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Helen Chappell

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Meet the 21st Century's Answer to Eudora Welty
Suggested Questions to Spark a Spirited Conversation with Helen Chappell

As your fans back home know, you have long written a humorous local newspaper column capturing the character of Oysterback, Maryland. What inspired you to expand your weekly snippets of fiction into a full-length novel, A WHOLE WORLD OF TROUBLE (Simon & Schuster; May 2003)?

Oysterback came to life in a previous mainstream novel that was never published and lies in the proverbial trunk to this day. And that may be just as well. Because those characters and that place returned later in the short stories, then this novel.

When I first created the Oysterback Tales for the Baltimore Sun, my editor Hal Piper, challenged me to produce something original and different about the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 600-800 words. I think he was hoping for a first person essay. What he got were stories from an imaginary world on a marsh where anything could happen and frequently did. I was surprised that Hal took a chance and decided to run fiction on an opinion page in the editorial section of the Sun. And I think we were both delighted when people responded to Oysterback and seemed to like it. Personally, I thought it was cool that I was sneaking fiction into an otherwise very serious venue. And I was having a lot of fun creating my own little world and populating it with my own characters. When a reader compared the fictional landscape of Oysterback to Faulkner, I was really pleased. What had started out as a book no one wanted had evolved into something people enjoyed. So, there is something to be said for recycling!

After two collections of Oysterback stories were published, I knew someday I'd want to try to write an entire novel about this place. When the time was right, Chuck Adams at Simon and Schuster liked what I'd suggested and took a chance with it. I feel very fortunate to work with such a great editor.

As your fans across the country know, you are the author of an acclaimed mystery series and more than a dozen historical romances. How was writing your first "mainstream" novel different from writing within specific genres?

Many years ago, I started my career with a couple of mainstream novels. I also discovered that I could keep the pot boiling with a talent for writing Regencies a la Georgette Heyer, under my nom de guerre Rebecca Baldwin. While I was doing that, I also worked as a reporter, editor, teacher and magazine feature writer for many years. After I'd been a reporter for a while, I started writing the Sam and Hollis mysteries as a counterpoint to covering hard and soft news.

Many mainstream writers have tried their hand at mysteries. It's been suggested that that genre is where a lot of serious writers go to get published. Working in genre means working within specific frameworks, but mysteries give you a lot more space in which to have fun. And working in genre is a great way to earn while you learn. I've been very fortunate to be able to write in so many different voices and venues over the years. It's been great training, especially working for newspapers like the Sun and the Washington Post.

A WHOLE WORLD OF TROUBLE was fun to work with because I had the freedom a mainstream novel provides a writer. It was also a challenge to come up with a story that doesn't depend so much on formal conventions or expectations. Following your instincts can be taking a real chance, but I hope the reader thinks it's worth it.

Are you a native Southerner?

No. I was born in Pennsylvania, but I've spent most of my life about twenty miles below the Mason Dixon line. A lot of people are amazed when they find out how Southern this region is, for good, bad and indifferent.

But I have lived in other places. New York, Los Angeles, London.

Would you like to be seen as a Southern writer?

I'd like to be seen as a good writer. A good Eastern Shore writer. I've spent most of my career living and writing about this small and isolated chunk of land and water bobbing right below the Mason-Dixon line. I'm not sure if that makes me a real Southerner, like my North Carolina cousins, or not.

To your mind, what makes the South such fertile terrain for hilarious and heartbreaking fiction?

An old Eastern Shore captain I knew once testified in a maritime salvage trial in Baltimore. The other side, perhaps trying to make the man look like a country fool started his examination by asking, "You have quite a few characters on the Eastern Shore, don't you?" To which my friend replied, "Characters? We have characters we haven't even used yet!"

So we have an Oysterback novel with characters we haven't used yet, as well as some we've used many, many many times before.

Your novel revolves around two contentious, contradictory sisters and their recently deceased mother. Did you write A WHOLE WORLD OF TROUBLE specifically for women readers?

I write for anyone who wants to read about the world I've created. I'm always pleased when anyone male or female likes what I do. It interests me that men do seem to like Oysterback, perhaps because there are so many interesting guys living there. I was delighted by one gentleman who came to a signing and said very tongue in cheek, "I've looked and looked on the map, but I can't find Oysterback. Can you tell me where it is? I really want to move there."

