Southern Writers Bear Witness

Jan Nordby Gretlund

Description

Fourteen Southern storytellers reveal their influences, methods and daily routines, and struggles with the writing process

Jan Nordby Gretlund has been studying the literature of the American South for some fifty years, and his outsider's perspective as a European scholar has made him an intellectually acute witness of both the literature and its creators. Whether it is their language and reflexive storytelling or the craft and techniques by which writers transform life and experience into art that fascinates Gretlund, elements of their fiction led to his interviews with the fourteen storytellers featured in Southern Writers Bear Witness.

Gretlund believes a good interview will always reveal something about a writer's life and character, details that can inform a reading of that writer's fiction. The interviewer's task, according to Gretlund, is to supply the reader with some of the sources and experiences that inspired and shaped the fiction. Through his conversations Gretlund also occasionally elicits the subjects' reflections on other writers and their work to discover affiliations, lines of influence, and divergences, and he also emphasizes the enduring power of their work.

His interviews with Eudora Welty and Pam Durban uncover strong family and community experiences found at the core of their fiction. Gretlund also turns conversations to the craft of writing, writers' daily routines, and specific problems encountered in their work, such as Clyde Edgerton's struggle with point of view. In other exchanges he investigates distinctive elements of a writer's work, such as violence in Barry Hannah's fiction and religious faith in Walker Percy's. Still other conversations, such as his with Josephine Humphreys, touch on the pressures and opportunities of publishing and its influence on the writer's work. Taken together, these authors' insights on life in the South provide a fascinating window into the creative process of storytelling as well as the human experiences that fuel it.

A foreword by Daniel Cross Turner, author of Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South and co-editor of Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture and Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry, is also included.

Featured Authors:
Pat Conroy
Pam Durban
Clyde Edgerton
Percival Everett
Kaye Gibbons
Barry Hannah
Mary Hood
Josephine Humphreys
Madison Jones
Martin Luther King Sr.
Walker Percy
Ron Rash
Dori Sanders
Eudora Welty

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• América
• Superiority (short story)
• Letter to His Father
• Culture of the Southern United States
• Joyce Johnson
• African-American literature
• Southern literature
• Life on the Mississippi
• General officer
• Baptists
• The Southern Review
• General
• American
• William Styron
• Tennessee Valley Authority
• George McGovern
• Tom Wolfe
• William Faulkner
• Ernest Hemingway
• Jack Nicholson

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611178777
• Langue: English

Extrait

Southern Writers Bear Witness
Southern Writers Bear Witness
INTERVIEWS

Jan Nordby Gretlund
FOREWORD BY
Daniel Cross Turner

The University of South Carolina Press
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-876-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-61117-877-7 (ebook)
Front cover photo: Andreas von Einsiedel / Alamy Stock Photo
For Annie
Gratefully Remembered
Ashley Brown
Richard J. Calhoun
Pat Conroy
Shailah Jones
Lewis A. Lawson
Marion Montgomery
Regina Cline O Connor
C. Vann Woodward
Thomas Daniel Young
I think that if there is any value in hearing writers talk, it will be in hearing what they can witness to and not what they can theorize about.
Flannery O Connor,
Mystery and Manners
CONTENTS

FOREWORD
Daniel Cross Turner
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Autobiography and Fiction: An Interview with Pat Conroy
Beaufort Inn, November 4, 2015
Lines out across the Gap: An Interview with Pam Durban
Beaufort, South Carolina, January 23, 2004
Interview with Clyde Edgerton
Jackson, Mississippi, March 26, 1996
Interview with Clyde Edgerton
Wilmington, North Carolina, September 29, 2010
Percival Everett
Odense, Denmark, March 13-14, 2013
In My Own Style: An Interview with Kaye Gibbons
Raleigh, North Carolina, June 18, 1996
Interview with Barry Hannah
Oxford, Mississippi, April 12, 1982
Interview with Barry Hannah
His home on Van Buren Street, south of Oxford, Mississippi, June 3, 1985
Fiction Is Like Fire and Flood: Interviews with Mary Hood
Oxford, Mississippi, March 26, 1996; Woodstock, Georgia, October 30, 2000
Interview with Mary Hood
Commerce, Georgia, October 29, 2014
The Excitement and the Mystery of the Immediate: Interviews with Josephine Humphreys
The Confederate Widows Home, Charleston, South Carolina, May 26, 1993; January 27, 1996; May 9, 2000; May 2, 2001
Interview with Josephine Humphreys
Charleston, South Carolina, October 21, 2014
Out of the Garden Forever: Interviews with Madison Jones
Auburn, Alabama, June 3, 1978; January 12, 1981
A Good Man with a Good Voice- You can lead a mule to water : Interview with Martin Luther King Sr.
The Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, June 1, 1978
Laying the Ghost of Marcus Aurelius: An Interview with Walker Percy
Covington, Louisiana, January 2, 1981
Difficult Times: An Interview with Walker Percy
Covington, Louisiana, January 29, 1985
Interview with Ron Rash: With Thomas Bjerre s Participation
Clemson, South Carolina, October 28, 2014
Interviews with Dori Sanders
York County, South Carolina, March 11, 1996; Aeroe Island, Denmark, August 23, 1997; Beaufort, South Carolina, January 29, 1999; Hilton Head, South Carolina, November 5, 2010
Interviews with Eudora Welty
1119 Pinehurst Street, Jackson, Mississippi, February 9, June 8, 1978
Seeing Real Things: An Interview with Eudora Welty
1119 Pinehurst Street, Jackson, Mississippi, May 20, 1993
INDEX OF AUTHORS AND WORKS
FOREWORD
Daniel Cross Turner

