That Secret Code

Larry Brown, Dan Chaon, John McNally, and Susan Straight tell what working-class literature means to them—how and why they individualize the experiences they do, what they hope to leave behind, and the pleasure they feel when they get a ‘laugh of recognition’

by Orman Day

Their childhood homes didn’t have shelves lined with leather-bound classics, but they made fervid use of their library cards. Their parents didn’t have the money to take them on European tours of museums and ancient architecture, but they learned that books would let them hike through the elephant grass of Hemingway’s Africa or study the wind-riffled waters of Loch Ness for signs of a huge, hoary snout, and a whip-like tail.

For the four of them, youth was a time when money was tight, but their imaginations were fertile. As early as five, one of them—bored with TV and his stash of books—started to create his own stories in secret.

In their twenties, they couldn’t rely on trust funds to finance garret flats in Paris or Brooklyn or San Francisco. Instead, they needed to work to buy their groceries, ink, and reams of paper. One of them joined the Marines and then became a firefighter.

Although the details and geography vary, these four rose out of the working class to win literary plaudits:

Larry Brown—who died of a heart attack at age 53 in November 2004—was a Mississippi native and master of “grit lit” whose work includes the non-fictional On Fire, short story collections Facing the Music and Big Bad Love, and novels Fay, Joe, Father and Son, Dirty Work, and The Rabbit Factory.

Dan Chaon is a Nebraska native who teaches at Oberlin College in Ohio and whose books include the novel, You Remind Me of Me, and the short story collections, Among the Missing and Fitting Ends.

John McNally is an Illinois native who teaches at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and is the author of The Book of Ralph, a fiction, and Troublemakers, a short story collection, and has edited anthologies.

Susan Straight is a California native who teaches at U.C. Riverside and is the author of Aquaboogie, I Been In Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, The Gettin Place, and Highwire Moon. She was a National Book Awards judge in 2004.

Here are their observations about their lives and literature in response to questions sent them by email in 2004. Answers from Brown—who interrupted work on a new book to participate—arrived by snail mail just months before his death in November.

What kind of work did your parents do?

Brown: My mother worked at Camp Electric Company in Memphis when I was a kid, next to Sun Studios. Jerry Lee Lewis used to come in there and get cigarettes from the machine. Later she worked at Katz Drugstore, over on Lamar. Much later, when we moved back to Mississippi, she worked at Sears for a long time, then the North Mississippi Retardation Center, running the switchboard. My father took us away from Mississippi in 1954 because he couldn’t make it sharecropping. He worked at Fruehauf Trailer Company for a long time. Then he painted houses some, and worked at the Mid-South Fair. When we moved back here, he worked at a stove factory in Oxford until he died suddenly early one morning in 1968.
Chaon: My father was a construction worker—a journeyman electrician. My mother was a stay-at-home mom or (as she said) a “housewife.” My dad traveled a lot and during the summers we would sometimes live in a rented trailer house near where he worked. The most memorable of these was an enormous worker camp, a huge trailer encampment outside of Gillette, Wyoming.
McNally: My father was a roofer for thirty-something years, but for about five or so years he tried to run his own wall-washing and rug cleaning business. He bought two machines and put ads in papers, and I’d occasionally go with him to help out. I was probably between six and ten years old. He wasn’t making as much money as he did roofing, which is why he went back, but he always wanted to run his own business. He hated working for someone. My mother worked in a factory until she had to go on disability leave for health problems. It killed her not to be working. (This is where we used to part ways: she always thought I should have a job, that it would be good for my character; I hated working and would resist looking for a job as long as I could.) She was from a large sharecropping family in Tennessee, and she started picking cotton when she was three. At thirteen, she left home, moved to Memphis, and got a job in a nursing home, working there for about six years before moving to Illinois with her mother and two sisters.
Straight: My mother was born in Switzerland, lost her own mother at age ten, and her family emigrated to Canada and then the US. She left her home in Fontana at age seventeen and began working as a secretary, and she worked for insurance companies and banks for my entire life, except for ten years when she stayed home and raised foster children with her own (five total). My stepfather has had many jobs: he owned a series of laundromats and repair facilities, and when I was in college, he got a great marketing job for a linen company. He is retired.

