Fried Chicken and Coffee: Online Home of Rusty Barnes

Interview with Dorothy Allison

Posted on June 24, 2009 by Rusty

This is not my interview–I will have some up one of these days, though–but one by Susanne Dietzel from Tulane University, conducted in 1995.

When I taught a writing course using what I called White Trash Literature maybe ten years ago, nearly every author we read was met initially with skepticism and ennui–another themed writing class. Most of the students had taken the class because of the subject matter, though, thinking I don't know what–that it would be an easier grade? And for some of them it was–it was a tough class to keep on topic,because I had so much to say and and a captive audience. But the one book they were uniformly floored by was Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina. Like many inexperienced readers, students thought novels were true a great deal of the time, if not always, and this book, and the harrowing film made from it, stuck to their brains like burdock, and reinforced this mistake, and it took some talking to disabuse them. And the film showing was one of the few times I had multiple walk-outs. As I said, what struck them, always, was what they termed 'brutal honesty.' They respected the text too much to question or discuss it, except for a couple voluble quick wits who made fun of it. So I was glad to see Dietzel dealing with that aspect of Allison's work specifically in this interview.

This interview was conducted as part of the annual Zale Writer in Residence Program at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women at Tulane University in November 1995. This year the program committee had invited award-winning novelist Dorothy Allison, who is most famous for her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, to be the Zale Writer-in-Residence. Dorothy Allison's work is securely located on the borders of southern and working-class literature, with deep roots in feminist and lesbian-feminist activism and politics.

Dorothy Allison is the author five books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction and the winner of numerous literary awards. She grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and Florida and now lives with her partner, son, and dogs in northern California.

This interview was conducted by Susanne Dietzel, a Visiting Scholar at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women and doctoral candidate in American Studies and Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is now a Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Tulane University.

This interview was transcribed by Kelly Donald and Michelle Attebury, and (only slightly) edited by Susanne Dietzel.

Susanne Dietzel- Dorothy Allison is an award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist. She is also an activist in feminist and lesbian feminist politics and, later on I want to talk a little bit about the connection between writing and politics. She has published five books, the first was a collection of short stories called TRASH came out in 1989. Her second book is a collection of poetry called THE WOMEN WHO HATE ME, poems 1980–1990 that came out in 1991. Dorothy Allison is most famous for her novel BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA, which came out in 1992, and won the Lambda Award, and was nominated for the National Book Award. She followed that one up with her absolutley wonderful collection of essays called SKIN that was published by Firebrand Books in 1994 and here is her newest book, called TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE, which is a memoir about fictional and real families coming to terms with each other and with their history. Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and Florida and now lives in Northern California with her partner, child and dogs.

Susanne Dietzel- What I find most striking about your writing is your brutal, but loving honesty. As a reader, you just come to love, but also hate your characters. Your fiction then is to some extent relentless, because you take your reader right into those experiences. But again, I kept coming back to the themes of honesty and love that I think are really the foundation of your writing.

Dorothy Allison- I have a theory about writing fiction. I often run into young writers who ask me the question "How can you tell those terrible stories about people? How can you make them seem almost real, or liveable or loveable?" And my theory is that if you create a character and if you tell enough about that character, even if you are creating someone who is a villain or someone who does terrible things, if you tell enough about them, then you have the possibility of loving them. And that if you tell enough about a character, even if you use a character based on people you know, you don't create an act of betrayal. It is when you use characters in small ways that you betray them. The key is to make the portrait as full as possible and it is not possible if you lie. It is not possible if you try to hide. And the thing that writers hide is themselves. I don't belive you can be any good as a writer if you're trying to hide yourself. So, I get told a lot that I'm brutally honest. I essentially think that I want to do it right, and I don't believe that you can if you try to shave off any margin of safety. If you're trying to be safe, you got no business writing. If you're trying to control what happens, you really don't have a whole lot of chance. The only thing you can control is to create as full a portrait as possible. Then you can make people seem human. But you don't really get any safety in that. And you don't get to lie — except of course that you are telling great lies.

Continue reading.

