This is the rough interview I did with Clyde Edgerton that was ultimately much improved by the editors at Image magazine (See Summer*2006*Number 50). Thank you Greg and Mary! A great magazine that I heartily recommend.
Interview with Clyde Edgerton
dd: I know you have said you find short stories difficult to write. What makes them such a challenge? Is it the required compression of events or fashioning a story of one emotional cloth? In Memory of Junior and The Floatplane Notebooks I see this very Faulknerian aesthetic at work. So, are you a short story writer trapped in the mind of a novelist? Lunch at the Piccadilly started out as a paragraph–did you know it was going to become a novel as soon as you wrote it?
CE. Short stories are usually difficult for me to write in part because I tend to wander when I write and it seems easier sometimes to go ahead and spend a few years writing a novel than to work my butt off over a few months hammering and chiseling out a short story, one that in my view needs to shine brightly, but never quite does. You ask if the difficulty comes from required compression or fashioning from one emotional cloth. At least both, I think. One reason I enjoy reading tight, full, explosive short stories is because they feel out of my reach. I keep going back every few years to the short story form, hoping to start getting it right consistently, and perhaps someday . . .
I do recall reading that Faulkner said the novel was easier to write than a short story -which was easier than a poem. That’s true for me, though certainly not for other writers.
Soon after writing the short story “Lunch at the Piccadilly” I began to see big hunks of the novel it could be a part of.
I think I’d say that Faulkner’s talent was for the short and the long narrative, but it seems he’s getting at something I’m not aware of-in other words it seems to me that Faulkner fulfilled his artistic potential where his talent was, not where it wasn’t.
dd: Another similarity I see is that you have the ability to create a novel out of a short story or a short narrative. I remember you said your idea for the opening of Where Trouble Sleeps was a paragraph you wrote into other novels, but every time you had to take it out. Changing Names is another story that we see later on in a novel. Is this in any sense the way you write your novels? In scenes?
CE
I think I do tend to write in scenes, initially. I will start with a short story-one I may know is not right yet (because it’s more of a scene or a telling of an incident than it’s a story)-then add scenes and sentences, watching it grow, because I see potential in my continued work with the characters and their situations. I start many short stories that die, and finish only a few that don’t keep on keeping on as a novel. I think I-or most writers who write this way-do not create a novel out of a short story; rather the short story is the first step. I read a critical piece in the 2003 issue of The North Carolina Literary Review suggesting that a novel originating in a short story is bad-simply because it started with a short story. Such a stand seems shortsighted to me, because it assumes an understanding of an entire process of composing a novel-only on the basis of the initial stages. Often a short story simply opens a vein. Or ends up in the middle or end or out of the novel. Judging from his essay this teacher/critic is advising students to abandon novels that began as short stories. Thank God he didn’t teach O’Connor or Faulkner or a host of other novelists.
All of my novels except one started as a short story or a combination of several short stories. That one orphan novel (Killer Diller) started with a setting-a halfway house beside a diet house across from a church. The potential was too rich to desert. I immediately felt that some characters from a former novel needed to be there and I suddenly saw, generally, the form and content of the novel in front of me.
I like how Josephine Humphries once defined the novel–”A series of scenes with meaning.” I probably have it wrong, but I hope that’s what she said. It reflects how I think of structure while I’m writing early drafts of a novel. Then I try to begin understanding what the novel is about. Writing early drafts is how I prepare for detailed composing, whereas other novelists spend that early time on “planning,” while trying to avoid writing a bunch of drafts. No beginning novelist should of course automatically exclude either approach or any other approach. Teachers who do so may, in my view, at least delay good novels here and there.
About the scene I kept trying to use: I had a scene of a six-year-old boy sitting on the steps of a grocery store looking across the street at men standing around a filling station drinking beer. The boy thought they were all going to hell, but in spite of that pretended to drink beer himself as he watched. This happened to me and it seemed personally important for reasons having to do with God and hell and my family, so I kept trying to fit it in a story or novel, but it would never adhere. Finally I started a book with that paragraph and the book turned into Where Trouble Sleeps, and the paragraph ended up somewhere other than in the beginning of the book. I think, though I’m not sure, the critic I spoke of earlier assumed expansion of short story into novel rather than short story as ignition of novel.
When I first finished Raney it was only 100 pages and my distant cousin, Sylvia Wilkerson, a fine novelist and the only writer I knew at the time, said, “It’s not long enough. Double the length. Write more scenes with those aunts.” So I did that during the following year. Of course, all that time, you’re trying to figure out what the story is about-so you can revise artfully–and that’s where Josephine’s “meaning” comes in.
dd: We first met when I was a student in one of your creative writing classes at UNC Wilmington. One day you brought in a stuffed rooster. The rooster sat between us and I remember you asked if he was bothering me. Later in the class a student worked up the nerve to ask you what the chicken was for and you said, ‘Oh him–he wanted to come.’ I’ve always wanted to ask you if you were working on a story involving a chicken or was he there just to keep us awake?
CE: He was there just to keep you awake. I always sit him near the drowsiest student.
DD: I set myself up for that one. Okay, I know you play guitar and banjo. Do you play any other instruments? How did you get interested in music? Who influenced you in music? What kind of music do you like? Who are you listening to now? Who would you like to jam with?
CE: I also play piano, but can’t do much beyond fairly decent blues in C or G. If I could play like anybody, it would be Dr. John. Wait . . . when I’m really ambitions, that would be Oscar Peterson. I got interested in music because my mother would lie with me on a blanket under the stars on summer nights when I was around five years old and say, “Just think, when you’re seven you’ll be able to start taking piano lessons. It will be wonderful.” I had every reason to believe she was telling the truth. Later, she calmly accepted the fact that I didn’t take music lessons very long and she never complained that my talent and musical interests were narrow, moving through Dixieland and blues to rhythm and blues, and some jazz, though I’m confident that she had hopes I’d be a concert pianist. I like Randy Newman, some Lyle Lovette and some Tom Waits, and most of Ry Cooter’s music. And Ray Charles from the early days. To the extent my talent allows, they and Dr. John and Professor Longhair, etc. are my influences.
I like rhythm and blues, bluegrass, Oscar Peterson, and James Brown, especially his Live at the Apollo, 1962.
Now I’m listening to Mike Craver. He’s written about twenty new songs for a musical version of Lunch at the Piccadilly, which I hope will be produced in the next year or so, and I listen to the cd almost every day now. I’m also listening to Pinetop Perkins, Taj Mahal, and Midtown Dickens, my daughter’s band.
