Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
by Rebecca Wells
List Price: $14.00
Pages: 386
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060502258
Publisher: HarperTorch
Rebecca Wells was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, where party-loving French Catholic Louisiana meets North Louisiana Baptist territory in the same parish where her family has lived since 1795. She grew up on a working plantation and was trained well in the school of Southern Ladyhood and Roman Catholicism. Early on, she began to suspect that "she might have a vocation other than marrying a lawyer or becoming the local T.V. weather girl," but the idea of being a professional writer never entered her mind. Writing, she thought, "was done only by people who lived in New York City who were very thin."
Wells has always been a storyteller and an actor. As a girl, she staged plays with her siblings, cousins, and friends, and performed in community theater productions. She learned to read early, and recalls, "It was like someone handing me the keys to another country, and I could go there any time I wanted."
The geographical territory of her writing has stayed close to Louisiana, however, and readers often assume that her work is autobiographical. Wells admits, "I grew up in a fertile world for story-telling, filled with flamboyance, flirting, futility, and fear. My work, though, is the result of my imagination dancing a kind of psycho-spiritual tango with my own history, and the final harvest is fiction, not memoir."
Starring in college productions, she began to write one-woman shows for herself, as well as short plays. After traveling the United States by train, Wells attended The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she studied language and consciousness with Allen Ginsberg and Choyyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and acting, movement, and voice with members of The Living Theatre, among others.
As an actress in New York City, Wells studied with Maurine Holbert, working within the Stanislavski method, as well as a depth psychology approach to acting, which seeks to integrate spirituality and performance. "I live in an actor's body," Wells says, "in which the cultivation of sense memory, active listening, and belief that the sublime can arise out of the most common character, word, or gesture is somewhat of a religion to me." While performing at regional theaters throughout the country, Wells was also active in the nuclear disarmament movement. An early member of Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament, Wells visited Seattle in 1982 to help initiate a chapter of that group. She fell in love with the Pacific Northwest, and has lived there for the past fifteen years. Her solo play, Splittin' Hairs, was developed at The Seattle Rep before going on to tour over fifty cities, including the wilds of bush Alaska. Wells is currently writing a novel based on Splittin' Hairs, which HarperCollins will publish. Wells's Gloria Duplex, "an erotic worship service for the theatre," debuted at Seattle's Empty Space Theater in 1987, with Wells in the title role as an erotic dancer who undergoes a mystical experience when she sees the face of God in the mirrored ball above the dance floor. Her acting and writing for the theatre was hailed by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as "uncanny and beautiful with a flair for mystical humor," and Gloria Duplex was praised as "one of the glories of the decade." It is this rare gumbo of humor and pathos, and an ever-present awareness of the spiritual life that flows like an underground river even in the most commonplace circumstances that gives Wells's writing such energy and depth.
Little Altars Everywhere, Wells's first novel, won the Western States Book Award, becoming an underground bestseller, and was included in the anthology Five Hundred Great Books By Women (Penguin, 1994).
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