Posted in bastard out of carolina, dorothy allison, interview, susanne dietzel | 2 Comments

How I Learned To Shut Up And Listen

Posted on June 22, 2009 by Rusty

What to say about Rachel who pressed
a dark pistol against her chest and gave up
in the middle of the day at the lakefront—
the hot cutting from tit to ass cheek,
missing all of the organs except her
mind which to this day she coats
in cocaine and sugar daddies.

Or Jean Paul who would tell me
what blow jobs were like when we
were kids, and he'd take advantage
of a smile and feathered hair to laugh
when laughing was inappropriate. His
stories of making it with the girl
who sat in front of us in class
became a form of history when
they found him hung outside
his girlfriend's trailer.

When I hear television news smile
about the tragedies of being alive—
again and again I wonder what
you are doing. The last time
we talked we fucked against
the wall in complete agreement
that whatever it was, was over.
The idea of a heaven everyone
seems to go out of their way
to avoid. The art of darkness.

What to say about the bad things?
And the ones contemplated while
I pretend to not be another asshole
in middle America? I once fell for
a Filipina hooker with blue contacts.
What is wrong with listening instead
of talking into the deaf wind?

Kenneth Clark has lived in most of the southeastern United States. He writes poetry and micro-fiction. His poetry has appeared in Night Train, Poor Mojo's Almanac(k), and Greatest Uncommon Denominator.

Posted in how i learned to shut up and listen, kenneth clark, poetry | Leave a comment

A Catfish Skeleton Reminder

Posted on June 20, 2009 by Rusty

I have been away on vacation with the fam. At the Museum of Natural History, I ran into a catfish skeleton, so I had my lovely bride Heather take a picture, in lieu of breaking the glass case and committing a crime. I'd take a vacation in the South for sure if someone would take me noodling. I even had takeout catfish nuggets for dinner one night. They were all right.

Stories and more edificational posts coming this week. Here's a travel tip for you: don't drive to DC from Boston. Just don't.

Posted in catfish, dc, heather, musuem of natural history, noodling | 2 Comments

That Secret Code: Working Class Literature

Posted on June 11, 2009 by Rusty

I pulled these interviews by Orman Day from the site of Third Coast several months ago meaning to add to my collection of links on or related to Larry Brown. While I wouldn't call his portion revelatory, exactly, Brown's story resonates even more when compared with the other interviews: Dan Chaon, John McNally, Susan Straight. You only get out of the working-class mindset by isolating yourself, changing social class entirely, pretending to forget what your past is like, becoming an 'other.' To remember what you left is to induce the gut-crunching homesick everyone who leaves feels: you might alienate your family, lose your bone-deep familiarity with your surroundings, and end by apathy your other relationships within that class, but you'll always have that guilt.

I'm posting the introductory portion and a few questions. For the full Monty, visit the Third Coast link in my first paragraph.

Larry Brown, Dan Chaon, John McNally, and Susan Straight tell what working-class literature means to them—how and why they individualize the experiences they do, what they hope to leave behind, and the pleasure they feel when they get a ‘laugh of recognition.’

by Orman Day

Their childhood homes didn’t have shelves lined with leather-bound classics, but they made fervid use of their library cards. Their parents didn’t have the money to take them on European tours of museums and ancient architecture, but they learned that books would let them hike through the elephant grass of Hemingway’s Africa or study the wind-riffled waters of Loch Ness for signs of a huge, hoary snout, and a whip-like tail.

For the four of them, youth was a time when money was tight, but their imaginations were fertile. As early as five, one of them—bored with TV and his stash of books—started to create his own stories in secret.

In their twenties, they couldn’t rely on trust funds to finance garret flats in Paris or Brooklyn or San Francisco. Instead, they needed to work to buy their groceries, ink, and reams of paper. One of them joined the Marines and then became a firefighter.

Although the details and geography vary, these four rose out of the working class to win literary plaudits:

Larry Brown—who died of a heart attack at age 53 in November 2004—was a Mississippi native and master of “grit lit” whose work includes the non-fictional On Fire, short story collections Facing the Music and Big Bad Love, and novels Fay, Joe, Father and Son, Dirty Work, and The Rabbit Factory.

