26 M E T R O S P I R I T M A Y 8 2 0 0 3
Arts: Book
“Here To Get My Baby Out of Jail” – Again
O
ne balmy spring evening in 1987, the warm air popped with excitement and the tiny explosions of champagne bubbles. Broad Street was closed to traffic, while excited celebrants milled about in tuxedos and evening gowns. It was the preview party for “Summer Heat,” a movie based on the novel “Here To Get My Baby Out of Jail,” by local author Louise Shivers. It had been published four years before and was now attracting national attention. Now, 16 years later, “Here To Get My Baby Out of Jail” is 20 years old and being re-released. It is about a restless young housewife, Roxy Walston, and the deadly love triangle that restlessness gets her into. It is set in the South, on a tobacco farm in the late 1930s. It is stark and disturbing – and familiar. Familiar because we know people just like Aaron Walston, Roxy’s husband, and her lover, Jake. And of course Roxy, who suspects that there is something better out there, something just out of her reach. Shivers found inspiration in a newspaper clipping about a love triangle that ended in murder, and set it in motion on her aunt’s tobacco farm and her father’s funeral home. “Her sensibility is mine,” Shivers said of
Roxy. “That’s the way I think. That’s my poetry, because I never knew the real girl (from the news article) and had no desire to. That character of Roxy comes out of my sensibilities.” We asked her what is different. “Well I think mostly just the fact that I was lucky enough not to get caught up in a love triangle and murder,” she said. But the fact that Roxy, Aaron and Jack occupy the places of her childhood has given the writer some pause. “Well I was still at that place where you are as a beginning writer where you’re very selfconscious about revealing personal thoughts and hurting family members and all those things that you have to get past if you’re going to be a writer. I was self-conscious about it, but I got past it because you have to.” I asked her if she does what I do when it’s time to make a piece of fiction – wonder how the heck I ever got myself into this mess. “Every time I ever sit down to write I think that. I thought it then and I think it now. I don’t think it ever changes in a writer. If it did I don’t think the work would be any good.” So why in the world do we do it if it’s such a gut-wrenching chore? Simple. We have to.
By Rhonda Jones
“If you really have that calling, you have to do it. If you can’t live without writing you just find a way. It’s just like the breath you breathe.” She said that a writer’s work is how she makes sense out of life. “It really is a way, I think, to try and figure out the puzzle of everything that’s going on around you all the time,” she said. And it’s a tricky thing sometimes to keep writing in the midst of all those whirlwinds, to be both a writer and a real person. To achieve balance. “It’s very hard,” Shivers agreed. “I still struggle with it. I think most writers still struggle with it.” She never writes on weekends, she said, reserving that time for friends and family. “But I always feel that pull. My characters are always pulling me. They want me to hurry up and come back.” But being a writer is about more than just hanging out with fictional people. You actually have to make contact with readers and potential readers, and she will be doing just that next week at Reese Library. “It’s just supposed to be a book signing,” she said, but of course, she always likes to talk to the people who come. “I’m sure I’ll
talk about what we’re talking about – the process of writing.” The main piece of advice she has for aspiring writers, and for writers who aspire to be better or to be published or to find enlightenment or reach whatever Holy Grail they’re after, is simply this: “Mostly you need to keep writing.” You can pick up a copy of “Here To Get My Baby Out of Jail” and say hello to Ms. Shivers at noon on May 15 at Reese Library on the campus of Augusta State University, where she works as writer-in-residence. For information, call Mellie Kerins at Reese Library, (706) 667-4912.
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