[piano intro] [uplifting music] ♪ - "A place may be changed, but who can change as man?

", says Horace, "And wherever I am, the mountains are with me.

It doesn't matter.

Blue, green, sky, and water, flowing water.

Up here, you get a little more sense of isolation.

We stand on on the mountain top here, feel a little like a prophet, and I never felt that way around cotton fields.

I don't know.

I carry the mountains with me wherever I go.

- Our mountains envelop us with protection and beauty and isolation.

I look at the creativity and the ingenuity that flows out of these ridge lines, and I never cease to be amazed.

Look at the literature that comes out of here, look at the films, look at the music.

This is where it started.

This is a part of who we are.

- There's something about the mountains that lends itself to music and to poetry.

[tranquil music] We heard those stories.

We sat on the porch in the summer, we sat by the fireplace in the winter.

There's something about the culture and the spirit of these mountains that just seems to inspire poetry.

[birds chirping] - [Fred] "A man's a fool in this age of money to turn the soil, never a dime to call his own, and wearing himself away like a kid's pencil eraser on a math lesson.

I've got a mind to quit these fields and sell cheap furniture to poor folks.

I've got a mind not to die in the traces like poor Honey.

Our Jenny mule had died two weeks before.

[plow squeaking] 'A man's not the same as a mule,' I said.

He said, 'You're right, a man doesn't have the heart.'

We buried Honey, me and Uncle Joe, while you were away at school.

I didn't tell you, two feet down, we hit pipe clay as blue and sticky as Buick paint.

Octopus rasslin', Uncle Joe called it.

Spade would go down, maybe two inches with my whole weight behind and come up empty.

Blue glue with a spoon.

I soon decided to scale down the grave.

I told him straight, 'I'm gonna bust her legs and fold them under.'

His face flashed red at once.

'My God, J.T., poor Honey that's worked these fields for thirteen years, you'd bust her legs?'

I nodded.

'She can't feel a thing,' I said.

He says, 'By God, I do.'

I told him to stand behind the truck and stop his ears.

I busted her legs.

I busted her legs with a mattock, her eyes all open and watching me crack her bones and bulging out farther slightly with every blow.

These fields were in her eyes, and a picture of me against the sky, blood-raw savage with my mattock.

I leaned and thumbed her eyes shut.

It was like closing a book on an unsatisfactory last chapter, not pathetic and not tragic, but angryfying, mortifying, sad."

[birds chirping] I decided that I would be a writer when I was 13 years old.

Unfortunately, that's what I decided I'd be, a writer.

I would be a writer.

I didn't decide that I would write anything or learn how to write anything or that I would read anything.

I just decided I would be a writer, as if you could be that by fit somehow or another.

Took a long time before I learned that you have to read a great deal, and you have to learn to write, and then you become a writer.

[uplifting music] [uplifting music continues] - [Narrator] "I learned to write," Fred Chappell has said, "more or less in the same manner that I learned to type, an eon of trial that was followed by an infinity of error."

Chapel is the author of more than 30 works of fiction, criticism, and poetry.

The most well-known, a novel called "I Am One of You Forever" is a work that brought postmodern devices to the kinds of stories that have been told on the front porches in the mountains in North Carolina for generations.

His long poem "Midquest" won the Bollingen Prize from Yale University in 1985, an award that puts him in the company of the poets W. H. Auden, Robert Frost and E.E.

Cummings.

[uplifting music] Fred Chappell was born May 28th, 1936, seven years after the beginning of the Great Depression, and five years before the United States entered World War II.

He grew up on a farm just outside of Canton, North Carolina, "A town that was snugged up against the foothills of the great Smokies," he once wrote, "and puddled over with industrial smoke from the chimneys of the Champion Paper and Fiber Company."

- Fred Chappell is really part of a, what I call, a first generation of Appalachian literature, and this is a really important generation because most of what had been written about Appalachia had been written by outsiders.

They spent some time there, they thought they understood, but what often came out was a caricature of Appalachian people and a lot of these stereotypes that are still in movies and television shows come out of the earlier literature on Appalachia.

- When I started reading Fred's work, it became alive because I could see and feel and smell Western North Carolina in his work, and also in the way that the characters talk, the way that people talk.

He grounded me in literature that was from where I was from.

[uplifting music] - I had grown up in the mountains myself, but for my first several books, I hadn't really written about that, I hadn't really written about the mountains 'cause I couldn't quite figure out how to do it.

