Red Clay Writer

Words

2008-05-17T15:25:00.001-07:00

Chinaberry Tree
Originally uploaded by Like Paper Cuts

When I sat down today I intended to write about Southern Literature. But I spent the last hour or so reading the Book of Revelation hoping to find a title for my novel. It’s a Southern Gothic thing, and I think I hit on something. By the time I finished, though, the air around my head was so heavy and oppressive that I didn’t feel like talking about, say, Carson McCullers, or god forbid, Walker Percy. Even Darcey Steinke, if you count her as Southern, can be depressing as hell.

Speaking of Walker Percy, let me recommend a book that isn’t fiction, but is highly interesting, and sheds some light on his personality. That’s The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy.Published a while back, but still in print. Funny thing, the relaxed, congenial Shelby Foote comes across as the stronger voice, with an openness and an intellectual curiosity--much more so than the rigid and puritan Percy. I suspect Walker swallowed too much Kierkegaard. Foote never had the success as a novelist that Percy did, but he produced a fine history of the Civil War.

Turns out that what I really want to talk about is words—and not just any words, but real down-home stuff. What started me on this road was coming across a children’s book called Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree (by William Miller). Zora’s mother dies, and she climbs the chinaberry tree and looks out over the world her mother said she would conquer.

A chinaberry tree. All of a sudden I’m back Home—wind-grieved as the place was. (Thank you, Thomas Wolfe, and Shelby Foote.)

Chinaberries In Winter
Originally uploaded by Big Grey Mare

Don’t know if you’ve ever seen a chinaberry tree. We had one in our back yard until we cut it down to make room for a screened-in porch. The last one I saw--that I’m aware of--was on a lonely road in Georgia, next to a dilapidated farmhouse. (How’s that for Southern color?) They were once common in the South, and in other warm parts of the country. I imagine that most have been cut down now: they’re considered an invasive species, brought from India in the nineteenth century as shade trees. Round green crowns, limbs solid as a rock—a great tree for climbing. They produced small flowers that gave way to marble-sized green “berries.” By Fall the berries yellowed and softened into a casing that was filled with slimy, thick liquid around a seed. We kids used to squeeze them and squirt the seed at each other. I’ve heard those little seed pods were poison, but nobody ever died.
We didn’t call them chinaberry trees. In fact, I didn’t hear that name till years later. We called them chaneyball trees. (Pronounced ‘Cheney,’ as in ‘Dick.’)

And now I want to recommend another book, or set of books, called The Dictionary of American Regional English. There I found my word for the tree, a word that was in use (with some variations) as far away as Louisiana. (I grew up in North Carolina.) But if I ever wrote a story that had a chinaberry tree in it (and I may plant some in my novel), I don’t think I would call it a chaneyball tree. But maybe I would.

The Dictionary of American Regional English is a browser’s dictionary, and a wonderful one at that. In a sense, it’s not a reference book at all. If I were reading Faulkner’s The Hamlet, I don’t think it would be necessary to know that ‘rabbit grass’ is a very local, Mississippi name for sedge (the plant we called ‘broomstraw’ in North Carolina)—it’s not important to the understanding of the story. On the other hand, it might be good to know that ‘belly-buster’ (and ‘belly-flop’) was, in some parts of the country, an expression for coasting face-down on a sled on a snowy hill. Could Edith Wharton have used it in Ethan Frome?

But most of all, The Dictionary of American Regional English is just plain fun. It’s like looking through the family album and finding all those faded brownie photographs — a moment from long ago, caught. And like those brownie shots, these words are fading away, replaced by other forms, homogenized.

‘Kitty-corner,’ for example, was used (primarily) in the North; ‘catty-corner’ in the South. Who knew?

Where I grew up, ‘locust’ and ‘katydid’ were both used to mean ‘cicada,’ a word we never used, and probably didn’t know. And there they are, the locusts and the katydids, documented.

‘Midges’ are Northern gnats. An even more Northern gnat is a ‘no-see-um.’ (My wife’s mother in Maine says this.)

In the South we had ‘redbugs.’ We had ‘chiggers’ too — though I never called them that.

We wonder: were there rules for when you use the pronoun ‘hit’ instead of ‘it,’ in the same dialect?

And on and on.

The dictionary has been in progress forever (see http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html). Four volumes of the alphabet are out now (though Sk), and the final volume is due in 2009. Supplements will follow. If you’re interested, the work can be found in good-sized public libraries, and in college and university collections.
Enjoy!

(Also posted at The Writerly Pause.)

