Rhythm and Books

Prime Meridian: A Chat with Brad Watson

With the recent passing of our friend Barry Hannah — and in recent years such beloved writers as Larry Brown, Willie Morris and Eudora Welty — we're hearing new conversation about the state of Mississippi letters.  Who are the new generation of writers rising to fill the enormous shoes of the great authors who helped forge our state's heralded literary tradition?

There are plenty out there, still young in their careers, who are publishing fine work, carrying the torch for this proud tradition.  Among the first we mention when asked about the new generation is Brad Watson, a former student of Hannah's and a native of Meridian.  He has published three books with W.W. Norton — his 1996 debut story collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men, met with considerable fanfare by readers and critics who placed him in line with the Faulkner-Hannah-Brown Southern literary tradition;  2002's National Book Award finalist The Heaven of Mercury, a terrific and off-beat novel of star-crossed lovers in small-town Mississippi, one of Turnrow's favorite books of the decade; and the latest, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, which brings him to Turnrow this Thursday, April 1.

Watson's new book is a varied collection with a handful of stories that may stick in your mind forever.  We've passed the by-now tattered advance copy around and have reached the consensus that stories like "Vacuum," "Visitation," "Water Dog God" and the title novella have staked their permanent claim in our literary imaginations.  Passive readers may balk at these stories' darkness, more emotional than physical, but there is an honesty and humor that lend this book a playful melancholy.  Through his characters and tone, he finds an accurate language to express the difficult and precise emotions riming the edge of loneliness and heartbreak without casting the reader into the fire.  He manages to guide us often into the glorious shadowlands between ecstasy and despair, that hallowed ground where robust literature plays.

Our senior book fellow caught up with Watson in Laramie and posed a few questions about his new work and the writing life....

Turnrow Book Co.:  How is Wyoming?  I often imagine Wyoming as being serenely quiet and a bit windy.

Brad Watson:  I have stayed because of the landscape and the openness and the vistas.  As Barry [Hannah] said, "In Mississippi, it is difficult to achieve a vista."  Out here, it is not.  It is windy.  Not uncommon to take the dogs for a walk on the nearby patch of prairie and get hit with 50 mph gusts on a clear day.  West of here is what they call the Big Hollow, the largest entirely wind-gouged valley in the USA.  But yes, 500,000 square miles of state, 600,000 people, most of them in town.  It's easy to get away and get quiet and calmer.

Turnrow:  I imagine you got pretty well snowed in over the winter there in Laramie.  Did you read any exceptional books you care to recommend?

Watson:  Snowed in but also snowed under with teaching work and writing and other work.  Last summer I read for the NEA grants, which took all summer and into the fall, then had a very busy school year from late August to ... ongoing.  So most of my reading this year has been grant application fiction, books I've assigned my students to read, MFA applications, and so on.  But in my class on 'innovative fiction' we've read So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell, a beautiful and ingenious memoir/novel;  The Death of a Beekeeper, Lars Gustafsson, my favorite Scandinavian novel;  Padgett Powell's new crazy novel The Interrogative Mood; The Lover, Marguerite Duras; Barry's Ray; Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son; stories by Joy Williams, Lydia Davis, Christine Schutt, Mark Richard, Gustafsson, Paul Bowles, Murakami, Ander Munson, Aleksander Hemon, Jamaica Kincaid, and parts of two Brautigan novels.  I've read Glen Pourciau's fascinating, Iowa-prize-winning collection, Invite.  On my bedside table, working on, is Stoner, by John Williams;  Steve Yarbrough's new novel, Safe from the Neighbors; Ron Rash's Serena; Alyson Hagy's new collection, Ghosts of Wyoming; poems by H.L. Hix and Kate Northrop; Bruno Schultz; Danilo Kis; and many others I can't call up right now.

Turnrow:  It's been a few years since The Heaven of Mercury.  Do you have to pump yourself up for book tour, or is it something you enjoy?  How are bookstores faring, generally, as seen in your travels?

