North Carolina People; Doris Betts, Author

It is laid down recently as a part of the bicentennial celebration that Chapel Hill was inaugurated the Cornelia Philip Spencer award one of the distinguished ladies and a part of that sided part of that awards ceremony was Doris Betts are going to meet and talk with her in just a few second production of North Carolina people is made possible by a grant from what could be a bank a symbol of strength stability and service for over a century. But I should say to all of our viewers first that all of us know you as one of our great novelists is a great teacher a former chairman of the faculty at Chapel Hill. You've been in everything in creative writing. You won all the awards. Thank you.

But here you are now alumni distinguished professor and on the committee defied a chancellor for Chapel Hill we'll talk about all those things in a minute but first your new book. So was raised from the dead. It's a fascinating piece of work coming out the first week of April. Howard off your eight novel eight eight published and I took a fiction some of them have been short story collections. What did this story come from it's an interesting title for a book about a chicken right. Well that's the real chicken Rick is what started it on 15 five a one watching that Howie patrolmen trying to bring order out of chaos all those chickens flying around that had never been loose before and I said to myself if John-Paul Sarte had come along and seen these he would have said that look on that man's face is true existentialist displayer. And he would have had a novel out of it. And I'm interested in how it patrolmen because years ago when my husband was a law student here at Carolina one of the ways that we made money was that it Night taught typing to Highway Patrolmen in the Institute of Government.

So for years afterwards if a patrolman ever pulled me over and said Are you the woman that gave me the See own type and that's not me not me not the wood. Now you're just listening to the drop of a gauge. Exactly and I hope they've forgotten me too. Well he's one of the judges but that this is a wonderful model. I read a whole lot of things in here. Heres a struggle of modern times a patrolman whose wife ran away has a daughter he dopes over a horrible actions and grandparents of another generation and how life evolves and all of this makes as you move toward the end which I'm not going to tell anybody about but. How do you put all this together. Well Southerners have always been interested in writing about families but the families change the extended family ad grew up in where you went to grandmas out in the country on Sunday for Sunday dinner. That's still here but it's not quite the same family there

are many divorces and many separations. They're single parents. I think that the strains on the family are slower to get to the south but they are all they are. So now I have family with feuding grandparents and they still have an old fashioned family re-union and eat dinner on the grounds in the old way. But there are new calls and new disagreements and new deal of CS. And it's interesting to see how the family is going to survive the changes in society. Also interesting to see how they struggle with. They've got to have dinner on the grounds but they're not sure about dinner on the grounds and when they have been on the ground all the tensions are there all the tensions are there and there's even a question of whether or not the young woman has fried her own chicken or picked it up at a fast food place and you and I know that she got it. Well you're quite a student of medicine. You certainly are a great student of human nature and all that you can see. I know this must be a

thrilling thing it's hard to write a book like this I'm sure but once it's done it's quite a lot of achievement. Well I'm greatly relieved to have it done part of because a medical subject is tedious in a way to work on although I had a lot of help but always dealing with illness and thinking about health began to give me psychosomatic ailments. So I'm glad I have this I'm gonna write something else. And if you put a title on it still raise from the dead how did that happen. Two things both of them either fortuitous or meant to be depending on your viewpoint. The first one was that I read at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte and didn't have a title for the book and I threw it open I said Somebody tell me what I should call this book and I read a section in which a woman goes to Durham into a neighborhood where people make tea and read poems and there came up from the audience scrawled on a supermarket slip a suggestion from a woman that said that in Atlanta before urban renewal there had been a huge plate glass

window that now it was torn down but he did say it. Keys may palms re the RID so rules raged from the day it and I thought well that's just too good to leave I'm so glad I took that. Then the second piece of good fortune was when Nobel Prize laureate poet Czeslaw Milosz was here at Carolina and I was very interested in meeting him but also very nervous I had never met a Nobel Prize poet but he had married a North Carolina woman from Tarboro. So I thought the accent would not throw it. It was a very interesting man a very religious man very devout Catholic and that was a subject we talked about most. And then I came across his poem which was written in memory of his mother. But it actually deals with the New Testament story when Jesus raises the daughter of Jarras from the dead. And in it he says that the sermon that he had just heard was to give him

