A Conversation with Lisa Alther

FEATURED AUTHOR—LISA ALTHER A Conversation with Lisa Alther_______ George Brosi EVER SINCE I READ KINFLICKS in 1976, I've longed to talk with the woman who wrote it, Lisa Alther. When I read her second novel, Original Sins, in 1981, 1 found a fictional character in Raymond who is more like me than any I had encountered before or have since. Perhaps this resonance between us two strangers made some sense because she was a student at Kingsport Dobyns-Bennett High School while I attended its great rival, Oak Ridge High School. On a crisp November day last year, I finally met Lisa (she pronounces it Lie-za, not Lee-sa) Alther at her parents' country home, a beautiful and historic log house nestled against a pond on four hundred acres south of Kingsport, Tennessee. For hours, we talked about how she views her work, the world, her family and her background. I came away more convinced than ever that this remarkable woman is making a substantial impact upon our world. Alther's paternal grandfather, William Henry Reed, was born in Skeet Rock in Dickinson County, Virginia. He came from a Virginia family that had kept moving west out of Franklin and Montgomery Counties and had reportedly intermarried freely with Indians. Reed became a teacher and met his wife, Hattie Elizabeth Vanover, a second cousin, as a student in one of his classes at the Big Stone Gap Normal School. After their marriage, he went to medical school and then returned to Clintwood where he practiced medicine on horseback for five years. Family stories relate that a cousin was trying to kill him over a political squabble when he decided to move to Kingsport, Tennessee. Lisa's father, a child at the time they moved to Kingsport, became a surgeon. He and his wife raised five children, three of whom became third generation doctors. Lisa Alther and her brother, John Shelton Reed, are thus the "black sheep." He, of course, is the noted sociologist of the South and author of over a dozen important books, and Lisa Alther has written five very successful novels. As a teen, Lisa wanted to fit in, but because her mother was from New York, she often felt like the "the Civil War was going on in my own head." She was raised an Episcopalian, and "found evangelical Christians to be such a drag because they insisted on imposing their beliefs on everyone else" while she was growing up. After graduating from Dobyns-Bennett High School, Lisa went to Wellesley. She married Richard Alther in 1966 and moved to New York City where she was an editorial assistant at Atheneum Press. In 1968, concerned about environmental issues and wanting to "think globally but act locally," the Althers moved to an 1803 home on five acres outside Hinesburg, Vermont, consciously identifying with the "back-to-the-land" movement and also following in the footsteps of her parents who had moved to the very farm where we were conversing after World War II. Lisa and her husband kept bees, horses and chickens and "slowly came to realize why their ancestors had mostly left their farms behind— because it was such hard work." Alther also worked as a free-lance writer doing feature articles, catalogs and even training manuals. During this time in her life, she was very active in feminist issues, attending a women's liberation "rap group," doing abortion counseling at a women's health center, and participating in pro-choice marches, although she did consider herself less political than most of her friends. She freely refers to "when I was a hippie," but she says she only experimented with drugs, never really getting into them. Her father, as a physician, had always stressed the dangers of drugs, and she says that she "was depressed a lot when younger and thus feared drugs." She notes that she felt "very much at home" in Vermont perhaps partly because most of her relatives fought for the Union. She notes that Vermonters are "more dour and less rambunctious" than Southern Appalachians, but enjoyed the fact that Vermont was a haven for unconventional people and had a tolerance for...