Daniel Woodrell writes crime inflected family sagas from the guts of the American heartland that land with uncanny impact. He’s best known for his ‘rough Ozark’ books (like Give Us a Kiss and The Death of Sweet Mister, which will be awarded The 2011 Clifton Fadiman Medal in June, championed by Dennis Lehane), but I first became aware of him when Ang Lee made his Civil War film Ride With the Devil based on Woodrell’s second novel Woe to Live On. Last year’s best picture nominated film Winter's Bone was based on his novel of the same name and anybody that was introduced to his work through that film now has some options for further exploration of the world through his eyes, as the slow unveiling of his backlist continues this month with Mulholland Books' release of The Bayou Trilogy, an omnibus of his three titles featuring Louisiana police detective Rene Shade. (BTW – it looks like the next feature film adaptation based on his books will be The Ones You Do, the third act of The Bayou Trilogy.)
When read straight through the trilogy provides an opportunity to watch the evolution of one of American Letters’ most distinct voices, one that deserves a far larger audience, but more importantly, a voice that illuminates the American shadow class with a dignity that it is too often denied in popular culture.
Daniel kindly agreed to answer some questions I had.
When the book Winter's Bone came out in 2006, your backlist was basically out of print. Last year saw the film adaptation as well as the reprint of Tomato Red and this spring The Bayou Trilogy and The Death of Sweet Mister will be available again, how does that feel?
I had come to feel that The Bayou Trilogy might be gone forever. The original sales numbers were not substantial, and to be reprinted somebody has to believe some sort of profit, even minimal, is possible. So it's wonderful to have them coming back, and I had to re-read them and realized again how good I feel about them, and how much fun I clearly had writing them, and how much I learned banging out all those pages. David Thompson and Busted Flush brought back Tomato Red, and I'm glad to see new readers are finding it and responding. I think the movie is only partially responsible for this---David was in motion before there was a movie, and John Schoenfelder at Mulholland was interested in The Bayou Trilogy well before the film arrived. But the movie has helped stir interest, of course. After years of things not quite happening, suddenly several positive developments have come about almost simultaneously.
Am I right in saying that the Bayou Trilogy's fictional town of St. Bruno Louisiana was inspired by childhood time you spent in St. Charles Missouri?
St Charles was a very different place when I lived there. We lived in a modest and somewhat older part of town, and I consider "old" St Charles to be anyplace you can easily walk from your front steps to the river and back. I learned to swim in the Missouri River where the casino is now, and this was before the river was dredged unto dullness, when vast sandbars stretched up and down and provided a fantastic series of hunting grounds for boys to search. The old cobblestone streets and French lore and all captured me early. What is now a tourist district was quasi-slum in those days. And, dare I say I liked it so much better when winos camped out in droves in what is now Frontier Park and poorly groomed men stood in doorways of brick rowhouses casting not-altogether-friendly glances up and down the street and I knew their kids from school? At about twelve we discovered that winos (especially Bill the Bum and his friend Speed) would go to liquor stores for us if we bought them a jug of the cheapest s*** available, and that led to a few precociously debauched periods that I could have probably done without, but that educated me in their fashion
St Bruno is altogether fictional though it is informed by my knowledge of St Charles , New Orleans , Cape Girardeau , and every other place I've seen or imagined. Most Missourians don't even know that there was until at least WWII a French speaking district south of St Louis a ways, and my grandmother was said to be entirely of French blood, though I think now that her ancestors were Walloons, or French-speaking Belgians.
Feels like a fair amount of biographical detail informing some of your work, in particular The Ones You Do and Give Us a Kiss. Were the Shade clan, the Redmonds or say the McCoys (from the short story Two Things) ever expressly representative of your own family?
I don't consider myself to be a deeply or directly autobiographical writer (this is always subject to change) and I love more than anything the joy of invention, but some founding notions of some characters were from my family. I had an older brother who was physically very powerful and did see the inside of a cell or two. My dad was a charming blue-eyed man who would take a drink if you didn't nail his hands to a cross and stuff a sock in his mouth, but was otherwise a good man and good worker who always provided for his family. He was an excellent pool player and had been a rack boy when young and is still tied (with Jim Crumley and Lance Corporal Pavelich) for the best man to go out boozing with I've encountered. That's about it, but we were three brothers and two of us were at times sort of social problems, I guess I'd say. Not happily in step with the accepted at all times. Small memories of climbing on top of St Peters to harvest pigeon eggs from the gutters with my pals and things like that often are based on my recollections.
The Redmonds in Give Us A Kiss are autobiographical to about the same degree, though with a page or two on grad school that are more clearly from life. Panda Redmond is a great deal like my granddad Pedro Daily in spirit if not in precise detail. Mr. McCoy from Two Things is invented, though his social observations are understood by many.