Dan Chaon is a Nebraska native who teaches at Oberlin College in Ohio and whose books include the novel, You Remind Me of Me, and the short story collections, Among the Missing and Fitting Ends.

John McNally is an Illinois native who teaches at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and is the author of The Book of Ralph, a fiction, and Troublemakers, a short story collection, and has edited anthologies.

Susan Straight is a California native who teaches at U.C. Riverside and is the author of Aquaboogie, I Been In Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, The Gettin Place, and Highwire Moon. She was a National Book Awards judge in 2004.

Here are their observations about their lives and literature in response to questions sent them by email in 2004. Answers from Brown—who interrupted work on a new book to participate—arrived by snail mail just months before his death in November.

What kind of work did your parents do?

Brown: My mother worked at Camp Electric Company in Memphis when I was a kid, next to Sun Studios. Jerry Lee Lewis used to come in there and get cigarettes from the machine. Later she worked at Katz Drugstore, over on Lamar. Much later, when we moved back to Mississippi, she worked at Sears for a long time, then the North Mississippi Retardation Center, running the switchboard. My father took us away from Mississippi in 1954 because he couldn’t make it sharecropping. He worked at Fruehauf Trailer Company for a long time. Then he painted houses some, and worked at the Mid-South Fair. When we moved back here, he worked at a stove factory in Oxford until he died suddenly early one morning in 1968.

Chaon: My father was a construction worker—a journeyman electrician. My mother was a stay-at-home mom or (as she said) a “housewife.” My dad traveled a lot and during the summers we would sometimes live in a rented trailer house near where he worked. The most memorable of these was an enormous worker camp, a huge trailer encampment outside of Gillette, Wyoming.

McNally: My father was a roofer for thirty-something years, but for about five or so years he tried to run his own wall-washing and rug cleaning business. He bought two machines and put ads in papers, and I’d occasionally go with him to help out. I was probably between six and ten years old. He wasn’t making as much money as he did roofing, which is why he went back, but he always wanted to run his own
business. He hated working for someone. My mother worked in a factory until she had to go on disability leave for health problems. It killed her not to be working. (This is where we used to part ways: she always thought I should have a job, that it would be good for my character; I hated working and would resist looking for a job as long as I could.) She was from a large sharecropping family in Tennessee, and she started picking cotton when she was three. At thirteen, she left home, moved to Memphis, and got a job in a nursing home, working there for about six years before moving to Illinois with her mother and two sisters.

Straight: My mother was born in Switzerland, lost her own mother at age ten, and her family emigrated to Canada and then the US. She left her home in Fontana at age seventeen and began working as a secretary, and she worked for insurance companies and banks for my entire life, except for ten years when she stayed home and raised foster children with her own (five total). My stepfather has had many jobs: he owned a series of laundromats and repair facilities, and when I was in college, he got a great marketing job for a linen company. He is retired.

Was money a major concern?

Brown: Yes. Always. We were very poor.

Chaon: My dad wasn’t very good with money. I remember times when he seemed pretty flush, and other times when it seemed that we were broke. My parents were always buying things and then having to sell them, or having them repossessed.

McNally: Money was always a concern. I tend to think that every argument my mother and father had was about money—and they argued a lot. My father, always looking for some way to make it on his own, would spend what little money we had on, say, “stock” for the flea market; my mother, on the other hand, was the one who had to buy the groceries, etc., so she always knew how much money we had or didn’t have. We used to move from one apartment building to the next—I went to five different grade schools—and the one thing my mother always wanted was a house. Once we finally moved into a house (my sophomore year of high school), my mother feared we were going to lose it, and my father always complained about how much it cost. The house ratcheted up the stress-level for the few years we lived there. After my mother died, my father (burdened with medical bills) filed for bankruptcy and let the bank take the house.

Straight: Money was always a concern. Every minute, until I was in college. We wore homemade and used clothing, we ate inexpensive food, and there were lots of kids. But as the clichés go, we had a great time playing ball in the park, running the streets of our neighborhood and the foothills (we loved dirt surfing down the barren hillsides!) and not until I went to high school did I realize how much money and clothes and haircuts mattered.

