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Writer Lewis Nordan was born in Jackson, Mississippi and grew up in the small delta town of Itta Bena. In addition to his two early short story collections, Welcome to the Arrowcatcher Fair (1983) and The All-Girl Football Team (1986), Nordan has published four novels: Music of the Swamp (1991), Wolf Whistle (1993), The Sharpshooter Blues (1995), and Lightning Song (1997). In 1996 a group of fifteen stories from his two early collections were selected and published in the volume Sugar Among the Freaks. His most recent release is the nonfiction memoir Boy With Loaded Gun, published last year by Algonquin Press.
In this interview with writer Max Ruback, Nordan reflects upon his early experience writing short stories, the relationship between his childhoodenvironment and the world of his fiction, and the experience of writing his recent memoir.
CQ: When did writing as a way of life begin to take shape for you?
Nordan: In the summer of 1974, just as I was turning 35 years old, I found myself out of a job. I finished the last days of a three-year-no-extension contract at the U. of Georgia and was desperate for work. Those were the bad years of the Ph.D. job market; I had no publications and I just couldn't find a teaching job. I applied for 250 jobs! And got not even one interview. I had a new Ph.D. in Shakespeare from Auburn and no one was taking. I had dabbled a little in writing, some treacly love poems to my wife (my first wife, Mary), and one story about my father's alcoholism (a very short piece in which the main scene was the drunken father falling off the porch into a holly bush), but Mary sensed what I could not admit: that I hungered to write something, anything, that might be acceptable. She offered, then, to support us for as long as necessary so that I might stay home and write; my responsibility would also include staying home with the children while she worked. We sold our house and moved to Arkansas to enter the creative writing program there under the tutelage of Jim Whitehead and Bill Harrison, and though it is melodramatic to say it in this way, perhaps, that is where...