MK: Tell us about yourself: family background, education, anything that’s been a major influence on your writing. In short, what led you down the primrose path to the writer’s life?
AD: I was born Sept. 21, 1964, in Columbia, S.C., in the hospital that’s now the Department of Social Services headquarters, last I looked. I was the belated youngest of three children; my brother was 20 when I was born, my sister 15. My father carried the mail on a rural route, my mother was a housewife, but they both were readers, believed in the power of reading and writing, the value of a library card. I grew up surrounded mostly by older folks, got along better, in fact, with grown-ups than with kids my own age, didn’t have close friendships with peers until high school, when I bonded famously with a few other self-declared outcasts. Read constantly, watched TV constantly, was fortunate enough to learn about the world as children should, at a distance, through mediation, while being sheltered from the worst of it. Always loved to hear people tell stories, grew pretty good at telling them, myself—orally, I mean. Went into journalism because, given my interests, that seemed the best route toward A Good Steady Job With Benefits, the Grail of my upbringing. Eventually got a bit bored with that, tried teaching, tried fiction writing, and lo, the fiction started selling, started gaining a small but devoted following. John Kessel, who was my M.A. thesis director at North Carolina State University, was my invaluable guide into the professional ranks of sf, remains my mentor and friend, and must be mentioned in any account of my writer’s life, however short; as must my wife, Sydney, who among many other virtues is the best support system I could hope for.
MK: You’ve had a day job all along when you were writing, and continue to do so. I take it you don’t believe in the stereotype of the starving artist?
AD: One’s life should not serve one’s art. It should be the other way around. You don’t necessarily have to do the Charles Bukowski thing and live in filth. Living in filth is not romantic.
MK: I’d love to ask you about how reporting shaped your writing. You worked at the Greensboro, North Carolina News and Record for seven years as a reporter and editor, and having been a reporter myself, I know that does things to a person’s writing. I’m curious if it had any effect on you, and if so whether you think it helped you.
AD: My newspaper years—four years as a reporter, three years as an editor—were instrumental in making me a better fiction writer. All those hundreds of stories I wrote, of course, were like on-the-job training in dialogue, description, narrative. Factor in all those thousands of interviews, the days spent listening to how people talk, the hours I spent at the library, the lengthy wire dispatches that I had to prune to their essence, the headlines that had to be an exact number of characters, no more no less, and you realize that I was learning to be a fiction writer all that time, without realizing it. Journalism also got me accustomed, early on, to my work being accepted and published, then read by hundreds, thousands, of strangers, then being responded to in the form of phone calls and letters. I also got very comfortable working with editors, dealing with rejection, dealing with rewrite requests. So when I finally started my fiction career, a lot of hurdles that many aspiring writers find difficult, even insurmountable, were simply not issues for me. I often tell young writers, even poets, that they should try working at a newspaper or magazine for a while.
MK: Andy, your work is pretty hard to fit down into any one category—which is a good thing, in my opinion—and you tend to play with styles and genre expectations. Being from Batesburg, South Carolina, and living below the Mason-Dixon line, you’ve probably had a lot of people call you a “Southern writer,” as if that was something you could put a finger on. Is there a “Southern” voice, in your opinion, and do you have one?
AD: There is no one Southern voice, no one Southern experience, no one Southern point of view. There are many Souths, have been since colonial times, and new Souths are popping up all the time, like the suburban Asian South in Atlanta. Certainly a number of traits are shared by many Southerners: a love of colorful talk, a sense of place, a yen for digression, a sense of humor, a fascination with the eccentric and quirky and grotesque, an obsession with history, an obsession with religion and the supernatural in daily life, an immersion from birth in an ocean of Story. If any or all of these are present in your voice, and you have spent any important time in the South, then I’d say you have a Southern voice, that you are, moreover, a Southern writer. But my credentials there are pretty safe anyway, no matter what I wrote, since I’m a South Carolina native who has never lived outside the South and who virtually spits grits whenever I open my mouth to speak. No one would mistake me for, say, a New Englander, or a Californian, or a Jamaican. But I’m determined not to write about the South all the time, not to use Southern points of view all the time, not to fit anyone’s predetermined notion of what “Southern writing” entails. That would be as limiting as, say, being pegged as only an SF writer.
MK: Beluthahatchie. I have a suspicion you collect pet words like some people collect knickknacks. Care to tell us where the word came from, and your story evolved from there? Maybe you could show us the process of how you evolve a story that was a finalist for the Hugo. I take it you changed your mind about basing it on annexation law after reading enough of that….
AD: I encountered the word “Beluthahatchie” in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang,” a story accompanied by Hurston’s own glossary, which drew upon African-American folklore much older than 1920s Harlem. “Beluthahatchie” was identified as one of several suburbs of Hell. My first thought was, “I’ve read a lot of stories set in Hell, but never one set in Beluthahatchie. I wonder what that story would be like?” So the whole story evolved from that one word. When the time came, it was easy to title the story! But I did take some spectacular wrong turns along the way, for example my foray into annexation law, when I believed the story should be about a boundary dispute between the sleepy suburb of Beluthahatchie and the bustling city of Hell. But in researching African-American folklore of Hell, I finally encountered the old slave tales of John and Old Massa, and the songs of Robert Johnson, and so the story finally clicked into place. I think writers should write down all the amazing words and phrases they encounter on slips of paper, or index cards, so that when they’re stuck for something to write about, they can pick a card and write about that word, that phrase. I just found out today that courtesy tickets used to be called “Annie Oakleys”—because the famed sharpshooter, as part of her act, would shoot holes in tickets, in effect “punching” them. So you’d say, for example, “We didn’t have to pay to get into the concert; my friend at the radio station gave us some Annie Oakleys.” Isn’t that great?
MK: Your stories come in an enormous range of voices, from vastly different times, educations, and walks of life. How do you evoke such voices, and have you ever gotten people who tell you “just write what you know”?
AD: People have told me that, and what they meant, I suppose, was that I should write only about thirtysomething nearsighted white guys who grew up in Batesburg, South Carolina, got their B.A.’s in journalism from the University of South Carolina in the mid-’80s, and so on and so on. That prospect does not interest me. Most writers lead fairly dull lives; if they were reduced to writing only about their own lives, the world of literature would be a duller place. That being said, there’s nothing wrong with the dictum “Write what you know” as long as you give “what you know” the broadest possible interpretation. You know some things because you’ve lived them, and other things because you’ve witnessed them, and other things because you’ve been told about them, and other things because you’ve read about them, and other things because you’ve imagined them, and all those avenues toward knowledge are valid, and all can (and should) enrich your writing. As for where all the voices come from, I don’t know, but I suspect a partial answer is what I wrote in response to the Faulkner question below.