The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Threads of History and Fiction with Kimberly Brock
Hi,
In this episode, I chat with Kimberly Brock about her novel, The Fabled Earth.
Kimberly Brock is the bestselling author of The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Townsend Prize for Fiction, and The River Witch, recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award.
Kimberly, a former actor and special needs educator, received her bachelor’s degree from the University of West Georgia in 1996.
She founded Tinderbox Writers Workshop, a transformative creative experience for women in the arts. Kimberly has been a guest lecturer for many regional and national writing workshops, including at the Pat Conroy Literary Center. A native of North Georgia, she now lives near Atlanta.
Her latest novel, The Fabled Earth, was released in October 2024 through Harper Muse.
Kimberly Brock
The Fabled Earth, Kimberly Brock
North Woods, Daniel Mason
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 276.
Speaker 1:Kimberley Brock is the bestselling author of the Lost Book of Eleanor Dare, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Townsend Prize for Fiction and the River Witch recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award. A former actor and special needs educator, kimberley received her bachelor's degree from the University of West Georgia in 1996. She is the founder of Tinderbox Writers Workshop, a transformative creative experience for women in the arts. She has served as a guest lecturer for many regional and national writing workshops, including at the Pat Conroy Literary Center. A native of North Georgia, she now lives near Atlanta. Kimberly's latest novel, this Fabled Earth, was released in October 2024 through Harper Muse. Hi, kimberly, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
Speaker 2:Hi, thank you so much. I'm excited to talk to you today.
Speaker 1:Likewise, and I loved your book the Fabled Earth absolutely beautiful. Thank you. Let's begin by learning about you as a former actor and special needs educator and what led you to writing specifically Southern and historical fiction.
Speaker 2:I suppose I have always been telling stories, even when I was a very little girl. I can remember getting in trouble in first grade for telling everybody a story about our playground behind our school. It was a new school a few years before I started there and they had pushed all of the dirt in the back into these hills and left them there to flatten the playground and we would play on those hills and there were woods behind the hills and a little sawmill back there that we could hear. But we were little, we didn't know what that was and I told everybody that those mounds were graves and I told them that there was a monster or a ghost in the woods. And I remember having to apologize. The principal came into class and I had to apologize because I had scared some of the kids so bad they wouldn't sleep in their beds at night. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2:So the storytelling started early. The writing started early. I wrote a lot in school but my dad always said have a job where you have good health insurance, you have a smart dad, right. So I went into teaching and, of course, theater. I did theater, but I think if you look at all of those things, storytelling is an element and and all of them. And it wasn't until I had my own children. They were very small. When I wrote my first short story I had connected. The very first email I ever sent was to another author that I just picked up her book at the grocery store and her email was on the back of the paperback and I sent her an email to tell her how much I loved the book. And we corresponded a little bit back and forth, which just thrilled me you don't think a writer is going to answer your email and she asked if I'd ever thought about publishing. And I wrote a short story for a small press that she was running with some other authors and that's where it started. So it was almost accidental.
Speaker 1:I love hearing authors publishing stories. Everyone is unique.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In an interview for Canvas Rebel you wrote quote stories were how I experienced the world around me and the larger one that I dreamed of, far from where I spent my days on a pretty farm in a small community in North Georgia end quote. You went on to say that you studied theater in college. Having taught high school theater and costume design and having written plays, I have seen firsthand how important theater is to students. I think theater is the best way to gain a sense of character and the character's voice and also the point of view of the character, and the quiet times between dialogue when there's action. Taking part in an acting class gives us a sense of self, a sense of what it's like to get up in front of people and speak, and I think that is such a gift for everyone absolutely, and but I also think that it it's an innate thing.
Speaker 2:if you're an actor, right, you're already doing that, and when I'm writing, I'm already just doing that. It's the way that I process story, it's the way I process the world. It's not just in my writing. I'm very interested in why people are doing what they're doing and why they're moving the way they're moving and why they're making the decisions that they're making and why they look the way they look. All of those, why questions that go into work in the theater, I think, when you're setting that up, so that when people are watching and hopefully being engaged in a performance, that also translates, I think, into my writing, because I'm staging it and I'm dressing it, and I'm dressing it and I'm informing it. I'm informing the characters that move and speak. So, yeah, all of that goes into it, for sure. I in fact this book. I just got a message from my theater director in college. He said, oh, I see a little of what you're doing there, I think. So, yeah, sneaky, but true, absolutely true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and speaking of the book, can you please share a synopsis of the Fabled Earth?
