(dramatic music) (jazz music) - Hello, I'm Janet Baker-Carr.

Welcome to Conversations.

It's a great pleasure to introduce you to our guest this evening.

A much loved Mississippi author, Ellen Douglas.

She's recently published her first work of non-fiction, "Truth: Four Stories "I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell."

Thank you for being here, Ms. Douglas.

- A pleasure, thank you for asking me.

- How did you know that this was the time to write these stories?

They've obviously been in your mind for a while.

- Two or three reasons I think.

For one thing, I am old enough to tell those stories because the people that are the chief characters in them are all dead and I can't hurt their feelings and they can't quarrel with me.

So I felt much freer than I might've felt, say 20 years ago.

And then I think I've gotten more detached from matters that might've been very strongly emotional for me years ago.

And I think a writer needs detachment.

So those are two good reasons, I think.

And the third, would be that sometimes it takes a long time for disparate events to come together.

And I realized that this, this, and this, all those things belong together in one story.

And that happened with two or three of the stories that they just came together.

Started off with maybe just an image and then I realized that there was other material that needed to go with them.

- Now you've just received the award for fiction from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.

And yet these stories are truth and are nonfiction.

The labels get complicated sometimes.

- Well, they get complicated in the storyteller's mind.

These are stories and in that sense, they're fiction.

They're about people who lived in the real world and in that sense they're non-fiction.

But in a way, what the whole book is, is a kind of exploration of the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, and the degree to which we turn our lives into stories.

And it's just natural to us to tell stories about our lives.

And so they become fiction.

- The subject of death kind of haunts all the stories, but they're all about life.

- Life, yes, life in the final scene or next to last scene, I guess, in the story about the two, the grandmothers and the love affair that the grandmother's friend has.

In the next to last story, when the grandmother is in her 90s she says to her granddaughter, as the granddaughter is leaving, "Have lots of children, Darling, "have lots of children."

And in that sense, it's both about passage and death and about new life.

- When you sit down to the blank page, the first page of a new project, how do you begin?

- Well, different ways with different projects.

With this one, I didn't really realize how strong of a connection there was between these stories until I had written and really sold the first one, which is "Grant," about the death of my husband's uncle.

And then I began to thinking about the second story, and I began to think about the third story.

And I realized that what I had was, it was a very strong connection between these stories.

And I went from there.

Then when I finished the fourth story, I saw connections that I hadn't made really.

And I went back and tinkered with all of them.

That's part of the most fun of writing is tinkering and changing and making things work.

- And how do you know when a story is finished?

- I don't think you really know, you just get to the place where you better stop, (chuckles) go onto something else.

- Well, to me the sound of your voice is very important to the sound of these stories.

I have the feeling, reading the book that I'm sitting on your porch in a rocking chair with you and you're reading.

And were you aware of that kind of feeling in the telling of stories?

- I'm always aware of voice and I read aloud to myself when I'm writing, because I want the voice of the story, I wanna hear the voice of the story myself.

And when I'm teaching, as a matter of fact, I tell my students to read what they've written aloud, so that they can hear and preferably read aloud to an interested and intelligent friend, because it's when you hear yourself that you realize maybe that doesn't work, or maybe this does work (clears voice).

- And that's how you know when there are some extra words that you really don't have.

Would you like to read a little bit to us?

- A little bit, yeah.

I'll be happy to.

I love to read as a matter of fact, I'm kind of a ham.

This is just a brief excerpt and it addresses what we were talking about earlier.

That is fact and fiction.

This is a very brief excerpt from Juliet Nellie, which is a long story about loyalty and friendship.

lifelong romance between a man and a woman who can't marry each other.

And how their friend who is ordinarily a very rigidly, moralistic person accepts and lives with their romance and their life together.

"I'm sure now that I remember my grandmother "and Julia and Donnie too, "on the gallery at the forest on a long, "hot summer afternoon, I recall an embrace.

"And then the two women in intimate, quiet conversation, "I hear their soft voices.

"Julia's pitched to shade lower than my grandmother's.

"The voices, it seems to me now "of ghosts alive only in my head and only "for the time left to me to remember them.

