In that instant, I understand forgiveness. The kind Preacher said Jesus had for the people that pounded nails into his hands and hung him on the cross. I push myself through the darkness toward Mama’s open arms. I fold into her, as if she is the golden Mary come to take me home. My head rests against her shoulder. I close my eyes, soaking in her love.
“We’re going to be all right,” Mama says. She kisses me on the cheek and rocks me in her arms. “We McAllisters are made of sturdy stock.”
We sit in that old barn for a long time. After a while Mama takes another long, deep breath, and releases it, as if she suddenly understands forgiveness, too, and all the breaks between us have mended.
In the moments that follow, I feel the secret sense come alive in me again, and I suddenly know that even though life will still be hard everything is also going to be just fine. I tell Mama that I am going to name the baby Lily because her mother’s name is Wildflower. Mama nods and tells me that Lily is a lovely name.
In my memory I hear Daddy playing his banjo in the living room singing an old country song that starts out sad but ends up all right. I can look on the best parts of life now, of having family with me and enough faith in myself that I can find my own way out of just about anything. Maybe someday, God and I will mend the breaks between us, too. Meanwhile, I will raise my daughter, Lily, the best way I know how.
SEQUEL!
I’m writing a sequel to The Secret Sense of Wildflower. It catches up with the McAllister family fourteen years later. I estimate publication to be in 2016. If you’d like to know when the sequel is published, please go to the link below and sign up to be notified.
https://www.susangabriel.com/wildflower-sequel/
YOUR REVIEW
Also, if you enjoyed The Secret Sense of Wildflower, I welcome your review of on your favorite book buying site, such as Amazon, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, GoogleBooks, etc.!
If you have feedback for me on the book for me, please email me at [email protected]
Acknowledgments
There were many early readers of this manuscript before it became a tangible book. I want to thank in particular, Josephine Locklair, Jeanette Reid and Al Mankoff, who gave me invaluable feedback in the early drafts, as well as Tommy Hayes, who teaches fiction writing in the Great Smokies Writing Program. Also, my agents, Deborah Warren and Mary Grey James of East/West Literary Agency, and Lisa Bojany Buccieri were supportive for many years, as were Ann Bohan and Krista Lunsford. The last readers were Rich and Mary Schram who offered invaluable final thoughts and proofreading.
It takes a village, as they say, and I remain grateful for all the support I’ve received over the years from family, friends and wise teachers. I am especially grateful to Anne Alexander, who has believed in me when others might have given up faith. Lastly, I thank Wildflower McAllister for trusting me with her story. I hope I have done it justice.
P.S.
Insights, Interview & Reading Group Guide
About the author
--- Meet Susan Gabriel
About the book
--- Interview with Susan Gabriel
--- Reading Group Guide
--- Other Books by Susan Gabriel
About the Author
Susan Gabriel is an acclaimed writer who lives in the mountains of North Carolina. Her novel, The Secret Sense of Wildflower, earned a starred review ("for books of remarkable merit") from Kirkus Reviews and was selected as one of their Best Books of 2012.
She is also the author of Temple Secrets, Grace, Grits and Ghosts: Southern Short Stories and other novels. Discover more about Susan at SusanGabriel.com.
Interview with Susan Gabriel
What inspired you to write The Secret Sense of Wildflower?
The Secret Sense of Wildflower started with a voice, eleven years ago, at four in the morning, a voice that woke me up from a deep sleep. It was the voice of a girl who began to tell me her story: “There are two things I’m afraid of,” she said. “One is dying young. The other is Johnny Monroe.” A day or two before, I had visited the small cemetery located in the southern Appalachian Mountains where many of my family are buried. I spent an afternoon walking among the final resting places of my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, as well as ancestors I had never known. It felt like I had accidentally brought one of them home with me, who needed her story told.
For a fiction writer, to get the voice of a character so clearly is really good news. I, however, wanted to go back to sleep. Who wouldn’t, at 4 o’clock in the morning? For a time, I debated whether or not to get up. I ultimately decided that if I didn’t claim this moment, the voice might find someone else to write her story.
Needless to say, I turned on the light, picked up a pen and a pad of paper and began to write the story of Louisa May “Wildflower” McAllister. It took months of listening to her and seeing the scenes of her life play out in my imagination. Then it took years of revising and revisiting the story to polish it and get it ready.
Which character do you feel was the most enjoyable to write?
I loved Wildflower and even miss her now that she and I aren’t spending every day together. But I also loved writing about her sisters. All of them were named after the sisters in Little Women, which was her mother’s favorite book. Aunt Sadie was the old wise woman of the story and was great fun to write, too. Old wise women have begun to show up in several of my books. In my novel Circle of the Ancestors it is Sam’s wise grandmother who still practices the Cherokee ways. In Temple Secrets it is Old Sally, who has Gullah ancestors.
