SLA Buff: Vivian Gibson

The Saint Louis Author (SLA) Buff blog highlights the unique and surprising authors who live and write in Mound City.

The best selling 2020 book by Vivian Gibson, The Last Children of Mill Creek.

It’s a busy week for Vivian Gibson, author of 2020’s best selling The Last Children of Mill Creek, now in it’s fifth edition. She wrote it as a reflection on growing up in the Mill Creek neighborhood—now gone—in the City of St. Louis for her children, nieces and nephews. This weekend, the exhibit it inspired, Mill Creek: Black Metropolis, opens at the Missouri History Museum. Gibson is in high demand by news outlets from KMOX to NPR. I was lucky to get a few minutes with her early this week.

Gibson didn’t think of herself as a writer until she had time to write, which was after her retirement. “I’m a late bloomer,” she said. “I was just cleaning out the spare room, going through papers. It was haphazard like that. My parents died years before my children were born, so I wanted to get something about them down on paper.”

She joined a writing group at St. Louis Oasis, the Lifelong Learning organization for older adults. “I figured I’d head over to Kinko’s and make copies for my family when I was done. But everyone in the group insisted I had a book.”

That book has flourished beyond anyone’s expectations. Since the demolition of the Mill Creek neighborhood in 1959 and 1960 in the name of urban renewal, Gibson’s story of growing up there, what her family was like, who her friends were represents a kind of living archeology. The land upon which 5,000 buildings—residences, schools, churches, and commercial establishments— used to stand is now occupied by part of the St. Louis University campus and Interstate 64. The community of 20,000 people relocated by the urban renewal project lost each other at the time, but have begun rediscovering each other due, in large part, to Gibson’s book. This story resonates not only with people with connections to the original neighborhood, but with communities across the country who have experienced similar upheaval.

Blogger with author, Vivian Gibson, at the Missouri Writers Guild Conference in September 2024.

“I was always scribbling,” Gibson said. “Always imagining, always full of memories. I am reflective, I listen to people. As a child I was always shooed away from adult conversations. I loved history because in my mind it was stories. While fellow students agonized over memorizing dates, I memorized and loved the stories. I speak in stories—that is how I communicate.”

As a college-aged person, Gibson found herself in New York City and in talking about herself to people she saw as “sophisticated New Yorkers”, she noticed that what she had to say interested them. She enrolled in night school at the Fashion Institute of Design and worked during the day in the reception area of McKinsey & Company. “It was a perfect job for me, at the time. I was in an opulent reception area, where I could read and study,” she said. When she had graduated from the Design Institute, she had advanced at McKinsey to the point where she was offered a management role. She chose that rather than the sewing rooms she would otherwise have worked in as a design school graduate. She stayed in New York for ten years and said, “To this day, it was one of the most enjoyable times of my young life.”

Gibson returned to St. Louis after a two-year period in Liberia, West Africa where her husband worked in banking. “Five days after the coup in 1980, we had 20 minutes to leave the country,” she said. She has been in St. Louis ever since.

As a writer, Gibson is interested in race relations in St. Louis. “There is a lot of material if you look at it from a historical perspective. Most of what I know I have learned as an adult when I started researching for the book. I wanted to reinforce the memories I was writing down for my kids with facts from the time-- what was going on politically, bussing, and desegregation. We were the first ones bused because the schools that were supposed to absorb the kids who had attended the three Mill Creek schools were immediately overwhelmed. I went down rabbit holes of history and policy and reasoning that made the book writing more interesting.”

In addition to many interviews and awards in the years since the book came out, exciting things have happened in 2025. A documentary, “Remembering Mill Creek: When We Were There,” resulted from a collaboration with filmmaker Khalid Abdulqaadir, who had emailed Gibson to complement her about her book and to tell her that he had roots in the Mill Creek neighborhood. It was part of the 2025 St. Louis Filmmaker’s Showcase.

Gibson in front of The Ross Family gallery in the Seeking St. Louis exhibit which was on view at the Museum from 2000 to 2025.

Mill Creek: Black Metropolis is an expansion of “The Ross Family” gallery which was part of the Seeking St. Louis exhibit mounted at the Museum in 2000 and taken down just this year. “For the Ross Family gallery, my siblings and I went to the museum for several weekends just talking about those days with museum staff recording us.” The gallery included quilts, family pictures, and walls painted yellow. An interactive option in the room was to pick up a phone and listen to the real voices of her family telling the stories. “That was very popular,” she said. Gibson requested the room be given to the Griot Museum of Black History in St. Louis and is hopeful they will soon stand it up there.

Gibson is on the advisory board for Mill Creek: Black Metropolis, and points out that the curator, Gwen Moore, is also from Mill Creek. “I helped her identify people who could donate artifacts.” The best part of it, for Gibson, is that it keeps the memories alive that she originally wanted to preserve. “I can’t believe so many people have been so interested. I just had a good story—no experience, no other reason for it to take off. Two weeks ago, there was a full page dedicated to it in the New York Times!”

Gibson is gratified that so many types of readers are using her book: Marquette University in Milwaukee for an Urban Planning graduate program, seventh graders at John Burroughs School, and senior citizens who remember the times and places she writes about.

Five years after its first publication Gibson continues to actively participate in activities prompted by The Last Children of Mill Creek, but she is also working on her next memoir.

“The Last Children of Mill Creek ends when I am 27 years old.  I have lived fifty more years of an incredible life.”  She lives alone and can write in the middle of the night without bothering anybody. “I find I am most creative writing in my bed, longhand on a yellow pad.” Gibson admits she had taken on more than she could really handle for a time, but said, “This year I learned how to say no, to give myself some space. It has made a big difference.”

Be sure to see the exhibition Mill Creek: Black Metropolis when it opens November 15—this weekend. It will be there until July of 2026.