"I remember for the call and response "of those voices is I might remember "the call and response of oboe and flute.

"Oboe making room for the flute, "and then meditatively answering.

"And like oboe and flute, "they speak with deep emotion, but wordlessly.

"Donnie sits a little apart from the women "dressed in shabby, khaki pants and a collarly shirt.

"Is he perhaps smoking a pipe "having first day as the lady's permission?

"Hampton, I think sits in the kitchen.

"I hear his deep officious voice.

"Condescending as a tuba.

"He too is in quiet conversation "with whoever presides over Julia's household.

"The evening draws in, my sister and I come back "from exploring the graveyard "and the ruined foundation of the old house.

"I hear the locusts' passionate calls "rise and fall from tree to tree "as I've heard them all my life from the tree-shadowed "galleries of the South.

"Does it matter at all whether I recall "or imagined this scene?

"There they are, I know they are there.

"The three of them together, "making their mysterious music.

"I wanna convey the quality of their lives, "their friendship, but I cannot.

"The secrets of a lifetime stand between me and them."

- You actually started out to write poetry, didn't you?

- When I was very young, 10, 11, 12, and then in my early teens, but I gave that up.

I decided I would never be a good poet.

I remember when I was about 12, as a matter of fact, I wrote a poem about a cardinal, a redbird in a snowstorm, and he stabbed himself on an icicle.

(Janet and Ellen laughing) So you can see why I quit writing poetry.

My son though is a poet.

- Is he?

- His name is Brooks Haxton, and he'll have, I think his fourth or fifth volume of poetry will be out in the fall.

- Well, that is exciting.

That's very exciting.

What do you enjoy most about teaching?

- I really enjoy the give and take with the students and I enjoy reading the work and then seeing it get better.

What I enjoy most about teaching kids is teaching them to read more than teaching them to write, because I think every writer comes out of reading and I like to assign reading.

And then to examine the stories and show how I think anyway, the stories work and how you can put to use what another writer has done when you are playing in your own work.

That's the part of it I liked best.

What I hate most is having to give people grades.

I don't like that.

I don't think it matters.

It doesn't matter whether you give somebody a C or a D or an A.

If they're gonna write, they'll write and they'll learn to do it in a way that'll work for them.

- Is that what happened with you?

- I think so, well, I think I was always a compulsive reader from the time I was in the first grade, I guess, and I kept at it and I think that's the test.

If you keep at it and then that's it.

- And what kinds of books do you encourage your students to read?

- Usually I'm teaching a course in writing short story and I assign reading that has to do with the questions and problems we meet in the working out character and place, time, setting, plot.

And I assign stories by mostly by great masters, Joyce, Saul Bellow, Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Mann, all kinds of folks like that.

- There seems to be a proliferation of books being published by women writers.

Do you have a reason for that?

- Maybe publishers are more receptive to women writers than they used to be, or maybe women have worked out ways to make it possible for them to write.

And maybe men are more cooperative.

I was extremely lucky in the beginning of my writing career because I had a husband who thought it was a great idea for me to write if I wanted to stay home all day and write.

That suited him fine.

And I think for women of my generation, that was unusual.

And I don't think it's so unusual, now.

- Yeah.

This was your first book of short stories.

Is that right?

- No, I had, my second book, "Black Cloud, White Cloud," was a collection of two short stories and two long stories, novellas, but that's been a long time ago.

- Is there a difference in writing short stories and novels?

- I think I'm not as good at plot as I would like to be.

And the reason it takes me so long to write a novel is I'm trying to figure out what I'm gonna have happen next.

(women laughing) And then in that sense, there's a great difference because I usually have a brief self-contained thing that's gonna make a short story and I don't run into that sort of difficulty, but it's also true I think for two or three of my books that I've started out thinking, "Well, this is gonna be a collection of short stories."

For example in, "Can't quit you, baby."

I had thought of it to begin with, as a collection of short stories.

Stories told by a black woman, as she works in the kitchen of a white woman's house.

And then after I got into the first or second of those stories, I realized that what I was really writing about, was the relationship between the black woman and the white woman, and that the black woman stories were always meant to teach the white woman some lesson or other, and that the white woman's character was really important to her relationship with the black woman.

