The Ecotone Interview with Joy Williams

78 The Ecotone Interview Rollie McKenna Joy Williams is the author of the novels The Quick and the Dead (Knopf, 2000), Breaking and Entering (Vintage, 1988), The Changeling (Doubleday, 1978), and State of Grace (Doubleday, 1973); the story collections Honored Guest (Knopf, 2004), Escapes (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), and Taking Care (Random House, 1982); the essay collection Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (The Lyons Press, 2001); and the travel guide The Florida Keys: A History and Guide (Random House, 1987–2003). She is the recipient of the Rea Award for the short story and the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and most other major publications, as well as in numerous Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. 79 Several years ago I wrote an essay called “Sick of Nature,” in which I complained that nature writing was too calm and quiet, without enough rabble-rousing. A friend read the essay and pointed me to Joy Williams’s book, Ill Nature, suggesting I’d find what I was looking for in its pages. I did and more: it was a bracing, angry, joyous book and its author, for all her moral seriousness, clearly took great delight in language and form. It is also a breakout book for the genre, slap-inthe -face confrontational but simultaneously smart, subtle, and funny. Last spring, Joy was a visiting professor at the school where the writer Wendy Brenner and I teach. On Joy’s first day on campus, I bumped into her and we decided to have cocktails at a local restaurant overlooking the ocean. The next time we met at this restaurant, Wendy joined us, and these meetings soon became a weekly ritual—Tuesdays at the Oceanic with Joy. There are fancier, trendier restaurants in town, but Joy kept voting that we return to this one—baskets of hushpuppies and fried oyster salads and martinis overlooking a pier that had been torn in half by hurricane Fran, then rebuilt. One week we even phoned Joy from our table to find out why she was late—she was in New York City attending an awards ceremony, it turned out, but she seemed happy to hear from us. It would be nice to claim that the conversation below was a composite transcription of our cocktail-hour conversations . But that is not the case. Rather, we submitted our questions to Joy separately and she mailed us her responses some weeks later, and then Wendy pasted them together into a kind of collage. Wendy had read and re-read Joy’s fiction as a young writer, and her personal history with Joy was longer and more complicated than mine, as she relates: One day in 1991, when I was an MFA student at University of Florida, I received a postcard from Joy Williams, whom I had never met—a friend with Joy Williams David Gessner & Wendy Brenner 80 Ecotone: reimagining place had passed along to Joy a story of mine, knowing how much I loved and was inspired by Joy’s work. The postcard featured a photo of the burned, Stonehenge-looking ruins of Sheldon Church in South Carolina, brick pillars leading up to nowhere; on the back Joy had penned a few encouraging words and some suggestions for revising my story. She ended with: “God, do you really want to get a postcard like this?!” I would have been happy to get no other mail for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, however, I proceeded to send Joy every story I wrote, the moment I finished writing it, for the next three years. My professors tried to stop me, warned me not to burden her, to wait a while between stories, but their idea of “a while” was six months or a year, which seemed ridiculous. I was twenty-five, unpublished and idiotically energetic. I wasn’t going to just sit there for a year. My memory mercifully has blocked out the rest, except that Joy’s replies were unfailingly generous and offhandedly brilliant; she...