A Winning Exchange: From Poets & Writers, Inc.

A Winning Exchange

Recently we asked Sue Monk Kidd, on the occasion of the release of The Secret Life of Bees, the movie based on her novel of the same name, to recount the genesis of her 2002 best-selling book. Poets & Writers was pleased to have played a small part in its coming to fruition.

The strangest question I ever received about my first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, came from a woman at one of my readings. The book had been out a few weeks, and there were maybe eleven people in the audience. I was wildly grateful to every one of them for filling a chair, especially one woman whose rapt attention I found particularly inspiring. During the Q&A, her hand shot up.

"Did you write the book yourself?" she asked.

I had no idea what she was thinking, but I'll tell you what flashed through my mind. I imagined that she'd taken one look at me and thought: This woman couldn't possibly write a novel. That's because I'd spent considerable time thinking the same thing.

When I began writing, at the age of thirty, I had an ardent, if short-lived notion about writing novels, but turned instead to freelancing and eventually wrote three memoirs. I assumed I would go on writing nothing but nonfiction; however, in my forties, the desire to write novels returned. It's hard to say which was more compelling, though, my desire or my trepidation.

I took a deep breath and began. Soon an image came, of an adolescent girl lying in bed while bees squeezed through cracks in the wall and flew around her room. Gradually a story sprouted, about a white girl named Lily who runs away with her African American caretaker in South Carolina in 1964. I wrote a rambling first chapter and took it to a writers conference. I was told its potential as a novel seemed small, but if I worked around the clock for...oh, a year, it might become a publishable short story. That's more or less what I did, actually learning a few things about the craft of fiction in the process. The story was published in Nimrod.

After that I put aside the idea of the "bee novel," and for the next three years wrote short stories, read literary fiction, took classes, and studied the craft. The writers conference had turned me into a serious apprentice. Then one day I read about Poets & Writers' Writers Exchange Program, in which a fiction writer and a poet are selected from a different state each year and showered with the sort of opportunities I'd only dreamed about. By a stroke of fortuity, it was South Carolina's year.

Being chosen energized me with encouragement and a sense of support, with a kind of second wind. Off I went to New York City to meet authors, editors, and agents and to read my work at the National Arts Club. For that occasion, I dug out my old chapter-turned-short story, "The Secret Life of Bees." After the reading, a literary agent, Virginia Barber, approached me. "I hope that's the first chapter of your novel," she said.

Which is how I got reunited with my original vision to write the novel, how I found the agent who sold it, not to mention how Poets & Writers offered me the advocacy and opportunity that helped to make it possible.

My answer to the woman who asked if I wrote The Secret Life of Bees myself was a simple yes, but I could have added that I had a lot of help.