The Creative Kid

Southern Voices

Remembering the writer inside the child

By Laurel Eldridge

On April 2–4, the Tivoli Theatre will echo with the sounds of stories, poems and lively discussions in Southern drawl as the Arts & Education Council’s Conference on Southern Literature returns for its 15th biennial gathering of world-class writers and their fans. Described as the “leading literary event in the South” by author Louis Rubin, the conference brings 1,000 people from all over the country to see their favorite writers participate in discussions, readings and book signings.

The 2009 Conference celebrates 20 years of collaboration between the AEC and the Fellowship of Southern Writers, an organization founded by Eudora Welty, Cleanth Brooks and other literary legends. The collaboration has enabled the AEC to bring the best Southern writers to Chattanooga for the conference and its education enrichment programs, which reach hundreds of students and teachers in Hamilton County each year. Keynote speakers at the 2009 Conference will be Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle. Among the many well-known writers participating at the conference are novelists Clyde Edgerton, Dorothy Allison, Allan Gurganus and Allen Wier, who took a moment to share with Chattanooga Parent their own experiences as “creative kids.”

Clyde Edgerton

Clyde Edgerton is the author of several novels, including Raney, Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks, and Lunch at the Piccadilly. A teacher of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, he most recently published a memoir, Solo: My Adventures in the Air and a novel, The Bible Salesman.

What did you read when you were a kid?

Mostly the Bible, but also Boys’ Life magazine, and then in the eighth grade I started ordering paperbacks through my public school. I particularly remember The Kid Strikes Back, The Red Car, and Old Yeller.

When did you realize you wanted (or needed) to write?

I realized I wanted and needed to write when I saw Eudora Welty read “Why I Live at the P.O.” on PBS, May 14, 1978. After she read, I wrote in my journal, “Tomorrow I will begin writing fiction seriously.” And I did, and have been at it since. It was a “born again” experience.

How did growing up in the South feed that artistic urge?

Well, in the rural South I grew up in, there seemed to be an emphasis on the objective world along with the metaphysics of the Old Testament. And then, at age 18, I hit Chapel Hill with its emphasis on ideas, reason, John Dewey and art. A little tension arose. My yeoman farmer kin was coming out of the post-Civil War era; I was thrust into the Civil Rights era. A kind of tension continued, and, with patriotism shining, I entered a war (Southeast Asia, 1970) I came to believe was wrong. Tension mounted, and I’m still relieving and reliving the tension with stories.

Dorothy Allison

Born in Greenville, S.C., Dorothy Allison lives in Northern California. Her first novel, Bastard out of Carolina, was a National Book Award finalist and became an award-winning movie. Her second, Cavedweller, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was adapted for the stage and screen. She is currently working on another novel, She Who.

What did you read when you were a kid?

I read everything I could get my desperate hands on … fiction, poetry, biography, short stories and modern library editions of great books. I also read newspapers, magazines, church pamphlets and “those” books I found under my parents’ bed.

Now I have a 16-year-old boy who buries himself in books just the way I did, and I know that no matter how much he talks about school being a waste of his time, so long as he is reading, he will be fine. Reading repays all the time spent on it.

When did you realize you wanted (or needed) to write?

I started writing poetry and stories and even a play in verse when I was still in grammar school. I was vaguely ashamed of this, since no one I knew did anything like it.… I showed almost no one what I wrote, and except for a few things my mother kept, I destroyed all of it.

It was after college … that I began to write stores in almost desperate earnest. I felt as if I knew something that no one else did—stories about people I loved that the world held in great contempt.

How did growing up in the South feed that artistic urge?

Two things fed my writing urge. The first is common all over the South—that ongoing storytelling impulse. My aunts told wonderful, terrible stories, endless tales of family and friends that went on and on like the unending novel of the counties where we lived. Of course, they only told those stories when they thought “the children” were not close enough to hear those stories. I would hide out where I could listen and not be caught—just to hear the unexpurgated version of why he went to prison or why she fed the baby poison. I was in awe and wanted to know everything—which leads me to the second thing that fed my writing urge (which is also common all over the South).

