Writer extraordinaire Rilla Askew is just a fabulous all-around gal. She's talented and interesting and full of life.

Oklahoma born and raised, Rilla currently hangs her hat part of the year in the Catskills of upstate New York. The other part she spends in Oklahoma teaching, speaking at writers conferences and visiting with her family.

Rilla's short story collection, Strange Business (1992) and novels, The Mercy Seat (1997) and Fire in Beulah (2001) are all deeply rooted in Oklahoma. She was born in the foothills of the Sans Bois Mountains in 1951 and grew up in the growing oil town of Bartlesville.

Rilla's short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary magazines and her story "The Killing Blanket" was selected for Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards. Her collection of short stories, Strange Business, received the Oklahoma Book Award in 1993 and The Mercy Seat was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. Rilla's most recent novel, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

After graduating with a B.F.A. in Theatre Performance from the University of Tulsa in 1980, Rilla went on to New York to pursue an acting career and eventually found herself writing plays and fiction. By 1987 she enrolled at Brooklyn College and left there with an M.F.A. in hand. In addition to writing her novels, Rilla has taught at Syracuse University, Brooklyn College, the University of Central Oklahoma, and the University of Oklahoma.

As Rilla comes in dressed in jeans and a black pearl snap shirt, you can't help but notice that you can take the girl out of Oklahoma, but not Oklahoma out of the girl. She told me that her daily work as a writer starts with early mornings, coffee and favorite pajamas. The "real" Rilla is a humble lady who revels in living her life, not as a teller of tales, but in her words, as "a re-teller, a balladeer, telling the story of how we came to be here and what we've wrought."

This is what we talked about when we met recently at Borders Bookstore...

by Joe Myers

JOE: What motivated you to move from writing stage plays to literary fiction?

RILLA: [laughter] Well, I started out trying to write plays because I was in the theatre as an actor and it was a natural segway, but it's almost like trying to exercise a different muscle that you don't normally use. You know how Eugene O'Neil or Tennessee Williams starts out writing all of that description of the characters? That's how it would begin. There was so much that it eventually became fiction. Currently I'm working on converting some of my fiction into stage plays, so it's coming full circle.

JOE: Do you miss acting and the stage and do you ever have plans to return to stage work in any form?

RILLA: I don't exactly. I may try to next summer. My husband owns a theatre in Liberty, New York, and watching the productions there, I do get the acting bug, the itch, and start to consider it. I love an audience and I do get the opportunity to "act" while I'm reading my work at writer's conferences and the like. When I turned away from acting toward writing, I never looked back. I never had a sense of regret. I think it was a good choice.

JOE: Did the cross-genre work benefit you as a writer and how?

RILLA: [matter of fact] I think so, yes. In a couple of ways, but the primary way is that acting causes you to "embody" the character with your whole physicality, which I did not have such a strong impulse to do. But I did have a strong impulse to do it in my head. That combined with the articulation, the breathing and the reading (all from stage work) helps to define the character in writing fiction.

JOE: You're living in New York now, but your work is set in Oklahoma. What's the pull to use Oklahoma as a setting? Is it because it's home?

RILLA: No, well maybe in the beginning it was because it was home. I've written stories set in many different locales, but none of them as successful as the ones set in Oklahoma. And this is normal as a writer. When we start writing, everything that comes out is, in a sense, autobiographical. Mine was just autobiographical in terms of setting. I've only written one character that was truly autobiographical. I've come to develop a great captivation, bordering on obsession, with Oklahoma. I think the confluence of events that took place in creating Oklahoma is an endless source of fascination for me.

JOE: During my research, I came across your name in the history of KGCT [Green Country Television] Channel 41, now UPN 41, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. What was your role in the station's early days?

RILLA: I was the administrative assistant to the president of the television station. Back then it was Glenda Silvey [now of KOTV, The News on 6 in Tulsa] and I who were essentially the only two employees there, waiting around for the station to come alive, since we weren't actually on the air yet. I left there after a few months for New York to pursue acting.

JOE: Talking about The Mercy Seat, how did you decide on that title?

RILLA: The original title that I came up with was Unspeakable Mercy, but my publisher said no way, people won't get it. So I decided to use The Mercy Seat. In The Bible, in the book of Exodus, the Mercy Seat is described as the top section, or lid, of the Ark of the Covenant. The high priest entered with sacrificial blood to sprinkle on the Mercy Seat. The priest represented all the people outside the temple who depended on this procedure to remove the guilt of their sins.

JOE: Do you have a title for your new book?

