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Mississippi native Steve Yarbrough
is author of the PEN/Faulkner finalist Prisoners of War.
[read
his profile]
SLR:
You were born and raised in
Mississippi. Do you find it easier to write about
Mississippi while living elsewhere, or harder?
Yarbrough:
I’ve never found it to be all that hard.
Mississippi has a storytelling culture. People talk endlessly about things
that happened fifty years ago. I’ve lived in
California for 17 years, but I find the culture to be shallow and everyone
seems to live in the moment, or even more, in the future. I do it too when
I’m here. In
Mississippi, history is a part of the present. It is common to know
stories about your great-great grandparents. Stories are passed
down from generation to generation. You don’t find that tradition
just anywhere. I
think if you grew up in place like Mississippi, you wouldn't want to write about any place else.
SLR: When did you first start writing stories? When did you know
you wanted to spend you life writing?
Yarbrough: I started out writing songs. Played the guitar. Like country
and bluegrass then as a teenager I liked rock and blues more. Later, I
tried poetry but didn’t get anywhere with that. I always loved books.
I’m not happy unless I have a book to read. When I was 21 years old I
wrote a football story. When I
was 24 I wrote something publishable. My first novel was
Oxygen Man.
SLR: Tell me a little about where you went to school. Places you have lived.
Yarbrough: I got a BA and MA at Ole
Miss, then a MFA at University of Arkansas in
Fayetteville,
Arkansas. I taught at Virginia Tech for
4 years then moved to
Chapel Hill.
My wife is from
Poland. We have a home there and I always look
forward to visiting. We have two daughters. They both speak Polish as
well as English, but I just know enough to get by. We’ve lived in
California for seventeen years.
SLR: What writers influenced you the most when you were young?
Yarbrough: O’Connor and
Faulkner, certainly. But also,
Larry McMurtry,
William Trevor,
James Salter, especially Salterw—every paragraph he writes could
be a poem.
Alice Munro too, definitely Munro. There has to be something
happening in the fiction I read. If the language doesn’t interest me, I
cannot finish the book. I like to read writers who write well about
women too. Male writers who write women well.
SLR:
What inspired you to write
Prisoners of War? How do you come up with your stories?
Yarbrough: I enjoyed writing the historical aspects of
Visible Spirits. I had been interested in the progressive era of
America, but knew nothing about it. I did a lot of research and when it
came time to write it turned out to be the most natural, effortless
writing I’d ever experienced. So, I thought I'd write
another historical book Prisoner of War. I had so many false
starts trying to write this book that it just about killed me. It turned
out to be harder to write than anything I’d ever written.
SLR: But worth it.
Yarbrough: Well sure , now, worth it.
SLR: Your first novel was
Oxygen Man, how have you seen your writing change, or develop
from that novel to this one?
Yarbrough: There was a huge psychological hurdle when I tried to go from
writing a short story to a writing a novel. I mean, you write a
short story and if it isn’t on track, well you’ve wasted maybe three or four
weeks of your life, but a novel, you could be two or three years into it
and realize, this isn’t working at all and you’ve wasted three years of
your life. I’m more comfortable with the idea now. I tell people that
in a short story you have to have your foot on the accelerator all the
time—you’ve got to get somewhere—fast! But in a novel, you have to
learn to pace yourself, keep a foot on the break. That was probably the
hardest thing to learn. The short story is about implication and
exclusion, something I feel we can all learn about from
Hemingway.
SLR: When you write do you have the story outlined completely in your
head or does it unfold as you write? Is there a point when the
characters take off on their own and you can’t easily predict what they
will do next?
Yarbrough: No, I don’t outline. The only time I ever did an outline was
when I worked for Disney and that’s because they insisted on it. I
convince myself that I know the ending of my story before I start
writing it, but it always changes.
SLR: Who do you like to read now?
Yarbrough: Right now I’m reading an extraordinary book by Donald Hayes
call Dying Light and I’m reading
War Trash.
SLR: What’s next in terms of your writing? Are you working on a
novel now? Will your stories stay in the South?
Yarbrough: I’m finishing up another novel. The End of California is
the title—it’s
set in Mississippi. It’s about a doctor from
Mississippi who moves to
California, then back. All the regional differences, political, cultural.
I’m excited about it.
As for my own writing,
I’m interested now in seeing ways I can develop
the form; that is, I’m interested in different narrations,
non-chronological order, getting into history.
SLR: Sounds great! I look forward to reading it. Thanks so much
for taking the time today to talk with us Steve. Southern Literary
Review values your work and your time, so thank you.
Yarbrough: Thank you.
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