(You know, kinda like stories but not.)
I Never Wanted to Be No Southern Writer but Done Became One Anyhow
There are a great many things that we as modern people can exert control over. From the color of our hair to the shape of our government, we have some flexibility – some room for the adjustment of reality, if you will.
Some things in life however are immutable, unable to be changed no matter how much we may wish otherwise. These things include (but aren’t strictly limited to) stuff like the literal color of one’s eyes, gravity, or the fact that exposure to radiation or chemicals will give us death instead of superpowers.
This list of unchangeable (the less fancy way of saying immutable) also includes things like where you come from. Like it or not, it’s one of those factual things that becomes a part of you, whether you like it or not.
(You could even pretend to be from somewhere else like say, Vanilla Ice, but we all saw how that went, so maybe that’s not the best idea ever.)
You can try to hide it – talk different, dress different, whatever – but the reality remains: where you come from will shape who you are, often in ways you aren’t aware of. Or if aware, not necessarily simpatico with, resulting in a lot of time pointlessly spent trying to fight what has already been determined to be an unchangeable fact, usually to one’s own detriment or shame.
(Miami, Robbie? Really?)
Now, lest y’all think I’m trying to be all high and mighty about this, let me clear something up real fast, so we’re all drinking from the same trough or what have you:
This was me. While I didn’t go anywhere so far as to affect an accent like I was from some other country, or dress differently, I did (and yeah self-consciously at that) try to downplay being Texan, and Southern, pretty hard.
(Now here you might all be thinking, “Well hang on now. You just done told everybody that where you’re from is one of those things you cain’t change, that it’s part of you and it’s no use fighting it. Did you just call your ownself dumb?”)
To the above there, friends and gentle readers, the only answer I got is, well, yeah pretty much.
Let me explain some.
My cousin and I (may he rest easy. He was seriously a good guy, as well as someone who didn’t waste a lot of years with the foolishness that I did.) were the first in our family to be from a major city. Granted, Austin in the 70s was a bit smaller than now, but still – a major city is a major city. As kids, we moved from Austin to Dallas – again, major city stuff going on here. None of that small town shit like the rest of our family. I mean, yeah sure, we would visit said smaller towns to see family, but we weren’t the same.
We were (drum roll and fanfare) city folks. And as every one – from that smart fella at the end of your block what reads foreign newspapers to crazy Dan at the other end who yells about chemtrails or gay frogs – knows, city folks is different.
Now I can’t say for certain, but I suppose I was the first (between the two of us) to become aware that, much to my supposed city folk surprise, people in Dallas sounded different. Sure, there was still plenty of Texas accents, and various other Southern accents to be heard, but they weren’t the only thing I heard. I was shocked and immediately entranced. I became aware of how I sounded when I talked, and while perhaps the least Texan sounding of my immediate family, I nevertheless worked all the harder to scrub any regional traces from my speech. Now, don’t get me wrong, I still loved em and all but damn it, I just didn’t want to sound like em. I know, I know, I already said all that about not being able to change where you come from and how foolish it is to pretend and all but still, there’s things y’all maybe aren’t getting as clear, which is why the explaining.
Maybe it was because it was the 80s, and because we lived in Dallas. Maybe it was due to having cable television (MTV even) and seeing a world beyond where I lived, where people looked and sounded different and cool. Shit, maybe it was aliens, zapping me with a green ray of Cultural Dissatisfaction, so that I worried incessantly that folks would think I sounded like a hick, and use that as an excuse to hound me endlessly with asking if I knew who shot J.R, and if I rode horses everywhere.
Pick one, all, or hell, make up your version – all comes down about the same: I didn’t want nobody getting the idea that I was some uneducated hillbilly, major city or not. I read books in translation, classics, watched foreign films – all that kinda shit you do to make yourself more worldly – as means of trying to change my voice. Again, not so I’d affect an accent or anything, but more so I could be not so easily identified as either Texan or Southern. Dumb thing to want maybe, but we’re rarely ever our wisest in our earlier years.
Did it work?
As simply as I can perhaps put it, yes. It did. My efforts paid off, resulting in a speaking voice that, as determined by one of my high school acting teachers, was perfect “Standard American” – clear American English, but devoid of regional accent or impediment. It worked, though in hindsight, so well as to be more detrimental than I had figured. You might, if so inclined, say it backfired rather spectacularly.
How, you ask?
