Posted on Sun, Dec. 11, 2005

 

Nature and nurture

Author Mary Alice Monroe reaps rich stories from the Lowcountry’s landscape — but she also works to preserve it

By CLAUDIA SMITH BRINSON

Staff Writer

Writers find the landscape of the Lowcountry irresistible. Its oak-shaded roads, grassy saltwater marshes and golden dunes lure them into love songs, place as important as plot.

Readers nationwide are hooked, too. Tidal creeks and sea islands seem to offer a leg up on best-seller lists. In the past few years, Lowcountry stars Pat Conroy and Jo Humphreys have been joined by Dorothea Benton Frank, Sue Monk Kidd, Anne Rivers Siddons and, from Georgia, Patti Callahan Henry and Karen White.

Jokes Marjory Wentworth, the state’s poet laureate and another enraptured writer: “It’s almost a genre.”

Mary Alice Monroe wants to do more, though, than sing praise. She wants to save the place: the slave cemeteries, the sand dunes, the sweetgrass, the sea turtles.

The author of nine novels, Monroe moved to South Carolina and altered how she writes her family tales, adding research, advocacy and paeans to nature.

“Two things changed my career,” she says. “Coming from far off and appreciating how beautiful this state is.”

And “Feeling the growth. I’m like the nervous rabbit in ‘Watership Down.’ I know ‘They are coming!’ ”

Monroe also suspected something else: “I hoped I could make a difference.”

She didn’t relinquish her fascination with families, with the interactions among husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. Themes of loss and healing still permeate her writing. But in her three most recent books she also weaves in stories of nature damaged and repaired.

“The Beach House,” published in 2002, describes preservation efforts for loggerhead turtles at the Isle of Palms.

“Skyward,” published in 2003, deals with rehabilitation of birds of prey on the coast.

And “Sweetgrass,” out in hardback this past July, takes on the whole South Carolina shebang: the fading of the Gullah culture, loss of habitat for sweetgrass, the passing of basketmakers whose children don’t pick up the craft, destruction of slave cemeteries, families losing land to taxes, the over-building of the coast.

‘ANOTHER LIFE’

“Pat Conroy says I was born here in another life,” Monroe says.

This lifetime, she grew up in the Chicago area. Monroe is the third eldest of 10, five boys and five girls. Of the 10, two write and one paints.

Monroe’s parents — her father, a pediatrician, and her mother, a nurse and onetime ballet dancer — were strict “in that they were watchful and kept us together.”

With a full cast available, the children specialized in family musicals. Monroe fondly remembers an animal version of “The Sound of Music,” with chickens, rabbits and hedgehogs. She warbles, “The hills are alive with the smell of carrots.”

The Monroe kids produced a variety show; a carnival, complete with fortune teller and animal tamer. The sisters put up and took down doll homes atop a ping-pong table, gathering knicknacks — a cup for a sink — as furnishings; they built entire villages in the basement. Monroe borrows from those memories for “The Four Seasons,” published in 2001, in which grown sisters work out their past.

“I remember those days and really believe that’s the place we can go for resources,” says sister Marguerite Martino, a painter and art therapist in Chicago. “For an artist, a blank canvas can be intimidating — or I think of my sister writing to deadlines — but we learned then how to create an environment for the muse that is forgiving.”

Says Monroe, “More than anyone else I know, we played. It’s a bedrock of why I wanted to be an artist.”

‘WRITE A BOOK’

Monroe is married to Markus Kruesi, a child psychiatrist; their son and daughter attend Clemson University. Monroe credits Kruesi with the advent of her novel writing, and Kruesi enjoys telling the story:

“She was pregnant with our second child, and the pregnancy wasn’t going well, and she got put to bed. I wasn’t home a good deal of the time, and she told me, ‘I literally have to stay flat on my back. Please move the TV in the bedroom.’

“I said, ‘No, I won’t do that.’ I said, ‘You have a lovely brain, and it will just rot.’ She was incredibly frustrated by being immobilized, and I said, ‘Look, what have you always wanted to do you couldn’t do?’ She said, ‘Write a book.’

