A Word on Words; 2315; Tom T. Hall

award and wears a program delving into the world of books and their authors this programme features john edgerton author of speak now against the day james white author of european and tom t hall of what the tom t hall symposium your host for word on words mr john c compiler chairman of the freedom forum's first amendment center at vanderbilt university oh i'm john singlaub welcome once again to word on words we'll talk with three distinguished writers would talk about writing lyrical about their work and how began by saying welcome to john edgerton latest of many books is speaking out against the day and welcome to jim whitehead a poll in a world that needs poets in the worst possible way and the county hall the author of novels short stories and an

autobiography and the hosts and leader of a company all symposium at an intimacy state university symposium i hear was great is you know a new and wonderful we had done with a great turnout them that some great student no friend of overture around the community came out they were just smashing success and we have this every year you know and in the conjunction with mia the southern border with the former national and big success well i'm glad i was a big success but i'm not surprised that it was a big success because you had to make a great talent there along with and that it needs to to shoot let me just ask the outset

mean one thing i keep hearing is the young people students college students are now visual train saturated by the message of the sideshow which is the medium that they're wired to get to that they're not reading they can write i don't care about writers are books was last night john an argument against that what i hope is a myth in most emphatically was and i must confess at the outset that won the doomsayers gone around preaching for the last twenty years that were at the end of the present age once described myself is feeling like a cold eager for an autograph party for joe hundred and her and it is true in one

sense the visual ages over whelming the the cold type age and brooks and graham parker and becoming more of an endangered spacey's but having said that i think the people who do love and appreciate books from even more passionate about that that that art form than ever before and it was especially encouraging to me last night to see so many college students who not only came but stayed and ask questions and entered into the debate in and discussion and conversation and stayed around afterwards that poll i should tell those of audience that both state issued and ann patchett will be all were words into will have an opportunity to interview them and i'll get there react the auction podium when they're here again why

did i mean you are not only a poet not only a right you also teach your contact with students as much more direct them edgerton geraldo saying goes it react to the question are we raising a new generation of some of the kids i don't think so we've got a writing program at the university of arkansas we've had it since nineteen sixty five it's one of the better ones we're about three or four hundred applications to a graduate program every year we picked him to twenty out of that group they are marvelously talented well read people and i a teach undergraduates sometimes member energetic and ready to go the route business or reading a book and writing a book is not the same thing as watching a screen watching tv or

watching even a stage play there is something private special an individual and the experience of writing and reading they will not pass from here but i don't believe it because the book is horrible and it's the reading is done in secret students given the opportunity to really right mr daggett with a well timed your idea of creating a symposium largely from four southern writers is one that with a son on one hand to bring to that campus writers of no writers of town it works or interesting hopefully to stimulate that interest on foreign students oh yes in an hour mike

madrid affected you know we have the room was full when a nice room it was full understanding the aisle and this would not require ten so the of the students with their love of their own interest an unknown and kristen and that's what really so much because they came because they want to come and i told them last night at that i told the people were there for that what about that that the seeing is reading books by great writers and seeing them on television shows like this and knowing about them from afar it is it is a lot different than getting the government a situation where they can talk outside their writing in and and it and of young especially arlington nj can constrict touch the people being near them and see them and see that they are truly by and large and every respect except perhaps for

the writing the ordinary people and i was false that young people near the people with some sort of touch them in a sense and see them and talk to them and they can go away saying they're not really that special way of broad perhaps i can do that and so it though sometimes decisions this great young people from making the proper effort to really are written in and to really get after the rioting and believe in themselves that they can do it what really was on your mind when you first came up with this audio we talked about it before it was a reality but it might be interesting for abuses suit and no knowledge gerald an idea and while ours love the idea of the title of world not withdrawing read so much for talking about a place to come to get rewards are

always low and that the title of the day the ok great boulders the size of one of the emotional place to come through them now so the light is what all the writers get across the country and some of them teaching from them and the day jobs and the other is an articulate themselves and write all the time but the notion that thing was a widely sportier follow the notion of these other literary festival that does that but the word and having this symposium we our sinking hollow place to come through with it really could come and talk and and i share their experiences and i think it's going to preclude we had remember that writing is a lonely an individual not necessarily longer but at the very private an individual endeavor as i think writers need to get out and get be with one mother and b mayer their readers and see them and touch them and shake hands so i was a selfish idea because i