I’m fortunate in that I’ve gotten to jam with musicians I greatly admire: Mike Craver, Jim Watson, the late Tommy Thompson, Jack King, and Matt Kendrick-all from North Carolina.
dd: What do you think of the misconception that you are a kind of Folksy Southern writer? When I read your work, the humor is there for sure, but you also write about the desperately serious things in life like people facing death who have fought in wars and drifters like Jack Umstead–but the reader is confident that the author has a moral compass. Are you concerned at all that some critics might interpret your work as being “folksy.”
CE: So far, a few reviewers have noted “folksy” or “quirky” characters but not the lone serious critic who once wrote about my work. But then I remember wishing that anybody would say anything about my writing, so I now try not to look horses in the mouth, gift or not. Or at least I pretend I try not to.
(The “folksy” and “quirky” descriptions usually come from reviewers outside the south because they see southerners in three categories: 1. the violent white men, 2. the “smile while stabbing you in the back while serving a casserole” white women, and 3. the folksy, quirky folk.)
I think the problem with folksy southern writing is that it’s mostly concerned with folksy stuff, and doesn’t speak to matters of hope and fear that can be felt by readers in any climate.
dd: What part has religion played in your life–and in your writing? I’ve always wanted to ask you how Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood struck you when you first read it. What do you think either O’Connor was getting at when she wrote about the “Church without Christ?” I have always been impressed with the way you deal with people, even people you don’t know without tension or anxiety. You treat people with a great deal of respect and empathy. Is this a result of your religious beliefs?
CE: It’s been a long time since I read Wise Blood. I think the “Church Without Christ” concept was a consequence of O’Connor’s devotion to Catholocism. Beyond that, it’s too deep for me. I’m just now reading her again and am fascinated with her loops in time within a short narrative or scene-that is, her going back and catching up with something that just happened, her shifting point of view, her ability to speak as both herself and a character. I wish I had a better answer about Wise Blood. I think O’Connor liked for her characters to have been struck by Christ, better negatively than not at all.
Earlier in my life I was a fundamentalist in the bad way as distinguished from the good way some fundamentalists try to not judge all non-fundamentalists as hell-bound. I found a security as a child in my church that I still feel–especially when listening to many of the old hymns. And those hymns (What A Friend We Have In Jesus, Just As I Am, etc.) take me back, emotionally, I guess, to a time when, in my life, spiritual and ethical matters were important, simple, clear, and preordained. As a writer, I hope that I’m able to draw from the self I was then.
I read Wise Blood when I was first in love with O’Conner’s sentences, paragraphs, descriptions, and dialogue. I was seeing and hearing people in Literature who I already knew in Life and I guess that love didn’t allow room for much of an effort to clearly connect with her on a “religious” plane–the way she apparently hoped a reader might. I was at that time feeling fear and anger in the characters, but not in her.
One perspective that recently occurred to me while studying Flannery O’Connor’s technique is that FOC took Jesus and Christianity more seriously than anything, and her problem, perhaps even to anger, was in others’ not taking Jesus seriously and her favor went to those who did regardless of their behavior . . . . Hazel Motes took Jesus seriously enough to name his own church against Christ. An acknowledgement of Jesus was crucial. Her passion for this taking seriously underwrote her fiction but didn’t get into it in a message-ie way and kept her somehow clear of the ideological sentimental bog that many so-called Christian writers get caught up in. “The Displaced Person” is thus an interesting story, and it’s noteworthy that both the Pole and Christ (and also the Misfit) threw things off balance. Mrs. McIntire didn’t fare well on earth because of her sin, and O’Connor tips her hat there, and also I think she identified with the old Tarwater who dies at the beginning of “You Can’t be Any Poorer Than Dead,” but somehow I’ve always been too delighted in the surfaces of her stories to wrestle with their theological signifance. Louis Rubin wrote an interesting essay called something like “‘The Artifical Nigger’ as Fiction Only (and not as theology)” and that’s one way to read her. Sally Fitzgerald, her biographer, felt very differently, and she was not happy that Dr. Rubin wrote that essay.
I think what comes across to you as my empathy might be my habit of observing people–or attempts to observe people rather than seek conclusions about their character. That can be good or bad depending on my relationship with someone, I guess. I’ve usually been in a position (white, male, protestant, professor, writer) that makes it perhaps easier for me than for over 50% or the rest of the population to be empathetic than disrespectful, and that’s probably because these positions in life-these roles-are less likely to be disrespected openly in our culture. In other words, I’m lucky-so far. Maybe, to take credit, something of this attitude is in some way related to what remains of my religious beliefs.
dd: How do you view the controversy that surrounded your betrayal of Baptists in Raney? Are you still considered controversial in that regard in your view? Do you think of yourself as a controversial writer? When I taught that class at Mount Olive College (Baptist affiliated) I caught some heat for showing a documentary called the Source on the beats and a discussion of the homosexuality of Ginsberg and Burroughs. What was the reaction of friends and relatives–Baptists in general to Debra’s Flap and Snap?
CE: On Raney. I felt I was the betrayed rather than the betrayer. It was like two trains (Campbell University and me) passing in a dark hurricane–at the time, 1985. I view the controversy as without much meaning in the context of the university where I was teaching–I was one of the few people surprised, and that was probably because I’d gone to college in Chapel Hill and had learned certain expectations about academic freedom. I thought the fundamentalist movement back then would be okay and happy where it was–out of politics. But the meaning of the controversy in general, in 2005, in light of intense desire of some people to unite church and state, seems significant.
I don’t think I’m considered controversial in general, and I don’t think I’m controversial, though Raney, Walking Across Egypt, and The Floatplane Notebooks and been banned in some schools, so some people think those stories shouldn’t be read.
On “Debra’s Flap and Snap.” At least one relative read it and said the sex stuff was gratuitous. Some of my students thought it was sexist, some didn’t. A few readers said, “What’s the big deal?”
Yes, there was a controversy in 2000 about whether Seattle Pacific University should accept Image magazine as part of their school, and there was a discussion and some faculty and students in the college newspaper quoted from the “Debra’s flap and Snap” in order to show it’s lack of suitablity for something connected to their Christian school. I can’t remember the sentence exactly, but it had the words “masturbated,” “his thing,” and “fourteen-year-old girl” in it, and some of the folks at Seattle Pacific were thrown off balance by that and worried about the suitability of a magazine that would publish such awful stuff. These folks didn’t prevail. I hope the magazine now thrives there.
Cold bloodied murder in fiction is fine; fraud in fiction is fine; lying and deceit and be-heading and maiming and sinful arrogance, but let’s stay away from touching your thing, because we all know that sin does not exist in real life, or if it does, well then it’s an unpleasant revelation. But of course this mindset doesn’t bother me at all. I’m over it. I understand it. Many fundamentalists feed the poor, and even their own children. And what does art have to do with anything anyway?
dd: Sorry but I meant to say portrayal, not betrayal in my earlier question. Who were among your most powerful literary influences when you started writing? Did you always want to be a writer? Who do you look to now for inspiration? Tell me about the significance of May 15, 1978?