Frank Schaeffer

2007-10-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

Our friend, Frank Schaeffer, has a new book coming out November 1, with the wonderfully long title: Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.
This is Frank’s non-fiction memoir. Those familiar with the (fictional) Calvin Becker Trilogy (Portofino, Saving Grandma, and Zermatt) will know the outlines of the story. Schaeffer grew up in Switzerland, the son of prominent American evangelicals. As he grew older, and prominent in the movement himself, he became disillusioned, and finally abandoned it.
Jane Smiley has written a long, favorable review in the October 15th issue of The Nation (www.thenation.com/doc/20071015/smiley). Here’s a quote: “[The book] offers considerable insight into several issues that have bedeviled American life in the past thirty years, and. . .gives us not only a handle on the mess we are in but also quite a few laughs (if you can believe that).”

Did Flannery and Bill get it right?

2007-09-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

old.truck.trees.01.holg.colOriginally uploaded by morsteen

Thoughts on the recently old South

I’m writing a novel set in the modern-day South, and because of that, I’ve been looking back, reminding myself how we got here. And trying to sort out, in my own mind, what some writers had to say about the time back then, and how it conforms to my memories of growing up Southern.

Re-reading Wise Blood, I was struck by how important cars were to Flannery O’Connor—at least in her early work. (Flannery? you ask.) Hazel Motes spends more time buying his car, and worrying with it, than he does thinking about his theology. We see it again and again: a high, rat-colored car. In fact, there are two high, rat-colored cars in Wise Blood, one driven by Hazel and one by his adversary--almost his twin--the false prophet. The cars fight to the death, and Hazel’s is the winner. “Nobody with a good car needs to worry about anything,” Hazel says. And maybe that’s his moment of enlightenment, in O’Connor’s design. He doesn’t seem to have another. Or is it a metaphor for a bad choice? When he loses his car, he blinds himself, and dies in a ditch.

In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” the old woman (as she’s called) will give Mr. Shiftlet the car he repaired if he’ll marry the girl. (The title itself is from a highway sign.) And Shiftlet sure wants that car. “The body, lady, is like a house” he says, “ it don’t go anywhere: but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move, always….” Mr. Shiftlet marries the girl and takes the car; abandons her somewhere down the road, and drives on. Another bad choice?

And then there’s the car that appears at the end of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” A big black battered hearse-like automobile, as O’Connor describes it, bringing The Misfit, and an end to a grandmother’s life. (“She would have been a good woman…if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

When you read Flannery O’Connor, especially if you’re from the South, there’s always an immediate sense of recognition: the speech, the characters, all so closely observed, and all seeming so right. And leaving aside the Catholicism (and Kierkegaard, and all that), the stories work on their own. The car as freedom? A sign of failed understanding and death? The soul on the move? Well, why not? O’Connor’s Southern primatives are forever finding small, even trivial, answers in a confused world, enlarging and seizing them, holding them close.

But did Flannery O’Connor get it right? Is this a true picture of the South?

Maybe for a certain period, and for a certain group of people--a narrow class of whites inhabiting Middle Georgia in the 1940’s and ‘50’s. But her characters are almost too ignorant, too naïve, and so limited they often seem mentally deficient. We see none of the cleverness, the sly intelligence, the manipulative skills that we find in a character like Faulkner’s Flem Snopes.

There never was a Hazel Motes. There never could have been.

One more thing about O’Connor. She turned away from the most important issue of her day. And that, frankly, was race. The culture and treatment of Southern blacks was background for her, when it wasn’t invisible. Once she even used it as a prop for another small—artificial--epiphany. Only late in life did she address the issue directly in her work, and still, it seems to me, her concern was with white culture. (Strange how the confrontation in “Judgment Day” reminds me of the confrontation in Mr. Sammler's Planet between Sammler and the black man.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Faulkner never turned away. He looked at the South straight on. O’Connor was always wary of Faulkner. Reading him, she said, made her want to go back and raise chickens full time. As a Southern writer (she suggested) you don’t want to encroach on his territory or put yourself in his way. He’ll run you over.

But did Faulkner get it right? In one important way, he did. I’m thinking especially of Absalom, Absalom!

Imagine it: This vast edifice that Faulkner constructed, a lop-sided, insane structure, a story torn from the earth and built with the bodies of men. Gone, but living in memory. William Sutpen comes down the mountain (in the longest tracking shot in American literature), takes what he needs, builds his empire—Sutpen’s Hundred--and seeks to found a dynasty.

But in the end, it all turns on racism. And founders.

There’s an unyielding stupidity at the heart of Absalom, Absalom!, and the characters know it.

So too that “Old” South—not so old at that. An unreal society, full of harm for everyone who resided there. For hundreds of years a world structured out of collective insanity, so bizarre you had to live in it to believe it. Only in the 1970’s did it begin to change in any real way.
Or did it just go underground?

