Interview with Lewis Nordan, at his home in Pittsburgh, May 19, 2001. (Interview).

Bjerre, Thomas Aervold

THOMAS BJERRE: FROM READING YOUR BOOKS it becomes clear that a few themes run like leitmotifs through your work: dead and absent fathers, dead and absent sons, the terrible realization that we are all alone in the world. Now that you have written a memoir, it is obvious that these themes draw on very personal experiences that you've modeled over and over in your fiction. Do you think these are themes that will continue to haunt your writing, or do you feel that by writing the memoir, by laying the facts down, you have come more to terms with them?

LEBIS NORDAN: Well, this is really getting right to the heart of the matter in the beginning. At this point I don't really know the answer to the question, because I haven't been able to write since Boy With Loaded Gun came out. There are a couple of guesses I can make as to why writing hasn't come to me. One of them is that I did exorcise some of those demons that inform the fiction, and they just don't have the power that they had previously to churn up things in my psyche or my unconsciousness or my creative space. Another thing, though, is that I have been suffering a neurological ailment and it required that I take some medication that took away my imagination, took away my short-term memory, and took away a lot of the affect of my life. So I have been very flatlined, not emotionally so much as imaginatively, for a couple of years now. Luckily I no longer have to take [the medication], and I'm preparing myself to begin writing again in June. And so I'll find out what I've got to say. I suspect that these old themes are never completely dealt with and that they will return. But at this point I really don't know.

TB: You said you were going to start writing in June. Do you have a certain writing process once you get an idea?

LN: I even have a certain process before I get an idea. About every year, I go to this artist retreat in Virginia. It's called the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. It's a converted dairy farm. About twenty artists can go there, writers, visual artists, musicians. And I stay a month; this year it will be the month of June. They do everything for you. They cook the meals, bring your lunch at lunchtime, and make your bed, and the whole thing. So there's really nothing to do but write. It's a rural retreat. So I'll go there with just the barest of ideas and begin writing, and see what happens. In fact, that's how I wrote Wolf Whistle. I had no idea what I was about to write until I got there and started to write.

TB: So there are other artists around at the same time?

LN: We all live in a residence hall, each has a private room, and we eat dinner together. Some of us have breakfast together. But we don't really see each other except at the morning meal and the evening meal. We spend all day at work, and some of us even work at night. But there are artists around and there is conversation to be had, and we go out to movies occasionally. It's a communal thing, but not the kind of thing where you share your work and get criticism.

TB: Like many other writers before you, you have created a place for your stories, your own "postage-stamp of soil," as Faulkner called it. Your place is Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, loosely based on your hometown of Itta Bena. After having explored this piece of land in so much of your fiction, could you imagine leaving it and setting a novel in, for instance, Pittsburgh? I guess you did leave it in Lightning Song, but you didn't leave Mississippi.

LN: That's right. I left it in Lightning Song to go to a kind of hill country. I thought the people were slightly different and needed a different locale. And in Boy With Loaded Gun, some scenes, some chapters, toward the end, were set outside of Mississippi. So over and over, I imagine that I'm going to do this. I have started literally almost every book that I have written since and including Music of the Swamp--each of those books has started out being in Pittsburgh. And I just realized that my characters are walking a very stiff, wooden kind of walk until I put them somewhere else. And it's always very near the same postage-stamp of soil.

TB: But in Lightning Song, you did leave Arrow Catcher. Do you think that you'll get back to Arrow Catcher and Sugar Mecklin and all those characters that we know so well?

LN: You know, I love Sugar Mecklin, and I want to get back to him. But that may be one of those things that I have stepped past; I'm not sure. I've got a glimmering of an idea right now. Of a boy, very like Sugar, and like me, sitting in a study hall in school and seeing a new teacher come in to the otherwise hermetically sealed environment of this whole community. An outsider coming in. It might be Sugar; I can't tell. He's a lot like Sugar, in any case, and I think he is in Arrow Catcher, so my guess is that I'm not quite through with it yet.

