♪ - We've gotten used to Clyde Edgerton's engaging writing and his reputation for great storytelling.

And best-selling books and for his teaching, his commentary and mentoring other writers.

He's been at this for a good while.

In fact, sometimes seems like yesterday when "Raney", Edgerton's first novel was published in 1985.

We'll talk to him about that groundbreaking book and the rich career that followed and about some of the projects that keep him busy today.

All that on North Carolina Bookwatch, next.

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[upbeat jazz music] ♪ - Welcome to North Carolina Bookwatch and Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill.

One of North Carolina's great supporters of writers and of North Carolina Bookwatch.

I'm D.G.

Martin and my guest is Clyde Edgerton, author of "Raney", his debut novel, and some of the many others has followed.

Clyde, welcome.

- DG Thanks for having me.

- I'm excited about looking back in your career and going back to 1985.

- Right?

- When "Raney" came out.

- 85 is the year.

I guess I feel really, really fortunate to have been able to find a publisher the way I did, accidentally in Lewis Rubin.

I had written, I had the book, a manuscript and didn't know that he was starting a publishing house in Chapel Hill.

- You know I ask authors all the time about how did you get your first book published and you've really got a story because, you brought along a new publisher.

I mean, he wasn't in existence when you started looking for a publisher.

- You know, I worked without any creative writing classes and what not.

And so in four years from 78 to 82, I think I had 12 stories and I had 202 rejections, six acceptances and of those stories.

And finally I started putting stories together and made "Raney".

But when it finally was published, let me jump ahead.

When it was published, 1985, a little local newspaper, I was living in Apex.

They interviewed me about the novel and it had been rejected probably 11 or 12 times before, Algonquin accepted it.

But the headlines, in the Apex paper was, "Local author gets novel published after 202 rejections."

[both laughing] That's not exactly what happened, but I did find out that Lewis Rubin might read a chapter of the book.

So I knew he was a baseball fanatic.

So I wrote him a note.

I said, "I'm reading a really good baseball book and I'll send it to you, if you'll read one chapter of my novel."

He wrote back and said, "Send along the chapter."

Well, I had two chapters that I wanted him to read and I couldn't decide which one.

So I sent him the book and a check for $10 to buy another baseball book and ask him to read two chapters.

[DG laughing] He wrote me back and said... And this is writing, this is letters in the envelope, the mailman comes and all this, no, he wrote back and said, "I've torn up the check."

He said, "I'll get back in touch with you in a few days."

Well, I knew that if he...

This is, I'd been riding for a while.

If he liked this chapter, my life was made.

If he didn't, it was all over.

So I waited and waited and I didn't wait long, 'cause he's always quick in reading.

He wrote back and he said, "I like what I read.

I'm sending it to our fiction editor.

I'm starting a publishing house, sending it to the fiction editor, Shannon Robindale."

Well, I knew that name because I'd been reading best American Short Stories.

So, I was...

So they gave me a first option contract, which meant we'll give you the summer to find out if you can revise.

And if you can revise, we'll finish off this contract in the fall.

So I had the summer working with Shannon Robindale and then Lewis read what we ended up with and said, I'm promising we'll get to the end this quickly.

He said, "It looks good, except there are five chapters", He named the chapters, "Which should be three chapters and something funny needs to happen in there."

And I immediately knew what to do.

There was a chapter with some golden agers, old people and there was a chapter about a bluegrass festival.

And I said, I'll just have these golden agers being taken to the bluegrass festival and that'll combine my chapters.

And I had a story about breaking my thumb, that I'd never written up, a biographical thing.

So I wrote that up and gave it to Raney's little brother and they published it.

And so that's kind of the story of how it came about.

Again, I was so fortunate, I didn't have an agent, actually, I had an agent, but that's another story.

He kind of flaked out on me.

I won't go into that, but.

- Let's go talk a little bit about this book, which we're focusing on is important part of North Carolina literary history, "Raney".

Who is "Raney"?

And talk about her and the other main character of the book and how they relate.

And then maybe if you do it right, we can get you to sing a song - Okay.

