How did you become a writer?
I earned my Ph.D. wanting to be a Shakespeare scholar. But the truth is I wasn’t any good at it. I didn’t have the kind of analytical mind necessary to illuminate a text. And attempts to publish in the field were torture for me.
It was because I couldn’t get an academic job, even with a doctorate, that I became a writer.
I did work part-time jobs during that time and one job was as a night watchman for a company that made fishing rods—Shakespeare of Arkansas. So at least I was still working in my field.
During that time I was part of a writing program for a year. After that I was teaching myself to write fiction, and I’d go through my pages and draw a red circle around every image. If I didn’t have enough red circles, I considered the page incomplete, and I would go back and fill it up with images of things to see, taste, touch, and smell in every paragraph.
The process has become intuitive for me, and it’s one I use with my students. Once we’ve looked at the structure of a story to determine exactly what it’s about, I lead them sentence by sentence through each paragraph and ask them to reimagine every one, as I do in my own writing. I’m teaching them to paint, to draw, and also to find the right musical notes.
Your writing has been described as somewhat surreal, reminiscent of Thurber. How would you describe your vision as a writer?
In all my years of school I had never quite understood what people meant by a writer’s vision. Then one day it dawned on me what my own fictional vision is. It’s a magical landscape just askew of the real, historical universe. That world, that created planet, doesn’t quite square with the world I live in.
I was fascinated by Thurber’s cartoons as a kid, though I couldn’t always figure out what they meant. I’ve always had a kind of cartoonish vision. My world has been one where I would see things as clearly as anyone else did, but when I reported them people would say, “That’s not the way it really was. You’ve made their heads too big, you’ve made them outlandish in some ways.”
Some time later, still just a kid, I read Thurber’s University Days. The totally real and believable silliness of his people fascinated me. In some sense, every story I write is a retelling of “The Night the Bed Fell.”
That outlandish quality might also be called grotesque, similar in ways to the characters of other Southern writers such as Flannery O’Connor. Why do you think Southern writing is peopled with such bizarre characters?
I think a lot of storytelling, Southern or otherwise, is about remarkable events. Death, disease and disfigurement, dwarfism and shrunken mummies, are not necessarily more common in one place than in another, but in places with a strong oral tradition these extraordinary phenomena naturally draw a lot of attention.
My theory about the grotesque in my own work, and in storytelling generally, is that it’s a way of saying, “This is more remarkable than anything you’ve seen today; this is even more remarkable than your own crazy family!”
Another more arcane theory about Southern storytelling is that the South, defeated in the Civil War and occupied by outsiders, became separate and defensive. I wouldn’t want to imply that slavery didn’t also cause a psychological separateness, but I believe there’s something inherent in being Southern that derives from the aftermath of the war. We still have the lingering attitude: “This is how bad it was, and this is how we laugh at it.” I think the grotesque has an element of humor in it, and humor is a way of dealing with pain. It’s a method of managing anger.
What other works have influenced your writing?
DC Comics—I preferred ones that mythologized a world, such as Superman with his secret identity that kept people from knowing exactly who he was.
And the rhythms of nursery rhymes influence my writing. I hear songs and rhythms such as jump-rope chants before I ever get the words. I often have to search for the right words to fit the rhythms that are already there in my mind.
Songs and rhythms, especially of blues music, seem important to your books. How does blues music influence your writing?
My feelings about blues music are all tied up with my feelings about black people. In the ’40s and ’50s when I was growing up in the South, Blues and Rhythm and Blues were forbidden—“race music” they called it then. But for some reason, my parents let me listen to it. And I listened compulsively. I knew the words to the most obscure songs. When I was twelve, I got a harmonica, thinking because I had listened so closely to the music that I would teach myself to play it. But I couldn’t do it.
And later I would seek that music out. I remember being the only white face in the black clubs because I wanted to hear that music and be a part of it. And one time my parents took me to a club where a black piano player named Al took me aside and taught me to play an eight-beat measure. He told me that was a “boogie-woogie beat.” He said, “If you listen you’ll hear it underneath most of the songs you listen to. And you can probably hear it other places, too.” I took that metaphorically, to mean I would hear it out in the world. And now I often find myself writing “eight to the bar.” I deliberately tried to incorporate it into the sections of Wolf Whistle that include the Blues musicians.
Robert Johnson seems to hold special sway over Wolf Whistle, since the Blues musicians are often playing his music. Can you tell us more about that?
The connection is a little mysterious for me, not a direct and easily articulated one. He was a hero for me when I was a kid, and I had so few heros.
In many ways Robert Johnson has become a kind of mythological figure, the quintessential Blues musician. He was said to have bargained with the devil for his talent. He drank a lot, ran with women, and was poisoned by a jealous husband. They recently found his grave near my hometown in Mississippi and I always make a point of going there when I’m down that way. And, of course, Emmett Till was also killed near my hometown, so I’m sure there’s some connection my mind is making there.
The murder of Emmett Till had a tremendous impact on the civil rights movement. How did it affect your life?
I had never really thought there was something wrong with black and white schools, white and black water fountains, white and black bathrooms, blacks in the back of the bus, and grown people saying “Sir” to children.
Wolf Whistle is in some ways an angry book. I still have a hard time talking about my upbringing in the South without a certain anger rising up in me. I feel angry sometimes that I was limited in these ways—although it’s nobody else’s fault—that I was put in a position of treating a whole race of people like peasants, like animals. And the story I wanted to tell was what happened to the people in a community where a murder was committed and they suddenly realized it might be their fault. This is the white story of the murder of Emmett Till.
Growing up in the South used to seem like a limitation on my writing. Now it just seems like it’s what I was intended to write about. I wasn’t able to write about the place when I was there. I have to speak about my characters from a distance, because that way I can do it more lovingly.