Leah Stewart is the author of the novel, Body of a Girl. She has been a creative writing teacher and an associate editor of Double Take magazine. The daughter of an Air Force serviceman, she has lived in nine states and two countries. She holds degrees from Vanderbilt University and the University of Michigan. Her short stories have appeared in various publications, including The Kenyon Review. We first met several years ago while she was working as staff at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in Tennessee.

Camille Renshaw: Faulkner once wrote, "Art is no part of Southern life... [but] is almost the sum total of a Southern artist." Do you think writing or art is still somewhat out of place in Southern culture, or is that tension different this century?

Leah Stewart: Currently, I don't see much difference between living and writing in North Carolina and living and writing in Boston, except that it's much cheaper to do the living part of it in the South. It doesn't seem to me that writing and art are out of place in Southern culture; in fact, I've always thought of writing in particular as a huge part of it. (And I'm living between Chapel Hill and Hillsborough, two towns where there's all kinds of art and music and writing going on.) It's in books that you see the version of the South I think he's talking about here — steeped in its history, especially the Civil War and its legacy of slavery, racism, and separatism. I'm attracted to the Southern gothic sensibility, with all its dark secrets: Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, William Gay. But, on the whole, that's not the South as I've experienced it. The summer I lived in Memphis I felt closer to that version of the South than I have anywhere else; maybe that's why I set the book there.

I'm not even sure how much I'd identify myself as a Southern writer, not because I wouldn't like to but because I'm not sure how authentic that claim would be. I'm an Air Force brat; my parents are from Alabama and Tennessee, but I didn't really live in the South (Fairfax County, VA, is not the kind of South we're talking about) until entering Vanderbilt. And I don't have a sense of Nashville as a city trying to hang onto its history. In fact, I was a senior at Vanderbilt before learning about the school's connection to the Fugitives. It's not something Vanderbilt plays up, I'm guessing, because of the racism that was part of their worldview.

I've moved so much — to the Southwest, Northwest, Midwest, Southeast, and Northeast, as well as England — that no particular place seems to me to have shaped my character. I don't really feel the urgency about place that Faulkner certainly did; no character I created would feel as conflicted as Quentin does about whether he hated the South. He'd just move.

CR: What were you doing the summer you spent in Memphis?

LS: I was interning at The Commercial Appeal, which is the Memphis daily. My job was in the Neighbors department, which is about as far from Crime as you can get, but a friend who was interning in Metro sometimes covered the police beat. She talked about rapes that weren't making the paper, like the woman assaulted across the street from the apartment where I was living. I was 19. It was the first time I had ever lived alone, and, as in my book, a number of murders were committed in the area that year, mostly men killing young women. So I was scared. One night I burned my finger badly on the stove and was too scared to walk down the block to the convenience store for Neosporin.

But I also really liked Memphis — it had a larger-than-life character unlike any other place I had lived. The city is a place with a strong sense of its own history: Elvis, Al Green, Beale Street, all the colorful Memphis figures the people there like to tell stories about. It really has that Southern gothic flavor we were talking about earlier.