- [Announcer] A production of South Carolina ETV.

(uptempo music) (uptempo music continues) From Clemson, I'm Patti Just.

On this program, we're featuring Mark Steadman, who's a writer-in-residence at Clemson University.

His books include "McAfee County," which is a collection of short stories, and then he has three novels, "A Lion's Share," "Angel Child," and "Bang-Up Season."

He was born in Statesboro, Georgia.

He attended Armstrong Junior College and Emory University and earned his PhD from Florida State University.

And he lives in Central South Carolina and still teaches at Clemson.

Dr.

Steadman, welcome to our program.

- Thank you.

- I read with interest all the various jobs that you had.

You've worked as a movie usher, a delivery person, you've been on a surveying team, a number of things, and now you're a writer and teacher.

- Yeah.

- Tell us about that.

- Well, that's what writers do, you know, before they write.

You have to have something to write about.

Most of those jobs were early on.

I was an usher when I was in high school.

I don't know what else I put on that, to tell you the truth.

Worked on the survey party in college, the summers in college.

The thing I'm most proud of as an English teacher though, is that I worked for a publishing house in Atlanta, writing advertising copy before I decided to go back to graduate school.

So I made my living as a writer of advertising copy for a while.

Not all English teachers can say that.

(chuckles) - All that experience, all those different jobs, gave you experience, and I'm sure you ran into a lot of characters along the way.

- Particularly the survey job.

The kind of people that you meet there on the county road gangs and all, they're unsophisticated, which means they don't know what's in, and so they kind of have to make up the rules themselves.

And I think they're more interesting for that reason.

- You've taught at Clemson, what now, 36 years?

- [Mark] Yep, since I came here in '57.

- So all of your writing has been here?

- Well, I started in high school.

(laughs) All of my publishing has been here and a lot of my rejections have been here too, I would have to say, to begin with.

But yeah, I've been here a pretty good while.

- That first book of the collection of short stories took a long time.

As you said, you had some difficulty in getting publishing.

What was it that kept you going and trying to work?

- I like to write.

I get a high out of it.

I don't drink much, which I worry about that a little 'cause American writers are supposed to be drunkards.

(laughs) And I just get sleepy when I drink, so I don't get anything done.

No, I got a high out of it and I liked it, so that's what kept me at it, I think.

- Let's talk about that first one, "McAfee County: A Chronicle."

It's a collection of short stories.

How'd you come up with that collection that made that whole piece?

- Accidentally.

The first story in there, the cigarette holder story, was one I had been thinking about for a pretty good while, and I had written some drafts of it and I don't think I sent it off anywhere.

And then I got a chance to teach at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and still working on it at the time we We went there and I had a very light teaching load and nothing to do outside of teaching, and so I got to writing again.

I finished that story and then I wrote another story.

I mean, I had all this time on my hands, no committees or anything, and then I wrote a third story and I was just writing stories.

But along about the third story, it occurred to me, these kind of go together, you know?

And I started to think of it in those terms and I wrote six stories that year we were in Egypt and then we came back and I wrote six more.

And that made the book.

But three stories, and then I started thinking in terms of putting them... You know, connecting them.

"Winesburg, Ohio," by Sherwood Anderson was kind of the model for that.

- [Patti] That story- - And I called it a chronicle because hardback publishers did not wanna publish short story collections as first works.

And they were very happy that I thought of that term.

So they didn't have to call that a short story collection.

- Why is that, that they didn't wanna take a chance?

- They usually just don't sell very well.

They want you to do a novel to get a little bit of a reputation, and then they'll take a chance on a short story collection.

It's not quite as bad that way now as it used to be, but it used to be almost impossible to get a short story collection out of the first book.

- Let's talk about that first story a little bit, Mr.

McAllister, and his profession was grubbing, which I found interesting.

I didn't know what that was.

- (laughs) That's taking the rocks and stuff out of the road bed before they pave it.

And it was a terrible job.

And it was a county road gang that was... Those people were paid.

I mean, a lot of road work in those days, this is summer of '50, 1950, was done by county road gangs.

That is, you know, prisoners.

But these were not prisoners and this was their job.

They worked at it and they spent their day bent over, picking stuff up out of the road bed.

That's what grubbing is.

(both laughing) - Makes for an interesting story.