hope to make him razz from the dead from his grief and that turned out to echo the first title and also the thing I don't want this to be a morbid or grim book I want to affirm life and say that grieving comes but life goes on and people survive. And there's a lot of ordinary courage in ordinary people. Well you find it here just that these people are very human they come out at you the real. You learn the lesson that you do survive you do survive. Grief and the great lesson is get it out not be ashamed to cry or when I think the tip Tyson is to write despairing novels and to give up on human nature it's harder to write. I don't want to say positive fiction but it's harder to write the kind of fiction in which the old virtues don't seem sappy and sentimental. And the truth of the matter is the old virtues are still very durable and they get people through serious

trouble and they have to they have to be acknowledged they're real they are real. Do you do you write all the time. Are you watching learning and looking and making little notes and you buy that kind of writing yes I don't always have a pencil in my hand and I remember once a professor saying man hope you're not going to write in the car because they used to be a history professor you who drove in with a book on the steering wheel and everybody would sort of head off into the ditch. But I do have a little notebook in the car because you do see things like a chicken truck wreck that seem to you to be gifts from the universe and although you think you're going to remember these things if you don't make a note they're gone they're gone. What's next. I am 200 pages into a novel thats not set in North Carolina but out in the Sierra Nevada. Although since I'm using the Donner Party story those people actually came from North Carolina Tamzin doner was from eastern North Carolina and married a man from Solsbury. I have a story

collection done in maybe a hundred pages on a long long Piedmont our Dale County novel The simply very fascinating. Welcome back to the book in a few minutes but you've had such an interesting career we want to talk about some other aspects of it what do you tell young aspiring writers who come up to you today and say that's a bet. Is it still a career. Can you get a gift for my four wheel drive to be a writer or a creative artist. This way using words fulfilled yes paid well no. So I would say to almost every young person found some other way to draw a paycheck because it's feast or famine for writers you write a long time and then you make a lot of money and the government takes a lot of taxes and you don't have much left. So if you need steady income things like health insurance and retirement there you get that on a steady job almost everyone who works at something and writes when they can. At night and on weekends and on vacations it's very hard to

make a living unless you really are a James Michener and a commercial writer or Stephen Grant of writer. When our daughter Mary study done to you she she didn't become a creative writer but she learned a lot about how to look at things and how to perceive situations that is not a part of the technique in teaching to get a bill. So yeah the world as it really is. I used to say in the matter of fact on a scavenger hunt to see if they really had noticed things like shoulder silent Siam has he's gone always just pay attention because I think Elizabeth Bowen said that a writer is just like a child a child doesn't know yet what's important from what's trivial so a trial has to pay attention to everything and I think that's what writers do pay attention. Eavesdrop watch people's faces listen. Well I would like the students to see that I have the feeling they really are interested. More creative experiences they want to give something back of themselves and not always looking that they are getting the getting's

good attitude we show you a few decades ago. Is that correct. That's correct in my classes certainly we have more students wanting to take creative writing than we can make room for some because they want to be writers. Some because they want to be a writer some day and they'd like to learn the craft now but a great many because they're taking it as an antidote. They're taking very little left brain scientific courses and they have a feeling they're withering on the other side. And so some of them take it I think is a kind of self-improvement self-love course and that seems to me equally valid. They will learn to write better even if they only do the minutes of the local Rotary Club. But your admonition was always read read read write write write pencil and then you begin by a process of elimination of the girls to learn something. Well they also come to me not having read read read and written written written they've come by way of video. And that presents new difficulties in teaching that are

stronger than they were 20 years ago there are habits that have to be broken. It's not all to the good in this video generation it's not well turn inward on the university a moment. Here you are a member of the process now to help us find a new chancellor. University communities today as when you first started teaching here not saying plates are good morrow is not and not the same place when we were students here back in the 50s but you have an even longer view than I do. The university is bigger. It has it has come through some financial difficulties. At the moment I think it just feels that many fan faculty members are either leaving or are feeling on the paid and unappreciated. I think the need for leadership in academic matters is very great. Our lab rary has declined