TB: It seems to me that many of your characters, in one way or another, have a curious relationship to sex and death; they are often connected somehow. In Wolf Whistle, Bobo's whistling at a white woman, thus pointing out her sexuality, costs him his life. In The Sharpshooter Blues, there is that terrible scene where Hydro is "raped" by the young woman, while she is pressing a gun to his head. Ultimately, she ends up dead at the hands of Hydro. In Lightning Song, Ruby Rae robs Leroy of his innocence and in many ways destroys him.

LN: He is pretty resilient, so at the end I think there is some strength in him, but it's very close to destruction.

TB: Also in The Sharpshooter Blues, the girl asks Hydro if he knows what sex is, and he says, "a grave?" So there is that connection between sex and death. Is that deliberate?

LN: No, it's not. In fact, I'm learning of it as you speak. So this answer won't be very coherent, I'm afraid, but I've got some answers. When I first started writing I wrote very badly. I didn't know what I was doing, it was just chaotic writing. A teacher said to me, "What do you want to write?" and I said, "I don't know." And he said, "Well, that's not a good answer. You know, you're thirty-five years old. That's something that a college sophomore might say, but you've got to know the answer to that." And so I thought, and said, "I want to write about sex and death, and I want it to be funny." I really don't know where that answer came from, but now twenty-some years later, I think of it and I think ... As you know from reading Bay With Loaded Gun I had two sons who have died. One as an infant and one as a twenty-year-old, from suicide. And some very unrecovered, unhealthy part of myself responded to those awful deaths viscerally, and I became even obsessed with sexual thoughts. And why that should be, I don't know. It might have something to do with my father's death when I was a child, and my cleaving to my mother's affections. So it's so complex as to be indecipherable to me. But somehow or other in the most traumatic moments of my life sex and death did come together in this way. I don't know that anyone could really ever fully unravel all the strings.

TB: Another prevalent image in your fiction is guns. Just the title Bay With Loaded Gun....

LN: By the way, I wanted to call that book Don't Cry for Me, Itta Bena. But nobody could pronounce Itta Bena, so the joke was lost. An editor came up with the title.

TB: But still, guns are recurrent, not just in your fiction. It's also a sort of notorious trademark in much of Southern fiction. And as a foreigner it's fascinating, but also difficult for me to understand this strong connection between an American and his guns. Given the ending of your memoir, where you want to buy an AK-47, could you talk about this fascination with guns?

LN: Yeah, right. I didn't actually buy it, though. When I grew up in the South in the forties and fifties, it was common for a child to get his first gun when he was twelve years old. And that was my gift under the Christmas tree, a shotgun and a couple of boxes of shells. And my father who had grown up hunting really didn't have any guns at the time, but just to be a pal to me he got a gun that year too so we could go hunting together. I don't know that we ever did; maybe we did once. But it was very much a loving expression of care and concern that you give a child this grown-up device. It was a little like the bar mitzvah, or something; you are now a man. And for many many years until really in the last couple of years, I thought that the way to prevent gun violence was to do that, was to give a child a gun and lovingly teach him or her the safety aspects of guns. Teach that if you kill a thing you are responsible for that life, and this is something to do for food and that sort of thing. And I thought that the reason kids shot other kids or their parents was that they had never had a gun, and that they had never been taught respect for life through guns. Now I don't think so. Now I think that a proliferation of guns is a tragic thing and kids who grow up in farming, hunting communities are just as likely to do it as kids in the cities. But for most of these long years of my life, I have believed in the healing power of firearms. And it was also true, though, that guns were for good people. The sheriff in my town was the only man who got to carry a gun. And the cowboys in the movies were the ones who made life worth living for the weak. So I'm [part of] a very long, complex American culture of guns, but it was informed by a deep-felt belief that a respect for firearms was a sort of saving, a salvation for the good of the world.

TB: Is there also a fascination of the mere act of shooting? In The Sharpshooter Blues they are shooting at refrigerators, and it seems to be sort of a redeeming process.

