YVONNE LEHMAN: BLACK MOUNTAIN, NC NOVELIST

by Patrick Killough  [01-30-1999 ]


Novelist Yvonne Lehman and her husband Howard live above the municipal golf course in Black Mountain, N.C. I recently interviewed  Mrs. Lehman over coffee in her sunny breakfast nook. Having been her student in a course on creative "right brain" writing and having just read one of her more than two dozen novels, I was ready for more.

Mrs. Lehman organizes life non-chronologically. Experience seems stored in her imagination, always ready to spin yarns. Life is for living without a
stopwatch. She reminds of Chesterton's boast of having written a 300 page history of the world without a single date. Or as Faulkner is quoted, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Yvonne Lehman grew up in Easley, South Carolina, nurtured by  Christian
grandparents. They  made church come alive. She always felt "different,"
and was pleased when others noticed. She was  taken seriously by family, friends and teachers. While welcoming and mastering grammar and syntax, she also created something new in her exercises. Writing she learned inside a busy household, surrounded by people, pets and commotion. "To this day," she said: "I don't like to write in solitude and quiet. I want hustle and bustle around me."

Lehman's First Novel

Her first novel was RED LIKE MINE, "red" referring to blood, the same
color in blacks and whites. 

"I lived in  Marion, Illinois and taught Sundayschool to young women. Racial issues and riots were in the air. It seemedsimply not  Christian to teach Sunday school as if inter-racial violence did not exist." 
So one day she said to her class: "let's invite some colored girls to join us." The result: six months of discomfort within the church but no invitation to colored girls.

In that humbling time Mrs Lehman asked: "What is my Christianity? I
decided, God and I are it.  And between us we make a majority.'" She
refocused her life. She transformed pious generalities about social issues
in the published Sunday school lessons by applying them in class to real
situations in the community. She intensified her practice of extensively
researching Scripture and other standard Sunday school materials. Once RED LIKE MINE appeared, she saw her Illinois church mend its ways.

A Writer's Calling

Yvonne had asked God, "what do you want me to do?" She enjoyed no visions, heard no thunderclaps. But she learned God's plan.

She read about the School of  Christian Writers In Minneapolis. She thought that writing might be what God wanted. Two hundred applicants had been accepted. 

"We had all been set the same qualifying exercise, to write about an epitaph. Most wrote essays or short stories about tombstone texts. I misunderstood the instructions. I just wrote a very long epitaph telling what was important about one person's life. My entry was judged the best."The head of the School of Christian Writers said that my entry  had overtones of Dostoevsky, someone I had never heard of."
All that school's students are invited to go home and submit a prize paper.
A few months later the author of the best paper is then selected to return,
all expenses paid, to read his paper before the next class. "The winner
from the class before mine wrote about a pig. I thought, 'this is a theme
for Christian writers? I can top that!'" Next year Yvonne Lehman had won
the right to read her prize-winning piece to the new students.

She Wrote of Illinois in the 1970s

"For quite a while I set my novels in Illinois. I touched on problems like
alcohol, drugs and abuse by boy friends. I was living in North Carolina in
the late 80s and early 90s but still writing about Illinois of the 1970s."

For over 20 years Mrs. Lehman has taught others to write, beginning in the 1970s after she and Howard moved to Black Mountain. Asked about recurring weaknesses of young writers, she replied:

  • --"Too many want instant success.
  • --  A  majority  think that their first draft is good enough.
  • --But saddest of all:  some who want to write are tied in knots, too shy to produce even a first draft. "
To help the diffident and the tongue-tied, Mrs Lehman now teaches the new techniques of "right brain" creative writing.

What to Do about Evil

Yvonne Lehman writes about evil behavior and wants to decrease it. "In my novels my characters debate a lot.They argue about theology and religion. They look at all angles of abortion, for example, or using drugs.  My characters change: some a lot, some only a little, some not at all. Some even grow worse."

"When I am planning and writing a novel I discuss it with others. My
daughter Lori helped me write my 1998 novel, CALL OF THE MOUNTAIN, by dialoging about abortion. My newly ordained Baptist preacher son also argues with me about God's plans for women."

Growing into Graham Greene When It Comes to Confronting Evil?

Yvonne Lehman might benefit from less puritanical publishers who would
prod her to write even better books. She might conceivably prove a new
Graham Greene, wrestling with torments of sin, suicide and despair. Mrs.
Lehman knows that  evil is attractive. "In an early novel about the Bible I
said the Hebrews in Gomer's days were going over to pagan worship. They were strongly tempted by pagan ways of  worship through ecstatic dancing. Why were they tempted?  Because the dancing was beautiful, seductive."  But some Christian publishers will not accept detailed literary  depictions of "the roses and raptures of vice."

Yvonne Lehman evokes other writers. Prefacing his novel about the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, DON'T DIE BEFORE YOU'RE DEAD, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko revealed his personal approach to life and writing . "I always loved Thomas Wolfe for his 'disheveledness,' for his 'overloadedness.' If I were a horse I would not eat hay pressed into squares."

Yvonne Lehman does not force her imagination into fussily precise times and grooves. No horse she! But if she were, it would be a high-tempered, wild pony roaming the boundless prairies. She  would not deign to eat "hay pressed into squares."

-OOO-

for Asheville TRIBUNE