Novelist Sybil Baker joins me to chat about her new literary novel, Apparitions and short novellete, The Picture Vanishes.
Bio:
Sybil Baker’s latest novel Apparitions (Signal 8 Press) will be published in May 2023. Her short novellette The Picture Vanishes (Signal 8 Press) is available as an ebook on Amazon. She is also the author of four books of fiction, including While You Were Gone, which won an IPPY Silver Medal. Her book of nonfiction Immigration Essays was the 2018-2019 Read2Achieve selection for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She was awarded two MakeWork Artist Grants and an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, and is on faculty at the Yale Writers’ Workshop. You can learn more at sybilbaker.net.
Welcome, Sybil. Please tell us about your current release.
Apparitions is set in Turkish-occupied Cyprus, where a woman battles grief and ghosts as she plans to disrupt her ex-husband’s Celebration of Life ceremony.
After Simone learns that her ex-husband Guy has died unexpectedly at the age of fifty, her only regret is that she didn’t expose his affairs when she had the chance. But when a woman asks her to help her disrupt his Celebration of Life planned in Northern Cyprus, Simone wonders if she has a last chance to reveal Guy’s hypocrisy. Accompanied by her best friend, Simone arrives in Cyprus; however, the circumstances surrounding Guy’s death become increasingly mysterious. Worse, since Guy’s death, Simone has been haunted by Guy and the ghosts of her loved ones warning her of impending danger. As the Celebration approaches and Simone’s mental state deteriorates, she must decide who she should trust and who she must betray in order to save herself.
A short novelette that explores how Simone and Agnes met called The Picture Vanishes is available as an ebook on Amazon for $ .99.
What inspired you to write this book?
I write the novels I want to read but can’t find. I love stories about female relationships. In my previous two novels, While You Were Gone and Into This World, I wrote about complex and intense relationships between sisters. Except for Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan series, I haven’t read many novels about long-term female friendships and wanted to write one focusing on that. I had also just gone through menopause and wanted to write about a character experiencing menopausal symptoms, including insomnia. I decided to have my two friends go on a caper together to Northern Cyprus (where I had lived for a few months), and to make things even more interesting, bring in some ghosts.
Excerpt from Apparitions:
June 28, 2016
Outside the Istanbul airport, I briefly closed my eyes, hoping that when we got to the hotel, I’d finally be able to sleep undisturbed by doubts and dead people.
“I love this place already.” Agnes lit a cigarette, joining a group of bearded men. “So much energy.”
“You’d hardly know it was Ramadan,” I said, opening my eyes and raising my voice above the traffic noise. I was being a sanctimonious hypocrite since I’d only discovered it was Ramadan through a Google search right before our flight from Atlanta. Agnes smiled through her cigarette smoke, nodding indulgently. When you’ve been friends for more than four decades, you learn when to let things go, and this was one of those times.
“When Guy and I were in in Indonesia during Ramadan someone yelled at me for drinking water during the day,” I continued. “And we had to disappear into these hidden tents with men who, for a variety of reasons, wanted to eat before sundown. Even though there was no alcohol, those tents felt like speakeasies.”
That trip to Indonesia with Guy had been one of my favorites. In Gunang Leuser National Park we floated down the river through the rainforest on rafts our young guides had made by lashing cut logs and old tires together, spending nights in the open sky under garbage bag tarps, and to our delight, spotting a few rare Sumatran orangutans along the edge of the river. In Kelimutu we slept in huts by tri-colored crater lakes for a dollar a night, sharing mangos plucked from trees and fresh fish cooked over open fires. The electricity ran from generators only a few hours a day, and we carried oil lamps in darkness so complete not even the stars could show us the way to our beds. After a month of traveling in buses along dusty roads and staying in small towns bereft of foreigners, I quit carrying a rough roll of toilet paper in my backpack and instead cleaned myself with a hose attached to the toilet or my left hand and buckets of water. We dispensed with utensils, scooping our nasi goring with our right hand, savoring the pleasure of licking the oil off our fingers and lips. But now, as I recalled that time, as I did when I recalled many pleasant times with Guy during our marriage, I also wondered who else he was secretly fucking back home, wherever that was, permanently ruining my pleasant memories of our trips, of him, of our marriage.
“Are you thinking about him?”
I nodded, gazing up at the generous clouds. “Why are we here again?”
In the distance, the call to prayer echoed from minarets of nearby mosques.
“It’s so beautifully haunting,” Agnes said.
Just what I needed, I thought, more haunting. Although Agnes had slept soundly on the plane, I hadn’t at all, worried that if I fell asleep, the ghosts from my past would visit me, as they’d been doing lately, and that I’d yell at them to go away, forcing the crew to divert the plane. Now, all I wanted was to get to our hotel so I could rest. Maybe now that I was in a different country, the ghosts would forget about me.
What exciting project are you working on next?
I’m revising a book of essays called Lost Nostalgias and am in the early drafting stage of a novel set in Georgia about a woman’s return to a family she left thirty years earlier to uncover some family secrets.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I first began writing fiction in the first grade. In that sense I’ve always considered myself a writer with a lowercase w—that is someone who writes. I became more aware of my public identity as a writer after I began publishing regularly, which was in my early forties.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I don’t write full-time, although as a creative writing professor part of my job is to write. I tend to write when I can during the semesters and then devote more time in the summer in winter breaks to writing. I like to write in the mornings and on weekends during the semester when I can. When I’m not teaching, I like to write in the mornings but for longer periods of time.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I don’t know if this is a quirk, but I prefer writing first drafts out by hand. I find this slows my process down and uses different parts of my brain. I also don’t like to listen to music when I write.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be an actress and teach in a foreign country. I did end up teaching abroad, but my acting skills never developed, partially because I could never remember my lines.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Even though my first time abroad (excluding Canada) was on my honeymoon when I was 30, I have since then loved international travel. I lived in South Korea for 12 years and traveled extensively during that time. My brother lives with his family permanently in Turkey and my husband is from South Africa, and I’ve visited both countries many times. My novel Apparitions was based on my time in Northern Cyprus where I was a visiting professor for a semester. It was such a magical place that few people know about. I miss it and the people I met there.
Thanks for this interview! I really enjoyed it.