Writing, Teaching, Learning

All around the world over the last few weeks students have been receiving admission decisions from the colleges to which they have applied. The Ivies released decisions yesterday and there have been some cheers but many more tears from students who have worked incredibly hard to achieve their dreams. At the same time, there have been many stories about how this whole process has become unhealthy for those seeking a place at schools ranked at the top of the US News. Frank Bruni’s New York Times article on this issue has gone viral.

What follows is not another diatribe against the whole process. Instead, readers will learn about a book and the man who wrote it. John Lane has been recognized for his words for many years. In addition, he has been recognized for his teaching by the faculty and students at his college, one that not enough people have heard of.

What John demonstrates and what Wofford as a school demonstrates help to underscore Bruni’s thesis and is something I too believe in. There are great schools and teachers all over the US. The perceived need for a top 10 ranked school on the degree is simply not true. John and many other great teachers have changed lives on their campuses for many years. Students and families need to look at schools that stress teaching and learning and that reward those who do this well. Wofford has done this with John and hundreds of other colleges have done the same with their star teachers too. It is not the name of the school that matters; it is what a student brings and what the student leaves with. John says it well (of course), that the key to academic success is “openness and passion.” These qualities will permit a student the opportunity to emerge from college an educated citizen who cares about learning and cares about others.

I want to thank John for sharing his words and wisdom. I am very lucky to have learned from him over many years. I hope some of you will have the chance to learn from him by reading his books or by taking one (or more) of his classes in the not too distant future.

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John Lane’s Fate Moreland’s Widow

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
— Robert Penn Warren

The victors write history. This often cited cultural meme (misattributed to Churchill) has been around for a couple of thousand years and like most grand statements both is and isn’t true.

Mr. Penn Warren’s words help to gather together some of what I want to say about John Lane and his new novel. My history with John goes back three decades. (We were at the same writing program at Virginia). Since then, John has gone on to write many books, collect many accolades for his poems and essays and now for his first published novel.

When I began to read Fate Moreland’s Widow, out last month from USC Press, I was not sure what to expect. I knew John had the ability to write beautiful poems and moving essays on a huge range of topics. What I found in this novel is yet another wonderful voice that is both poetic and historical.

Ben Crocker, the main character, is a product of a time and place in which there was a chance for the South to unionize its textile industry. As John mentions below in his interview, this movement has largely passed from consciousness and from the history books too. His book gives us a close up of the families whose lives were altered, for a time, by this movement. Ben is a bridge between the two sides—the workers and the owners. His is an uncomfortable position because while he’s born into the working class side his education permits him to become what some might now call a white collar worker. He does wear a tie and this in itself separates him from virtually everyone he has known. But he is not anywhere close to the heights and wealth of the owners. He is, to quote Wiley Cash in his introduction to the novel says, in a “liminal position”.

We as readers the get to learn about both worlds from this inside outsider. He can talk to almost anyone but the words he gets are often guarded and hostile. He must try to navigate a path that tries to placate both sides, and as is often this case, this does not work well. John has not cast Ben as a hero in any traditional way except perhaps to himself. His efforts to help Fate Moreland’s widow seem based in part of Romantic myths that characterize the Southern gentleman’s code of conduct. He projects himself as a man trying to save a woman who has lost her husband, or at least did when he was young.

By keeping the focus on a small set of characters and one particular set of events, we see lives in close up and for me this is crucial to the success of the book. Through poetic prose, there are many instances of what Ezra Pound called “luminous details”, those images and sentences that shine brightly enough to light our way to insight about a time, place and the infinitely complex space inside our heads. The most enigmatic character is Novie Moreland, the beautiful widow of Fate. Of course Fate is a word chosen for all its connotations and it is telling that Novie is not given her name in the title of the novel. She is, to me at least, a figure that Faulkner would have loved to have written. She is the person who through her beauty and mystery draws in Ben and many others to her orbit. In this she is a bit like Caddie in The Sound and the Fury in that the males around her apply their preconceived notions about who she is while we as readers are still left to wonder about what goes on inside her mind. We are left to choose and to create our own Fate Moreland’s Widow. We participate in the human condition of projecting our own desires and interpretations and this is what great literature should do-- leave us room to explore instead of providing easy answers to questions of character or history.