- Yeah.

Well, the thing that struck me about that character was that he was... And patterned on somebody I didn't know, but saw, you know, observed was that he had this terrible job and he had this great dignity in spite of it.

And how he could maintain that under those circumstances is what got me interested in him as a character.

And so I just set out to explain that, I guess.

And there's the story, - Well, that work got a label, it was called Southern Gothic Fiction.

- Yeah.

- Can you discuss what that is in layman's terms?

- It's a mixture of comic and grotesque, weird.

I don't think we have any more weird characters in the South than probably other people have, but as we were saying a little while ago, I think we maybe cherish them more, perhaps than in a city, for instance.

And we related to them too.

(laughs) I think that has something to do with it.

I like Flannery O'Connor and... Although that first book, I wasn't... I didn't know her that well at that time.

I've read a lot of her since then, and she has become a favorite writer.

The model for the first book was more Erskine Caldwell, who deals with the same kind of strangeness in the South.

There's a long tradition of this.

Faulkner writes that way, Caldwell writes that way.

- Flannery O'Connor has even said that Southern writers have a penchant for writing about freaks.

- Well, she also said, I think this is interesting, that when Southern writers write grotesquely, Northern critics call it realism.

And when Southern writers write realistically, Northern critics call it grotesque.

(both laughing) I don't know what it is.

I think it's the small town, sort of rural society.

And we have strange people living next to us and related to them and we take care of them and all of that.

- You have a sample, a little example you're gonna read out of "McAfee County: A Chronicle."

- Well, this is just a description of the county.

It's a little hard to excerpt it even stories, but this will show you the kind of place I was dealing with.

I said that it's an imaginary coastal county in the state of Georgia, and then I give some description.

I got a lot of figures out of the 1960 census report.

and I combined figures for Macintosh and Bryan counties.

And my county would fit in between those two.

And I sort of averaged them out, things like that.

1,334 families with an average income of $2,431 a year.

37% I think of the houses had running water and indoor plumbing, that kind of thing.

And then I end up with this after the statistics.

I say, "That's about it for statistics, but there are other ways you could look at McAfee County if it was there.

Latitude, 31 degrees, 30 minutes north and longitude, 81 degrees, 30 minutes west would intersect it shot for its grocery store and filling station.

If you could leap up in the air and hang there for a day while the world rolled around underneath you, you'd see it shares a parallel of latitude with Jessup, Georgia, Greenville, Alabama, Laurel, Mississippi, Nacogdoches, Waco, and Odessa, Texas Ensenada, Mexico, Nagasaki, Japan, Nanking, China, Lahore, Pakistan, Baghdad, Iraq, Haifa, Israel, Alexandria, Egypt, Marrakesh, Morocco Running meridian of longitude up through the North Pole and around again, it passed through Spartanburg, South Carolina, Charleston, West Virginia, Cleveland, Ohio, Moosonee, Canada, Hudson Bay, Nova to Russia, Lucknow, India, Colombo, Ceylon, Paita, Peru.

To Isthmus of Panama, Havana, Cuba, and Cape Kennedy, Florida.

Those are the main places.

If only it was there, McAfee County would have a hell of a good location, practically a crossroads of the wide world.

But it's not.

McAfee County, Georgia is not real.

So always remember, none of this is true.

I thought you ought to know."

(Patti chuckles) 'Course, all of it is true.

(both laughing) - That's right, that's right.

We were talking about that being a landmark year.

When that book was published in 1971, you turned 40, you'd had a hard time getting published and here was that book, and I know you felt good about that.

- Yeah, yeah, it took a long time.

I didn't have much to say, I guess, until I got around to writing this one or didn't say it the right way or something.

'Cause I had written half of a novel when I had that job in Atlanta doing ad copy, and then another one my first year here at Clemson.

The first one I didn't send off at all.

The second one I sent off.

Nothing came of it.

It's a mean spirited black humor sort of thing.

And then a bunch of short stories and then I don't know what happened.

- Right.

Well, I'm glad it did.

- (laughs) Found my groove.

- What'd you think about this treatment, if you'd hold that up, the "3 By 3" book?

Peachtree Press put your stories in with a couple of other authors.

- Yeah, they wanted to do, I guess... These are all sort of Southern gothic stories and they put me in with very good company, Doris Betts from Chapel Hill.

