Family inspires second novel

Things happen to you while you're writing, Augusta author Louise Shivers said.

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Jackie Ricciardi/Staff

Author, Louise Shivers poses for a photo.

In the old and tattered copies of John L. Stoddard's Lectures , a gift from her grandmother Georgeanna to her father, she discovered an inscription: "When I am gone I will soon be forgotten. G.S."

That line reinvigorated Ms. Shivers and helped her to persevere with her second book, A Whistling Woman .

That's because that book, which was published in 1993, is based on her grandmother and proclaimed muse, Georgeanna Shingleton. It's the third novel by a Southern woman to be featured in our book club, a partnership between the East Central Georgia Regional Library System and The Augusta Chronicle .

Writing is about preservation for Ms. Shivers. She wants to tell the stories of women like her grandmother, who were silent and constrained by their times.

"This is real, this is important, this is worth preserving," she said.

She thought of the idea for A Whistling Woman while driving up the hill to her office as writer-in-residence at Augusta State University. A song, not even one she liked, was stuck in her head.

She was thinking about growing up in a time when girls were urged not to whistle -- "I didn't whistle." As she thought about the place society had gotten to, the title came to her: "You don't mess with a whistling woman."

"Titles come to me first," she said.

She decided to write in the voice of Georgeanna, who also was in Ms. Shivers' first book, Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail (1983). Readers often asked her about the character.

"A lot of people were fascinated with that witchlike woman," she said.

Her grandmother died when Louise was 6 years old, but she still remembers her well. She would read anything she could get her hands on, she said, even stealing catalogs from neighbors' outhouses. Ms. Shivers wishes her grandmother had been given access to a library.

"She'd never talk about it much, but there were always books everywhere," she said.

Ms. Shivers, who is usually reading two or three books at a time, says the availability of libraries has made it a different world from her grandmother's.

Had her grandmother had the access -- "I think she would have been the person I am."

Ms. Shivers' mother, too, was brought up in a small-town way of thinking. Ms. Shivers grew up in a house with many brothers and in a manner that she, as a woman, knew her place, she said.

It wasn't until she was older, with her three children grown, that she gave a try at writing by enrolling in continuing education classes through Augusta State University.

"I thought I'd missed my chance. I was too old," she said.

She attended the Sandhills Writers Conference, an experience that changed her life, she said. She was in a six-member group that met regularly, fought like siblings and made progress on their works.

Another inspiration was Georgia author Flannery O'Connor.

"I saw she had written about country people and people I could identify with," Ms. Shivers said.

For her, it's a struggle to keep writing -- it takes a buffer of a couple of hours to get into and out of the meditative mode required to write.

She writes in the mornings -- "If it's going to come, it's going to come when your mind is fresh, before the day gets in the way."

As O'Connor said, you have to make yourself available, Ms. Shivers said.

It took her five years to write the Civil War novel she recently completed; now, "it's out in the world" to publish.

There's good news for Louise Shivers fans: Now that she has found her place in writing, she's staying there.

"I'm never going to retire," she said.

Contact Sarah Day Owen at (706) 823-3223 or sarah.owen@augustachronicle.com.