Was money a major concern?

Brown: Yes. Always. We were very poor.
Chaon: My dad wasn’t very good with money. I remember times when he seemed pretty flush, and other times when it seemed that we were broke. My parents were always buying things and then having to sell them, or having them repossessed.
McNally: Money was always a concern. I tend to think that every argument my mother and father had was about money—and they argued a lot. My father, always looking for some way to make it on his own, would spend what little money we had on, say, “stock” for the flea market; my mother, on the other hand, was the one who had to buy the groceries, etc., so she always knew how much money we had or didn’t have. We used to move from one apartment building to the next—I went to five different grade schools—and the one thing my mother always wanted was a house. Once we finally moved into a house (my sophomore year of high school), my mother feared we were going to lose it, and my father always complained about how much it cost. The house ratcheted up the stress-level for the few years we lived there. After my mother died, my father (burdened with medical bills) filed for bankruptcy and let the bank take the house.
Straight: Money was always a concern. Every minute, until I was in college. We wore homemade and used clothing, we ate inexpensive food, and there were lots of kids. But as the clichés go, we had a great time playing ball in the park, running the streets of our neighborhood and the foothills (we loved dirt surfing down the barren hillsides!) and not until I went to high school did I realize how much money and clothes and haircuts mattered.

How did you earn money growing up?

Brown: The first job I ever had was chopping cotton for $4 a day, from six to six. Hour for lunch. Later I picked it for two cents a pound. I started working in a grocery store when I was about fourteen or fifteen. I got a job at the stove factory where my father had worked as soon as I got out of high school, before I joined the Marines in 1969.
Chaon: I didn’t get a regular allowance, though in general we would get some money if we asked my dad for it. I always had work of one kind or another when I was growing up—we kept a lot of animals (chickens, pigs, sometimes a calf) and had a big garden. I got my first real jobs when I was in junior high, usually working some labor for local farmers. We lived outside of town, so I didn’t have a regular job until I could drive. In high school, I worked as a disc jockey at the local radio station.
McNally: I walked dogs for five bucks a week per dog. I sold stuff at the flea market. I was actually a pretty entrepreneurial kid, so I probably had more hard cash in my pocket than a lot of other kids. But I basically gave up a lot of my weekends to go to flea markets with my father and, as he liked to put it, hustle.
Straight: When I was twelve, I cleaned houses and babysat and mowed lawns. I cleaned houses and apartments through high school, and did general clean-up yard jobs with my future husband, whose father was a gardener. I also worked as a movie usher, a waitress, and a secretary. In college, I had three jobs: work-study clerk, part-time library clerk, and customer service operator for the L.A. Times.

What were your reading tastes growing up?

Brown: There were always books in our houses, of which we had many because we moved so much. We always had library cards and went to the library frequently, strictly with my mother. She was the influence on reading and instilled a love of it very early. I read all kinds of things when I was a child: westerns, Greek mythology, Norse mythology, horror stories, short stories of all kinds, history, even Moby-Dick. Read Hemingway when I was in junior high school and I’d never heard of him. When I was a boy, I liked stuff about boys and dogs, so I read some of Faulkner’s hunting stories, Jim Kjelgaard, Fred Gipson, Wilson Rawls, MacKinlay Kantor, James Street. Anything that had hunting was good, or animals. But I liked other stuff, too. Twain. Bierce. Poe. O. Henry. Saki. Welty. Just lots of stuff. I read widely. I loved reading. I liked going to other places in books.
Chaon: My parents were not big readers. I liked books from a very early age, and so I remember getting books as gifts: those Little Golden children’s picture books from the supermarket, and then comic books, which I was obsessed with. Our teacher at school would sometimes let us take old books home, and I still have one of them, Legends, Poems and Stories: Listed as Required Reading in the Seventh and Eighth Grades in Course of Study for Elementary Schools of Nebraska. It’s copyrighted 1936, but I remember how thrilled I was, back in the second and third grade, that I had a book meant for seventh and eighth graders! It had stuff in it like “Oh Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman and “The Village Blacksmith” by Longfellow and “The Great Stone Face” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In later elementary school and middle school, I tended to gravitate toward SF and fantasy.
McNally: I wasn’t much of a reader, although I do remember reading a novel that had been assigned to our class—maybe the first novel I ever read—called The Loner, I believe. It was about sharecroppers, and I remember immediately getting hooked by it because of all my mother’s stories about sharecropping. It was the first time I experienced the shock of recognition at reading something familiar. I saw the book 20-odd years later in a public library, and I was amazed at how much I’d remembered from it. I bought books, but mostly from the Scholastics order forms—books on the Loch Ness monster or Houdini—or else I’d buy paperback compilations from Mad Magazine, the collected “Spy vs. Spy,” that kind of stuff.
Straight: Growing up, I loved both working-class literature and British literature. I loved James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Betty Smith, Lucy Maud Montgomery, the SE Hinton novels all about class and teens.