RILLA: Yes. It's called HarpSong, spelled as one word, with the S capitalized. It's set in the 1930s and follows a young couple as they ride the rails in Oklahoma during the Great Depression and Dustbowl era. The characters are unlike any others written about during this time. They did not hit "The Mother Road" to California for a new life. They stayed behind and did what they had to do to survive.

JOE: What kind a research did you do for HarpSong and where did you get the idea for the novel?

RILLA: I took a trip to Goodwell, Oklahoma, and over to Cookson and talked with a girl behind the counter at a little store there. I also read through things at the local libraries for tidbits of history of the area.

The idea came from attending the Woody Guthrie Festival a few years back and the evening at the Crystal Theatre. Woody's son Arlo was there with his kids and they were singing all of Woody's old songs. Arlo said his dad so believed in everyday people, believed in the working man and that that came across in his music. I remember thinking that I really wanted to honor Oklahoma and Oklahomans by exploring that in a way that was not as darkly themed as my previous books.

JOE: Do you remember how old you were when you wrote your first story and what it was about?

RILLA: [laughter] Sorry. The reason I was laughing is because in junior high I got in trouble for passing a note in class that was intercepted by the teacher. It was more than a note. It was a third person narrative about things I had no business writing about at that age. But that's not really the first one. That would have to be in the fourth grade, back when we had to write stories with our spelling words in Mr. Lewis' class at Oak Park Elementary School. I have no idea what it was about, but I do remember that it was clever and funny.

JOE: What was first the literary magazine that published your work?

RILLA: Nimrod [Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry] was the very first one, in the "Oklahoma Indian Markings" issue in 1989, and the story was called "The Gift."

JOE: What was your "weed out" process when it came to where you would submit work?

RILLA: Back in those days there were not many publications or writing programs, so you really had to match your work to what they were calling for in their upcoming theme for their publication. I started getting published while I was still in the writing program at Brooklyn College, and I sent work to college reviews, The New Yorker, etc. and relied on the information in The Writers Market to guide my submissions.

JOE: Any recommendations for developing student writers wanting to pursue a graduate level education? Do you suggest an M.F.A. or PhD?

RILLA: Serendipitously, I saw an ad that said "Brooklyn College's M.F.A. writing program is one of the best kept secrets in New York". Alan Ginsberg was there at the time, as was Peter Spielberg, [Twiddledum, Twaddledum], Jonathan Baumbach [B, Reruns], Michael Cunningham [The Hours, Specimen Days]. I had written a short story that became a novella that became a short novel that's still in the drawer and will be in the archives, but I knew I could write. At the time, I didn't question M.F.A. or PhD. I just wanted to write. It was mid-year and a slot was open and I got in based on my writing sample. The M.F.A. program was about teaching people how to write, not about teaching people how to be teachers. It also allowed me to develop in a community of writers.

I like the M.F.A. notion. I think the Association of Writers and Writing Programs [AWP] has worked very hard to make that a terminal degree, while most universities don't want to consider it a terminal degree. If a university wants to hire a PhD, then they want a teacher, not a writer. The horrendous workload as a teacher would prevent the time one would need to write. To do that and still write, one would have to be one of those people who just runs on pure energy.

JOE: In your opinion, what are the top M.F.A. programs?

RILLA: Iowa (because it's Iowa), Columbia (very competitive, less peer support), University of Alabama (with Michael Martone), Brooklyn College (Michael Cunningham, Director), NYU.

JOE: Any thoughts on the so-called decline of literary fiction?

RILLA: I don't believe it. I think there are just so many people writing these days combined with the fact that we don't talk about writing as much as people did in the past. The time when a single novel, like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, can change society is not now. Today, the times seem to be so challenging that only non-fiction is adequate to describe them. But people will always need fictional stories-I meet these people all the time. They want the inside of the characters that you will never get in film or television. These people care about language and resonance and they know these are the things that make us human.

Publishers today are owned by multi-national companies and want books that sell in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Literary fiction doesn't always do that. But there will always be readers that want to read for escape and exploration and that's who we write for.

JOE: What are you reading right now?

RILLA: Some books about Catherine of Aragon for research on my next novel that will be set in pre-Elizabethan England and about a woman who was martyred in 1546. I just finished a wonderful book by Craig Womack called Drowning In Fire, about a young Creek Indian gay man coming of age in Okmulgee and Eufaula. The richness and resonance is just beautiful. I really recommend it.

JOE: What would you say to aspiring writers?

RILLA: Keep doing it. Despite rejections, just keep doing it. Rejections come with the territory. They affect me now just as much as they did when I began.

We live in society that has such a cult of celebrity that we just need to remember that when we get there [published], we'll still just be there teaching and talking about writing, sitting across the room from each other.

It happens just one reader at a time.

Email Joe Myers at joe.myers@okstate.edu.