The Language of Horses. A professor at Eastern Kentucky University and core faculty member in the Bluegrass Writers Studio Low-Res MFA Program, she lives in Richmond with her husband, the writer R Dean Johnson, and their two children.
Hensley applied the Page 69 Test to Five Oaks and shared the following:
Page 69, from Chapter 4: Into the Woods:Visit Julie Hensley's website.I liked the sound of the balloon tires whizzing over the blacktop, the feel of the bills clutched soft and damp between my palm and the handlebars. This had been my mother’s bike, and Papaw had fixed it up just for me. I didn’t mind the rust creeping through the pink paint. At the store, Mr. Jessup, fiddling with a transistor radio, would always look up and smile when I passed the counter. I could smell the minnow tanks and the cricket cage in the back of the store. Mr. Jessup usually slid a little something extra across the counter for me. He stocked all sorts of candy I’d never heard of before—waxy root beer bottles, caramel Cow Tales, tiny boxes of Boston Baked Beans.This paragraph is a pretty good representation of Five Oaks. I love that page 69 takes us to a Sylvie chapter. She is the narrator of the entire novel, but in certain chapters, her voice nearly dissolves into the imagined the consciousnesses of her mother and grandmother. I think you can see some of Five Oaks’ thematic concerns simmering in this paragraph: the conflux of the old and the new in that pink, slightly rusted bicycle (and, of course, how that accordions out into the hauntings of familial history and adventure of new experience). The same goes for that old-timey candy, all of which is completely new and fascinating to Sylvie. The idea of “the lure” comes through the image of the bait creatures in the recess of the store. The idea of hunting/predation.
Q&A with Julie Hensley.
My Book, The Movie: Five Oaks.
--Marshal Zeringue
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