“I said, ‘Well, that doesn’t get you out of bed. I’ll get you paper and a pen, but I won’t move the TV in.’ So by an accident of fate she got to do what she wanted to do.”

You might call the current stage of Monroe’s career an accident of fate, too, since a move sparked it. But that doesn’t adequately credit her energy and will.

For 10 years, the family visited the Isle of Palms. In 1999, Kruesi accepted a post at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, and Monroe got more than a new home. She got a different view.

While visiting her sister Marguerite in Florida, Monroe saw a loggerhead turtle on the beach. “That image stayed with me. The first thing I did was join a loggerhead turtle team, but I didn’t know my interest would become a passion.

“Once I knew I would write about the sea turtles, that changed everything. I saw a need to protect. I thought, ‘You know, I can really educate all the tourists that come here and write a novel at the same time.’ ”

That’s not easy, keeping a fiction reader through the field notes. “Your top goal in writing a novel is to tell a story,” she acknowledges. “I hate it when you hit a part in a book where the author is dumping research.”

She dedicates “The Beach House” to the Island Turtle Team. In all, more than 100 members work on the Isle of Palms and Sullivan’s and Dewees islands.

Each chapter begins with an instructive epigraph. Chapter One offers: “After living at sea for 20 years or more, the female loggerhead returns to the beach of her birth to nest ... ”

Weaving together turtle habits and human habits, the novel begins with a daughter reluctantly returning to the nest. It draws to a close with a “boil,” dozens of baby loggerheads digging out at the same moment:

“The sand erupted and the 80-plus hatchlings bubbled out of the nest, flippers waving in the night air, bodies squirming and pushing as they climbed one over the other.”

‘ON THE TURTLE TEAM’

Barbara Bergwerf, a photographer and member of the Island Turtle Team, records the team efforts as well as sea turtle rehabilitation at the S.C. Aquarium.

She and Monroe met during night work on the beach. From May to October, team members protect egg-laying, nests and hatchlings and keep a tally. The 2005 season ended with 6,043 eggs laid and 4,144 hatchlings emerging.

“An average novel, how many people does it impact?” Bergwerf asks. “But ‘The Beach House,’ it’s striking how many people have read it.”

When the Isle of Palms team, dressed in their turtle-emblazoned blue T-shirts, dined together at a local restaurant, a waitress confided she moved to South Carolina because of “The Beach House.”

“Mary Alice was walking up behind her,” Bergwerf says, “and I said, ‘Would you like to meet the author?’ ”

On the beach, Bergwerf often hears people exclaim over the team’s red buckets, used to move eggs to safety. Tourists say, “You’re on the turtle team! Did you read ‘The Beach House?’ ”

“So I know she has made an impact.”

Monroe recently joined the board of the S.C. Aquarium and is shadowing its turtle rehab staff for her next book, a sequel called “Turtle Beach.” She donates honorariums, lends her name and presence to fund-raisers and sometimes a check arrives from elsewhere, a note saying the donor heard Monroe speak.

“She really walks the walk and talks the talk,” says Kate Darby, the aquarium’s director of institutional development.

‘MEDITATE, PRAY, REFLECT’

Monroe took the response to “Beach House” — a bestseller on paperback fiction lists — as a green light. For her next novel, “Skyward,” she worked at the S.C. Center for Birds of Prey.

Monroe did everything from scrub cages to release hawks. The book that emerged traces the healing of injured birds and injured humans when a nurse comes to a raptor rehab center to care for the director’s daughter, who has diabetes.

“I thought it was wonderful,” Grace Gasper says of “Skyward.” Gasper is the medical clinic director at the center, where close to 400 raptors are treated each year with the help of 70 volunteers.

“She does such a good job in reaching a large audience with an important message,” says Gasper. “Now in ‘Sweetgrass’ she has moved on to the most important message of all: preserving habitat.”

With another best-seller, Monroe knew she had a good fit in method and message: Do meaningful work; figure out a story; weave together.

“I figure out what I want to say before I begin a novel,” Monroe says. “I meditate. I pray. I reflect. Then all of a sudden, I see it. It clicks.

“What comes next I call ‘projectile writing.’ The first draft pours out. I’m one of the rare writers who likes to rewrite, to polish, to fine-tune. It’s the first draft that’s painful.”

