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Interview with Paul Ruffin
by Jill Caputo
Paul Ruffin has become one of the South's most beloved storytellers. In honor of his latest collection, Jesus in the Mist (University of South Carolina Press, 2007), The Southeast Review has tracked Ruffin down for the following interview.
Q: One of the most memorable things about the stories in your collection is that they take place in the South, one of the most distinct regions of America. That said, do you think any/all of your stories would be as effective if they were not set against the background of Southern rural society? Likewise, when writing so closely about a particular area such as the South, do you feel its presence almost becomes another character within your stories?
A: Well, I have written a number of stories set in other places, such as New York State and West Texas, but I don’t feel as comfortable in any other settings as I do in the Deep South, including East Texas, which was settled almost exclusively by people from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, etc. Having said that, I would add that due to my extensive travels to West Texas, I am feeling more and more comfortable setting stories out there.
For me landscape/locale/setting—whatever you want to call it—does indeed become a kind of character in many of my stories, perhaps secondary, like a foil for the actual characters, helping to confirm them in what they are or to change them in some fashion.
My stories have been compared several times by reviewers to those of Flannery O’Connor, and frequently those reviewers have mentioned my use of landscape.
Frankly, I am most at home setting my stories in rural Mississippi and Alabama, where I grew up, and I doubt that they would be as effective set elsewhere. I certainly wouldn’t be as comfortable with the stage and the characters interacting on it.
Q: The supernatural plays a key role in several of your stories, (in particular “Harvey Watson and the Angel” and “Jesus in the Mist” come to mind). Do you think these supernatural elements are influenced by the South and Southern folklore/storytelling as well, or am I totally off track?
A: Oh, yeah, supernatural elements play a very significant role in Southern literature, as does religion, many of whose manifestations one may or may not categorize as supernatural. Ours is a region heavily entrenched in folklore—“Time of the Panther” is a good example of a story shaped by folklore. I’m not saying that there a big black livestock-eating panther didn’t show up every spring in those red hills south of Millport, Alabama, but I am convinced that the people living back in there made a whole lot more of him than was there—and nobody ever, to my knowledge, killed one or took a picture of him. That cat took on a life of his own.
Now, as far as religion goes, it is as ubiquitous in the rural South as fire ants (or kudzu in Mississippi). It is almost impossible for me to write a story set in Mississippi or Alabama without incorporating religious elements, as evidenced by the titles of my three books of stories: The Man Who Would Be God; Islands, Women, and God; and Jesus in the Mist. Part of this arises, I’m sure, from my background in a fundamentalist church, in which faith healing, talking in tongues, and belief in miracles of all sorts persisted.
One time someone asked Flannery O’Connor whether she thought that the South was Christ-centered. She said that she didn’t know about that, but that it was certainly Christ-haunted. That would be my stand as well. Something else she said that is very much worth repeating: “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” Don’t that knock you right out of your underwear?
Q: The last story in the book, “Hunters,” differs from the other stories in the collection in that it is set further back in the historical past and is written from the perspective of Native Americans. What led to your decision to include “Hunters” in this particular collection of short stories, and why did you choose to make it the final story in the book?
A: This is a tough one to answer. I had it in the collection, took it out, then put it back in. I think it’s a good story, in its own right, but I’m not sure many people will feel that it fits. My only defense in leaving it in is that it seems to me that it reduces life to a primal level at which there is no provision for spirituality or the intrusion of other restraints on the struggle for survival and understanding and tolerance. Maybe it universalizes the whole of human experience and at the same time reduces it to this one lone scene in which the white hunter is slumped over on his knees praying, or at least that’s what I hope the reader got out of it, and then looks skyward, beseeching God to save him. The Indians don’t know his language or his God—they know only what must be done, according to the code that they live by. Their behavior is governed by the seasons and the harsh world they live in, and their spiritual world is one centered on that same landscape and the stars and moon and sun under which it lies. There is no room for the artificial or hypocritical in it.
I am not suggesting the moral supremacy of the Indians anymore than I am suggesting the moral degeneracy of the white hunters. I fall back on Faulkner’s description of what went on in most of his fiction: “Just poor sonsabitches doing the best that they can.” That story sums it up.
That’s probably a puny answer from this poor sonofabitch, but it’s the best that he can do. (One of the readers of the manuscript for USCP said that the final story came as a “wonderful surprise.” Maybe other readers will feel the same way.)
Q: What is your favorite story in the collection, and why?
A. It would be a tossup between “When Momma Came Home for Christmas” and “Jesus in the Mist.” I love the characters in “Momma” and the storyline. I’ve known men like Talmidge all my life—my father was very much like him—and I have known many women like Darlene, who work so very hard to subdue their men to the useful and the good. Hell, it’s just a happy story. Uplifting. Brimming with felicity (an observation that will make more sense when you read my response to your last question). I would choose “Jesus in the Mist” because I think that it has everything that I ever wanted in a short story. I love the characters and plot and—well, everything about it. And I think that I’ve never written anything better in terms of the language itself, from the descriptive passages to the dialogue. There’s so much going on in that story that the average reader will probably miss. I stand on what one reviewer said of it: “This is Flannery O'Connor territory. I can't think of any Southern story that is so funny or that captures so exactly the intersection of religion and sex and that weird mix of the devout and the ludicrous in Southern evangelical religion.” And another, in reference to this story: “The tension is between belief and disbelief. Like Jesus' stories, these are more complex than they seem.” (I’ve been compared to O’Connor lots of times, but never before to Jesus.)
