"I do believe there is a kind of good death," Jill McCorkle says in this interview. Her most recent novel, Life After Life, addresses a subject many people find uncomfortable--conversations about death. (The novel was initially inspired by her own father's passing, and she spent more than a decade working on this book.) Set in a North Carolina retirement home, the novel is written from multiple points of view, and it contrasts the way the dying view themselves and their legacies vs. the observations of others. The ending shocked some reviewers, and McCorkle gives a (spoiler-free) explanation of why she chose to take the story in a sudden, unexpected direction.
McCorkle also discusses a period of several years she spent in Boston, and how that time affected her as a Southern writer. She also talks about her early career, when she achieved something unique--both her debut novel and her second novel were published simultaneously in 1984.
A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, McCorkle will be in Chattanooga April 16th - 18th for the 2015 Celebration of Southern Literature.
From her Web site:
Jill McCorkle has the distinction of having her first two novels published on the same day in 1984. Of these novels, The New York Times Book Review said, “One suspects the author of The Cheer Leader is a born novelist, with July 7th, she is also a full grown one.” Since then she has published three other novels—her latest, Life After Life coming March 2013—and four collections of short stories. Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books. McCorkle has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Four of her stories have been tabbed for Best American Short Stories and several have been collected in New Stories from the South. Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine and The American Scholar among others. Her story “Intervention” is included in the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. An essay, “Cuss Time,” originally published in The American Scholar was selected for Best American Essays. Other essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, Southern Living, Our State, Allure and Real Simple. McCorkle has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Tufts, and Brandeis where she was the Fannie Hurst Visiting Writer. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard for five years where she also chaired Creative Writing. She currently teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at NC State University and is a core faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She is a frequent instructor in the Sewanee Summer Writers Program??. She lives with her husband, photographer Tom Rankin, in Hillsborough, NC.