LN: Yes, I guess so. This is also hard to unravel. But guns are a metaphor for power, and sometimes power is expressed just in a hoop or a shout or a celebratory yell. And that's in a way what shooting a gun is. It's "yahoo! bang-bang! oh boy, ain't life great." I'd hate to see that phrasing taken out of context, but in fact that is a part of what the people in The Sharpshooter Blues are doing; they're saying life is great and these gunshots are a kind of shouting. So when Hydro kills people and does things that are the opposite of what I, and I think Hydro and all the other people in my stories believe about guns, the shock is terrible. Not only have I done this thing, but I have betrayed the whole idea of guns as something celebratory.

TB: Another trademark for Southern literature is the Civil War. That seems strangely absent in your fiction. Has it never played a big part in your life, or was it a deliberate choice not to include it?

LN: Well, it has never played a big part in my life. I'll be incredible when I tell you something else about myself. My grandfather was in the Civil War. My father was twenty years older than my mother, so that's why. He was a young man, so he was a water boy. I don't think he carried a gun, but he carried water to the Confederate troops. The Civil War was never a topic of conversation in our home, and it was because everybody thought it was a hideous war. There was no glory, no honor, no anything, except a bunch of rednecks fighting for a bad cause. So it never came up, and it's just not one of those ... it's not a memory or anything that holds together for me with any power. Other people have said that I avoid, more than most Southerners, religion, fundamentalist religious practices, revivals, and that sort of thing. And although I went to church on Sunday, religion was never a strong talisman or a magical element for me as a writer. I don't know why that is, but we just never talked about this as interesting subjects.

TB: I actually don't see a lot of religion in contemporary Southern writing. Maybe I'm reading the wrong people.

LN: Well, actually no. We tend to think of Flannery O'Connor as the religious person who stands for all of us. But there are writers like Harry Crews who take the other end of religion. A kind of mocking or angry tone toward it that is really the same thing. And Jack Butler, a Mississippi writer, who wrote Jujitsu for Christ; he has a novel, Living in Little Rock With Miss Little Rock, in which the narrator is the Holy Ghost. So maybe it's another generation. It's true that there is less nowadays than surely there was at one time.

TB: I'd like to talk about style for a minute. There is a remarkable shift in style between your first two short-story collections. While the stories in Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair are told in a traditional style, the stories in The All-Girl Football Team are characteristic in that they seem to establish your own voice. From that book on, your dialogue is very script-like: He said, and then the dialogue. She said, and then the dialogue. How did you come upon this way of transcribing dialogue, and why has it stayed with you?

LN: Those first two books were surely me looking for myself as a writer. And The New York Times criticized Arrow-Catcher for being kind of two books in one. One a kind of Southern gothic or exaggeration type of work, and the other a much more realistic, family relationships [type]. So I was on uncertain grounds as a writer during that time. I think that the first sense of myself as a writer came in that first book--in the story "Sugar Among the Freaks," a story where people go to Oklahoma in a car together. And there is all that exaggeration and kind of laughing comedy that was the beginning of my understanding of who I was as a writer. So exactly how I came to that device of dialogue isn't necessarily implicit in any of what I've said before and any of those attempts of finding something. But there was something I realized as I was learning to write, and that is that every story requires a rhythm in its telling. And there is more than one way to put a punctuation mark. There are the periods and the commas, and so on. But there are also word-devices, like "he said" and "she said," that are actually punctuation marks. They say to the reader, hold up for two beats ... "he said" ... "she said" ... and then you get the information. And then when that information is given to you, you'll need two more beats to catch up to exactly what it implies. So "she said" ... beat one, beat two, and then the next bit of information. And so although I don't think that that's the only way to do that, it became a very useful technique for punctuating a sentence so that the reader is deliberately caused to pause before entering into new material. And this comes in part from something else I learned in those early stories. And that is that my writing is for the ear more than for the eye. I mean, you can't separate the two utterly, but when my writing is working, it's working because you hear somehow in your head rhythms and the music of what the words sound like and what their relationship to each other is. Whereas in many a writer, writers whom I admire, you don't hear that, you just see the information come up off the page. And this is a very acceptable and wonderful device, but it's not one that pleases me, pleases my ear. I don't know where this comes from, wanting to hear the word. But I read my work to myself out loud in order to know what to do with the language.

