Conversations with Lee K. Abbott: an interview

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1995 by Jonathan Leizman

The son of an army colonel, Lee Kittredge Abbott, Jr. was born on 17 October 1947 in the Panama Canal Zone. He moved around frequently before his family settled in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he attended public school. Abbott received his bachelor's and master's degrees from New Mexico State University, studied at Columbia University, and earned a Master's of Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas in 1977. Since then, he has taught Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University, Colorado College, Washington University, and Rice University. He currently lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife, Pam, and directs the Creative Writing program at The Ohio State University.

Interviewer: In essays you've written for The Ohio Review, you claim, "character is the center of fiction" [Abbott 124] and the best stories are those that "subordinate the fancy footwork - style and structure and plot, all the other parts that make the engine go - to character" [Myers 105]. Seemingly, you argue that a good writer or storyteller can create a masterpiece irrespective of plot, for example, as Garland Steeples does in "When Our Dream World Finds Us, And These Hard Times Are Gone." How do you see yourself doing what Garland does as a storyteller?

Abbott: I anticipate what will happen to him in the future. One of the things that's true for me is I just don't understand human life anymore outside the context of story. There are no "yes" or "no" questions any longer as far as I'm concerned. There are no ABC answers. Everything is a function of my reading into the world of motivation and characterization and trying to, through the felicity that is the structure of story, make sense out of what's going on, what's happening to people. Particularly the people I am closest to, those in my imagination and those in my family and colleagues and things like that.

Interviewer: Which do you consider yourself foremost, a storyteller or a writer?

Abbott: I think a storyteller, though I can't imagine doing it aloud. It seems to me that I need the discipline of the sentence. I need to be able to evoke that voice in a reader's ear without speaking aloud. Maybe we can call it writing aloud or something like that. When I'm writing the stories, I clearly hear the voice of the focal character. That seems fairly evident to me. I hear its intonations, and as Jim Whitehead says, its purl and its sweep, and I hear its rise and fall. My job is to try to get you to hear it by writing sentences in such a way that it becomes obvious and clear.

Interviewer: You do not speak highly of those who claim your characters seem very much alike, yet, certain characters and names recur. For instance, Dr. Hammond Ellis, Hal Thibodeaux, Allie Martin.

Abbott: Well, I guess we could say at first it's just ignorance and laziness on my part. That would be the least charitable response of some of my least charitable critics. The most charitable response and the most charitable critics would say that these are, if nothing else, sort of archetypal inhabitants of the universe that is my page, somehow. That in the small part of the world that I write most about there are these figures. There is that Episcopal minister Dr. Hammond Ellis, there is Del Cruz who owns the Triangle Drive-In in the imagined the part of the world that is my Yoknapatawpha County. Maybe these people are important to me in ways that I haven't yet begun to investigate in a meaningful fashion. They're important to me, but I haven't sufficient courage yet or intelligence or knowledge about them yet to actually write their stories. But they're clearly part of my world, as part of my world includes The Mimbres Valley Country Club and all of the people who have memberships there, either permanent or visiting; as are law firms, and doctors' offices, and car dealerships, and the El Corral Bar where people go to have cocktails and Del Cruz's where they always get their chicken-fried steak. So, it's just part of that world.

Interviewer: Works of fiction are often largely based upon an author's personal experiences. How do you see yourself using experiences from your own life in this fictional universe? For instance, in "The World Is Almost Rotten?"

Abbott: There was a guy named Tommy Cruse, who was my father's protege back in the late '50s, who was this phenomenal golfer. He was really good, but my father was really good, too. I remember no details whatsoever except that every year our country club had a club championship, an invitational tournament. Many of the people show up in stories. I mean people like Frank Reddman. He was kind of a crony of my father's. The Clute brothers: Mickey is about three years older than I am but was a very good college golfer. The Swetmans were members of the country club and he was a good golfer, but she was an incredibly good golfer. So as it happens for that story, all that's true about it is that a boy, me, had a father, my own, who had as a protege this guy named Tommy Cruse who was very, very good and who eventually beat my father in, what for my father, was a very important golf tournament and for Tommy Cruse was a very important golf tournament. That's it. The rest of it is just utterly made up.