And then I've read "I am One of You Forever, which had an enormous effect on me.

Just the way people told stories, I mean, I came from a family of talkers as you wouldn't believe, and all of that kind of thing just seemed to me to open a window of a certain way of telling a story.

- Here was a guy who grew up in Western North Carolina and thought that his region and his people and his experience were worth literature.

And you know, I'm from a town called Gastonia where, you know, it's almost ingrained in you from birth that Gastonia's not worth anything, much less being put on the page, and I thought, you know, well, if Fred Chappell can do that and write these beautiful stories and recollections and memories of where he's from, and instill them with such wonder and such experimentation, then certainly I can tell those stories I know.

- One of the reasons that Fred Chappell is one of the most important poets of our time, not just that he is the representative Appalachian poet of his time, but he's also one of the most accomplished poets in the art of poetry, the craft of poetry.

To be able to be as eloquent as a classical poet, but in the language of today, this is the secret of poetry, to be able to be formally perfect, but in the speech of our time.

- I hear voices inside my head.

The voices of the characters are actually the voice of the book itself sometimes, a certain tone of voice, a certain level of a language, a certain pace to the sentences, and if I can hear that and make it come out on the page a little bit, I've gotta runnin' start.

"You're bookish.

I can see you easy a lawyer or a county clerk in a big, white suit and tie, feeding the preacher, bribing the sheriff and the judge.

Second-generation respectable don't come to any better destiny, but it's dirt you rose from, dirt you'll burry in.

Just about the time you'll think your blood is clean, here will come dirt in a natural shape you never dreamed.

It'll rise up saying, 'Fred, where's that mule you're supposed to march behind?

Where's your overalls and roll-your-owns?

Where's your blue tick hounds and domineckers?

Not all the money in this world can wash true poor, true rich.

Fatback just won't change to artichokes.'

'What's artichokes?'

'Pray Jesus you'll never know, for you if you do, it'll be a sign you've grown away from what you are.'

- [Robert] He wants to explain what Appalachia is, what Appalachian people are, that they're real people, that they're real intelligent people, that they're real hardworking people, that they have qualities not only that are good, but that the rest of the nation ought to be emulating.

- I've always found in them an independence of spirit, and an ear for a certain kind of language that is unfailing, and a wonderful gift for the pithy statement, always skeptical, always a little barbed, and I admire the other parts of their characters, their strengths and endurance, their absolute face that things are not gonna work out well at all, no matter what happens, and their ability to hang on in the face of the worst times that almost anyone could imagine.

[tranquil music] - In the aftermath of the Civil War, things began to change in this part of the country, and life became more precarious.

You had smaller and smaller farms.

People were moving further and further up the ridge on land that was less arable, that eroded easily.

As Horace Kephart said, "The land was so poor, it wouldn't raise a cuss fight."

This kind of image of Appalachia as being this poor, benighted place, this is when it was, quote, "Discovered" by outsiders.

[tranquil music] - [Narrator] Chappell writes primarily about events that occurred during the first half of the 20th century, a time when the North Carolina mountains were still isolated from the rest of the country.

The introduction of interstates, television, and a mass media culture were still years away.

- The important thing is that these people had limited opportunity to travel.

They spent most of their lives in these hollers and places, and as a result, you see things persist in a lot of these areas that had long since disappeared, so, you know, things like ballads, and ways of talking and handicrafts, ways of singing, ways of dancing, all these things persisted longer in these areas.

You know, you had to make do yourself.

So people who grew up in this environment become, what I like to call, cussively independent.

They don't like to be told what to do, and they're gonna go their own way, and in some cases, just to spite you.

- [Robert] But there was a feeling of isolation, a feeling of difference.

So that isolation certainly had its effect on the culture, a feeling that you didn't quite belong in that outer world also, the negative sides to this, as well as positive ones, a feeling that you're different.

It's a feeling of just being outside, the outsider, and I think that's very important in Appalachian writing.

- [Fred] Always on the Eastern horizon of Appalachia, there's a genteel society, there's a town society.

Appalachians in North Carolina are always vaguely aware that there are people not too far from them, just a few hundred miles, who have a lot more money, have a real different way of life, go to universities, often to Northern universities, and do things very differently.

Doesn't impinge on the mountaineers very much, but they're aware that the difference is there.

- The fabric of life was just different before interstates, before television.

My dad, who's Fred's age, kind of grieves that television came along.