TB: It does seem very rhythmical and musical to me, and all your novel titles have some reference to music. Are you directly inspired by music when you write?

LN: I have been. When I wrote Wolf Whistle, I don't know that I wrote a word of it first draft without blues music playing.

TB: And there are actual plinks and plonks interspersed throughout the text.

LN: Right. A lot of those songs that are in there are either directly transcribed from stuff that I was listening to imaginatively transcribed. There's a song that Glenn Gregg's father, Solon, sings to him at his bed site, "Li'l Bo Peep done lost her sheep. They come trucking back on down the line," I think is the final line. Well, that's actually a song, but done with a different nursery rhyme. "Li'l pig went to the market. Wasn't to market, so he come truckin' back on down the line." So I just changed the nursery rhymes. Yeah, all those songs were in my head as I was writing Wolf Whistle, and although I've never been so inundated with music as I was during this book, I'm always listening to the blues.

TB: That scene that you just mentioned, Solon in the bedroom, is one that I remember vividly, because it is a beautiful scene, but it's also a terrible scene. His burnt, dying son lying there. This is the last time Solon is with his family. And again there is this redeeming power; they don't talk, they just play.

LN: It's the only language he's got. There was no concern as I wrote that, but as that book got ready to go into print, I thought, you know, this is possibly volatile. This gives a certain humanity to the evil villain, who murders a black child who is based on a real black child, and so on. I wondered whether that wouldn't seem like excusing him or making excuses for him, or whatever. But it seems so right to give him moments of sweetness or humanity, or whatever. There's another moment in that book when he's lying in that awful boarding house thinking of how he can help his family by killing them and being sure if he's got enough bullets. And it's a demented thought, but again it's a moment in which his best self is trying to get out in the middle of all the horror that he's about to create.

TB: I read somewhere that you said that Wolf Whistle was sort of the "white trash" version of the Emmett Till murder. Do you see yourself as a writer with a social agenda?

LN: No, I don't. Saying that was a kind of a modest put-down of the self. You know, "I'm just an old white trash boy." Maybe a little disingenuous, maybe just jokey. But what lies at the heart of that is, that it took me thirty-eight years of thinking about that story ever to give myself permission to write it. I rarely even knew how to start writing it, because I thought it was not my story to tell. I thought it was a black person's story to tell. And in the same year that my book came out, Bebe More Campbell's book came out, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, which is another telling of the Emmett Till story. It was very hard for me to give myself permission to do that until I realized that people like me, well not "white trash" but just, poor, middle-class whites living in a community in which this terrible thing happened, we have a voice too. And our voice was too silent during the fifties. We didn't say, "How dare you." Instead we just retreated and thought, "Oh my God, is this us who did this?" So we never really even talked about it at the dinner table, we were so horrified by it and so implicated in it, by our silences and by our casual use of racial epithets, and things like that. It was a turning point, really. The truth is, until I embraced who I actually am, certainly who I was, I had no way of writing that story effectively. So that's what I meant by "white trash" version.

TB: That's also one of the central scenes in Wolf Whistle, in the locker room, where there is one brave soul who speaks out. I guess that's a personal experience; it comes back in your memoir.

LN: Right. Yes, that actually happened a lot like that. In fact, and this is in Bay With Loaded Gun, there is a chapter in which I do that scene and I actually call that guy up.

TB: And he didn't remember doing it.

LN: No! The only brave person in town, and he forgot.

TB: You teach creative writing and have done it for how long?

LN: Eighteen years.

TB: I guess that's a good chance to get a glimpse into what young aspiring writers do, what they write about. Do you like what you see, and do you recognize anything from when you started out?

