LITTLE ROCK — One of the appeals of Little Rock artist Jane F. Hankins’ quirky, comical sculptures is that her works - from large-lipped fish to wide-hipped Southern ladies - are so filled with vibrant colors and expressive personalities, her creations threaten to leap out of their lakes or jump off their overstuffed sofas and come to life.
Well, some of her beloved ladies have done just that - through the pages of Hankins’ first foray into fiction.
Hankins’ first novel, Madge’s Mobile Home Park, was released earlier this month and is set in an east Arkansas trailer park in a pecan grove in the fictional town of Peavine. The characters are based on some of the ones, already beloved by Arkansans, she has sculpted from porcelain and stoneware. Hankins’ book was published by Parkhurst Brothers, Inc. and sells for $20 in paperback with a $14 e-book edition also available. Madge’s Mobile Home Park is the first volume in a planned series titled the Peavine Chronicles.
“I like to the describe the book as Lake Wobegon meets Greater Tuna with a little bit of Fannie Flagg and a pinch of J.K. Rowling thrown in for good measure,” Hankins says.
Born in Jonesboro, by the time she was 4, Hankins, now 61, knew she wanted to be an artist. For more than 30 years, she has been working as such with her pieces currently for sale at the Arkansas Arts Center Museum Shop and the Clinton Museum Store in Little Rock, where she lives with her husband, KTHV-TV, Channel 11 anchor Craig O’Neill.
Her characters first arrived back in 2000 when Hankins created a group of artworks she dubbed the Mavens of the Mobile Home Park.
“I made up a story about each character and how their benefactor Loretta Doll Dumas had helped them,” Hankins said, explaining that each sculpture had a brief narrative on the back giving insight into the character depicted.
“I’d make the sculptures of the ladies in the chairs and they’d be saying something and I would see a whole story around them.”
The book, set in the mid-1980s, grew from there.
“It’s been through five revisions over eight years,” Hankins says. “It could have easily been a 400-page book but Ted [Parkhurst, her publisher] convinced me to save some of the characters for a second book.”
The second book will feature an old stripper named Krystal Bridges: “I’m already at work on it and up to Chapter 5.”
She says has never struggled to flesh out her sculptural creations and credits her father with instilling his storytelling abilities in her. It was just a matter of putting all her stories down on paper and then typing it up. But first she had to learn how to type.
“I don’t have to come up with them, they just come to me; it’s like I actually know these people,” she says.
In 2003, she and her husband and children held an hour-long reading of her work at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre.
“Ted told me it read more like a play than a novel and I needed to novel it up some,” Hankins says.
Does she worry she’ll run out of characters or storylines?
“Not at all,” she says. “I’m afraid I’ll run out of time and energy instead.”
Hankins says her book is for sale at several central Arkansas locations including the Arkansas Arts Center Museum Shop, the Clinton Museum Store, Historic Arkansas Museum store, Words Worth Books, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, Cynthia East Fabrics, Raspberries Hair Studio, River Market Books and Gifts and Hallmark Crown Shops.
At signing parties, Hankins often serves refreshments worthy of her mobile home park characters - cheese dip, grape soda, Ding Dongs and the like.
For more information on the book or Hankins’ artwork, visit www.janefhankins.com.
Style, Pages 23 on 05/29/2012