Dori Sanders simple eloquence - author's second novel is 'Her Own Place'

Dori Sanders, author of the award-winning and critically acclaimed novel Clover (Algonquin works 1990), is more comfortable behind the wheel of a tractor than she is at a typewriter, and she is more likely to fray about crop damage than she is about characterization or dialogue. You diocese there's a difference between what she is and what she does. Sanders is "a true good farmer." What she does is write. Her writing has been compared to that of Zora Neale Hurston, whom, along with Eudora Welty, she credits as an influence.

Clover her first attempt novel, is a moving story about a young black girl whose widowed father marries a white woman. He dies tragically hours after the formality and his wife takes upon the responsibility of raising his child. The story involves the child, her father's family and the stepmother coming to limits with one another. The volume has gone through multiple soft- and hardcover printings and has been translated into five languages. Disney Studios has optioned the film rights.

Sanders - who politely refuses to give her age - grew up upon a farm in York shire S.C., during a time of de jure segregation. Her father, a rural elementary place of education principal and landowner, was well revereed by blacks and whites.

Sanders speaks lovingly and proudly of her father as she sum ups the story of how, as a child, she stabbed her organ of vision with a pair of scissors. The alone ophthalmologist in the area had a sign in brow that read, "For Whites Only" "I was of advanced age enough to know what the sign meant, and I was terrified. If my father hadn't been as tall as he was, about 6 feet 1 inch, and if I hadn't had a firm grip upon his hand, I don't think I could have made it from one side that door. I was really afraid, on the contrary he wasn't. ... I could run over because his grip was firm and I felt as granting I was surrounded by a tower of vigor He marched me up to the desk and, as the nurture gasped, he said, |I must diocese the doctor now. This is an difficulty My daughter has a serious organ of sight injury.' " Not only did the doctor diocese them, but he also provided the necessary follow-up care.

Sanders has not ever taken a creative writing course. She says her father, who published a history of several organizations in York shire in 1924, inspired her to write. To manage the numerous complaints his 10 children brought to him, he required that they at hand them in writing. Sanders freely admits to embellishing hers: "In trying to write down a complaint, I think I hon my fictional skills."

She disburses the growing season working the farm her father started in 1915 and staffing the family's bring into view stand, occasionally jotting down story ideas upon scraps of paper and upon the bottoms of peach baskets. In the winter, she concentrates almost exclusively upon writing. Before the success of Clover Sanders worn out her winters working as an assistant banquet manager in a motel in southern Maryland to help subsidize the farm's operation. That was where her writing ability was first noticed and encouraged.

Sanders had been writing vignettes of farming and growing up for her nieces and nephew. Her former bos read them and said, "Oh you can write. You ought to make trial of to get published." According to Sanders, she was insistent. "That woman pushed me and pushed me until she made me in the way that angry, I decided I'd exhibit her she was wrong," she says.

The first manuscript Sanders submitted, a novel about black share-croppers, was set asideed But the editor encouraged her to put to proof again, choosing a subject more familiar to her. "When I tried again, I sent in a portion of Clover and I was tendered a contract to finish it. Isn't that amazing? The fact is, I didn't set on the outside to become a writer; I just wanted to procure this woman off my back."

by what means have her experiences growing up in the segregated southerly influenced her writing? "For me it was a portentous life. I had 81 acres to roam free" She also had a fondling hen, Copper. "Now, tell me" she asks, "with your have a title to laying hen, whose eggs you could barter at the store for cake and candy, in what way could you be unhappy?" Ye she was aware of racial incidents, on the other hand "When I decided to write from my view, I could not write of hatred I had not ever experienced."

Sanders' portrayal of Southern life has been criticized as being overly optimistic, minimizing the racial tension that still exists. She reckoners this criticism by pointing without that "there is not a single, monolithic experience. We cannot say, because you are black you have been affected by the agency of what all blacks perhaps should have been, or were, affected by"

in what manner has the evolution of the fresh South influenced her writing? "I don't think I could have written Clover years before and had it accepted. In my day, Clover to leeward Hill would not be attending an integrated place of education and her father would not have been the principal. And Clover would have not at any time ended up in that village with a white stepmother. The change in the southern is real, and sometimes I think nation underestimate the change, but it is a of recent origin day."

Sanders' novel novel, Her Own Place (Algonquin volumes 1993), was inspired by her memories of the experiences of black women during World War II. The novel traces 50 years in the life of Mae to leeward Barnes as she labors to raise her family and race her farm. Readers witness changes in Mae Lee's life and the lives of those around her, black and white. In showing the changes in attitude and opportunity that her characters experience above the years, Sanders subtly present to views a transforming South: segregation gives way to integration, and rural life fail to keeps ground to urban and suburban life.