Remaining interview here, in case you missed it above.

Posted in dan chaon, john mcnally, larry brown, orman day, susan straight, third coast, working class literature | Leave a comment

Love Letter by Donna Vitucci

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Rusty

Dear Sam,

Once they sprung you loose from the war, why go to a no-name Oklahoma town, among strangers? Why hole up in a boarding house with a freckled girl who has no idea the shine and purpose you held in 1932? Why, Sam, do you prefer flat plain to the glory mountain? Why not come home to the sister who wrote you when writing seemed the least effective means of relaying devotion? Come back to your people, who would lavish love and forgiveness in equal measure for all you sacrificed over there. We’d bind your wounds, every one. I would.

The preacher would pour praise from the Sunday pulpit like Saul anointing David, and those praying in the pews would sing your heroics. You were our chosen one, Daddy’s chosen one, first born son, and he never got over you leaving.

While you’ve been gone, Daddy’s told stories we never imagined we’d hear. Darren, he only half understands. To him it’s another way of Daddy soothing him to rock-a-bye-land. The harelipped midwife, once Mama expired, Daddy said, she snapped the pelvis easy as a chicken’s wishbone to get that baby free. Woman said, “She never should have had more than one.” The one being me, and believe me, I wear that mark of being “the one” like a birthmark. Thus, the baby stuck in the canal, our little Darren, got deprived of some oxygen. At least the way he is he’ll never be going in the mine.

Oh, Sam, no reason now not to come home to this West Virginia holler, where I know your heart is, where works a daddy who loves you like a worshipper his God. He took and tried burying that deep affection, but every day Daddy comes up from there more rock and less man. All this time we’re supposing you’re part of the marriage ‘tween him and a first wife. But the woman, he revealed in a fit of drink, took off to be a singer, “or mostly a whore, while I gave my name to another man’s son.” His secret wiped the world black a minute, then the stars came out, twinkling so bright they hurt my ears. My mind clanged like a piston so I hardly heard him add: “Chose my first wife for vices, chose the second on her virtue.”

I know what I’m telling you here is all background, all edge of story because to tunnel to the truth, to write it on paper any clearer would be like greeting the dark mouth of the mine and the decision to take each new day down into it. Like the locomotive you stared at til you realized staring wasn’t going to stop it, til you realized in that contest it was you or flying steel and it was never gonna be you.

Me and Darren, we make the home now. Mothers gone. Yes, two mothers AND two fathers. Sam, I loved you, I love you still. Don’t you see we aren’t blood kin after all? And it would be all right. It would. Even the preacher would say so.

You have my heart.

Lorraine

Born and raised in Cincinnati, Donna feels very nearly southern, what with that Ohio River and Kentucky practically part of her back yard. On her mother’s side of the family every uncle and male cousin has been a truck driver. Before trucks they drove wagons, mostly ice deliveries to the bars in Over-the-Rhine, an inner city neighborhood in the heart of downtown Cincinnati.

Donna’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in dozens of print and online publications, including Natural Bridge, Hawaii Review, Meridian, Gargoyle, Broad River Review, Hurricane Review, Front Porch Journal, Beloit Fiction Journal, Storyglossia, Insolent Rudder, Turnrow, Night Train, Juked, Smokelong Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, and Ginosko.

Posted in donna vitucci, Fiction, love letter | 4 Comments

Writers Who Deserve More Attention I: Tim McLaurin

Posted on June 6, 2009 by Rusty

I mean, besides all of them. 🙂

I'd like to create a warehouse of links occasionally, referencing writers who may or may not be on your list of popular or well-enough-known writers, along with some small commentary. When I do these, they'll be subject to additions and corrections at various points as I find more information, and I'll let y'all know when I edit. Today's writer is Tim McLaurin, a North Carolina native with a few novels, two memoirs and one epic-length poem to his credit.

