A few months ago, Guy Lancaster asked me to write an entry on "The Annunciation" for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
"The Annunciation" was Ellen Gilchrist's first novel, published in 1983. The novel was "really about Fayetteville," Ellen says in a 2008 essay called "My Paris and My Rome, Part II." She says that she used "many of the real people and places as background for the adventures of a poorly disguised autobiographical heroine named Amanda McCamey. (I disguised her by making her thinner, kinder, and braver than I was at the time.)"
In her 2010 interview for the Pryor Center's Arkansas Memories project, Ellen told Scott Lunsford, "I wrote a novel 'cause [publisher] Little, Brown wanted it" then went back to writing short stories and poetry and to get away from the stifled, alcohol-soaked life she'd known in New Orleans.
Ellen began drinking as a teenager. "Every culture has made intoxicating drinks and developed complicated and sometimes beautiful rituals for imbibing them," she writes in "How I Got Stronger and Smarter instead of Stupider and Sadder," and "every culture has had its victims of these rituals."
In the same essay she recounts some of her sodden adventures, including the time she "went down to the French Quarter in New Orleans and tried to get the whores in a whorehouse to come home and live in our house and stop being whores." That must be the truest and most poetic encapsulation of drunk logic this side of the King James Bible.
In her mid-30s, Ellen, while drinking, fell down a flight of stairs and had a concussion. This led to her seeing a behaviorist named Chet Scrignar, who convinced her to stop drinking (possibly by hypnosis; I remain unclear on this), and then to a long and productive relationship with a Freudian named Gunther Perdigao.
(Ellen's best account of the benefits of talk therapy is in a short story called "The Uninsured," collected in "The Age of Miracles." In a series of letters, her autobiographical heroine Rhoda Manning attempts to explain to Blue Cross Blue Shield that the therapy they've been paying for for years has actually saved them money; to a prospective insurance company, she says that the therapy is necessary because she is a writer, not because of any mental disturbance. Hilarity ensues.)
Here's how Ellen describes the relationship with Perdigao in her Pryor Center interview: four days a week, "I talked to this incredible mind. Not that he ever said a single word. He didn't. I talked. He listened. And all this time, I'm writin' unbelievable reams of really good poetry. And I'm publishing it."
Ellen says that her first trip to Fayetteville was in November, and that on her way up she stopped in Jackson because Hodding Carter II and Patricia Derian wanted her to meet Jimmy Carter. Ellen says no one in Fayetteville had heard of Jimmy Carter; remote as it was in those days, I don't think that's possible as late as November 1976, so I date her first trip there to November 1975. (An article from the March 1976 Harper's opens with Jimmy Carter talking to a dozen 17-year olds at Admiral Benbow Inn in Jackson; I'll try to pin down the exact date of his visit.)
In any case, Ellen was smitten with Fayetteville upon arrival. She showed 117 poems to Jim Whitehead. She was already getting them published in magazines but wanted help turning them into a book. She wound up publishing "Land Surveyor's Daughter" with Frank Stanford's and C.D. Wright's Lost Roads press. The poems are, as she said, really good.
Bill Harrison noticed her talent and taught her how to write short stories. The University of Arkansas Press published her first collection, "In the Land of Dreamy Dreams," in 1981 and it sold 10,000 copies in three months. Little, Brown re-issued it, then asked her to write "The Annunciation." It's not as tight or precise or as funny as her early stories, but as Walker Percy said, the novel is a big, baggy form. (Percy felt it gave him enough room to work out his ideas, and that writing a short story is a more demanding art.)
Ellen's second collection of short stories, "Victory over Japan," won the National Book Award in 1984.
My Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry is not going to be a skeleton key to "The Annunciation." I don't plan to speculate about the real identities of her Fayetteville characters. I am on a hunt for some of the places she mentions, particularly her first house on Mount Sequoyah. I welcome emails from anyone who can help.