The book is prefaced with an epigraph from Mr. Penn Warren that says what I have just attempted to in much more eloquent and poetic way:

Before all had happened that has happened since
And is now arranged on the shelf
Of memory in a sequence that I call myself.

Those reading John’s book will also arrange the events and characters in this book that will lead them to learn more about others, but more importantly, more about themselves.

In the interview that follows I am lucky enough to be able to share John’s words— about teaching, writing and about his wonderful and important new novel.

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Before talking about Fate Moreland's Widow, I would you mind giving a bit of sketch about your history? Where did you grow up, go to school and anything you want to share about your family?

I was born in North Carolina, but grew up in the upcountry of South Carolina, in Spartanburg. My father died when I was five and my mother raised my sister and me on my dead father’s veteran’s benefits and social security. I was a working class kid, moved by my mama from rental house to rental house. I attended college in the mid-seventies, a time with low tuition and lots of government aid for the measurably bright but poor. I had a few other choices, but I went to Wofford College, in my hometown, the small liberal arts college where I now teach. My mother was a proud woman, who read all the time. I know that's where I got my love of story.

When did you first start writing? Did you know early on you wanted to be a writer and did you find a mentor who steered you on this path?

I always wrote. I wrote poems as early as elementary school. One important moment for me was having a poem selected to be displayed in the lobby of the school when I was in the fifth grade. It was called “The Big Snow,” so I had an environmental interest even back then. I also wrote a poem that year about our family dog. The first two lines were, “I got a dog named Hugo/Where ever he go I go,” exhibiting an early interest in clever language. That title and those two lines are all that survive of my early oeuvre.

In all seriousness, I think that my love of literature did start then. I realized, early on, that if you were good with language you could get people's attention, larger older crowds like teachers, and your own peers, particularly girls, who seemed to like boys who wrote poetry. I was in a bar many years ago and a girl friend from junior high approached me. I had not seen her in years. We talked. She asked what I was doing. “I'm a poet,” I said. “Oh, you were always a poet,” she said, laughing. “I have a shoe box full of poems you wrote me thirty years ago.”

Stories were important to me too. I learned listening to my mother, my uncles, my sister at our dining room table every Sunday in Spartanburg. Those family stories were about our people who had prospered and failed in the past. The stories that circulated were about the black and the white sheep. I remember a lot of laughter and much of it in places where we shouldn't have been laughing— gunshots, flimflam, money lost and money stolen, backsliding in general, and the redemption that often follows. As fiction teacher Janet Burroway says, “Only trouble is interesting.”

I didn't know it at the time, but I was a novelist in training, and my first mentor was this dining room table where I sat and listened and learned to tell a story and hold the attention of the room. I've had other teachers and mentors, but this was my first fiction classroom— a Southern dining room table at Sunday dinner.

Can you talk a bit about your role at Wofford. How long have you been teaching there and can you give readers an idea about how you cross disciplines in order to teach students interested in things other than writer how to communicate well?

I have been teaching at Wofford forever— twenty-nine years. When I came back in '88 I didn't think I'd be there but a year. I had a one-year slot and then, I dreamed, I was going to become a famous writer. But here I am, tenured, not yet famous, but grown somehow into a full professor. I started out in the English department teaching literature and creative writing, but almost ten years ago I lead the effort to create an interdisciplinary environmental studies major at the college. After the major and minor were established, I started to teach what I call “the humanities arm” of ENVS. I really resisted the idea that the primary value of learning to write and read literature was to teach “communication.” This was too easy, although you hear it all the time. I wanted instead to promote the idea that it was impossible to understand environmental problems and issues unless you were willing to look at all three “ways of knowing,” that of science, social science, and the arts and humanities. Each was like a different tool kit for knowing, or a key to a different vault, or a set of lenses to see a landscape, or grammars evolved to know and understand. If superior communication skills developed as a result of reading and discussing Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or Elizabeth Bishop's “The Fish,” so be it. If one could master the memo by writing personal essays about adventure travel, all the better. I now teach a suite of classes with a humanities/literature focus: a required intro to environmental humanities, and electives like “intro to environmental writing,” and “major themes in environmental writing.” I direct senior capstones in environmental writing, and I direct the field station and two of our lecture series. It's a good and busy life (we have 50 majors) and it's quite different from my first twenty years in the English department, which I loved.