I discovered his work by following the blurb trail from Harry Crews to Larry Brown to McLaurin. The first book I found was the memoir Keeper of the Moon, probably his best-known book, in which he described his difficult childhood as well as his adult experience in recovery from the multiple myeloma which eventually killed him at age 48 in 2002. I'd read Crews' A Childhood first, so I knew more or less what I could expect from McLaurin. Poverty–hardscrabble poverty–and alcoholism, along with often-rapturous desciptions of the natural world, and considerable attention paid to the whys and wherefores of family interaction. The book remains in the enjoyable though quotidian realm until McLaurin begins to detail his battles with cancer. I wish everyone who ever sent me a cancer story would read this before sending it out again. It is a rock-hard revelation of a story, one you won't forget soon. I recommend, besides Keeper of the Moon, the following titles:

The Acorn Plan
The River Less Run
The Last Great Snake Show
Cured by Fire
Another Son of Man

Here's a small list of relevant links if you'd like to find out more about McLaurin:

Posted in harry crews, links, tim mclaurin | 4 Comments

Blind Lemon, by Jim Parks

Posted on June 4, 2009 by Rusty

"[African-American folklore] is like jazz; there's no inherent problem which prohibits understanding but the assumptions brought to it."

–Ralph Ellison, Paris Review No. 8 Interview by Alfred Chester & Vilma Howard

Walking into the uncomfortable warmth of the building, the odor of warehoused, enfeebled, sick humanity struck the senses like a soft blow from a foul flannel rag. Spotless floors and walls, televisions blaring so that weak ears might hear them, someone struggling weakly to play an old hymn on a spinet from the Baptist book of devotional music, the aromas of overcooked vegetables and meats reducing down to mushy preparations all conspired to make one feel a little bit sick,oppressed.

The researcher, clothed in collegiate chinos and a plaid sport shirt, his steel rimmed spectacles glittering under the bright lights of the nursing home, wore a jaunty jazz man's Kangol cap at a rakish angle.

He tried and tried to get the old man back on the subject.

"No, sir, I mean to ask you about Jefferson, you know. Blind Lemon. Back in Dallas."

The ancient black man, confused, looking up and over his shoulder at his daughter and a nurse, couldn't hear him. He chafed under the wool of the tight Army tunic, running a forefinger around the tight collar with one hand, pointing to a row of campaign ribbons on his chest with the other.

The writer nodded at the ribbons and smiled, scratching an itch in his professorial beard gone gray, white in some spots.

"Is this motha' from the Army, or what? I thought they were interested in how we chase Pancho Villa through all that cactus in them Model T Fords, man."

The writer and the old man's daughter exchanged glances. He had already visited the family home in South Dallas where he and his wife had raised half a dozen kids while he worked on the railroad and in warehouses until he retired. After he had become enfeebled, he went into the rest home near where he had been born, a cotton town an hour's drive from Dallas.

"Daddy, listen. The man say he want to know about the time when Blind Lemon Jefferson stay at our house in South Dallas. You know, the guitar man from Wortham, from Groesbeck, from Marlin. You know, the blues man. He…" Her tone was insistent, though patient, a little loud for politeness.

The old man still didn't understand.

After a lifetime in the news business, the researcher, whose day job as a copy editor on the Dallas daily started as a beat reporter prying facts out of people grief-stricken, scared to death, injured, angry, crazed, knew hearing impairment when he saw it. The man was so hard of hearing he had no idea what was going on.

He had decided he was going to be decorated, once again, for his pre-World War One service in General Black Jack Pershing's skirmishing band of marauders that had pursued the rebel bandit Villa across the border into Ojinaga and beyond, into the barren desert country, after the Mexican chieftain had made raids on Douglas, Arizona, and Presidio, Texas, during the Mexican revolution of 1917.

What made that story interesting was that for the first time, the Army had used motorized transport, Model T's, to pursue the fleeing Mexican irregulars. It was the beginning of the end for the cavalry.

Though it was a fascinating subject, unfortunately it wasn't what he was interested in at the moment. He was working on a coffee table book, a definitive oral history of the famous Dallas neighborhood of jukes and dives, pawnshops and liquor stores, bootleggers's cafes and hotels known as "Deep Ellum."

Another spot for the inevitable birth of the blues, nurtured in the plantation towns and shipped to the hub cities.

