Julie Hensley

Julie Hensley is the author of three books, Five Oaks, Landfall: A Ring of Stories, and Viable. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Real World and The Language of Horses. A professor at Eastern Kentucky University and core faculty member in the Bluegrass Writers Studio Low-Res MFA Program, she lives in Richmond with her husband, the writer R Dean Johnson, and their two children.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title Five Oaks is indicative of how important setting and landscape are to the story. It is the name of the family lake cottage where the current temporal frame of the novel takes place across a summer in 1988. The historical chapters all branch into that space eventually, as well. It is truly a nexus. The working title for this novel was actually The Recklessness of Water, a reference to the REM song “Night Swimming.” I changed the title to Five Oaks at my agent’s urging. I spent about a day worrying over it, but ultimately, I grew to love the new title. Both that lake cottage and the five sprawling oaks for which it is named anchor the lives and secrets of all the women in the Stone/Pritchard lineage.

What's in a name?

I found the name my narrator, Sylvie, in a cemetery. I love to walk in cemeteries, and I always make note of interesting names and play with trying to extrapolate into narrative. I liked the way the name contains both light and a mineral strength. I stole her last name, Pritchard, from one of my MFA professors, the amazing Melissa Pritchard.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I think teenage Julie would be shocked. I’ve always written—when I was young, I journaled and wrote poems. I devoured novels when I was a teenager, often reading one a day in the summers; however, back then, I wanted to be a scientist, specifically and ethologist. I wanted to live amongst animals and study their behavior like Dian Fossey or Eugenie Clark. Maybe being a novelist isn’t such a stretch. Writers live amongst human animals, observing and recording.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Honestly, it depends on the project. I feel like with short stories my endings usually feel like gifts. The entire narrative is a process of discovery, but once I’m deep in it, I feel such a propulsion toward those final lines. Five Oaks is my first novel, and it was definitely a different beast. I didn’t write sequentially in the beginning. At some point, I had to find my structure and create some scaffolding. Originally, I assumed the narrative would end at the lake, but I found I had to follow the girls back home and see how the trauma of the summer reverberated in their regular lives. For a long time, the novel began with the image of Hollis leaping off his dock and swimming across the cove toward Sylvie. Late in the process, I began experimenting with the intercalary chapters and decided to open with one of those, to let Sylvie’s musings on her sister function as a kind of prologue. I definitely wrote and rewrote the end of that last chapter many times. I don’t know if it ultimately changed more, but it certainly felt more important. I worried over it more.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I’ve called Five Oaks a work of autofiction, and I think that label fits. I used to spend my girlhood summers at my maternal grandparents’ cottage on Lake Hamilton in Hot Springs Arkansas. Their cottage was called Five Oaks. The current temporal frame of my novel is closely based on my own tenth summer when my own oldest sister began sneaking out with an older, local boy. Courtship stories from both sets of my grandparents and my parents are woven into the historical chapters. In many ways, this book is about memory and family lore.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Well, my working title was pulled from REM’s album Automatic for the People. Tonally, that album influenced the work—it feels full of nostalgia. So many of the songs feel like coming-of-age songs.

When I was in high school, I saw the movie Man in the Moon and had a strong, emotional reaction to it that I didn’t quite understand. It actually got me thinking back to my tenth summer, thinking about how my sister and I, despite our difference in age, were living out secret separate/parallel versions of coming-of-age stories that summer.

I’m also really interested in the theory from Family Systems Theory that secrets can be passed down, generation to generation, without ever being explicitly revealed. I believe we live around the previous generation’s secrets, that they affect the decisions we make and the relationships we form. This idea is something I explore in nearly everything I write.

Visit Julie Hensley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue