The Story Of A House Over Changing Decades
“The Turner House” is Angela Flournoy’s debut novel. It tells the story of a home that’s stood on Detroit’s Eastside for over fifty years, surviving family members come and gone and a changing neighborhood and city. When the matriarch of the home is forced to leave, the Turner children return to help sort out the house’s future and their own. The author will be one of the readers at the Midwest Literary Walk in Chelsea, Michigan on Saturday, April 25th. She sits down with Stephen to talk more about her book and her involvement in the Literary Walk.
Flournoy says the idea behind the novel came from visiting her paternal Grandmother’s Eastside house while she was growing up. She remembers noticing all the changes in the neighborhood, like seeing fewer and fewer occupied houses, and how different it was from her and her friends experiences growing up in California. She says she wondered how it must feel for her father to see all of these changes to the house he lived in while growing up, and it was those questions that led to “The Turner House”.
“As a storyteller when you have questions that is the beginning of a story. You sort of write to answer those questions,” says Flournoy.
At the Midwest Literary Walk Flournoy says she will be giving a talk about how she wrote a structured novel about a neighborhood that no longer exists and the research that entailed. She will also be giving a reading at the Scarab Club on April 26th.
