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257 Lewis Nordan Lewis Nordan is the author of three novels, four short story collections, and a memoir. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1939, he grew up in Itta Bena, a small town in the Mississippi Delta. He earned a BA from Millsaps College, an MA from Mississippi State University, and a PhD in Shakespearean Studies from Auburn University. Before taking a job teaching creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, Nordan worked as a fireworks salesman, soda jerk, yardman, lumberyard hand, hardware salesman, junior high teacher, orderly, night watchman, and book reviewer. His fiction, which was influenced by the DC Comics (especially Superman), the rhythm of nursery rhymes, and the blues, has won many honors, including two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards, two Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Awards for Fiction, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the New York Public Library Award for Fiction, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers Hillsdale Award for Fiction. Nordan lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife. Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair, 1983 (stories); The All-Girl Football Team, 1986 (stories); Music of the Swamp, 1991 (stories); Wolf Whistle, 1993; The Sharpshooter Blues, 1995; Sugar Among the Freaks, 1996 (stories); Lightning Song, 1997 How do ideas, bits of dialogue, and events mutate and become a novel? For example, how did the Emmett Till case work its way into Wolf Whistle? The road to Wolf Whistle was a circuitous one, but once I found the path, I followed it with some ease. It began with the title story of my book of short stories, Music of the Swamp. In that story, a couple of boys find a body—a drowned person, apparently—sunk in a lake, snagged upside-down in a pile of brush. When I conceived the story, my thought was that this was the body of Emmett Till. But when I got to the moment 258 the INtervIewS in the story when the body is found, I knew that an infamous murder was out of place in this tale of the love of father and son. Such an incendiary detail would derail the point of my story. So I had the narrator eventually identify the body as that of an old man who had had a stroke and fallen out of his boat and drowned. These were momentary thoughts for me, quickly generated and quickly forgotten. I plunged forward with Music of the Swamp and made no other note of Emmett Till for the time being. A year or so later, the book was finally published and I went on tour to promote it. On a TV show in Atlanta I was asked what I was working on now, and I heard someone answer—me, it turned out!—“I’m writing a book about the murder of Emmett Till.” That was the first moment I had ever imagined that such a book would be my next project. I carried off the lie I had just blurted out by telling the audience what I remembered of the event in my childhood and escaped, finally, happy to have thought up an answer to the question and certain I had not been telling the truth. Months and months later, I wrote and even published a story called “Get Well Soon, Glenn Gregg.” A good deal of time had by now passed, and finally I got caught up on teaching duties and had time to think of writing some more short stories. I read over that recently published story and, in really a blazing moment of insight, knew that Glenn Gregg’s dastardly father in that story was the murderer of Emmett Till. The falsely identified body in the river, the odd remark I’d made on that TV show, and Solon Gregg’s villainy all came together there, and at that moment I knew I was writing a novel. Solon, of course, was nothing like the real murderers, Milam and Bryant. In fact, almost nothing, suddenly, was “true” to the real story. But my course was set—a course of fiction, not docudrama or history—and that book began to pour out. I wrote 365 pages in six weeks. As I wrote Wolf Whistle, I listened constantly to the music of the blues—Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters—a diverse group of singers and pickers. I suspected , and it turned out to be true, that the music would wind its way into the prose. What about Lightning Song? How did you know it...

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