Doris is a wonderful character.

I don't know if you've ever met her.

I think Doris doesn't even have a bachelor's degree.

And she's a full professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

I think that's wonderful.

And Shirley Ann Grau is from New Orleans.

She's from New Orleans, and they're all about the Southern rural scene.

And Doris Betts' short story, "The Ugliest Pilgrim," I think is the name of it.

Wasn't that in the American Short Story Collection?

- Yeah.

Would you agree that your stories are Southern gothic?

- Yeah, I think so.

I don't think in terms of writing Southern gothic stories when I sit down to write.

That's just what happens to come out, kind of people I'm interested in.

- Right.

And moving on to your next work, that was the first novel you tried in 1976, "A Lion's Share."

- That was about somebody I did know better, a friend of mine who was a a star football player, showed a lot of promise and then kind of blew it all away and died very young.

I knew that he had died young.

I lost contact with him really, after that one year.

I lost contact with him.

And so I didn't know how he died.

I knew he had died and that all kinds of bad things had happened.

His marriage broke up, and he drank, and things like that.

So I made up an ending for him that was rather heroic.

I went down to Savannah, you know, that book came out in '76 for autographing party.

And I didn't think about his family at the time I was writing this book.

And when we got to Savannah, there were billboards all over the place.

His half-brother was running for county council, (laughs) and I wondered how he was gonna take this.

But I got a call from him and we talked for a pretty good while and he felt like I had treated him quite well.

He thought I had made him a lot more admirable a person than he had actually been in real life.

And his mother came to the book signing and I was very apprehensive about that.

But her attitude towards this was pretty much the same.

So that worked out all right.

- It did.

People have talked about your storytelling abilities and how that shows in the book.

- I think you need to tell a story.

I like for something to happen, you know, feel like you've gotten somewhere when you get to the end.

I think it's traditional, but I think there's a reason that it's traditional.

I think it's a good way to do it.

- And what about the use of humor?

You even teach a course in humor in your writing.

- [Mark] Yeah, post-American humor.

- How do you make it work so well?

What's your secret?

- I don't know.

I don't think... It's not something I really work at.

I don't say, "I'm gonna make this funny."

If you get characters that are strange enough and if they're funny enough... I don't take much credit for this.

I think it's the characters who kind of take on a life of their own and they do funny things and I just kind of record what they do.

I have a sort of mystic view of this whole process.

John Gardner said... He wrote "Sunlight Dialogues" and "Grendel," said he didn't know what he was going to say in the book until he had said it.

You know, he discovered as he wrote it.

And I go one step further and say, "I often don't know what I have said after I have said it."

And my colleagues in the English department come explain my words to him.

and I never contradict whatever meaning they find.

That's right, I'll take credit for it.

- That's what you meant.

- (laughs) I wrote it.

- That's right.

Well, can you describe that book, "A Lion's Share," by saying it's about football, it's a love story, it's comedy?

- I think it's probably all of those to some extent.

It's also a tragedy- - [Patti] Yeah.

- 'Cause of the early death.

I didn't want it to be a football book.

Of course, they put the football player on the cover.

And certainly, he is a football player.

But I think it's... I hope it's more than that.

- Did you play football?

- No, I didn't.

I went to a high school that I think lost two games in the four years I was there.

And I weighed about 125 pounds dripping wet, fully clothed.

And there just wasn't any point in me going out for football and getting myself killed.

- (laughs) You have something- - I'm a big fan.

- Right.

- You have something you wanted to read for us from that?

- Okay, this is... Again, this is... I dunno whether this gives the flavor of the book or not, but it's a description... I don't do description too well, it seems to me, at least I have to work at it a lot.

Dialogue comes much easier.

But this is a little piece of description that I rather like.

He goes out to this place outside Savannah, which exists.

It's called Isle of Hope.

My mother was born there and raised there and it says a description of it.

Let's see.

"Isle of Hope was 10 miles out of town on the waterfront.

The isle of Hope River was not a river really, but a tidal estuary made of long brown curves sweeping against the crescent of a high bluff going from north to south.

Along the bluff and Narrow road, followed the sweep of the curve open to the water and marsh on the riverside with a one deep string of houses on the other.

