An interview with Lewis Nordan

Southern Quarterly, Spring 2003 by Dupuy, Edward J

I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY to meet Lewis (Buddy) Nordan when he graciously accepted my invitation to read at the annual Walker Percy Symposium in 1999. I ferried him from New Orleans across the twenty-four mile span of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway and knew from the ease of our conversation that he would be an excellent interviewee. He consented to do an interview with me after the Symposium. In the fall of 2001, knowing that I had agreed to serve as guest editor for this special number of the Southern Quarterly, I finally managed to arrange our conversation, which was conducted via e-mail, his preference. Buddy approved the final draft of our electronic interview.

ED: Thanks for agreeing to do this interview. It's the first chance I've had to formally interview any writer, and I can't help but think of the collections of interviews I've read, especially those put out by the University Press of Mississippi and Peggy Prenshaw, the former editor of the Southern Quarterly. Would you care to comment generally about interviews and their relation to a writer's work? To your own work?

LN: I've never really given serious thought to this issue, and it strikes me as an original and helpful question. Well, let me see. I've read a lot of interviews where the subject did not really seem invested in searching his heart or mind for personal insights, or where the subject was content to be clever, or worse, where he or she didn't realize that the answers he was supplying were canned and hackneyed. This occurs with actors more frequently than writers, I think, but with writers too. And I'm sorry to have to include myself in this number. Being interviewed is on the one hand an imposition on the writer/subject, but on the other hand it is the largest compliment one literary person can pay to another. To be asked to answer questions about your work because somebody believes others will care! That's the part I try to keep in mind when I'm being interviewed-not that I'm doing someone a favor but that I'm being paid a compliment. Then my answers are more honest and I am more forthcoming, more giving. The real value of an interview of me is the opportunity to take time to find out what I really think about matters that I take for granted most of the time. Sometimes this is a matter of discovering where I told the truth in a piece of fiction or skewed the facts (uh, lied) in a piece of nonfiction. I can also learn from other writers' interviews and test the realities of my writing life against theirs. For example, I recently read an excellent interview that Richard Ford did with Margaret Love Denman. He spoke of having written a first book, which dealt with "southern" themes and characters and setting but which he thought had transcended the regional context. But when the book was reviewed it was not taken seriously, only treated as one more Faulkner imitation or genre piece. This is a sad fact of many, many southern writers and their books, incidentally. Richard realized this would always be the case if he did not change. And I suppose you could say the rest is history. He writes beautifully of Montana and of New England, he is a world-renowned Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer. I on the other hand continue to be thought of as a largely regional writer, and though I have a loyal following here and abroad, I have never really fully shaken the categorization that Richard was speaking of.

When I read the interview my first thought was that I could do what Richard did. Then on reflection I realized I could not do this. The gifts that were given to me are limited to what I must write rather than what I might write to gain an audience. This is in no way a put down of what Richard does. He's a better writer than I am, and if you don't believe this, read "Rock Springs." It's a great book. What I'm saying is that when my settings and characters begin to live outside the South, in Pittsburgh, for example, my present home, it will not be a result of a conscious choice to find acceptance of a wider audience (something I would very much like) but some as-yet-unarticulated need to explore depths in myself I have stumbled upon.

ED: You speak of "writing what you must write." How do you know, what manifestations do you have, to indicate what you must write?

LN: I didn't mean for my response to sound quite as high-falutin' as it may have, concerning what I "must write." I only mean to distinguish between the stories that come naturally to me at a given time of my life-father/ son stories, marital problem stories, stories of death, etc.-from stories that I might write to find an audience. I can't do what some other writers seem capable of doing, that is, altering setting and theme or whatever as a way of looking for an audience.

ED: In a related vein, I wish you would speak on the general relationship between criticism and literature, especially as it relates to your work.

LN: I love to read articles or dissertations or whatever about my work, and often I learn to see connections between works that I had not seen before. Once again, to have someone write on your work is to receive an incomparable compliment. I've always believed that the author's "intention" is less important than the effect a given technique or theme has on an audience, and the critic is more likely to know these things at times than the author. The caveat, though, is that nothing a critic writes is likely to influence what the author subsequently writes. It certainly has never done so with me, in any case. What a writer "learns-i.e., in the critical, analytical sense-has little or no effect on what that writer already knows in an instinctive, intuitive way. This can be good or bad, obviously. A person with racist or sexist or other deplorable instincts is unlikely to read that this is true and then be able to refine them out of that dream-state where stories exist and replace them with something else. In short, I suppose I believe that criticism and the type of writing I'm interested in doing and in reading come from different parts of the self and rarely meet to say hello.