Was culture part of your upbringing?

Brown: Not much that I remember. I belonged to the Boys Club and we had art classes, drawing, pottery. I never saw a real play that I can remember as a child. We had music, though. Even my daddy liked Hank Williams, and we listened to Marty Robbins, Elvis Presley. We had no art in the house. I liked to draw and did it pretty well, but quit. I tried to learn to play the violin, but I’m left-handed and they tried to force me to play it right-handed, so I never had a chance on that. I finally taught myself a little guitar by stringing one backwards about twenty-three years ago. Now that I’m grown I buy good left-handed ones. But I don’t remember much culture in my early life besides The Lawrence Welk Show on Saturday nights. Books were about it. Nobody in my family had ever even gone to college until my cousin went in the late ’60s.
Chaon: Well, not PBS-style culture, like opera or ballet or art museums. I don’t think I encountered any sort of high culture stuff until I was in college. Most of the cultural stuff I was exposed to was of the folksy variety. My uncle was a self-published cartoonist, for example, and there was a lot of craft-oriented activity: quilts and cabinet making and metal work and so on. A lot of people in my family sang and played instruments, and that was often part of a large family gathering.
McNally: Our family had friends who lived in one of the buildings we lived in—two sisters—who worked downtown Chicago and used to take me to plays (Annie, for instance), but otherwise I’d say the only culture that I knew about was pop culture. I loved movies and would watch anything, but all of those experiences were in a critical vacuum: a movie featuring the Munsters was just as interesting to me as Citizen Kane.
Straight: Culture was movies and books, for me. My mother and father never went to the movies, and my mother read textbooks while going back to school, while my father read only thrillers. But I loved books and film and music.

Was it always assumed you would go to college?

Brown: No, just the reverse. I fully expected to be drafted and go to Vietnam and be shredded. As it turned out, I volunteered and served all my time stateside. I wouldn’t have gone to college anyway, even if the war hadn’t been going on, because all I wanted to do once I got out of school was get a job and buy a car, and that’s exactly what I did. Both my brothers got college deferments, but I had to send money home the whole time I was in the Marines to help my mother keep my little brother in college so he wouldn’t wind up in the shit I was already in. Basically I had no desire for any more education, and probably had little ambition. My father died when I was sixteen and I was lost for quite a while. The world changed suddenly on me in an unthinkable way.
Chaon: I think my parents decided that I should go to college when I was pretty young, even though neither of them had finished high school. I was just sort of obviously bookish and gravitated toward school. I had a scholarship, a Pell Grant, and various kinds of students loans, plus some uninteresting work study stuff—desk monitor in dorm rooms, library refilling, kitchen crew, cooking, that sort of thing.
McNally: I don’t remember anyone mentioning college to me. My mother’s education ended with eighth grade; my father went to a year or two of high school before dropping out. It’s not that my parents didn’t think I shouldn’t go to college; it just wasn’t in their realm of experience, so it didn’t cross their minds. My high school guidance counselors tended to push trade schools on us. What made me decide to go to college was seeing someone return to my high school wearing a Loyola sweatshirt, and I thought it looked cool.
Straight: My mother never went to college, and neither did my father. My mother always had in mind that I would attend college, and when I scored high on the SATs, I got fifty letters from colleges and universities recruiting me. She helped me with the application process for three southern California schools, because I was afraid to go too far from home, and I worried about money. I got a full scholarship to USC, but still had to work.