LN: You know, I haven't given this question enough thought. I teach graduate writers and undergraduate writers. And it's very hard to characterize what they write. Well, it's easy to characterize it if you're choosing the worst of it, you know. There's "I got drunk at a fraternity party ..." But the best of it is very ... each one seems very different from the other. The graduate students are gradually a little older than just right out of college. One recent novel I read by a guy, he had served on a submarine. So there was a lot of very interesting information about submarine life and that sort of thing. Another person had done long-haul trucking, and so there's a lot of just tremendous information about that. I would say that most of them, the one thing that may characterize them all is that they are all very interested in the character, but that they're a little too interested in what actually happened. They refuse to make that final jump and say, let the mind explode and let the imagination take hold and go places that they never went on a submarine or that they never went on a long-haul trucking situation. The best ones break out like that. But that's the trick. To tell that critical, analytical side of the brain, close down for now, and let the intuitive, imaginative side of the brain explode. I have a friend who wrote this book called Mind Games. It's about how to let the intuitive, imaginative side of your brain come up at will when you want it. I haven't read the book yet; I just got it yesterday. And how to close down the other side. But what he does is not write. He advises baseball players on how to hit, and it's done the same way as letting go of that control that you need to let go of in writing. And this guy, he's amazing. He can take a batter in a slump, and an hour on the phone can turn him around to, like a .400 hitter. His job is to advise college and some minor league baseball players on hitting, and this is it, this is the technique. And that's how you write. When you've got all the rules about point of view and all the structural notions and everything down, that's all right. But then you've got to say goodbye to all that, and let another, almost translate, part of the mind take over. And that's what's almost impossible to teach.

TB: And that's something you do in your writing. It's almost sort of magical realism. You have the talking vultures in Wolf Whistle, and just the singing llamas have some magical element to them. And there are parrots, I see parrots on the walls here.

LN: Yes, I'm into parrots.

TB: But it does seem like magical realism to me. Are you inspired in any way by Latin American writers, or is it Mississippi folklore?

LN: It's more Mississippi folklore. I came to Latin American writing late in life, and it didn't have a chance to influence me. But there is a certain amount of what they now call magical realism even in Faulkner. Apparitions appear, and this sort of thing. And even just exaggeration could be called magical realism. But my connection to it is not exactly literary. My connection to it is dream-like. When I'm in that space where dreams can happen and yet I'm awake and writing, that's when these things occur. There's a mention of these creatures, swamp elves--I don't have any idea what that is. I only learned in Lightning Song that they are a kind of bird. I thought they were mammals until then. So these are waking dreams and not to be confused with literary influences.

TB: Speaking of literary influences, you mention in Boy With Loaded Gun, the whole beatnik scene in New York was very appealing. And it seems to me that every writer growing up within the last forty years has been really, at some point, fascinated and inspired by the beat scene. Do they still interest you, or is it just an adolescent thing, the Beat writers?

LN: Well, as a boy I was not a reader of the Beatniks, so much as just a recipient of this filtered-down magical quality of the Beatniks, the aura. But just as I started to write fiction, about this time I was thirty-five years old, I became best friends with one of the old Beatniks, John Clellon Holmes, who was Jack Kerouac's best friend.

TB: He wrote Go.

LN: Yeah, Go. And as a part of my very first ways of teaching myself to write, I outlined every chapter of Go. I had a hundred pages of outline for that book. Actually, by doing that you can find out all the flaws of a book. But it was my way of teaching myself how to get from place to place in a novel. And John and I were really close, close friends until his death. We lived next door to each other. While we were, he had lots of friends come in, and they were all these old Beatniks. Ginsberg and Orlowski and Kesey and Gary Snyder. All those old guys would come to the house, and my children grew up with all these Beatniks without knowing they were famous. They still don't, really. And yet I was not really influenced by them literarily, just emotionally. But my literary influences were John Steinbeck's early work and George Orwell's non-fiction. And I'm not really anything much like either one of those writers, except I saw in those crystal-clear sentences, that's how to do it, that's what you want to do. The simplest, most direct language that gets you to the point where the language then can expand beyond itself to something else. And I found that in Steinbeck's early stories, like The Pastures of Heaven. But also Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. I don't care much for the fiction, but the non-fiction is great. I reread a lot of Steinbeck and Orwell last year and was really impressed with most of it.

