Dragonflies, Manatees and Snakes, Lots of Snakes – Writing About Place

Lambert’s Passion for Place is Crystal Clear

There is not a single illustration in Sandra Gail Lambert’s debut novel, The River’s Memory, and yet each of its 238 pages comes alive with captivating imagery. For example, in a passage written in her compelling first-person narrative, Lambert invites you to skinny-dip with her young female character in the spring-chilled waters of Ocala’s Silver River.

Underwater grasses stroke down my back and bottom. Minnows gum at my heels. The water pushes me into the shallows, and left sitting waist deep. Spikes of red flowers surround me. Mating dragonflies float through the air liked jeweled bracelets. Yellow swallowtails flicker around my nipples.

Simply put, Lambert paints with words. Her ability to describe settings in vivid sensory detail allows readers to immerse themselves in the environment her characters are experiencing.

She was kind enough to share her writing process during WAG’s first monthly meeting of 2015, at the Millhopper Branch Library. She stressed the use of setting not just as a backdrop to stories but as a unifying force. The writer’s challenge is using distinct and evocative language.

The process did not come naturally to Lambert. “What I wrote early on was pure insomnia,” she said, eliciting chuckles from the audience. By reading other authors, notably Randy Wayne White and his descriptions of Florida, Lambert developed a knack for writing about place.

She often wraps the description around the plot. “My plot is revealed throughout the book,” she said. “By the end, it pulls together.” However, there can be pitfalls. Lambert cautions writers about wanting to share all their research and becoming too absorbed in setting.

“Any place will want to escape its bounds and take off,” she said, noting that she resisted going on ad nauseum “about the mating habits of dragonflies.”

Lambert not only uses place to develop characters, she tells herself that the setting — in her case, the river — is a character in itself with an omniscient point of view. “I got to write about a place close to my heart.”

In The River’s Memory, Lambert introduces a number of female characters: “depressed women who have given birth to just too many babies that  die on them, people escaped from slavery who lived quiet but dangerous lives on the Florida frontier, disabled women who find a way to explore their worlds, artists of pre-Columbian Florida who yearned for better materials and more skills.”

“I know these type of people existed, but their lives are lost to a formal historian,” because, of course, no facts were recorded. “But as fiction writers, we can believe in their existence and write their lives back into history of an era. Because there’s a way a novel can preserve history, especially the history of women, especially the history of marginalized people, that would otherwise have been lost to us. We can meld history and story into a novel or story that perhaps reveals the emotional truth of an era. And that’s not a small thing to offer the world.”

In a question-and-answer period following her talk, Lambert admitted, “I never thought of myself as a creative person. I ran a bookstore.” Now she tells writers not to be discouraged by rejection letters, especially when a publisher  goes through the trouble of providing a personalized response.

In addition to her book, Lambert’s essays have appeared in the journals New Letters, Brevity, Water’s Stone, Weekly Rumpus, North American Review and Arts and Letters.

Lambert, a longtime WAG member, published The River’s Memory through Tallahassee-based Twisted Road Publications.