Q: Sufficient Grace explores many of the uncertainties involved in marriage. What drew you to this theme as a writer?

A: I suppose it has something to do with the fact that both of my parents were divorced before they married each other (that was my mother's third marriage), their marriage was permanently disrupted by her illness and other factors, and my first husband and I divorced when I was twenty-five. I was single for almost twenty years before I remarried. During that time, I paid attention to what seemed to make a good and lasting marriage, what seemed to constitute the disillusionment of marriage, what made people think they wanted to be married in the first place. Having remarried at forty-six, I am interested in the ways romance and commitment work at middle age, both for people who are coming at it from previous experience and those who are still inexperienced, like Parva.

Q: What kind of research did you do on the medical condition of schizophrenia with which Gracie/Rachel is diagnosed?

A: My mother was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia when she was forty years old and I was eight. Before that time, my mother had been a resourceful business woman and a popular person in the community. Her late-onset of the disease probably started in her late thirties, but the symptoms became undeniable when she was forty. So I have grown up with this disease, seen treatment and diagnosis of my mother change over time, and talked at length with some of her doctors and caregivers. And, until I moved to Tennessee in 2000, I've always spent a great deal of time with my mother and she has lived with me and my children on a few occasions. Along with that close personal experience of the disease, I have talked with psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric nurses about the changes in treatment and the different perspectives on the disease and its variations, and about the evolution of treatment. And, of course, I've read about the disease.

Q: You have an undergraduate degree in American Studies with a concentration in Southern folklore. To what extent did this background influence your portrayal of Gracie Hollaman, a character who undergoes a "rebirth" of sorts?

A: My undergraduate studies included folk art, anthropology, religion, and material culture, among other things. I dipped into each of these disciplines while writing Sufficient Grace.

The most obvious link is with Gracie's art. Nowadays the definition of term "folk art" extends beyond utilitarian decorative arts to include a wide range of work and terminology, and sometimes controversy: outsider art, visionary art, untrained artists, self-taught artists, and so on. I know authors, gallery owners, exhibit curators, and collectors who specialize or have experience in this field. In the last fifteen years there has been an explosion of interest in outsider and self-taught art, and the number of traditional and online venues for viewing and purchasing this work continues to grow. While many outsider and visionary artists are not mentally ill, some artists in this broad category do experience mental illness, and their art therapists are often early witnesses to as that artistic vision manifests and develops.

While this novel is not autobiographical, I have borrowed certain things from my own experience and given those things to my characters in places. The scene where Gracie draws the Jesus at the foot of Ed's bed comes from my mother drawing a Jesus at the foot of my bed when I was eight years old. She had a feeling something wasn't right with her, or that others thought so, and that she might be forced to leave me. She wanted me to know that Jesus was always with me and looking out for me, even if she couldn't be there. My mother isn't a visual artist, but that act, coupled with exposure to outsider and visionary art from my studies in college and later work at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, has fed into the character development of Gracie and the art-related themes in Sufficient Grace.

The history of mythology and religion plays a huge role in the novel in both obvious and subtle ways. Gracie's religious point of view is widely inclusive. She believes in both angels and fairies, figures from both a Judeao-Christian-Islamic tradition and pagan tradition. Our modern visual concept of an angel is heavily influenced by Egyptian, Greek, and Roman ideas of goddesses, with some later influence from Celtic traditions. So, on some level, the angels and fairies have become intertwined. The Celtic influence is evident in the fairystone myth, a myth I didn't make up. Those fairystones and their legend really exist.

Sufficient Grace is full of the borrowing from one cultural tradition to another. Even Toot admits her knowledge and acceptance of "the old ways" even though she is washed in the blood of the Lamb, and Tyrone is the subject of prophecy that some might consider outside the strictest interpretation of Christianity. Yet, others might reconcile and absorb these phenomena to be the work of a larger Godly design.

Q: Sufficient Grace is suffused (both structurally and thematically) with references to faith. How do you see faith operating for the characters in your novel?

