Kidd tells how 'Bees' evolved

Melissa Haneline
The Post and Courier

Author Sue Monk Kidd shows a collage to a group of Burke High School students Thursday during a talk in the media center. The collage inspired her first novel, "The Secret Life of Bees," which has been made into a movie.

Melissa Haneline
The Post and Courier

Burke High School freshman Kayla Dorsey leans in to see the photo Sue Monk Kidd brought of the cast of "The Secret Life of Bees" based on Kidd's first novel.

It's early in the morning, but best-selling author of "The Secret Life of Bees," Sue Monk Kidd, has no trouble drawing 50 poetry students at Burke High School close to her heart.

"I will not forget the time in 1964, when I was 16 and living in Georgia and Dr. Martin Luther King came marching through and was put in jail in Albany," recalled the Mount Pleasant resident. "One reason I wrote this book is because I wanted to tell of a community of African-American women who took in a desperate young white girl, and I wanted to create an understanding of the image of the Black Madonna. And, I thought, maybe in some way this might make up for the injustices I had seen in my life."

Kidd's novel has sold 5 million copies and opens as a film next week. But her main purpose Thursday was to explain, step by step, how she wrote her novel. To show its humble beginnings, she took out a collage of cut-outs from a magazine she had pasted on cardboard.

Despite the red-carpet treatment in Toronto and New York, Kidd hasn't forgotten a major concern in her life: public education. Because of this, her publisher, Viking Press, sent 100 free paperbacks of "The Secret Life of Bees" to students in the Advanced Placement Academy at Burke and to those who completed the Lowcountry Initiative of the Literary Arts' Poets in the Schools program.

And it paid off.

"I love this book," said Kayla Dorsey, a ninth-grader, as she lovingly holds the orange-cover paperback. "I read it over and over."

After Kidd told of her main character's quest to fill the space left in her life when her mother died, Shandelle Deveaux, a 10th-grader, said, "I liked the book because it relates to me."

Asked in what way, Shandelle, keeping back the tears, answered, "Because my uncle recently died and I was very close to him. It left a hole in my heart, and I'm trying to fill it, too."