Front yards were long and wide, but in the back, second row pines crowded in close with here and there, an outbuilding, pushing up against the big main houses that fronted on the bluff.

Slightly seedy houses in a genteel way.

Most of 'em had been built in the last part of the 19th century, occupied by the grandsons and granddaughters of the builders, not all alike, with individual patterns in the inoculations and towers.

Some had widows walks, some did not.

But they had all come out of the same basic conception of style, solid and fancy.

They were all big 2-story, clapboard sided, mostly white with widescreen porches wrapping around them on the front and sides.

From the high front steps, oyster shells walks led down to the road and across the docks and boat houses hang on the bluff on the riverside.

And then Bala Beach Pavilion there in the early 1900s, which got blown away in a hurricane about 20 years ago, but one of the things I remember about it.

In the early 1900s, Bala Beach had been a thriving place with dances every weekend, played for by Blue Steel and Tony Pastor and other well-known bands at the time.

Excursion boats left on Sundays for trips to Beaufort and Tybee Island, and Warsaw.

The streetcar line ran out from Savannah and townspeople would rattle out on it to spend Sundays and holidays in the summer, drinking beer and cooled lemonade in the afternoons under the roof of the pavilion while the Chatham Artillery band played the kind of heart-raising music that had been popular then, Strauss waltzes and marches by John Phillip Sousa.

Then after the sun went down, there'd be dancing in the light of Japanese lanterns to songs like "My Gal Sal" and "The Bowery," and "After the Ball."

It was something... My mother has very fond recollections of her childhood at that place.

And a lot of that got into that passage, I think.

- You saw a lot of Georgie.

You said you moved every two years.

- Yeah, until I was in the fifth grade.

I think we kind of came to rest in Atlanta.

But yeah, I was born in Statesboro, lived there till I was about six months, so I'm told.

(laughs) I don't really remember.

And then moved to Millen and Macon, then Atlanta to Augusta, to Fitzgerald, Georgia, back to Atlanta in 1940, and stayed there until I finished high school.

Then we moved to Savannah.

My father had died, and Mother wanted to go back where her family was.

- So you incorporated the Isle of Hope into that book.

- Isle of Hope.

Savannah, I love Savannah.

- Yeah.

The next book was so funny, the "Angel Child" book in 1987.

That book, the plot, not to be unkind, but it was about two very ugly people- - Right.

- Who have a very beautiful child.

- Right.

Well, one ugly child.

- Well, one ugly child, and the second child is beautiful.

And the conflict that they have.

And where did this story come from?

- Okay, I just saw this couple, I guess I met this couple you might say, but I didn't really know them when I was in grad school in Tallahassee.

They lived in Madison, Florida.

And he put out the... Well, they put out the newspapers in that town.

I was working for the Tallahassee Democrat.

And we went out to their house and he had all of the afflictions that I give him in the book, plus a speech impediment.

But I could not have a main character for, you know, a 300-page novel that spoke with a speech impediment.

So I had to drop that affliction.

And his wife looked pretty much the way I described her.

And they had this one child who was about 9 or 10 years old, looked like he was about 80 years old, and then this beautiful little 2 or 3-year-old kid.

And it just stuck in my mind, you know, what did they think of this child, this angel child?

Now, I wrote a short story about this right after I came to Clemson.

Never could get it published anywhere, but I liked the situation.

I got stuck on something else that I was writing.

I was trying to make it mean too much, trying to make it too deep, you know.

And I decided I had to get off of it.

And I thought I'd go back and just change a pace.

I'd rewrite the short story, couldn't find the short story.

So I had to start over again.

And before I knew it, I had about 50 pages and I was just getting started.

I said, "I got a novel."

And so I kept going.

And that's what came of it.

The idea, I guess, in all of my books is it's okay to be different.

- [Patti] Right.

- I like to write about people who are somehow outside the mainstream.

- And so this one looks at the way people see beauty, to the eye of the beholder.

- Because to them and their... Because of who they are, they have a sort of inverted aesthetic.

And I can make too much of that too, but I hope I didn't.

And anyway, it makes the beautiful child for them the kind of problem that say a deformed child would be for a normal couple and what to do with... Well, it's not so much a problem for the mother, but it is for the father.