Flannery O’Connor once admitted that she couldn’t deal with the larger things. But Faulkner did, and got it right. So much shame in the past, and he’s shown it to us. But was he right, too, when he said that the past is never dead, it’s not even past. I hope not, for the sake of my own writing.

In the last pages of Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson finishes the story of Sutpen’s Hundred. Having listened to it all, his Harvard roommate asks him, “Why do you hate the South?”

And Quentin replies, “I don’t hate it.” And he thinks: I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!
Doesn’t he?

Marcia Talley: “Write what you’re passionate about.”

2007-05-03T19:19:00.000-07:00

Marcia Talley is the Agatha and Anthony award-winning author of Sing It To Her Bones, Unbreathed Memories, Occasion of Revenge, In Death’s Shadow and This Enemy Town. The sixth book in the Hannah Ives mystery series, Through the Darkness, was released in September 2006. She is the editor/author of Naked Came the Phoenix and I’d Kill for That, star-studded, tongue-in-cheek collaborative serial novels set in a fashionable health spa and upscale gated community. Marcia’s short stories appear in more than a dozen collections, including the multi-award winning stories “Too Many Cooks” and “Driven to Distraction.”

Marcia lives in Annapolis, Maryland with her husband, Barry, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. The Writerly Pause spoke to her on a recent Sunday afternoon.

The Writerly Pause: You’re one of the many writers who came to writing later in life. What inspired you to act on the impulse to write?

Marcia: I’ve always been interested in writing, and have kept a journal for many years—something I think is imperative for any writer. I’m a breast cancer survivor, and knew that I had to make a change if I wanted to write. Time was moving. I had been commuting an hour each way from Annapolis to Washington for my job (as a librarian), and was afraid it would kill me. The final decision to stop came when I was stranded in a snowstorm on the way.

TWP: Did you take courses, sign up for a writing program?

M: No, I joined a writer’s group. I found them at a bookstore—they wanted people to read in the mystery genre. We’ve been together for ten years now, though we did have to expel a couple of members during that time.

TWP: How does the group work.

M: We meet once a month. We e-mail each other ten to thirty pages, but don’t discuss more than three submissions at a time. Working with the group gives us a deadline. We discuss POV and plot, and big overarching issues. We help with query letters.

TWP: Are there any men in your group?

M: (Laughs) One or two. We want the diversity.

TWP: How did you find your first agent, get published the first time.

M: I was accepted into the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee, and worked with John Casey. After he critiqued my manuscript, I threw away everything but the first chapter, and that became the first chapter of Sing It To Her Bones.

I later submitted the novel for the Malice Domestic Grant Award, and won. That got me my first agent and publisher.

TWP: What is your impression of publishing today?

M: It’s a very tight market, with only five major publishers. It’s harder for an agent to pitch a book with so few opportunities. And it’s strictly a business. If an author’s subsequent novels don’t show a modest increase in sales, she’s dropped.

New York City doesn’t know the next trend until it falls on them, but there are good, small quality presses.

TWP: Annapolis is the setting for your books. Is there any other place that you’ve traveled to that you would consider as a setting for Hannah Ives?

M: I’m working on a proposal where Hannah would go to England, but I would love to send her to the Bahamas.

I consider myself the Queen of Proposals, but in the past I tried to tell too much. Now I set the scene, talk about the character and get them in trouble. I don’t give away the ending.

TWP: Any advice about submitting manuscripts.

M: The query letter should be one page, about four paragraphs. Usually a synopsis of two to three pages is sent, and the first three chapters. The first sentence is very important.

TWP: How do you work?

M: I write after dinner. One of my rules is don’t fall in love with your prose, and that means cut. I read my stuff aloud. If it sounds wrong I cut it out. Everything has to move the plot forward, and I try to put in just enough detail. Writing short stories is a good exercise.

TWP: What did you read as a child?

M: Nancy Drew. So wonderful: an independent girl who solves crimes and drives a cool car. And Agatha Christie. She was my mother’s favorite. Agatha Christie is a textbook for writing the traditional mystery. I still re-read her for inspiration.

TWP: Who are your reading now:

M: P.D. James, Andrew Taylor, Phil Rickman, Cornelia Read. I especially recommend A Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard. I also read historical fiction.

TWP: Has your style changed over time?

M: I’m not as afraid of putting my thoughts down on paper.

TWP: Any last advice?

M: Write what you’re passionate about, and don’t give up too early. One of my friends had 140 rejections before being published.

Marcia’s website is: www.marciatalley.com

View Marcia Talley books on Amazon.

Also published on thewriterlypause.blogspot.com