My great-great-grandfather, a second
lieutenant in the 1st Kentucky Mounted Rifles, CSA, brought his
family to the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas following the Civil War. His
solemn photograph, taken in his later years, hangs at the head of a family collage
on the dining room wall. But even in the old man, without the uniform, with his
stark face and white beard, you cannot miss the Confederate officer. The long
thread of history that precedes him—the Protestant Rebellion in England, the
Plantation of Ulster in Northern Ireland, the long struggle with poverty ending
in the potato famine and the long voyage to the hard scrabble of a new start in
Appalachia—is of little consequence compared to that moment when the young
second lieutenant rode away from his Kentucky home. Or so it seems to me as I
look at the photo. His shadow lies over my sense of family, even though all the
other photos hanging on that dining room wall are cast in a very different
shadow, the shadow of the Ozark Mountains. There is the second lieutenant’s
son, my great-grandfather, who developed a process for melding metal that made
him a blacksmith of some renown in the region, and who ended his days in the state
hospital for the insane. And below him, there is his son, my grandfather, who
built up a mercantile business, lost it in the Depression, and became an
alcoholic.
On various branches of the family tree hang
distillers, horse traders, thieves, preachers, and teachers. Especially
teachers. In the first half of the twentieth century, my father’s generation—the
Guinns, the Faubuses, the Bucks, and the Gages—was fertile ground for teachers,
men and women who, in the 1920s and 1930s taught in one room or two room
schoolhouses in small rural communities like Delaney or Crosses or Greasy Creek,
after finishing their own high school education at the county seat in
Huntsville. They were readers, all of them, and it surely must have been they
who turned me and my cousins to books and gave us a love of language. The thick
hillbilly accent of the rural Ozarks prior to World War II, the language of the
novels of the late Donald Harrington, was mostly absent in my family. I cannot
remember an aunt, uncle, or cousin who sounded as if he or she was raised in
rural Arkansas. A product of the Great Depression, they had recognized the
value of speaking and writing well and had cultivated the skills thoroughly. When
they left the hills for the economic opportunities of the larger towns and
cities, they became businessmen, bankers, and even a governor of the state.
And they were storytellers. At family
reunions, over a plate of fried chicken, they became animated: the six hungry
boys of the Delaney basketball team on mules, returning from a game on the
other side of the mountain, fed cracklings and cornbread by a family of
strangers along the way who were slaughtering hogs; the shell shocked veteran
of World War I, putting his big Radiola Grand, powered by a car battery, on the
front porch and playing it so loud every evening that the road crew from
Fayetteville, camping down by the White River, poked a screwdriver through the
speaker; the philanderer whose wife locked him in the outhouse and left him
there all night to stall an escapade; the local bootlegger, shot in the leg,
fed by a committee of local women while he lay recuperating in the local jail,
and the fear and trembling of my aunt Lake, ten years old, who was sent all
alone to carry his lunch to him. The dirt basketball court on the Delaney
square, the cannery whistle that called people to seasonal work, the train that
came down the Frisco line from Fayetteville in the morning on its way to
Pettigrew and returned in the afternoon, the swimming hole at the old mill dam,
the swinging bridge. Story after story. The little hamlets that populated the
White River in the early twentieth century are almost as real to me as my memory
of my home town when I was a child. If writing is a process of self-discovery,
then my writing has been an attempt to find myself in those places, among those
characters.
Robert K. Gilmore says in the preface to
his book Ozark Baptizings, Hangings,
and Other Diversions that the people of the Ozarks have always had
a strong sense of belonging to a particular place. They are suspicious of
strangers, fiercely independent, and cherishers of solitude. The land of the
Ozarks, “the hills, the gullies, the hardwood, the rivers, the small
communities,” has formed the character of the people who live here. And it
forms the characters in my work. When Sherwood Anderson advised William
Faulkner to go back to Mississippi and write about that little patch of ground
Faulkner knew so well, Anderson understood the power that a place can have over
a writer’s imagination. The Ozarks are that for me—a patch of ground and the characters
who are grown from it.
I’m a little embarrassed to confess that,
having grown up in this fertile story-telling ground, I did not know, as so
many writers seem to have known, at the age of six, or eight, or ten, that I
would become a writer, and that the desire to write burned in me from that
early age. I do, in fact, remember, after having seen the movie Bambi, at about the age of ten, sitting
down that very evening and writing a long tale about a young deer, a story that
was, I’m sure, to my parents indistinguishable from the movie. And that was the
extent of my burning passion to write at that age. More like a little spark
than a burning flame. The truth is that I was, as my uncle used to say, a lost
ball in high weeds for most of my youth. Like many other young men, I began
writing poetry in college—vague, romantic, anti-war, anti-social. It was
terrible poetry, but it felt good to write it and to share the praise of other
dreamy young men and women who were also writing bad poetry. The compulsion to
write fiction didn’t strike me until I had been teaching literature in a small
college for several years. I was immersing myself and my students in the usual
suspects from Southern literature—Faulkner, O’Connor, and their progeny—when
the long recessive family story-telling gene began to reassert itself. Early
on, I leaned a bit too heavily on the great-great-grandfather, and I will
always be thankful to Alan Cheuse, who in a writing workshop at Peugeot Sound
advised me to put the old soldier on the closet shelf, and let all of that
material be a hidden reservoir to the real stories that would come. There is,
after all, in most of our lives, plenty of material. For me, the alcoholics,
the quiet women who end their lives with pistols, the disappointed ambitions,
the unfaithful husbands, the jealousy, the bitterness. And, of course, the few
grand successes and the many simple, long lives of work and pleasure.
