14
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 22
Mountain magic An Interview with Sarah Addison Allen
by Hal McDonald photograph by Melissa Markis
Apple-tossing trees, creeping self-help books, glow-in-the-dark Southern gentlemen. These are just a few of the wonders a reader can expect to encounter when entering the magical world of Sarah Addison Allen. A native and lifetime resident of Asheville, Allen grounds her novels in familiar North Carolina landscapes but imbues the lives of the characters who people these landscapes with a marvelous strangeness through her use of magic realism, a literary technique more commonly associated with Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende than with writers from the American South. Not to be confused with its near relative “fantasy,” magic realism – or “Southern-fried magic realism,” as Allen prefers to describe her work – blurs the boundaries between the magical and the real by portraying fantastic elements in a matter-of-fact style, treating such unusual phenomena as books that follow a woman wherever she goes more as quotidian annoyances than as supernatural marvels. Within the framework of this magically real, or realistically magical world, Allen casts a spell of small town Southern romance that has made her four published novels, Garden Spells (Bantam Books, 2007) The Sugar Queen (Bantam Dell, 2008), The Girl Who Chased the Moon (Bantam Books, 2010) and The Peach Keeper (Bantam Books, 2011), international best sellers. On June 13, 2012, Allen took time away from work on her fifth novel, tentatively titled “Lost Lake,” to sit down “I think the South lends itself very well with me at Malaprop’s Bookstore in downtown Asheville to magical realism. We are willing to and talk about her life, her work, and the Western North believe a lot of things here – to suspend Carolina mountain region that she calls home. We folour disbelief.” lowed this up with a few questions via email. The interview that follows has been transcribed from both, then —Sarah Addison Allen edited, and organized for clarity and flow, while remaining true to the voices and intentions of the speakers.