Kimberly Brock Brings Southern Legend to Life in 'The Fabled Earth'

In The Fabled Earth, award-winning novelist, Kimberly Brock, writes a Southern-Gothic, historical novel set during the Gilded Age on Cumberland Island, the southernmost island off the coast of Georgia. Told in dual timelines, the story begins in 1932 when a young woman comes to the island to live there as an artist. “…She tells some stories around the bonfire one night to some wealthy kids that are there, and things go wrong and two boys drown. The second timeline is in 1959 when the only other girl that was there that night dies, and her daughter comes to Cleo Woodbine with questions about what happened in 1932. Cleo’s been living for the last three decades as a recluse. She’s got a lot of secrets and Frances Flood is there to dig them up… There are 3 POV characters who are all female, the third is a young woman… Audrey Howell, who is an innkeeper in town. She’s new to town… and she takes some pictures… and when she develops the roll of film, she accidentally develops an eerie, double-exposure photograph and it has the face of one of the boys that hasn’t been seen since 1932. So, it’s a book about mystery and folklore, and how what happened in the past is now revisiting these three women and how it connects them in their lives in this place in 1959.”

Regarding her writing process, Brock described how her stories end up with dual timelines and why she tells them from multiple points of views. “…typically, I think for a long time… I usually know the place, and once I have a person in mind and I start to have a voice to that person… I will then know the end for the story… So I’ll write the end scene, and it’ll shift and change through drafts to some degree, but mostly it holds up… and then I know where my story starts… I think, ‘Ok, I’m going to have three characters, one main point of view, some secondary characters in this straight line,’ and then I start to write, and what happens inevitably is it will split into a dual timeline and the reason it does this… is because this is how I learned to tell a story… I have to know where [the characters] came from, who they were, why they’re where they’re at… so I will inevitably have this event that happens in the past, and then my secondary characters, sometimes I just like them too much for them to just be a secondary character. They’re giving me more information about the question that I have.”