I frequently discover stories in
small-town or area newspapers. I’m not likely to find high crimes and felonies there
as much as the petty thefts and audacious accidents that are part of most of
our lives. A story about a pickup truck crashing into a small country church,
reported a few years ago in the local county paper, gave me the idea for a
story titled “The Scar” that ultimately found its way into the Editions
Bibliotekos anthology Puzzles of Faith
and Patterns of Doubt. The obituary section of the local paper is a
treasure of names that seem to carry a heavy weight of story.
For most of my adult life, I have been
deeply involved in theater, both acting and directing. As an actor, “creating”
a character from the script of a play has always come naturally to me, developing
a personality with a particular voice and way of moving, a strong yearning. I
have often thought that acting was that other career that I might have pursued,
that other road I might have taken. Some writers have discovered that acting is
a first cousin to creating fictional characters. Charles Dickens, as a young
man, considered a career in acting. Throughout his career, he acted in and
directed a traveling troupe that raised money for the families of stricken
writers and that once played before the Queen. When he gave public readings, he
acted the characters so powerfully—Bill Sykes killing Nancy in Oliver Twist—that women in the audience
fainted. My fiction typically begins with a character—a face, a voice, an
attitude to life. When I write that character into a piece of fiction, sitting
at my desk, I “get into character,” as I do when acting, so I can feel and
think like the character. I have been somewhat surprised to find that some of
my best characters are women, though I have never played a female role on stage.
A good friend and fiction writer, Roger
Hart, once told a room full of students that he thought of story ideas as
pictures that hung a little crooked on the wall. Something is not quite right, is
a little crooked. It suggests a setting and a few characters, and the story
becomes an exploration of what that dislocated something is and how the
characters find their way through it. I like that image of the crooked picture.
Desire is at the heart of all tension. Characters yearn for something. If the yearning
is wrongly placed or frustrated—sometimes even when it is satisfied—the result
is pain. Most people will do whatever it takes to make the pain go away. I have
to wonder what good happiness and success in fiction are if they do not spring
from suffering and failure. And what good are suffering and failure if they do
not offer a chance of redemption? All of my stories look for that redemption.
It can be hard to come by in this world, and it doesn’t always look like
happiness. But the world being a place that is both awful and beautiful,
redemption must always be a possibility, whether or not it is realized in the
story. When I discovered the work of Lewis Nordan, I felt a shock of
recognition and a refreshing sense of something new and true and wonderful.
After reading his novel Sharpshooter
Blues, I spent the following year reading all the fiction he had published.
His is a violent, magico-realist world populated by weird and wonderful
characters looking for love in all the wrong ways. But it’s a redemptive world
for all that.
The only kind of fiction I’m interested
in writing is realism. I admire genre fiction, such as science fiction or
fantasy, when it is well written, but I have little interest in writing it
myself. I admire genre fiction that uses the tools of realism, when it does so
in a literary way, as is often the case in crime fiction or western fiction.
Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is a
favorite summer read. A few years ago I began reading the Belgian crime fiction
writer George Simenon, both his Maigret detective series and his roman durs, the hard novels that are a
match for Camus and Sartre in tone and style. McMurtry and Simenon are writers
who have transcended their genre. Over the past few months I have begun to read
Scandinavian crime fiction, writers such as Kerstin Ekman, Arnold Indridison,
and Lars Kepler, but especially the Swedish writer Hakan Nesser, whose
Inspector VanVeeteren reminds me of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse.
Scandinavian writers are highly influenced by their environment—long periods of
dark, cold, and wet, opposed by short bursts of summer. Place is an abiding
power in their work. Darkness pervades their treatment of humanity in the same
way it pervades Camus and Sartre, and the better writers among them seem to be
influenced by the mid-20th century existentialists.