What kind of working-class jobs have you had over the years? What did you learn from those jobs, especially from your coworkers?

Brown: Grocery store sacker, house painter, hay hauler, pulpwood cutter-and-hand-loader, fence builder, bricklayer’s helper, carpenter, carpet cleaner man, truck driver, forklift driver, dock worker, firefighter, pine tree planter, timber deadener, surveyor’s helper, plumber, answering service employee. Kind of hard to say what I learned from my coworkers. I guess the main thing I learned was that I didn’t want to work with my back for the rest of my life and wanted to use my mind instead. I didn’t want to remain poor. I wanted my children to have better opportunities than what I had. I wanted to work for myself. I saw people work their whole lives in factories, standing on concrete forty hours a week, and I didn’t want that life. I wanted more than that from life. I thought I could find it in writing. And I did. I have great sympathy for the good people of the working class. They have a hard time making ends meet, even when they work very hard and the fat cats in this country just keep getting fatter and not paying their fair share of income tax because the government allows it to be that way and gets rid of American jobs and gives them to foreigners. There’s much injustice. The little man is kept down by the big man, and it’s always been that way, and it always will probably. The factory worker can’t find anything better, or figures he has no right to hope for anything better since that’s what his daddy did and what all the people around him do. I was exactly of that mindset, but I changed over the years. Education is the only answer. For those that want it, I mean. I consider myself a working-class person who lucked out. I’m exploring some of this in the novel I’m working on now. I have a main character who works in that same stove factory.
McNally: I should state up front that I don’t really consider myself working-class. I grew up in a working-class family, and that’s certainly played a role in the shaping of my sensibilities, but I’ve also spent over half of my life now in academia, in one capacity or another, and so it would be disingenuous of me to claim that I’m working-class. And the sorts of working-class jobs I’ve held have been either short-term or part-time, so I don’t want to give the wrong impression. One thing that I find annoying are writers who’ll list every shitty job they’ve had, even if those were jobs they held for a week or two, when in truth they have an MFA or a PhD, and what they’ve really spent their time doing is teaching. It’s a weird phenomenon, the denial of one’s higher education in favor of casting oneself as a self-made man or woman (usually, it’s a man), as if that’s going to make the book any better. Often, these are the writers with Ivy League degrees and parents who teach in academia or are artists themselves. As for the jobs I’ve had, I scored standardized tests for about eight bucks an hour; I worked shipping and receiving; I worked for University Surplus, gutting buildings that were going to be destroyed; I did a lot of minimum wage data entry—just a lot of bad-paying grunt work. What did I learn from my coworkers? Most lessons I took away weren’t good. In Studs Terkel’s introduction to his book on working, he talks about (and quotes his interviewees) how most work breaks the spirit, and that’s what I often saw, people who were simply resigned to their lots in life.

Larry, what did you learn from your time in the Marines?

Brown: Um. Gee. Let’s see. They were without a doubt some of the meanest and scariest sumbitches I have ever met. Killers. Yes. And they trained you to be like them. We got picked up as seventy-five recruits and graduated thirty-three. It was good for me. It gave me some discipline and let me know I could do things a lot of people couldn’t do, because if you kept fucking up you were out of there. It was the first time I ever saw any reverse discrimination. This black sergeant looked at my admission papers the first night I was there and said: “You look like a backwoods motherfucker. Get yo ass to the back of the line.” I didn’t understand why he was talking to me like that and told him I hadn’t said shit to him. When I bowed up on him, he got kind of mad and threw my application on the floor. Another sergeant, a jovial Hispanic guy, told us with much merriment about killing all the chickens and pigs in the villages they raided in Vietnam and “fucking all the bitches.” It was a bad place to wake up in the morning. But I’m glad I went. It challenged me harder than anything ever had up to that time. I would’ve probably stayed in if I hadn’t gotten into some trouble near the end of my enlistment that was none of my fault. There was a life there, but I decided it wasn’t the one I wanted. I missed home too much. But I certainly understand why it’s the only life for some people, women and men both.

When did you realize you wanted to write about the kind of life you experienced growing up?