I want to return to some questions about writing after I ask you to talk about your book. A novel is something new for you. You are a well-known poet, essayist, and journalist. What made you want to write this novel?

Well, the urge has always been there. Fate Moreland's Widow is just the first successful manifestation of it. As early as the 1980s I was already working on a novel, never finished. Then I wrote a collaborative genre novel, what I'd call an “eco-adventure novel,” with a close friend. That one had an agent and went around New York, but everybody rejected it. But I didn't give up. I then wrote two more unpublished novels— both set in the mythical Morgan County, in upcountry South Carolina. The first was about race relations and its time period was 1970, when the schools in South Carolina were first integrated, something I lived through. The hero was a 15-year-old point guard named Duncan Daniels. He was me in many ways. The second was a comic novel about a small struggling liberal arts college that takes a gift from a local garbage dump tycoon. The only trouble is that the tycoon doesn't have the money he's given the college— his crooked brother-in-law has stolen it all. It was called Dirty Money. The college isn't Wofford, but is more like me imagining what it might be to be at a college struggling to stay open. Both these novels were circulated in New York by agents, but the he couldn't sell either of them. But once again, I didn't give up and Pat Conroy and USC Press selected Fate Moreland's Widow as the fifth title in their new Story River fiction series.

Looking back now I realize the main character of Dirty Money, an eighty-year-old named Darrell Crosstie, in some ways presages my narrator in Fate Moreland's Widow, Ben Crocker. Like Darrell, Ben is an old man often reflecting back on the past.

I'm glad you bring up Ben. In Fate Moreland's Widow he serves as the bridge or go between the two vastly different classes that make up the population in the novel. He looks back on events from the past and describes a time that is largely forgotten today. First of all, he is, any great character in fiction, complex. By this I don’t mean he spouts philosophy but he has many sides. He has come from the mountain, as it were, and is now the right hand man of George McCane the mill owner.

How have readers of your book responded to him so far?

I have had some great emails from people saying that they see their own lives in Ben's dilemmas and choices. Everybody seems to have had some work-place situation where you must do something you are not sure about because your boss or company expects you to do it. Ben's situation is so intense because of several reasons— it's the middle of the Depression and he has a job and would like to keep it, and he is in a position where he can move up socially if he does a good job. Neither of these rewards balances the choices he has to make.

Do some like him and so some judge Ben Crocker for making choices he should not have made?

So far no one has admitted to not liking him. I was a little worried that he may not be a sympathetic character but it hasn't worked out that way. One of my good friends, an ecocritic and poet in Great Britain, read the book and wrote to say, “I loved the dignity of the tone of conversations by Crocker and the way he can be still accepted enough to have conversations of a dignified kind with those in his family, old life and the union people.” That meant a great deal to me. I knew that I had pulled off what I wanted— a full character with a full range of humanness!

Textile Mill

I am interested in how you think this book could be used in classes to teach students about history. I say this in part because the whole notion of fiction, non-fiction, creative non-fiction has blurred. Hilary Mantel’s novels may tell us better history than many scholarly texts. Do you use novels in the way I am asking about?
If you care to would you want to say what you think about him?

I really like him. His moral complexity even surprised me from time to time. He seems like a good man, and as we all know (and Miss Flannery told us) a good man is hard to find.

One of my favorite lines in the book it this one: “I know what’s forgotten and what’s remembered (like a face) are related.” It is enigmatic but also serves, to me at least, as a key to understand Ben and also the whole community he lives in. Do you want to talk a bit about how this dialectic of memory and forgetting plays out in the book (and in writing too I think)?

