Susannah Suffolk struggles to defend her most public court case while she returns to Walloon Lake to arrange a funeral for her mother, in Cheri L. R. Taylor’s debut novel, Leaving Walloon. Susannah is foggy with memories of her mother’s tirades, the sound of a pot being banged on the kitchen counter, watching her meals fly out the door at her mother’s hand, and punishment that came with pain. Though she has since moved far away, and created a life for herself, her life at Walloon has remained present in her mind and in her heart. Amidst the chaos of her memories,the pressures of her family and reminders of lost love, Susannah is faced with a choice: Will she remain entrenched in her memories, or will she finally find a way to leave Walloon for good?
In this frank interview, Cheri tells us how she channeled the roller coaster of emotions for her novel.
Q. What inspired you to write this story?
A. I started it at my very first writer’s retreat back in 2000 at Walloon Lake! There was something about the water and the way the place had a kind of haunting, beautiful loneliness to it. I wondered what it would be like to grow up there and suddenly, I was 16 and falling in love on the edge of the lake. For many years I had been trying to write this story or some variation of it. I have a fascination with the way in which people handle moments of great pressure and crisis. I am awed by the average person’s ability to cope and even create in those moments. I am also fascinated by the notion that we can have a friend, neighbor, co-worker who’s been through the unimaginable in their life and we have no idea. They may appear as if they have everything and are in total control of their lives, but we don’t really know.
Q. The sections that deal specifically with Susannah’s mother’s schizophrenia are especially vivid. How did you research this illness?
A. I did some online research, but I also have known some people who suffer this illness. It takes many forms and is characterized by obsessions and unreasonable fears and paranoia. A schizophrenic sees these threats as very real and when the disease is severe, will do whatever it takes to ensure their own survival and that of those whom they care about. Susannah’s mother truly believes that she is keeping her children from sin, and thus keeping them safe. Her intensity is actually a manifestation of how much she loves her children. I liked that irony, and though it’s easy to hate this character, I hope that I added enough of her humanity in to create at least a little empathy for her. We are all creatures of many sides and many shades.
Q. Susannah has spent her life trying to maintain an appearance of normalcy, against all odds. How did you tap into her emotional roller coaster so well?
A. That is a great question. I lived a kind of emotional roller coaster as I was growing up. My circumstances were not as severe as Susannah’s, but I did live through a time when things on the outside of my life looked very different than from the inside. I experienced the effects of a mother who watched her marriage dissolve and was left with three children to raise. She was terrified and so used things like scripture to try to create an illusion of power. If we misbehaved, we were not just misbehaving against her rules, we were angering God Himself! My brother and I used to laugh uncomfortably about our mother’s ‘Hot Line to God’, as we put it. It wasn’t, “Hey, get your feet off the table. I don’t like that!”,it was, “Get your feet off the table. GOD doesn’t like that.”
She was doing the best she could to protect us and truly terrified that we’d fall too far from grace and it would be her fault. She became quite unreasonable and saw danger everywhere. She was also terrified of our sexuality. Since my father left her for another woman, she became convinced that men in particular had no control over their sexual urges. This became truly horrifying for my older brother and I, especially as burgeoning teenagers, as every situation in which there were men and women or boys and girls suddenly became threatening. She wound up having a breakdown shortly after my father left and was never quite the same afterward. That overprotective part of her seemed to take over.
I based Susannah’s experiences on that feeling of being old enough to understand that the person in charge wasn’t equipped, but not old enough to change it. I love my mother, but it is a difficult love. I wanted to capture that. Moving into my adult life, I married young and realized that while I’d left home, I hadn’t left the experience behind me. This is what Susannah is experiencing. I came to understand that if I was going to have the kind of life I really wanted, I would need to make a choice between being forever at the affect of my past, or moving into the future. Susannah faces that choice.
Q. What do you hope people will take away from your novel?
A. An appreciation for the ways in which we can feel as if the world is ending, killing us, pressing down upon us in the worst possible way, but still find a way to come out of those moments. I’d like them to take away some hope, and the idea that choice is our most powerful weapon in this world. Our point of view creates our reality. If we believe we cannot change things, then it will be so. If we believe we can, then we will. It’s never, ever too late to change your life.
Q. Are you working on a new novel?
A. I am working on two novels, actually. The one I hope to finish first is a story of a young woman named Allie, who is in the midst of trying to figure out who she is in the world. She’s left a boyfriend who was a serial proposer, and gone off to Paris for a year. When she returns, he is engaged to someone else and she can’t stop thinking about it. Even though she turned him down a dozen times, seeing him with someone else has her in a strange kind of tizzy. She is an aspiring poet, but ends up working a menial job to get by while she lives with her 65 year old, widowed mother. In her absence her mother has begun a kind of new lust for life and is essentially living the way Allie wishes she could. The book is (hopefully!) fun and funny and much lighter fare than Leaving Walloon.
It is quite challenging to write humor. There are scenes of physical humor that I have to kind of choreograph in my brain! It’s a lot of fun to write, and I think I needed the break after the intensity of Walloon.
The other book is much more intense and follows a woman from post-partum depression into post-partum psychosis. I think it’s an under addressed issue, and that we actually know very little about it. It deserves more attention. In order to write it, I have to be inside the mind and body of this woman and it’s incredibly immersing and exhausting. It is my hope, however that in the end, I’ll have a work of some resonance, that may bring awareness to the issue, and the brave women who face it.
Leaving Walloon is available on Kindle and soon to be released in print. Contact Cheri at cherrion@aol.com.
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Cheri L. R. Taylor holds a MFA in Writing from Vermont College and is currently a writing instructor at Macomb College. She has facilitated writing workshops with the Arts in the Spirit Program at Oakwood Hospital and Inside Out Literary Arts Project. She has four chapbooks of poetry and has been published in Ellipsis, Awakenings Review, The Café Review, Reintegration Today, Clean Sheets, Current Magazine, Rattle, Third Wednesday, Strange Michigan, Jezebel, Love Notes: An Anthology, and others. Her book of poems, Wolf Maiden Moon was released from Pudding House Press in 2009. Among her awards is a 2007 RARE Foundation Everyday Heroes Award for her work in dedication to the healing potential of expressive writing community settings, and a 2009 Ragdale Foundation Artist’s Residency. Director of Blushing Sky Writers, an organization dedicated to all things creative, she established the Projection of Soul Poetry Workshop Program for Boysville in Clinton Township, Michigan, and was the founder and Director of the Blushing Sky Poetry Performance Troupe.