Well, for starters, I now sounded pretty much unlike everyone else. From my father with his East Texas meets East Coast mishmash to my mother and her Panhandle phonology, I sounded alien, different, strange.
Foreign.
When we would visit family in the Panhandle, my relatives would pretend they couldn’t figure out what I was saying, claiming that “I talked funny, like one of them Yankee car dealers you see in movies that cain’t be trusted or unnerstood.” Now, given that these were the people I was trying to not sound like, you might think, “well, shit, son – why would that bug you?” and mostly you’d be right.
Mostly. It did get old, though.
This is not, however, to say that all results borne of my efforts were exactly bad. One interesting effect of having such a voice was being now exceedingly well-suited for work that involved talking to people. Work like being a customer service representative, or technical support engineer, for example.
In other words, I had effectively won the lottery in hell. Not that I knew that at the time, mind you. We ain’t always at our brightest or most shiny in our younger years. I think this is mainly to protect us from the inevitable depression that would otherwise arise from the poor decisions we often make.
(But wait, I hear y’all saying; hang on just one hot minute now. What’s all this flapjaw about family and work and whatnot? Stories about other shit’s fine and all, but ain’t this supposed to be about being Southern and about writing? That’s in the title, even – just what kinda shit you trying to pull? To which I’ll say, now just be cool a second. Dang. I promise, it will all make sense. Just keep on reading…)
Time went on as it will tend to do, whether we like it or not. As one might have guessed in the lead up there, I did in fact work in tech in the years that followed, putting my accent-free American English to use, fielding the inevitable, “You sound kinda funny. Where you from?” in the process. I read a lot in my off time, and wrote as well – poetry mostly, along with the occasional short story, that I never ever showed to anyone.
Now, you may be asking yourselves, “Well, dang man – how you gonna be any kind of writer, you ain’t showing your works to people or letting em read?” A valid and fair concern, but there’s something more important here that y’all need to maybe understand:
I didn’t show anyone these works because well, they weren’t very good.
Let me back this up a second and point out that I’m not saying these were, from a technical standpoint, bad or anything – far from it. I mean, I am (and was then too) an educated person, who comes from educated people (teachers even), so from a structural perspective, these were all fine enough – mechanically speaking.
Just not very good.
(This is the part now where I tell y’all that there is a fairly wide difference between skilled and good, which these works demonstrated with all the subtlety of a giant turd sitting in the middle of an otherwise immaculate bathroom floor.)
Now, because it’s rare that we ever say (leastaways out loud where other folks can hear) “Damn, this is really some boring ass shit that had I not written it my ownself, I probably wouldn’t read it,” even when we know deep down that this is perhaps closer to home than we may enjoy, I made no mention of my writing to anyone. Again, it wasn’t bad, exactly, it was just…boring and I didn’t like it much myself. Like the unfortunate fella who misjudged while juggling chainsaws and ended up an amputee, I felt very little. Once I was done writing, I would read it a few times, trying to puzzle out what it was that was missing before finally shoving it in a box and forgetting about it.
(I imagine it’s here that y’all are all, “Finally! He’s talking about writing. I thought for a minute that he ain’t never gonna, and all this would be some weird shit about his childhood, or worse, tech support. Ain’t nobody wanna read that.”)
Now you may ask yourself, why bother with all this, if not satisfied? Again, a good point, to which there aren’t any answers that don’t sound like a bunch of mess. I guess the best I can really say here is because I read a lot, and well, because while feeling like it wasn’t no good, I still liked it. Like, there was a part of me (most likely the same part that likes all them detective novels so much) that thought that if I could just figure out the missing part, I’d like what I wrote a lot more – maybe even get to a point where I wanted to show and have people read, versus having it be more like when you dash off into a room to rip a fart and then run away as fast as possible, slamming the door behind you, rehearsing your denial as you go.
Or so I figured anyhow.
I suspect (y’know, like if this were a detective novel or what have you) that y’all are thinking, having read that last part that this is where I finally figure shit out – how the missing bit was making peace with being Southern, integrating it all into my writing like public education after 1965 and the like. Surely, you’re sayin’ to yourselves, surely this has hit his ass like lightning or a big ass rock or something.
Well…yes, but also no.
I mean yes, because that is indeed coming up – how I, per Mark McGurl, quoting Dorothy Hale, had found that “authentic self-expression of identity that is integral to and inevitable in any act of novelistic communication” 1 and leveraged it. In other words, how I had “found my voice”, like they talk about in school, and made that sucker work for me. That’s coming.
