A Country Boy Can Surmise

Back in November I was delighted to sit down for an hour-long conversation with my friend Barbara Kingsolver.  We talked about writing, living a conscious life, our place, books, and everything in between.  I hope you'll enjoy listening in on this public conversation.

I come from hard-working people.      My mother was orphaned at the age of nine, raised by cousins, and the first person in her family to graduate from high school.  She never had a bicycle or a birthday cake as a child.  My father was the next-to-youngest of nine siblings all being raised by a single mother after my paternal grandfather died when her youngest was still an infant.  Dad, like his brothers and sisters, had to leave school to work and help support the family.  A desire to be of more help led him to volunteer for the service...in Vietnam.        Once my father returned from the war he spied a beautiful young woman at the local hangout, Finley's Drive-in, and before they knew it they were eloping to Jellico, Tennessee, a state border town that made an economy out of marrying people.  Justices-of-the-peace were everywhere in Jellico.  One could even get married by the butcher's case in the back of the IGA ...

I always recommend that fellow writers look to film for inspiration.   Readers think in a cinematic way.   They are exposed to moving images constantly.   We can learn much from the storytelling qualities of the movies.   I particularly look to cinema to learn more about writing tense scenes of dialogue and to better present pacing and plotting.   Most of the great movies of real storytelling have to be seen at home since so few of them make their ways onto the big screen.   It is a rare treat to be able to go to the movie theatre and see a film that is a feat in storytelling.   Nowadays the cineplexes more often showcase the latest action thriller in which everything is constantly being blown up.   So I was very pleasantly surprised to be able to go to the movies with my daughters recently to see a movie that did just about everything right.   Not only did it tell a beautiful, layered story, but it also presented a way of life rarely cap...

While in Louisville this week to participate in festivities honoring the Dalai Lama's visit I had the opportunity to linger at my favorite historical marker again.  You can read about my connection to this spot in this recent blog post  about Thomas Merton, if you haven't already.  Truly a sacred spot for me, and many others.  I always get a boost out of visiting this marker while in Louisville.  I think it's important for us as writers to have places to go like this.  In England and Ireland literary spots abound because so much attention is paid to the rich literary history of those countries but often in America that gets overlooked.  When you can, seek out places that should be important to us as writers. I've been lucky to be in many places that were integral to the lives of writers like Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Margaret Mitchell, Lee Smith, Willa Cather, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence, Denise Giardina, Alex Haley, Fl...

Make art everyday, any way you can. Work on your novel.  Or poem, essay, short story, play, screenplay.  Or a painting, song, sculpture.  film, photograph.  Most of all, expand your notion of what art is.  Anything that is made with care can be art, too.  The art is what goes into it almost as much as what comes out.  The art is in the making as much as the end product.  So if you can't put your energies to that novel today, keep your creative juices flowing by making art in your own way. Bake homemade biscuits.  Plant tomatoes.  Hoe your garden.  Make a pie (give it to a neighbor).  Read a book to a child (performance art).  Walk in the woods and make an art of observation.  Have a dance party in your living room.  When my daughters were little, we did this almost every night and those are some of my best memories.  Develop all those pictures that are stored on your laptop and make a photo album that ...

Very often when I am on the road and do a Q&A after a reading or presentation, people will hesitantly raise their hands and when called upon will ask:  "What inspires you?"  It's a question I always dread because the answer is too simple, and too complex, all at the same time.  When I give my honest answer:  "Everything," half the audience might think I'm being  facetious while the other half may think I'm corny.  But it's true.  As writers, we must be open to everything in the whole world moving us to write.  For me--and it doesn't have to be like this for everyone--writing feels like a kind of worship, or prayer.  Not just the act of tapping out words on the keyboard, but the actual thinking process of writing.  It is meditation, prayer, worship, living.  If that sounds overwrought, so be it.   In my new novel I am often looking to the writings of Thomas Merton to guide my lead characters.  Merton was a Cathol...

When writing fiction, it always helps to have a geography in your mind, a space within which you can walk around and orient yourself so that your characters know where they are, which way to move, where to stand, how to be in that space. In my new novel most of the action takes place in Key West, Florida, although my main character is a man from rural Tennessee.  He sees the island from the point of view of an outsider so he thinks of it as exotic, foreign, even like a world that is the opposite of his own.  As one of the lines in the novel says, he has gone from "a world of trees to one of the sea."  He loves Key West, but he is forever missing his home, the fictional community of Harpeth River, Tennessee (based on several small communities along the Harpeth River in the area just outside Nashville). Throughout the novel he is drawn back to a pivotal moment in his life that happened near the banks of the Harpeth River.  It's a moment that haunts him.  This ...

My new novel is largely populated by people who are running away with something.  Some of them are running from love, others from hate.  Some are trying to outrun their grief while others are in self-exile because of past mistakes.  All of them have had the urge for going that is so perfectly articulated in one of Joni Mitchell's best songs, and one of the cornerstones for my novel's soundtrack.  I encourage everyone to create a soundtrack for any long piece of writing they're doing.  My novel soundtracks usually have about 75 or 80 songs.  Some of the pieces show up in the actual piece of work but others simply inform scenes.  All of them help me to get to the emotional truths of my characters and even sometimes reveal things about my characters that I wouldn't have known had I not tried to understand the music with which they identify.  In this particular video it is not only the words and music that are important, but the images, too.  I...

I grew up surrounded by older people, and I stuck as close to them as I could.  I hid beneath kitchen tables, porches, and quilting racks so I could eavesdrop on their juiciest stories.  But I also piled into cars with them when they went to town and told stories about each house we passed, sat in John boats with them while they fished and gave tips on the best way to reel in a bluegill, walked the hills with them while they announced the names of trees and plants and tuned their ears to birdcalls so they could identify their songs.  Most of all, I listened to their stories.  Stories about hard times, old times.  Stories about ways of life that were gone with the wind.  But within those tales there was always something to apply to the right here and now.  There was always wisdom weaving itself in and out and around their words. We don't mix generationally enough any more.  The young stay with the young, the old with the old.  And something ...