A: The short answer is: "A variety of ways!" The long answer is: I am the child of a jack-leg Catholic father and a schizophrenic, formerly Protestant, currently Catholic mother with religious cornerstones in the psychotic ways she sees the world. As an older child, I lived with my grandmother, who was a Baptist, then a Methodist, who was suspicious of Papists. I've studied mythology, religion, and religious practice. And I'm married to the well-educated son of a Pentecostal Church of God preacher. To say the least, I have an eclectic personal spiritual position and vision. Basically, I am a seeker full of questions and constantly formulating shifting answers. That probably has a lot to do with why I write.

I try to make facets of my religious history and education come through in my characters. I want my characters to explore their spiritual lives and personal relationships with something both inside and beyond themselves, some characters stretching the confines of a traditional belief system and some openly challenging the same. While some of my characters are churchly people, and I respect that, I want them to, on some level, either proactively or reactively, step beyond Man's attempt to define and confine God by rules and fragile reason, to be less occupied with defining God by limiting him with doctrine and dogma, much of which has and always will be politically defined and motivated.

Alongside evangelical Protestantism in the novel, Catholicism is present in cameos and in the underlying structure of the novel and the story. Historically, Catholicism is the root of modern Christianity. And Catholicism has always borrowed from pagan cultures to create its rituals and calendar. In the same way, Toot and Gracie borrow and absorb beliefs and practices from Catholicism. The sections of the novel come from a loose interpretation of the Mass and other religious worship services, but the Mass in particular. In the Mass, transubstantiation occurs and the food becomes the body; the wine becomes the blood. The participants eat the body and become one with Christ. They become part of the death and rebirth, the Resurrection. The novel begins with "invitation," the invitation of the voices to Gracie, but it is also meant to reflect the call to worship at the onset of a religious service. The other sections have similar double meanings as in commitment to faith, the offertories -- the second being more defined in purpose, the Eucharist, and the close with a benediction, a prayer to carry participants out of the sacred ritual and into the secular word prepared to maintain a spiritual existence.

All of this is of course playing with ideas, not certainty. In my mind, my novel is not about divine intervention so much as the possibility of divine intervention. What implication does that possibility have for Gracie as well as all the other characters in the novel, whether they are believers or not?

The bottom line is that my religious perspective doesn't have to matter to readers. How they interpret Sufficient Grace and judge its characters and events will be as personal and individual as their own beliefs and questions, and their own points of view on faith, religion, charity, and possibility.

Q: You introduce some wonderful comedic moments into the relationship that develops between Parva Wilson and Ed Hollaman. Why does their intimacy lend itself to such moments of humor?

A: My first answer to that question is, "That's just how it came out." But giving the question more thought, I believe it has something to do with my own marriage and the courtship that started when I was in my mid forties and my husband had just turned fifty. We had both been divorced for years before we met, and our accumulated experience taught us that one of the most important elements of a relationship can be a compatible sense of humor, that a shared sense of humor is one of the most intimate connections between people. While Ed and Parva don't laugh so much at themselves, and do experience from the beginning a kind of electric attraction, they have a lighter, more slapstick approach to love and romance, despite the serious circumstances that surround their relationship. That vision of love and my attraction to the evolution of their mid-life relationship surely comes from my own marriage on some level.

Q: Descriptions of food, cooking, and recipes abound in Sufficient Grace. How did this culinary theme emerge in your work?

A: At some point I realized that Ed was really hungry and, in more ways than one, he needed to learn to feed himself. Later I thought there was too much food and cooking and eating going on in the book. I tried to stop writing so much about it, but it wouldn't go away. Then, one day it hit me like a ton of bricks that my novel started on Holy Thursday, the day of the Last Supper. Then I knew my subconscious was trying to tell me something, trying to help me write my novel. I realized that everyone in the novel is indeed hungry for something.

As for the food, the truth is, I'm not a great cook. I'm a passable cook. But I love to eat, and I have been exposed to a variety of food cultures and the Southern propensity to heal and nurture with food. All that experience was helpful as this particular theme became apparent during the novel-writing process.