TB: Steinbeck was criticized for being too sentimental. It seems to me that your writing often walks the fine line between sentimentalism and honest emotion. Writing about childhood, death, and heartbreak is an admirable risk to take for a writer. But it is a risk that you have to take if you want to get to the heart of the matter. Is that something you are aware of when you write?

LN: Not as I write, no. But after I've finished I sometimes go back and look, and say, is this too much? Steinbeck, at his most sentimental is almost unreadable. He had a way of avoiding sentimentality, where he kept the point of view at arm's length from his characters and spoke of them as persons at a distance from himself. He would then put the text out there and say, there it is. Whereas my attitude is different. I try to get right on top of it, to look it in the eye. I use point of view to come very close to the characters and so have to find other techniques to avoid sentimentality. Humor, irony, the sudden switch from heartbreak to comedy. These are where I go when I come too close to the maudlin. Steinbeck seemed less certain of himself in comedy; this may be heresy to Steinbeck fans, and more certain with a sort of photographic long-shot distance that he worked into the prose.

TB: What contemporary writers do you admire?

LN: I especially admire Richard Bausch. He's an amazing writer. He lives in North Carolina and writes both stories and novels. I have been rereading some books that I loved a long time ago. My Antonia by Willa Cather, and The Red Badge of Courage by Crane. And then, they send me out somehow to other writers. I'm very fickle about books. I like them and then I decide, well, I don't think I do like it so much. For a while I was absolutely fascinated with A. Manette Ansay's work. She grew up in Wisconsin, she lives in New York now. And Anne Padgett who wrote The Magician's Daughter. And for a while I was very high on Josephine Humphreys. And I still like Jill McCorkle. A lot of women writers more than men writers, although I'd say maybe Richard Bausch is my favorite male writer. So right now I'm very much into modern women writers.

TB: I guess this is the inevitable question, since you're a Mississippi writer: One could argue today that there isn't a clear distinction between North and South anymore. But there's still this tendency to categorize into Southern fiction, as I've been doing. Do you think the South is still a distinct region, or is the New South just another part of this homogenous America?

LN: Richard Ford is pretty much proof that you can be a Southern writer and not seem Southern. People like Styron have already proved it, I think. But there is a quality of Southernness that says it's almost a genre, and could be even considered a limiting genre. Once you've had the fat deputy sheriff, and once you've had sweet black kids swinging on a tire swing, and people eating black-eyed peas and cornbread, that's what the writer Ellen Douglas calls riding the Southern Pony. And you don't want to do that. You don't want to deny your Southernness either, in the way that Chekhov couldn't deny his Russianness. To deny the Southernness is a tremendous mistake, but to just take those conventions that have been useful to Southern writers is a tremendous mistake. I don't want to acknowledge that I have done that myself, but I may have. But the truth is, whether I have or not, reviewers are likely to need something to identify. And so when Arrow Catcher becomes my postage stamp of soil, I'm identified with Faulkner's postage stamp of soil. When my characters are oddballs, they don't say, he's like John Irving who writes oddballs; they say, it's Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty. And so there is a pigeon-holing or categorization that can be very limiting, so it's no wonder that writers like Richard Ford will write about Montana. So, yeah, there is still a South and there is still a Southern fiction, and there is even still a Southern fiction that's African American that's not thought of much. And I don't accept any of the same old reasons that people used to give. That we lost a war, and that sort of thing. I didn't lose a war, I won. But there's a sort of defensiveness and a sort of geographical isolation that's traditional in the South, even if it's mostly gone now. It's still literarily there. And this defensiveness says, "We are ourselves, by God, like it or not." And it's a sort of announcing our differentness in order to keep people from announcing it to us. And think maybe I do some of that, you know. I create these defective characters who are Southern. So although I resist being pigeon-holed I find that I'm the reason that I'm pigeon-holed. I continue to play off of certain conventions.

TB: That defensiveness you talk about is also brought out in Wolf Whistle when the Northern reporters come to town.

LN: Right, exactly. And of course there the Northern reporters misunderstand things quite fully themselves, and say sing "Old Man River" to me, which is a show tune.

TB: As you mentioned, one of the characteristics of Southern fiction is this connection to place. What's it like to not live in your home state, to be up here in "Yankee country"?