And then there’s Daniel. God, I loved Daniel. Still do. The story needed a positive male character to balance it out. And he feels like the brother I never had. My characters often become like family members to me.
Is there a particular message in your book that you want readers to grasp?
I realized just recently, after I listed all the books I’ve written, that almost all of them were stories of courage and transformation. Like The Secret Sense of Wildflower, these are all stories about people that persevere in spite of difficult things happening to them—people who end up learning something from the experience, usually about themselves, that will help them in the future.
I was a psychotherapist for many years and one of the things I learned from my clients is how incredibly resilient people are. They would come to me with these very difficult stories of things that had happened to them and yet they had the courage to tell me about it and then try to make changes to make their lives better. That’s heroic, in my view.
All my main characters (female and male) are on some kind of hero’s journey. They’re flawed, as we all are, but they’re seeking better lives. I also have a thing for secrets. Every novel I’ve written has some kind of secret in it that is revealed before the book is over. For Wildflower, it’s the “secret sense.” Do I have secrets I keep myself? You bet. I think all of us do.
Do you have a specific writing style?
I am what we call in the business an intuitive writer. I don’t use an outline, I just let the story take form in my imagination. With Wildflower, it was like watching a movie. I saw her walking through her life. I saw the story playing out like a film and simply wrote it down. I love it when stories come that way, and that’s part of why I often use present tense. Sometimes the story surprises me along the way. Sometimes the endings surprise me. I rarely know the ending as I’m writing it. The creative process for me is an act of discovery. Of course, I still have to edit and polish it after that initial draft, but most of the story is there.
It’s hard to pin me down in terms of genre. Mostly, I write literary fiction. The Secret Sense of Wildflower is considered southern gothic fiction.
What drew you to writing southern fiction?
I grew up in the South and except for a few years that I lived in Colorado, I’ve lived here all my life. For years, I swore that I would NEVER write southern fiction. I had enough crazy “characters” in my gene pool to not want
to spend any time there. But as they say: NEVER SAY NEVER. It was only after living in Colorado for three years that I discovered what a Southerner I actually was.
To me, the thing that makes southern fiction “southern,” is not only that the characters are down to earth and sometimes bigger than life, but also that the land plays a big part in the stories. The landscape is often its own character and plays a central role.
Now I realize what a great honor it is to be considered a southern author. I am someone who is writing in the same genre as Harper Lee (who I’ve been compared to) and William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Reynolds Price, as well as Ron Rash (who lives just over the next mountain ridge from where I live in the mountains of North Carolina), and a slew of others that I admire.
I also write contemporary fiction (that isn’t southern), children’s books and poetry.
Are you currently working on any new projects?
I am currently working on a book called Temple Secrets. It’s a quirky southern gothic novel set in Savannah about the wealthy (white) Temple family and their black help. It is a comic novel, something I needed to write after I wrote Wildflower’s story. This project will be completed in early 2015.
What do you find most challenging about writing?
Just about every professional writer today will tell you that they hate the marketing and self-promotion part. I’m basically a shy person who spends a lot of time by myself writing stories, so trying to find the attention of readers in a tidal wave of new titles is a challenge. I’m not one to toot my own horn, as they say. But I believe in Wildflower’s story and if her story helps only one reader feel more hopeful and have more courage, then I’ll shout it from the rooftops if I need to. I know the book has helped readers already, so I am committed to "shouting." We need fiction out there that will help us transform our own lives and take our own hero’s journey.
By the way, something that readers can do when they love a book is to tell friends about it and even write short reviews at places like Amazon, Goodreads, Nook, iBooks, Audible, etc. They don’t have to be long, literary reviews. They can simply say: “I loved this book!” and a sentence or two saying why. Reviews help other readers take a chance on an author or book they haven’t heard of. Thanks, in advance, for considering this!
Is anything in your book based on real life experiences or purely all imagination?
I had a huge debate over this with a screenwriter once. She swore that none of her work was autobiographical, but my argument was that your work can’t help but be autobiographical, simply in terms of what you notice as a writer. I notice sounds and smells and see things in a way that is totally unique to me. My imagination is the instrument I use to tell a story, so it can’t help but be a reflection of me in some way. Length of paragraphs, turn of phrase, word choice, my choice of metaphors are all, in a way, my tiny fingerprint. That said, Wildflower’s story is not my personal story.
What is the environment like where you write?
I live in the mountains of North Carolina, so everywhere I look are trees like oaks and wild dogwoods and every other kind of deciduous tree and pine in the southeastern United States. In the winter I can see seven mountain ridges from my office. In the summer, it’s just a blur of green. My office has two giant windows and just off my office is a screened in porch, so lots of times I have sliding glass doors open to the outside. I am very lucky that I live in a beautiful place. It’s a humble place, but the setting is one I love, which really helps since I spend a lot of time at home writing.