- About those characters.

- The song you're talking about, the "Chicken Song" was something that I had written.

I was doing music before I started writing fiction and I had written a song, the "Chicken Song".

And so once I've started writing the novel, I said, maybe I can put the 'Chicken Song" in the book and I did.

And it's funny because when I look at it now in the book, it probably wouldn't be in there again.

But what... How the story started was, I drove up with my wife in front of our house, a little house in Apex and my aunt's car was in front of the house also.

and I thought to myself, oh my, she probably walked in the house.

The door was open and I thought to myself, maybe not, because I thought that, that might not be popular with my wife.

My wife was from Atlanta and her father was a professor and my people were more country.

And so there was, I worried about the kind of cultural clash and I said she might be in the backyard picking up apples, so we went around to the backyard and my aunt was not back there picking up apples.

She stuck her head out of the back door and she said, "I'm just leaving a note, is that okay?"

And Susan, my wife at that time said, "We love you, but it's not okay if we're not there."

And my aunt looked at me from up on top of the steps and, My wife looked at me and they were both looking at me and I did the smartest thing I've ever done, one of the smartest things, I just kept my mouth shut, [DG laughing] - I didn't say anything.

But I immediately thought, and I just started writing fiction.

I said, oh, there's a story here.

But the story can't be told by...

In my subculture, by a man.

It's gotta be told by, a woman.

And I immediately saw her.

She was 24 years old and I found her name in the obituaries in the news observer, first name and last name here, Raney Shepherd.

And I just got, started to talking about what's the problem with her?

And I made it her mother, her mother coming in the house when she and Charles her husband were not there.

What's the problem?

So I had a nice little story of that and then that led to another story which led to another story.

Finally, I had a hundred pages.

I didn't know what to do with it.

And I knew one writer in the world.

It was my cousin, Sylvia Wilkinson speaking of North Carolina Writers, she lived in California.

I sent her the a hundred pages, she wrote back and said, "You need 200 pages."

Just put those aunts around the dining room table and let them, as A U N T S, aunts, for people in the north part of the state.

Let those aunts just start talking and finish the book that way.

So that's what I did, had the novel and send it, two chapters to Lewis - And it worked.

- Who are the characters in your book?

- Well, Raney and Charles, get married and that book is about the first two years, two months and two days of their life together.

And he's from Atlanta, as I mentioned before, the rest of the characters are mainly Raney's family, she's got aunt Naomi, aunt Flossie.

- They're in, what I'd call a conservative part of North Carolina.

- Well they are, they're from the first 18 years of my life.

When I was 18, I came to Chapel Hill to go to school and there was a gradual movement toward our out of a kind of conventional, rural, conservative, provincial life for me.

And so after I was 18 and up until I started writing this book, I came up with ideas I never knew existed about all kinds of things in the world, - In that respect, you're like Raney.

- The first 18 years Raney and the second 18, Charles.

So I began to see that I had internalized a lot of this cultural clash and that I could make up characters and situations, actually, a lot of situations from my own life and put them together and see what happened.

- Well, you're like Raney?

before you were 18, you were like Raney?

- Well some of the... Yeah, I mean it's really interesting to me now.

I mean, I think about the fact that, so much, we're thinking about the divide, the cultural divide in the United States now, that's a lot of talk about that.

At least in the universities where I reside a lot of the time, there's a lot of talk about this divide.

I think there might be less of it in certain rural areas, I don't know.

But anyway, that is what was coming out of in a way that I continue to be respectful.

- Well, let me just jump ahead.

- Yeah.

- You're Raney.

Who you'd talked about is in love... Falls in love with Charles and Charles falls in love with her.

Charles is a tilts on the liberal side.

He's- - Yeah, we have a love for country music.

- Is that what brings them together.

- That brought them together.

They knew some of the same songs and they kind of met at this community college where Charles- - Is there a song you could sing to us.

- Sure.

I can do [Clyde laughing] Sure, I can do the song that I wrote before I wrote the book.