CE: When I first starting writing seriously my most powerful literary influences were Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Cervantes, and Ernest Hemingway, then Faulkner when I finally read him.
I started writing seriously when I was 33. But I, long after the fact, found a sentence I’d written about wanting to be a writer-written in a journal when I was 22. That was about the time I knew I wanted to teach literature as a consequence of reading Hemingway, Twain, and Crane. I don’t remember admitting to anyone that I wanted to be a writer.
For inspiration now I look to Lewis Nordan, Larry Brown, Mark Richard, Cormac McCarthy, Turgenev in Fathers and Sons (use of dialogue) Chekov (and what he says about writing, and his notebooks, and his refusal to seem to take a side in his short stories), Kundera’s The Art of the Novel (especially his concept of the need to embrace uncertainty) and the original influences mentioned above.
For adjunct inspiration I’ve also recently read the theology of Marcus J. Borg and Richard Elliott Friedman, as well as a bit of John Dewey (The Quest for Certainty) and Wittgenstein (The Blue and Brown notebooks).
My focus is relatively narrow, in terms of fiction I enjoy. It’s mostly southern. But I hope it’s-as the boy on the bridge famously said-deep too.
In my early thirties I discovered Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. (Most of my “adult” time until then had been spend flying airplanes and studying English teaching methods and educational sociology.) I felt very lucky and suddenly realized that rather than invent stories from my imagination only, I could remake my own extended family and my life in all sorts of ways-into stories. I practically memorized “Why I Live at the P.O.” in part because I was in several Readers Theatre productions of it (and also because it seemed to be made of my own private language almost)-playing several different parts, including Mama. I’d never heard Eudora Welty read, nor seen her. On May 14th, 1978, I turned on PBS and there she stood behind a podium, reading “Why I Live at the P.O.” I was mesmerized. When she finished reading the story, I went to my journal and wrote, “Tomorrow I will start writing fiction, seriously.”
dd: Harold Bloom says one of the reasons we read is that we cannot know enough people as intimately as we need to in our daily lives. In fiction, we connect with characters and get to know them more intimately than we can know people in real life. I recently had one student almost gleefully tell me that she had never read a book. What would you say about the value of reading literature for the non-reader? Why do you think some people don’t place any importance in reading?
A. I’ve never been a big reader of fiction. Though I’ve read more fiction that most people, I think I read less than most writers. And I don’t push students to “read, read, read.” Rather than a young fiction writer always seeking new reading materials to read (and feeling guilty otherwise), I think he or she might get more out of picking a few favorite novels and stories and after re-reading them for enjoyment, studying them passionately for how they handle the world and life.
Reading Twain, Crane, Hemingway, Welty, O’Connor, Faulkner, and others has brought great satisfaction and inspiration to write, but I also get inspiration for writing out of being in places where odd things happen. For example, I was recently on an island were a man who’d recently had a stroke was caught in a half submerged truck. He couldn’t get out and a wrecker had to be ferried from the mainland to pull the truck from the water before the man could be gotten out of the truck. I got a story from that.
I think some nonliterary people are reading all the time. Reading how you look at them, reading what people are saying to and about them, reading their spouses’s body language, reading how the water is rippling above a school of finger mullet. There’s too much going on to miss out on some of it just because you’re feeling obliged to be “literary,” to sit home seeing how many books you can read so you can talk or write about it. And which is more interesting-reading about a cat eating a bird, or seeing it?
dd: Why are Southern writers the best writers out there? Are North Carolina writers or Mississippi writers the best? Why are Southern writers generally so wary of being asked about their relative southern-ness do you think? I think there is another misconception out there that southern writing only deals with issues of race. Isn’t this a common misconception about our southern writing and is this part of the reason southern writers are so discomfited about the question of southern-ness?
CE: Southern writers are best in part because much good fiction tends to lean on spoken stories. And the nature of daily life in the south since the Civil War up into the 1950s has supported a preponderance of told stories. On the other hand, Southern writers are the worst, too. Many of them are worse than the worst New York writers. Our writing ends up in the head of the reader and since a reader reads with his own experience, observation, and imagination as tools, we must leave it at that, though I believe we can find criteria to help determine good and bad writers. I lean toward the New Critics of the 40s and 50s as being helpful to writers. Of course many more recent critics and their big and little followers are scrambling for ways to lift society.
And as to the question–which are best: North Carolina or Mississippi writers? The answer is Mississippi writers.
I can’t help disconnect my bias (in favor of southern writers) from the facts of my upbringing in a family that: almost worshipped ancestors, avoided discussing most abstractions, and talked a lot about cooking, relatives, neighbors, food, eating, farming, weather, and animals. This wasn’t necessarily an insular upbringing-and was a norm for most of the human race over the last several hundred thousand years-and this environment supports stories told about characters and their human relationships.
In any case, I guess I find favor in Southern writers writing about universal truths that lie under the surface of the life I knew as a child.
I would assume that most people who have a clear and commanding and pleasant upbringing in a specific culture would lean toward literature originating in that culture.
dd: Silas House one told me that someone at a reading asked him if they ever got the internet in Kentucky’s Appalachian mountains. He had to explain that the starting using the internet the same time as everyone else. In your view where does this stereotype come from (i.e., the violent white men/casserole women/the folksy issue)and do you think its evolving or getting worse? Does the rest of the country still look at things this way or is the South changing?
CE: The stereotype probably comes from where most sereotypes come from. There’s a grain of truth there that is easily exploited, and sometimes it’s fun to do that. The agrarian cultural base of the south makes it an easy target. The city cousin and country cousin make fun of each other like monkeys jumping up and down, grinning and pointing fingers, except the country cousin in my view is too often having too much fun outdoors to spend time worrying about the pin-head, uppity intellectuals who wear turdle necks and with lips near the rim of a wine glass spout off about Wittgenstein and red states while standing perfectly still. It helps people who perpetuate the stereotype to feel a little taller, a little smarter, a little better about themselves. I’m feeling a little better now. Plus, when did they get the internet in the Appalachain mountains? I don’t know if all this sterotyping of southerners is getting better or worse–but I think it keeps people from reading Southern literature. I’m hoping that Oprah is helping solve the problem. Faulkner helps us understand the depth and universality of the hope and fear underlying any group consciouness, and introduces us to some fascinating people. I imagine there are sociologists and anthropologists studying the question you ask. I suppose Harold Bloom would say all the stereotyping is about the same and will remain so, evolving though: in some way we can’t quite keep up with.
dd: You teach at UNC Wilmington in the creative writing program. What is the value of an MFA? What do you think of MFA programs?