LN: Well, to be an expatriate is to see the world anew and beautifully and gently, and to forget why you ran away from it in the first place. Pittsburgh has been the perfect place for me. Even Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is not really the South, it's the Ozarks, where I lived before. But it gave me a chance as a Mississippi writer to look over there across the river, across the mountains and say, that's the place I'm writing about. And in that way to be able to mythologize it to our advantage rather than to be there fighting the Civil Rights battles. And here, I've been supported as a sort of an exotic creature. I'm a Southerner more here than anywhere, because I'm identified that way. So I'm able to look at my life in this nice distance and make sense of it.

TB: You've mentioned your critics a couple of times. How do you feel about being a subject of literary criticism, not just newspaper reviews, but scholarly articles discussing, analysing your work.

LN: Well, my favorite subject is myself, so I like it. I'm always a little surprised at what is discovered in it. And by that I don't mean that I reject what is discovered; it's just that when you write so much from the right brain it takes left-brain thinking to clue you in that this is what you do. Really, I had written three books before I knew that I wrote father-son material. The son longing for the father's love is a life theme for me, but I hadn't even understood that that's what I wrote in my fiction. I didn't know that I wrote about sex and death--well, I actually said that I wanted too, but I'm not aware still how fully it's true. And so although these are simple matters and some of the matters that are being written about are complex matters, like the function of narration and the function of memory and that sort of thing, I'm very happy to learn what people know about me that I didn't know about myself. Not that all of it is completely acceptable to me; some of it I just can't deal with at all. But I find it a part of literature that I can't know about without help.

ANNOUNCEMENT

THE 17TH ANNUAL SIENA COLLEGE MULTI-DISCIPLINARY SYMPOSIUM

WORLD WAR II - A 60 YEAR PERSPECTIVE

June 6-7, 2002

Papers include: The focus of 2002 will be Fascism and Nazism, Midway, New Guinea, Guadalcanal, North Africa, the North Atlantic, Literature, Art, Film, Diplomatic, Political and Military History, Popular Culture, and Women's and Jewish Studies dealing with the era. Asian, African, Latin American and Near Eastern topics of relevance are solicited. Obviously, collaboration and collaborationist regimes, the events on the home front, conscription and dissent will also be of significance.

Replies and inquiries to:
Professor Thomas O. Kelly, II
Department of History
Siena College
515 Loudon Road
Loudonville, NY 12211-1462
(518) 783-2512 - FAX 518-786-5052
E-mail: legendziewic@siena.edu

CALL FOR PAPERS

June 5-6, 2003

WORLD WAR II - A 60 YEAR PERSPECTIVE

Siena College is sponsoring its eighteenth annual, multidisciplinary conference on, The 60th Anniversary of World War II on June 5-6, 2003. The focus for 2003 will be 1943. Other papers dealing with issues of the war years will be welcome.

Topics welcomed include, but are not limited to, Fascism and Nazism, new Guinea and the Southwest Pacific Theatre, Central Pacific Campaigns, the Air War, Sicily and Italy, the North Atlantic, Literature, Art Film, Diplomatic, Political and Military History, Popular Culture, Minority Affairs and Women's and Jewish Studies dealing with the era. Asian, African, Latin American and Near Eastern topics of relevance are solicited. Obviously, collaboration and collaborationist regimes, the events on the home front, religion, conscription and dissent will also be of significance.

Inquiries from those wishing to Chair and/or Comment are also invited.

Replies and Inquiries to:
Professor Thomas O. Kelly, II
Department of History
Siena College
515 Loudon Road
Loudonville, NY 12211-1462
(518) 783-2512 - FAX 518-786-5052
E-mail: legendziewic@siena.edu

Deadline for submissions: November 15, 2002

Send: Brief (1-3 p) outline or abstract of the proposal with some sense of sources, archival materials, etc., consulted and a recent c.v. or brief current biographical sketch.

Final Papers Due: March 15, 2003.

THOMAS AERVOLD BJERRE
University of Southern Denmark, Odense