I'll do a little bit of it, and it's been a long time, and you can help me with the words, but I'll do it - Give us a little background about how this fits in the book.

- So the way it fits in the book is Charles has a friend that he talks to on the phone about the situation he's married into.

And so, he asked Raney to sing a song with him, to his friend on the telephone.

As I recall, I think that's the way it came about.

And so, because I had written this song before I wrote the book and wanted to get the song somewhere published, [Clyde laughing] I decided just to give it to Raney and it's called "Chicken Song".

It goes like this, I'll just do a couple of chapters.

♪ The town council chairman came by late last May ♪ ♪ Said we sorry, Mr. Oakley, about what we must say ♪ ♪ But the airport's expanding ♪ ♪ We mean you no harm ♪ ♪ The New North South Runway's gonna point toward your farm ♪ [DG laughing] [guitar playing] ♪ My chickens ain't laying and my cow's gone dry ♪ ♪ 'Cause airplanes keep flying to the sweet by and by ♪ ♪ To the lights of the city, to the Hawaiian Shore ♪ ♪ While the rock on my front porch intend to get poor ♪ ♪ I talked to a doctor, you should've seen the bill ♪ ♪ I talked to a doctor, she gave me a pill ♪ ♪ I talked to a lawyer, you should've seen the bill ♪ ♪ I talked to a professor, he grinned and winked his eye ♪ ♪ And he gave me a little book ♪ ♪ Called chickens can fly ♪ The book was about BF Skinner about behavior modification.

♪ I read BF Skinner, taught my chickens to fly ♪ ♪ Dame at the intake, says the jet planes flew by ♪ ♪ My chickens are gone now but the answer is found ♪ ♪ My kamikaze chickens closed the new runway down ♪ ♪ My kamikaze chickens closed the new runway down ♪ - Now wonderful.

Wonderful, people who are watching Clyde would want me to say let's do some more.

Let's talk a little bit more about the book "Raney" and as we talked about it, was your debut novel and it set you on a career.

I do want you to tell us a little bit more about the book.

What was the challenge that Raney and Charles faced with each other and with their surrounding family?

- So it was kind of, I thought after finishing "Raney" that the problems I had in writing the novel would carry over to the next novel and they would carry over to the next novel.

But each novel, of the ones I've written have, presented different problems, of course.

And in this book, there were problems in the marriage and I needed something that would, actually from a structural position, point of view, break them apart, so that they could come back together and have a child.

That was finally what I saw, but I had to write half the book or get into it and get a draft before I started seeing that.

Now it's so happens that I had an uncle who committed suicide in real life.

And in the book, there was a character based on that uncle although the personality was entirely different, Uncle Nate.

There was a serious issue with alcohol, with uncle Nate, as it was with my uncle.

In the book, spoiler, uncle Nate committed suicide.

Raney and Charles see that suicide, the sources of it, or the reasons for it, are part of the underlying story very differently and it causes them to break apart for a while.

So I had to continue writing drafts to come to that final kind of form.

I do remember in this particular novel that I had neighbors growing up, that I had listed across the top of a page and under the real neighbors name, I would put my fictional characters name.

And then I would put, I had a list of what they had for breakfast, where they went to church.

And that helped me create fictional characters, which were not like the real characters, so I was learning how to take my experience.

I thought when I started writing novels, everything was supposed to be made up.

I had no idea that you could use your own experience and so that's one reason, it was such a failure to start with.

I was making up all this stuff and suddenly I realized I could, as Faulkner said, "You've got three treasure chests.

One is your own experience, one is what you see and observe and one is what you make up.

But you've got those three treasure chests and as soon as I realized I could pull from my life, not unlike Flannery O'Connor said, "If you write about what happened to you before you were 12 years old, you can write for the rest of your life."

So when I saw the richness, that happened to be in my upbringing and in the stories and in the family and the loyalty and the disloyalty, in the religion, in the racism, all of that gave me a material.

And so I brought that into every story, Every family story in "Raney" was from my family, except for one.

I can't remember which one, but I pulled on a lot of that.

Oh, I got to tell you one quick one.

