Lewis Nordan: Humor, Heartbreak, and Hope

19. Buddy on the Plains: An Interview (2009)

19 Buddy on the Plains An Interview (2009) Barbara A. Baker Barbara Baker: I am delighted to have Lewis Nordan with me today. It’s been a pleasure spending almost a week with you now.We are coming off the heels of our symposium called “Lewis Nordan and the Heartbreaking Laughter of Transcendence and Hope.” I was overwhelmed with the responses from people who wanted to come to Auburn University to talk about you. A lot of people who wanted to attend weren’t able to make it but watched the symposium online or became involved in some other way. I was interested to know if you have had enough time to reflect on the symposium, what you thought about it, and your relationships to some of the speakers, like Clyde Edgerton, who was slated to be here but had the flu,John Dufresne, and Hal Crowther. What were your thoughts on the symposium? Lewis Nordan: I had such a good time this week. Clyde’s having the flu and not being able to come was a real disappointment to me. He and I have been dear friends since 1991 when we went on a book tour together and we just immediately fell in love and wanted to spend as much time together as we can. John Dufresne and I have known each other since long before that, BAkER 180 really since the seventies. So being together with him was a special treat. But what I’m most impressed about with the whole event was just how good the papers were. Not only did I feel like I was being read carefully, but I actually learned some things about my own writing that I had not fully understood before. There were mentions of ways of looking at love and ways of looking at father/son relationships that had been inside me all along. I can recognize them as mine, but I really hadn’t put them together as a coherent way of looking at life that I now see. So it was very pleasing to me. BB: I was really curious about that—if you would have heard something that you thought, “Oh, yeah, I guess that really was in my subconscious, but I didn’t realize that that was what I was saying.” The papers were so parallel and flowed together, with a lot of people seeing the same things and reacting to the same things over and over again in your writing. LN: I was very pleased that so many different parts of my work were reflected in the papers, too. So often when I go to a symposium Wolf Whistle is what we talk about, and often not even the book Wolf Whistle but the Emmett Till tragedy. I’m interviewed as a kind of expert on civil rights, which I really don’t feel like I am. I know something about it, but I wrote a novel. And I want to be interviewed as a novelist.The symposium was a perfect example of being treated as a novelist and short story writer. BB: That’s a good segue to the next comment I was going to make. I read an interview with Dory Adams, and you said almost exactly that to her. You said, “I don’t understand why people keep asking me questions about firearms and Civil Rights. What they should ask me” is this question I’m going to ask you: “Who are you as a novelist and what kinds of things would you say about this life as a novelist that we’d want to know about?” LN: That’s my question? Well, I deserve this. As a novelist, I’m a guy who tells a story that I would like to hear.The job of the novelist is to tell stories that he wants to hear. As a reader, I read stories like I want to write. The story I want to hear is—once upon a time something happened that caused another things to happen and this caused a myriad of other things to happen and it looked like it would never be resolved, but finally it was in some (probably) hopeful way (in my case). So my whole theory of being a writer is that one thing comes after another and B follows A and C follows B. That’s Buddy on the Plains 181 the writer I...