Travels with George, in Search of Ben Hur and Other Meanderings

Preface

Preface Early on in my writing career I focused on little more than poetry—my first serious efforts and my initial publications were in that genre. It was only after I started a cattle operation outside Huntsville and for some reason began writing dramatic poems about cows and rabbits and drought and women (an odd stew there) that I realized how little more needed to be done to flesh them out into essays and stories. This is not to say that I had not already written a whole lot of fiction and nonfiction. Whereas it is true that my love of poetry came from years of memorizing the lyrics in the Broadman Hymnal in church or going berserk from boredom, it is equally true that my love of fiction and nonfiction started there. I got so weary of hearing the same old Bible stories told over and over the same old way by the same old people that I started rewriting them to suit myself. I had one fine cast of characters to work with—Noah, Jonah, Lot, Moses, Daniel, David, the Magi—and I let myself go. You think God is whimsical? You ought to see Moses gleefully dashing about with a big basket picking up fish left flapping in the mud and then staring in horror as those towering sea walls close on him like a set of whale jaws. Oh, I scrambled things up. In school I wrote poems and stories for classmates who had assignments due, and I cannot begin to tally the number of times I wrote essays as punishment for misdoings (until my teachers concluded that they were involved in a Brer Rabbit and the briar patch situation and put an end to that). The Monday after I graduated from high school, I was on the way to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for basic and advanced-infantry training. The two things I wanted most in my life at that time were a woman of my own and a college education, but both required money for acquisition and maintenance . You can imagine how little a buck private earned in those days—I realized soon enough where the term buck came from—but when all your living expenses are met, any revenue is cream. So, while others took off to Columbia or other points for the weekend, I stayed in the barracks and read and wrote. x Preface I was reading modern poetry at the time, but my writing efforts focused on stories and essays, primarily pieces about what it was like growing up on Sand Road. I would write everything out in pencil on legal pads and then type it up in the company clerk’s office. I have no idea what happened to all that stuff, but I suspect that when I moved out of the house midway through my second year in college, it got tossed out with my baseball cards and the rest of my leavings. I regret the loss of that material, since it would make the writing of my memoir, “Growing Up in Mississippi Poor and White but Not Quite Trash,” much easier. In the eighties I started writing a good bit of fiction, beginning with the conversions of those dramatic poems I mentioned, and I launched a column, called “Ruffin-It,” in the local paper. Those columns were about everything under the sun; I’m still writing it today, and it is still about whatever I happen to stumble across. You name it, and I have written about it or will tomorrow. At some point I realized the essay potential in the column pieces and started rewriting and fleshing them out, and before I knew it, I was placing them all over: Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Connecticut Review, Literary Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Living, Southern Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature. Southern Quarterly ran four in a row. NPR featured one. The upshot is that the familiar essay is now my genre of choice. This will be my fourth collection, and I can easily envision four or five more before I feel that I am scraping the bottom of the barrel. I am often asked whether the essays are true, partially true, or mostly fiction . I aver that they are, for the most part, dead-on true, though pulling from memory is always a perilous proposition. Everything that we recall is subject to distortions imposed by time and circumstance, but...