A Word on Words; 0906; Kaye Gibbons
- Transcript
says edwards tonight j givens talks about a cure for greening your host for a word and words mr johnson president and publisher tennessee once again welcomes the world for saving your friends back a distinguished author kate give welcome to word on words and it's nice to have you back to talk about the new book a cure for dreams a cure for dreams it's a wonderful story and that it's a it's fictional
but it's fiction that is a sort of self storytelling is an actual sat down it was born out of reading the debt epa interviewees a bad air and the first one i read a woman is asked to talk about her life and she says and i'm talking is my life and so i set up the genesis the art of storytelling adding grow up telling stories in our house speaker of yelling stories sat around coming to the storytelling diners with honey and i try to understand our dad had mature for trains well when you take on a woman who spent a whole life talking you say that the us is you done signature top and then you let her you let her
tell us about about life well but it you know it's an interesting thing i don't really place where in a timeframe which is strange but those gifts it's the year if you wrote it from the experiences of reading the mpaa right it would seem that our help fix on that period but i think she could have lived and though her story one of the things historically when the ship the five year year history of my my career historically that has been time prize than criticize about the work is that the time and place aims to be impressionistic and i think that comes from our own reading habit what happens internally when i read and re reading david copperfield for that and probably at the timeline than
an apple mr macabre and david copperfield now the victorian england even that i know for whale where it was said a wear it where i'm supposed to say this landscape bread and i don't know what that and i'm sure they're set reading her psychological trite and in that we did at what happens to a story when we tell it again and online is that it was an part from a two to pin down a cure for trains and a time and applies the nineties and studs terkel was workforce to do it and then i read everything i could about the depression and having no real sense of how history trickle down that's when i went to the deputy tagged and that's when i read over a hundred letters written during that period finding giant and that the end that the only thing more fun than riding his rating of the paper was nine well you've translated people into it
into story that so my guess is that that this one is going to be confusing for some readers for some reviewers i think once you get a handle on who this woman is and how she is how she fits into the world around her and the people who are part of the world it flows but my guess is that reviews main it take you some mama may already be doing that with jimmy mchugh so what i started out writing replace there's only been one city mean spirited review and an outline that i like people who like notebooks and i don't like people down so i had dismiss this man is at a plant in atlanta so i don't worry about him to match that hey i'm damned made for him pull me through the mud with
eudora welty in and how i said bass that's quite okay let's start raiding the movies but what i did raid and a day before i stopped in a national daily publication of some renown they are there was confused because he tell what the book was about and then he said is this enough to write a book about an in my head muscles and sharing with the public there's not been a newspaper with every time i'm in an airport so i didn't understand that but that was a lot about language language last in the south during world war surgeon at him he's obviously not a southerner with a sense of any history because in a cave and i was born in nineteen sixty i have another soul or another so the sense of
history and bad hey he doesn't understand what happened in the south with the advent of world war two the landscape chinese young men like mom father in young women like the mother left the south and they came back and they had say in the world and they were exposed to ideas and they settled back down on the farm but they were chinese gin and changed utterly like nights with sammy and a one and would no longer sang a minute cause as the time that night she left me after world war two or she would've said menopause and then they would have lost that wonderful elizabethan line which said he didn't understand that and he's done his eyes are frustrated novelist say say it in all our lives and now i mean you really go after mean spirited critic stood in terms of research and the bike crash certainly so and another lab and an fbi agent that are concentrating now they were going to call it a problem goto seeds
them what about this woman and she mixes there there is a family mixture of the welsh and the irish lad that's what our half of the problem of the process of the catholic saints and you know and that's not unusual for the south's innate in india but it's an interesting mix and katie has an end of the seventy nine er i read recently that eighty three percent of the people in north carolina and seventy nine were from wales or in england that's a lot of bags and recently air balloon another statistic was taken and it has just dropped to sixty four sixty three percent and mess over the past two hundred years that's not a lot of fluctuation and even though we're just saying to be inundated by yankees then
