It was a small apart­ment in a flat space at the bot­tom of a hill in Boston, a small apart­ment with­out much light, look­ing out on a flat space that all that win­ter was jammed with snow. I was six months past my col­lege grad­u­a­tion, three months past my wed­ding, and my hus­band had left for basic train­ing in New Jersey—these were the years of the draft. This curi­ous sequence of events had been care­fully planned: grad­u­a­tion in June, the wed­ding in October, basic train­ing next, and then—my first novel.

I’d been writ­ing since I, lit­er­ally, could write: ter­ri­fy­ing ghost sto­ries my first grade class was per­suaded to per­form, in sheets; sen­ti­men­tal poems, sent to my father over­seas in World War Two; short sto­ries that began to win prizes by the time I was in high school; the Dana Reed Prize at Harvard for best under­grad­u­ate writ­ing (the first time it was given to a woman); and a request from edi­tor Ann Barrett at Houghton Mifflin to see a novel.

Senior year I man­aged to churn out a novel I’ve long for­got­ten, at the same time writ­ing my hon­ors the­sis on the nov­els of George Meredith. (I’d wanted to write on the Brontës but was told by my tutor that their story had been done too often.) The novel I sent to Mrs. Barrett, as I always called her, was not what she wanted—I don’t remem­ber any­thing about it—and so that dreary win­ter in Boston I was writ­ing another one I was deter­mined she would want. All I knew was that to avoid the cliché that haunts all first nov­els it was not going to be auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. So I set it in the 1920s, on Cape Cod and in Paris—a time, and places, I would need to cre­ate in my imagination.

I wrote all day, every day, with a break for peanut but­ter and jelly in the mid­dle. When I ran out of food, I walked a few blocks to the neigh­bor­hood mar­ket and stocked up. I was liv­ing on an allowance, as I had all my life; one of my aims was to replace that allowance with an income.

Once a week, a quiet woman came to clean; she was often the only per­son I spoke to for days at a time. In the halls and ele­va­tor of the apart­ment build­ing, and on the streets, I must have passed peo­ple, liv­ing peo­ple who breathed and spoke, but I have no mem­ory of them.

One Sunday, I was invited to lunch in the sub­urbs with friends of my par­ents; dri­ving the gearshift VW bug per­suaded me I was bet­ter off inside.

At the end of six months, my hus­band came home and I had fin­ished my novel. I walked it up Beacon Street to the offices of Houghton Mifflin, dim and dark with muf­fled hide­aways for invis­i­ble edi­tors. Mrs. Barrett liked it, handed it on to the head edi­tor, Paul Brooks, and within a mat­ter of days, or per­haps a week, it was accepted, edited, and proofed, then sent out into the world in a pale yel­low and green cover. I called it, with the hubris that never out­lasts one’s twen­ties, After Such Knowledge—with­out quot­ing the end of the T. S. Eliot tag, but assum­ing every­one would know it, “what forgiveness?”

“Summer can be won­der­ful for a roman­tic girl just out of school,” a line on the book jacket read, “wonderful—and in the end terrifying”—because the romance results in what would have been called an “out-of-wedlock pregnancy.”

It was reviewed, favor­ably and widely, in those days when local papers had book review pages. They often are, when the first nov­els are by young writ­ers who look good on the book jacket.

As I’d been writ­ing short sto­ries since child­hood, and had already seen sev­eral pub­lished in the Harvard Advocate—one, “Winter Term,” won me a guest edi­tor­ship at Mademoiselle a few years after Sylvia Plath held that post, and was then included in the Best American Short Stories—it made sense that my next sub­mis­sion to Houghton Mifflin was a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries, which they promptly accepted. I had been given a three-book con­tract, an incred­i­ble advan­tage I didn’t quite appreciate.