Well, I think this dialectic between memory and forgetting is the most important element of the novel. It's where the novel began, with my own experience of how communities like mine can forget their past. The past we tend to forget here is the labor past, how the people once rose up and tried to take control of their lives and they were beaten. As the labor historian G.C. Waldrep puts it, writing about Spartanburg County the 1930s represented a deep loss. I think Waldrep calls the Uprising of '34 a “protracted and agonizing defeat” of the workers aspirations at the hands of their employers.

The memory of that union defeat has been driven deep inside, but not forgotten. When it does surface it's raw. I wanted to show, through fiction, what it looked like and felt like to have hope in the late 1920s and early 1930s. I wanted the story to illustrate a complex hope that was not built on upward mobility. Ben feels it. He knows there is more to having a job than having a job, or at least he remembers it— as the story is constructed of an old man's memories fifty years after the fact.

And I've never thought about it before, but that face image Ben references is like “what's forgotten and what's remembered” — In the first three pages, the first of the book-ended 1988 sections, Ben actually sees Novie Moreland's face after fifty years when he's shown a newspaper article— and the whole story comes back to him like a remembrance of things past.

As a follow up to this I wanted to quote from the afterward: “Though this story is set in the fictional town of Morgan, South Carolina, there are parallels between my family’s real work world and the imaginary one I have made up. In the thirties Spartanburg was more of a union town than most people think.” The role of unions is something that plays a central role in the book but as you point out this history has largely been forgotten. Why do you think this is?

It was taboo to speak of the unions. Maybe not an official taboo, but taboo none the less. The unions had been defeated and the Uprising and unionization had caused terrible pain, setting family members against family members. I'm told my own great-grandfather actually ambushed my mother's step-father because her step-father was a scab during the strike. Great-granddaddy didn't kill my mother's step-father, but not for lack of trying. That's one of the stories my family told around the dinner table.

At one level your novel gives voice to the voiceless. It tells the story that many either never knew or have forgotten. Would you say you had a desire to tell, in fictional terms, a story that needs to be told?

Oh, yes. It needed telling. It demanded to be told. And there are more stories to be told. Every community has them— hundreds of central stories, the best of them taboo.

At the same time the story is also a love story. Ben is motivated in some of his actions to try to help Fate Moreland’s widow. In some ways this ‘love story’ reminds me of some others that I have read (Faulkner comes to mind). Would you call this book more of a love story than a historical novel or do you see it as a delicate balance and if so how did you manage to do this?

Well, what drives it is the love story— Ben's desire to know more of the widow Moreland. He never really gets very far, but the creepy idea that he might get somewhere with this beautiful, vulnerable young woman is one of the driving engines of the plot. And then there is the love story of Ben and his wife. Colleen I think is a great character, and it's clear in the last bookend they've had a good marriage. Coleen's Ben's conscious. She's his true north through those two troubled years in the 1930s.

I recently read an article that underscored how stories and fiction can make us, the readers, better people. Do you believe this?

I would say stories can't necessarily make us better people, but they can illustrate for us what a better world or better people might look like if we give ourselves to them.

I can't say I use them this way exactly. Most history for me now is natural history and I use novels mostly to illustrate problems or issues in environmental studies. An example might be a novel I'm teaching this semester, Timothy: Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It's the story of a captive tortoise owned by the 19th century naturalist Gilbert White, one of the first literary naturalists. It's told in first person— and the speaker is Timothy the tortoise. It's a wonderful novel and I use it to discuss complexities among species. It works really wonderfully when we see our first box turtle in the field on a field trip.

Do you think there are some who would question this and if so how would you respond to them?

We've had this happen at Wofford. We've had at least one novel for our freshman “novel experience” program that some professors felt fell short on accuracy of the historic period in a scholarly way and yet was a great, award-winning story. The teaching faculty tended to divide into those who discounted the novel because of historical inaccuracies and anachronisms, and those who cared deeply about the story and were willing to discount the inaccuracies and anachronisms. I tended to fall into the latter camp. I cared more about the story. The anachronisms seemed something you could easily correct if you needed—but a good story is very hard to write and maybe more valuable than simply something that teaches the perfectly accurate history. I worried about that as I wrote my novel. The press brought in a reader at the end— a historian who knew the 1930s— and she made some great suggestions, and I was grateful for her suggestions. I hope I got it right, but in the end, it's fiction and not history, so I don't worry about it so much.

