Tom Eblen
Sena Jeter Naslund
Sena Jeter Naslund, photographed Oct. 22, 2019
Sena Jeter Naslund of Louisville, whose nine books of fiction include the best-selling novels Ahab’s Wife, Four Spirits and Adam & Eve, is the newest living inductee into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
Naslund will be recognized Feb. 5 in a ceremony at Lexington’s historic Kentucky Theatre. She will be inducted along with four deceased writers: Hollis Summers (1916-1987), Lucy Furman (1870-1958), playwright Sam Shepard (1943-2017) and literary critic Cleanth Brooks (1907-1994).
They bring to 44 the number of writers inducted since 2013 into the Hall of Fame, which the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning created to recognize outstanding figures in Kentucky’s literary past and present. Members are chosen by Carnegie Center and Kentucky Arts Council committees, whose members include some of the state’s most accomplished writers.
This year’s ceremony includes a new, occasional award. The Kentucky Literary Impact Award recognizes someone who has made great contributions to the state’s literary culture but not necessarily as a writer. The first recipient is Gray Zeitz, who founded a small publishing company that uses vintage methods to produce literary works of art for contemporary writers.
Learn more about these Kentucky literary icons in this special section, written by Tom Eblen, a former Lexington Herald-Leader columnist and managing editor who is now the Carnegie Center’s literary arts liaison.
Sena Jeter Naslund may not be one of the first names that come to mind when people think of great Kentucky writers. She was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and her best-selling novels have been set all over the world.
Rarely does Kentucky appear in Naslund’s fiction, although her most recent novel is partially set in her own home, a mansion in which a famous Kentucky poet lived more than a century ago. But Naslund has long considered herself to be a Kentuckian.
“I’m from Alabama, but I haven’t lived there for 50 years,” she said in a recent interview. “I came to Kentucky in 1973. I have spent my writing life in Kentucky.”
That writing life has involved much more than her own writing. Naslund has made major contributions as an award-winning teacher and mentor to other writers.
Ron Schildknech
Sena Jeter Naslund, photographed Oct. 22, 2019
She taught in and directed the University of Louisville’s creative writing program. Then she helped start and was program director of Spalding University’s acclaimed low-residency MFA in Writing program. She also founded The Louisville Review and Fleur-de-Lis Press, which publishes the first books of authors whose works have been featured in the literary journal.
Naslund fully retired from teaching two years ago, but that hasn’t slowed her creative drive. At 77, she is well into writing an ambitious Civil War novel titled Wreath: A Novel of American Civil War and Peace.
“I have written 850 pages, but—you know what—I haven’t gotten to the war yet,” she said with a smile. “I’m dealing with major historical figures on both sides. So many Civil War novels focus on a very small area, but I wanted to take on the challenge of a bigger canvas and write about both North and South experiences.”
She also is working with her partner, the Kentucky-born symphonic composer Gerald Plain, to write an opera based on “Pretty Polly,” a 300-year-old folk ballad about seduction and murder. Writing an opera might seem like an odd turn for a novelist, but not for Naslund.
“I grew up with classical music,” said Naslund, the youngest of three children and only daughter of Flora Lee Sims Jeter, a music teacher who played piano and violin, and Marvin Luther Jeter, a physician who died when Naslund was 15. As a teenager, she played cello with the Alabama Pops Orchestra and was good “up to a point.”
“Then I realized I wasn’t going to get any better, and it wasn’t going to be good enough to satisfy me or be a career,” she said. “It just seemed that it was time for me to find something I was really more skilled at doing.”
That turned out to be writing. Naslund gave up a music scholarship to the University of Alabama to study English at Birmingham-Southern College. She graduated in 1964 and was accepted into the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. She earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.
But music has remained important in her life. “A lot of my early writing has to do with music, one way or another,” she said. Several stories in her first book, Ice Skating at the North Pole (1989), have musical motifs.
After teaching for a year at the University of Montana, Naslund joined the University of Louisville’s English faculty in 1973. She was director of Louisville’s creative writing program for a dozen years and found time to be a visiting professor of creative writing at Indiana University and Vermont College.
Naslund published her first two novels in 1993, The Animal Way to Love and Sherlock in Love. Then she got a whale of an idea: a take on Moby-Dick through the eyes of Captain Ahab’s wife, who rated only a mention in Herman Melville’s classic novel.
Ahab’s Wife: or, The Star-Gazer became a bestseller when published in 1999, the same year as her second collection of short fiction, The Disobedience of Water: Stories and Novellas. Both books are about human relationships and emotions, touching on themes Naslund has explored many times in her fiction: the quest for compatible relationships and a questioning of spiritual and philosophical issues.
“Ahab’s Wife in a way is a series of friendships between Una [Spenser] and various women, starting with the slave girl she helps to hide,” Naslund said.
The success of Ahab’s Wife took Naslund around the world for readings and signings. While on the other side of the globe, she came to the realization that her next novel must keep a promise she had made to herself four decades earlier in Alabama.
