bestseller list. But not because of money or fame. I'm so thankful for the Oprah Book Club because more people are reading my work. What's worth it is the one person who reads the book because of it. One man called me who had been ostracized from his family for leaving their Amish Mennonite faith. He found strength in my book and even came and stayed with me for a while."

Beyond a
Southern Writer

THE SOUTH figures prominently in her novels-in the swampy settIngs, the backwater characters, and the ever-present struggle with spiritual belief. Further, she now holds the Ruth and Perry Morgan Endowed of Southern Literature at Old Dominion University, where she's an assistant professor of creative writing. But Reynolds doesn't want to be known as merely a Southern writer.
     "I don't really think of myself as a Southern writer. I no more consider myself just a Southern writer than I do just a woman writer."
     While she admires successful Southern writers of preceding generations-Flannery O'Connor, ("I love her mystery, the mystery of grace"), Toni Morrison ("I love writers who are pushing the limits"), Eudora Welty, and others-she does not see her work as a continuance of theirs.
     "Changes in Southern life will make my writing different from Eudora Welty's. You can't separate a writer from her world, and Eudora Welty's world is not mine."
     Reynolds sees herself not only as more than a Southern writer, but also more than merely a writer. A big part of her world is her teaching.
     "I love to teach. I love ODU-the students, the faculty. The M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) people are like family. I plan to stay there."
     In her teaching of fiction writing, as in her novels, sensuality and spirituality figure prominently.
     "You've got to get into the body and heart. You need to get your story outside the intellectual idea, which is inevitably clichéd.
     "The symbolic level is a bridge between conscious reality and imagination. It transmits understanding. I use dreams, visions and inanimate objects, which talk in my books. They certainly speak to me every day."
     For Reynolds, learning to write means learning to live, passionately, which is what she advises her students to do.
     "Often people who want to write ask the wrong questions. They want to know how to get published and get an agent. But the people who are writing the books people want to read are people who have passion in other parts of their lives You do it not

by holing up in your garret but by living a passionate life."

Full Immersion in
Transforming Worlds

IN ADDITION to living passionately herself, Reynolds is passionate about both writing and teaching. But she can't do both at the same time.
     "I can't create when I'm teaching. Which means I write over Christmas break and summer break."
     When she does, she works all day, writing intensely. Her most recent book (which she was editing from the rocking chair on her front porch when I arrived) she wrote in six weeks-all 400 pages. For Reynolds, writing is a full immersion baptism in the world of her story.
     "During the writing of a book I lose my ego almost completely. I lose the real world. I will feel so strongly about what is happening in the book that I fear I'll never come back to reality."
     But that immersion brings enlightenment. By living in the world of the novel, she comes to better understand its mystery.
     "I have no vision to begin with, but then themes emerge and I start to understand more about what the vision is."
     Reynolds' themes center on extricating grace from seemingly graceless situations.
     "The job of literature is to show ways to survive and make meaning out of things which at first look meaningless. People look for answers in literature. You can find answers if you can break through differences in culture and class."
     As did the Amish Mennonite who saw himself in Ninah, the heroine of The Rapture of Canaan, whose grandpa founded The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind.
     "I write about characters who are at turning points. That's where the growth and pain are. People who are looking to find ways out of pain. I'm curious about when you have the best of intentions but [foul] things up anyway. How do you make it meaningful?"
     The source for Reynolds' fiction lies in the mundane, in the drama of everyday lives.
     "I have this curiosity about what makes people do what they do. I love people. They crack me up. Recently there was the woman who bitched me out at the tollbooth on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. I handed her $10 folded in half and she said, 'We'd get folks through here a lot faster if people didn't have their money all crumpled up.' I was amazed. I started to imagine her life. There was something more behind that than just crumpled money."

Mystery and Meaning

FOR REYNOLDS, writing a novel was once a mystery tour whose destination remained unknown. It was the search for meaning in the writing process that compelled her.
     "If I knew where a book was going I would never write it because that would kill the energy and spirit of the book."
     But that changed this past summer. For the first time, she wrote a novel that she had planned out in advance-though the plan changed along the way. It showed her that she didn't know as much about writing as she had thought.
     "Now I feel I know less than ever. But I'm feeling not loss but more possibility."
     Although all of Reynolds' novels are set in the South, with young female protagonists who take to the woods and the wilds with their fertile imaginations, she maintains they're not autobiographical.
     "I'm not recording my life in my fiction, but writing past my life."
     To help do that she keeps an extensive journal to separate her own life from her characters'.
     "I write everything that's happened to me in my journal so I'm not re-living my life in my fiction."
     Hand-in-hand with not writing about her own life is her desire to break new ground with each new book.
     "I don't want to write the same book and the same things over and over. For example, I did not want sex in A Gracious Plenty [her third novel]. I wanted to stretch outside it to show intimacy without sex. In the current book I'm writing, I tried to avoid religion."
     Though much of her life is now devoted to literature - writing it, reading it, teaching it - there's more to her life than just that. For example, she likes to attempt other creative endeavors, such as making leather-and-crystal necklaces, whose components lay scattered about the dining room table, and baking "inedible" cookies, which sat cooling in the kitchen. But her passions extend beyond domestic pastimes.
     "I don't want to become anything so much that I miss out on other parts of my life. I discovered, after turning 30, that it's more important to be with friends and to take my kayak out on the marshes."
     Also, she's not sure if she'll always be a writer or a university professor.
     "I want to be open to whatever possibilities present themselves. I suspect that I'll always be writing, but I don't know if it will always be for publication. There may be other things I want to do. If writing is a step, it's been a great step."
     The next step?
     "I might want to get a Ph.D. in medieval studies. And there are a lot of ways to

teach without being in a university." For example, she dreams of teaching drama to schoolchildren. "Or I would love to earn a living on the water," Reynolds says.
     That dream echoes the life of her father, who spends his time fishing. It seems right for Reynolds: nature, freedom, slowness. Small things, seemingly.
      "The most meaningful things are the smallest," she says. "I have big dreams, but they're through little things."