He said that's when people stopped visiting each other, this breakdown of one kind of society as another one kind of moved in.

And I think Fred traces that in his work, that passage of time and the change from one culture to another.

You can see how Appalachia changed.

- I think Fred, like a lot of us, is a preservationist.

He is recording the way that things were, but he's too smart just to be a preservationist.

He tracks, I think, really, through rhythm, through the rhythm of storytelling, but also just through the rhythm of the sentences, the emotional shifts that happen when we move from one point in our lives to another.

- My family followed the Appalachian custom of the women having all the brains and doing most of the work in the family and holding things together, while the men followed their fancies, kind of one way or another.

- Mother was the referee and Daddy was the prankster.

I remember he and Fred getting into a lot of trouble together.

Fred got a chemistry set one time for his birthday and he and daddy decided they would learn how to make explosives with it, and they used my grandmother's canning jars as their example and blew up her canning jars all along the creek down through here, and Grandmother was the least happy person about that.

So daddy and Fred managed to get into a little bit of trouble together, too, which was fun.

- [Fred] My father was a man of well-chosen words and not a whole lot of 'em.

My father was great because he told the world's dumbest jokes and they were very dear to me.

There were three moles going along under the earth, and there had been a fresh rain, and they were anxious to come out and get something to eat, and the first mole says, "I think I smell corn."

And the second mole says, "I think I smell strawberries."

And the third mole says, "I think I smell mole asses."

[guests laughing] Is that dumb enough for you?

[guests laughing] - The father character in so much of Fred's fiction writing is almost as complex as the grandmother.

He's having to live in this modern world and make this transition.

He's educated, he has a great sense of humor, he respects the past, he respects the people around him, but he wants to improve, to rise above the bad things.

And there's some dark sides to mountain culture, of the way people treated black people, for instance.

This father is a transitional figure.

He's looking with a more liberal, a more informed, a more tolerant attitude toward the modern world, but also warning his son against getting too far away from his roots and his raising.

- [Fred] My grandmother, who I thought is the greatest woman in the world, except for my mother, she was a farm lady in the old sense who rose at 4:30 in the morning and would go to bed at 9:30 or 10 o'clock at night after having stacked hay and milked cows and hoed corn, and done all the things that you do on a farm without complaint, without seeming to tire, and always fairly cheerful.

I don't see how anybody could do that, but she did.

- She had been a Circuit Riding school teacher going through the mountains, three months here, three months there.

Grandmother would ride her horse over the Smokies into Mount Sterling, Tennessee, and she'd teach for three to four months at a time.

Then she would ride from Mount Sterling in to Madison County, where she started a school at the old Spring Creek community where she met my granddaddy, and so she had been an independent woman for quite a while.

I think our love of reading, our love of books came a lot from her and from mother, too.

When you live in a house full of teachers, that's what you get.

One of the best poems Fred ever wrote was the poem about her driving herself to her wedding.

- "The young lad is asking his grandmother about the old days and specifically about his grandfather, and he says, 'You never told me how you met.'

She straightened, rubbed the base of her spine with a dripping hand, 'Can't recollect.

Some things, you know, just seem to go clear from your mind.

Probably he spotted me at prayer meeting, or it could have been a barn raising.

That was the way we did things then, not like now with the men all hours cavorting up and down in cars.'

Again, she smiles.

I might have sworn she winks.

'But what do you remember?'

'Oh, lots of things.

About all an old woman is good for is remembering, but getting married to Frank wasn't the beginning of my life.

I taught school up Greasy Branch since I was 17, and I took the first census ever in Madison County.

You can't see it now, but there was a flock of young men come knockin' on my door.

If I had the mind, I could have danced six nights a week.

Of course, it wasn't hard to pick Frank out, the straightest standing man I ever saw, had a waxed mustache, and a chestnut mare.

Before I'd give my say, I made him cut that mustache off.

I didn't relish kissing a briar patch.

He laughed when I said that, went home, and shaved.

It wasn't the picking and saying though that caused me ponder.

Getting married in church, in front of people, for good and all, makes you pause.

Here I was 28, strong and healthy, not one day sick since I was born, what cause would I have to be waiting on a man?

I never said this to a soul.

I don't know why I told my papa, 'Please hitch me the buggy Sunday noon.

I can drive myself to my own wedding.'

That's what I did, I drove myself.

A clear June day as cool as April, and I came to where we used to Ford Laurel River, a little above Coleman's mill, and I stopped the horse and I thought and thought, 'If I cross this river, I won't turn back.

