A Word on Words; 2711; Ellen Douglas

johnson though once again welcome to our own words and walk among both with gray get you to talk about truth i sometimes wonder what it is it's so nice to have a book that suggest that you go come on here and tell me what are some simple question well some of the promotional material or sealed book suggests that view a fiction writer have crossed over in a search for truths and i'm not so presumptions enough as to tell us what the truth is i think veterans remains a mystery and a number of the stories for stores here that i find low fascinating rhythm without a great interest in and were talking about them but let's begin with the truth about rubio and douglas is just in action i mean why the pseudonym come on like that very brief but it's a it's an odd story i finish my first novel and blamed it too afraid

and to revive those a poet novelist himself and just want to find out what he thought of that i was down in mississippi with not much to bounce mind isn't against and he took it home with him to annapolis way tolerant of st john's college and he gave it to an editor at home if wind and the first i knew of that was when eleven calmly and it came over me you in a blinding flash based very closely on the line today a lot of up and that they were the dmv and being exposed to our budget builds hour so i went and met is where they lived in case they have permission to sell a smoke and haven't been released and they were they were very unhappy about it but

they weren't lovely ladies and they couldn't refuse the mission but they had to revise those one that they wouldn't have to read it to that i would use of an ah ha ha ha and so yeah i guess so just having a de mello and even l emerson wrong and you are one of our most acclaimed i mean everybody who's ever written a book in there and gained great fame marvels at your work out well and that includes everybody from walker percy up and down the area where that water for a while as a very very lucky in that early married life out of greenville mississippi and that's walker's own design and seventy foot zone by so on how it's going to look up from their drivers well armed truth truth

first story is on to say it it seemed to me that all four stories ahead of almost mccarthy as well as the experience i think is a real bad their families still hear his live right then dumped and it's partly i suppose workers at the age of seventy seven that something come to have to come to terms with in my writing i should tell our readers that the subtitle is four stories i am finally old enough to tail end and so what we're talking about in this work is indeed nonfiction blood it all is there also may be some myths in the in the process of relating it

just came to saint germain that over the years i've had these stories that it does gradually come through three members of my family are members of the community where i'm my alley of which were not necessarily true or where and when i finally began to write about them in a way they had become a it's to me yes my grandmother's life and europe are a friendship with a woman who was a disgrace in the community in and i began to walk to work out how that had come about what the character was like and what her friend was like who defied convention and it was a man in a small southern town you have that one and then when that family came to the delay story which is really a novella on second creek when i was dealing with was the murderer a number of slaves the beginning of the civil war and it was a secret that had been kept

from hundred and thirty years to talk about the story is the syria in the uncle rat brain cancer comes to living out the secret is out the secret maybe more be open secret the secret is a secret that the narrative is that he's named get the narrative has kept to herself and it's a secret that she is in fact has hidden from us set up a secret of the reason why she could write a story about this so much he was at in his eighties you write also about beautiful young woman who raised him nursed him rosalie beautiful but i didn't want to think about all that when i was young and he was living in my house and i didn't it was too hard to think about someone that

fateful too painful to play but how is it that someone who has brought in the last literally welcome in the house allowed to live in the house learn to die in the house allow because sony negotiated but allowed this young beautiful effort at of another generation to tend to him care for how is it that you feel that right was abandoned this is anne and i don't have that feeling to the extent that you have to figure out why there is a new video prices the elk it's probably in the end the feeling of abandoning him was not something that he knew about all say it's really it was something that was and certainly nobody in in your neighborhood or community or in that

place thought he was being now run their perspective he was being loved ryan and and i'm surely put people look on as sort of an ordeal you if you will carrying all i'm a bird really about identity i think you're right the story is really that deal on route that abandonment is something that's in the narrator is medea sing on youtube and i go up i always feel better when i finish a book i think oh maybe it's good i mean the stories are terrific is there a feeling also of urging yourself in the story particularly ill now terry because even though the story comes out of the labs of people out no

amount life i always felt when i was working that i was making a form like a fictional form it's a story and in that sense it's very close to been fiction although it is true as far as i could make it truly let's let our own view is the sheer obit about do you know well now i was my grandmother and her name was allen as a matter of fact that's where denmark and that is a new era and the susan of buried problem but very gentle and very devout presbyterian lady and had beer is for and lived for forty years with with them until she was unmarried and understand the setbacks renee thousand grown woman when i was a child on you found out there is your best friend and anwar were not married after the fact that you hold it lived in that long i think that yeah