Speaker 2:So this novel is set on Cumberland Island. It's one of our barrier islands, the southernmost barrier island in Georgia, and it's now a national park. It's mostly still undeveloped today, but in the 1880s the Carnegie family one of the two Carnegie brothers, thomas Carnegie and his wife bought property there and they built winter homes for their family there. So I have you know I love history but I'm a storyteller. So this is a fictional story that is set. It's a dual timeline, historical set in 1959 predominantly, and then with flashbacks to an event that takes place in 1932, when two boys drown after a night of storytelling at one of the Carnegie mansions.
Speaker 2:And my main character, cleo Woodbine, was there in 1932. And she has a lot of secrets about what happened that night and the folklore that's told and the tragedy that occurs. And she lives for the next several decades on this little spit of land off of Cumberland Island that she calls Kingdom Come, until the daughter of the only other girl that was there in 1932 shows up with questions in 1959 about what happened to her mother and there's a third character. So the second character, the daughter, is Frances Flood and she's a folklorist. And then the third character is a young girl who has recently married straight out of high school and then been widowed only a few months later.
Speaker 2:And she has come to live in a fictional town on the coast on the coastline called Reverie and her aunt ran an inn there and she's taken over the inn and she has brought her brownie camera with her and she's taking pictures of the town and she develops this eerie double exposure photograph by accident and in the photograph there's a face of one of the boys from 1932 that nobody has seen since that night and everybody in town thinks she's raised a ghost. So there's a lot of ghosts and folklore and these three women, their lives, intertwine around that event in 1932. And at the end of the book there is a true historical event that takes place In 1959, the largest mansion, dungeness, that was built on the island by the Carnegie's, burned in an arson and nobody's ever been charged with that arson. So I got to speculate a little bit about that and it's just a big Southern mythology. I think it was a lot of fun to write.
Speaker 1:I love the folklore within the story. It's wonderful. But it made me wonder when did you first visit Cumberland Island and what drew you to the Carnegie Dungeness ruins and the stories of the Gilded Age around the island?
Speaker 2:Well, to me it's such a strange thing. Those Gilded Age mentions just they look like they fell from the sky, they don't look like they belong there at all, like they look very confused. Why are we here? But I so that to me that drew me to the place. That's very southern, gothic, and so I was always interested in Cumberland. But when I was a little girl my dad's best friend had a house on St Simon's Island, which is near it's one of our barrier islands there, and my first trip to the beach was to St Simon's. So I had this connection. Although I grew up in the foothills of North Georgia, I had this connection to the coast and I have always been intrigued by the way stories connect people around the world and across regions, and so when I write I always try and connect those two areas in my book all the way across the state that I'm from. And I had always wanted to go to Cumberland but had never been.
Speaker 2:And when my husband and I got married in 1996, we got married I grew up in a house that was 100 years old and it had a hundred year old oak tree out back and we got married in the backyard. There were about 25 people there in folding chairs and we had pound cake that little ladies had made from my church. It was just very small and intimate and I loved it. And then a few months later we heard in Georgia, along with the rest of the world, that JFK Jr had married Carolyn Bessette in a secret wedding on Cumberland Island, and I was so charmed by that and I thought, oh, we're just like the Kennedys. I was so charmed by that. I thought, oh, we're just like the Kennedys.
Speaker 2:When it came a few years ago, it was our 25th wedding anniversary. We were looking for something to do. My husband surprised me and got us a reservation to stay at the Grayfield Inn on Cumberland Island. It is one of the mansions that Lucy Carnegie built for her nine children. Then it still exists on the island and you can stay there. It is the only place you can stay, unless you camp on the island.
Speaker 2:So we went and while we were pulling up you get there by ferry alongside the island I was looking at all those live oak trees and all the moss and it's very spooky and it was very quiet. There was nobody else in the boat and I realized it would have been their 25th wedding anniversary too. Oh, beautiful. And I had not thought of that and I thought, well, I've always said I wanted to write a ghost story and maybe this is the place to do it. So it started there with the idea of this fantastic wedding and these very wealthy people and this kind of unlikely place and then their, their ghost story. And then I looked at that and I looked at all the history of Cumberland and how long that history is and the Carnegie family there and how strange it was that they were there and how strange that would have been to people who were local to that area to have people of that immense wealth there in those homes and the differences in their lives. And I came up with Cleo Woodbine and her grandfather.
