Calling Home
by Janna McMahan
List Price: $15.00
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780758221964
Publisher: Kensington
A Kentucky native, Janna McMahan now lives in Columbia, South Carolina with her husband and their daughter. Many of Janna’s stories are set in the lush hills and farmland of the Bluegrass state and the swamps, beaches, and marshlands of the Lowcountry. Janna is the winner of the South Carolina Fiction Project, the Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Open, the Harriette Arnow Award from the Appalachian Writers Association, and the Fiction Prize from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. Her short stories and non-fiction have been published in various journals and magazines including Arts Across Kentucky, Wind, Limestone, The Nantahala Review, StorySouth, Alimentum, South Carolina Homes & Gardens, Skirt!, Appalachian Journal, Charleston, and Knight-Ridder newspapers.
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Author Q&A
Q: Do any situations or characters in Calling Home have basis in real life?
JM: I grew up in a town similar to Falling Rock, peopled with personalities reflected in my novel. I will take a fragment of someone’s speech or the way they act and use it to flesh out a fictional person. I’ve written about drug dealers, gay thespians, unwed mothers, nursing home residents, university presidents, prison inmates, people who cross picket lines, and a flurry of other characters. All are imagined, but they may have the mannerisms or job or hairstyle of someone I know.
As far as situations go, I used experiences I had in my hometown for this novel. I actually ran a boat dock restaurant and store one summer during college. I was a high school speech champion. My parents did work in an underwear factory. Our town was devastated by a tornado in the early 1970s and it made a huge impression on me. I’m still hyperaware of tornado warnings.
Q: What about the concert scene in Lexington? Did you go to concerts in high school?
JM: I rocked out. I couldn’t name all the bands I’ve seen, but a road trip in high school was the ultimate fun. Do you remember when it was a huge deal to come to school the next day wearing your concert T-shirt? It still smelled like ink, but it made you feel like a rock star for a day. I went to college in Lexington when Rupp Arena opened. At the time, it was the largest indoor arena in the country and it seemed as if there was a concert every week. I listened to what we now consider classic rock, but I got caught up in punk and new wave when I hit college. I love the spectacle of live music. Music was one of the few things that linked me to the world outside of my town. I was even a disk jockey in high school. It was fun to revisit the music of the late 1970s for this story.
Q: In the beginning of Calling Home, Virginia seems like an unbearably angry person and Roger seems an insufferable lazy ne’er-do-well. By the end, we have a very different attitude toward these characters.
JM: It’s easy to dislike a man who runs out on his family. But it’s also true that the human heart can only take so much before it builds a wall, something hard to buffer the hurt. That’s what Roger was doing. He’d tried, in his own way, to be as loyal and comforting as he could, but it simply wasn’t enough for Virginia.
On the other side of the equation we have Virginia, a controlling woman with expectations of constant disappointment, particularly when it comes to Roger. Did she ever give him a fair chance? No, I don’t think so. Will she change her ways toward Roger? Only time will tell. But at least by the end we understand her better, too. Her actions, although unpleasant, are not unwarranted. She’s human and she’s hurt. Her way of coping is by keeping real love at a distance, even though it’s what she needs most.
Q: Each chapter is from a different character’s point of view. Why did you write the story this way?
JM: I liken this writing approach to how life really is. You can hear the same story from four different people and each person will give you his or her take on things. Usually none of the stories agree perfectly, so that leaves it up to you to decide which version is most valid. I wanted readers to have insight into the motives of each character, to weigh different perspectives in order to understand why a character made a certain decision. People have reasons for every decision they make, even the bad ones.
Q: The story is about being human, about making mistakes. It’s also about family and forgiveness.
JM: The Lemmons family may be a dysfunctional bunch, but they have a strong sense of what it means to be a family. They may lie or sneak around, maybe they hold grudges or lash out when things get tough, but ultimately they come together again. They know you can always go home. Families know all the ugliness and they still are places of refuge and comfort. I loved writing about the quail and how they call each other back to the covey at the end of the day. They huddle for comfort. They need each other so much that they voluntarily walk into the callback cage and entrap themselves again.
Q: This story is about sacrifice on a grand scale. Roger sacrifices happiness for love. Virginia redeems herself by taking her daughter’s child as her own. That speaks volumes about who she truly is in her heart.
JM: That’s right. Virginia is not a bad person. She’s a wounded soul. And above all she’s a mother. A mother’s love is one of the strongest forces of nature.