Trouble is a novel about women, however. Their ties of blood and friendship and the shared experience of being female.

Carrie, your novel's younger sister and leading lady, is resolutely unconventional, single, professionally adrift, wary of men, perpetually searching, and pushing forty. Is her character based on a woman in your personal past or present? Do you share any of Carrie's defining traits or anxieties?

I think there's a little of Carrie in many women I know. There's probably more of me in her than I want to examine too closely. I created her because I wanted to work with a woman who was resolute in her independence, who was trying to avoid making the same mistakes she sees the women around her making, especially in their attachments to men and to women's traditional place in society.

In her desire to end up as unlike the women she knows as possible, to avoid taking emotional risks, she's ended up
just as wounded as if she'd gone the traditional route. It's only when she can confront her own past that she starts to realize she can be herself and be happy that she can heal.

Like a lot of women who became the adult child in a mother-daughter relationship, Carrie is wary of emotional entanglements.

Earlene, Carrie's older sister and main antagonist, is decidedly conventional, married (only once) and a devoted mother. Was it especially challenging to make such an apparently "normal" character complex and compelling?

Interesting. When I first created Earlene, she was a counterpoint to Carrie. Where Carrie chose an unattached, drifting life as a way of avoiding getting hurt, Earlene has clung to respectability like a lifesaver in a squall. Frankly, I didn't like Earlene much early in the working of the book.

Gradually, Earlene fleshed herself out for me. She took on depth and dimension and dignity as I worked with her, and she demanded that I respect her as I grew to understand her perspective on life. As Carrie grows to respect Earlene, so do I, and so, I hope does the reader. Earlene's evolved into a really great character in this book and one I'm pleased to have created.

Why does Carrie's dead mother play such a pivotal role in her story?

The relationship between mothers and daughters is one of the most complex and compelling in a woman's life. In many ways, the mother who lives in our heads never dies, even when our real mother does.

As readers may notice, I like to play with ghosts in my fiction. Audrey is not literally a ghost here, although that was a tempting idea, but she's just as alive and involved with the sisters in death as she was in life.

Audrey's obsession with men, her selfishness, her failure as a mother to act like a responsible adult have had enormous repercussions on the lives of her children, including her son.

It's the working out of these Mom issues that frame the story here. Even after she's dead, everyone's still cleaning up Audrey's messes.

These kids were never allowed to be kids. They were forced into adult roles by her childishness, and only when they resolve this last, posthumous mess can the Hudsons move on with their own lives.

If she were June Cleaver, there wouldn't be much a story.

Your novel has been described as a comedy of Southern manners. Is this a fitting description? If so, how and why?

It works for me. It's definitely a comedy and everyone has nice manners, even if they don't always use them. I always have fun taking a situation and stretching it into ultimate ridiculousness just to see what will happen.

A WHOLE WORLD OF TROUBLE is at turns, and sometimes at once, wildly funny and profoundly sad. What do you find more difficult to write: humor or pathos? Is it particularly tough to combine these two emotions?

My motto is dying is easy, comedy's hard. It should not be done at home, but only by trained professionals.

Tragedy is hard too, because it's so easy to tip over into cheap sentiment and bathos, especially if one is inclined to irreverence anyway.

So I have more trouble with pathos, because I like these people and I want them to have some dignity and humanity. Otherwise, there's no point to their creation.

Why did you decide to make Carrie's ultimate love interest, Professor Jack, an Oysterback outsider?

Because she'd never go for someone who's known her since middle school. And I liked the idea of Jack, coming from somewhere else, a really liberal urban environment and just falling in love with Oysterback. He can make her see what there is about it that's good and valuable, why she is a part of the community, whether she wants to be or not.

Does A WHOLE WORLD OF TROUBLE have a moral or a lingering message?

Hmmm. No moral. But the message might be that no matter what happens, or how far you run, at some point, you have to come back and face down your past demons if you want to have a happy future.

Are you planning to revisit Oysterback for your next novel?

Oh, yes!