thought that this thing started properly i'd be invited to my name that's the only thing that it the thing that is most impressive to me about the crowd that turned out for a small edge of the new river poll this is another one couple of foot but they won't let me read it and i had an aunt and it's just hot off the press yesterday years writing i cannot wait to read the generation before civil rights movement in the south now you would think if there was anything to the myth that a book on this enormity by an author as prolific as yourself it would it would it would be there and they would say when groves you would think that this is poetry is is not a literary go that's the conventional idea

of the last thing they want to come look at a poet i mean it's it's like looking at a ballot in the not the nominee i'm around anymore it's impressive to me that that sort of turnout represented in the day he's incredulous that we got a prayer now i am in the last year of your life well one thing that they were pleasantly surprised or will happen at that poses a little gives a really surprised us and waters and the response there was what's wonderful i mean they were they were asking all right quadrant webbing all right places there were encrypted and then what was being done though is being said it would be the graham by then one recent years besides the three of us there was cecilia peachy danny impaired and padded as a young novelist

a lot of the young students could identify with her kids say you know i'd like to write a novel and here is this young woman is written this wonderful novel cecilia tissues subject of country music out there were a lot of people in the crowd who are interested in country music and one of the better moments of the evening was once is syria said she had brought a tape of tom t play an insane the song the homecoming and you want to talk about that song and she had said the hammond and our own social hour before that she had brought this tape and thompson well i'm on guitar here on display which may be infinitely better and the crowd absolutely loved it and cecilia was she was just she took over time had some wonderfully funny comments the mike after she analyzed this song and it was created to soar listen everybody if there were people there who had thought they'd hang around for fifteen minutes and

see how bill this was they changed their minds in india just opened up and out to be a very lively assigned on comments on the ticket their allies the whole song do a beautiful power station the song i won't find anything i thought was remarkable because of a beautiful insight into a country music lyrics and music itself and i said but i thought you and teresa do you have to make a point here if i had recorded what she just said i couldn't short one record but when you put it in the oven music and inventive and just going through a lyric then it worked but she did a beautiful job on what's novel about a portrait because the business about being a poor is not so says you may think they're great many presses that do

portray not enough several thousand titles a year maybe not enough support we've been around a little bit and to develop some bad reputation can expect fifty to five hundred people are reading where were sheer egos and there everybody writes poetry those who votes or really are not very good but they ride it their passion for this is they have a passion for storytelling and for songs in the song in a poll there's some point you on a giant seaport years and it and i think its prospering after a fraction in this country curiously enough there's a lot of money in washington private and public interview in oil prices last week of unions yorkers and people read those poets that the prices these are not as happy as i would have them

be well i think the state of the art this high and the country live for five hundred ports a real quality and their books were also the two eight thousand and ten thousand copies and i remember on this program a few years but the author of the diana pats which was really a long dated narrative about a group of people they're going to that in that way in california trapped by snow drifts cannibalism poisoned while a great human tragedies of and of the movement west but that book called on out made some of the sellers and it occurred to me then that

said it now to poetry could make it certainly or poetry could make another jimmy carter is a poet and that that poetry is getting rave reviews and it is very funny some of its very pointed over at all it appeared at the top of about that noah williams and i worked with president carter on the book that some editing talk to him about that writing poetry and he wrote what he wanted to do you know what i had wanted to and these wonderful image early portrait and at one point we were still carry along with him and he sort of fired it's set up now to get on with other things in these poems are weird wonderful afternoon so when you and diana got married we so they're in the motel and talk about torture including his portrait all latin or police are linked to lose

value and it as it raged for three reasons very intelligently so you how about reading from forty four plus picking a president carter apparently i will read that they've told you on television they call this a segway i have nineteen eighty one county hall as the curfew would like arab somebody right holmes for his homecoming on the day of reagan's inauguration and plain at the party and billy sellers and new orleans and i were given nine days to write the holmes and nine days turnip all is not wall monitors or wives communicate by television we lock yourselves in the rooms we work from nine days and we went compliance and read these homes rather pause for the president and this is what i write and i'm

happy to say i because i believe that he would be a great ex president as it was a great president and i have been prophetic and our reviewer wrote in nineteen eighty one it's the old was born in this new book for president jimmy carter on his homecoming plains georgia january twenty nineteen eighty one people in history began to say you were a steward of the earth and cared for human dignity and knew the dread that the awful power that would take away the good sense of the day a war and take away the night the night for arrest them pleasure they have begun to recognize and measure how carefully watched the hours strike into the future where we live and die how carefully you were responsible