I'll join to that blue-eyed man as long as I've got breath.

There won't be nothing I could feel alone about again.'

My heart came to my throat.

I suppose I must have wept.

And then I heard a yellow hammer and a willow tree, just singing out, ringing like a dance fiddle over the gurgly river sound, just singing to make the whole world hush to listen to him.

Then my tears stopped dropping down and I touched Nellie with a whip, and we crossed over."

Poem's about my grandmother, Mrs. Frank B. Davis, and I came to write it because she was a powerful influence in my life, and because she was an unforgettable lady, and because I wanted to memorialize her as much as I could, and because she had a natural gift for telling a story, and that's one of the stories she told.

I thought I'd include it just like I'd include a photograph of her in a photo album.

In a sense, this long poem, "Midquest," is a kind of photo album of my family and their past, and the region's past.

- How does a man born in his era know that about women and know so many things about women?

I can only answer that he was around women a lot.

They welcomed him into their lives and showed him not just the barn, but the kitchen, and he was able to see all of it.

- I observe everything I can when I can.

I love to hear what people say, I love to listen to them, I love to watch them.

I'm aware enough of experience around me to think of it as a kind of great river, and my sharing is put my hand in it to get it wet, and if I flick a few drops off my fingertip that land on the page, that's about what it stands in the relationship to real life.

- [Robert] That's kind of what fiction is all about.

They connect the reader to other people and to other lives.

They cross those boundaries, and finding that common humanity is the very heart of great writing.

[car engines whirring] - Canton is in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

That is, it's a very specific place in which you can find a great deal of the old Appalachian culture, and also, because it has a paper mill there, something of modern industrialism moving into that culture.

So right off the bat, you have those two tensions, which characterize our century for us, the old ways and the new ways, and the accommodations they have to make with each other.

- We were primarily a rural farming community, and when they built the paper mill, it changed the face of Canton drastically.

Initially, we became a boom town in Haywood County.

The management was, I call it, basically, paternalistic.

- Champion, of course, made Canton stand out.

It was a major manufacturer.

It was a major economic driver for the whole region, but it was a mill town and it ran the town.

It was the town.

- [Narrator] When the paper mill opened at the turn of the 20th century, Canton was still a small farming community of about 300 souls that straddle a fording spot on the Pigeon River.

Over the next three decades, the local people moved from the fields into the factory.

Farmers who had only recently measured their lives by sunrises and sunsets now marked their lives by the whistle and the clock.

By the 1950s, when Fred Chappell was a teenager, there was a new library and a permanent high school, Canton High.

These modern amenities help introduce the young Fred Chappell to a larger world, a world beyond the sloping fields, tobacco barns, and the practical jokes that were the habit of daily life in the North Carolina mountains.

- Fred Chappell's rearing an upbringing, though, is really binary, I guess you'd say, you know?

He lives on a farm, you know, he's steeped in the culture of the region.

You know, this front-porch culture that is so formative in his life.

But at the same time, you know, here's Canton down the hill and all the things that are coming into there, his exposure to movies, to magazines, to comic books, to all kinds of literature, Champion, you know, has helped the town build a good library, and this becomes, for Fred, kind of a refuge, you know, and an exposure to a much broader world, and that's very important.

- In my hometown of Canton, North Carolina, there was a establishment called Mease's Newsstand, and it displayed a lot of pulp magazines, among them, science fiction magazines.

Amazing stories, astounding stories, and on the covers they would have these strapping heroic guys and these bosomy females, and they would have these bug-eyed monsters and these things seemed to intrigue me and I started reading the magazines, and that's how I got to training in writing.

I would send off stories to science fiction pulp magazines and get extrinsic criticism back from them.

One editor sent me a note saying, "Never send us anything again."

Another editor sent me a note saying, "This story is like a boy scout hike, half running, half of dawdling."

[laughs] But I learned to pace a story just from that little old sentence, I learned that you have to pace.

For some reason, I had formed the idea that this is how it was done, that you got rejected a whole lot and you kept on trying and you kept on trying, and one day you had a breakthrough.

Published two stories under a pen name, which I will not give out.

- I know he went to the National Science Fiction Writers conference in Philadelphia, I think.

Mother drove him there.

They had wanted to meet this Fred Chappell.

They had no idea he was a 14-year-old till he walked in the door, and he was asking for his name tag and they were going, "No, no, we're waiting on Fred Chappell."