Annelle Williams, a friend and food columnist from my hometown (who is a much better cook than I am) has helped me come up with some of the recipes mentioned in the book. Despite all this self-effacing humility, I will go on record by saying that I make a darn good salmon patty and killer deviled eggs.

Q: You are both a published poet and a novelist. For you, how does the composition of poetry and of fiction differ? Is there any overlap?

A: I began writing poetry when I didn't have time to write anything longer. A poem is small, compact, travels well. I could write and revise in short moments in the bleachers of a Babe Ruth League baseball practice, or while waiting for middle school to let out, or in those last few tired minutes before I turned out the light. Much of my poetry is character-driven narrative poetry because I had all these characters in my head when I was a young single mother and no time to put them in a longer story. But as I began to take poetry more seriously as a genre, line length, rhythm, language, and the value of just the right word took on more and more importance. Being a poet makes me a better fiction writer than I might be otherwise.

Short fiction is much more like a poem than a novel. But in each case, the increased elbow room of a longer type of story gives you space to explore and make side trips, to add characters and geography, to develop back story and subplot, and let things develop in layers. The poem is looking through a keyhole and imagining what is beyond the boundaries of what you see, the short story is sticking your head in a window and seeing that one room pretty well and maybe being able to see into another room slightly, and the novel is walking through the door into a life, a whole world. With a novel, I have to live with my characters. I work hard to get them solidly planted in my head, and then they don't want to leave while I'm having dinner or going for a ride with my husband. They are THERE for the duration, or I lose them and have to work like hell to get them back.

For me, separating that act of writing poetry from fiction is like combing out a badly tangled head of hair. It is important to explore poetry as a writer, even if you never show your poems to anyone. I read a lot of good fiction before and while I'm writing fiction, but I read lots of poetry as I revise because it makes me mindful of my most precious tool, words and the way they work individually and together to build a narrative. And poetry is a wonderful exercise in distilling ideas in relatively few words using the concrete, not the abstract. That same approach makes the novel more real to me.

I'm always writing poetry, good and bad, as part of my writing practice. But reading other poets' work often gives me ideas for something other than poetry. Despite the apparent differences, separating the writing of poetry from the writing of fiction is almost impossible for me.

Q: Sufficient Grace is your first novel. How long did you work on it, and what were some of the challenges and delights you encountered along the way?

A: This novel started years and years ago as a short story about Ed and Gracie that wouldn't stay a short story. After a couple of years, I gave up on the story and gave in to the novel. I was so stretched for time in those days that I carried notes on characters and scenes and fifty pages of the novel around for several years before I was able to focus on it in a big way. That time came about ten years after the conception of the novel and the two families. When I married my husband back in 2000, he gave me the gift of time and encouragement to work on the novel full time. Oh, and he paid the bills! Once I got down to business, it took me about a year to write the first draft and about another eight months to revise it to a point I was ready to send it out to agents. I worked all this in around revising my poetry collection, because I decided to make it my master's thesis, and LSU Press had expressed interest in publishing a shorter version of the thesis. It was like having two babies at once, only not twins.

Q: Do you consider Sufficient Grace a novel in the tradition of contemporary Southern fiction?

A: I am a Southerner. I grew up in the South, a part of the South heavily influenced by Southern Appalachian culture. I love and appreciate the beauty and complexity of the South. And my long-time friends and mentors are considered some of the South's finest contemporary writers. So it would be hard for me to write a book that wasn't considered Southern. But like so many other writers whose work comes out of that experience steeped in place and artful storytelling, I hope the novel has a universal appeal because, while it addresses themes commonly thought of as regional, those themes have significant implications far beyond the Mason-Dixon line and Gulf of Mexico.

Q: What's your next project?

A: I am working on a novel about a woman who has seven husbands -- not all at the same time. The working title is The Nine Lives of Loody Tibet. Of her nine lives, one is defined by her father, seven by her husbands, and the 9th life she shapes for herself alongside, in spite of, and in the space in between the men in her life. This is another story I began years ago. After I married my husband, I found out his grandmother had been married seven times. This is where the Twilight Zone theme starts playing in the background.