I feel, however, that I got a little more backstory in there before I get into all that. Because well, you know, details, y’all, details. So, having said that, let me backtrack a second and talk a bit about the Spock that goes with the Kirk of writing – the Bonnie to the Clyde, Calvin to the Hobbes, pick your pairing, it’s all the same.
I’m talking about reading of course. I mean, I’m sure that y’all already knew that but nevertheless, I still got to complete it, having gone to the trouble of setting it all up and such.
One of them things writers do, you know.
Since I done already flapped my mouth some and made mention earlier to reading a lot (which y’all surely picked up on, being detail-oriented and attentive readers and everything), I think that if I’m being just as honest as I can, the other thing hanging me up here – squashing my voice, repressing my identity, whatever – had to do with some of the Southern literature I read as well.
Hang on now, I hear y’all saying, hang on just one moment there, amigo. A page or two up you said some stuff about reading things to help distance yourself from the South, which meant, per you, “books in translation, classics” which we took to mean “not Southern.” Hell, we even figured you probably read books by foreign weirdos, or that crazy Yankee what tells stories about haunted cars and clowns and shit. Now, you’re trying to say that not only did you read that kinda mess, but you also read Southern writers…and they’re also somehow to blame for this, too? Seriously? What kinda shit you handing us here, hoss?
Make it make sense. Because right now, this bears some suspicious resemblance to what falls out of a horse’s ass.
Cool your jets, folks, and be easy now. Give me a minute and I swear on my mama’s (who would undoubtedly pick this thing apart and tell me, in excruciating detail, everything wrong with this) grave that I will. Just put them pitchforks down and read on.
It’s like this: whether we all like it or not, our parents – from bout the time we usually manage to gain semi-decent bowel control until we tell em to shove off and roll out of the nest – have a lot of impact on the shit we do. From the way we walk and talk to what we wear and eat, Mom and Dad carry weight there. This includes (as you can likely guess) what we read.
In this, I was no exception. Shit, I might have been even more influenced in that area, given that my mother – small Panhandle town origins be damned – was an English professor with a doctorate. If she said read something because it was good or important, I did. Who was I to know better or enough to argue? That, and well, I wanted her to be proud.
I mean, ain’t that what we all want from our parents?
So, whatever she suggested, I read. William Faulkner. Tennessee Williams. Truman Capote. Eudora Welty. Mark Twain. Harper Lee. Flannery O’Connor – my mother’s all-time favorite – and her literary enemy Carson McCullers, yeah them too. I read em all. And while I can say that I appreciated these fine folks, and in some cases thought the works in question were indeed great, there was still something…missing, I guess. The easy answer here is “Well yeah – them folks was writing about times before you so of course it don’t connect all the way” and while I will allow that that is maybe a part, I’d be lying if I said it was the all.
I think that, when you get down to it, it was more that enough of that South they described had passed as to produce a feeling closer to recognition versus a deeper resonance, if you follow here. It was all familiar enough, to be sure, but more like a “hey I know or heard about that kind of place/them kind of people” way than a “well hang on now – that’s me” kinda way. So, coupled with the feelings I already held in my younger (and yes, more foolish) days, these works just kinda helped lend themselves to the desire to shy away, and do all them things to avoid sounding Southern like I talked about earlier.
As one might guess, this put me in an odd position. Here I was, well-read as all get-out, but unable to really produce anything writing-wise that I wanted to show anyone, including but not limited to my own parents. Hell, especially not them. This wasn’t like them shitty drawings that look likes scribbles but are really a house or a truck or whatever that you do when you’re really small and apparently challenged by shapes as well as motor control. This wasn’t even one of them silly hand turkeys you do in school. That kinda messy shit, your parents will still say nice things about – praise it, display it, tell other parents – even though objectively everyone involved (including you, deep down) knows this is some mess, cause ain’t no truck in the world bigger than your house or looking like a pile of sticks with wheels.
No, this kinda shit – when presumably you’ve gotten some years and education down – will just get you ignored (bad) or heavily criticized (worse) and you know it. Should you show it to anyone, parents or otherwise, you of course won’t pretend like it ain’t yours, but all the same, you’ll be squirming inside, wishing like hell that you hadn’t, like some kind of artistic beer goggles or whatnot. You know what I mean, I think.
So, what then did I do, you ask?
I did the only thing I could reasonably think of, to avoid the discomfort, artistically speaking. I stopped writing.