Speaker 1:After I read your book, I started doing a little research about that area. I I came up with Cleo Woodbine and her grandfather. After I read your book, I started doing a little research about that area. I fell in love with the way the trees fall over the road and the moss dangling from the branches. Oh, it is absolutely gorgeous. And you're right. You know, those big mansions do look like they kind of fell from the sky. Big mansions do look like they kind of fell from the sky.
Speaker 2:It's amazing and it feels very. You feel very out of time and place while you're there. So I liked the idea of it being this backdrop for a very conventional little southern town in 1959, even though it still is an imaginary town. I didn't want it to be too real either. I kind of liked keeping that soft edge to everything. And then the Carnegie's are sort of the old gods in the background, you know, in a time that's fading and social changes happening in 1959.
Speaker 1:And let's talk a bit about your characters. So Cleo Woodbine, frances Flood and Audrey Howell are the main protagonists of this fabled earth. A fable is their connection and a beautiful way to bring these characters together and explore what happened decades ago and how it affected their lives and those around them. What came first, the women or the fable?
Speaker 2:I think Cleo came first. Out of everything, cleo came first and Cleo was difficult to know. Cleo didn't want me to know her, she didn't want anybody to know her. So she was an interesting character and it was easier to get to know her, her I could not get to know her in her hardened state in 1959. It was easier to get into Cleo from 1932 as a young girl showing up and and being sort of having a capacity to be impressed at that point with all of the wealth and what her life might be if she meets this family. And her grandfather is a folklorist and a watercolor illustrator and lived in a cottage that they provided. The Carnegie's provided for him and published a small little book of his folk tales and illustrations, and she's aspiring to do the same thing. So I think that's where the folklore started.
Speaker 2:When I think about ghost stories, and specifically that day I was thinking about ghost stories looking at the island and I thought you know, our stories haunt us, they follow us, but what if they really literally walked alongside us? And so Cleo's grandfather's folktale characters literally walk alongside her and haunt her, and so that's where that connection began. And so that's where that connection began, but it is a much broader metaphor, I think, for not just this one fictional person, also for that region, for the South. I think the South is a big haunted house. I think it's all a folklore, it's all a fable.
Speaker 2:But our country, our whole country, our whole world, the way stories, folklore has traveled through centuries and across oceans, and our family folklore, all of our families. We have folklore in our communities, so I was trying to drill it down into the story of this woman. But then each of the characters presents their own ghost story or their own folklore that they bring with them. Frances Blood's mother has a German folktale and that's how she and Cleo originally became friends. They talk about that folklore. So the stories do connect all the characters and that was the theme that was running through the whole book.
Speaker 1:And it worked so well. Now, Jimmy is a character that you just fall in love with. He is a gem and in his own way, he brings everyone together. So did you draw on students? You've taught to add depth and reality to his character.
Speaker 2:Yes, I did. Now, he is a fictional character, but I did my best to highlight his humanity. Every one of the characters in my book is somehow a little bit atypical and he's just one of them. And he's just one of them, the the, the child that I taught that had Williams syndrome. Specifically I, I was very moved by her capacity for joy and despair and wonder.
Speaker 2:And I think a lot of the characters in this novel have been stunted in some way or they are jaded and struggling with the capacity to embrace the divine or wonder or magic in the world around them, or wonder or magic in the world around them. And Jimmy does not hold back. Jimmy embraces all of it, the good and the bad, and experiences it very broadly. He vibrates at this very high level and I think there's such bravery in that, there's such courage in that to be that open. He's gregarious and he's forgiving and he's loving and he's horrified and he lives very loudly Right. And that's what I wanted. I wanted a character that was moving through this world where everybody's holding on so tight and he just flies.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's so beautiful, the way you've said that Jimmy just attracts joy, and he feeds people joy too. I think that's what's so precious about him. Now, what are your thoughts on the idea that reading fiction helps develop empathy?
Speaker 2:I think it's the whole point. There's the whole point. I don't think I could sit and make up stories all day long, and what would be the point, except just to entertain myself when I and even then, even if I'm entertaining myself, there's a. There has to be a purpose to it. There has to be a function. It should change you.