CE: An MFA is like a mirror. When a born writer looks in, a born writer looks out and when a scribbler looks in a scribbler looks out. The born writers learn a few shortcuts which save a few years in their finding the characters and situations they were born to write about, and a few shortcuts which help them write better-earlier in their career than they would otherwise. The value of an MFA can be that, plus it may be an aid in getting a teaching job. I don’t know much about MFA programs other that ours at Wilmington, and I think our faculty is very strong in teaching and writing skills-and devotion. The student is central. I can image programs where the professors are central. And, you know, it’d probably be fun to be in one of those. In fact, I get a little tired of reading so many student stories, and of presiding over workshops where my stories are never read, and participating in so many conferences where I get so little glory.
dd: The fact that you have an advanced degree in English education sets you apart from many professors in writing programs. How does it make you a better or more prepared teacher? It seems when I have read things about you that your education is played down–nobody calls you Dr. Edgerton. Why is that? I have met a few professors who I imagine force their own mothers to call them Dr. Whatever.
CE: “Dr. Edgerton” might establish a barrier like the one I experience between me and academic types who wish to be called doctor. In my mind, doctors belong in hospitals, not in halls of teaching and learning.
I think what I learned getting my English education degree would help me in a secondary classroom where curiosity is not assumed, but less so with graduate students where curiosity is normally present. I may do a few things differently than other writing teachers. Specifically, I may use readers’ theater and film a bit more than others in workshop instruction, and generally, I try to consciously teach about teaching (since many MFA students will become teachers) and help students get their heads around this definition of teaching: “Teaching is the act of inducing students to behave in ways assumed to lead to learning.” It’s not just about a verbal transferal of wisdom.
dd: In Redeye you write about Colorado. It’s actually a western. What inspired that? It almost seems out of character for you. Do you have a connection to Colorado?
CE: Redeye was inspired by a visit to Mesa Verde in California, and then by reading an account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre that took place in Utah in 1857. My connection to Colorado is a friend who directed me to take my then 10-year-old daughter to Mesa Verde where I became obsessed with reading about the civilization that once inhabited the Mesa. A cowboy, Richard Weatherill, became likewise obsessed in the late 1800s, and then I became obsessed with his life, as did Willa Cather before writing The Professor’s House.
dd: What’s your writing schedule like?
CE: Right now it’s a schedule of fits and starts because I’m regularly involved in the joys and difficulties of, with my wife, raising our two young boys. But my writing schedule will soon smooth out into something resembling a couple or three hours on most mornings. And that’s what works best for me.
dd: You seem to like using things that actually happened as springboards into scenes. How does that work and why is it so effective?
CE: It’s just the way I’ve always done it. For me that’s what fiction writing is about in the main-translating, rather that inventing-though plenty of inventing is involved, and for me it’s creative translating. In many cases the real thing is only the “structure” for the made up event. I’ve also found that it helps me to write made up events in the context of real settings, settings then translated to fictional settings. My fictional characters usually reach through windows in that wall that separates them from real people and then from those real people or from me they grab little habits or pieces of character or personality. As this happens in early drafts, the fictional people began to then have their own personalities and motivations.
dd: Do you read much criticism of books? What do you think of the state of book criticism today?
CE: I get several criticism journals, and all are about Southern writing: The Southern Quarterly and the Southern Literary Review, for example. I think criticism of fiction is fascinating. I’m able to get into the heads of these well-read (usually) readers who call themselves critics and that is fun. I like to see what these well-read readers are making out of a story? In the last twenty years, much criticism has gotten into the hands of social reformers and that makes it no less interesting and fun to read. But for the purposes of helping writers I always fall back on-as I mentioned earlier– Warren and Brooks, specifically The Scope of Fiction, which was made for the classroom from Understanding Fiction. It’s terribly outdated to some grad students, but that’s usually because the student already knows the fundamentals of story writing, or else is infatuated with “experimental” writing of one sort or another.
dd: Eudora Welty wrote in “Must the Novelist Crusade” that ” . . .the zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction much good.” In your own writing do you ever consider theme as a message to the reader?
CE: I think Miss Welty is right and I do my best to not consider theme as a message to the reader. When that happens, fiction is most likely to fail, and the writer (myself included) needs to consider essay writing or preaching as a career-or hobby-so that purpose and form are more likely to be aligned.
dd: Do you ever reject novel ideas based on your audience? You know, like I have this great idea for a novel but maybe it’s not an Edgerton book or my fan base wouldn’t like it or the sales wouldn’t be good?
CE: No
dd: Larry Brown was a friend of yours. How did you first meet and become friends? What is his greatest contribution to southern writing in your view?
CE: Larry and I first met at a book event in Atlanta. A while after dinner, he phoned me from his room and asked how to get the red blinking light on his phone to go out. He was so authentic in so many ways he could make your heart ache. And very funny, especially in his writing, and loyal, and tolerant. The last time I saw him, he took me to his pond, removed the top to a garbage pail at pond side, scooped up some dog food pellets and threw then in the water. “Watch this,” he said. Within five minutes the water was boiling with catfish eating the dog food. I didn’t know whether to laugh or not. Larry was standing there expressionless. Finally he looked at me, straight-faced, but with eyes twinkling, and mumbled, “It took me about two weeks to find a dog food that would float.”
His contributions to Southern writing, in my view, include the authenticity of his stories, the feeling that you are with his people as they live; the almost unconscious sense in the reader of characters being loved by the writer, unobtrusively; the immediacy of character emotions; the combination of humor and darkness; the sense of forgiveness between writer and character; the thickness of emotion lying beneath the sparseness of some of the short stories.
dd: What is it about your books that make them so attractive to moviemakers? How does it work? Do people approach you about adapting books to scripts or is it the other way around? Are there any actors or actresses that you envision playing characters in any of your books?
CE: They’re attractive because of the quirky, folksy characters and dialogue. Three books have been made into movies: Raney, Walking Across Egypt, and Killer Diller. One, Killer Diller, is yet to be released and the other two didn’t make it to the big screen, though Walking Across Egypt made it to video and T.V.
In all cases I’ve been approached about having the story adapted, and some projects-one with Raney and one with The Floatplane Notebooks-never got off the ground.
Let’s see. I see Fred Willard as L. Ray Flowers in Lunch at the Piccadilly and I see Lucas Black as Bumpy in Redeye and I see Todd Schofield as Cobb Pittman in Redeye.
dd: With regards to your new book Solo and being a pilot in Vietnam–how did you (and how do you now) view that war. Am I right in remembering that you don’t fly your own plane anymore after your wreck? Do you see any parallels to Vietnam and the current situation?