He kept saying, "I am Fred Chappell," and so that was the first sign of whoa, here's somebody with a talent.

- One of the very special things about Fred is his extraordinary erudition, and apparently this goes back to his childhood.

He was very interested in everything, really, but he was reading on his own books like "Don Quixote," which had a deep influence on him.

I mean, Fred's genius is partly comic.

- He is the most educated, amazingly educated person, and it would be hard to tell that if you just met him in a bar or you were just talking to him, you know, on the street, but he is, and it comes across in his writings.

That's why his writings are so deep and they are so different.

- I'll emphasize that my parents were school teachers and they were both college graduates.

This was during the Depression, and the house had lots of books in it, partly because, in those days, a lot of people who had formerly had other kinds of jobs had to sell books to try to make a living, and my parents, the best they could, bought books from their friends.

They didn't read them, but they sure did have them, and I went through "Compton's Illustrated Encyclopedia" lots of times, actually reading some of the text.

And I had, they had sets, as people did in those days of classics, you know, cheaply-bound sets.

So we had a Shakespeare, we had a Stevenson, we even had a Balzac, for goodness' sake, and I read as much as I could stand to in those books.

I think a lot of people romanticize farm life.

It's drudgery.

Like a lot of folks, I had imagined writing as my way to get out of the farm.

I didn't want to spend my life on the farm.

I really did not want to spend my life on the farm.

I know now that there were a lot of people who wrote poetry and even fiction who did not admit it to anybody in my community, it was something secret they did.

I suppose they feared that people would make fun of them, their family members, mostly, I guess, or maybe they thought there was something a little shameful about it themselves and they wanted to keep it quiet.

If you were in high school right now, say, you were 14 years old, would you tell everybody that you wrote poetry?

- I'm sure, knowing Daddy, he probably wanted him to be the businessman of life because that's what Daddy was, you know?

And, "How are you gonna make a living doing that?

And what's that gonna be?

", and all of that.

Daddy came from a family of 12 brothers and sisters, and work was hard there, and so that was a focus for him.

- If you said the word writer to my parents, they knew of two writers, really.

I mean, they were educated people, but of writers, they thought of Edgar Allen Poe who was a penniless drug addict, drunkard who lived in a garret, and they thought of Ernest Hemingway who flew around the world dating movie stars and shooting animals.

I thought Edgar Allen Poe had it all over Ernest Hemingway, I mean, geez, but I wanted to hold up, get drunk and stoned and write poems that I couldn't understand.

That just seemed like a lot of fun.

So that's the kind of thing they had in mind, and it was the kind of thing I had in mind, too.

- [Narrator] Chappell was smart, smart enough to win admission to Duke University after graduating from Canton High School in 1954, but he was also fiercely independent, a quality that ultimately got him expelled from college.

- I missed the mountains, I missed the landscape, but to tell the truth, I was so pleased to get out of the cultural situation of the mountains where I was.

There was no literary activity whatsoever, except for people to poke fun at.

I felt, as an aspiring writer, isolated, little put upon, and when I got to the university, there were more books than I ever thought there were in the world, and people who were interested in them.

It was a great escape for me for a little while.

Did nothing but drink and talk and read for three years until they got tired of me, sent me back home for a while.

- [Narrator] As he would later explain, "I got drunk, sassed a cop, and got kicked out."

Back in Canton, working for his father at the family furniture store, Chappell would marry Susan Nichols, a defining moment in his life.

She was 18, he was 22.

She would figure prominently in his poetry and in his life from that day forward.

"Susan is and always has been a mentor, guide, co-partner, and collaborator in all my endeavors, inventing solutions, correcting sometimes egregious mistakes, and leading our way through real difficulties," Chappell has said.

[lively music] - When we got married in this church, it was the first time I had been into this church.

And when I come back now, it brings back to me my first impression of being in here and being nervously married.

I have kind of dazed memories of that particular day, which was August 2nd, 1959.

And I was a little late to coming to my wedding because I was working for my father in the furniture store and we had to make a delivery on the way to the wedding.

I don't recall that I had a best man.

Not many people would be willing to stand beside me because I was a bad boy, and I stayed that way for a long time.

- It did get a little old.

- [laughs] I imagine it did, probably still does.

[lively music] - What is it about Southern women?

The badder the guy, the more attractive he is.

I loved your reputation, Fred.