In the original short story, I had to mutilate that child at the end of the story, but I was about 28 years old when I wrote it.

And you can have him mutilate at 28.

When I rewrote it in my late 50s, you can't do that in your late 50s.

(both laughing) You mellow out, you know?

- [Patti] Right.

- So she stops him at the end from doing this.

But that's his inclination.

He thinks that maybe everything will be all... He's having some troubles and maybe everything will be all right if he makes the child ugly like the rest of them.

- So many of the reviews were fantastic for that book, and you had all sorts of comparisons to Twain and Faulkner.

What was your reaction to that?

- Well, that's high cotton.

(laughs) Yeah, it's always flattering, you know, for that kind of thing to happen.

Every now and then, I'm conscious of writing a Faulkner line or a Mark Twain line.

I love Mark Twain.

Hemingway is hard to top for dialogue.

I'm sure that's been an influence.

Although, the dialogue master that I have in mind is Ring Lardner, who isn't anthologized as much anymore, but he was an influence on Hemingway.

He writes... Well, they've done a couple of his stories.

I can't remember.

Oh, "Golden Honeymoon," that's one of 'em.

He dealt with the bottom of the middle class, the lower middle class mostly, and he just pegged them, you know?

- [Patti] Yeah.

- The way they talk is just exactly right.

- Yeah.

Well, then moving on to the latest work a couple years ago, "The Bang-Up Season" book.

And in that one, you took care of some unfinished business from the very first novel.

- That's right.

I say I've written three and a half.

You say I've written four books.

(chuckles) I've written three and a half.

That's my half book.

What I did was take out the comic sections from "A Lion's Share," cause on second thought, I've got a fairly serious opening in "A Lion's Share" and then this comic section about a high school football team.

And then it gets serious again.

They're four books and one of them is funny.

And I thought after it came out, you always have these second thoughts, that maybe that broke the mood of that book.

And it might have been better to just do a short comic high school football book and let that be one thing and let the other story be another.

And it was still percolating around in my mind and I had an opportunity, 'cause I had a former student who was an editor at Longstreet, to suggest that maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to bring that out, that section out, as a short comic novel.

She agreed, so that's how we did it.

I had to write a few bridges for it and the ending, of course, is different, but a lot of it was just almost word for word from the first one.

- So I wondered if it was difficult, because so many years had passed in picking back up the setting and the characters.

- It really took almost no time.

I spent maybe two or three weeks on that.

And usually I write... Well, I write fast in bursts, but they're long glides between bursts (laughs) so that it takes me a good while to spit one out.

'76 for "A Lion's Share."

And then, what did we say, '87- - '87 - For "Angel Child."

- And just three years after that for "Bang-Up Season" - Well, of course, it only took two weeks to do it when I got around to it.

- Were the other books easier to get published after you'd had that first success?

- Yeah, that works I think, up to a point.

And then if it depends on what the sales are.

It may get hard again.

I remember a friend of mine, a North Carolina writer, a guy who may have known him or not.

He died several years ago.

I remember going to a writer's workshop with him and he had a letter from his agent.

He'd sent her a novel manuscript and he had been carrying that letter for about four days.

He was scared to open it.

(laughs) He was afraid she was gonna say, "I can't place this book for you."

I don't know what the final outcome of that was either.

But, you know, that can happen.

- Yeah.

- [Mark] Go ahead.

- I was just going to, in conclusion, talk about your view of yourself.

I read one quote that you said that meant a lot to me.

You consider yourself a teacher who writes more than a writer who teaches.

- Yeah.

I mean, my identity has been more as a teacher than as a writer.

It's something I like to do and I think maybe it supports the teaching in some way, helps it.

But I mean, I've taught.

I've been a teacher for 36 years, a writer for not that long.

And I think maybe I... Well, I don't know.

I was gonna say I teach better than I write, but I don't know.

I better stay out of that.

- That's right.

- I'm not the one to make those judgements anyway.

- Right, but obviously you care about your students and what they think.

- Oh, yeah.

- That's important.

- Sure, yeah.

I mean, there's no reason to be in this business if you don't feel that way, I think.

- All right, well, thank you so much for sharing your books with us.

- Well, thank you for inviting me.

- All right, Mark Steadman, thanks for being with us.

From Clemson, I'm Patti Just.

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