https://www.loc.gov/poetry/interviews/wallylamb.html
“Many of the most important turning points in your characters’ lives are centered on trauma and loss. Do you think that the way people process these events is what defines them?
I don’t think people’s processing of trauma and loss necessarily defines them fully, but these surely influence the course of their lives. I was 12 years old when a dam collapsed at the northern end of my hometown, releasing millions of gallons of lake water that cut a path of death and destruction. Among the dead was a 27-year-old mother who drowned in the flood waters after helping rescue her three sons, ages four, two, and six months. I drew on that remembered local tragedy when I wrote We Are Water and, in the course of my research, became friends with those three little boys—who are now well-adjusted, middle-aged family men. Each has a successful career and a great sense of humor. Were these three brothers greatly impacted by the loss of their mother on that terrible night and the reality of having grown up without her? Certainly. But are they defined solely by tragedy and loss? No.
For the past 15 years, I have volunteered at a maximum-security women’s prison where I facilitate a writing program. Most of my students there had terrible things done to them as children and many have been convicted of having done terrible things. Some are serving life sentences and will die in prison. Yet each is a complicated equation not fully defined by the trauma she endured or the crime for which she has lost her freedom. In my novel The Hour I First Believed, Maureen Quirk, afflicted with PTSD and drug addiction after the Columbine trauma, must discover how to live a useful life in prison. In I Know This Much Is True, Dominick Birdsey must ride a roller coaster of emotional responses to his twin brother’s mental illness. In We Are Water, Andrew Oh must struggle with the grim truth that he killed a man in a rage and has not been caught. Should he keep his dark secret or reveal it? In my fiction, I’m interested in examining and depicting not only the ways in which trauma and loss derail the lives we may have imagined or planned, but also, and more importantly, how our responses to these can attest to the resilience of the human spirit. Thankfully, I have not had to endure the tragedies that befall my characters. But what we share in common is this: we are imperfect people living less-than-perfect lives yet trying to become better people.
Has your work with the female inmates of the York Correctional Institution changed the way you write your female characters? If so, how?
I grew up with older sisters and older girl cousins who lived next door. The only other boy on McKinley Avenue was a rock- and snowball-thrower named Vito, which didn’t exactly make him great playmate material. A loner, I frequently was thrust into the role of observer of my sisters’ and cousins’ exotic games of pretend—not a bad perspective for someone who will grow up and become a fiction writer. The girls were cowgirls and stagecoach robbers one day, Amazons in sarongs (old curtains) the next, harem girls the day after that. In the latter fantasy, I was enlisted to play the minor role of a sultan named Kingy Boy, which required me to sit cross-legged on the floor with a bath towel wrapped around my head turban-style and say things like “Peel me a grape” while they danced and undulated around me. All this to say that, from an early age, I became immune to the spell of “the feminine mystique.” I’ve always felt comfortable among, sympathetic toward, and amused by females, and I am aligned with and supportive of the tenets of feminism. This has served me in my interactions with the women of York Prison and my goals for them as writers.
If I have taught my incarcerated students a thing or two about how to write more effectively, they have taught me a number of things, minor and major, about life—everything from how to talk “street” and how to cook an English muffin pizza with a plastic bag and a hair dryer to how to use humor, art, writing, and sharing as survival tools in a harsh and institutionally hostile environment.
I reject the supposition that men are marooned on Mars and women on Venus, and that each gender, therefore, is doomed never to understand the other. That rejection has allowed the women of York Correctional Institution to give me the gift of their trust. Whenever they hand me writing in which they expose the hard truths and long-buried secrets of their pasts, or they read their highly personal pieces aloud to the group for the purpose of getting feedback, I am an eye- and ear-witness to acts of courage and generosity. Perhaps that’s the most impactful thing these students have taught me about writing and life: that taking risks, no matter how risk-averse one may be, will pay dividends in ways you might never have imagined.”