and the nine protestants x we're still a fairly homogenous culture and i wanted to get at the heart of that and get at the heart of that cultures language and personal way that one in and a cure for james is the one our really one of my mother today and anna mae and josephine humphreys says that like that that fiction often predicts a writer's life and announce say that now work is protecting the relationship now have with nine three little girls and they're scaring so you say that the reviewer really didn't comfort him the changes that took place in the south after the report being more pronounced war ii it just says again what i sense and pride expression the outset
that quasi fascinates me he takes me out and aside from what of and that critics say you had to comprehend what you were and thousands who despite that they're there remains it seems to me a baby on an image of the southern writers should write about quote the old south close quote and that the new south except for the violence and civil rights movement is really not worth much of a look around about two years ago i stopped at a honky tonk on the way to the page it was called the new south and it had a silhouette of a man and woman
dancing out frei uno inside this country time and asked them the man and there is no alcohol and then i got a diet coke and carol corps now is just looking to find out that they would name a hundred times and they sat and i found the owner and then as it was in nine days tears and he said what the house after that burned down and we had this and a south and i support it liked it had any alcohol this is a dance hall and he said in a south we only allow kyle collins now in today's sun drops anderson and spiky hair up the segment and their sound is the kind of place that any body any area checking tommy and on saturday night we have a fun time and our left armed with that and i don't write too much about modern culture because i don't have a dance dance to write about it i could write about that and that when they sat but not my knees saffron aioli and then and then they'll house
in avondale a neighborhood but i'd downton saying the prizes have the outside because it was a fairly nasty places to ban and i don't believe that a life in the hour south was simpler and better when i'm there has been talk about in this book there and i dont birthright whereas was incredibly high and it's not a place i would have wanted to live in but there's some things that i do prize and i think it's that language that was so tied to the rhythms of nature and they're curious physician at the southern writer right now i am is today would have one foot in the old world in and one foot in the navy and to be able to shuttle back and forth between those two worlds and ride a bad burn i was born at the telly and of the civil rights movement and i have to educate myself mail indicating that flame alive is more of an intellectual exercise than an
emotional one because in my time it looks like all the work might have been done but i know it's not dunn said i saw said the social responsibility of a southern writer is to keep talking about racism and i'm not just saying that because people are dying in selma and birmingham anymore that the work has been done it's so much easier than a metaphor of a burning honky tonk on the belly of a new one for as the story of a transition also offer meals and eighty years and in the book i'm working on now that's a quota that a woman wants to lead the south forever that she really can't she comes back home i get nervous when i think about leaving let's talk about those women and about a marriage to charles that austere a working man who won his wife to work
about that woman who did not want to work about our strange willingness to figure job with child wanted as both with jobs for the head of on the stories in their idea that sunday's if i've had a hard day and tempted to let my children at alphabet swiftly marshmallows are three times just to avoid if i want to be up with the menu for the kids to do is to learn to shiite iran cornbread and molasses and that was our innate and that's all at that performance in the ten year term war starts wailing you scan your turn snatching you have a nice case of pellagra had resorted to their own i'm very he had very definite ideas that
wiser charge be raising his barley rye but is not sacred he was a deadly weapon shop as much as they wanted them out in the book is sacredly in charge and being rise to get southern one minute i've learned had it to pass a dress with a vengeance and i've learned how to be sick really in charge than married to yankee and he sees right through it i got away with it for about three nights when we were married didn't i wonder secretly in charge just in charlotte where we share the danger of your signature us beating of cheering but you secretly enjoy it and that's a device so oh yeah we can't be again and williams well it just think about all the work you do you write about strong women know i think i