It was so-called because Southern people often mispronounce Elm as "Ellum." The "Deep Ellum" neighborhood was anchored at its main point on both sides of railroad tracks with sidings for warehouses just East of downtown Dallas on Elm Street, the same street where almost fifty or so years later and fifteen or twenty blocks west of there an assassin with a high-powered rifle lay in wait for President Kennedy on Dealey Plaza, the Dallas County Courthouse square.

"Does he have a hearing aid? Perhaps if we put it in, he would hear us and catch on," the newspaperman turned historian interjected to the woman, who was, herself, in her seventies.

"Well, he have one, but it's broken. Besides, he only hear what he want to hear." She turned the corners of her mouth down and looked down on the top of her father's head in a severe frown.

The writer was starting to believe it.

He kept the tape recorder rolling. The detail of what he, the old boy with the ancient Army tunic, wanted to talk about was marvelous. There were all sorts of little asides about cantinas, what the people were like, how much beers cost, how much tequila and pulque would set a soldier back, how the old man and another private soldier named Ace Jackson spent most of their time fixing flats caused by cactus thorns and keeping the radiators of all those Model T's cool, then catching up to the skirmish line on the double.

He let a jolly forty-five minutes pass as he listened to all this.

"Was it hot, sir? After all, Presidio is almost always the hottest place in the state during the summer, and…"

The little old buffalo soldier's eyes lit up. He'd finally heard something.

"Hot! Shee-it, man. It was scalding, boy. I was too hot to worry about anything, man.

"It was a little old bridge up there that they had blown up, went across a little gully, and, man, when we got up there they really let us have it. They shot all up in there with some kind of machine guns, man. We had to wait 'em out…"

"Yes, sir, I see," the writer shouted, leaning in close. "What I am interested in was the time you met Blind Lemon Jefferson, the blues man, and he stayed at your house. How long did Blind Lemon Jefferson stay at your house?"

Suddenly, the old man reared back in his chair, his chest expanding, making the brass buttons of his old Army tunic strain, his cataracted, blue-filmed eyes suddenly blazing behind the trifocal lenses of his glasses.

This interview was not about his war with Pancho Villa, after all. It was about how he had invited a newly-arrived traveling man with a guitar to stay awhile in his home.

"Blind Lemon Jefferson! He a git-tar man! That fool stay at my house, man!"

Yes, sir, the writer shouted at him. Where had Jefferson come from?

"He been everywhere, man. Beale Street in Memphis, Sweet Auburn in Atlanta, Sugar Hill everywhere, The Beat in Marlin, The Sunnyside in Houston, all down in Loo-zee-ana and Mississip'a. Man, he been everywhere picking that git-tar and playing them blues."

How did he meet him?

He sat back and pondered.

"I guess up on the corner where he was playing. I don't hardly remember no more. It's been a long time ago."

He grinned back over his shoulder at his daughter and the nurse again.

Did Blind Lemon play on the corner?

"Seem like they all did. They play and folks would dance. Put down cardboard they got from the freight warehouses over on the tracks and dance, spin around on they heads and they backs and come up dancing. Yeah."

Was that in Deep Ellum or in South Dallas?

"Both places. Everywhere. Didn't be no rules against it. They be doin' it everywhere, man. They be inviting the git-tar man on inside the café to have a little somethin' to drink, a soda pop or somethin'."

He slapped his knee and laughed.

"Had plenty to drink in them cafes."

Well, was it his policy to open his home to boarders, or did he just decide that he liked Blind Lemon and decided to…

"Man, you akses way too many questions, boy! Here I thought you were from the Army and you were going to do something about my medal and everything and you be talking about all this here trifling shit like this. This here don't be about nothin'…"

The daughter gave the writer a pointed look, said, "I think Daddy is tired now. Maybe another time."

He folded up the microphone, put his notebook in his pocket, took one last picture and shook hands all around, backing away from the interview feeling confused and sad.

"It's been a pleasure, sir."

"Yeah, man, come back when you can stay a little longer."

He snorted.

"Daddy!" His daughter attempted to shush him as if he was a rude child.