Speaker 2:Like I write historical fiction, I grew up in the 80s. I, you know, I don't know anything except what I read or what I hear from other people about a time that I did not live through myself, and I know that I'm going to get things wrong, but I hope that when you write or when you read, it changes you. So by the time you're at the end of the work, you may not see things the same way as you saw them when you set out reading it or writing it or listening to it, and I think that it opens the world in ways that you don't expect. You find that you have things in common with people that you never dreamed you would have in common good and bad and it makes you reconsider the world. It makes you.
Speaker 2:I think a story is like the river in this book, where there are. There's a spot in the river there between Cumberland and the mainland where the river runs both ways, like are. There's a spot in the river there between Cumberland and the mainland where the river runs both ways, like it does in a salt creek, and they call it the dividings, and I think people are human beings, are creatures who tell stories. We're it. We're the only ones we exist. We live in a fixed point, but we have the capacity, from that fixed point, to reflect on the past or dream about the future, and we do it all at the same time, and that's a story. That's how a story connects us, it's how a story travels, and I think that is what I wanted to write about. That's empathy. That's what creates empathy, that we can look at all of it at once and see ourselves and one another.
Speaker 1:Yes, and feel the way someone else feels. Let's talk about books. What are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:I am right now reading Northwoods by Daniel Mason. Yeah, I've been waiting. It's been sitting here forever in my office and I have a friend who kept saying you've got to read this, you've got to read this and it is fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yes, that one's on my list too. I don't know about you, but it's so difficult. You have a pile of books to read stacks beside my bed, stacks in my bookcases, stacks beside my desk but every now and again at the weekends I just grab a book that I've wanted to read for a long time and sneak it in. It's kind of fun, I know, before we go. I was just wondering if there's anything you'd like to talk about regarding the Tinderbox Writers Workshop that you created. Did you keep it afloat during COVID?
Speaker 2:So during the time between writing my last book, which was the Lost Book of Eleanor Dare, which was a huge historical fiction and I didn't sit out to write historical fiction, so I sort of stumbled into it and had to learn the ropes. It took me many years and then, while it was on sub to hopefully find a home with an editor which thankfully it did I wasn't sure what I wanted to write next. It took me a while to write that book and it was very hard to sort of get started with something new. And I decided during that time that I didn't know how to do a whole lot, but I knew how to open up space and I could sit and listen to people and we could tell stories.
Speaker 2:And I kept hearing women say they weren't creative, or I used to be creative and not creative now, or I just I don't have time or I just feel so drained all the things. And I would hear it while I was walking through the grocery store. I would hear it at school with my kids and my kids are mostly big and grown now, but at that time I was sort of in the thick of it. So I was hearing it a lot from moms, but also older women that I knew, and so I rented a space and sat down and started teaching some creative writing and creative skills. And women came they came from I don't know where and we would sit for about six weeks and do these classes and they would write, they would paint, they made quilts, they made cookbooks.
Speaker 2:It was you know, it ran the gamut what they were doing with anything creative in their lives. They were creating, they were making, and then it became a retreat. For a little while I was doing retreats out on Sullivan's Island in South Carolina Twice a year. We were doing this and it was fantastic. And then COVID, and so I actually COVID was not all bad for me because I wrote another book and you know I'm publishing. So I have not been back to the workshops in the six weeks format that I had or the retreats, but I'm kind of revisiting it and I've done some online teaching and I'm hoping that I'll get back to doing that in some form, because it was great for me too.
Speaker 1:I love what you just said, then, about being great for you too. I think as a teacher and a student whichever one you are there is a give and take and a learning between both. You might be a teacher, but you're still learning through something that you hear from your student. I miss that about teaching too. Kimberly, it's been lovely chatting with you, and I thoroughly enjoyed the Fabled Earth. It's a beautiful, beautiful story.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. This was lovely. It's fun having your accent and my accent back and forth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know what? I never think I have an accent until I hear someone like you speak, and then I go oh yeah, I guess we both have an accent.
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 1:I do love your accent.
Speaker 2:I tried in college to get rid of it. We moved and lived in Seattle for four years and I was teaching kids. I was a reading specialist for a short period and I was teaching reading and their parents would come in and say you should hear my kids sound out their bowels. They all sounded like me. I just gave up. This is it.
Speaker 1:Well, I would love to hear those kids speaking now. Kimberly, I love your accent.
Speaker 2:I think it's great and I love your book. You take care. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time today. Bye-bye.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with author Kimberly Brock about her new book. You've been listening to my conversation with author Kimberly Brock about her new book, the Fabled Earth. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson-Beverly, theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy, adrian Ohtohan and graphic design by Francis Barala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.