So, it turned into a novel about those two women and their lives.

- Are there many surprises as you write a book of that kind of a thing?

- Usually, yes.

I think, I lived for many years in Greenville and knew two writers they were, Shelby Foote and the other Walker Percy.

And their methods were radically different.

Walker always said that if he knew how a novel was gonna end, he'd lose interest in it and wouldn't finish writing it.

And Shelby always had everything mapped out exactly like it was gonna be.

Every chapter and the movements of the plot and the development of the characters before he ever wrote a sentence.

I tend to make a rough outline and move forward in the way that I think the story is going.

But sometimes it changes.

- Do you type or do you use pen?

- I haven't mastered the computer, but I use it.

I'm always expecting it to master me.

(women laughing) - Well do you write right into the computer?

Very often, I do first drafts in longhand, but after that I use a computer and print out lots of copies because I'm always afraid I may change my mind and wanna put something back that I've taken out.

- When you teach writing to young students, are you aware of any, a surge of interest in particular subjects?

- Not particularly, what I'm mostly aware of, and how I sort things out with the student is, how much really obsessed the student is with writing.

I remember Larry Brown, who I think maybe he's been on your program, I don't know, but he is a real good Mississippi writer.

Took my course at Ole Miss when I was teaching up there.

And by the time he got to me, he had already written drafts of three novels and 100 short stories.

So I knew he was a writer.

When somebody is obsessed with the work, then you feel like it's very exciting.

- So that it really doesn't have anything to do with the subject, but are there subjects that young people should be focusing on?

- I don't know.

I've gotten to the stage in age where I'm not sure what young people should be focusing on.

(women laughing) I only know what old people focus on.

I think it's difficult for me as a matter of fact now to write stories that dramatize the lives of young people, because I've moved along in my own life.

And so I wouldn't, I would be loathed to judge what young people should write about nowadays.

- Do they ask you?

- No, they just tell me, tell me what they gonna write about.

And I say, "That's fine."

- Are you working on a project now?

- I've just finished writing a series of essays on the craft of fiction, which I may or may not do something with.

And I'm thinking about going back to a draft of a novel that I was working on before I began "Truth," and had trouble with and abandoned and decided I would do something else for a while.

Now I may go back to it and see if it'll work again.

- Well, I've heard you say that the title of your book should perhaps have a question mark at the end of it.

Is that-- you're not sure if it's true or does it matter if it's true?

- Well, I think what I meant was that in a sense, the book is about what truth is.

And so it's an exploration of what truth is, truth in fiction and truth in the real world.

And in that sense, the title should have a question mark after truth.

- Ellen Douglas has a lovely ring to it.

How did you choose that name?

- That's a long story, but I'll make it as brief as possible.

My first novel was sold by mistake.

I didn't send it to a publisher.

I gave it to a friend, Charles Bell, who's another Mississippi writer as a matter of fact, a poet who taught for years at St. John's College and he gave it to an editor and the first I knew of that, of where it was, was when the editor called me and said he wanted me to enter the book in the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship Competition.

And when he told me that it struck me very strongly, that I hadn't thought about the fact that that book was based very closely on the lives of my two aunts and that they would take a dim view of my exposing their privacy, invading their privacy.

And so I told him, I didn't wanna enter it in the competition.

We went back and forth about that through several telephone calls.

And finally he said, "Well, Mrs. Haxton, if you will enter this book "in a Fellowship Competition, you have won.

So I said, "Well, that case a very different light "on the subject."

(women laughing) And I went into Natchez where my aunts lived and asked their permission because I felt I couldn't do that, couldn't enter it all, couldn't win, couldn't be published unless I had their permission.

And that was their provision was that it would be okay with them if I would use a pen name and if they didn't have to read the book.

So I said, fine.

And then I had to choose a pen name.

Ellen was my paternal grandmother's name and that's why I chose Ellen.

And my own maiden name was Ayres, which is a Scottish name.

So that's, I wanted a Scottish name and my publisher suggested Douglas.

So that's how I happened to get that name.

- Did the aunts ever read the book?

- One aunt was very reserved and very private and probably didn't.