The sto­ries were set in Boston, and in Kentucky, and were mostly about lone­li­ness, the lone­li­ness that was my com­pan­ion as well as my com­plaint for so many years. The col­lec­tion, shep­herded to pro­duc­tion by Mrs. Barrett, was called The Touching Hand and Six Short Stories. The title novella, still one of my favorites, was my memo­r­ial to Lucy Cummings, my beloved nurse, who had raised me, and who had, indeed, the “touch­ing hand.” I had known for years the unspo­ken tragedy of her devo­tion to five chil­dren who were not hers and who would as they grew up dis­tance them­selves from her; I had unwit­tingly been a part of that when I’d seen the toaster she gave me as a wed­ding present pushed to the back of the dis­play table, behind the sil­ver and crystal.

In the novella, the transat­lantic voy­age that pro­vides the plot is also the con­text for her loss of the chil­dren who, at the end, are swept away into their par­ents’ busy cos­mopoli­tan world. The novella was also my first attempt to describe my younger brother’s iso­la­tion and strangeness—a topic I would return to in my writ­ing again.

“Sallie Bingham … binds her col­lec­tion together with sheer talent.…The title novella is … absolutely first-rate … a skill­fully sug­ges­tive amal­gam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty.… This same unblink­ing gaze is hard at work on the essen­tial weak­ness and depen­dence of men (“The Banks of the Ohio” and “The Ice Party”), the illu­sion of free­dom the comes with divorce (“Bare Bones”), and the des­per­ate ter­ror of ado­les­cent love (“Winter Term”).”

—The New York Times Book Review

Again, the many reviews were by and large flat­ter­ing. But like nearly all col­lec­tions of short sto­ries, this one was quickly for­got­ten, and again in my inno­cence I was bit­terly disappointed.

By now I was divorced, the mother of a lit­tle boy, and liv­ing in New York, labor­ing under the delu­sion that my amaz­ing career would be even more amaz­ing at the lit­er­ary cen­ter of the world; it was not long before I real­ized the cen­ter was hurl­ing me to its out­side rim. This was the era when Elaine’s Restaurant (a place of ter­ri­fy­ing dark­ness to me) was begin­ning its long reign; Norman Mailer was trum­pet­ing at cock­tail par­ties; and my ex-husband was part of the lit­tle band that started the New York Review of Books. A friend who was an edi­tor at the Partisan Review gave me its unso­licited man­u­scripts to read; the only tal­ented writer I found was sum­mar­ily rejected by the other edi­tors, and I real­ized that my role in the rar­efied atmos­phere of lit­er­ary New York was so small as to be invis­i­ble. And, in an act of fool­ish­ness, I broke my three-book con­tract with Houghton Mifflin (they did not seem overly heart­bro­ken to let me go), and then scram­bled to find a pub­lisher for my next collection.

At this point I was mar­ried again, and two more sons came like unher­alded bless­ings into my life. I was get­ting up at dawn to write short sto­ries in the hour or so before the newest baby woke; my agent was sell­ing them rapidly to the women’s mag­a­zines like Mademoiselle that at the time pub­lished seri­ous fic­tion (Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Conner, James Baldwin, and more)—hard as it is now to believe.

I now had an agent, or several—I went through two or three in those years, for rea­sons I don’t remember—as well as a dear friend, Ann Arensberg, who was an edi­tor at Viking. My next col­lec­tion of short sto­ries found a home there; it was called The Way It Is Now and Other Stories, and the black-and-white pho­to­graph of a tall, thin blond on the cover was assumed to be me. In fact I never found out who it was; the sto­ries were set in the New York I never really mas­tered, and the anony­mous jacket woman, seen from the back, seemed to be con­tem­plat­ing a dis­turb­ing mystery—the mys­tery that con­fronts all writ­ers who are blessed and cursed with early success.

It would be my last book pub­lished for fif­teen years.

It was the usual story: three adorable but demand­ing boys; life in the big city with schools, friends, work; even­tu­ally a week­end house up the Hudson; even­tu­ally another divorce—and the con­sum­ing chaos of the great changes that were com­ing: Vietnam, the women’s move­ment, civil rights. That chaos caught me up like a bit of paper and tossed me around for a while, and it sud­denly seemed that New York would never feel safe and that it was time to with­draw, with two of my sons, to my home state, Kentucky.