think i probably date to compensate person way for my mother in law at so us and as i say there's a very strong woman announce and as i say well if she was so strong why didn't shape survived an end up not been that impressed with me and i am bad weather in literature and i think i stayed in dallas choral mr macabre i'm not that impressed with me and poetically outsiders than jimmy carter and i guess hearing earl longer oh here it is of man and and personally i have a you know a couple of me and the pilot background that i would give ten bucks for work but otherwise i'm i have come to depend on women and to recognize their strength elizabeth collett is that the reason you're they emerge and so the art is it because you just write from a woman's experience i
hailed a black also once on this program tell me look don't talk to me about the credibility of his book author the army were untrue things like shoes true you came to understand my calculation war and you're not saying that in those stronger than an app allies here what would be the point in writing what would be the point of literature and the points of literature to educate end and in any line in asset to entertain and i try to keep those two things balance that goes back to aristotle or someplace or whether these characters and that i think alarm on personality is injected in turn into these characters and that's why the women come a lot
easier than me and i'm having a horrible time with herman in this a core em on page seventy and thus far he has no personality and our music of cardboard character and i've gotten desperate to the point of asthma has been affected our own his personality to write the book i made and he said sure he's anxious to get it done so we can get on with life were firmly to be an image of a new mayor of me so i can get my wife signed it now while back and we can start i'm not falling peso had three times a week we can get to spokane their hands so i'm not good with man end and how long we will get their breath at way out and it'll put the pans than that and i think that the women don't come easy in an unmanned down at this another question about your writing style there are passages when you put
words together and strains there are passages where short sentences seem to punctuate the story roy was such a son of a bitch it in san antonio where it's a loser may sound i can bill learn he's unconscious device in an iron i don't think so i think it's trying to spy trade to them to the situation in the thought process that the character would be cut having eudora welty talks about finding a character straight whisper say jerk so on our way is willing to jump over literary device to get in the truest sage or any courageous they earn that a fall at this gorgeous they go as the snow i don't think
it'll i don't think the answer is to grab a reader paul re roll or you prefer senator says that they are very important that race a sad and one asset learned first impressions scale so i want to read a little bit so the us again cheryl of how you write and this woman is again by us that name i'll go on the internet and we all thought we were once i asked my mother do you think you ever said or did anything in the creek bed tarried and down later carried to the point that he believed you found a girl who are not who would knock yourself out working on the farm now this is the this is this is daddy asking her mother likely questions about why she married her father this is bette davies bad about its lineup and nine
after betty davis here that's half sour and not bryan when i was working you know absolutely mary davis the movie's going on and it starred bette davies somebody the eighties whenever an aberrant einstein those alerts your vision our listeners my vision to alanna knows that's what the subliminal ever do you turn me into getting a visual picture of this one it worked for our i don't know but i think i like betty davis and i wanted to sleep symphony in indebtedness as arsenal family my maternal and paternal grandmothers name that as babies or selling it and they were so yes it did from white house so it can iverson editor's advice night nine i said that if she did promise to work beside him why did you think you would pull as hard as you would think people would call as hard as he pulled because i was a young girl when he knew i loved him as much as a sixteen year old chocolate lover man he had told about water flowing for ever
down he'll and he taught me my father was ignorant lazy not cursed you know i trust in him and would more than likely yearn for things to do in his favor he asked i knew that i knew how to work the cars parked right like he did in the work to the women he had written by pharaohs and say me getting up fodder and he was accustomed to the side of me and on the sisters' the three of us who could work plus the three little when strung out across the field like the saints and i'll stop and tell you something that i recognized that right about the strength of women i read recently in a deadly p i interviewed a woman who had to take hold to western cape code with matt anesthesia she was afraid of it and she told the dennis that women in general can stand more padding in tight more punishment than me and just do it and he did it and when he started to pull she slapped him and she said i continued to sit there until he apologized sort of hamas