Brown: I don’t guess that was a conscious decision. Or maybe it was already an ingrained decision. I don’t remember ever thinking about it. I wrote about what I knew, country people, rural people who were working people. And I set them within a geography I knew. It was the natural thing to do.
Chaon: Probably not until late in my college career. I started out writing fantasy and horror. It wasn’t until I was in college at Northwestern, where there weren’t very many other working-class kids, that I began to want to tell those kinds of “realistic” stories about working-class life.
McNally: I tried writing about it when I was in college, but it was always sentimental and maudlin. It wasn’t until I was working on my PhD and started writing the first Ralph and Hank story—“Smoke”—that I found the tone I’d been looking for, as well as a way into the setting. By the time I started writing The Book of Ralph, the characters were well-formed in my head, and it was easier for me to write the other stuff (i.e., what Hank’s father thought about work, etc.).
Straight: I was a writer from age sixteen, when I took a fiction class at Riverside City College and wrote stories about older retired women who were poor and barely surviving. I never thought
about writing about anyone I didn’t know, and what I knew was lower income or working-class people.

Did your family encourage you to seek security in life or go all out to follow your dreams?

Brown: I wasn’t either way, really. It was just something I did in my spare time for years (while working as a firefighter) and they were probably surprised when I stuck with it. I know my wife was. She thought it was one of my whims. The last whim had been completely disassembling a ’55 in very bad shape and putting it back together, which I never finished and sold for junk. It was a pretty big day around here when I went up to Square Books in Oxford for my first book party in 1988. I became an official writer then. And my whole life changed.
Chaon: My dad really wanted me to go to law school, but it was never a big point of contention. Once I was out of the house, they really didn’t push me in one way or another. I was very self-directed, even from a very young age. I do think they were puzzled when I got out of college that I didn’t do better for myself, financially, and I’m sorry that they didn’t live long enough to see me become a college professor and have some success with publishing my books, etc.
McNally: My mother was always the pragmatic one: she thought I should have gotten a job after getting my bachelor’s. That’s not to say that she wasn’t supportive of me—she and I were very close, and she just wanted what was best for me, and I suspect she was afraid that I’d spend the rest of my life in school and put myself into deep debt…and she was right. My father was the one who thought I should follow my dreams, come hell or high water. I think I fall somewhere in between: I’m pragmatic (I have a teaching position), but I’d give it up if I could afford to in order to write full-time.
Straight: My family wanted me to go for security, and so I have always taught. I taught gang members and refugees at Job Corps, I taught ESL at a refugee center, then taught writing at
Riverside City College, and now have taught writing at U.C. Riverside, across the street from where I lived as a child, for sixteen years.

How does a working-class background help and hinder a writer?

Brown: Well, one way it helps is to make things realistic. I’m talking about these big presses and stuff in this stove factory in this novel, and I’ve got one that’s twenty-two feet high, and you can make car fenders with it if you’ve got the proper dies. And I used to change the dies in those things. They’ll smash your fingers off in a second if you forget what you’re doing for just one moment. And I also know what kind of people work there, so it surely helps to make the characters real. The food they eat, the cars and trucks they drive and the things that are wrong with them, the kind of beer they drink, the music they listen to. What they do on the weekends. Not just the way they talk, but that’s important, too. Real dialogue. Those people have hopes and dreams, too. About the hindrances I’m not so sure. Maybe they’re just personal ones. I rub shoulders with wealthy people sometimes and I’m not completely comfortable with some of them because we don’t have much in common. They like my books, yeah, and buy them all, and have for years, but beyond that, what do we talk about? So maybe my working-class background separates me from some people. I don’t seek a lot of company up town. The main thing I want if I go out to a bar is to be left alone, but that’s hard around here these days. So most times I just stay home and work. I’ve found out that I’m more comfortable with musicians than just about anybody, including other writers, but at the same time I’ve got a lot of friends who are writers. I’ve found that the better the person, the better the writer. It makes sense if you think about it.
Chaon: I don’t think I can speak in generalities about this stuff. I used to feel jealous of kids whose parents were very literary, who had access to the world of letters in one way or another. I had friends in college whose parents were magazine editors or publishers or who were close relatives to famous writers, and I envied them that. But I was lucky in that I found teachers who encouraged me in junior high and high school and college, and I was pretty willful about pursuing a literary life myself. It might have been nice to have a trust fund in those early years after college, but that brings a whole other set of problems along with it, doesn’t it?
McNally: I’m not sure how it helps a writer in general. I know how it helps me personally: I have a strong work ethic when it comes to writing, and I don’t expect anything to be given to me (as a number of writers I know do). As for how it hinders, well, publishers aren’t crazy about stories about the working class. There is inherently depressing stuff at the heart of most working-class stories—I think if a writer is honest, he/she will have to address that depressing stuff somehow—and, let’s face it, people don’t want to buy depressing stuff about people who toil away. My saving grace is that there’s humor in my work, but for years editors would say, “We like this, but it’s too depressing,” even though I was writing stuff that I didn’t think was depressing at all. The mass book-buying public would rather read about attractive people who have everything going for them. I’ve heard people say to me, “My life’s depressing…why would I want to spend time reading about someone else’s depressing life?” It’s a completely sensible argument on some level, too.