Watson:  I'm having a great time.  Feeling a little overwhelmed sometimes, juggling a few too many things, but having fun.  And for once, working on the next book, a novel, even as it goes on, which isn't easy, given school and book travel.  The bookstores I've seen do seem to be doing well, which I think is testimony to the owners innovation and hard work against a tough, awful market. 

Turnrow:  This is you second story collection out of three books.  Is this your preferred form?

Watson:  I don't think so, although I'm probably better at the story than the novel because I've written dozens of stories and only a handful of novels, only one of which has worked out so far to my and my editor's satisfaction, but most of which are still in the works.  I was surprised, though, at how much fun I had writing the stories and the novella in this collection.  More fun than I've ever had writing, period. 

Turnrow:  The stories in Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives seem to have shifted from a Mississippi or Southern setting.  The place is not as distinct or essential to the characters and story.  Does it have to do with being out West now?  How crucial is sense of place to a story versus a novel?

Watson:  I still think it crucial, although sometimes that sense of place, even if strong, may be kind of submerged in the story.  It's very much NOT submerged in "Water Dog God" — which one early review idiotically typo'd "Water Dog Good," for God's sake — it's a teeming character.  And I think it's there, recognizable if not named explicitly, in "Fallen Nellie," "Noon," and the title novella.  And it seems very Southern to me.  But I do think it's there, in a more submerged — or quietly integrated? — way in "Vacuum," "The Misses Moses," "Carl's Outside."  "Terrible Argument" is set in Wyoming, although that is entirely in my mind aside from one utterance of the word "prairie."  Interior space is much more important in that story, because it's about a couple of pretty tortured minds.  And southern California's a pretty strong and obvious presence in "Visitation."  I knew the main character was Southern, but didn't make anything of it because it was so much more important in that piece to get at his sense of confusion and loss and regret.  He's living in the present in the exact opposite sense of what the psychologists refer to as the very positive "living in the moment."  His moment is a kind of hell and he would like to find a way to get out.

Place probably is more important in a novel, as you're making a bigger world and the reader has more need to know where the world is, what it is.  Although you can have very interior novels such as Padgett Powell's last two, in which place is definitely there but more through our recognition of the characters' origins, cultural and geographical, just from their language and sensibilities.

Turnrow:  Earlier this month at the Oxford Conference for the Book, you sat on a panel about Barry Hannah and told some interesting stories about your time with him at the University of Alabama.  You seemed to have been close to him during one his most devilish phases.  How would you characterize the true Barry of that time versus the myth of a demented, unpredictable wildman?

Watson:  As he has admitted in person and in print, Barry believed alcohol could put him in the perfect zone for his particular brilliant style, into his voice.  As one person once said to me of As I Lay Dying, where you really are is in Faulkner's mind — so with Barry.  But, as Barry also admitted, he had a hard time maintaining the balance — keeping himself in the zone and not barreling through it into a state of mind that was less under control — although I was always amazed that, no matter how far he fell out of absolute control, he was able to keep at least keep a finger-hold on what connected him to the brilliance, the ingenious vision and voice.  Many times when he did wild things, when I was around or with him, he seemed kind of eerily under control:  speeding down River Road in the MG like a stock car driver, under heavy influence, looking over and saying, "What's the matter, you afraid to die?"  Or when, at 3 a.m., he calmly offered to break into my neighbor's apartment and shoot the stereo that was offending me with it's overly loud Big Band music.  It was the timid, even cowardly students' fault, as far as I'm concerned, that bringing the gun — it was empty, for Christ's sake — into the classroom was offensive instead of instructive and/or entertaining.  Barry loved guns as beautiful machines, and I don't think he ever shot anything with one, aside from cans and bottles, after his BB gun days as a boy.  His writing about gun violence was an expression of outrage toward the actual violent, the destructive powerful, the stupid strong, the bully, the coward, the sneak.  He never threatened me with a gun or a fist.  He only ever threatened me with failure if I would not work hard enough at my writing.  When I arrived in Tuscaloosa, I asked him if based on what he'd seen of my writing he thought I would do well.  He looked over and said calmly, "Of course.  We're going to make you a star.  But you're gonna have to lose the tan." 