and some of our departments that used to be write more highly in national polls are not ranked as highly and even if the rankings all followed that perception and that reputation is important to us in attracting both students and faculty. I don't think that we have as good a time as with the state as we once had with the citizenry as well as with the legislator. I don't think we tell our story very well when it comes to the service that the university does do. We do a great deal with service but somehow we are not making that as visible and as well-known as the taxpayers deserve to hear. You do something now you didn't do 15 years ago you speak a lot which I think is wonderful marvelous person and on the platform but the people when they talk to you about your own experience and you're what you perceive the university to be doing you detect any anxiety or

concern or is it. What kind of reaction do you see. It varies. I meet a lot of people who just want me to remember they were in my classes or their children were in my classes and I'm delighted that I do in that too is important that the university is not so big that individuals off forgotten. I find a number of people who are concerned about how we admit students about the costs the rising costs of tuition. This is not a wealthy state and many people still remember as I do that the constitution said that it should be as nearly free as practicable. And I would like to see that continue we have been an inexpensive State University. I see many people wondering if we still have the leadership in the region in the nation that we once had. And on the other hand I also see people say who say to me you faculty members are whining all the time. You work very short hours for the money you get etc.. Again I don't think we are telling

the true story as well as we need to. But I think our responsibility to each one of those questioners is intensely important that maybe it's not what appears on TV or in the newspapers that matters nearly so much as that mom and dad from wherever have their questions answered when they're getting ready to send their children to us and trust them to act. And that gets more important as the years go by and harder to do. I think a lot of years out reach is becoming a very important role for a public university isn't Darcy is it. But what about our use of technology. I hear a lot of people say you know you're afraid of computers and television screens and all these wonderful things you could do in a teaching high school professor say the other day if you could sit in a class and push a button and up would come launch the Libby A's deputation of a scene in them but then you would Geoffrey Arens

as Richard Burtons and I could compare. We did things like that. Universe where we have the two still but it's funny that you ask that because I well remember being surveyed on that very question was some 25 years ago would you use a system like that and I don't have it yet but we are improving the number of computers available especially to students in everywhere from the dormitories to the laboratories to the computer center. That's much better. I don't get a typed or hand-written piece anymore. So there are lots of useful and developing technologies on the campus I don't think we're frightened I don't think we have had the money for all of them and when we do have it's a question of priorities what what do we need to spend the money on the most urgently. So yes I think we're coming along but will be better in another five or ten years and we are now we're behind and many peer institutions in the search process.

Mr. Ayres has now got all of you on the way out. Are there means by which a citizen viewing this program here and you could just write in and say Thank You should look at this person or that person are we that open about it. I certainly hope so and you can certainly write to me. But I think Mr. Harris would probably prefer that you write here and there will be I think some public hearing certainly on the campus. And in fact there's been discussion about having public hearings out in the state as well. I favor that. I think the committee would surely ask specific people to come and talk with it. It's a big committee which makes it own weild Lee in some ways but in other ways it probably guarantees that a core group will always be available to sit and listen and also to receive letters and answer them and comment on. I hope we will hear a lot from people out in the state and in the nation from alumni they're scattered all over the world in fact they have views and if they don't have a nomination that doesn't mean that we are not interested in what they think the university ought to be for that extended 20 years.

That too is a part of the process. You were part of a symposium that took place over at the National Data Center recently on the south. Are there southern novelists as against Midwestern novelists now. The way people like to popularize all of you to write about. Yes there are and what makes that so. Well it leads to a kind of typecasting the sort of Hollywood version of the South which can be either the Spanish moss and Scarlett OHara version or else Dan Hiers Norma Rae in the cotton mill and the Dukes of Hazzard somewhere in between that is the real contemporary South that we're writing about. The big change I think is that Southern writers have become different from the class of writers that you had Faulkner on back where you really had I think upper class planters grandchildren mostly male mostly white very well-educated. Now you have

both black writers and women writers. You have what they call moral fiction or trailer court big shit. But you're beginning to say the Southerner comes in many times its many classes many colors. That's a different South from foreigners Lowcountry Deep South and in Mississippi. I've always heard it referred to as people who had three binding qualities. First the land second family Third the church. And so raise from the dead I watch for that. There are people who in the country. There are references to religious question that goes all well and in fact I wanted to bring the church together in this novel. We're all looking for ways to make those old values function. I was interested in what has happened when medicine and ethics have collaborated in a way that for great grandma they did not. So whether you're doing organ transplants