CE: I view the war as a mistake growing from a paranoia about the spread of communism–a paranoia that granted a kind of release from international responsibility–and also growing from a confusion in the belief that people always have stronger attachments to their nation states that to their tribes or ethnic groups. These mistakes were similar in Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan. Another parallel between the wars is the U. S. arrogance of power, as demonstrated in our leaders. But back when I was flying in the war I was only beginning to realize the above and I saw the war as an adventure and I rationalized that in flying missions over Laos I was perhaps saving the lives of friends in South Vietman. I’ve haven’t flown since totaling my airplane in 1991. I hope to get back to it when I have more time to devote to it. But I may be too old to see well by then.
dd: What’s next for you?
CE: I’ve been working with Mike Craver for the last year or so on a musical play, Lunch at the Piccadilly, inspired by the novel, but quite different. I’ve started a novel about a boy playing in a garage band in the 1960s, and I’ve started a nonfiction book about the Raney controversy. I’m also writing a short story as requested by Tom Franklin and William Gay that in some way relates to Flannery O’Connor. They are proposing an anotholgy by contemporary writers. I hope their project works out.
Mike and I have sent the play out and are waiting for responses. It’s been great working with a real musician on the musical, and we had so much fun we may adapt another novel, maybe Redeye.
Clyde Edgerton’s bestselling books include Raney, Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks, Killer Diller, In Memory of Junior, Redeye, and Lunch at the Picadilly. Five of his novels have been named New York Times Notable Books. Clyde is in demand as a speaker about writing, reading his own fiction, and he is a songwriter and musician. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife and their sons, where he is a professor in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His latest book is a nonfiction work about flying airplanes, Solo. Daren Dean holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He lives in Columbia, Missouri with his wife and daughter.Interview follow up questions:–In the quote about the unnamed school in Seattle–did they quote from your story? I am confused about what you intended…is it just the part with the character asking her to watch him masturbate? (Quite a follow up question to the above, huh?)****((Daren-I included my answer here below in the original question above.))A. The quote-the whole incident at Seattle Pacific University was on the web a few weeks ago (June 05) but has vanished. Yes, there was a controversy about whether the university should accept Image magazine as part of their school, and there was a discussion and some faculty and students in the college newspaper quoted from the “Debra’s flap and Snap” in order to show it’s lack of suitablity for a magazine connected to their Christian school. I can’t remember the sentence exactly, but it had the words “masturbated,” “his thing,” and “fourteen-year-old girl” in it, and some of the folks at Seattle Pacific were thrown off balance by that and worried about the suitability of a magazine that would publish such awful stuff.–I like what you said about sticking to Southern fiction reading–and not feeling guilty about what you haven’t read. There’s too much to read, isn’t there? But everytime I read something new that I am blown away by I am glad I waited to read it.A. There is always a writer around the bend who brings life to you in such a way that you feel honored and responsible as a writer.
You mentioned the New Critics of the 40s and 50s. Who would you say is one of the leading contenders for writers to consider? Does Cleanth Brooks fall into that group–or was he earlier?
A.Cleanth Brooks is in that group, as is Robert Penn Warren. Those are the two of that group that I’ve used to help teach fiction. Specifically, I’ve used their book, The Scope of Fiction, and I think that book can be helpful to writers if they don’t think about its positions while writing stories but rather later, during revision.
–As a teacher an MFA program–how do you fell you are most helpful to the student of writing? Or, is it more the workshop experiene/dynamic itself? (I know people have told they were intimidated by my silence in workshop, but actually I was the intimidated one–hence the silence…)
A. I feel I’m most help to students through my behavior as an editor in marking up their work and writing comments at the end of their stories or novel chapters. I think the workshop works best when out of twelve students, at least six are excellent student editors.
dd: With regards to being a pilot in Vietnam–how did you (and how do you now) view that war. This is too broad I know, but maybe you can humanize it. Am I right in remembering that you don’t fly your own plane anymore after your wreck? Do you see any parallels to Vietnam and the current situation?
A. I view the war as a mistake growing from a paranoia about the spread of communism–a paranoia that granted a kind of release from international responsibility–and also growing from a confusion in the belief that people always have stronger attachments to their nation states that to their tribes or ethnic groups. These mistakes were similar in Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan. Another parallel between the wars is the U. S. arrogance of power, as demonstrated in our leaders. But back when I was flying in the war I was only beginning to realize the above and I saw the war as an adventure and I rationalized that in flying missions over Laos I was perhaps saving the lives of friends in South Vietman. I’ve haven’t flown since totaling my airplane in 1991. I hope to get back to it when I have more time to devote to it. But I may be too old to see well by then.
DD: I know you have said you find short stories difficult to write. What makes them such a challenge? Is it the required compression of events or fashioning a story of one emotional cloth?
Clyde Edgerton: Short stories are usually difficult for me to write in part because I tend to wander when I write and it seems easier sometimes to go ahead and spend a few years writing a novel than to work my ass off over a few months slowly hammering and chiseling out a short story, one that in my view that needs to shine brightly, but never quite does. I tend to have shiny scenes and then my story strolls off through a swamp and then back into a shiny scene, etc. You ask if the difficulty comes from required compression or fashioning from one emotional cloth. At least both, I think. One reason I enjoy reading tight, full, explosive short stories is because they feel out of my reach. I keep going back every few years to the short story form, hoping to start getting it right consistently, and perhaps someday . . . I do recall reading that Faulkner said the novel was easier to write than a short story –which was easier than a poem. That’s true for me, though certainly not for other writers. Soon after writing the short story “Lunch at the Piccadilly” I started seeing the novel it could be a part of.
DD: You have the ability to create a novel out of a short story or a short narrative. I remember you said your idea for the opening of Where Trouble Sleeps started as a paragraph you wrote into other novels, but every time you had to cut it. Changing Names is another story that we see later on in a novel. Is this in any sense the way you write your novels? In scenes?
Clyde Edgerton: I think I do tend to write in scenes, initially. I will start with a short story—one I may know is not right yet (because it’s more of a scene or a telling of an incident than it’s a story)—then add scenes and sentences, watching it grow, because I see potential in my continued work with the characters and their situations. I start many short stories that die, and finish only a few that don’t keep on keeping on. I think I—or most writers who write this way—do not create a novel out of a short story; rather the short story is the first step. I read a critical piece in a recent issue of The North Carolina Literary Review suggesting that a novel originating in a short story is bad—simply because it started with a short story. Such a stand seems shortsighted to me, because it assumes an entire process of composing a novel—simply on the basis of the initial stages. Often a short story simply opens a vein. Or ends up in the middle or end or out of the novel. Judging from his essay this teacher/critic is advising students to abandon novels that began as short stories. Thank God he didn’t teach, O’Connor, or Faulkner, or a host of other novelists.
All of my novels (except one) started as a short story or a combination of several short stories. That one orphan novel started with a setting—a halfway house beside a diet house across from a church. The potential was too rich to desert. I immediately felt that some characters from a former novel needed to be there and I saw, generally, the novel in front of me.