I think when he was drinking, his criticism of younger writers' work was no more blunt or direct than when he wasn't drinking;  from what I hear, it just got funnier, too.  Once, when I was over at his place at 3 or 4 a.m., a lot of drinking going on, and admiring of a beautiful pistol, he suddenly seemed startled and said, "Are you hungry?  Have you had anything to eat?" — he wasn't eating, himself, of course — "My god.  Here."  He went to the little refrigerator, pulled out a carton of something.  "Here's some barbecue, real good stuff.  Eat it, you need to eat."  I opened it.  It was some kind of barbecue, beginning to turn green.  I ate it.  I was fine.

Turnrow:  From the standpoint of craft, how do you think knowing and studying under Barry affected your work?

Watson:  He always went straight to the story's main problem, said exactly what it was, and told you to address it.  No bullshit, no padding, no petting or ego-stroking.  Not to say that if he thought you were doing particularly well, he wouldn't tell you that, either in or out of class.  But he never wasted your or his own time with pussyfooting around.  I valued and still value that, although it seems harder for students these days to take it or accept it.  It would be a lot better for all of us if they would.  I learned that you work even when you're in bad shape, even if what comes out isn't what you'd hoped.  When does it ever?  But sometimes it's close.  That you'd better know what you're trying to do, when you're writing, or else you're a sap or a fool.  You'd better know what you think about something.  There are values in this business, too.

Turnrow:  Can we expect a novel next?

Watson:  Already working on it, and hope to get a lot done on it this summer.  Something I've been wanting to write about for a long time, something that's important, not just to me, in terms of subject.  And I think the narrator's the right one, a good one, the right voice, and can see the story from the right angle and can tell it in his own good way.  I hope I'm right.  Took a long time to find that voice, so I hope it stays with me.  I feel up to it.

We hope you'll make time to stop by and meet Brad Watson this Thursday, April 1, at a reception from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Stick around and hear him read from Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives at 5:30, and you can reserve a signed copy here.

While Walking to Gatlinburg...

We hope you have the opportunity to come out this weekend — Saturday, March 27 at 11 a.m. — to meet and hear Howard Frank Mosher, a friend and rare storyteller from Vermont, who plans to stop in Greenwood on his 2010 Great American Book Tour.  Mr. Mosher is a tireless promoter in the best sense — not pushy or overzealous, but generous to share his talent and curious to find good bookstores and readers all over the country.  With each book he jumps in the car and travels from New England to the West Coast and back again, stopping at stores all along the way — a grassroots roamer whose enthusiasm for his own stories is infectious.

You'll see what we mean when you start reading his new  novel, Walking to Gatlinburg, the story of a 17-year-old Vermont boy who heads out to find his older brother, gone missing from the Union Army.  From the outset the young man has angered a band of slave catchers, who pursue him south through a shattered country, into the Great Smoky Mountains, encountering strange characters and wild adventure along the way.  Not so different from his book tours, we imagine.

Mosher's ode to the classic 19th century road novel hits all the right notes — a great narrative, wise tone, rich historical detail and fantastical elements from the tall tale tradition.  Imagine a more upbeat Cold Mountain, or a more down-home Odyssey.  "William Gay meets Pilgrim's Progress," one reader here described it, likening the author's gothic sensibilities as much to Poe as McCarthy.  This is the kind of homespun adventure tale we don't see near enough.  Passing around our tattered advanced copy, we must confess that Mr. Mosher never fails to amaze us.  Why's he not a household name?  The Associated Press, after all, dubbed him "the closest thing we have to Mark Twain."