Within a month of set­tling into that sub­ur­ban ranch house, I knew I’d made a mis­take. I was now not only at the rim of lit­er­ary life, I was a thou­sand miles away. And so, with the renewal of mem­o­ries of my child­hood, I wrote and sub­mit­ted a play—without any real under­stand­ing of the world I was entering—to the American Place Theatre, where it was per­formed with an amaz­ing cast and direc­tor. That was one of the hap­pi­est expe­ri­ences of my life, and I decided to go on work­ing in the theater.

This meant going back to New York fairly reg­u­larly; dur­ing one dead-of-winter rehearsal, my youngest son called me from Kentucky to ask me what had hap­pened to his mittens.

My first play, Milk of Paradise, bloomed with poetry, with love of that lost Kentucky child­hood, and with a sharp appre­ci­a­tion of the divide between chil­dren and grownups, shown on the stage where the grownups only appeared on the bal­cony, while the chil­dren and the black ser­vants dis­cov­ered their life on the ground below. I wrote parts for five black women, not real­iz­ing that that par­tic­u­lar part of the past had already become unspeak­able; only when the majes­tic fig­ure of one of these women, Theresa Wright, rose, dur­ing the after-play dis­cus­sion, to denounce the notion that she’d been part of a “Tom play,” did I real­ize how close I’d come to disaster.

Milk of Paradise

My next ten years were spent writ­ing plays and work­ing wher­ever they were read and/or pro­duced: col­lege the­aters, small regional stages, and the very fine Actors Theatre in Louisville, which pre­sented three of my plays: The Act, In the Yurt, and Couvade.

One of the most reward­ing the­ater expe­ri­ences I’ve had was with the Women’s Project & Productions in New York, which two dear friends, Julia Miles and Joan Vail Thorne, banded together to found along with me. Our aim was to pro­duce new plays writ­ten and directed by women, attempt­ing to fill the enor­mous gap in con­tem­po­rary the­ater that yawns still today.

After read­ing Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and expe­ri­enc­ing an unex­pur­gated ver­sion of life in the South, I knew that the source of my unease was com­mon to many women. After a hard fam­ily fight over sell­ing news­pa­pers bought by my grand­fa­ther, I used a quar­ter of my pro­ceeds to start the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which makes small grants to women artists in that state who are fem­i­nists work­ing for social change. It was, and is, a source of con­tin­ual delight and sat­is­fac­tion, pro­fes­sion­ally admin­is­tered, with a board that reflects the diver­sity that may yet save the South.

Passion and Prejudice, some­what unfor­tu­nately sub­ti­tled, “A Family Memoir”—a mem­oir no one in my fam­ily would accept—was pub­lished by Alfred A. Knopf to much crit­i­cism; as time passed, its virtues would begin to be apparent.

The mem­oir also ush­ered into pub­li­ca­tion the two nov­els I’d writ­ten about life in the South soon after I moved back to Kentucky. Zoland Books brought out Small Victories, the story of two elderly sis­ters liv­ing in the ruins of a defunct mil­i­tary school in North Carolina, sus­tained through poverty and men­tal dis­ease by their endur­ing, unques­tion­ing love.

Next came Matron of Honor, set in the 1970s, about the cur­rents that dis­turb the beau­ti­ful sur­face of a big south­ern wedding.

Finally, Straight Man, told from the point of view of a man tor­mented by his own ambiva­lence, lead­ing to a ter­ri­fy­ing act of violence.

In the midst of this storm of pub­li­ca­tion, a slim novel called Upstate was brought out by another coura­geous small pub­lisher, The Permanent Press; its end­ing was so night­mar­ish, and its woman nar­ra­tor so out­ra­geous, that my then-agent per­suaded me to write an ame­lio­rat­ing coda.

At the same time, the Women’s Project in New York was pro­duc­ing my next play, Paducah, directed by Joan Vail Thorne. I’d always been amused by the name of that town in far west­ern Kentucky; the set­ting allowed me some gen­tle com­edy at the expense of a con­ven­tional mar­ried cou­ple who find them­selves hap­pily part­ner­ing with another woman; the voice of rea­son, and of moral­ity, was sup­plied by their African-American butler.

