1--What is the title of your latest release?
DANCING WOMAN
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
An aspiring artist living abroad finds passion for her craft when she enters into a brief love affair with a local musician. When she discovers she is pregnant, she understands that her risky liaison could upend every aspect of her life. In a frantic afternoon of gardening in her yard, she unearths an ancient sculpture which might guide her steps. But it will take great devotion to discern what those steps should be.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
The book has a backstory in Virginia, but the present-day action occurs in northern Nigeria. I lived in southern Nigeria growing up. I was interested to see how a white American woman in the early 1960s would acclimate to a Muslim dominated area and what she could learn outside of the U.S. that would give her an intelligence and artistic sensibility that she could not have attained by staying at home. I named her Isabel Hammond.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Absolutely. Isabel would be one of my best friends. She’s lived where I have lived. She has aspired to being an artist and devoted herself to a craft at the same time that she was mothering. She is imperfect, but strives to learn and improve. She gets lost in her own thought and has a deep interior life. She sees outside the box. She makes the world she wants to live in. She’s a dreamer.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Dreamer, Artist, Seeker
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
That I can’t control the narrative. I meant to write a story about my protagonist’s daughter, with her young life in Nigeria being the backstory. But when I began to write the mother’s story, my Isabel Hammond, her story took over. Hers was clearly the quest I was meant to write.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I edit all along. As I write my first draft, I go back every morning and read what I wrote the day before, whether it be a paragraph, three pages, or ten pages. I feel as if I’m “combing” those earlier passages, improving sentences and transitions, gaining inspiration for what I’m going to write next. I don’t make an outline, so that review of the previous day’s writing is propulsive. It gets me going and I keep going. I see enough light for the next section. I write this way until I complete a first draft. Then I print it out and edit by hand on hard copy. That revision can include handwriting in a notebook that I then key in to the manuscript. It’s a serious revision. I keep working this way, through several full drafts, at least 10-12 and probably more like 15-20 until the novel is finished enough for my agent and a potential editor who might buy it. And then I have to revise again several more times.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
Wow. This is hard! I really love freshly made guacamole with blue corn chips. It can be a meal, and I can feel good about it!
9--Describe your writing space/office!
I write in a spare bedroom in our house. It’s painted a pale blue. My desk on the second floor looks out onto trees and the neighborhood. I see lots of birds. The cardinals are always a sign of encouragement. On my right, I have a full wall of books, floor to ceiling. These are my treasured books, the books by writers I look to for direction. Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty, Louise Erdrich, Jose Saramago, Sue Monk Kidd, Sena Jeter Naslund, Charles Frazier, Ben Okri, for example, along with Carl Jung and bell hooks and Henry David Thoreau. I love philosophers as well as fiction writers and poets. My long teaching career as an English professor has required a diversity of reading. I recommend that everyone “write under the influence,” by which I mean: read the geniuses while you’re writing. Any genius, any genre. Read the best.
10--Who is an author you admire?
Well, I just offered a long list but at the top of that list is the one I named first: Virginia Woolf, who told us that women writers need a room of their own.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
Yes. Two by Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own, which makes so may brilliant observations and recommendations for women who would write. And her novel, To the Lighthouse, which showed me that the most exciting writing (and reading) is quiet, interior, character-driven, and poetic. There is no exciting writing for me that is not poetic.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
After writing two scholarly books and being diagnosed with end-stage renal disease and enduring two and a half years of dialysis, I first got the call for two organ transplants at Duke University: a kidney and a pancreas. After that life-changing surgery, I finished a memoir about my life growing up in Nigeria. I was so naïve, I didn’t really think about whether it would be published. I simply believed it would be. Of course, it was harder than that. But I had a tenacious and very smart agent, Joelle Delbourgo. She placed the memoir with the highly esteemed University of Virginia Press. I remember receiving her email telling me they had made an offer and how excited they were to get the book and how it would be their leading title for the fall of 2003. I remember thinking, “it’s begun,” which meant, the rest of my life in writing. From then on, I was a writer of works of the imagination. I was free.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
Novels. They are long enough to take me on a journey. I love thickness.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
Wow. You all ask some hard questions. I didn’t grow up watching movies much in Nigeria. I still watch fewer than most Americans, I suspect. The English Patient would be among my favorite films, but, of course, the book is better. I also loved Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, and A Passage to India.
15--What is your favorite season?
Fall
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
With family, at home, around a meal, and with presents!
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
Carter Sickels, The Prettiest Star, a novel about the AIDS epidemic
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
It’s starting to be Indian because an Indian restaurant recently moved into my neighborhood.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
Garden, sit in the grass with my dog.
20--What can readers expect from you next?
Another novel, this one set in western Massachusetts and the Sauratown Mountains of North Carolina. It’s a sequel to a famous American novel, but I’m not saying whose novel. I also have a dream for a second book of memoir. But it’s hard to beat the joy-level that comes to me when I’m writing fiction. It’s as if the roof of the world recedes. Anything can happen.
Elaine Neil Orr, born in Nigeria to expat parents, brings us an indelible portrait of a young female artist, torn between two men and two cultures, struggling to find her passion and her purpose.
It’s 1963 and Isabel Hammond is an expat who has accompanied her agriculture aid worker husband to Nigeria, where she is hoping to find inspiration for her art and for her life. Then she meets charismatic local singer Bobby Tunde, and they share a night of passion that could upend everything. Seeking solace and distraction, she returns to her painting and her home in a rural town where she plants a lemon tree and unearths an ancient statue buried in her garden. She knows that the dancing female figure is not hers to keep, yet she is reluctant to give it up, and soon, she notices other changes that make her wonder what the dancing woman might portend.
Against the backdrop of political unrest in Nigeria, Isabel’s personal situation also becomes precarious. She finds herself in the center of a tide of suspicion, leaving her torn between the confines of her domestic life and the desire to immerse herself in her art and in the culture that surrounds her. The expat society, the ancient Nigerian culture, her beautiful family, and even the statue hidden in a back room—each trouble and beguile Isabel. Amid all of this, can she finally become who she wants to be?
Literature and Fiction Literary [Blair, On Sale: January 21, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book , ISBN: 9781958888339 / eISBN: 9781958888445]
Elaine Neil Orr is a writer of fiction, memoir, and literary criticism. With stories set in Nigeria and the American South, she delves into themes of home, country, and spiritual longing. Swimming Between Worlds, her newest, is called by Charles Frazier, “a perceptive and powerful story told with generosity and grace.” Anna Jean Mayhew writes, “the riveting plot and real-life characters would not let me go.” In a starred review, Library Journal said of Orr’s last novel, A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa, “this extraordinary novel shines with light and depth.”
Her memoir, Gods of Noonday (Virginia, 2003), was a Top-20 Book Sense selection and a nominee for the Old North State Award. She is associate editor of a collection of essays on international childhoods, Writing Out of Limbo, and the author of two scholarly books.
In 2016, she was Kathryn Stripling Byer Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan College, Macon, Georgia.
Orr has published extensively in literary magazines including The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Shenandoah, and Image Journal, and her short stories and short memoirs have won several Pushcart Prize nominations and competition prizes. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Orr was born in Nigeria to medical missionary parents and spent her growing-up years in the savannahs and rain forests of that country. Her family remained in Nigeria during its civil war. She left West Africa at age sixteen and attended college in Kentucky. She studied creative writing and literature at the University of Louisville before taking her Ph.D. in Literature and Theology at Emory University. She is an award-winning Professor of English at North Carolina State University and serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University. She reads and lectures widely at universities and conferences from Atlanta to Austin to San Francisco to Vancouver to New York to Washington D.C., and in Nigeria.
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