The autobiographical piece in Granta online a couple years ago was an eye opener. Members of your family jumped into their fictional counterparts fairly easily and it was bursting with the warmth of your most personal books (as was the essay How Much Ozarks Is In Me? for the Mulholland Books site more recently.) Any more non-fiction on the way?
I enjoyed having an excuse to write that little piece. That made me think that I might want to write about that time and place and the people some more, though what form that writing might take will have to be decided later. I haven't otherwise written much non-fiction though I do read quite a bit---perhaps a "creative non-fiction" approach would appeal.
What, so far, has been the appeal of fiction over non?
Fiction has always been the most interesting writing to me. Years ago true crime books were very successful and I always sort of thought I'd come across a true crime that intrigued, and write one, but they are no longer so easy to sell and the only regional crime that I find so interesting is still unsolved, in fact not much is known except three women disappeared on graduation night and have never been seen alive again or found dead.
I know there's a novel kicking around your creative peripheries about your experience in the Marine corps and there've been short stories published recently with feet planted in both the world of the corps and that "rough Ozark" territory you've become synonymous with, is there a creative-focus shift underway?
A new marine corps story called Oceanside just went up at Narrative, and I loved writing it. This answer slightly rearranges my previous answer (I told you my use of autobiography was subject to change!), in that ransacking memory for recollections to bounce off of is what the marine corps pieces are all about for me. I'd love to do the novel and do intend to finish it, though I realize that I am associated with Ozark settings and characters in most minds. I've never been eager to accept any limitations on what I might or might not be capable of writing---I could swing at something fresh and miss, but swinging anyway is important to my conception of being a writer. As Chekhov said, All labels are a form of prejudice.
I do feel that a certain spot has been reached with the Ozark fiction (excluding short stories, as there are many I am thinking about although most would concern a less economically stressed sort of Ozarker), and I have been feeling a need to change, to spark my blood alert by visiting a few new places in my imagination. I think the style of prose I use is crucial to my own pleasure and the quality of each novel, but the style needs to be apt for the chosen narrative not imposed upon it, and the styles of, say, Give Us A Kiss or Winter’s Bone, don't automatically succeed with other material. The marine corps pages are a bit different and refreshing to me. I am and have long been extremely moved by Kawabata and other Japanese writers (and Tobias Wolff, James Salter, Romesh Gunesekera and others) who write in such a deceptively simple manner that it's initially difficult to credit how powerfully they communicate the visual and interior worlds of which they write. That clean, pure prose that takes you into the deep blue water before you even realize you've gotten wet---they are inspirational figures, and I need to feel inspired, otherwise what the ****'s the point?
Have your priorities shifted as you've gotten older?
Yes. Katie Estill, my wife, always mattered to me greatly but has come to be even more central to my cosmos over time. We've knocked around together for thirty years now, and there were lots of knocks, most of which we laughed at even as they hit us.
As to writing I strive to become more like Thelonious Monk, who said, Just play the notes you really mean.
Does it bother you any that the "country noir" a label that stuck to you for better or worse and which has been popularized largely through you, is being taken up by young writers, perhaps untested, whose point of view is perhaps un-earned?
Country noir was not a term I expected to survive long and become attached to me forever. There is no point in my wishing it was gone, since it won't be anytime soon. Younger writers should grab onto anything that gives them a foundation, or sense of what they are trying to do, and if the term is congenial to them, have at it. The worrying aspect of said label is that you may feel that whatever you write needs to fit the term, and thereby limit your own investigation of other things that interest you in order to continue being the writer that the label says you are. Remember that with any luck, life is long, and you might want to change your hat someday, and perhaps on many days.
Do you feel there's an underlying virtue or ideal you're striving for in your characters?
I'm not striving to reveal any particular virtue with my characters, but to uncover one in the reader. In most instances I introduce you to characters you most likely won't immediately approve of or feel empathy for, and then with the accretion of human detail lead you to at least concede the characters' essential humanity if nothing else. I don't always do this, but often enough that I've become aware of it as one of my basic impulses.
Are there any pervading misconceptions about you or assumptions about your work that have surprised you?
All in all, I am pretty lucky with this---certainly I hear things said about me that I can't imagine where such notions came from, but everybody experiences that in life. The first book review I ever received attacked me for not knowing how to write a mystery, for being thoroughly ignorant of the qualities that make a mystery a mystery---of course, I had never intended to write a mystery, nor had I ever described my book as a mystery, but the reviewer charitably assumed I was attempting a mystery and was just a complete ****up. That has happened many times, more years ago than recently. I suppose that is why I so often say that I am a writer, not a hyphenated writer.
Daniel Woodrell's story Twin Forks appeared in the April issue of Esquire magazine and his first volume of collected short fiction The Outlaw Album is due in October.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