The author is stopping by in time for lunch on Saturday, and we're encouraging everyone to show up at 11 a.m., meet Mr. Mosher, place a lunch order and settle in for his 11:30 slide show presentation, "Transforming History into Fiction: The Story of a Born Liar," in which he describes the research trips he made through the Smoky Mountains as well as the strange family history that inspired the book, including tales of the great-great grandfather who "met his end while attempting to murder his family."

A Fire in Reverse

The phone rang one day during the Christmas rush.  We were all busy helping customers find books or wrapping presents or ringing up sales at the register.  Everyone tried to ignore the phone, but it kept ringing.  Finally, with a sigh, a senior clerk answered.

"Do you carry books by female authors?" said the man on the other end.  The voice was soft-spoken and familiar, probably someone who had been in the store and conversed with any one of us at one time or another.

"Of course," the clerk replied.  "We carry many women writers.  Are there any in particular you're looking for?"

"No," the customer said.  "No one in particular.  Just a good woman fiction writer."

The clerk mentioned some tried-and-true favorites such as Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, to which the customer responded, "Yes, of course.  I have read books, you know."

The clerk tried a few more:  Ellen Douglas, Elizabeth Spencer, Carson McCullers, Jill McCorkle.  "Too regional," the caller said.  The clerk mentioned some recent customer favorites — Kathryn Stockett, Jodi Picoult, Muriel Barbery, Audrey Niffenegger.  "Too contemporary," he said.  The clerk tried a few of his own favorites — Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, Lorrie Moore.  "Too prized."

"Excuse me, but could I ask who's calling?" the clerk pried.

There was a pause, then, "Joseph Conrad."

"I see," the clerk replied.  "Perhaps you can tell me more of what you're looking for, Mr. Conrad."

"I'd like something great, something proven; perhaps a little dark, a little dangerous; and certainly nothing obvious.  Recommend to me the best female writer I've never read, and maybe never even heard of."

The clerk lobbed a few more names:  Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Louise Erdrich, Joan Didion.

"Mmm, yes, I know these, very good," Mr. Conrad replied.  "Tell me more."

"Are you looking for a gift?"  This was becoming quite involved, and the clerk wanted to make sure he wasn't being put on a fool's errand.  The customers were lining up at the register, and now the staff had become distracted by the one-sided conversation.  We all began tossing out names — Mary Robison!  Barbara Kingsolver!  Ashley Warlick!  Zora Neale Hurston! — not even knowing the context of the call but deducing the pattern from the clerk's responses.

"I'm leading a book club discussion, and my fellow members have tired of reading men," the caller explained.

"I think we can find something for you," the clerk responded.  "But it's kind of busy here.  Can I talk with some of my colleagues and call you back, or email you a list?"

"Tell you what," Conrad said.  "Why don't you tape the list to the bookstore door and I'll come by tonight and retrieve it.  Also, if you could charge my credit card for a copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami, then gift wrap it and leave it over the transom, I'll pick up the list and the package later this evening.  Thank you for your time."

When the rush died down, the clerk described the call to us, and we were all suitably intrigued.  "Could it be the secret book club?" we wondered.  Generally, when the Club selects a new book for their clandestine meetings, we recognize it immediately.  Whenever we receive several orders all at once for the same obscure or mysterious novel, that's usually it.  Several of us often read along as part of our own shadow secret club.  To our knowledge, the real Secret Book Club has only ever read male writers, mostly dead, and come to think of it, their last couple of selections were quite macho.  It stood to reason that members in the club, especially females, would want to read more women writers.

And what of Murakami?  The clerk who took the order found the book on the shelf, charged it and started to wrap it but first opened and read several pages before snapping back to reality.  "Hey, that's pretty good," he said.  "Entrancing."

