Freedom to Roam: A Conversation with June Sylvester Saraceno
June Sylvester Saraceno grew up in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, among storytelling aunties and preachers and all the conflicts that riddled the rural South. This background shapes her debut novel, Feral, North Carolina, 1965, a coming-of-age story about a curious young girl named Willie who tries to learn her family’s secrets.
After making her way west, Saraceno joined the faculty of Sierra Nevada College, where I took a composition course from her in 1987. We have since become writing colleagues. When I learned about Feral, I asked to interview her. Our conversation about genre, craft, and characters took place over email.
KL: Years ago, when we both attended a writers’ retreat, you mentioned that these stories drew on your own life. Did you consider writing them as personal essays and linking them together as a memoir, or did you always want the work to be fictional?
JSS: Though I do draw on places, people, and experiences from my childhood, this book could only exist as fiction. Memoir would have limited me to the realm of what actually happened (or that’s how I would have felt, that it had to be factual). I needed the freedom of fiction to dive into the complicated things I wanted to explore, such as the spectrum of racism, the discomfort of strict gender roles, religious hypocrisy, and more. Fiction was my only way to get at the emotional truth. The idea of the stories laced together as a novel came later, in part because Willie changes. She’s a little more capable of self-reflection and a little less trusting of adults by the end of the book.
KL: Tell us about the evolution of this novel. What books did you use as models for linking short stories together?
JSS: The work grew out of short stories I had already published, many of which appear in edited versions as chapters in the book. I’m grateful to Southern Fried Karma Press—and Pinckney Benedict, the contest judge, in particular—for seeing the episodic structure of the book as an asset rather than a liability. The idea of linking the stories as a short novel dawned on me as a gift from other writers. There are wonderful novels that rely on linked stories—Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge come to mind—and several others that I went back to and studied as models.
KL: Because your novel grew out of short stories and has a young protagonist, did you struggle with how to categorize the book?
JSS: Young adult literature seems to be having its day currently. There are so many excellent YA novels being published, but I didn’t really see Feral as fitting into that category. As far as Willie being a 10-year-old, I don’t think her age means the book is appropriate for that age range. In Feral, there’s a lot of dramatic irony between what the reader knows and what Willie doesn’t. I think that gap gives the book some of its best punches. I’m thinking of other books with child narrators, such as Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina or Justin Torres’s We the Animals. They’re not YA novels, but could be read by teens. I read them as an adult, and I wouldn’t place them on the YA shelf if I ran a bookstore. Feral could be appropriate for teen readers, but I didn’t see it as specifically geared to a younger reading audience.
KL: How did you decide on the order of the stories/chapters?
JSS: In the process of writing this, I saw it clearly as a coming-of-age story, and that guided the structure. I’m not sure every chapter can stand on its own as a short story, though ideally most can. Some of the early chapters have a little more humor and nostalgia than later sections. Eventually, Willie won’t have the safety of old certainties about her world. That shift needed some scaffolding to support it, so that guided the order of the episodes.
KL: How did the title of your novel come about?
JSS: Originally, I called the town near where Willie grew up Fairfield. One of the first stories was titled “In Fairfield, on Earth.” It was never a particularly good fictional name, not one that seemed completely on target. Then one day as I was describing the book to a friend who hadn’t read it, he said, “You’ve used ‘feral’ to describe it so many times, you should just call it feral!” It was an “aha” moment. I thought: how perfect if the town were called Feral. It blends into how feral Willie is, but it also suggests some things about the place itself that hit the mark. After that conversation, Fairfield became Feral.
KL: Which story or element of the novel did you enjoy writing the most?
JSS: I absolutely loved writing most of the bike-riding scenes because they reminded me of that first heady taste of freedom when you realize you can get away on your own and no one knows where you are. That thrilled me as a kid. The outdoor scenes brought back to me one of the biggest blessings of my childhood—freedom to roam, or just sit under a tree and practice birdcalls or build a fire. Of course, that last one could turn out bad. My brother and sisters and I were expected to “get outside and play” in summer. We came in for meals and when it got dark. During daylight hours, we ranged around in the woods and fields. Getting a bike changed everything, though. With a bike you could really take off. There was an old country store within pedaling distance and in the era of penny candies, that was a big score. The rush of that freedom. I still feel lucky.
KL: One of my favorite chapters is “Church Ladies,” the setting of which is a church on a hot Sunday. One of the characters in “Church Ladies” is Miss Violetta, who is quietly subversive. She does not remove the hair from her legs, she’s the widow of a sinner who did not attend church, and she has no children. You contrast her with other parents, who are less well liked by children: “Kids loved Miss Violetta. She was gentle and always had mints or chewing gum in her purse. She would stroke our hair and let us sit on her lap. She never said now get on outside and play. She never raised her voice.”
JSS: Miss Violetta is loosely based on an actual woman who attended our church and who didn’t shave her legs, and it was the source of many conversations between the other ladies. That’s what made her an interesting character for me when I started writing about her as Miss Violetta—she was a very soft-spoken person who never offered any explanation for this choice. It’s an unusual kind of courage to withstand the unspoken pressure of conforming to this customary grooming, especially in those days. In every other way—dress, hairstyle, accessories—she looked like all the other church ladies. With her character, I was also trying to touch on something else that separated some church ladies from others—a quality akin to grace, the ability to sense a child’s need, or to make sure a wounded worshipper has her purse with her as she’s whisked off to the hospital. I like the idea of her as a very practical person, with otherworldly kindness, who was centered enough to not be concerned with conventions.
June Sylvester Saraceno (@JuneJuniverse) is a professor at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe. Feral, North Carolina, 1965, her debut novel, was listed in BuzzFeed as one of “18 Must Read Books from Indie Presses.” She has published three poetry books: The Girl From Yesterday, Of Dirt and Tar, and Altars of Ordinary Light. She directs the popular literary speaker series “Writers in the Woods.”
Krista Lukas was born and raised in the North Lake Tahoe area and now lives in Carson Valley, Nevada. She is the author of a poetry collection, Fans of My Unconscious. Poems from the collection appear in The Best American Poetry 2006 and The Writer’s Almanac. Find more at kristalukas.com.