I like how Josephine Humphries once described the novel–”A series of scenes with meaning.” I probably have it wrong, but I hope that’s what she said. It reflects how I think of structure while I’m writing early drafts of a novel. Then I try to begin understanding what the novel is about. Writing early drafts is how I prepare for detailed composing, whereas other novelists spend that early time on “planning.” No beginning novelist should of course automatically exclude either approach–or any other approach. Teachers who do so may, in my view, at least delay good novels here and there.
I had a scene of a six-year-old boy sitting on the steps of a grocery store looking across the street at men standing around a filling station drinking beer. The boy thought they were all going to hell, but in spite of that pretended to drink beer himself as he watched. This happened to me and it seemed personally important for reasons having to do with God and hell and my family, so I kept trying to fit it in a story or novel, but it would never adhere. Finally I started a book with that paragraph and the book turned into Where Trouble Sleeps, and the paragraph ended up somewhere other than in the beginning of the book. I think the critic I spoke of earlier assumed expansion of short story into novel rather than short story as ignition of novel.
When I first finished Raney it was only 100 pages and my distant cousin, Sylvia Wilkerson, a fine novelist and the only writer I knew at the time, said, “It’s not long enough. Double the length. Write more scenes with those aunts.” So I did that during the following year. Of course, all that time, you’re trying to figure out what the story is about—so you can revise artfully–and that’s where Josephine’s “meaning” comes in.
DD: We first met when I was a student in one of your creative writing classes at UNC- Wilmington. One day you brought in a stuffed rooster. The rooster sat between us and I remember you asked if he was bothering me. Later in the class a student worked up the nerve to ask you what the chicken was for and you said, ‘Oh him–he wanted to come.’ I’ve always wanted to ask you if you were working on a story involving a chicken or was he there just to keep us awake?
Clyde Edgerton: He was there just to keep you awake. I always sit him near the drowsiest student.
DD: I sat myself up for that one. We were expecting that rooster to workshop a story–or at least crow.
I know you play guitar and banjo. Do you play any other instruments? How did you get interested in music? Who influenced you in music? What kind of music do you like? Who are you listening to now? And who would you like to jam with?
Clyde Edgerton: I also play piano, but can’t do much beyond fairly decent blues in C or G. If I could play like anybody, it would be Dr. John. I got interested in music because my mother would lie with me on a blanket under the stars on summer nights when I was around five years old and say, “Just think, when you’re seven you’ll be able to start taking piano lessons. It will be wonderful.” I had every reason to believe she was telling the truth. Later, she calmly accepted the fact that I didn’t take music lessons very long and she never complained that my talent and musical interests were narrow, moving through Dixieland and blues to rhythm and blues, though I’m confident that she had hopes I’d be a concert pianist. I like Randy Newman, some Lyle Lovette and some Tom Waits, and most all of Ry Cooter. And Ray Charles from the early days. To the extent my talent allows, they and Dr. John and Professor Longhair, etc. are my influences.
I like rhythm and blues, bluegrass in small doses, James Brown, especially Live at the Apollo, 1962.
Now I’m listening to Mike Craver. He’s written about twenty new songs for a musical version of Lunch at the Piccadilly, which I hope will be produced in the next year or so, and I listen to the cd almost every day now. I’m also listening to Pinetop Perkins, Taj Mahal, and Midtown Dickens, my daughter’s band.
I’m fortunate in that I’ve gotten to jam with musicians I greatly admire: Mike Craver, Jim Watson, the late Tommy Thompson, Jack King, and Matt Kendrick—all from North Carolina.
DD: I don’t know if you are aware of this or not. I sometimes think you use it to your advantage, but what do you think of the misconception that you are a kind of folksy Southern writer? When I read your work, the humor is there for sure, but you also write about the desperately serious things in life like people facing death who have fought in wars and drifters like Jack Umstead–but the reader is confident that the author has a moral compass. Are you concerned at all that some critics might interpret your work this way?
Clyde Edgerton: So far, a few reviewers have noted “folksy” or “quirky” characters–that gets quoted–but not the lone serious critic who once looked at my work. But then I remember wishing that anybody would say anything about my writing, so I now try not to look horses in the mouth, gift or not. Or at least I pretend I try not to.
(The “folksy” and “quirky” descriptions come from reviewers outside the south because they see southerners in three categories: 1) the violent white men, 2) the “smile while stabbing you in the back while serving a casserole” white women, and 3) the folksy, quirky folk.
DD: What part has religion played in your life–and in your writing? I’ve always wanted to ask you how Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood struck you when you first read it. What do you think either O’Connor was getting at when she wrote about the “Church without Christ?” I have always been impressed with the way you deal with people, even people you don’t know, without tension or anxiety. You treat people with a great deal of respect and empathy. Is this a result of your religious beliefs?
Clyde Edgerton: Earlier in my life I was a fundamentalist in the bad way as distinguished from the good way some fundamentalists try to not judge all non-fundamentalists as hell-bound. I found a security as a child in my church that I still feel–especially when listening to many of the old hymns. And those hymns (What A Friend We Have In Jesus, Just As I Am, etc.) take me back, emotionally, I guess, to a time when, in my life, spiritual and ethical matters were important, simple, clear, and preordained. As a writer, I hope that I’m able to draw from the self I was then.
I read Wise Blood when I was first in love with O’Connor’s sentences, paragraphs, descriptions, and dialogue. I was seeing and hearing people in Literature who I already knew in Life and I guess that love didn’t allow room for much of an effort to clearly connect with her on a “religious” plane–the way she apparently hoped a reader might. I was at that time feeling fear and anger in the characters, but not in her.
I think what comes across as my empathy might be my preference for observing people rather than concluding about their character. That can be good or bad. I’ve usually been in a position (white, male, protestant, professor, writer) that makes it easier for me to be empathetic than disrespectful because I’m less likely than many other people to be treated unfairly.
I guess this attitude is in some way related to what remains of my religious beliefs.
DD: How do you view the controversy that surrounded your portrayal of Baptists in Raney? Are you still considered controversial in that regard in your view? Do you think of yourself as a controversial writer? What was the reaction of friends and relatives–Baptists in general to Debra’s Flap and Snap?
A. On Raney. It was like two trains (Campbell University and me) passing in a dark hurricane–at the time, 1985. I view the controversy as without much meaning in the context of the university where I was teaching–I was one of the few people surprised, and that was probably because I’d gone to college in Chapel Hill and had learned certain expectations about academic freedom. I thought the fundamentalist movement back then would be okay and happy where it was–out of politics. But the meaning of the controversy in general, in 2005, in light of intense desire of some people to unite church and state, seems significant.
I don’t think I’m considered controversial in general, and I don’t think I’m controversial, though Raney, Walking Across Egypt, and The Floatplane Notebooks and been banned in some schools, so some people think those stories shouldn’t be read.