Julie Beard, a friend regularly acknowledged in the novels, says: “I tease Mary Alice that she’s lucky there’s such a thing as Southern fiction. Writing about turtles or ospreys is not the same as writing about cornstalks or cows.”

The two met in a Chicago writing group and became “critique partners,” going over each other's manuscripts. A professor of communications at Lendenwood University in Missouri, Beard writes “futuristic women action adventures.” Her latest is “Touch of the White Tiger.”

She brings up a memory of finishing a Monroe manuscript in tears. “I cried not only because it was touching, but I realized I could never write anything that well.”

Monroe talks often about, and relies upon, intuition in writing. She paraphrases Joseph Campbell, known for his work in mythology: “Writers have to put their ears to the ground. Writers and other artists are shamans. If you open yourself up, it comes to you.”

She also cites William Faulkner’s encouragement to heed the universal, “lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed,” as he said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

“My goal as an author is to write emotionally, to present life in intimate detail,” Monroe says. “I am a conduit. I tell a story and inspire.”

And then she hopes people feel called to act.

A SYMBOL FOR LOSS

Monroe doesn’t mention her sense of obligation, although that seems another place from which she operates. The front or back pages or epigraphs of Monroe’s books direct readers to action, to taking responsibility.

Each book arrives in her mind with an image. For “Sweetgrass” it was the hands of mothers weaving Lowcountry baskets.

The novel, already in its third printing, opens with a fight over land and family. Taxes have quadrupled on Sweetgrass, a Lowcountry plantation in the hands of the Blakely family for eight generations.

When Preston Blakely suffers a stroke, an estranged son returns home. But the heart of the novel, and the family, belongs to matriarch Mama June and friend and employee Nona, a basketmaker.

Monroe says her novel deals with “loss of habitat due to development, which translates into loss of home. It’s happening all across the Southeast, people unable to hang onto their homes. And the unique quality of many Southern families is they’re in one spot for generations. They are stewards of land and home.”

Her field notes and metaphor are found in sweetgrass, “an indigenous, long-stemmed plant ... fast disappearing from the landscape due to urbanization and development of coastal islands and marshland,” as the epigraph to Chapter Two informs.

“As the sweetgrass dies out, so does a cultural art handed down from mother to daughter,” Monroe says. “As the grass disappears, they can’t make the baskets, and the young ones don’t want to learn anyway.

“You see a loss of culture, a loss of family, a loss of place. Sweetgrass is the symbol for the losses. The book’s thrust is for preservation.”

Monroe has found her place, both geographically and thematically — and she’s sticking with it. “When you come from somewhere where you’ve seen destruction, and you come to a place that’s paradise, you don’t take paradise for granted.

“Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Reach Brinson at (803) 771-8683 or cbrinson@thestate.com

IF YOU WANT TO HELP

International Center for Birds of Prey

WRITE: P.O. Box 1247, Charleston, S.C. 29402

CALL: (843) 928-3494

E-MAIL: info@internationalbirdsofprey.org

South Carolina Aquarium

WRITE: Christine Nott, 100 Aquarium Wharf, Charleston, S.C. 29401

CALL: (843) 720-1990

E-MAIL: publicrelations@scaquarium.org

Botany Community Conservation Sea Turtle Project

WRITE: Botany Turtle Project, 3002 Myrtle Street, Edisto Island, S.C. 29438

CALL: Meg Hoyle at (843) 869-2998

E-MAIL: megcoastal@aol.com

This is the only turtle project recruiting minority students into sea-turtle conservation efforts.

A LOWCOUNTRY READING LIST

Pat Conroy: “Prince of Tides,” “Beach Music”

Dorothea Benton Frank: “Pawleys Island,” “Shem Creek,” “Plantation: A Lowcountry Tale,” “Isle of Palms”

Patti Callahan Henry: “Where the River Runs”

Josephine Humphreys: “Dreams of Sleep,” “Rich in Love,” “The Fireman’s Fair”

Mary Alice Monroe: “Beach House,” “Skyward,” “Sweetgrass”

Anne Rivers Siddons: “Low Country,” “Sweetwater Creek”

Karen White