Clara Rising looked out the window of her hotel room and smiled.

“Why write?” she asks in response to my question. “Well,” she begins slowly. “You write to create a different world, a refuge in a way; you want to get away from the world as it is and get in touch with yourself, your feelings. You want to discover the significance of the small things in life that are normally overlooked and then express that to others.”
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Author, Clara Rising
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For nearly than half a century, Mississippi author Clara Rising has been doing just that. Known principally as an author of historical fiction, she has maintained an unabashed passion for producing works that tease the intellect and challenge the reader to consider new insights about human nature, history, and America’s cultural inheritance. Her six books are historical in content, yet packaged with literary conventions to read like fiction; it is a writing style that was also favored by Civil War author and historian Shelby Foote.

“I write historical works so others may appreciate where we are now and where we have been,” she maintains, pointing out that unless people can connect with their cultural past, they cannot hope to fully understand themselves, their country, nor their place in history. “Knowledge and observation and experience are everything in writing,” she notes. “But it is feeling that puts all of that into motion and makes it come alive.”

While writing was the goal, her books actually came later in life. She had been an academic for years, a PhD who taught Literature at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. It was only after she retired from academia that her ideas on the importance of cultural inheritance in American society took shape and became the springboard for writing the books.

It was Clara’s mother who can be credited with first influencing and setting into motion that desire to learn, to know, and to write. She was a strong-willed, creative, red-haired Irish girl from New Orleans who dabbled in short stories and literature for years, and who started a small poetry magazine in the 1930’s. By the summer of 1938, Clara’s mother decided she also wanted to try her hand at writing screenplays. “She heard that William Faulkner had been in Hollywood and she had the notion to go talk to him,” says Clara of the times. They drove from Water Valley to Oxford to meet Faulkner at his Rowan Oak home.
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Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home in Oxford,
where Clara and her mother spent an afternoon
with the author in 1938.
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“He was very kind, very gracious, and very friendly,” Rising remembers of the future Nobel Laureate. “He invited us to come sit on the porch and have some refreshments. Mother and I had lemonade, but he drank something much stronger.” They sat for hours talking freely about each other’s interests, about writing, about current events. It ended all too soon, but Clara never forgot the experience.

As a daughter of the South, the influence of history is inescapable. The other influence that shaped her growing awareness of history came in 1943, when she met and married a handsome, young Army officer named Stan Rising and sent him off to war. She endured it as her husband fought the Nazi’s in the Ardennes and at Bastogne; he received the Bronze Star for bravery and he came back to her after it was over. After the war, she became an Army wife, following Stan from assignment to assignment for another 17 years until his retirement in 1963.