Paducah

And the short sto­ries I’d been writ­ing and pub­lish­ing for decades in var­i­ous mag­a­zines and lit­er­ary jour­nals were appear­ing in antholo­gies, and I was teach­ing writ­ing in work­shops and under­grad­u­ate pro­grams, at the same time mov­ing to New Mexico.

Plays are still in my blood, although try­ing to have them pro­duced is ener­vat­ing; read­ings fol­low revi­sions fol­low read­ings, but the play so rarely gets on its feet.

However, there are notable excep­tions, such as the Women’s Project plays, and two more, pro­duced by the Perry Street Theatre in New York: Treason, in which I shifted the focus from the too-well-known poet Ezra Pound to the three women in his life—his wife, his mis­tress, and his daugh­ter. The idea for the play came to me when I was wan­der­ing along a dis­mal back canal in Venice and read a mod­est plaque mark­ing the house where Ezra and his mis­tress spent his last years, after he was released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. Ezra was held there for thir­teen years, barely escap­ing a capi­tol sen­tence for trea­son due to his broad­casts from Italy dur­ing World War II.

But that’s a famil­iar story. The trea­son of my title was about his per­sonal acts of trea­son, the betrayal of the three women who loved him and assured his sur­vival; such a shift in focus was a lit­tle beyond most crit­ics, but the play was a success.

Spurred on by the atten­tion it received, I tried some­thing even more haz­ardous: A Dangerous Personality, based on the life of Madame Blavatsky, who founded the eso­teric “sci­ence of reli­gion,” Theosophy.

An enor­mous woman in all senses, she was a mys­tic decried as a fraud, a worker of what, on the stage, appeared to be merely par­lor tricks, and the pos­ses­sor of a self-confidence that alien­ated the audi­ence as it had alien­ated many who knew her at the turn of the twen­ti­eth century.

The pro­duc­tion didn’t work, and I felt the keen tooth of fail­ure which bites deeper, it seems to me, in the the­ater than any­where else.

My happy col­lab­o­ra­tion with a fine small press, Sarabande Books, began with their pub­li­ca­tion of my short story col­lec­tion Transgressions—sto­ries about the way we betray our­selves through acts of compassion.

At the same time, Sunstone Press here in Santa Fe pub­lished two nov­els set in the south­west: Cory’s Feast—the title a reflec­tion of my admi­ra­tion for Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast—about the recre­ation of an his­toric adobe bed-and-breakfast in Taos, and Nick of Time—about the world of ball­room danc­ing which I was enjoy­ing to the hilt, tak­ing lessons, par­tic­i­pat­ing in com­pe­ti­tions, and even­tu­ally meet­ing my cur­rent boyfriend.

Along the way, three col­lec­tions of poetry threaded between the prose: The High Cost of Denying Rivers their Floodplains, drawn from a news head­line, which I pub­lished myself; The Hub of the Miracle, the title thanks to a poem by Mary Oliver, pub­lished by Sunstone; and If in Darkness, pub­lished by Tebot Bach.

Of course each book demanded, and received, the work on my part that is essen­tial for find­ing read­ers: work­shops taught, read­ings given and attended, a fair amount of travel to the places where I am known: New York, Kentucky, and all parts of New Mexico.

Throughout, inde­pen­dent book­stores such as Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe have pro­vided haven and readers—without these stores, my books would not exist.

I con­tinue to live a blessed life, hik­ing the moun­tains out­side of Santa Fe, ski­ing, rejoic­ing in the com­pany of old and new friends and of my three sons, their wives, and my five grandchildren.

My grand­mother, who failed as a writer after pub­lish­ing two col­lec­tions of short sto­ries in the 1950s, would be proud. She had seven chil­dren. My next book, the story of her life and of the women who pre­ceded and fol­lowed her, word women all, will be called In the Blue Box.

But first of all, Sarabande Books, my beloved pub­lisher, will bring out Mending: New and Selected Stories this com­ing fall.