or heroic measures for the elderly or whether you're raising questions about abortion or euthanasia you are into territory where medicine and science and religious views and ethical behavior get really tangled. And I was interested in that remain very much interested in that and that's one of the motives behind that book and I think increasingly the land thing becomes environment and ecology and the family thing becomes in some ways the broken or the reconstructed family or the lost family. So those are still constants but they are changed by contemporary conditions. Is there really a colony of all of you here now in our region we hear this referred to so many times. But I know on this program I have the pleasure of finding you writers once in a while at first novel people. What you and Sam Reagan and all of you who held the Southern writers group together and done all these things that have been so important to the state.

Is it still strong it's flying out like the Big Bang and way back in your young lady who's producing the program is working on a novel. I just met her outside and we talked about that. There's something like 17 hundred members of the North Carolina writers network. Two hundred fifty members of the North Carolina Poetry Society. I remember when that was 10 elderly people doing song it's they say in chapel if you throw a rock you will hit a writer and it's true. And furthermore it's not just a cluster of people who are rioting but it is I hate this kind of overused word community but it is a community and there's a lot of the section in support and help not a sense of great competition or a Ravelry. That's that's very good I think that in fact that and quite good teaching at any number of institutions and in high schools. That's what's produced this renaissance. Well I'm glad nobody made this is producing a novel here. Seriously on the question of the students to come do you

interested in creative writing. You see the schools are doing enough to stimulate them as Scholastics when they come to the university they're ready for you. They're doing a lot better than they were fab 10 years ago when I grumbled even about grammar. Yes I think they are doing better although the poets in the schools programme is not as strong as it used to be. But then the number of splendid high school English teachers in this state is really I think remarkable. And very often when I have an excellent student I'll say where did you where did you learn English. Who is your favorite teacher. And they will name a teacher that I have heard of before. I usually ask my freshman sometime early in the fall. After I've had them write about the best teacher each one ever had then I say now mail it to the teacher. I don't get that much money. Give them a little bonus. They need it.

Do you ever get the chance to talk to these English teacher groups. Let them know from the other side. Oh yes after all to the North Carolina English Teachers Association they were good enough to give me a little award. I belong to the triangle group down here in in Sanford in Harnett County and so on and about periodically I've had workshops held workshops out in the various high schools and I don't find the teachers that far from what I am doing at all. I think they have a hard job to do under the pressures of bureaucracy and administrative detail and lack of support from families and the whole weight of social ills has been laid on the public schools. I have things to criticize but it's not the teachers I think considering the difficulties they work under. They are in the trenches. They are doing the job that I'm not strong enough to go into. From all you see and what you experience as you go up what you feel you people generally today are moving away from too much

attention to what's on the tube and really coming back to serious reading now and getting closer. Are you worried about your sharing me. I'm not sure that I do see that and I would like to see it there something like 50000 hardback trade books published every year and I do say to myself somebody is reading these books because otherwise free enterprise would not be bothering to publish them. And yet I think the big craze is somewhere between television and time and athletics I mean nothing. I don't see many people turning from those three things to books and to the life of the mind. Well I would agree with you that those three dominate all that you see today. I guess I'm reacting more to what comes to me in the mail a baguette and books. There seems to be a higher quality about it but I hope you're right. And furthermore what one of the things that's always concerned me about the drift toward

Oh visual learning is that I can't help remembering there's only a hundred years ago when a lot of women were not educated very much a lot of black citizens were not educated very much and I don't want to see reading go back to being an elite activity so you'll enjoy it the way you enjoy opera. It'll be for the few I want it to be. I want it to be for the population. Well I want our friends to know you're buying your books for your summer reading at the beach or in the mountains or wherever you go. So raise from the dead as Doris Betts is new work. You'll enjoy it it's immensely entertaining and it'll be in your bookstore in April and we Darcy I want to thank you for coming and visiting with me today and catching up again on everything that's going on in your world and I must say this has been a fascinating experience. Thank you. The reduction of North Carolina people is made possible by a grant from what could be a bank a symbol of

strength stability and service for over a century.