Marilyn Arnold is an established writer of fiction and nonfiction. She has taught in colleges and universities and has spent a lifetime in service to her communities for which she was acknowledged in 2004 by the Governor of Utah. She lives with her familiar little truck in a pretty desert home in the Red Rock country of Utah.

Minding Mama won Mayhaven's Award for Fiction. How did you happen to submit it for the Award?

I had a recently completed manuscript that seemed to me to have broad appeal, especially to people with a great sense of humor. I looked in Writer's Market and spotted Mayhaven. Something told me these folks were human and appreciated down-home, well-crafted kinds of writing. So I went without meals for two days, which netted me the fifty-dollar entry fee. Luckily, I spotted Mayhaven's announcement in early December and was able to meet their December 31 deadline. The U. S. Post Office did the rest.

You've got to admit, the story is pretty unusual. What inspired it?

"Inspired," hmmmm. Well, I heard of a woman who actually put her deceased mother in a car and drove her across a few states to bury her by her husband. As a writer who is always looking for ideas—especially unusual ones—I said to myself, "herein lies a novel. I can have a lot of fun with that." When I told friends what I was up to, a few had heard of such incidents. As always, I took the kernel of the idea and ran with it. In the process, I gave Dorie June Grimes more adventures on her trip from Atlanta, Georgia to Jericho, Utah, than any mortal should have to endure in a decade, much less a couple of days. I put Dorie June and Mama in my own 1989 red Toyota pickup and set them on the road. From there on the story took on a life of its own, inventing itself as we rolled along together. It doesn't hurt, either, if a writer is just a little crazy herself. I think I'm wired to see the humor that "normal" people might miss.

You have been writing for a long time. Will you give us a run down on just what you have written.

Well, first there were my compositions on the walls of my parents' home (I think I favored green crayons), and since then there have been the grocery lists, the threatening notes to plumbers, the endless, mindless memos, and the July responses to Christmas letters; but I assume you aren't interested in those. Essays of the academic sort make up the bulk of my serious bibliography, but there are a good many personal essays too—on everything from skiing to poetry to faith-based ruminations. The world of novelist Willa Cather was, and is, my academic specialty and my great love. I have published many dozens of articles and several books on Cather, and quite a lot on Eudora Welty and a few other writers as well. Three of the Cather books are heavy research stuff, not recreational reading. The manuscript for the last book, which involved taking on the work a man near death had begun five decades earlier, was seven years in the making. It weighed eighteen pounds. After completing that mammoth task, I decided to take an early retirement and limit my writing to books that I could carry single handedly to the post office.

Since then, I have published a lengthy commentary on a sacred test (Sweet Is the Word), an anthology of riggings (ranging from the simple and humorous to the profound) loosely illustrative of the attributes of charity named by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 (Pure Love, five novels (Desert Song, Song of Hope, Sky Full of Ribbons, Fields of Clover, The Classmates), and an international anthology of women's poetry (A Chorus for Peace). I have also coedited a massive reference companion to a sacred text.

That's a broad spectrum. What led to each of those areas?

Academic writing goes with the territory, of course. When you're on a university faculty, that's what you do. But with me, it was not forced labor. I truly enjoy research and writing, demanding though it is. I guess I have always loved words, and it was that love that led me first to journalism (as a cub reporter for a Salt Lake City paper when I was in college) and then to literature. Then, too, my mother was a great storyteller and my father a great reader. We had little money, but we had books and language.

Writing novels was not something I even considered when I was buried in an academic career. Then one day I said to myself (I talk to myself all the time), "Why not give it a try? As a teacher of fiction and a writer about fiction, you've had a long apprenticeship in the business." So I hatched an idea and began a novel. It was love at first try. Writing the first novel was absolutely liberating. I had always been bound by the text; now I could change it, do anything I wanted to it and not have to account to anyone but myself. It was great fun. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

The work with sacred texts grows out of my faith, which subtly undergirds my approach to nearly everything, blessing me with a solid value system as well as with optimism and a great exuberance for life.