i mentioned that because it's elevated it introduces this woman and her husband in an interesting way and he did expect article own way he was very critical of her father who was an overgrown she have a lot about our family as you say and mother that a lot about our friends bridge of the year the point of that brief reading it is to me is that i think there's a passage where early on you really capture the sense of what's to come you're writing about a fascinating person old small life has lessened for the world but i don't think you're writing another get a sense of your writing in the lesson than a century right to tell me a story maron i want to tell a story and i want to do it i think in them as artistic way i take and i'm not i've never been one just then spewing out lady
had to come back and played it up i didn't like her over things they hadn't had it so i want to tell a story and i like a six hundred page stories anna hundred and seventy pages which the manuscript is really hurting twenty anger about that right now should do that yes they did they have to do that would hurt like a pamphlet night had to charge well your books always have that life and you tell me no you do it all out of time big bird yeah i can take two years the billiard so yes it is and it's scary to us like and the site running an orphanage there sami they pay for to keep that within i feel responsible are these characters they're still on editing it just like that oh i do one of these small books so on and riding using the same process that i do for small book but it's kind of the bay now most fiction
writers most fiction writers most often choose themselves as the narrator and they introduced characters without any maneuver of the riots as for the creators saying that the cabinet then you enter the un is to attack about being an aunt and it bothered by the author we take you through the story and it seems may be more difficult to introduce attack goes through a creative voice at the wellhead it is but when i have tried the other device than just as try telling that stride omniscient telling of radiation is so bad it's a flat lifeless that tune i destroy at night i go through six or seven months of agony and then i'll let the character tell the story because the character generally wants to end and i fail on that i have i can be free or with flying witch in a slot lively and then if
i didn't i used to worry about that i used to wear that it would talk about me if i didn't learn right in our nation i would get these reviews and i would say is this are shaken day and and that might happen that's why don't write the reviews anymore but it is it is very hard to stop being an actress as like being an actress employing a sign raul for two years which isn't it that's a difficult fight and this is a difficult job and didn't think riding with it as hard it is very real and the business end and it's harder now don't like it promoting wellness just yet be sitting here are people you just you know one year in a wonderful new plan your day well i didn't know that i would be covered as much but i didn't realize that i would have so much correspondence this canon and not have to be a business woman and i'm not want the irs could
have failed i would never say draw were so you know so it's also the you've had this smashing success rate critical early playing and now that it's come you have reached celebrity status and one in a comfortable with it and to your scared that you're not going to continue awesome nice game you know scared and i don't have continued because sam to produce our own work so critically acclaimed well i and their harshest critic to have an end and i think probably the best critique to heaven my husband to say that that doesn't worry me as matches and going out and having an not personal life you are with not public life and having people think that because they have red knot yesterday ok given the author of a few or for dreams as that our
guest on a word on words featuring john singing this program was produced in the studios of wbez and television nashville tennessee are
- Series
- A Word on Words
- Episode Number
- 0906
- Episode
- Kaye Gibbons
- Producing Organization
- Nashville Public Television
- Contributing Organization
- Nashville Public Television (Nashville, Tennessee)
- AAPB ID
- cpb-aacip/524-9c6rx9494x
If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip/524-9c6rx9494x).
- Description
- Episode Description
- A Cure For Dreams
- Date
- 1991-05-24
- Genres
- Talk Show
- Topics
- Literature
- Media type
- Moving Image
- Duration
- 00:29:20
- Credits
-
-
Producing Organization:
Nashville Public Television
- AAPB Contributor Holdings
-
Nashville Public Television
Identifier: A0611 (Nashville Public Television)
Format: DVCPRO
Duration: 00:28:46
-
Nashville Public Television
Identifier: cpb-aacip-524-9c6rx9494x.mp4 (mediainfo)
Format: video/mp4
Generation: Proxy
Duration: 00:29:20
If you have a copy of this asset and would like us to add it to our catalog, please contact us.
- Citations
- Chicago: “A Word on Words; 0906; Kaye Gibbons,” 1991-05-24, Nashville Public Television, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed June 10, 2026, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-524-9c6rx9494x.
- MLA: “A Word on Words; 0906; Kaye Gibbons.” 1991-05-24. Nashville Public Television, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. June 10, 2026. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-524-9c6rx9494x>.
- APA: A Word on Words; 0906; Kaye Gibbons. Boston, MA: Nashville Public Television, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-524-9c6rx9494x