i didn't think they were a man i just it was her cousin which i am not and that i was just fascinated with that the ministry of our of why he had lived there with her why there had been no divorce how my grandmother managed to accept that situation given her it in her aunt and the mores of the time and to annoy the terms included something about ms margaret thatcher's moines island to follow suit right on the only other very complex situation that my grandmother that same to me until he relatively unknown hero to talk about that heroism but i certainly agree with that she never land anyone to speak a word against her for him and she was lawyer to afford thirty

forty years see their radar when the church wouldn't barrier and see in spite of her patty and her presbyterian ism which were very passionately held a friend was a catholic and she didn't allow that to get an ally sheedy and one thing that interested me so much about it was the way she did it was she just whale whatever she didn't want to see and invisibility and that was a lesson learned but is that the bill is that a is that it's almost a talent to will away what we know but don't wanna know and she added i think its bit of maybe it's a it's a small town trying to our

country try above where there's a strong r morrow system that's very rigid and and you don't want a settlement the person didn't want a certain that might just will away whatever it is you don't want patients when i the carriage in their course any new real life in c was done by his wife the wife of the lovable and sunni have in la now a live studio and leave the mystery there across the mystery was what happened to that man what happens and what happened if any what happened to a marriage why dunbar come back to mississippi and for a fake identities they're going you know it does they're in an end the fiction writer just as talented just really wants to make a story how they and so i believe you sure did

they're now looking back on that at what point did you discover more about fan even just the shadow myth it existed before okay frau began writing that story as a matter of fact i found out i had not known as a young woman that fannie and do your first cousins and therefore they had probably been a contest between them about who would get done body named him an enemy and i didn't find that and a long necked i was grown and that was another thing that really made me want to write this into a story that said was so mysterious you talk about the forest you talk about long would the gaza was a mythical place is yes they have their analysis in a way because as a mythical place so don't you say somewhere that fall when the night i am i bet that farm i live in a day and that his and an existing ruler and

saccharine and and you also come to a point where you discuss wills the wills that were left then only ended ah a novel a year to the mystery industry another layer of the state to the mystery that and i do it and that was the last it writing this story i went into protests and went to the circus change it works out as unread those whales allen found out that the man had a daughter by his marriage fanny and no i never even mentioned this so all of that was very mysterious who's long would belong to do to write this new syrian that and eight was billed by her grandfather hal and not the end he's a savior rather modest well courses so a wall had

what a week or even done by yesterday he ed is in his estate was modest but he had enough to live on the lake that disease care right that's a low lying area that's that's what the data indicate the sky as he came back from his italian hyman took up with syrian tobacco accounts you know i tell you what you say there is but this marriage broke up and almost immediately that was like the ads in there and every effort after the honeymoon and i was guessing it shattered where is why the idea of the thing that brings to mind is that this may be more commonplace than we really know i mean you saw was sam houston america's woes shelton weeks after their marriage it is said that many parliaments that

immediately on the morning after the marriage that she said to the war last with whom they spent the first night while siam was the place the walls with a jew one of the house that eliza said i don't really know then she was gone and that also is in history has never been been definitively saw it i have heard on several occasions from my grandma my grandmother mother grandmother the one who's more all opening what she has to say baylor on a more realistic arm i've heard of marriages where the woman particularly back than a hundred years ago are where the woman has been so she offered in a place so one woman has been so she ordered that she has a really know no conception of what the unmarried is i remember and this is the dimension bleep this out but i remember my

grandmother telling me one time that a friend of hers said she got married in there was this true so and there was a silver in the jam and so forth and then she went home and put on a beautiful late night gannon get in bed and she said and here he came at me writing a broomstick ah ah ah well you know i had to get treatment on the show last week i think when we got bike to getting winded by ellen dollars but it's true that and selling girls or not war kept an ignorance of what the world and so i think it is possible that in that age and maybe even today more marriages or shouted early probably few very few dates theater knights and then later in that story oh yeas hampton appears and duty in la and then he has his own story which is the story of the life of world of highly intelligent and

