[echoing piano
leads placid arrangement]
§
(man)
To me, the writer's block
is more writer's evasion
[chuckling]
or writer's procrastination.
If I get myself in a chair,
I can always think of a story.
It just comes.
§
This is the opening
of, uh,  DarkWinter,
which is one
of the Cuddy Mangum novels,
so I know the voice.
I--I've heard
Cuddy before,
but to capture
exactly
what that voice says is--
is crucial to me.
Here's the first sentence:
"This is about the summer
when everything changed."
Now, I thought a lot
and then have removed
the word when.
"This is the summer
everything changed."
That's--doesn't seem
like much of a difference,
but it's  every difference.
Like Mark Twain said,
the difference
between one word
and another word
is the difference
between lightning
and a lightning bug.
So you're looking
for the lightning
when you write.
§
After so many years,
decades away,
I was writing television.
I was in New York.
Maureen was teaching at, uh,
University of Pennsylvania.
I had met Eudora Welty,
whose work I  hugely admired.
I told her,
"I'm havin' trouble,
"and I've written
three novels.
"Novel one's California.
"Novel two's Colorado.
Novel three's Connecticut."
And she said, "Honey, you're
just sneakin' up on Carolina.
"You go home
and let your fiction
grow out of that land
beneath your feet."
[chuckling]
It was an astonishing moment
in my life.
I started  UncivilSeasons.
The moment I wrote
that first sentence:
"Two things don't happen
very often...
That voice that  we
was different--
I was always puttin'
these outsiders
in the first novels--
the person from the South
who was living in Connecticut,
but then I was
in that red clay,
that landscape
of my imagination.
I think those experiences
are set fairly early.
Willa Cather--
she lived
in Red Cloud, Nebraska,
from age 9 to age 15,
but that's the landscape
of her imagination.
That's what she sees.
Joyce had long since
gotten outta Dublin,
but you read  Ulysses,
and you are on the streets
and in the pubs.
And for me,
the red clay
of North Carolina,
the towns, the sound--
that is key,
and when we came back here
and were looking
for a place to live,
we came to Hillsborough.
First of all,
Maureen's wandering around,
saying, "Oh my God!
It's like being
inside your fiction."
I'm livin' in a house
in which there were slaves
who moved away
with Emancipation.
I am living in the presence
of the history
that is so important
to any writer
from the South.
When I came here,
I just sat down in a chair
and started to write
as fast as I could.
I am just passionate
about silence
because the way I write
is to sit there
and essentially say,
"Talk to me."
I'm listening so hard,
and I think that's
really coming out
of my personal experience.
My mother was deaf,
and I was...
her ears in a way--
"Listen for me"--
and I really think
there's a relation
between that
and my being a writer.
Who is
the voice?
Who's gonna tell
this story?
I always say,
you don't have to be a whale
to write Moby Dick.
You know, that person may be
very different from you,
but you--
you have to hear.
"Through a meadow where
in summer wildflowers grew.
"Toward the bottom,
the slope plunged steeply
"through the knolls
and gullies
"left by century-old
earthen terraces
"falling to the edge
of the dark woods
that guarded Heaven's Hill."
[delicate piano
leads droning strings]
The physical landscape
defined this place
that we live in--
became a fictional place
to me.
The courthouse in Hillsborough
showed up in "Red Clay,"
a short story of mine.
[guitar leads strings]
"Up on its short slope,
"the columned front
of our courthouse
"was waxy in the August sun,
"like a courthouse
in lake water.
"The leaves hung from maples,
and the flag of North Carolina
"wilted flat
against its metal pole.
"Heat sat sodden
over the county
"week by relentless week;
"they called the weather
'dog days'
"after the star, Sirius,
but none of us knew that."
[strings ebb and flow]
The mill's so much
a part of the change
from the old South
to the new South that is, uh,
a part of the story,
particularly
of  Time's Witness.
"The factory whistles
kept crying over Hillston,
"grieving
for the old industrialist
"who'd built them.
"Decade after decade
they'd summoned the town
"each morning
to come weave for him,
"told it at noon
to eat lunch,
"sent it home
each evening to rest;
"now they wailed
that Briggs Cadmean was dead,
"wailed loudest
here in East Hillston
where the factories loomed."
[piano leads]
Writing
is a lonely business...
takes isolation...
and so it's wonderful to--
to have other people
that are doing that.
These are all my neighbors
in Hillsborough
and all my wonderful friends:
Allan Gurganus,
Jill McCorkle,
Lee Smith,
Craig Nova.
All these people live and
write here in Hillsborough.
[peaceful guitar
and piano theme]
I do find that this group
of world-class writers
are wonderfully harmonious.
The beauty
of having a porch
like this is,
I can work
on the porch,
and I
can either speak
to people or not.
They don't
really see you
'cause you're
slightly recessed,
but it's like command
performance, you know.
You have to actually
formally invite people
to come and sit
on the porch.
They know not--
"Hi!" is not,
"Will you come and
join me for an hour."
It's a buffer;
it's something pleasant--
slows 'em down.
Then you choose the ones
you want to invite.
What are we doin'
in this little town
in Hillsborough?
But here we are.
(woman)
"So, at the beginning
of this particular summer,
"the summer
everything changed,
"I started packing
to head west on Highway 64
in search of a new job,
new town, new Cuddy Mangum."
(Malone)
I have been graced
by my marriage to Maureen.
Editors come and go,
and publishing houses
come and go,
and she has been
my constant reader.
(Quilligan)
"Created herself young,
"mostly out of movies,
in the belief
"that your script
can come true
if you keep on
believing in it."
And she loves to--
sometimes,
a little hard on me--
hah, you know, yeah--
but I've learned,
just watch her face.
If she winces,
you wanna change that word.
This, everyone's
gonna recognize--
oh, Cuddy's back!
(Malone)
And she's been very much
a part of my work.
§
A novel, when you write it,
you send it out,
and only
when it reaches a reader,
when they respond
out of the world
they come from,
out of the feelings
they have,
out of the desires
and the hopes
and the renunciations
of their lives,
does that novel
fulfill itself.
That's the great hope
for a creator of a story...
"Wind was cold
off the bright water
of Albemarle Sound."
...that it won't be silenced
by time...
"As I met the ocean,
the sun blew up
over the horizon line."
...that the characters
will be there
for a new generation
of readers
and will speak to them.
"Shafts of sea oats
bowed shaking
"to a sandy highway
"that warned
of the dangers
of leaving it."
§