Q: And yet Shannon doesn’t take to the idea of motherhood. She seems so driven by her own goals that it makes her somewhat unsympathetic at times.
JM: No person is sympathetic all the time. Shannon is still a child, and to children the world revolves around them. Men who read my story sometimes don’t like Shannon. I think they believe she should have an epiphany where she embraces motherhood, but women who read the book understand Shannon’s fear and desperation. Children dominate a mother’s life for decades, and still, women rarely walk away from the responsibility. Being a good parent is work and cannot be taken lightly. It is the most intense life experience on a variety of levels and not something that most teenagers are equipped to handle. Shannon runs away from her baby. That may not be pretty, but it is realistic.
Q: Bootsie is a very enlightened character in some ways, particularly sexually. How did you come up with her character?
JM: When I was a child there was a woman my parents occasionally referred to with that name. I always assumed she was promiscuous because of the way they talked about her only briefly, in a tone they reserved for adult matters. I like that Bootsie is wise in a certain hard way and that she is sexually free. She needed to be a stark contrast to Virginia. I didn’t know when I started writing that this book would be so much about sex --- young lust, kinky sex, abstinence, acquaintance rape, and when sex becomes a weapon in marriage. I didn’t intend for the story to go in that direction, but it did. I think it was John Barrymore who said, “Sex is the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.” Sex always presents interesting story possibilities.
Q: Were the rape scenes difficult to write?
JM: Very difficult. It was It was necessary for those scenes to be graphic. I didn’t want to shy away from the horrendous reality of rape, but I found that most words relating to sex have been made trite and giggly by overexposure in popular culture. Finding a way to bring severity to the rape scenes was a challenge.
My mother asked at what age I would let my daughter read this novel since it has so much adult behavior and trauma. I don’t know the answer to that, but I will say that children are unbelievably more sophisticated now than when I was a child. Sex is much more a part of their world than it should be. With all the date rape drugs going around and AIDS such a huge threat, I think mature teenagers should read this book. Girls need to know they always have the right to say no and boys need to respect no in all instances.
Q: It seems from Calling Home that you are supportive of abortion rights, so why didn’t Shannon end up having the abortion?
JM: The story is about Shannon. Her situation is her own. If she had been able to obtain an abortion easily her story would have been less meaningful.
Readers are always interested to know when something is true, so I will say that the story that Shannon finds about the college student who went to jail for performing an abortion on herself actually happened. Of course, I changed the woman’s name to protect her. It was just a fluke that this tragic story turned up in my research and the timetable matched.
The scene at the clinic was derived from a personal experience. I was very naïve about politics when I was in college. I took a girlfriend to an abortion clinic, and when we got out of the car, a dozen protesters moved in on us. Of course, they didn’t have any idea who was there for the procedure so they gave me the same treatment they gave her. It was an absolutely horrifying experience having strangers shoving and screaming at you.
The security guard ran out to rescue us. I thought my friend was going to have a nervous breakdown. It infuriated me that people attacked us, both physically and verbally, for something that was legal and had no effect upon them. I carried that experience with me for two decades before I wrote about it.
Q: Virginia’s life was basically by default. Shannon struggles to take her own conscious path. Both women have to deal with the social expectations of the time.
JM: Calling Home is set in a time when women in rural parts of the country were just beginning to wake up to the possibilities presented by the women’s rights movement. Women were expected to perform the traditional home and family role, but ironically, society devalued that endeavor. That’s one of the reasons for this novel. I wanted to revisit a time when women were still less than men at work, at home, in the eyes of politicians. Perhaps in some ways things are even harder for women today than in Virginia’s time, since we have so many options for career and family. I see my friends stressed out, constantly juggling obligations. It seems that if you don’t have a flowering career and a stellar family life and a beautiful home and a movie-star body, then you’re a failure.
Q: So how does a woman today balance all those expectations?
JM: Life is hard, but it helps to have something solely yours that gives personal satisfaction. Writing is definitely my emotional release, my therapy. Many students come to my class believing they want to write, but what they really want is to be heard. People need a forum to express themselves. It seems most people who come to the profession of writing have a deep-seated need to have their thoughts validated. Isn’t that what we all want, to feel legitimate?
© Copyright 2010 by Janna McMahan. Reprinted with permission by Kensington. All rights reserved.
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