So just before I finished the last draft, one of my aunts was talking to another aunt and she was telling a story [Clyde laughing] about, you know, I always have to censor myself when I'm in modern age, but I think this is okay, if it's not, it'll be cut out.

So my aunt is remembering, seeing her cousin at the beach one day when they were jumping up and down and jumping over the waves and just jumping up and down and somebody, all of a sudden said, "Lord have mercy, one of Lola's dinners just fell out."

- Dinners?

- Uh-huh.

One of Lola's dinners just fell out.

Well, I heard that story and I'd finished the book pretty much.

I said, oh gosh, it's got to be in there, so- - Well, just to be sure, because I mean, I'm so dense, when I first read it- - I never heard of the term before - I didn't know what a dinner was - Well I didn't either.

- Well, a dinner is a woman's breast, is it?

- Well yeah, yep.

If you wanna get specific about it I was gonna leave it up to the imagination, but now we getting way off.

- Okay.

- So that was just an example of how the stories in my family got into that book.

But I wanted the tension to be there what I wanted beneath the story, which is what has to be beneath any fiction, which is in any way universal is hope and fear.

And I think you can find other words for hope and fear, but if those concepts are not beneath the story, it's probably not gonna have the legs that it might have.

- So when you, what do you tell your students?

I mean, how do you get?

How do you... That's tough to... That's easy to say, but hard to get to.

- It is and I think students often, I think about how we educate young people in classrooms.

As someone normally, although they're certainly beautiful exceptions, standing in front of young people, telling them what to think, and they get fed back and they have to do well, and they're not interested.

They know better than to challenge the person who's teaching them and so, there's a lot of, I mean when I was 12, 15, if somebody told me your life, up until now, 12 or 15 has a lot of drama.

That means a lot in it.

I wouldn't have known what they're talking about.

And so I think my students, I try to let them know that it's okay to take what has happened to them, that as energy and to use it, to make up a new story that carries something important about them and their family and therefore their culture and therefore all human beings.

I ask them to write down the first 12 years of their life.

The year like for me, 1944 and on up, but say now 2000, 2001 to 2012, write those, write that down and then beside each one, come up with something that happened to you that's memorable, you broke your thumb, your grandmother died, your pet got run over your parents divorced et cetera.

And then use that to begin to think about maybe a made up character and how these events.

And so you can bring some of the emotions to the story that otherwise wouldn't happen.

Flannery O'Connor says you can be a... She didn't say it exactly this way, but you can be a pro...

If you've got a homesick prisoner in New York, you don't have to have been a prisoner.

You don't have to have been to New York, but it helps if you've been homesick.

And if I can get students to realize the power of the feelings that go with their past experiences, that can sometimes help them become storytellers.

- Wow, well this, that is amazing.

Now with respect to "Raney", and all of these things that you've taught us just now that went into the book, when it was over and you're looking back at it Was it a great success?

- You know, I'm lucky in that when I go back, I don't go back much, but I'll go back and look at something occasionally deep into a book.

I feel good about this book.

I feel good about it.

There's some things that I might change, but I feel good about it.

And I kind of secretly feel like the people in the book reflect, the two main characters reflect the divisions that we have now in our culture.

And probably that are always in all cultures.

When you have something that's new and something that's old.

And one of the complaints about the book from the administration at the university, where I was teaching, when I wrote it, was that it shows the old clashing with the new, with the new replacing the old, and that was a criticism.

And of course, I didn't quite agree with that, but that was a problem that somebody found with the book.

So I feel comfortable with the book, and fine with the book.

It's not the one that, it's not the one that I wouldn't throw out of the boat if I had to throw them all out of the boat, except one and that would be "The Floatplane Notebooks", because that was the third book and I'd had so much, I'd learned so much more about my family.

- Let me interrupt you, just to- - But please do, or I'll go on forever.

[DG laughing] - But what did you learn that you... From "Raney" and from looking at it and, becoming older and wiser, and that you put to work and "Walk Across Egypt" and "Floatplane" What did you learn?