My father did not like your, he liked to shoot pool with you, but he did not like the idea that I was going to marry you, I think.

[people chattering indistinctly] - I wrote a four-volume poem called "Midquest," which really is a love poem, in the whole of it, and I thought that went on to satisfy my love poetry impulse, but as it turns out, I've gone back to writing love poems again.

My first first order of business is to introduce to you Susan Nichols Chappell, my partner in rhyme or crime this evening.

Would you come up?

If you don't mind.

[audience clapping] I don't know if that's obscene, at age 83 or not, but I'm too old to worry about whether it's obscene or not, so I'll keep on writing love poems.

- He's fun, he's good.

I like him, I like him lots.

[Fred laughing] He's a great date.

- [Fred] People who can stay married for any length of time are lucky.

It's just very hard.

- [Susan] Oh, I quite agree.

John.

[book thumping] [audience laughing] - What a villainous dirty trick!

You gave my snout a monstrous kick.

You broke five teeth, and what is more, you made my face a running sore.

You blacked my eyes and smashed my nose with your ill-mannered, treacherous blows.

You've done what none or very few well-bred, gentle folk would do.

- In this one lucky hour- - [Fred] She's my muse.

- I possess the power- - I wish I'd live up to my muse a little better, but what the hell?

The date of my marriage marked a new life for me.

Before my marriage to Susan, I was a regrettable mess, living haphazardly, drinking to excess, a problem which continued for decades afterward, pursuing luckless and chimerical dreams, obnoxiously flouting a sleazy cleverness.

A month after the wedding, we moved to Durham, where I hoped to finish my undergraduate degree, and eventually to attend graduate school.

Now I had a wife and real responsibilities and I was determined to do the thing right this time.

- [Narrator] Chappell managed win readmittance to Duke University, where he continued to study with the legendary professor William Blackburn, to whom he dedicated his first novel.

- I applied to Duke because I had heard of Dr. William Blackburn, whose name I thought was Blackstone.

Nevertheless, I knew that he had a reputation for the teaching of writing.

[dramatic music] - [Announcer] Today we invite you to meet Dr. William M. Blackburn, professor of English at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Professor Blackburn is in conversation with four of his former students, all of whom have taken his course in creative writing.

- Fred, you wrote a sketch, I believe, and perhaps your first one, which I'm running under on 25, about a little boy and girl, about brother and sister walking through a very cold, wintry evening.

I believe your novel rather grew out of that first sketch, in a way.

I'm not asking you how it did, of course, but is that a fact?

- Well, it did, it was a very short sketch.

It was only 900 words, I think, one page.

I wrote it as a one-page sketch, and I started thinking about it and the thing gathered more in more energy, and it wasn't something I made up.

After a while, it became something I remembered, really.

It really happened after a while.

- It was a stellar bunch, honestly.

It really was.

We didn't think of ourselves as very stellar at that time because we weren't.

We were just grubby and a little woozy like most students.

But when you look back, you see that it was a gifted group of people and that we were, in fact, inspired toward literature by Dr. Blackburn so much, in fact, that we rarely talked about him in person.

It was almost a religious feeling about it.

You didn't take the name lightly.

[melancholy music] - [Narrator] Chappell would finish a successful career at Duke, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in 18th-century English literature.

By 1964, at the age of 28, Chappell had published his first novel, "It is time, Lord."

He completed his degrees and landed a job at the Women's College of the University of North Carolina, a highly regarded school for women that was transforming into a co-ed university.

Working in a traditional English department that prioritized its doctoral program, Chappell would help to build something new, a master of fine arts in creative writing, one of the nation's first graduate creative writing programs that quickly built a reputation as being one of the nation's best.

- I came to University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1964, and I was very happy to do it.

I knew the poet, Robert Watson, who was here, and the fiction writer, Peter Taylor, and I had met Randall Jarrell once before, too, so I knew of it as a great place for a writer to go, so it was kind of like a wish come true to come to UNCG.

- Fred attracted a lot of students.

He was such a fine teacher.

He's the best reader of poetry I have ever encountered, and I've known a lot of good readers of poetry.

He made it exciting.

It was an exciting place.

The influence of the writing program at Greensboro really shifted the center of the literary world in North Carolina a little bit west from the Raleigh Chapel Hill Durham area to Greensboro.

It was a place for a writer.

Writers were respected.

[bell chiming] - I can tell you one story that I've heard about Fred Chappell as a teacher from a former student at Women's College.