Q: Why did you pick “Jesus in the Mist” as the title story?
A: Mainly because I love the title and the story that goes with it. If I ran across that title somewhere, it would certainly get my attention. And if I read that story somewhere, I’d say, “Damn, I wish I had written that.” Believe me, I lug a heavy load of humility, but, like Larry the Cable Guy, I gotta tell you, “If you don’t think that’s a good story, there’s something wrong with you.”
Q: You’ve written novels before in the past, including Pompeii Man and Castle in the Gloom. As a fiction writer which do you feel is easier to write, the novel or the short story? Regardless of which is easiest, which form do you prefer? But you’re a poet too; do you consider yourself a poet at heart?
A: Well, I think I’d have to agree with Falkner on this point too: It is much harder to write a good short story than a novel. Every word in a short story has to be right, every element has to fit—you don’t have room for rambling. A good short story is written with the same kind of passion you have when you write a poem—it’s intensity, as opposed to duration. But a novel is duration, hard work, much of it tedious and painfully slow. Only when you get to dialogue do you start knocking out fifteen or twenty pages a day, as opposed to three to five.
I do not think of myself as a poet at heart. I once did, but I just like fiction and the familiar essay too much now. I will, however, be forever grateful for my background as a poet, because I think that it has a significant bearing on the nature of my prose. A good many reviewers have commented on the influence of my poetic background on my prose.
The following can be answered in a word, a phrase, a sentence . . .
1) Name a writer who is currently making you jealous.
A: There was a time when I was jealous of people like Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor (who is, to my thinking, the best short story writer this country has produced). I don’t know the fiction scene the way I once did—the press eats up so much of my time that the only outside books I read are usually ones I am reviewing. So I don’t know anyone to be jealous of. Maybe Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith, George Garrett, Fred Chappell, Barry Hannah, you know . . .
2) What kind of child were you?
A: I was a loner, for the most part. There were a few kids nearby whom I played with occasionally, but I preferred the solitude and sanctity of the river, woods, and fields. Lord, the games I played by myself! All that helped develop my imagination. We lived out in the country, so I didn’t have much interaction at all with schoolmates who lived in town. Daddy never would take me anywhere in his old car, so wherever I went, I walked or rode my bike. (When I first started seeing girls, I had to ride my bike to their houses. There’s dating for you: “Hey, Baby, let’s get on the back seat!” Fersher.)
I was forced to attend church every Wednesday night and Sunday morning and night, and I hated it with a passion. But, in all honesty, that’s where my love of literature came from: the lyrics in the Broadman Hymnal and all those Bible stories. I began writing poems at a very early age (all with the hymn beat, of course) and made quite a lot of pocket change whipping out poems for classmates who had a poetry assignment. And I would rewrite the Bible stories many different ways: I’d have Jonah take out his pocket knife and thoroughly gut that damned whale, for instance, or turn Lot himself into a pillar of salt and name him Morton or have three dumbasses riding up on donkeys instead of wise men on camels, and they’d be carrying stuff a baby could use: blankets, rattlers, teething rings, pacifiers, stuff like that.
3) What is your relationship with rejection like?
A: There was a time when rejection really bothered me, but once I became an editor and realized how many manuscripts are floating around out there, I came to understand that a story or poem or essay or book might be turned down for many more reasons than that the work isn’t good enough for publication. The last time I was really stung by a rejection was when a university press turned down my second book of stories, Islands, Women, and God. One of the readers trashed that manuscript so badly that the director of the press sealed it in an envelope and told me to read it sometime later, to let a little time pass. It was a female reader, and she flat broadsided me—found nothing redemptive at all in the collection. Said that it lacked overall felicity. Well, hell life lacks overall felicity, so when you write about it realistically, all is not going to be bliss. After doing a bit of investigating, I figured out—or thought I did—who the woman was: someone whose book I had not been kind to in a piece I wrote for The Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook on the state of literature in Texas. It was a purely personal attack, and it scalded me that the director would even consider it, especially in light of the other two reader reports.
Then there was the time that I sent a familiar essay, clearly labeled so in the cover letter, to a major journal, and it came back not only rejected, but with red marks all over it suggesting how I might develop more character here or enhance the plot a bit there. The last line was what floored me: “This would be a splendid essay, but as a short story, it simply does not work.” Well, duh! I called the editor of the journal and bitched about my manuscript being written on, and I asked him just who the hell on his staff could be inept at evaluating a manuscript. It turned out that a graduate intern did the dirty, and he was soundly admonished for it. They then accepted the essay.
So when rejection is based on personal animosity or ineptness on the part of an editor or intern or whoever, it bothers me.
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Copyright © 2008 The Southeast Review
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