For decades now, Jan Nordby Gretlund has been a highly prolific and attentive scholar of the literature of the contemporary U.S. South. From his professorial post at the University of Southern Denmark, Gretlund has long offered a unique international vantage on Southern literature and culture. His influence has encouraged us to adjust our sightlines on the region and its literature. No more do we view the South simply as the lesser part of the United States, a region forever tangled up in the briar patch of backwardness, aberrance, and ignorance. Thanks in large part to Gretlund s presence, we no longer see the U.S. South in isolation but seek connections between the South and other regions and nations, on a global scale. Because of his keen, long-standing acumen as a Southernist, we might invent a new word for Gretlund and similar international scholars of Southern studies: he s an extrapatriate, adding an extra layer of cross-national regional identity on top of his native Danish. Over the course of his extensive career as a Southern extra pat, Gretlund has had much to say about Southern literature and has said it memorably.
But Gretlund has proven himself a good listener, too. This is clear in the numerous interviews he has conducted with major Southern writers over the past forty-plus years, now collected here in a single volume. In Southern Writers Bear Witness , Gretlund asks telling questions and then generously cedes the floor to permit some of the finest Southern storytellers around to do exactly what they do best: tell about the South. And they do not disappoint, turning phrases and spinning yarns in fine form. Thank goodness Gretlund was there to record every word, so we get to listen in, too.
As the collection s title rightly suggests, this constellation of excellent Southern writers witness major issues in our time, including racial segregation, the civil rights movement, gender dynamics, religion, (sub)urbanization, political demagoguery, the ecology, education, and economic hardship. While these matters are often deeply associated with the American South, they are certainly not located exclusively south of the Mason-Dixon. Through these interviews, we come to know the South, inside and out. On account of the interviewer s pointed questions, these writers witness to so much of the cultural history behind their work. The interviews, then, are also significant as cultural artifacts, helping us to view literature in its larger contexts.
But the title of this interview collection contains a further meaning. These Southern writers also witness to us: they talk not at us but to us, engaging with us, clearly aware that there is an interested audience. Throughout this collection, Gretlund s interviews reflect a heightened sense of reciprocity between interviewer and interviewee and between the storytellers and their wider listeners-summoning responsibility in its etymological sense of responding to. Southern Writers Bear Witness initiates a call-and-response between interviewer and subjects and between authors and audience. The interviews collected here are sharp without getting lost in the arcana of academia. They are smart but not showy, striking an informal, conversational chord while at the same time tendering unmatched insights into the workings of life and literature that may well be rooted in a particular region but can also be rerouted to connect with other cultures, other spaces, other times.
There have been previous collections of interviews with a variety of Southern writers, but these typically are dated or concentrate on a specific genre. The majority of interviews with contemporary Southern writers are published individually in journals or on websites, or, if several interviews are published in book form, the collection usually focuses on only a single author. Gretlund s collection of interviews, by contrast, presents something unique and much appreciated in bringing together in one place so many trenchant and distinct Southern authors. Southern Writers Bear Witness indeed achieves the interviewer s intention to record the voices of a literary tradition and to maintain what is perhaps the South s most impressive cultural legacy in tying together fourteen Southern writers across thirty-two interviews. These collected conversations are invaluable as an archive of the thoughts of fourteen southern writers from the 1970s until today.
Despite Gretlund s disclaimer about viewing interviews as art in his preface, the collected interviews present significant information about the authors lives and work and their region and do so quite artfully -in the author s incisive, thoroughgoing questions and in the eloquence, even brilliance of the writers responses. The interviews reflect an array of styles, with some writers making good use of compressed, even terse prose in their responses and others reeling out verbose answers so artfully done that these sometimes read like the beginnings to a new novel. It is clear that the interviewees feel comfortable with the interviewer, and the resulting interactions come across not just as smart and insightful but also as relaxed and often humorous. In terms of presenting legitimate, detailed accounts of the author s interactions with these varied writers, the collection is accurate save, perhaps, for the author s second interview with Barry Hannah, who-clearly unimpeded by the restraints of sobriety-provides a gloriously inaccurate interview, finely balanced by the interviewer s polite, if dogged, professionalism and self-deprecating humor. Which I suspect readers will enjoy quite a lot. I know I did. Even if a reader is unfamiliar with a particular author, the interviews supply enough biographical and publishing information so that all the conversations are meaningful. And the interviews repeatedly associate current Southern writers and writing with the big names of Southern literature past: Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Flannery O Connor.
In any sort of anthology like this interview collection, certain questions always arise: But why is this author included, and not that author? Where s [other author]? Of course, no collection can ever collect everyone, and this book offers an impressive spectrum of writers, all of whom are notab