A TALK WITH NOVELIST JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS AHEAD OF HER VISIT TO THE MOUNT
B y S c o t t E d w a r d A n d e r s o n
A Conversation Before the Conversation
A TALK WITH NOVELIST JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS AHEAD OF HER VISIT TO THE MOUNT
Jayne Anne Phillips, awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Night Watch, returns to the Berkshires this summer for a greatly anticipated literary event at The Mount in Lenox. The ongoing summer series, titled“ In Conversation,” brings together André Bernard, former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, with innovative thinkers whose contributions shape our culture today. On Thursday, July 31, Phillips will be discussing her latest novel, a powerful exploration of shared trauma in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Phillips has long been celebrated for her nuanced approach to capturing human experience through historical and familial landscapes. Her previous works, including Machine Dreams and Lark and Termite, have established her as a masterful storyteller who delves into the complex emotional terrains of war, family, and personal resilience. Night Watch, set in Phillips’ own native West Virginia, continues this trajectory, offering a haunting narrative that follows ConaLee, a young girl navigating a world fractured by conflict, secrets, and the lingering shadows of a brutal war. Her character provides the only first-person voice in the book, but readers also suspect she’ s not that reliable a narrator. We spoke with Phillips, looking for insight into her creative process, the research behind her work, and the enduring power of literature to create empathy and understanding across time and experience.
Your novel Night Watch takes place in the aftermath of the Civil War. How did this historical context influence your approach to writing the book? I’ ve written two other books that have to do with war and also with sibling bonds; these three books comprise a kind of trilogy. Machine Dreams, my first novel, had to do with Vietnam, the crucible of my generation. It was very much based on living through that time and wanting to write a book that represented both the war where it was fought and the war as it was experienced at home. Lark and Termite, the next book in the trilogy, is set in the 1950s and connects to a particular event that happened early in the Korean War, when the Americans were constantly in retreat. The incident at No Gun Ri haunts the novel and, again, it is a sibling story. The main characters are a half-brother and half-sister who share the same absent mother. I’ d written about Vietnam, a civil war between the North and South in a foreign country, and about the Korean War, another civil war between North and South that was, in a way, a rehearsal for Vietnam. I began to think about our Civil War, particularly given the last 10 years— there are so many similarities between the time that we’ re living through and the time of our Civil War. The period leading up to our Civil War was a time of great division, rife with conspiracy theories and misinformation. Tribal identities led to a national inability to see beyond one’ s own experience.
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, in Weston, West Virginia, plays a significant role in the novel. You visited the site multiple times during your research. How did physically being in that space influence your understanding of the story you wanted to tell? I did eight years of research for this book, and every time I went back to see family, I would visit the asylum, which had been purchased by a private individual and became a nonprofit. The main building was restored to what it might have looked like in 1880. I would spend several hours. You could take a tour, but you could also just wander around on your own through the hallways, not into the rooms. Some of the rooms were fashioned as though people might be living in them. The restored asylum, and the ruins that are still there, were
106 // BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE Holiday August July 2025 2025 2023