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Since her last interview in The Carolina Quarterly appeared in 1 980 , Doris Betts has published three novels, Heading West (1981), Souls Raised From the Dead (1994), and The Sharp Teeth of Love (1997). Her short story "The Ugliest Pilgrim" which first appeared in Beasts of the Southern Wild (1973), was the source for the Academy Award-winning film Violet in 1983 and an off-Broadway musical by the same title in 1997.
A member of UNC-Chapel Hill's English faculty since 1966, Betts has directed the freshman-sophomore English curriculum, chaired the faculty, and led the creative writing program. Since entering semi-retirement last spring, she has not slowed down. As Alumni Distinguished Professor of English, Betts continues to write and teach. She also serves as co-host for "Storylines Southeast" a weekly public radio call-in program focusing on regional literature.
Born and reared in Statesville, North Carolina, Betts sets much of her own fiction in the Southeast. She lives with her husband, a semi-retired judge, and her mother on a horse farm in Pittsboro, near Chapel Hill. In a recent interview, Betts discussed the importance of family and place in her work.
CQ: You've been an English and creative writing instructor, college administrator, horsebreeder, wife, mother of three , fiction-writer, and now radio talk show host. With all that in mind, what are your thoughts these days about vocation?
DB: This may be my failure to focus. [Laughs] I suppose I do think that vocation means what it says: it is a call. I think you have a call to some things more than others. And although I have done many, many things, many of them are sort of subsidiary. I've felt from childhood on that I was called to work with words and books, and that has never changed. But I also saw that people who only did that seemed to me imprisoned in that vocation rather than using it as a wellspring for a richer life.
Most women who write are not writing for posterity. They aie not as persuaded that posterity is worth more than this life right now, in being able to love and be loved and have children and take pride in attempting more things than one. So I have spread myself out,...