We walked around the store gathering more names for our list of women writers:  Grace Paley, Ruth Rendell, Rebecca West, Amy Bloom, Kelly Link, Dorothy Parker, etc.  We came up with several dozen names, typed them up and pasted the list on the front door, then stashed the gift-wrapped Murakami over the transom and locked up for the night.  The next day was busy with holiday shoppers, and the next day and the next day after that, and we thought very little of secret book clubs or women writers or obscure and mysterious requests.  The holidays came and went, it was a bountiful season, and all was well in books.

Calculating the end-of-year sales, we noticed a sudden spike in sales of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  The uptick had occurred in mid- to late-December, and the sales were all easily traced back to staff members.  It appeared as though we had all quietly, and of our own volition, chosen Murakami's modern classic as our holiday read.

Naturally we agreed to meet and discuss the book.  Our little shadow club needed to recharge its batteries, and everyone who had read Wind-Up was quietly buzzing about this strange and lovely novel.  And so, on one of the coldest Sunday afternoons of winter, we met at the home of one of the bookstore managers.  It was a modest red-brick bungalow on a quiet side street.  In the spirit of secrecy, he advised us all to enter from the gravel alley in back, which ran parallel to the street and provided rear entry for all the houses on the block.  Also, the manager had told his wife and family he was having a few colleagues over for a cook-out to celebrate a prosperous holiday season, neglecting to mention it was a secret book discussion. 

Everyone stood in the backyard, huddled together, freezing to death as the temperature hovered in the low 20s.  At least the host had built a campfire in the middle of the yard, and we stood around, warming our hands and feet, as burgers and hot dogs cooked on the grill.

"So, this book...." someone said, trying to start the book discussion. 

"Yes," another agreed. 

No one seemed willing to talk, whether because of the cold or because the dreamlike quality of the novel resisted discussion.  It's like when you wake from a bizarre dream that has a profound, altering impact on you, but when you try and describe it to someone else, it seems trivial and absurd.  There must be a secret language to dreams that only the dreamer can understand.  But could a writer achieve such a thing?  A novel of certain potency whose brilliance, once brought to air in a public forum, dies quickly, like a fire in reverse.  Or were we all just too numb to come up with any intuitive remarks?

For those who have not read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami, it's essentially the story of Toru Okada, an unemployed man in modern-day suburban Tokyo who must contend with the sudden and mysterious disappearance of his cat, followed soon by his wife.  During this time, Toru encounters a host of new acquaintances, whose appearance may or may not be related to his wife's departure, and he experiences a series of bizarre occurrences that may or may not be dreams themselves.  If it sounds tiresomely contrived, the art of it may lie in the fact that it is definitely not.  It feels completely natural as the story unfolds, and Murakami writes in a hypnotic, deceptively plainspoken style that draws you into its hallucinatory core.  If it sounds melancholy and absent of plot, then perhaps it is, but also, like the dichotomy of dreams, full of joy and stories also, along with the cruel comforts of darkness and unknowing.

In many ways, the book suggests that life's meaning comes from such random encounters as those experienced by Toru.  "People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they could not choose, moving in directions they could not choose," Murakami writes.  We seemed to be having just such an encounter here, huddled around a small campfire in a co-worker's backyard, waiting patiently for grilled meat as we stomped our feet on the frozen earth and wedged our hands under our armpits.

"This reminds me of the lieutenant's adventure," one reader said, referring to one of the most fascinating sections of the book, which occurs about a fourth of the way through.  Toru is visited by an old lieutenant from the Second Sino-Japanese War, the conflict between Japan and China leading up to World War II.  The lieutenant is delivering a bequest from a recently deceased family friend and, in the course of conversation, reveals the epic story of his time as a solider in China serving as a mapmaker for the Japanese army.  His unit was captured and tortured by brutal Mongol soldiers and a sadistic Soviet officer after they strayed into Outer Mongolia on a delicate intelligence mission, and his subsequent escape and ordeal in a dark, freezing well, without food or clothing, was the defining event of his life.  Stranded for several days at the bottom of the pitch-black well, the lieutenant describes a brilliant light that flooded in for only a few seconds a day, the result of the sun's arc at its perfect angle, shining down through the small mouth of the well.  He explains:

"Under these special circumstances, I believe, my consciousness had attained such a viscid state of concentration that when the intense beam of light shone down for those few seconds, I was able to descend directly into a place that might be called the very core of my own consciousness....  In the midst of my momentary blindness, something is trying to take shape....  Some thing that possesses life....  It is trying to come to me, trying to confer upon me something very much like heavenly grace.  I wait for it, trembling.  But then, either because it has changed its mind or because there is not enough time, it never comes to me.  The moment before it takes full shape, it dissolves and melts once again into the light.  Then the light itself fades.  The time for the light to shine down into the well has ended....  The grace came to an end before it could be given to me....  (T)he life I led after emerging from that hole in the ground was nothing but a hollow, empty shell....  When the revelation and the grace were lost, my life was lost.  Those living things that had once been there inside me, that had been for that reason of some value, were dead now.  Not one thing was left.  They had all been burned to ashes in that fierce light."

The lieutenant's white-hot story, told against Toru's gray narrative, inspires the narrator to seek out his own dark sanctuary, a dry well in his neighborhood, and reenact this intensely spiritual deprivation.  Considering this, such a locale, whether a well or pit or even windowless room devoid of light, may have been a more suggestive setting for our meeting, spurring some visionless insights into this book, some blind core of truth that rubbed off on us.

Finally one reader, who was especially moved by the book, said that this was the book he'd been waiting for his entire reading life.  We urged him to expound, and he said that early in his teenage years, he imagined that he would find one very special book, and once he read that book, his desire to read would vanish.  It would be a sign that he had read enough.  "I'm pretty sure this is the book," he said.  "I haven't read anything since."  He said that he also had no desire to talk about books and that he would be leaving now.  And then he left. 

"Don't you even want a hotdog?" cried the manager, who was busy tending the grill.

The discussion sputtered on awkwardly, in light of this admission.  We couldn't recall or make sense of anything anyone said, as if the fire consumed the words as soon as they were spoken.  Obviously, the group had submitted to the strange, dreamlike quality of the novel, and we began to mistrust that there was ever a secret book club at all, that perhaps this was as close to a secret book club as had ever existed in Greenwood, and that the other, supposedly true club, was just a figment of our collective imagination.

Finally, one reader in our group, a quiet staff member, the most recent hire, who we doubted had read the book at all, admitted that he had been a member of Secret Book Club all along.  He told us about the books they read, and the coup that ousted the tyrant book group leader Dr. H, and even the book selections we somehow missed in the fall — two Russians, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Yuri Olesha's Envy!  We were stunned to silence.  Only the crackling of the fire and the sizzling of the grill could be heard against the cold, dead afternoon. 

"I'm the one who called about the women," he revealed.

"Joseph Conrad?" said the senior clerk.  "But you were working that day!"

"I phoned from the back."

We all felt betrayed and more than a little hungry.  But mere burgers and dogs would not be enough for this particular hunger.  The staff member and Secret Book Club member, here in our midst, thanked the manager for inviting him, then left quietly.  Some of us went inside to eat, while others stayed and stared into the fire,  mourning our friend, the reader who proclaimed he would never read again, and we each drifted away a little.

Go Easy, Godfather, and No F'ing Pity

On Monday we lost Barry Hannah, godfather of Mississippi letters.  Here was a man who could part a bookstore or barroom crowd like royalty, out of respect for his command of language and his mythic character.  This in an age when the power of the written word sometimes barely raises an eyebrow.  "Hannah stories," traded like currency among writers and devoted readers, attest to his reputation as an enfant terrible in the early days of his writing career, and for quick, clever wit and an eccentric nature, even up until the end.  He was everything you crave and hardly ever see anymore in a fabled writer. 