On “Debra’s Flap and Snap.” At least one relative read it and said the sex stuff was gratuitous. Some of my students thought it was sexist, some didn’t. A few readers said, “What’s the big deal?”
Some students and faculty _____, near Seattle, Washington (where the magazine, Image, that published the story wanted to settle) were upset with the story’s content, regardless of what the story was about or what it could mean, so they quoted this abhorrent content: “ .”
Cold blooded murder in fiction is fine; fraud in fiction is fine; lying and deceit and be-heading and maiming and sinful arrogance, but let’s stay away from sexual molestation or touching your thing, because we all know those sins and shortcomings do not exist in real life, or if they do, well then they’re unpleasant. But of course this mindset doesn’t bother me at all. I’m over it. Many fundamentalists feed the poor, and even their own children. And what does art have to do with anything anyway?
DD: Who were among your most powerful literary influences when you started writing? Did you always want to be a writer? Who do you look to now for inspiration? Tell me about the significance of May 15, 1978?
Clyde Edgerton: When I first starting writing seriously my most powerful literary influences were Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Cervantes, and Ernest Hemingway, then Faulkner when I finally read him.
I started writing seriously when I was 33. But I found a sentence about wanting to be a writer—written in a journal when I was 22. That was about the time I knew I wanted to teach literature as a consequence of reading Hemingway, Twain and Crane. I don’t remember admitting to anyone that I wanted to be a writer.
For inspiration now I look to Lewis Nordan, Larry Brown, Mark Richard, Cormac McCarthy, Turgenev in Fathers and Sons (use of dialogue) Chekov (and what he says about writing, and his notebooks, and his refusal to seem to take a side in his short stories), ______’s The Art of the Novel (especially his concept of the need to embrace uncertainty) and the original influences mentioned above.
For adjunct inspiration I’ve also recently read the theology of Marcus J. Borg and Richard Elliott Friedman, as well as a bit of John Dewey (The Quest for Certainty) and Wittgenstein (The Blue and Brown notebooks.)
My focus is relatively narrow, in terms of fiction I enjoy. It’s mostly southern. But I hope it’s—as the boy on the bridge famously said—deep too.
In my early thirties I discovered Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. I felt very lucky and suddenly realized that rather than invent stories from my imagination only, I could remake my own extended family and my life in all sorts or ways—into stories. I practically memorized “Why I Live at the P.O.” in part because I was in several Readers Theatre productions of it (and also because it seemed to be made of my own private language almost)—playing several different parts, including Mama. I’d never heard Eudora Welty read, nor seen her. On May 14th, 1978, I turned on PBS and there she stood behind a podium, reading “Why I Live at the P.O.” I was mesmerized. When she finished reading the story, I went to my journal and wrote, “Tomorrow I will start writing fiction, seriously.”
DD: Harold Bloom says one of the reasons we read is that we cannot know enough people as intimately as we need to in our daily lives. However, I have many students who don’t read fiction. In fact, I recently had one student almost gleefully tell me that she had never read a book. What would you say about the value of reading literature for the nonliterary? Why do you think some people don’t place much importance in reading?
Clyde Egerton: I’ve never been a big reader of fiction. Though I’ve read more fiction that most people, I think I read less than most writers. And I don’t push students to “read, read, read.” Rather than a young fiction writer always seeking new reading materials to read (and feeling guilty otherwise), I think he or she might get more out of picking a few favorite novels and stories and after re-reading them for enjoyment, studying them passionately for how they handle the world and life.
I get inspiration for writing out of being in places where odd things happen. For example, I was recently on an island were a man who’d recently had a stroke was caught in a half-submerged truck. He couldn’t get out and a wrecker had to be ferried from the mainland to pull the truck from the water before the man could be gotten out of the truck. I got a story from that.
I think nonliterary people are reading all the time. Reading how you look at them, reading what people are saying to and about them, reading their spouses’s body language, reading how the water is rippling above a school of menhaden. There’s too much going on to miss out on some of all that just because you’re feeling obliged to be “literary,” so you sit home seeing how many books you can read. Which is more interesting—reading about a cat eating a bird, or seeing it?
DD: Why are Southern writers the best writers out there? Are North Carolina writers or Mississippi writers the best? Why are Southern writers generally so wary of being asked about their relative southern-ness do you think? One time as an undergrad someone asked me what I liked to read. My response was Southern writing. The person in question made a face and I asked why she did that? She said that southern writing only deals with issues of race and that wasn’t something she wanted to read. Isn’t this a common misconception about our Southern writing and is this part of the reason Southern writers are so discomfited about the question of Southern-ness?
Clyde Edgerton: Southern writers are best in part because much good fiction tends to lean on spoken stories. And the nature of daily life in the south since the Civil War up into the 1950s has supported a preponderance of told stories. On the other hand, Southern writers are the worst, too. Many of them are worse than the worst New York writers. So we end up in the head of the reader and since a reader reads with his own experience, observation, and imagination as tools, we must leave it at that, though I believe we can find criteria to help determine good and bad writers. I lean toward the New Critics of the 40s and 50s as being the most helpful to writers. Of course many more recent critics and their big and little followers are scrambling for ways to lift society and deserve respect for those efforts.
And as to the question–which are best: North Carolina or Mississippi writers? Mississippi writers.
I can’t help disconnect my bias (toward my favorite writers being Southern) from the facts of my upbringing in a family that: almost worshipped ancestors, avoided discussing most abstractions, and talked a lot about cooking, relatives, neighbors, food, eating, farming, weather, and animals. This wasn’t necessarily an insular upbringing—and was a norm for most of the human race over the last several hundred thousand years—and this environment supports stories told about characters and their human relationships.
In any case, I tend toward Southern writers writing about universal truths that lie under the surface of that the life I knew as a child.
I would assume that most people who have a clear and commanding and pleasant upbringing in a specific culture would lean toward literature originating in that culture.
DD: You teach at UNC Wilmington in the creative writing program. What is the value of an MFA? What do you think of MFA programs?
Clyde Edgerton: An MFA is like a mirror. When a born writer looks in, a born writer looks out and when a scribbler looks in a scribbler looks out. The born writers learn a few shortcuts which save a few years in their finding the characters and situations they were born to write about, and a few shortcuts which help them write better—earlier in their career than they would otherwise. The value of an MFA can be that, plus an aid in getting a teaching job. I don’t know much about MFA programs other that ours at Wilmington, and I think our faculty is very strong in teaching and writing skills—and devotion. The student is central. I can image programs where the professors are central. And, you know, it’d probably be fun to be in one of those. In fact, I get a little tired of reading so many student stories, and of presiding over workshops where my stories are never read, and participating in so many conferences where I get no glory.
