First Novel Forces Rose To Hit Road
Joanna Rose has a passion for language.
As an 11-year employee of Portland’s Powell’s Books, the 44-year-old Rose co-manages the world-famous store’s military history section, writes advertising blurbs and coordinates its book-reading parade of notable authors.
Lately, Rose’s passion has taken a personal turn. She is on the road reading from her first novel, “Little Miss Strange,” a coming-of-age story set in Denver of the late ‘60s, early ‘70s.
And she couldn’t be happier. She’s working with a publisher that she admires (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, N.C.), and she’ll be appearing in the comfortable atmosphere of familiar stores.
Plus, as a member of two Portland writing groups, she’s long since grown to love reading her work in public.
“Presenting in front of people is a big part of how we explore our work,” she said over the phone recently. “So I’m really going to enjoy that.”
There is one problem, though.
“The interview thing,” she said. “I haven’t quite got that figured out yet.”
Case in point: A recent 90-minutes interview that resulted in a story she didn’t expect.
“He kept trying to make me a spokesperson for the ‘60s, and trying to find Sarajean (her novel’s protagonist) in me,” Rose said. “He tried to turn me into a personality, and I’m just not one. If I were, I probably wouldn’t be a writer.”
Make no mistake about this: A writer is exactly what Rose has been since third grade. The daughter of “two very white people in New Jersey,” Rose grew up moving throughout the mid-Atlantic states. Buoyed by a fertile imagination, she “wrote stories all the time.”
In those early years, however, she kept most of her writing to herself. Stopovers in Michigan and Colorado, where in 1971 she lived out her own “hippie experience,” added to her life-story file, while jobs at various bookstores and library systems fulfilled her literary needs.
She seldom submitted anything for publication.
“It was personal,” she explained. “I moved around a lot and I’ve never really established close ties to communities or friends until I started living here (Portland). It just never occurred to me to try to get published. I think that’s why I worked in bookstores and libraries. I was a reader first and a writer in secret.”
The move to Portland was almost by chance. Tired of living in rural Colorado, Rose considered moving to the urban streets of Atlanta, San Diego, Boston or Portland.
What made the difference? “I wanted to live where it rains,” she said.
She took various jobs but aimed at Powell’s because, she said simply, “It’s the best store.” When a position opened up at the travel store (there are seven Powell’s outlets in all), she jumped at it. A year later, she was hired as the main store’s publicity/events coordinator.
As for her writing, she began studying with Portland writer Tom Spanbauer, to whom “Little Miss Strange” is partially dedicated and whose theories on writing led to the formation of a group called Dangerous Writers. Breaking away, Rose and a few others began meeting regularly under the name Fiction Asylum and conducting readings at Portland-area taverns and coffee shops.
Over the years, she did publish some work - a couple of stories here, a poem and an essay there. But it wasn’t until she dreamed up Sarajean and her friends that Rose got serious about publishing a novel.
“Little Miss Strange” covers eight years in all. Beginning in 1969, it explores the then-5-year-old Sarajean’s world in Denver’s hippie section. Living with Vietnam veteran Jimmy Henry, attending a free school and having friends such as Lalena (or, as she later renames herself, Elle) and John Fitzgerald Kennedy Karpinski, Sarajean looks at the world around her but understands only a portion of what she sees.
What she doesn’t see is a mother, which ultimately sets her off in search for her roots.
The book’s success rests with Rose’s ability to resolve an interesting literary problem: Since Sarajean often hasn’t enough experience to comprehend what she’s seeing, she acts as a camera lens equipped with a filter of immaturity. This leads to sections of the book that, because they conflict with a young girl’s vision of the world, are written elliptically.
Thus while a more mature reader recognizes what is going on - heroin addiction and, in particular, sexual abuse - Sarajean doesn’t. She feels only that something is wrong.
“That was hard to write because child abuse is such a cliche now,” Rose said. “And I wanted it to be unclear, and I wanted Sarajean’s reaction to it to be unclear.”
Her intent, Rose explained, “was to get rid of preconceived notions of the world.” To write, she said, “from the heart.” In this way, she could portray Sarajean’s confusion and her pain, and she could then show how a child might place blame for those feelings elsewhere.
“She was confused and upset, but she was jealous because Jimmy Henry never brushed her hair anymore,” Rose said. “They weren’t close anymore.”
While some reviewers have fixated on the book’s setting, the hippie era of the swingin’ ‘60s, Rose insists that “Little Miss Strange” is no single-issue story. By involving a number of topics, but by refusing to belabor any of them, Sarajean’s tale ends up being a portrayal of her growth as a person, of her awakening as a woman.
“It’s not really about the ‘60s,” Rose said. “I mean, the ‘60s are a kind of exotic metaphor for what we all go through. Are we ever close enough to our fathers? Do we ever forgive our mothers for deserting us? There’s an instant in infancy when a child realizes that mother is a separate person. Do we ever get over that or do we, all of us, struggle with it in one way or another all our lives?”
So while Rose may be stepping into a new world, one defined by her own literary efforts, she is doing so carrying a book that should strike a chord in us all.
“It’s a timeless story of growing up and struggling to find out who you are and what language means to you and how to interpret the things that people say to you,” Rose said. “We need to always look at life as though we had no language for it.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: READING Joanna Rose will read from her debut novel, “Little Miss Strange” (Algonquin Books, 367 pages, $20.95) at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Auntie’s Bookstore.