Driving back to Dallas, cutting down through the smooth asphalt between the miles of stout cotton plants and geometrically precise rows of cultivation, he suddenly felt morose, mourning he knew not what.

Was it another missed opportunity to learn something about the train-riding blind man that brought his style of blues to Dallas, had been in Clarksville in the Delta, traveled the South, only to die in mysterious circumstances in Chicago? He was a cipher, but an important cipher, one about which little was known except that he was from the East Texas cotton town of Wortham in Freestone county. It was as little to know as what was known about Robert Johnson.

A blind man with "an uncanny ability to get around without much help from others," the biographers often said in their foreshortened, abbreviated narratives. In fact, many people thought he may have had partial sight, since photographs of him show that he wore clear, thick glasses and not the dark glasses completely blind men usually wear.

"He a git-tar man!"

He fairly shouted it at the windshield, knowing it would become one of his most cherished stories, something to tell people about his life, his work.

He was already framing the section of the book he would make out of the interview. How he loved his craft.

When he reached the city, the tedium of the black land giving way to motels and factories, warehouses and railroad yards, he crossed Trinity River bottoms and detoured into the potholed streets of South Dallas, stopped at a liquor store and bought a short dog of white port and a lemon, squeezed it in the wine, shook it up, poured a little bit on the ground for the dead, their spirits hovering all around him.

Throwing back his head and chugging down the sweet, syrupy stuff, he noticed a wino rolling up on him.

"Save me a spider on that, daddy?"

The writer handed him the bottle, winked, said, "Sure, dude. Knock yourself out."

Starting his old car and throwing it into gear, punching one of his home made tapes into the stereo and turning it up, he threw back his head and shouted, "He a git-tar man!"

Jim Parks is a Texan, a newsman, a truck driver, commercial fisherman, deckhand and a dreamer. Keep him away from the firewater and don't mess with his food or his woman.

Posted in Fiction, Jim Parks | 1 Comment

Quick Informational Post–Request for Submissions

Posted on June 2, 2009 by Rusty

If your creative work owes anything to or resembles the works of the following list of folks, please consider sending me a story or poem or essay to feature on Fried Chicken and Coffee.

Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, Paula K. Gover, Lisa Koger, Chris Offutt, Silas House, Chris Holbrook, Lee Smith, Ron Rash, Richard Ford, Jim Harrison, Donald Ray Pollock, Russell Banks, Tom Franklin, Cormac McCarthy, Andre Dubus, William Gay, Charles Frazier, Tom Cobb, Breece Pancake, Pete Fromm, Nelson Algren, Dorianne Laux, Mary Lee Settle, Mary Hood, Daniel Woodrell, Dagoberto Gilb, James Lee Burke, Isabel Zuber, Willy Vlautin, James Crumley, Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Jayne Ann Phillips, Charlie Smith, Andrew Hudgins, Richard Hugo, James Dickey, Chuck Kinder, Gurney Norman, James Still, Wendell Berry, Mark Richard, Pinckney Benedict, Tim McLaurin, Brad Watson, Steve Yarbrough, Rick Bass, Richard Currey, Bobbie Ann Mason…

I'm always interested in reading writers I don't know, too, so if you have suggestions, please shout out in the comments.

Later on this week we'll have another piece by the Legendary Jim Parks. Stay tuned.

P.S. Did any of you know that Wednesday is White Trash Wednesday for some bloggers? Google up some stuff, if you like. I learn something new every day.

Posted in submissions, white trash wednesday | 2 Comments

Noodling and River Monsters

Posted on June 1, 2009 by Rusty

Burkhard Bilger's Noodling for Flatheads is about noodling, obviously, and some other largely southern pastimes. I'm going to bet, though, that he never caught or saw anything near the likes of this bad boy. I have had great fun and edification from Animal Planet over the years, me and my kids, but never more than the recent River Monsters.

