The exerpt is reprinted with permission, the entire conversation can be found at DeadMule.com.
I recently struck up another email conversation with Doug Marlette. Ya’ll might know him in any one of half a dozen different ways — as the creator of comic strip Kudzu, as a novelist (The Bridge, Magic Time), as an Pulitzer Prize winning editorial
cartoonist, …hell, the man’s even written a musical!
We discussed his book, Magic Time, (which comes out in paperback published by Picador this summer) as well as life in general, life in North Carolina, new life in Tulsa, OK — well, that’s enough of my introduction, read on…
Val: Compare the literary community of Chapel Hill with that in Tulsa. Does Tulsa have a book store to compare with Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh?
Doug: For starters, I doubt the literary community in Tulsa would ever launch or tolerate or gloss over a book-banning. Oklahoma writers seem to have learned from the embarrassment caused by those in their state who banned John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath what North Carolina writers failed to learn from provincial Asheville’s dumping on Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. Amusing as it is to me that while The Bridge rocks merrily along six years after publication, still selling steadily and winning new readers nationwide, including a growing number of book clubs and Community Reads programs around the country, both the local Orange County head librarian and the chair of the neighboring Alamance County Community Reads program have mentioned to me that to their chagrin and embarrassment they still can’t buy The Bridge in our local independent bookstore, Brick Alley Books in Hillsborough, NC, the town that is the setting for the novel. Frustrated readers have complained to me about that for years and I had to explain that the store’s owner is doing the bidding of Allan Gurganus, Lee Smith and Hal Crowther, turning her bookstore into a sleeper cell of HillQueda (the local name for their fatwa of passive aggression against The Bridge). Of course, that kind of buzz and controversy sells books and I’ve thought of sending HillQueda a dozen roses, but I’m afraid their bush-league behavior has damaged irreparably their reputations, not to mention the bookseller’s, and turned the local so-called writers community into a literary laughingstock. If Kudzu’s Bypass is a town so backwards even the Episcopalians handle snakes, I guess that makes Hillsborough a town so backwards even the writers ban books. But the truth is, as far as I know, I’m the only writer with any actual roots in town. My family goes back generations in Hillsborough and Orange County. The book-burners are recent arrivistes and carpetbaggers and do not represent the real Hillsborough. For instance, a frame shop in town wants to host a book-signing for Magic Time next month but was warned that their business would suffer if they did. I told the owner she could back out if she wanted, that I didn’t think she had any obligation to lose business over this silliness. She said, “No, I’ve talked about it and prayed about it with my daughter, and we still want to host a signing for you because it’s the right thing to do.” Bless her heart and I rest my case. That’s the real Hillsborough.
Tulsa reminds me of Greensboro or Winston Salem now, or Charlotte ca. 1980, sort of like the best of North Carolina before Yankees and traffic, and literary pretense. One of the things I wanted to show in The Bridge was how Eno (standing in for Hillsborough in the shadow of Chapel Hill) with its bourgeois bohemians and Manolo Blahniks trodding on the gravestones of slaves and lintheads had morphed from a mill village into the worst of homogenized America, with the same kind of yuppie upward mobility, shallowness and superficiality we associate with homogenized suburbia or celebrity-addled Hollywood. So far as I can tell Oklahoma has not so far developed the self-infatuation and self-importance that plagues writers elsewhere. I’ve been catching up on reading Oklahoma writers like S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders, Rumblefish, Tex) and Billie Letts (Where The Heart Is) and met them recently and they are delightful. The only independent bookstore I know of in Tulsa is Steve’s Sundries. The Barnes&Noble at 41st and Yale hosted the Tulsa debut of Magic Time.
