Why a librarian’s debut novel explores forgiving the unforgivable

Terah Shelton Harris spends her days reading books for a living. Since the Alabama-based librarian and travel writer is surrounded by the brilliant words of others, it only makes sense that she would eventually craft her own prose. Ms. Harris was featured in a debut authors panel at the Publishers Weekly U.S. Book Show in May, where she spoke about her novel, “One Summer in Savannah,” which was published July 4. It is a novel about love and loss, and it deals with the sensitive subject of sexual assault. Monitor staff writer Ira Porter sat down with Ms. Harris in New York for a brief chat.

If there is one sentence or paragraph that sums up the book, what would it be?

It’s about a woman who conceived a child via sexual assault and has to decide whether or not to allow her attacker’s family into her daughter’s life.

What was your motivation for writing it?

There were two events that served as motivation for this book. The [Charleston,] South Carolina, church shooting [in which nine people were murdered in a 2015 hate crime], and days after that event, the survivors, they forgave the shooter. And that’s when I realized I know nothing about forgiveness, because I was shocked that they forgave them. And they basically taught me that there’s nothing that you can’t forgive, when I thought that there were things, acts, behaviors, crimes that, you know, it was fine not to forgive. And then the second event was when I learned from someone really close to me that she conceived a child through sexual assault. She used the words and she practices the act of forgiveness every day. So I had a theme after I discovered the South Carolina church shooting, but I didn’t have a story. She basically gave me the story that I needed when she said that she practiced the act of forgiveness every day. 

You’re a librarian. How close is this book to what you read as a librarian?

I read hundreds of books for work, for pleasure every year, and I am drawn to stories that stick out, stories that I’ve never read before, something that’s different. Recently [I read] “Chain-Gang All-Stars” [by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah], “House of Cotton” [by Monica Brashears], “Adelaide” [by Genevieve Wheeler] – those are stories that really resonated [with] something [inside] me, that stuck out. That’s when I realized that if I was to ever write a book, I wanted to write something that would stick out as well, something that people have never really either heard of before or read something similar to that. My patrons are also drawn to those stories. They love the tried-and-true dedicated writers in the John Grishams and James Pattersons, but they also seek debut authors and they also seek those unique stories. I wanted to be able to offer my patrons something like that.

What are your thoughts on the current threats to close libraries and punish librarians for letting people borrow certain books?  

Banning books has consequences, and it’s not the consequences that people think of. When someone decides to pull a book off the shelf, you’re basically saying that this information is not readily available to the person that needs it the most. But also when that happens, when librarians fight against this [and] they do not pull the books off the shelf, their funding is threatened. My library is funded by the state, the county, and the city. If the city pulled our funding, we would not have a library. There are consequences that come along with that. Libraries, I love to say, are about more than books. 

I’m a collection development librarian, but I’m also the deputy director of my library. There are so many things that I do, that we do, that have nothing to do with books. My library circulates 30 hot spots that provide internet access to people at home, and they can check out the hot spot and have internet for two weeks at home. You know, they don’t talk about the women that come in and thank us, that just had a child and say, “Thank you for having this hot spot, because I take classes from home and I can’t bring my child to the library because she’d be too loud.” 

You know, when you close libraries, when you cut funding, that’s what you’re cutting. My library is a rural library, so we are also passport agents. When you cut funding and my library closes, where would people go to get passports? We’re also notaries. In my state, they stopped notarizing marriage certificates for same-sex couples, so they come to the library to get married. Where would they go if we were notaries but we didn’t do that? So that’s an unexpected consequence that people don’t think about when they think about banning books and protecting the children. But what about everything else that libraries do that will be affected if they cut the funding?

What are your writing habits?

I love to write anywhere I can. I keep a notebook in my car, in my purse, everywhere. I write whenever I can. My characters speak to me, so I don’t see scenes in my head. I can be at my desk or at lunch or taking a walk, and the characters speak to me. I’ll just write them down. I just document what is being said to me and being told to me as it’s being fed to me. I write at night, because I work a full-time job. ... I’m up pretty early in the morning, so I like to write in the morning, but I don’t necessarily agree that you should write every day. Whenever it’s available to you and whenever you can. I just write whenever the character starts speaking to me.

As a debut author, why should people gravitate toward you? Why should they read your book?

I love that question, because “One Summer in Savannah” will be unlike anything that they’ve read before. It’s different. It’s heavy. And we bring a piece of our history to everything that we read, but I would ask for people to take a chance and to be open-minded about a topic that is rarely covered in fiction. Conception after sexual assault is rarely covered in fiction, and it’s something different. It’s also eye opening to people when they started reading because they didn’t think about the consequences of something like this. It’s giving a voice to all the Saras of the world who people don’t realize are out there. Some of the research that I did, I was talking to a specialist about the number of women that conceived children through sexual assault, and she said, “Whatever number you find, double it,” because there’s not accurate numbers because so many of these cases go unreported. If people are interested in reading and learning about unfortunate circumstances that happen to people, then they can pick up “One Summer in Savannah.”

What are you currently reading? 

I just finished “Chain-Gang All-Stars.” That book was so fascinating to me. And I just downloaded “Lone Women” [by Victor LaValle], and I’ll finish that today. I’m actually behind on my reading.