My brother's friend Ronnie spent a week or so with me once acting the part of big brother while mine was gone, sometime in the late 70s, I'm guessing, so I was eight or nine or so, and we spent a long early fall day pulling deadfalls out of Seeley Creek and hand-searching through great sodden heaps of leaves stuck in the slow-moving water, negotiating the bob-wire fences a few over-industrious (one might charitably call them pricks) land-owners had spread all across the water and into the water, honestly, where they rusted, making you lift them up and swim-crawl under. Not great fun, but fun, including the barbs I took in the hand that got me the first of many tetanus shots. I can never remember the date of the damned things, so I get them every five years or so. Anyway, we found fence-posts and tire rims in the water, several tires, too. A couple traps (not set, thankfully), a chain, some fishing line. No fish.

I've always wanted to noodle since then, though, even before I knew what it was. I was first to stick my hands up under the tree roots that jammed into the stream, the first to fuck around in the occasional clay beds, making penises both gross and abnormal. I even named them: Cowprick, Horseprick, Dogdick are the names I remember.

We finished with the creek pretty early then took on the farmpond in the field in front of our place, where I used to house my pet ducks. I mean, what was in that water, after all? This was long after the ducks had been smacked down and flattened in the road, but the car hood they'd sheltered under was still there. Ronnie and I lifted it up and unearthed a nest of sixty or seventy snakes who had taken up residence in the relative cool. I'm shuddering even now.

I'll tell you a a secret–isn't that what blogs are for?–I've hated snakes ever since. But somebody needs to get my pasty white ass in a river soon. I want a catfish.

Posted in burkhard bilger, catfish, noodling for flatheads, river monsters | 2 Comments

Russell Banks and Contextualized Naturalism

Posted on May 27, 2009 by Rusty

I find this article, linked from Conversational Reading, fascinating. While discussing Russell Banks' book Affliction, Daniel Green posits some reasons why Banks, often read as a realist or naturalist in his later work, is actually continuing along the path on which he began, as an experimental or largely postmodern author who now uses the tools of realism toward the same general ends.

Here are some short excerpts from the Green essay:

The novel is about Wade Whitehouse, not about its own status as fiction (although its status as fiction can appropriately be considered), and our response to Wade can be as complicated as our response to actual human beings. Indeed, an important measure of the success of Affliction would have to be precisely the degree to which we do finish the novel feeling some combination of compassion and horror toward Wade, regarding him as a human being in all of his multifarious and often contradictory traits and behaviors. Any consideration of form, style, or narrative technique would for most readers be a way of extending our perception of this character, not of reflecting on the artifice of fiction-making.

And this:

If Affliction calls more attention to its own artful construction than Sister Carrie or McTeague, it is also finally more convincing as a representation of both character and setting, as well as more credible as a narrative depicting true-to-life events than either of these novels. However compelling they are in their unrelenting adherence to their own narrative logic, neither of them can really described as telling stories that are altogether plausible as realistic reflections of ordinary life. Both could accurately be called melodramas, even if the melodrama mostly succeeds in supporting some pretty substantial thematic weight, and both have fairly obvious stylistic limitations of a kind that only intensifies the melodramatic effects, finally calling attention to the storytelling process even more persistently than does Rolfe Whitehouse’s much less rhetorically embellished style. The invoked worlds of these novels are vividly rendered, but they exist to further the portrayal of characters subject to the influences of “environment” more than they serve as depictions of a setting meant to be aesthetically realized in and for itself in its mundane particulars.

I have much more to say on this in the future, as one of my preoccupations is discovering a way to write about my preferred subject matter in my own writing and reading habits–rural lit, grit lit, Appalachian, and other subjects often discussed as 'regional' writing–while considering techniques from the 20^th century, the postmodern or avant, or whatever you like to call it. I'm not well-read in theory despite my degrees, so I likely won't be writing about the kinds of things scholars do, but rather considering how realism works on its terms, and trying to configure what I can salvage from this century's lit (modernism on, let's say) into creative work that encompasses both the way I experience the world personally–why else write?–and the elements I can add that will help my work do justice to the complexity of the contemporary world and human experience in the contemporary world.

I should say too that my interest in rural subject matter came fron Banks' Continental Drift, another of his fine novels that I read in my junior year of college. It was only after that I came to Andre Dubus and Larry Brown and a thousand others that formed my opinions and biases and gave me leave to write about something I knew.

So, more later.