Several of your novels have been published. Are they anything like Minding Mama?

Yes. They are all written in English. Beyond that? Well, yes and no. They all have characters with whom I fell in love at first sight (in my head), and they all have their share of delightful eccentrics. All are set, in part at least, in the desert country that is my heart's (and now my body's ) home. And, no surprise, they all feature women as the central characters. I know (and adore) a good many men, but being a woman, I guess I know a little better how women think.

The first time I spoke to you, I asked if you always write funny. Clearly you don't, but I remember that you said you "just couldn't help yourself." Are there other titles you have written, that someone reading Minding Mama might want to read?

Truly, I am one who gets carried away. These wonderfully nutty characters keep popping out of the woodwork (along with assorted scorpions and spiders) whenever I start writing fiction. In the first novel, I think I was a little hesitant to cut loose. So some of the humor in Desert Song (not my title of choice), thought plentiful, tends to be of the "intellectual" type. You know, bantering dialogue. By the time I hit Song of Hope (not my title of choice either), however, I was on my way and having a blast. Let the eccentrics begin! And with the third of the desert trilogy, Sky Full of Ribbons (my title!), it was clear that I could, as you say, "write funny" and get away with it. The next novel, Fields of Clover, is rather different because it is based on the closing days of my parents' lives, definitely not a humorous subject, though peppered with funny moments. All my novels, including Minding Mama, are tender, and I hope insightful, as well as funny; but Fields is perhaps more tender than the others. Nonetheless, I threw in a comic subplot that lightens the load and creates a good deal of fun. The fifth novel, The Classmates, is of all things, a mystery novel set in a small southern Nevada town. I had to try the mystery genre once. It cured me, I think. The book is full of intrigue and comic characters, several of whom I happily killed off before I had either a motive or a killer. The trilogy is out of print, but available in libraries around the Intermountain West. Fields of Clover and The Classmates are still in print, are Pure Love and some of the other nonfiction books.

Did you grow up in Utah?

Yes. Up and up. I'm 5'9". I spent a number of years in Wisconsin, but I'm an outdoor freak and have to live where there are mountains and desert, and where summer lasts more than a month.

You mentioned your nieces and nephews. Mary Cassatt's relatives found their way onto her canvases, do your family members appear in your writing?

Occasionally, although always altered or combined with others. I'm still seeking forgiveness of one or two who think they recognized themselves. A few of the older ones died before the books came out, and a few others don't read, so I'm safe there. People also say they see me in some of the female characters. They won't find me in Minding Mama, however. Characters come from a variety of places including family and neighborhood. Sometimes I read an article in a newspaper, or hear about an incident and think, "Now what kind of person would do that?" Then I create that person. Take Ike Chandler in Fields of Clover, for example. I read in the newspaper about a father who, after his son got three traffic tickets, strung the boy's truck up in a big tree. So I named him Ike and made him the central character of the subplot. Ike is not "family," but I know him like a brother. The parents in the main plot of Fields have many similarities with my own parents, of course; and many of our family's struggles with their decline are represented in that book.

You had a friendship with another author, one we would all recognize from high school and college reading lists. Would you tell us a bit about that?

You are probably referring to Eudora Welty, a great national treasure and as deep South as they come. We became acquainted some twenty or twenty-five years ago when BYTY conferred an honorary doctorate on her, and I was privileged to host her for several days. She died a few years ago, but in the interim we kept in touch. During her days in Utah we did some uncustomary things, I suppose. I hauled her into the mountains a couple of times. On one of the excursions we ate toasted cheese sandwiches at the Brighton Ski resort and attended an afternoon rehearsal of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. This was a woman who was into local color. Her "must" reading in Utah was the telephone directory. This was also a woman confident of her gift, but humble in her dealings with people. I learned from her that the truly great have no concern for things that feed the ego. Her interest was in ordinary people, in story, character, and heart. Her immense sympathy, blended with her comic spirit and her eye and ear for small town speech and manners, has taught me much.