John Lane with Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy, the series editor at USC Press for Story River Books, has been a big promoter of your book. How much of influence has he been to you?

I would find it hard to imagine a South Carolinian of my generation who didn't read Pat Conroy. The Prince of Tides is still one of my favorite novels. I loved and learned from his descriptions of the low country landscape, his powerful characters, and the psychological complexity of his stories. Also, there was Conroy's willingness to take on complexity and various establishments— in The Water is Wide, and in Lords of Discipline. I am eternally grateful to him for his support.

Do you think this book would make a good film?

Folks have said so, though it's a tough time for period films. I'd have a better shot if it was a comic book first. There are a few cotton mills still around as locations, if anyone is interested.

Going back to writing, I would like to ask a bit about how you approach teaching it. Is good writing good writing whether it is non-fiction, poetry or a novel or does each require a different way of instruction?

I think the basics are same for all— experience, modeling (reading, mostly), attention, discipline, and revision.

You have been a great teacher for many years. What makes a good teacher?

I think it comes from caring about students. If you were lucky enough to have teachers care for you, then you never forget how it felt. You want to pass it on.

What makes a good student?

Openness and passion helps— openness to all I listed above.

Have you seen the skills student bring to the classroom change over the years? Have you changed the way you teach and the way you write given the interconnected world we live in now?

I'm not sure the skills have changed. The habits have changed. The students maybe don't read as much. They're not intimidated by not knowing things, as they can Google it all now.

I would be remiss if I did not ask you about Southern fiction and southern writing. You are certainly a product of the south and it goes back and goes deep. I know this would take a book to answer but are there things that you can point to that make something fit under the rubric of southern writing? If so, is it a part of your DNA or is it something you learn to be a part of or a bit of both?

Well, Flannery O'Connor, a Southern writer if there ever was one, talked of “mystery and manners” in her essay collection by that name. By mystery of course O'Connor was referring to God and his grace, the greatest of mysteries, at least for her, a devout Catholic, but I would add a sense of how simply unknowable any world is. There is always mystery and always will be mystery, in the South or anywhere. O'Connor also refers to a place's “body of manners” and how they are of great consequence to the writer, and how s/he can employ them to effect in a particular region, and that Southern writers are at an advantage in this matter. Southerners know their geographical places, and their customary manners. By manners I think O'Connor does not mean what it is to be polite, but instead what gestures are humans make in public, what can be said and what goes unsaid, what we feel inside when we witness certain acts and how we react. When I lived in Vermont or Seattle I still opened doors and let others walk through first. A good novelist would notice that, and a foreign student would learn something by noticing as well. When I was in Shanghai a few years ago the manners were strange to me. But I adapted. I know there were Chinese novels I could have read to make my initiation easier.

Why do you think there is a genre for the south in a way there really isn’t for the north?

There may not be a genre of the North but there is one of Manhattan, and L.A and The West. Those are places where the stories hang together in a way that creates myth. In spite of CNN and the Internet the South still hangs together as a place. We have a cultural cohesion and it can contain the best and worst of our nature. It somehow contains The Color Purple and Go Down, Moses.

I have a lot of readers who come from places all over the world. Do you think a book like this represents a particular challenge? Do you think that they can learn to see parts of their own culture in new ways as a result of reading your words?

I think a great deal can be learned about a place by reading a novel, maybe more than you can learn from movies or television or popular music. Good novels allow for a deep complexity of mystery and manners you can maybe only get through written language. If someone from China is coming to study in the South and wants to understand the complexity of the culture they are entering they might read a good novel about that place. In it they'll see that the past, as Faulkner said, is never past, and that what is said is often not what is meant, and that sometimes what isn't said (or what isn't even acknowledged publicly) is, like a black hole, affecting everything visible in the room or, in the case of the beginning of Fate Moreland's Widow, on the porch.