Influence for a writer is a sticky
question. When I’m asked which writers influenced me, I hesitate. Everything a
writer reads influences how he/she writes. But the question of discernible
influence gets at a complex issue. Having a PhD in 19th-century
British literature and being steeped in that period, I struggled, when I began
to write fiction, to silence those ponderous Romantic and Victorian voices and
find the contemporary voices that ultimately reproduced themselves in my
fiction. Out with Dickens (though surely not quite totally absolutely) and out
with Thomas Hardy, and in with Louise Erdrich, Lewis Nordan, and Cormac
McCarthy. I would like to claim kinship
with Faulkner and O’Connor, and any writer raised in the South could make that
claim, but in fact, those writers, whom Lewis Nordan calls “the family,” are
surely the outer verge of style for contemporary writers, are in fact, as they
are called, the “gothic” of southern style. I admire the minimalism of Raymond
Carver, and I love the rich, layered prose of James Joyce. But exactly how have
these very different styles affected my work?
I confess to being one of those writers
who struggle to establish a disciplined schedule of writing. I’ve always been
able to blame my teaching, scholarly work, raising kids. But I’m running out of
excuses. Charles Dickens sat down at his desk at 9:00 in the morning and worked
until 2:00 in the afternoon, regardless of whether he wrote one page or twenty.
Writing fiction does take a block of time, enough time for the writer to move himself
or herself into the world of the work, to crack open the characters’ hearts
again. It takes time to step out of the real world and into the fictive. So
creating some kind of schedule that allows you to do that becomes a fundamental
decision about whether you are able to write or not. I tend to be streaky—when
a story is working, I ignore other things and stay with the story.
A colleague of mine at the university
teases me for being old fashion in my writing method. I write with a pen on a
lined pad of paper until I have finished a chapter or a story, revising
whenever I start a new writing session. Then the chapter/story is transferred
to the word processor, and revised again. I tend to do a lot of revising as I
go, until the story or novel is complete, at which time I look at the bigger
structural revision questions. At that point, the word processor is a great
help, especially in the ability to move material around and to save deleted
material unchanged or simply delete it altogether. In the initial writing of
the piece, I like the feel of the pen on the paper. My colleague laughs when I
say it, but I have a heightened sense of physicality in the writing, a sense of
carving the images and lines out of nothing onto a piece of highly processed
wood. I like that feeling, and I go so far as to believe it makes me more
physical, more concrete, in my writing. I’m an Episcopalian, and so I have no
problem at all with that idea. Episcopalians are very incarnational in their
view of the world. We bring our physical bodies into our worship—kneeling,
bowing, crossing ourselves, focusing on the Eucharist, the body and the blood.
I am currently trying to finish the
revisions on the second novel of a projected Ozark trilogy. The first novel was
set at the beginning of the 20th century, this second during the
Depression era, and the third will be set in the late 20th century. Daniel
Woodrell’s highly successful novel Winter’s
Bone, and the movie made from it, project the dark side of life in the
Ozarks, a vision of meth labs and gratuitous violence, but that subculture is
not representative of the broader life in the region. The southern Ozarks are
populated mostly by hard working rural and small town people, whose lives are
governed largely by the forces of nature and of social and religious
strictures. Their roots go back through Appalachia to Good King Billy, William
of Orange, and his Protestant army. And overwhelmingly Protestant they remain.
Their religious sentiment still runs deep, with their sense of moral rectitude.
My family has been shaped through five generations by this ethos. My writing abrades
constantly against it, like a knife blade against the whetstone. With deep
religious sentiment and a strong sense of moral rectitude come the potential
for both great love and terrible abuse, both grace and judgment, gentleness and
violence, sacrifice and manipulation. These are the poles between which my
characters move and between which I seek to place myself and my work.
In spite of writing so much bad poetry in
college, I never gave up writing it. It still excites me, as one poet has put
it, to write a novel in a few lines. I spend part of my writing time on poetry.
I love the poetry of William Stafford, his Buddhist view of the simplicity of
life. The intensity of poetic language, and its concreteness, make the reading
and writing of poetry a good exercise for a fiction writer. The caveat there
for me is that I have to be careful of getting bogged down in beautiful
language and stifling the plot.
As I think about what I really want to
communicate in my work, I remember a course I taught in Modernist literature a
couple of years ago. Our only texts were Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses.
One of my objectives was for the students to see that what seems to be darkness
can sometimes be light. Another objective was that students understand that
great literature creates highly complex characters who can be both despicable
and sympathetic. Enter Leopold Bloom, protagonist of Ulysses. Working slowly through that difficult text, most of the
students came to see that we are all Leopold Bloom, all outcasts, all keeping a
tight lid on our deepest self, all noble in the little ways that make us human.
Leopold Bloom is Everyman/woman. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the character Satan, when asked about Hell, says,
“Where e’er I go is Hell, myself am Hell.” After teaching Ulysses, that line became for me, “Where e’er I go is Bloom, myself
am Bloom.” The great humanistic objective of great literature, after all, is to
communicate vividly our common humanity. I hope my own work does that.
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Copyright©2013
by Gary Guinn