She was telling me that Fred came in and he took over in the middle of the year for Randall Jarrell, and the students were used to Randall's style of teaching.

Fred came in and he put his leg up on a chair and was smoking, and the woman said, "We didn't know what to make of him.

We didn't know if we were thrilled or terrified."

That kind of tells me a little bit about what he was like back in those early days of teaching.

He's from the mountains.

He was rough cut.

- [Fred] Teaching has been such an important goal to me that it took me 20 years to understand that I don't do it very well.

I'm not patient with my thoughts when I try to speak them and I cannot articulate them with sufficient logic.

I've usually tried to teach in a variation of the Socratic method, drawing out the students by process of dialogue, but often I cannot make my intentions clear so that the students think I'm merely badgering them, trying to make them look foolish.

In short, I've never learned to relax properly in teaching and probably communicate more anxiety than substance, but I still try, and this profession is still the one I'd like to succeed in.

- The gift he gave me as a professor was he took my work seriously no matter how bad it was.

So even though he criticized it, he took it seriously enough to criticize it.

If he hadn't cared, he would've just said, "Oh, it was good.

It's okay, try something else," but he would give me detailed reasons why something wasn't working.

He was trying to teach me, I think, to be less self-conscious and not to write for a particular audience and to sort of try to find my voice, and finally I did with a story that he absolutely loved and it changed my writing life.

[upbeat music] - Well, let's think of the summer of 1967, very hot summer, hot and humid.

Fred was teaching summer school, but there was this wonderful little bar down the street, about half a mile from campus, called the Pickwick.

It was air conditioned.

It was a place, in some ways, it was a kind of working class bar.

Had a good jukebox, but also musicians hung out there, people who played in the evening at other bars in town, and clubs, would come there, as well as the writers.

Fred, after he taught, would go over to the Pickwick, and a lot of my MFA program was really conducted at this little bar called the Pickwick where Fred, I would give him some poems or a short story a week before, and then we would meet at the Pickwick and he would talk about them, and it was absolutely brilliant.

- Fred has always been the most fun of anybody because he has this dry wit and humor, and this funny way of looking at everything.

And his stories, I mean, just telling these stories, he is a grand recontour, and he's a great person to be around, and he's also interested in everybody.

- Fred's personality is actually very complex.

Because you came from the mountains, from a farm, he really wondered how you could thrive in the bigger world out there, especially in the academic world and the intellectual world.

Fred, back then, could actually be very shy.

There would be days when Fred would say, "Well, I'm just too nervous to come to class or to talk."

Sometimes it had to do with, you know, whether he was drinking or not.

I think that it depended a lot on how his writing was going.

That was my impression.

- You have to remember that Fred was in the very first group of writers who became writers at a university.

For a long time, creative writing was not respected as anything legitimate within English departments, and so Fred was in that very first group of writers who were there for their writing, and so the question comes up, how do you remain an artist?

Can you be a poet within the university?

And what's that gonna do to your soul?

- Beginning "Midquest," I wrote a poem one day that I didn't understand.

I had no idea what it was about or what the hell it meant.

I just knew that it had some feelings in it that I could tell were important.

I put the poem aside for two years after that, and then when I dug it out again and looked at the poem, just in a flash, the whole design of the four-volume tetrology came to me, the idea for the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, for the characters in the book, the family situation, all that came to me just like that, and I looked forward to a great deal of work in front of me.

When I'd written the second volume of "Midquest," I realized that it would be nice to have a background for these poems to stand against, so I began to think why not have a quartet of poetry volumes and a quartet of novels that connected to them?

In other words, to have a kind of octet.

So that's what I did.

It took 28 years and a lot of labor, and the more alcohol than I like to think about, but I got it done.

- One of the most important genres in American fiction is, what I call the, the book of linked stories.

The advantage of that genre is you have the concision of the short story, but the overall impact of a novel.

The finest example in our time is almost certainly "I Am One of You Forever" by Fred Chappell.

- [Narrator] "I get homesick for the people that are gone, that are no longer with us, that I wish I had remembered more clearly," Chappell told an interviewer in 2002, "and I always felt I owed them a kind of obligation to remember them.

And that's one of the things that's inspired me to remember more clearly the landscape too because I can't think of them without putting them in that landscape where I knew them first."

- In this section of the novel, "I Am One of You Forever," an uncle is visiting the mountain family, and he takes the young lad and his friend Johnson Gibbs to see a part of the mountains that they have never seen though they live here by themselves all the time.

