This collection of interviews from three decades features one of the
South's most prominent contemporary writers, one of America's most
dazzling practitioners of postmodern fiction.
From the early sixties, when she published the award-winning A Family's
Affairs, to the late nineties and the publication of Truth: Four
Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell, Ellen Douglas has written
novels, short stories, essays, and a book of fairy tales.
These conversations with Douglas reveal her earthy frankness and her
disdain for portentous declaration. In them, just as in her fiction, she
expresses her love of people, language, and stories, her constant moral
values, her inclusive compassion, her deeply felt obligations to others,
and her keen sense of humor. She explains that comedy is as serious as
tragedy -- it's just funnier. Because she is an excellent, candid
conversationalist, her light touch with portentous matters makes these
interviews both dead serious and very funny.
The first is with Hodding Carter III, who in 1971 was a young journalist
and family friend from Greenville, Mississippi, the town where Douglas
was living and rearing three sons. Carter is among her early
interviewers who explore the mystique of the southern writer and the
southern climate for literature. Douglas's string of new novels took her
work forward into civil rights, women's roles, and questions about the
institutions of family and marriage. The conversations illuminate this
shift from southern tradition to concern over contemporary issues.
Arranged chronologically, the interviews testify to the growth of
Douglas's narrative sensibility and to the profound use of allusions in
her work. As she discusses A Family's Affairs; Black Cloud, White
Cloud; Where the Dreams Cross; Apostles of Light; The Rock Cried Out; A
Lifetime Burning; The Magic Carpet and Other Tales; Can't Quit You,
Baby; and Truth, her remarks exhibit a consistent concern with
technique and craftsmanship, for which she is much admired.
Of these sixteen interviews ten originally appeared in print between
1971 and 1999. Six have never before been published. Resurrecting lost
material and exploring new insights, this collection offers the only
comprehensive introduction to Douglas's lasting body of powerful work.
It also provides the tools for the in-depth studies of her art which are
sure to follow.
