Connie May Fowler Confidential: Secrets, Storytelling, and the Oil Disaster

by Shana Thornton

Connie May Fowler understands the impact of secrets, both private and political. In her novels and memoirs, she acutely communicates the interconnectivity of life, including her own.

Fowler is a Southern author and she utilizes that culture and landscape in her novels. Her characters reflect the diversity of the South, while also portraying those subtle moments in all relationships that transcend culture. When asked if her characters relate to her Southern heritage, Fowler says that what other people might consider eccentricities are just a part of everyday life in the South.

“Secrets are a necessary part of being a human,” Fowler says. “If someone tells you something in confidence, you have to keep that held in confidence. Otherwise, people wouldn’t be able to unburden themselves.”

Fowler has made a career out of storytelling and trying to recapture a missing piece of her childhood. She says, “I had a fractured beginning. I only knew one grandparent who died when I was four. My father died when I was six. My mother died when I had just turned eighteen. Not knowing any of the grandparents, when my father died it blew what was left of the family completely asunder. I so longed to try to understand where I came from. Sometimes, I felt like I was hatched. It really did drive my thirst to be a storyteller just to try to figure out who these people were.”

Fowler’s father was a musician and the focus of her essay, “Affirmation, Etched in Vinyl,” which was published in the June 4, 2010 edition of The New York Times. She describes the revelation of a mystery, hearing her father’s voice for the first time in 45 years. As a six-year-old, Fowler had listened to the sound of her father dying after a heart attack, and those final moments had become her strongest memory of her father’s voice. After receiving a vinyl recording of her father singing with his band Henry May and His Rhythm Ramblers, Fowler could finally stop chasing the ghost of her father’s voice, a sound that she had lost while growing up.

“I had literally searched and searched,” Fowler says, “and it came out of the blue.”

She had suppressed her desire to know her father when in the presence of her mother, who communicated a disdain for him. In this way, Fowler’s secret as a child was to know her father, hear stories about him and listen to his music.

“For me having this disconnect from a familial trail,” Fowler says, “one of the most interesting things is to not only hear my father sing the song but to know that he wrote the song, and that I’m a writer. We are connected. There is a line that you can actually follow.”

While Fowler is comfortable, accessible, and communicates human interactions with fluidity and humor, she admits that she wasn’t always so certain of herself and her talents.

“I used to be extremely shy,” she says. “I had a stutter. I was terrified to go to the convenient store and I think it was because of the way that I was brought up and being beaten and that horrible stuff, so I didn’t know how to be a public person. My editor and agent just kept saying, ‘Be yourself. Be yourself.’ I didn’t know what that self was, and I literally made myself sick.

“I remember the first time I went to New York to meet them,” Fowler says with laughter, “and we were at a little pub and we were talking and I’m trying to pull it off. I just run to the bathroom, and I kept a bottle of Maalox in my purse. Eventually, I just wore myself out. It was almost out of physical necessity that I decided, Well, I am who I am and I can’t adopt airs. I think that writing books which have helped people in their own personal journeys has helped me to learn that it’s okay to be honest about who I am and what I have gone through.”

In Fowler’s seventh novel, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly (Grand Central Publishing, 2010), the main character struggles with an inability to admit that she is in a loveless and often abusive marriage. Indeed, Fowler says that most secrets drift into the unconscious, so much so that, like Clarissa, we are often unaware of the secrets we keep from ourselves. She points out that Clarissa is isolated and has no meaningful friendships. Though Clarissa is aware of current events in the outside world, she isn’t aware of herself. Fowler also emphasizes the aspect of shame that’s attached to secrets, specifically Clarissa’s embarrassment of her marriage and her writer’s block.

“She’s really abrogated her power to her husband (Iggy),” Fowler says, “and he’s stolen a lot of it and outright taken it.”

In connection with the novel’s release, Fowler created The Clarissa Burden I’ve Got a Secret Postcard Project to inspire others to anonymously unburden their minds. Through the project people are encouraged to anonymously disclose their secrets so as to unburden themselves, while also creating a dialogue about the pressing issues of our time and the subtleties of our relationships. Anyone can e-mail or send a postcard through standard mail. All of the original contributions are deleted and/or destroyed after being copied to Fowler’s website. Names are omitted. Fowler says that she was surprised by the responses and how freely people confessed their secrets.

“It’s been really humbling,” Fowler said. “I don’t think that I expected the level of candor. I wanted to do something in conjunction with the release of the book that made sense. I just thought that at the beginning of this book, Clarissa is paralyzed with secrets, including her many imagined, spousal death scenarios. I hoped the postcard project would create a dialogue. What I’ve realized is that for every person who makes a comment or sends me an e-mail privately, or even some who have posted on my Facebook page comments about the secrets, I know that a lot more people are thinking. It’s not always a public dialogue, but people are thinking and that’s something.”

On Fowler’s website, a person writes, “I worry that I don’t love my children the way other women love theirs. I mean, I do love them. Very much. But sometimes I wonder if I’d be happier if, you know, I’d not had them. Or waited until things were better.”

Another reveals, “I had an abortion in 1955 at the age of 18.”

Fowler admits that she is questing to collect stories, but to have fluid goals and change as she continues to write. In our interview, Fowler does not shy away from the politics of this time and place and immediately she begins expressing her concern for the abnormally large numbers of sea turtles coming to shore close to her Florida home. The BP oil spill has been foremost on her thoughts.

“I’m just completely bereft,” Fowler says, “The turtles are completely lost. They’re coming ashore in record numbers and going back out to shore. For us to have so many turtles so early, they’re obviously not accustomed to coming to this exact spot. We would feel better about it if they were still able to adapt and go ahead and lay their eggs, but evidently they’re going, no this is not my place.”

Fowler wants to tell people what it’s like for the residents of the Gulf Coast. She has been blogging about it and is already working on a new nonfiction book about the current oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.

“I had started a new novel and it wasn’t going anywhere because Clarissa from How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly kept popping back up,” Fowler said. “I would be writing along—the new character’s name was Euphrates—and I would think, wait a minute, I just wrote Clarissa.

“I had an idea for a long time to write what would be a sort of environmental memoir,” Fowler says, “An artist living on the edge of the world, making things grow out of sand and what that life is like, so I decided that I probably needed to turn back to that and give Clarissa a rest. Then, the oil disaster happened. It became much more urgent. My new book will be about what it’s like to live here amid this disaster.” Fowler is a prolific American writer who will wrestle with heartbreak in her next book.

Her current project, The Clarissa Burden I’ve Got a Secret Postcard Project, contains anonymous, heartbreaking confessions and witty annoyances, all secrets nonetheless. Anyone may join the discussion and contribute a secret.

www.conniemayfowler.com

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