and seemed of course to be astonished by a world out courageous and its vanity world i'm surprised by greed so terrible it would desire complete catastrophe people and history beginning to say it's clear you love the earth day in day out so much to catch your breath to imagine the deaf might take the possibility of love away like you sir for a living with what you know that's the new muscle and another report had that voice but dr sally earl jones that's right well thank you

john to talk about the generation full of life well i got into this booth john the trio of an answer to a question that that i couldn't i couldn't work out in a year the question was why didn't the south sort of reform itself after world war two when when america who was in a sort of the united states after a victory in the global war victory against the two nations that that made a big thing of racial superiority and we didn't like a big thing of it but we had the problem we had it under the road in and didn't talk about it and everybody knew that the south was was

near the heart of the problem fewer people knew that the whole nation had to deal with the problem that was still a ways down the road but everybody knew that the south had somehow or other to come to terms with the whole problem of racial segregation and yet we didn't do it we we miss the opportunity and so it took a revolution in the courts and in the streets in twenty five years of her more to bring us to the point we had almost reached when the war was over and so i started going back to see if i could find any answer to that question and i ended up all the way back to the beginning of the roosevelt administration and i and i ended up writing a book about a twenty the twenty five year period of time when a group of southerners white and black spoke out against the notion

that that the segregated life was ok people who were disturbed by the fair that it existed and who for all kinds of reasons religious philosophical political or simply pragmatic reasons felt in our hearts that we had to come to grips with the problem and found the words and the wisdom and courage to say so long before it was fed to do that and i thought i knew and at least in a general way who those people were but i discovered many many others whom i had never heard him i have tried to link them in this narrative both with one another and with the cans in which they lived and with the larger context of american history all of those young people sending their last evening at any idea of the year

sweat or low taste to create and i don't know don we never really talked about this what motivates created to write a song but we have talked about on this program about your books anne it seems to me the toughest thing in the world for either just put the suit pants and sit in the chair then force yourself to write different we won't come as easily as it might sound or maybe you will maybe many find easy and i don't know of those and frankly mr randall invokes it is with youth and i probably won't get any one of these really praise when i feel like i'm somehow you know in some way involved in this book because the gun owners and the french were or something with him when he was writing and that was it you can look back now until you what

a tremendous mind boggling experience it was and we were all going through it with him and i think most though really good writers are going to do these things and take these projects and i want to get them right it's it's awesome unusual for uniformity and author of that interview sima before you know what the process is because do you still have to do it and actually worries leave those photo id on and they all add to macy they all would say are you gonna be ok you'll like it when they topped one another's i really do now you'll be ok or you know i have said that it's the nearest thing for a male off their experience the nearest thing to have a baby and

a male author can ever experience in that to giving birth to do a book and maybe that painful to do earth to pulp it takes nine days to write a poem i'm sure it takes nine months or i buy components like there's more than nine days ago it's all work but it's also boris and i wouldn't fool anybody there days when you don't exactly want to be there but it's a privilege and it's marvelous finally heroic we write a paragraph finally when the dove the sense of the butterfly id is tom's matter for comes to you know you've written a good page not the best thing the world just about sixty four of a good point is that and the other thing is you get that the agony of that that can show up in the page

you can sit there and sweat word which begins on the papal yes and thats it to europe to keep your balance of everything you do in that van and on tour and it's but i told john i said now now that this thing if they think you're gonna get a lot of free cocktails and meet some wonderful people rubber bullets and on television you smile away lives in the area congratulation lloyd i asked me last night what i was trying to say in this book and i said i was trying to say in three hundred and fifty thousand words what time do you say it in two hundred words in old out into the water opp opp opp for life if that's right what life is what's what's your view of the future was imposing a ticket that could grant successes we have now will mean that women will fall in winnipeg continued to make this place to come to memphis to state university where we want to

the interesting thing i'd like to maybe maybe a one year have two rooms and then have to have a lawyer would like to keep a small us earlier i'd like these now young people to be able to touch these people say you know this board and david just ordinary people with the exception of the writing and i got i think i could do that so i'm working with small what he would animate then on the glorious excess that we have i had just this past evening answer is is aware wanted to them now and what we want people to hear about it and we want we want to take a walk john edgerton author of speed now against the day james white haired author of near

van and tom t hall for the county all symposium and then our guests are no word on where your host has been john sigg and chairman of the freedom forum's first amendment center at vanderbilt university this program was produced in the studios of the louisiana nashville