DD: Well, the fact that you have an advanced degree in English education sets you apart from many professors in writing programs. How does it make you a better or more prepared teacher? It seems when I have read things about you that your education is played down–nobody calls you Dr. Edgerton. Why is that? I have met a few professors who I imagine force their own mothers to call them Dr. Whatever.
Clyde Edgerton: “Dr. Edgerton” might establish a barrier like the one I experience between me and academic types who wish to be called doctor. In my mind, doctors belong in hospitals, not in halls of teaching and learning.
I think what I learned getting my English education degree would help me in a secondary classroom where curiosity is not assumed, but less so with graduate students where curiosity is normally present among students. I may do a few things differently than other writing teachers. Specifically, I may use readers’ theater and film a bit more than others in workshop instruction and generally, I try to consciously teach about teaching (since many will become teachers) and help students get their heads around this definition of teaching: “Teaching is the act of inducing students to behave in ways assumed to lead to learning.” It’s not just about a verbal transferal of wisdom.
DD: In Redeye you write about Colorado. It’s actually a western. What inspired that? It almost seems out of character for you. Do you have a connection to Colorado?
Clyde Edgerton: Redeye was inspired by a visit to Mesa Verde in California, and then by reading an account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre that took place in Utah in 1857. My connection to Colorado is a friend who directed me to take my then 10-year-old daughter to Mesa Verde where I became obsessed with reading about the civilization that once inhabited the Mesa. A cowboy, Richard Weatherill, became likewise obsessed in the late 1800s, and then I became obsessed with his life, as did Willa Cather before writing The Professor’s House.
DD: What’s your writing schedule like?
Clyde Edgerton: Right now it’s a schedule of fits and starts because I’m regularly involved in the joys and difficulties of helping my wife raise our two-year old son and a two-month son. But my writing schedule will soon smooth out into some resembling a couple or three hours on most mornings. And that’s what works best for me.
DD: You seem to like using things that actually happened as springboards into scenes. How does that work and why is it so effective?
Clyde Edgerton: It’s just the way I’ve always done it. For me that’s what fiction writing is about in the main—translating, rather that inventing—though plenty of inventing is involved, and for me it’s creative translating. In many cases the real thing is only the “structure” for the made-up event. I’ve also found that it helps me to write made up events in the context of real settings, settings then translating to fictional settings. My fictional characters usually reach through windows in that wall that separates them from real people and then from those real people or from me they grab little habits or pieces of character or personality. As this happens in early drafts the fictional people began to then have their own personalities and motivations.
DD: Do you read much criticism of books? What do you think of the state of book criticism today?
Clyde Edgerton: I get several criticism journals, and all are about Southern writing: The Southern Quarterly and the Southern Literary Review, for example. I think criticism of fiction is fascinating. I’m able to get into the heads of well-read (usually) readers and that is fun. I like to see what these well-read readers are making out of a story? In the last twenty years, much criticism has gotten into the hands of social reformers and that makes it no less interesting and fun to read. But for the purposes of helping writers I always fall back on Warren and Brooks, specifically The Scope of Fiction which was made out of Understanding Fiction. It’s terribly outdated to some grad students, but that’s usually because the student already knows the fundamentals of story writing, or else is infatuated with “experimental” writing of one sort or another.
DD: Eudora Welty wrote in Must the Novelist Crusade that ” . . .the zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction much good.” When you write do you ever consider theme as a message to the reader?
Clyde Edgerton: I think Miss Welty is right and I do my best to not consider theme as a message to the reader. When that happens, fiction is most likely to fail, and the writer (myself included) needs to consider essay writing or preaching as a career—or hobby.
DD: Larry Brown was a friend of yours. How did you first meet and become friends? What is his greatest contribution to southern writing in your view?
Clyde Edgerton: Larry and I first met at a book event in Atlanta. After dinner, he phoned me from his room and asked how to get the red blinking light on his phone to go out. He was so authentic in so many ways he could make your heart ache. And very funny, especially in his writing, and loyal, and tolerant. The last time I saw him, he took me to his pond, removed a top to a garbage pail at pond side, scooped up some dog food pellets and threw them in the water. “Watch this,” he said. Within five minutes the water was boiling with catfish eating the dog food. I didn’t know whether to laugh or not. Larry was standing there expressionless. Finally he looked at me, straight-faced, but with eyes twinkling, and mumbled, “It took me about two weeks to find a dog food that would float.”
His contributions to Southern writing, in my view, include the authenticity of his stories, the feeling that you are with his people as they live; the almost unconscious sense in the reader of characters being loved by the writer, unobtrusively; the immediacy of character emotions; the combination of humor and darkness; the sense of forgiveness between writer and character; the thickness of emotion lying beneath the sparseness of some of the short stories.
DD: What is it about your books that make them so attractive to moviemakers? How does it work? Do people approach you about adapting books to scripts or is it the other way around? Are there any actors or actresses that you envision playing characters in any of your books?
Clyde Edgerton: They’re attractive because of the quirky, folksy characters and dialogue. Three books have been made into movies: Raney, Walking Across Egypt, and Killer Diller. One, Killer Diller, is yet to be released and the other two didn’t make it to the big screen, though Walking Across Egypt made it to video and T.V.
In all cases I’ve been approached about having the story adapted, and some projects—one with Raney and one with The Floatplane Notebooks—never got off the ground.
Let’s see. I see Fred Willard as L. Ray Flowers in Lunch at the Piccadilly and I see Lucas Black or ______ as Bumpy in Redeye and I see Todd Schofield as Cobb Pittman in Redeye.
DD: Clyde, what’s next for you?
I’ve been working with Mike Craver for the last year or so on a musical play, Lunch at the Piccadilly, inspired by the novel, but quite different. I’ve started a novel about a boy playing in a garage band in the 1960s, and I’ve started a nonfiction book about the Raney controversy. Something may come of the musical—I’m not sure about the other two yet. Mike and I have sent the play out and are waiting for responses. It’s been great working with a real musician on the musical, and we had so much fun we may adapt another novel, maybe Redeye.
A nonfiction book about flying airplanes, Solo, was released in September 2005.
Clyde Edgerton’s bestselling books include Raney, Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks, Killer Diller, In Memory of Junior, Redeye, and Lunch at the Picadilly. Five of his novels have been named New York Times Notable Books. Clyde is in demand as a speaker about writing, reading his own fiction, and he is a songwriter and musician. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife and their sons, where he is a professor in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His latest book is a nonfiction work about flying airplanes, Solo.
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Reader-response from New Stories from the South, Raise Children Here by George Singleton. Length: One developed paragraph. Worth: 5 points. What is it about place in Southern literature that’s so important to authors and their characters? Can your hometown or state boast anything like the Fruitcake Capital of the World as mentioned in the story? Explain.