The other aunt was very curious and probably did, but they never talked to me about it.

We just moved on past that, very much like people move past events in this book.

- Yeah.

- But most of us by the time we're about 12, have enough to write many books, don't we?

- Yeah, I think so.

I think everybody has just an... that's one thing I do tell my students, you have an immense store of material in your head and in your heart from just from having lived in the world and known your parents and your friends and your aunts and uncles and the place where you live and the traumas and tragedies of your lives, just immense amounts of material.

All you have to do is sit down and think about it and read lots of good books and try to tell the truth.

- Well, it was obviously very important for you to tell these stories.

How did you feel about it when they were told and published.

- I found that it had worked.

I was pleased with the way the stories had worked, I was.

- Is it always that way with a new book?

- Well, I think if you spend two or three years, or five or six years working on a book, it's like a child.

You really have a very protective feeling toward it and tend to think whichever one you just finished is the best you've done.

So, but I don't think writers are very good judges of their own work.

So it's anybody's guess.

- Is music important to you as a writer?

- I used music, particularly blues, a great deal in, "Can't Quit You, Baby."

It was extremely useful to me then.

And I was married for many years to a composer and oboeist, pianist.

My house was always full of music.

One of my sons is a professional musician, and both the others are musical.

And so the music has been important in my life.

And certainly in at least one of my books.

- Do you have another short section that you would like to read to us?

- Let's see, what else have I, I do have one other little thing I thought I would read in here.

"As I grow older, "the past is an increasing weight in the balance scale "of my life and the present lighter, more ephemeral, "the dust of the present blows away, "the past grows more real, heavier, "Hampton's brown skin and shaven head.

"My great aunt's pince-nez, "her story, of the flood in the rice fields, "my uncle's auburn hair and high color.

"But though I call up these memories, "although they're my own, I have reservations.

"I know that I put words in the mouths of people "who didn't speak them.

"I imagined scenes in which I was not present.

"I know that this is my world and no one else's.

"My stories, my history or myth perhaps.

"One among the myths that form the lives "of families and sometimes of larger worlds."

- That's very beautiful.

- Do you find that you often have the opportunity to say important things like that as you write?

- I think that where a work comes from is a great mystery.

And I think you sit down and you write and then you revise and sometimes you sit down and you write and a paragraph or two or a page or two or three works really well.

You're not sure what the associations were that brought that to you and it's always a mystery, so-- - So just have to have confidence and keep going.

- And I don't think it ever comes-- to me anyway-- if I don't sit down and try.

I mean, it doesn't come to me all of a sudden when I'm driving down the highway is what I mean.

It comes to me when I sit down and begin to think about my work.

- Does that mean it's hard work?

- It's work, yeah and association and persistence and reading.

I often find that that reading suggests a way to go in my work.

I keep reading all the time.

- What are you reading right now?

- Right now, as a matter of fact, I'm rereading a novel of Milan Kendura's called "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and also a book of his essays, "The Craft of the Novel."

He's a very interesting writer and he's been very useful to me.

I'll tell you who I have read in the last few years that I really like as a woman writer from Canada.

Foot, what's her name?

Her name's gone out of my head, but she writes wonderful short stories.

I'll think of her name in a minute and maybe the program will be over.

- It's all right.

(women laughing) Well do you often go out of the nationality?

- Alice Munro, that's who it is and she's just written some wonderful, short stories and she's been exceedingly useful to me.

And that's another thing I tell my students.

Writers read in a different way from the way the general public or a critic reads.

Writers read and the idea is always in the back of your head, what's in it for me?

How will this be useful to me?

How will it stimulate me to set off in my own direction?

And I think Alice Munro is very good at doing that sort of thing.

- And you find that writers from other countries, other languages help you too.

- Yes, I tell you the English writer that I've found very interesting over the last few years is Byatt, the woman who won the Booker Prize for, "Possession."

She's a wonderful, interesting writer.

I'm getting ready to read the new novel by Salman Rushdie.

He's somebody else that I'm interested in.

- Thank you so much for being with us Ellen Douglas.

It's been a great pleasure.

- Pleasure for me too, thank you.

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