(Now clearly, I can’t see none of y’all, so I’m having to imagine this part, but I suspect that here, the overall sentiment is something like, “Hold up. Is this sorry sumbitch really trying to tell everyone that rather than keep pluggin’ away or ask someone for advice, he just done quit? Man. If ain’t that some sorry shit right there. Think I got half a mind to quit reading this, see how he likes that.” To which I say, yeah wouldn’t blame you none if you did in fact do that – however, you done come this far, should stick it out to the end. Done ridden this far, right?)
If this were one of them Hollywood ass movies or something, there’d be something really dramatic right about here, to rein shit in and steer this horse, so to speak. Sadly, this ain’t no movie whereupon I am saved from the worst consequences of my actions, shit works out great and the like, plus maybe some explosions or a fight sequence. Instead, I did as I said there – quit writing – and just kinda moseyed on, doing life things and pretending not to hear folks saying anything to the contrary.
This went on for a time (a length of which I did not calculate in specific terms but sufficient to say lengthy. Like when they say shit like, “forty days and forty nights” – obviously not literally meaning that but more in that “damn, he/she/they done been gone a minute now to a point where we stopped countin’ and considered renting their room out” kinda way.) until one day something happened along to open my eyes and reconsider.
Now, before y’all get any weird ideas on what this happening was, think I maybe oughtta say real quick that it wasn’t nothing magical (like a vision of J. Frank Dobie speaking to me in a dream) or weird (J. Frank Dobie again, only riding an armadillo through a field of chili) but something a bit more ordinary, if no less important for that. No, what happened was that someone gave me a book.
Yes. A book.
(A book – a fuckin’ book – is what changed everything? Seriously? Now I know you’re just yankin’ our dicks, man. Fess up now. This is all bullshit and you just been jackin’ with us this whole time, right?)
No, really. It was a book. I shit you not. As to just which book that was, well, I guess maybe I’ll skip that lest y’all get to thinking it’s some miraculous visionary thing (not unlike J. Frank Dobie and that armadillo) that will change your lives or something. Don’t wanna be settin’ no weird expectations now. Besides, you ain’t that interested in knowing that, right?
What’s that? Y’all do wanna know what book it was?
I guess I can part with that information, provided none of y’all get mad or weird or whatever. Expectations, folks, expectations. I ain’t trying to tell you that this book or any of the ones I may mention in here will change you. I ain’t even trying to tell you that they told me how or what to write. I have tried pretty hard thus far not to tell you anything that was not exactly true (albeit in perhaps a drawn-out manner, but that hardly makes it untrue, just less direct.) and I intend on keepin’ it thus.
The book (the first of a few really) that opened my eyes and showed me what it was that I was missing – hell, getting wrong – was Freezer Burn, by Joe R. Lansdale. It’s about identity, acceptance, and figuring out what or who stops you from accomplishing things.
It’s also about a dude,” lonely as the last pig in a slaughterhouse line,”2 who can’t win for losing, a traveling freak show, and a mysterious corpse in ice. It’s a crime novel, a black comedy, twisted and Texan as all get-out.
I read that, and I swear, something in my mind just lit up all bright like when they finally take your picture after dickin’ around forever and catch you staring full-face into the flash, damn near burning out your mind in the process. I kid you not. It was like discovering that you’d been sittin’ on the last two or three pieces of a puzzle for years before finally shifting your ass enough to find em, allowing you to complete the picture of dinosaurs at a dance party or puppies eating ice cream or whatever. I guess you could call it an epiphany if you’re into that kind of thing, though I’d hope an actual one would feature heavenly guitar solos or at the very least, some free tacos. In any case, it was like someone, or something shined a big ol’ flashlight not only on me but through me, if you can follow.
I felt seen.
Eventually, I came back down to earth and started to think on things a bit: Here was a Southern voice – a Texan even – writing about the South and connecting with me in ways unlike the others I’d read. Why? What was the difference here? These were the questions banging around in my head, along with the fervent for more and others of similar type. So, in order to answer these questions, I did what anyone would do.
I read more books.
I continued my exploration into what I guess we could say would be more “contemporary” Southern literature, with folks like Cormac McCarthy, Randall Kenan, Lee Smith, and Tim O’Brien, but for a few. During this time, I think I probably read everything that Tom Robbins had out in print, as I thought he was just as hilarious as they came. Tried reading one of Donna Tartt’s novels (ain’t sayin’ which) but that didn’t really work for me as well. Read it to the end to be fair but decided after that she wasn’t much to my tastes, Southern or not. I could go on and on here, but I think y’all get the point I’m making: the switch done been throwed and the light was on. I had found my tribe, so to speak, and with it, a better sense of place.
