Many writing careers begin in an English class, but in Gerry Wilson’s case, the classroom was her own.

A longtime educator, Wilson found her passion for creative writing after grading one too many five-paragraph essays from her students.

“I didn’t like the way students were being taught to write,” she said. “They had no voice. They wrote these cookie cutter essays.”

Wilson successfully pitched a creative writing class to her school administration and then set out to master the craft for herself.

“I started going to some workshops and learning along with the students, basically,” Wilson said. “That’s when I began to write fiction.”

“That Pinson Girl,” released in February, is Wilson’s first novel. She previously published the short story collection “Crosscurrents and Other Stories” and earned a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship in 2015.

Wilson’s novel is set in a rural town in Northeast Mississippi in 1918 amid World War I, the Great Influenza and the Jim Crow era. Certain aspects of the titular heroine Leona Pinson were inspired by Wilson’s grandmother, who she remembered as a wonderful storyteller.

Wilson will discuss “That Pinson Girl” in the main branch of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System on March 11 at noon. She will be joined by Ellen Ann Fentress, author of “The Steps We Take” and faculty member in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Mississippi University for Women. The event is free and open to the public, and lunch will be provided courtesy of the Friends of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Tell us about who you are.

I was born and I grew up in the hills of North Mississippi. I have a vivid memory of when “Intruder in the Dust” was filmed in Oxford. That would have been about 1948 or ’49.

Pontotoc is sort of halfway between Oxford and Tupelo. And I sometimes think of my little hometown Pontotoc as the place in between.

Because I wonder, if the university had located there, or if the medical centers and the industries had located there, then it might have been a very different place.

The point I’m headed toward is that phrase of (William Faulkner’s): “My postage stamp of native soil.” I feel that way about the hills of North Mississippi, even though I’ve been gone for so many years. It is the place that birthed me and grounded me, and I think it’s a place that leaves its mark on us if we’re fortunate enough to come from there.

Can you tell us about some of the historical tidbits that you discovered or researched?

Well, there was a lot because I wanted to be sure to support the story with details that felt right, that felt realistic without calling too much attention to them. In my mind, there’s nothing worse than running across an anachronism where something leaps off the page as being completely out of sync with the story and with the time frame.

I did a good bit of research about the war, World War I. I needed to know what the draft was like, how that was structured, when young men and boys were called up, where they might go for training. All of that needed to be relevant. Then I wanted to place Leona’s lover, the father of her child, in the trenches in France. In order to do that, I wanted to read about trench warfare and what that was like. I had the impression of how awful it was, but I needed more of that. I needed the stench and the sound and the mud and the fear.

This is also set during the influenza outbreak of 1918. Did you write this before or after COVID?

I started this book about 10 or 12 years ago, actually. I got a strong beginning, but I just polished that beginning to no end and couldn’t get much beyond that. So I worked on it periodically and I put it away. And I pulled it out, and I worked on it again, and I put it away.

I think it was maybe during the summer of 2021 that it just kept nagging at me. Maybe it’s because of COVID that it did, so I went back to it and I was able to do some really good work on it.

I think what COVID did is that it increased my awareness. It made the flu epidemic seem so much more real to me. It made the fear and the details of the sickness and all that just more relevant to the novel.

Could you give us a summary of our protagonist, Leona?

Leona gives birth to a child out of wedlock when she’s only 17 years old, which of course isolates her. She’s ostracized in the community.

She’s an embarrassment to her family, which was true in those days, certainly. Leona has only gone through the eighth grade. She lives way out in the country, where she’s gone to a one-room school, and that’s as far as she’s able to go.

But I like to think that Leona is very resourceful. One of the things I struggled with with Leona was that she could have been, and she was in some ways, such a powerless character, because so many other people had control over her life. My goal was to make her stronger and help her grow beyond that.

We can’t talk about a book set in Mississippi without talking about race.

That was also a struggle for me in writing the book. There are people who would say that because I’m an older white woman, I have no right to try to create a character of another race because I have not experienced that, and therefore I shouldn’t try to recreate it. But I felt it was important once I decided to set the story in this time frame. It felt really important. How could you write a story set in rural Mississippi, or rural just about anywhere in the South, during that time period and ignore the race dynamics? I just don’t think it’s possible.

Emily Liner is the owner of Friendly City Books, an independent bookstore and press in Columbus.

READER FAVORITES

• 

  Kitten season heroes

  By Ashlynd King • 2 days ago