Author Interview

Clyde Edgerton talks with Daren Dean of Image

You grew up in the rural South, where most of your fiction takes place. Would you care to talk a little about your upbringing?

I was raised in a postwar fundamentalist Baptist church. Those who’ve been there understand. Many of the adults seemed to treat me as one of their own, as a nephew, perhaps, and that was an especially positive part. There were church camping trips with the Royal Ambassadors, who are sort of like the Boy Scouts. (The girls’ group was called the Girls’ Auxiliary, an interesting word choice.) Church members did not drink alcohol openly, though many smoked cigarettes, there was no public profanity, and among children at least there seemed to be a belief that if a person drank or cursed he or she was bound for eternal damnation. There was no doubting this. It was as certain as tomorrow’s sunrise. Quarterlies published by the Southern Baptist Convention formed the foundation for Sunday school lessons, and they presented a narrow and harsh interpretation of the Bible. The emphasis was not so much on what to do in this world of ours as on what not to do. There was talk of love, but that was trumped by fear. This general philosophy was illustrated by my mother taking me to Central Prison in Raleigh in the late forties to see what I thought was the electric chair. (I’ve since learned that it was the gas chamber chair, which is a load off my mind.) Luckily for me, my mother was in some senses very tolerant and wanted me to see and experience the world.

You have mentioned reading Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Mark Twain, and others. What other writers do you look to for inspiration?

As well as the writers I mentioned, I look to Lewis Nordan, Larry Brown, Mark Richard, Cormac McCarthy, Turgenev in Fathers and Sons (for his use of dialogue), Chekhov (for his refusal to take sides in his short stories, and for what he says about writing, and for his notebooks), Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel (especially on the need to embrace uncertainty).

For adjunct inspiration I’ve also recently read Harold Bloom, 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 Books).

My focus is relatively narrow in terms of fiction I enjoy. It’s mostly southern.
In my early thirties I discovered Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. (Most of my adult life until then had been spent flying airplanes and studying teaching methods and educational sociology.) Reading them, I realized that rather than invent stories from my imagination alone, I could remake my own extended family and life experience into stories. I practically memorized Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”—in part because I was in some readers’ theater productions of it, playing several different parts, including Mama, and also because the story seemed to be made of my own private language. I’d never heard Welty read, nor seen her, until May 14, 1978, when 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, I went to my journal and wrote, “Tomorrow I will start writing fiction seriously.” This was when I was thirty-three.

Welty wrote in her essay “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?

I think Miss Welty is right (for me), and I do my best to not consider theme as a message to the reader. Otherwise, my fiction is likely to fail. If I ever find myself trying to deliver messages consistently, I’ll need to consider essay writing or preaching as a career—or hobby—so that purpose and form are more likely to be aligned. Having said this, I believe some writers are able to write successful fiction that grows from their zeal to reform. But more of this kind of fiction fails than succeeds, I’d guess.

What do you think of the misconception that you are a kind of folksy, humorous southern writer? The humor is certainly there in your work, but you also write about desperately serious things: war, drifters, people facing death—and always with a moral compass.

A few reviewers have noted “folksy” or “quirky” characters. But I still remember a time when I wished that any reviewer would say anything about my writing at all, so I 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 at times they seem to see southerners as belonging to one of 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 people.

Silas House once 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 they started using the Internet at the same time as everyone else. Where does this stereotype of southern backwardness come from, and do you think the South is truly evolving?

As with most stereotypes, 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 will always make fun of each other, like monkeys jumping up and down, grinning and pointing fingers—except the country cousin is often having too much fun outdoors to worry about pinhead uppity intellectuals who wear turtlenecks and with their lips near the rims of their wineglasses spout off about Wittgenstein and red states while standing perfectly still. Most stereotypes help the people who perpetuate them 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 Appalachian Mountains?

Are southern writers the best ones out there? What makes them so good?

Southern writers are best. Roy Blount Jr. recently said at a book conference in North Carolina that the literature of the South remains distinct because “the South gave the Enlightenment a pass,” and that while other Americans worship reason and wrestle with doubt, “southerners believe in something whether it’s stupid or not.” He added, less critically, that southern writers are generally less concerned with making a point than with crafting stories about people, rich in voice, texture, and language. The nature of daily life in the South from the Civil War up into the 1950s or later has supported a preponderance of told stories. On the other hand, southern writing can be awful, worse than the worst of New York writing, in that overly abstract but well-written material is better than overly cute, poorly written material….

As for my own literary preferences, I was brought up in a family that almost worshipped ancestors, avoided discussing most abstractions, and talked a lot about cooking, eating, relatives, neighbors, farming, weather, and animals. This wasn’t necessarily an insular upbringing—it was the norm for most of the human race over the last several hundred thousand years—and this environment supports stories about human relationships. I guess I favor 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.

You seem to like using things that actually happened as springboards into scenes. How does that work and why is it so effective?

For me that’s what fiction writing is about in the main: translating, rather than inventing, though plenty of inventing is involved. For me fiction is creative translating. In many cases the real thing provides only the structure for the made-up event. I’ve also found that it helps me to put made-up events in real settings.

My characters usually reach through windows in that wall that separates them from real people, and from those real people, me included, they grab little habits or pieces of personality. As this happens, they begin to acquire their own characters and motivations. And if I’m lucky, what I’m writing about is all the time becoming clearer.

You teach at University of North Carolina at Wilmington in the creative writing program. What is the value of an MFA?

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 that save them a few years in finding the characters and situations they were born to write about, and a few shortcuts that help them write better prose and poetry earlier in their careers than they would otherwise. And an MFA may aid in getting a teaching job.

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? Things I’ve read about you seem to downplay your education—nobody calls you Dr. Edgerton. Why is that?

 “Dr. Edgerton” would create the kind of barriers I generally don’t like. 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. I may use readers’ theater and film a bit more than others in workshop instruction, and I try consciously to 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.”

What’s your writing schedule like?

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 young children. But my writing schedule will soon smooth out into something resembling a couple or three hours on most mornings. That’s what works best for me.

I know you play guitar and banjo. Do you play any other instruments? How did you get interested in music? Who are you listening to now?

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—or, when I’m really ambitious, 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 wanted to stop taking music lessons, 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 Lovett and some Tom Waits, Delbert McClinton, and most of Ry Cooder’s music. And Ray Charles from the early days. To the extent my talent allows, they and Dr. John and Professor Longhair are my influences. I like 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 is just getting up and running. 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.

A longer version of this interview originally appeared in Image. Reprinted by permission.