Magendie finds words flow easily
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No one ever told Kathyrn Magendie she could write.
“I would love to be one of those writers who says ‘I wanted to be a writer when I came out of the womb,’” Magendie said in a phone interview from Maggie Valley, N.C., her home for more than four years now. She pauses to laugh. Her conversations are punctuated with laughter. She is satisfied to be where she is — in the mountains – but it was a long journey getting there.
Like the main character in her book, Tender Graces, Magendie was born in West Virginia, then shortly after her parents split up, she came to live in Baton Rouge with her father and stepmother. Unlike her Virginia Kate character, Magendie was just 3-1/2 years old when she moved to Louisiana in 1967.
One by one, Magendie’s biological mother gave up her first three children. Magendie and her two brothers wound up living in Baton Rouge. Her mother later remarried and had two more children that she kept. “I’ve never heard of it,” Magendie said of her mother’s curious way of giving up her children. “My older brother went first. Then I went. It was quite a while before the third one,” she said. So that part of the story is inspired by her own life.
“I couldn’t help but write about that,” she admitted. Most of the rest is invented, she said. Once she created the main character, “Virginia Kate just took over.”
It all began as a short story, Magendie said. “Before I knew it, 200,000 words were out,” she said. The fact that she wrote it all still amazes Magendie. “It never entered my pea head until I was in my 40s that I had a gift and I could cultivate it.”
Magendie wrote Tender Graces in Baton Rouge, and nearly completed a degree at LSU, but school got put aside when she and husband Roger took a trip to West Virginia to visit her birth mother (her father’s second wife adopted Magendie and her brothers). “We decided to stop here (Maggie Valley) on the way back,” she said. Like the John Denver song, she felt she was coming home to a place she’d never been before. The couple moved to North Carolina after more than 35 years in Louisiana, and Magendie took up writing full-time.
Despite a lack of encouragement for her writing, Magendie said she has always loved books. “It was all about my love of words. I knew I could do something with words.” Now she is hard at work on her second novel which continues the story of the characters in her first book. And she is co-managing editor of The Rose & Thorn Literary Ezine, an online magazine. She is doing something with words and loving it.
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