However, I don’t need beautiful scenery to write. I also write anywhere that I can take a laptop or iPad with a keyboard: coffee shops, libraries, by a river, in a car, you name it. Barbara Kingsolver wrote her first novel in her bedroom closet! I haven’t tried my closet, but I’ll write anywhere.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of writing The Secret Sense of Wildflower?
I’m pretty accessible through my website and blog so people email me and tell me how moved they were by the book and how Wildflower’s courage gave them hope in their own lives. That means a lot. If they take the time to email me, it is usually because they really liked the book and they’ll tell me why. I’ve had people say about my novels that they couldn’t put them down. That’s always a really good sign. It means the story kept them engaged. That’s a huge compliment to a writer.
On a professional level, Kirkus Reviews gave The Secret Sense of Wildflower a starred review (for “books of exceptional merit”) and it was voted a Best Book of 2012. When I got the email about this honor I thought there must have been some kind of mistake. A switch-up in books or something. It still shocks me to this day. After all, I’d been writing in utter obscurity for almost two decades, so to have such a respected reviewer give out this kind of praise rocked my world and has opened a lot of doors for me.
But honestly, hearing from readers that they enjoyed the book means even more.
Reading Group Guide
1. As the novel opens, Louisa May “Wildflower” McAllister says, “There are two things I’m afraid of. One is dying young. The other is Johnny Monroe.” What role does fear play in the story? Where did these fears originate?
2. Loss and grieving are key elements in this story. What role does loss play in the novel?
3. In Wildflower’s ritual to get across the footbridge, she calls on a rabbit’s food, her dead father and a gold medallion. What is the significance of the medallion in the book? What does the footbridge symbolize?
4. Wildflower constantly questions God, and especially Preacher and the self-righteous in the congregation. What role does God play in her coming-of-age?
5. How does Ruby Monroe (and what happens to her) impact Wildflower’s life?
6. After Wildflower is attacked, why does she go back to her given name and refuse to be called “Wildflower” anymore?
7. Wildflower says: “Like a friend who goes away because you never listen to them, my secret sense seems to have left me, too.” Why did the “secret sense” go away? What is the significance of when it comes back? Are there any other words that you would use for the “secret sense”?
8. What role do secrets play in the story?
9. How does Wildflower’s friendship with her friend, Mary Jane, evolve throughout the book?
10. What purpose does Aunt Sadie serve in Wildflower’s life? Daniel and Jo? How do these close family bonds help Wildflower? How do they hurt? Did you have a favorite sister in the story? A least favorite?
11. In the final scene, Wildflower and her mother reconcile. What is the meaning of this scene? What is the significance of it taking place in the barn and her daughter being called “Lily”?
12.How does the setting—a rural mountain town in 1941 Tennessee—impact Wildflower’s story?
13. The Secret Sense of Wildflower has been called “a quietly powerful story, at times harrowing, but ultimately a joy to read.” (Kirkus—starred review) What makes this novel “quietly powerful”?
14. In the same review, the reviewer called Wildflower “an adolescent Scout Finch, had Scout’s father died unexpectedly and her life taken a bad turn” comparing The Secret Sense of Wildflower with To Kill a Mockingbird. How do you think these two books are similar?
15. What do you imagine happens in the next chapter of Wildflower’s life?
16. On reader wrote: I’ve found a new heroine and her name is Wildflower! In what way is Wildflower brave? How can her story help others?
17. This novel has been said to “pack an emotional punch.” How might the emotive quality of a story be of benefit to readers?
18. Is there anything you wish had happened in the story that didn’t? What does the author do particularly well?
19. How is southern (gothic) fiction different from other genres, such as historical fiction and literary fiction?
20. Why do you think coming-of-age novels are such a popular sub-genre?
21. What does fiction offer to our moder
n world, as opposed to non-fiction?
Other Books by Susan Gabriel
Temple Secrets
A novel
Fans of The Help and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil will delight in this comic novel of family secrets by acclaimed writer, Susan Gabriel.
Every family has secrets, but the elite Temple family of Savannah has more than most. To maintain their influence, they’ve been documenting the indiscretions of other prestigious southern families, dating as far back as the Civil War. When someone begins leaking these tantalizing tidbits to the newspaper, the entire city of Savannah, Georgia is rocking with secrets.
The current keeper of the secrets and matriarch of the Temple clan is Iris, a woman of unpredictable gastrointestinal illnesses and an extra streak of meanness that even the ghosts in the Temple mansion avoid. When Iris unexpectedly dies, the consequences are far flung and significant, not only to her family—who get in line to inherit the historic family mansion—but to Savannah itself.
At the heart of the story is Old Sally, an expert in Gullah folk magic, who some suspect cast a voodoo curse on Iris. At 100 years of age, Old Sally keeps a wise eye over the whole boisterous business of secrets and the settling of Iris's estate.
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