- Oh, what I learned was to take stories from my own past, but what I learned about "Walking across Egypt" came from Jill McCorkle.

I was finishing up this book and I read "July The Seventh".

Now this book is told in the voice of "Raney".

This is a first person from people who write, novels.

This is the first person, the person is talking.

I had to become this character and I actually, I was trying to become a person who was not of my gender.

And so I wrote the first draft and I gave it to somebody and I said, does this seem like a woman writing the story?

And they said, "Not quite."

So I came back and I had to think about it.

So a fourth of the way through, halfway through, three quarters of the way through and toward the end, I just had Raney get her hair done And where I kind of worked that in, I think it made a difference and there are other things I tried to do, but I learnt that you could be anybody, but the "First Person", this is, I think the only full novel "First Person", it was so much fun and you'd have to really go in to become someone else.

And who believes and thinks and acts and looks differently than you do.

So that was a good experience 'cause I felt like I kinda got it, but I'm reading Jill McCorkell and Jill is writing a book.

And again, I hadn't studied literature, but I'm reading a paragraph.

And in the next paragraph, she'll be in someone else's head.

And I'm saying, that's amazing.

It's third person and it goes into someone else's head.

And so, I said, I wonder if I can do that and so luckily the second book that I started, I tried to use that, what I call a third person comprehensive, I use that point of view.

And that helped me so much get through the second book, which came much quicker and much easier than this one.

And I was lucky because of that.

- So you give Jill credit for giving you an alternate way to look at.

- Oh yes and she was just... She published her two books before I did "An Algonquin" and to see her and to get to know her.

And we're experiencing this publishing house where everything is stuck in the trunk of a car, and we're driving down to Atlanta.

And I made a whopping $500 or $250 at a time, on my first novel and Lewis Rubin and...

I mean just, I can talk forever about Lewis and Shannon and how they edited it and they basically said, "We can give you editing."

In fact, after I wrote this book, I got a letter from a publisher that said, "We'd like to publish your second book."

And I took it to Lewis and I said, Lewis, what should I do?

And he said, "Go with them.

If you want to make more money," he said, "If you want good editing, you might wanna think about staying here."

So it took me about 10 minutes, to decide to stay and I did.

And then he got me an agent, which was not in his interest.

So there was so much going on there and I'm sure that still goes on today.

Although you kind of wonder about how much that kind of, looking for and working with, a writer who has potential, rather than someone who's already a best seller.

I'm sure it goes on at university presses and other presses but the word on the street is that happens less than New York.

- We've only got a minute more.

[cross talking] - No, no, you do and this is so wonderful, I hate to interrupt you but, you wrote your first book in the voice of a woman.

I mean- - So I can tell you, I can anticipate the question and I can answer it and we didn't rehearse, right?

- You can tell we didn't, yeah.

- So.

My mother was 40 when I was born, She had a slightly older and slightly younger sister who were childless and my mother had lost a child.

So, I was an only child among these three women who talked more than I do.

And who loved language, who loved to tell stories, who loved to laugh, who loved to find odd things in the world.

These three women took me with them shopping, eating, blah, blah, blah.

And I was absorbing this stuff, not realizing that, not all children are that lucky.

And only again, when I learned to write about my own experiences, that I hear those voices and I had 23 aunts and uncles, and the uncles talked about as much as, compared to the aunts, about as much as you have in this conversation.

And the aunts talked about as much as I have during this conversation.

So I was full of these women's voices.

And of course they were in my, this language I grew up in- - Thank goodness for those women for launching you and giving you the voice, a wonderful voice, right, within "Raney" and your success of books.

But our time is really up.

- DG, I can't stop without saying that you've allowed so many writers to do what I just did to talk about, what we did.

'Cause people don't just walk- - We're out of time, thank you so much for that.

And thank you Clyde Edgerton for being with us on Bookwatch, for your great service to North Carolina and you've been a great guest on Bookwatch.

So thanks to those of you who are watching.

Thank you and check the webpage for other information about North Carolina Bookwatch and I look forward to seeing you soon.

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