at Ghost Town when the park first opened.
Kiffen Lunsford’s great-uncle was famed mountain musician Bascom Lamar Lunsford, which may account for the fact that Livy Two is an aspiring songwriter and performs at the Mountain Folk Festival in Asheville, a traditional music event that is still held each year.
My guess was that the character of Livy Two is based on the author, and I was mostly right. Madden said that while she used her sister-in-law, Tomi Lunsford, a singer-songwriter in Nashville, Tenn., as a model for Livy Two’s tendency to set her thoughts to music, she based the rest of Livy Two’s personality on herself.
“The storytelling, baby-sitting and getting sick of baby-sitting, that would be me. I was also a total tomboy. I hated anything frilly or pink.”
Though she grew up in college towns rather than an Appalachian hollow, Madden says she did experience the same closeness and dependence on her siblings as friends and companions.
“I have two younger brothers and a younger sister, and since we moved all the time, they became my companions and charges, since I was the oldest. When baby-sitting, if I wanted them to dress up like orphans from ‘Oliver Twist’ or school children from ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ they had little choice in the matter. We were always making up stories, and I mainly played the tyrants to get the high drama going. My sister, who is an actress in San Francisco now, played along more, crying in all the right places – my brothers always rebelled after the layers of orphan clothing got too hot. Our black lab was always the kindly grandmother in a kerchief and shawl,” Madden said.
Madden says she considers herself fortunate to be able to write about a Smoky Mountain family.
“I feel like one of the luckiest authors in the world to be able to write these stories and then go back to the mountains and visit with kids and also to have met people like Mary Jane Queen, who taught my daughter, Norah, about touch-me-nots and pretty-by-nights last summer,” Madden said in her e-mail. “I also realized recently that the only pictures I drew as a child were either pictures of mountains or pictures of huge families. I never knew I would put them together to write stories.”
Madden will be at City Lights Saturday, July 28, at 2 p.m. to read and sign copies of “Louisiana’s Song.” For more information, or to reserve a signed copy of either of her books, call City Lights at 586-9499.
To learn more about the author, visit her Web site, www.kerrymadden.com.
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