[melancholy music] "The sun had gotten nearly to the tops of the far mountains and the lights scalloped the broken edges, spilling toward us a flood of burning silver.

The rocks around us began to hum and quiver, and the birds began to clatter in the thickets.

It was hard to look into that over-brimming furnace, and I looked into the valley where the grass and trees were fast becoming green, foggily in the coves and hollers like puddles of Blue John.

At last, the sun had escaped the mountain tops, and shown through upon uncle Luden, who stared into it wide-eyed.

His arms were stretched out as if he were a fish hawk drying its feathers.

He mumbled a little tune I couldn't make out, but I could sense the sunlight and blue air in the broad glory of morning soaking into him.

The slumped, pudgy body drank it all up like thirsty sand.

Then he dropped his arms and blinked his eyes three times and found the path.

We followed him down through the friendly woods, and none of us said anything until we were almost at the clearing.

He stopped, blocking our way and said, 'They got some mountains in California.

You ought to see 'em sometime, but it's not the same.'

He marched on a few yards before halting again to declare, "Some way or other, it just ain't the same."

[birds chirping] - [Narrator] Over a 60-year career as a novelist and a poet, Chappell's work has won dozens of prizes and wide critical praise both here and abroad.

His fiction has been translated into more than two dozen languages.

In 1997, he was named the North Carolina poet Laureate by Governor Jim Hunt.

Despite the critical recognition, Chappell's reputation is greater among fellow writers and scholars than among the general public.

"It may be true that I write for an audience of one," he once told an interviewer, "and I've achieved that, according to my publishers."

- [Reporter] Written by a man- - [Narrator] And yet Chappell has successfully built the life he first imagined as a farm boy from the mountains, to be a writer.

- I suspect, Fred, as I've had this wonderful experience of realizing that even though you were an outsider and felt as somebody you didn't belong there at Duke or Cornell or Chapel Hill, that you did, really.

[audience clapping] - We are the youngest children of the river, which suffers us to return to it again, and yet again.

- Why is it important to understand my roots?

Why is it important to understand where I came from?

The students that I am closest to, in many ways, are very smart students, but who grew up in rural Appalachia.

They were very self-conscious of the way they talked, they were very self-conscious of the way that they grew up, of the things that they did.

For those students, it's a revelation that this is something that they shouldn't be ashamed of, that, in fact, this is something that they can take pride in.

- By river light, we read our history and watch ourselves become part of the land, apart from the land, as we embrace a mutual destiny or abrogate the solemn fealty that keeps us bound to our native ground.

- And when they learn about people like Fred Chappell, got teared up here, you know, it's a revelation there.

Like these are my people and they're not ignorant hillbillies.

And yeah, we've produced a few backwards sort of people, but we also have produced people like Fred Chappell, you know, who are wonderful gift not only to Appalachia but to the world.

- Let both emerge to site, reborn, forgiven, new clothed, and light.

Thank you.

[audience clapping] I'm the person who lives down the street who writes.

Took me a long time to accept that as a part of my definition of myself, if I ever had a definition of myself.

I've realized that if I don't write, there is something missing in my life and some piece of my personality is whited out.

That's who I am.

These things are important to me, and I try to pursue them as diligently and honestly as possible.

- He taught at UNCG in the MFA program for 40 years, so he must have had hundreds and hundreds of students.

They became writers and they became teachers.

His life must be like dropping a little rock in a really big body of water, but the ripples from his life must be reaching shore pretty soon.

He's had a huge influence on so many, so many grateful readers, writers, students.

- You know, he'll just shuffle around and, you know, call himself old Fred, whatever, but he loves the work, he loves the literature, he loves the writing.

You know, it's the purest form of art that he has.

[cheerful music] [tranquil music] [tranquil music continues] ♪ Ol' Fred, he puttin' along ♪ ♪ Down on on the corner, hummin' a song ♪ ♪ By Lester Young or Billie Holiday ♪ ♪ He'll greet you with a handshake ♪ ♪ And a belly laugh to say ♪ ♪ "Amen, what happened to old Del Ray ♪ ♪ Was he finally the one who got away" ♪ ♪ Old Fred around your heart and head ♪ ♪ Lickety split, what was it I said ♪ ♪ Old Fred, oh Fred ♪ ♪ Old Fred, he don't seem that old ♪ ♪ Sharp as a razor ♪