I first became interested in Welty as a young professor when I decided to read, systematically, everything she had ever published. I went to the library and borrowed one book at a time. The first book that came to hand was The Golden Apples, still my favorite, I think. I read it through and was blown away. I had no idea what it said, really, but I knew I had encountered something magnificent. The second time through, the book began opening up to me and I was hooked on Welty for life. Even so, who could read "Why I live at the P.O." and not adore Eudora Welty?

You write both fiction and nonfiction. Do you approach them very differently?

Yep. I usually write nonfiction to find out what I think about something, to learn. It often feels like "work," though generally satisfying work. Often I do it at the request of an editor or publisher (or someone I owe a favor!). Writing fiction is how I reward myself for good behavior (like cleaning the garage or doing committee work or collecting for the cancer drive or bypassing a hot fudge sundae). I go to fiction with great anticipation and joy. Sometimes life gets too hectic and the fiction gets put on the back burner. Then I am likely to get cranky and throw rocks at the rabbits eating my flowers and shrubs.

I had an idea to write on Mary Lincoln, but it was 25 years before I got around to it. When you get an idea, do you act on it right away?

It depends. I have a little slush file in which I drop scraps of things I think I might use sometime. But when a major idea strikes, I keep it filed in the front of my mind and launch into it as soon as I finish the opus in progress. When you're as old as I am, you have to jump in to make sure a thing gets written before you die. Or before writing novels becomes illegal under the Patriot Act.

What inspires you most?

The obituary page. I get all my names from the obituary page in the local newspaper. When you live in a rural community surrounded by cactus and jackrabbits as I do, you run onto wonderful names, names you've never heard of before and expect never to hear of again, names created by parents who failed to consider that these tiny babies in their ams were going to have to wear these names all their lives. When I have settled on a name, I'm halfway to the character.

Are you always happy with the finished product?

Let's put it this way: I'm always happy when the product is finished. There is no feeling quite so exhilarating as writing the final sentence of a novel. Then, of course, the real fun begins—the working and reworking and reworking of the text. I love the revising process, playing with the words and sentences refining and refining. Tinkering. Once a book is published, however, I never look back. By then I am so absorbed in the next one and I don't try to second guess work that is beyond my further tampering.

How has being an author changed your life?

Mainly, it has made me poorer. I left a steady job with a regular salary to follow this path (some would say of near poverty). But, I'm still eating and I've never been happier in my life. I also have a new identity. Instead of an uptight university-slave identity, I have a laid-back-desert-rat-writer identity. People down here in the Southwest corner of Utah introduce me to their friends as a writer. I like the sound of that a lot better than "professor," or "dean," or "assistant to the president" It fits. I could also favor the sound of "wealthy playgirl."

What advice would you give to unpublished writers?

That's a hard one because I don't know enough to advise anyone beyond this: Write what you know, write out of love, and read authors who write well, noticing how they construct sentences. Focus your energy on writing well, on crafting your work, on writing good sentences. If you do that, someone, somewhere, will recognize quality and publish your work.

You have been the recipient of awards, one from the Governor of your state. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Several Utah women were selected to receive a Woman of Achievement award from the governor's office in 2003. I was one of those, and so I attended a fancy ceremony in the State Capitol. I don't want to seem ungrateful, but in my new life as a desert-rat-writer the Mayhaven Award for Fiction meant a great deal more to me. It's so good to find people unknown to you who see value in something you have created, something that is part of you.

Has anyone written about you?

I'm sure that over the years a large number of students have taken the opportunity to "roast" me in the pages of their journals or in letters home. Then, too, I was very likely the subject of more than a few ruffled memos and e-mails during my administrative tours of duty at the university. I assume, however, that you refer to a friendlier treatises. There is no "official biography," of course, and there never will be (thank goodness), but a number of well-meaning souls have done pieces about me for magazines and newspapers. 'Nuff said on that.