They would not tell me the story I most wanted to know.

Every time I asked about an event or a person or a family legend, someone would purse their lips and look around as if someone were waiting to catch them betraying a secret.…Worse still, my mother never would tell me anything. Her silence drove me crazy with curiosity.

I started making up my own versions of what happened. Everything I am grew out of that.

Allan Gurganus

Allan Gurganus is a fiction author from North Carolina. His works include Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People and The Practical Heart. His next work will be stories and novellas called Assisted Living.

What did you read when you were a kid?

Since my childhood backyard adjoined acres of woods, I read very little as a boy. In school, I skated through by funny comments and faked book reports. At home I made camps, built dams, trapped rabbits in boxes only to release them. My childhood might have been one lived in 1840: mandatory Sunday visits to grandparents, enforced church three times weekly, living unsupervised in an everyday wilderness.

Only while onboard an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam disasters, did I, at age 19, find myself forced into reading. There was a library onboard. There were views of whatever ocean we sailed.

Suddenly Literature became a choice companion, an adult playground, a worthy occupation.

How did growing up in the South feed that artistic urge?

I came to reading and writing all at once. I had been a lazy student. But I became, at once, an avid obsessive reader. I wrote myself reports of most books read. (I later got two years’ college credit for my Navy reading). I was too innocent to even guess how difficult writing a book must be. Thank God for what little we know, starting out.

Growing up a Southerner meant knowing the names of birds and trees and plantsan excellent head start for any writer. (My New York pals knew pigeons and the roses sold in florists, period. They seemed proud of this. I pitied them).

A great Southern advantage: growing up among people of many races. There was always farm land, owned by our family for generations and widely known by our own name. All these privileges fed my sense of entitlement to stories documented and invented, tales real then imagined and finally written down.

Allen Wier

Allen Wier is the author of a book of stories, Things About to Disappear, and four novels, Blanco, Departing as Air, A Place for Outlaws and Tehano. He teaches at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he was awarded the Hodges Chair for Distinguished Teaching.

What did you read when you were a kid?

I read the usual children’s stories and poems—I especially liked “Hansel and Gretel,” and we had an old hardback copy with wonderful illustrations.… My mother and I read, together, out loud, the Kings James Bible and a volume of Charles Dickens’ collected works. Later I read stacks of Classics Illustrated comic books that whetted my appetite and sent me to the library for the real versions. That is how I discovered the work of William Goyen, a writer who came to mean a great deal to me and who I was lucky enough to get to know and call a friend in my adult life. His first novel, The House of Breath, was set in Texas, and the characters all talked with the same twang and music as members of my family. That was the beginning of a life-long connection between Goyen (the work and the man) and me.

When did you realize you wanted (or needed) to write?

I was a senior in college and facing the military draft, likely to Vietnam, and considering whether I was brave enough to be a conscientious objector or to flee to Canada or to Sweden, but I worried that my motives had as much to do with fear as with a moral stand, and I did not think I could bear to leave this country and possibly never be allowed to return. A friend asked if I had entered the undergrad fiction writing contest. I had, still have, no idea why he assumed I would enter such a contest. After he mentioned it, I wrote a story—my first, really—and it won and was published in the campus lit mag.

One of my professors knew I had gone to high school in Louisiana, and he wrote a letter recommending me to graduate school at LSU. They wrote and said they were holding an assistantship for me if would apply. My other options being the military or flight, I applied quick as a rabbit and, soon, I was learning to read as a writer. I revised that undergraduate story and The Southern Review published itmy first publication.

How did growing up in the South feed that artistic urge?

I grew up in Texas, Mexico and Louisiana. My roots were all in Texas, and that felt both Western and Southern. My mother had taught in a rural, one-room schoolhouse in South Texas, and she was a reader. In Mexico, using a chalkboard on an easel, she taught me to read and write and count. I had musical Mexican talk all around me and my daddy’s storytelling and my mother’s reading out loud, both my parents with a soft Texas twang.