Belonging. And yeah, I guess that whole authorial voice thing like what I mentioned earlier.
(McGurl talks about this way more in depth (and far better) than I can, do or will in his book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, which is all fine and good. That’s his deal and one he’s far better suited for. Me? I’m just some dude what figured out his deal was with his own writing and what stood in the way.)
All that that remained then really was to write again.
Which brings us to today – the here and now if you will. As pointed out in that bit above, discovering (a silly ass word here as it makes it sound like ain’t nobody knew about these before I ran across em or whatever) works of contemporary Southern writers was what ultimately kinda kickstarted me back into writing. By reading other Southern voices, talking about a South I knew and despite whatever misguided feelings I’d fed myself over the years, cared about, finally gave myself permission to see what had been in front of me all along. To connect the missing parts, reconnect, and become who I really am.
(Y’all probably guessed from earlier but was hopefully kind enough not to scream out. Nobody likes spoilers.)
“But did it make you a better writer?”
This is what I imagine y’all might be wondering now. All this stuff about denying identity and sayin’ that’s what made your earlier works no good before you read all them books – did it make you better as a writer? A fair question, and certainly a logical one, to which I have but one answer:
I don’t really know.
Now, before y’all get mad and bust out the modern-day version of pitchforks and torches (you know, mean ass emails and comments), let me qualify that a bit real quick. Better still, let me rephrase it some.
Am I a better writer for the reasons mentioned previously? Yes but also no. Yes, because as one might gather from reading this, I finally done figured it out, in regard to authorial voice and identity. I started writing again. Shit, if that ain’t one in the yes column, then I really don’t know what is. However, it’s also a no, because again, like said before, there was not a lot technically wrong with the previous works, they were boring to read. So, in a sense it wasn’t bad to begin with. In that way, reading those works didn’t make me better, because it wasn’t never about technique to begin with.
I suppose that, should we want and not have a whole lot else going on for the day (and possibly the rest of our lives), we could discuss what makes the difference between a good book and a bad one, or good writing versus bad writing.
I strongly suggest that we do not do this, however, as I don’t think it will help a whole lot, and likely just result in the kind of hurt feelings typically left in the wake of professional sporting events and the latest Star Wars films.
Rather, I’ll just say the following:
Whether or not discovering other later Southern writers made me a better one is largely immaterial because good or bad is something that as artists and writers we are largely not the best at judging, at least when it comes to ourselves.
(Unless you’re one of them pompous self-important types who probably gets high huffin’ their own farts or something. But I digress.)
Sounds like a cop-out maybe but it’s the stone truth.
What discovering them did do, however, is allow me to not just connect back in terms of self but write in a manner that’s well, more truthful. More real.
More me.
Not the version of me I thought I needed to be, or the one that came to exist by means of attempting to escape, but the one that underneath the education and highbrow tastes*, still uses words like y’all and ain’t with more frequency than might previously have been suspected, and who’s finally learning to wear being Southern like skin rather than clothes. The version who I tried really hard to avoid but became anyway because writing is a much a mirror as it is an escape or a journey or whatever metaphor you like, and well, you won’t get all that far if too afraid to look once in a while.
Guess what I’m saying here is this: whatever it is you do, be it writing or otherwise, do it as the real you, whoever the hell that is. Pretending you’re someone else, from somewhere else – denying the essential roots and nature of where and who you come from, avoiding that metaphorical mirror there – that ain’t gonna get you much of anywhere but stumbling through life, and likely wandering with fucked-up hair and a stain on your shirt to boot. Be kind enough to yourself not to do that.
Should that real you be say, another Southern writer, then by all means, be one of them.
…I’ve since learned that being one of those ain’t all that bad.
*Please understand however that my likings of things like French New Wave cinema or the art of Marc Chagall are indeed genuine, and that while actually things I like, do not invalidate my genuinely being Southern in any way shape or form. I mean, it’s entirely possible to like both duck a l’orange and Frito Pie – though obviously not together. I’m a Southerner and a Texan, not a gastronomic pervert. Basically, don’t get it twisted, y’all.
References
- McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard University Press, 2022.
- Lansdale, Joe, R. Freezer Burn. Mysterious Press, 1999.