When Naslund was an undergraduate at Birmingham-Southern, the civil rights movement was literally exploding around her. She often saw it in the streets as she commuted between her mother’s home and Yieldings department store, where she worked as a switchboard operator.
“I can remember standing on the corner waiting for the bus and promising myself that, if I ever did become a writer, I would write about Birmingham. And I would tell the truth about how bad things were,” she recalled. “I tried to do that after I came to Kentucky.”
She wrote a play about her experience teaching at the all-black Miles College in Birmingham, where she helped high-school dropouts earn their GEDs. Then she wrote a short story about an African American boy whose father was killed in a steel mill.
“But I couldn’t get it together, a big novel,” she said. “I was always looking for how to do it, and it just seemed so large and [had] so many facets to it, it was overwhelming.”
Then, one morning while on an Ahab’s Wife book tour in Australia, she opened her hotel room door and picked up the local newspaper. There, on the front page, was a photo of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church and an article about two former Klansmen who had been indicted (and were later convicted) in the bombing that killed four little girls and wounded 14 other worshipers during services on Sept. 15, 1963.
“That old promise I made to myself just reached halfway around the world and grabbed my heart and squeezed,” she said. “It was almost that literal. It came up from within me, and what it said was, ‘Now’s the time to write that novel on the civil rights movement that you always promised yourself you would write.’ ”
The result was Four Spirits, Naslund’s second bestseller. It weaves together the lives of racists and civil rights crusaders, both black and white. Told from many perspectives, it creates a vivid picture of a society coming to grips with social injustice and change.
Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (2006) explored an older chapter of history. Naslund said she wanted to “set the record straight” about the queen who lost her head in the French Revolution. “She met death with dignity and self-knowledge,” Naslund said. “I’ve always been interested in the process of creating a self for one’s self and having the courage to be loyal to that creation. To know that’s who you are.”
That book was followed in 2010 by another historical novel of sorts, Adam & Eve, which explores the impact of science and the way people interpret sacred texts. “Partly, I want to arouse people’s curiosity about where we came from and where we’re going,” Naslund said, adding that she also wanted to explore human creativity as “a paramount force in satisfying us and helping us to know each other.”
Naslund enjoys writing about historic figures, using her skills as a novelist to explore aspects of their inner lives and characters about which historians can only guess.
“But I try hard to build it off of factual basis,” she said. “In some cases, these are people I admire that I want to explore more fully. I focus on events that most reveal character. Who are these people? What is their complexity? What are the forces that drive them, and how did they become that way?”
Her research methods are like those of a historian, but she also looks for gaps in history.
“I want to know how people felt about what they were doing—not just what they did,” she said. “And not even just why they did it, but how did they experience it themselves? That’s where imagination comes in. I try to be historically accurate. But there are important disparities in the historical records, so I get to choose which ones I prefer to believe.
“It’s not so different from how we relate to people we know,” she added. “We have some speculative insights that are beyond the factual, and we believe in it. We admire some people more than others. We like some people better than others. We fear some people more than others. In all of these equations, we are creating a character, whether we’re writing about that character or not.”
Naslund’s most recent novel, The Fountain of St. James Court: or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman (2013), brings historical fiction home—literally. The novel-within-a-novel tells the story of 18th-century painter Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, a survivor of the French Revolution who was widely hated for her sympathetic portraits of Marie Antoinette, and a fictional contemporary writer living in Naslund’s home across from the Venus fountain on St. James Court.
Tom Eblen
Sena Jeter Naslund, photographed Oct. 22, 2019
It was no surprise that Naslund’s 1901 neoclassical mansion would end up in her fiction; it had captured her imagination more than two decades before she moved there.
Madison Cawein, dubbed the “Keats of Kentucky,” lived there from 1907 until 1912, when he was forced to sell it after losing money in a stock market crash. He died two years later in an apartment across the street, from which he could still see his former home.
Naslund said she had admired the house since the early 1970s. But she didn’t get serious about buying it until she went to a friend’s Christmas party nearby, parked in front of the house, and noticed it was for sale.
She said the purchase seemed extravagant. After all, she liked her bungalow in the Highlands. But finally, she said, the grand house’s 10-foot ceilings spoke to her subconscious. “I’ve worked hard for you,” Naslund said an inner voice told her, “and I’m not going to do it again unless you give me more space over my head.”
Naslund writes in Cawein’s former study, a magnificent room with a marble mantel from Louisville’s original Galt House hotel, where Charles Dickens once stayed, and huge bowed windows above the Corinthian-columned front porch. When not working, she enjoys visits from her daughter and son-in-law, Flora and Ron Schildknecht, who are both Spalding MFA grads and accomplished writers, and her 7-year-old grandson.
As Naslund grapples with an opera and an epic Civil War novel, she continues to draw inspiration from Vigée-LeBrun, the subject of her most recent novel, who never lost her excitement about art.
“I am just very drawn to someone whose life is filled by work that is perfectly suitable to them, and that they explore and explore and never exhaust,” Naslund said. “It seems like a very good way to spend one’s life.”