Equally precious is the kind wisdom he imparted to his writing students, which can be sampled from any number of interviews posted on the web (including this one by Wells Tower), and the generous spirit he shared with his friends.  His death marks the end of an era, not only in Oxford but in the wider realm of Mississippi literature, and to us and many more, the loss of a treasured friend.

We've fondly preached our devotion to Hannah in these pages, using him as the gold standard for literary art.  He could write sentences and paragraphs whose distilled power often trumped entire books.  No one crafted a sentence this way.  We often find ourselves pulling a novel or story collection, opening and dipping in at random, sampling like poetry or scripture.  Just a hit sometimes is all you need.  No one would accuse him of crackling plots, but nor could they ignore the terrifying gift of his prose, only read in awe or slink away in misunderstanding.

Living in this part of Mississippi and loving books, much is made of William Faulkner and his legacy, and among writers especially, there is the quiet concern of writing in his "long shadow."  We've often thought of Hannah as our generation's Faulkner.  Both had a reputation in Oxford of being different, sometimes difficult, often misunderstood and under-appreciated.  Both possessed the chops to write circles around their contemporaries, often writing for little reward but the awe of peers and readers or a self-satisfaction they fed like a vice.  Like Faulkner, it will be difficult for the next generation of Mississippi writers — and the time is yours to rise up — to write in Hannah's long shadow, not to imitate and reach for something that cannot be duplicated.

Several years ago, a meeting was assembled in Oxford by young writers all over the country who called themselves the Sons of Barry.  Dozens of writers, both known and soon-to-be, former students and long-time admirers, came to town to pay tribute to their hero.  Though his health had already begun its decline, a cycle of various and grave illnesses, he attended the celebration, met his "sons" humbly, dined and smoked and danced with them.  He left before the others, who had assembled outside a ramshackle lodge in the country, and saw him off in the light of fireworks launched from a cotton field. 

What many of those young writers learned, and what we have had the good fortune to know for many years up close, is the generosity of Barry's character.  Not only a stunning wordsmith, but a true friend, who charms students in his class and friends on the street with his vibrant conversation, which is as hilarious, colorful and raggedly wise as his prose.  Listening to him speak, you realize his writing is not studied.  Poetry erupted from the man.  If it took him any time at all to write — and though there have been long gaps in his bibliography, and we have been waiting ten years now for the next book, through all his struggles and pain — it must be because he labored to strain every ounce of boredom out of his stories.

In times of trouble, Barry knew the value of friendship, how even brief eloquence can lend comfort.  He did not take his friends for granted.  We were surprised and honored just last summer when he dropped in unannounced, wearing oxygen to combat emphysema and bearing scars from a wreck that totaled his motorcycle (we thought the guy was indestructible!), in high spirits, sharing tales and good cheer on his way back from the Vicksburg battlefields.  He still wrote letters to friends, a dying courtesy, and lucky are those who received one. 

We received our last letter from Barry on Monday, of all days.  We'd sent him a box of books to sign months ago, and when they didn't return, we feared that he hadn't felt up to it.  But then it came, before we heard the bad news.  We must've opened it around the time he passed. 

The letter was short, heartfelt, thrumming with life.  (We always took pleasure deciphering his chicken-scratch hand.)  He described his new book — maybe a novel, maybe a collection — almost complete for a possible 2011 release "as mortality presses nearer and nearer (no fucking pity, please)."

For a less wistful elegy — and perhaps to learn a little more about why he was so important, not just to us here in the dysfunctional family of Mississippi but to American literature — read his New York Times obituary.  And dear God, please read one of his books, whether the brilliant novel Geronimo Rex, still one of the best Mississippi novels ever, or one of his famous short story collections, such as Airships, or his last novel, Yonder Stands Your Orphan, a sleeper favorite here with plenty of wisdom, comedy and happy tragedy.

Finally, our love and thoughts go out to Barry's dear wife, Susan, and all the rest of his family.