Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee

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.