Novelist Trow calls on her Huntsville experience for fiction debut
Lisa Trow was teaching creative writing to Huntsville prison inmates when she noticed the obsession lurking behind some of their work.
The men would pen love poems to female attorneys or medical professionals whom they’d barely met.
“They’d fixate on these women as symbols of hope for the future,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It was all unrequited. It was just a distraction they would indulge in.”
That obsession is at the heart of Trow’s debut novel “Sign of Redemption,” in which accountant Richie Harrison is wrongly accused of armed robbery and finds himself behind bars.
His sign-language skills enable him to interpret a conversation between a deaf inmate and attorney Elizabeth McKenna.
Harrison’s growing obsession with her sparks his prison escape and escalates into violence as he tracks McKenna down in Austin and eventually kidnaps her.
As a reporter covering death row for the Huntsville Item (she also had two stints as the paper’s managing editor), Trow came to the story with first-hand experience.
“A capitol murderer fixated on me,” she said. “I had to ask the warden to ask him to stop writing me. It wasn’t flattering at all. It was gross and creepy.”
Harrison’s obsession is more nuanced and decidedly more human, mainly because Trow decides to have him narrate the tale as a man drifting near the point of no return.
Trow writes in Harrison’s voice: “When I first got sent down, I thought about escaping every day, and every day I thought of the bullet that would pierce my back and exit through my breastbone in a bloody spray. I thought of myself tumbling out of a dead run, my legs buckling, my face hitting the pavement. Maybe I’m just a coward if all it takes to make a coward is a vivid imagination. But I wasn’t here long before I found out what it sounded like when the blood left the body in gurgling rushes.
Behind bars, Harrison realizes that “there was some mysterious force that took over in these tragedies and became both writer and director to a cast of helpless actors.”
“If your narrator is a prisoner, he’s going to be unreliable,” Trow explained. “You could go into prison rational, but the experience of prison would corrupt you. It’s a bizarro world. Everyone assumes you’re worthless and up to no good. You are surrounded by people you have to be afraid of. To survive you have to learn to lie and you must act to protect yourself.”
“Sign of Redemption” was 20 years in the writing, morphing at one point into a Quentin Tarantino-esque screenplay.
It took so long, in part, because most of that time, Trow was a single parent working full time.
But she rejected efforts to buy her story idea and instead tried to teach herself to write a novel. She got stuck, and the partially completed book languished for years.
“Those urges to create don’t go away,” she said. “I felt I was letting the story beat me. Because it was now or never, I started to work again.”
he result is a nuanced, well-crafted tale that brings together both Trow’s journalistic skills of observation and her creative skills honed while earning a master’s degree in writing poetry.
“You have many, many more crayons writing fiction than journalism,” she said. “But there are things to borrow from journalism, like the use of dialogue. Somebody said that if you cross poetry and journalism you create novelists.”
Prison was a natural subject matter for Trow, whose first days as a Sam Houston State University student were marred by the 1974 Carrasco prison siege in which inmates took prison workers hostage. She heard the gunfire from her dorm room.
Meeting poet Grady Hillman and assisting him with his 1983 documentary film “Lions, Parakeets and Other Prisoners” led Trow to teaching writing in prison, where she once experienced a lockdown.
“The prison SWAT team came through,” she said. “You could hear the thunder of boots from the team, then hear them recede.”
And Trow had the personal heartache of marrying a seemingly reformed ex-con who later went back to his old ways.
Richie is not based on her ex-husband, she said, but through the relationship, she did get access to unfiltered information about real prison life.
In the end, the novel aims a spotlight at a corner of humanity we often ignore.
“I had this romantic idea of making the ordinary beautiful while also trying to make ugly things lyrical,” Trow said. “Those two notions are what drive me to tell stories the way I tell them.”
Joe O’Connell is a Texas writer.
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