Author of The Mother Gene, 2023 Sarton Winner: Contemporary Fiction
Lynne Bryant says living two vastly different lives influenced her when writing The Mother Gene. One of those lives was as a heterosexual, Southern Baptist, conservative, married mother; the second was as a lesbian, liberal, non-Christian mother by donor insemination.
Those two lives provide a lot of life experience to draw from, says the author, who now lives with her wife in Manitou Springs, Colorado, along with their three pups, while their three children and one granddaughter are scattered about the country. Lynne’s book is a story of mothers and daughters set against the backdrop of a not-so-distant dark time in American history, when powerful forces sought to control who should have children.
Lynne was born and raised in New Hope, Mississippi, where her maternal grandparents farmed cotton and her mother was one of their fifteen children. “I grew up during the era of the Civil Rights Movement and came of age during the volatile integration of Mississippi’s schools,” she recounts.
After completing a nursing degree from Mississippi University for Women, the author returned to school to earn a master’s degree from Ole Miss and began a career in nursing education.
“But there came a time when that community no longer fit, and I made the decision to leave. Always craving learning, I continued my education and entered a doctoral program at the University of Texas, Austin, where I lived for nine years. After moving to Colorado Springs, I finally finished my PhD in Nursing at the University of Colorado in 1999.”
Lynn says leaving the South opened her mind and heart to the world beyond her narrow upbringing.
“And once I began to see the world with new eyes, I could not unsee. Trying to make sense of the parts of my identity forged in the South inspired me to write fiction.” This was strengthened, she says, when a member of her dissertation committee told her that her work read like a story. “This was not a compliment. I revised the dissertation to make it more academic, but what I realized a short time later was, I’d rather write stories than write about nursing,” recalls Lynne
The Mother Gene is her third book. The first was Catfish Alley, which she says developed out of her troubled relationship with Mississippi and racism. “Wealthy, middle class, or poor—if you grew up in Mississippi, you grew up with segregation. Yes, our schools were integrated in the early seventies, not because the Mississippi general public thought it was a good idea, but because the Federal government said it was time.”
Her second book, Alligator Lake, deals with the subject of passing. “I’d read stories about people who thought of themselves one way for their entire lives, then ordered a DNA test and suddenly realized they were not who they thought they were… I even ordered my own DNA profile, and, unlike my character Miriam in The Mother Gene, my profile did not hold any surprises—an amalgam of mostly English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish heritage,” Lynne says.
Another inspiration for The Mother Gene, she says, was the 1927 Buck versus Bell Supreme Court decision, which allowed compulsory sterilization of the “unfit” in Virginia. “I was also fascinated by the mountain midwives, who rode on horseback into the hollows to provide healthcare for women and children. Then there were the contemporary issues Appalachians still faced: poverty, lack of access to healthcare, and the ever-present threat of opioids. Out of this rich historical context, I imagined women of three different generations navigating their own reproductive years,” she says.
“An important theme in all my work is what it means to be a mother. Mothering as a verb, not a sanctified place in society. Choices, in particular women’s choices around mothering, including the choice not to have children, is a huge emphasis for me.”
Lynne says she feels incredibly honored to have won the Sarton Award, especially since May Sarton is one of her writing heroes, and that to have her work recognized affirms her as a writer.