educated black man who introduced by the depression to being in butler and show for to my grandmother and his life in a way is very mysterious to we never know why the man who owned the plantation hussein enough to swoon educating why he took it great interest in hampton it would have been easy if i'd been writing a work of fiction gets to have the right name be the black man's farm bill faries of the mother was was a cook in his hands but i didn't know and so on i didn't intend to invent the other is no speculation why did you feel that was a secret that maybe go i think i had always thought of hamptons life as being

one way and then when i thought about it when he was an old main an eighth he'd and i realize that his life was and particularly i think if god my friend tell me that he he had been an atheist or a sore asked three and now and they made any rate that he had been a very different thoughtful kind of person that i want to transform what i had thought into what seemed to me to be more true to make as much of the investigation it was more of who have been really was behind this masked that but reviews were in alabama when he was when he was quite old and was in the nursing home he said to three things to me this week that revealed in the way that he hadn't been told about but internet to be in any semi one thing he was hard fact that they felt that he might have to go to work all a gene at

my grandmother than he was very much this now i'm the inquirer ran among his friends and word would be suitable for him to work of my grandma well status was such that it would be impossible and then when he was in the nursing home and healers and again to me that you know he was a nice to make it he wouldn't go work figures people felt they did deliberately because my husband was jewish and how he was rebuking me for having me love's status is our but it was a very complicated relationship and the longtime a complicated story a sewing room start over with a real a sense of subtle question i think unless the nile and allies in the government of allies that spencer a tragic antiques to her and then led a steward another ally is col own second

creaky and it's if you really a mystery it's really unknown and that is it's an account of the murder of the thirty up perhaps even as many as forty madeline king mei slanting of slaves during an eighteen sixty one at the beginning of the civil war this and the slaves so we're supposed to have planned an uprising but in fact there was very little evidence that the uprising was planned but the slaves were some of them were gotten everywhere forced to confess others never confessed and that under the plea and someone hang out and it was it was it was a lynching of course but it was an awfully lynching it was conducted over a period of several weeks back the gentleman of the neighborhood oh nat and passion but as it is it and i can

kind of kangaroo record i am it was something that had completely vanished wrong the animals of the matches on the record so that there was no way it was at what it was a year ago with a hobbling that would be a shame that a scar and so and so the cosmetic effort a third of women work for a long time and now you have on earth that mystery well as a matter of fact the man who wrote to modern scientists had second greek theater recently when sergio him and and when i read his book which i was very much interested in because and it was a bad match isn't about something that had happened that i realize that the people who are involved with the man who ruth on the committee were all my great great uncles a whole kerr great great great cousins they were all either

connected with all related to my ancestors and it was as a terrible shock golf course there will share an accelerated first that alan make a novel out of the aisle at a the whole thing started when a two hour went home to his parents and told him that you know her this conversation among the slaves i thought i could maybe do something with that boy's life that is what would you how would your life turnout if you grew up and realize that huge columns the murder i love all these people some of whom would have been his companion jane as as black man very often we're the companions of their masters sounds and i decided that i just couldn't believe that i was not it was not mass story in that way in a way it was sort of like trying to write about the holocaust if you can i will add

anything to do with it it just seemed wrong to me to try to turn into a work of fiction and your fiction games and so instead of this took what i found out from went through jordan's book and we're off and out from various black people in the community and for my cousins and commanded with other struggles and the black community and other people i've known during the civil rights period and hooted out down as fact and truth as far as is nearly as i could get to the truth all dale dale dale dale dale dale that was his name is an annual event and the manuscript that joe i'm not used to start his book is it it somehow and elyse to dissolve the manuscript when you write it right i mean you going back to fiction are taking

the ham and lamb fiddle around with a novel you write a better one period a long live on the swing is has undergo a western ally have a drink and hang out with us for a ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha and how much free riding you do a lot of parts of the world maybe rewritten as many as ten twelve ten other parts work pretty well and don't get re written them once it's published do you know a feeling of relief well is the lowland here fear of this thing and for just a few days that are allies of the day when you're in do it again and then i began to worry about whether it's going to get a good press another economy claim correctly and you've done some terrific people appalachian now what what your it was your next book well

it's it's dangerous to talk about what to maybe did but i'm thinking about a book which comes out of all my metal son's experiences a motorcycle race but which you did from the time he was eighteen to use twenty two and now i began thinking about where that's sort of where i'm coming from but i know i can do it and i will say though we'll have a whole lot of characters that i can do very well with i think no that's that's ok what i can handle motorcycle race is going to start going to the races no

no