Do you think that writers with more prosperous backgrounds misrepresent the working class, including the jobs they perform? If so, how?

Brown: I can’t think of anybody in particular who’s doing that. If it’s inaccurate or fake, I think that would come out on the page. Just like in anything else.
Chaon: I think misrepresentation and stereotype is a part of the human condition, and the clichés about working people are very, very old by now. I think the biggest misrepresentation—in literature, film, etc.—is that working-class people are “simple,” that they don’t have complex mental and emotional lives. That’s the one that has always bothered me.
McNally: I think sometimes you can catch them making stuff up. I remember reading a story in which a character is moving a couch from one room to the next, and it was clear that the writer had never tried moving a couch from one room to the next. I read that passage and thought, Jesus Christ, I’ve moved a dozen or more couches in my life, and it’s NEVER been without incident. Now imagine what a professional furniture mover would think reading that passage. But there is another problem: such writers sometimes tend to glorify the working class in a way that ends up being patronizing. It’s as if being working-class in and of itself exalts you to a special class, one where the writer feels he/she is doing working-class people a favor by showing what good, honest, decent, hardworking people they are. This sort of writing lacks honesty.

Currently who are your favorite writers whose subject is the working class?

Brown: Brad Watson, Harry Crews, Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, Kent Haruf, Tim Gautreaux. There’s probably some more I’ve left out. Hard to make a complete list. There are so many people I haven’t read that I’ve heard are good. But it’s difficult for me to get enough time to read to stay halfway current.
Chaon: Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, and Russell Banks are three that I particularly admire, though their subjects aren’t always “the working class.” There’s a new writer named Keith Banner, whose book The Smallest People Alive has a lot of heart in it. Lynda Barry (the novelist and cartoonist) is fantastic. I also like, among others, Stuart Dybek, Steve Lattimore, Ann Cummins, Chris Offut, David Means. And of course there is Ray Carver, whose work probably taught me more about class than anyone.
McNally: When I first started writing, I was heavily influenced by Raymond Carver, as was every other student writer. I have always been a fan of Russell Banks’s books, and Continental Drift is, for me, a book that captures the desperation of a working-class man who, while trying to better his lot, keeps making things worse. More recently, Dan Chaon’s Among the Missing, which seems to be informed by a working-class sensibility, is a recent book I love. The working-class background in his work is more subtle. For satire, I’d have to give it to George Saunders’s Pastoralia. It’s probably not the first book that comes to mind when you think “working-class fiction,” but I think he captures a lot of the ridiculousness of work.
Straight: My favorite writers whose subject is working-class people: Pat Barker, William Trevor, Ernest Gaines, Pete Dexter, Toni Cade Bambara, James Baldwin, Tim Gautreaux, and Manette Ansay.

What is the importance of working-class literature?

Brown: To document these lives and the times these people lived in and to tell who they were. To leave something indelible behind. To let people know other people they would have never come to know personally in their lives. To let them know they are human beings just like everybody else.
Chaon: I don’t know if literatures need to have a subheading, but I think it’s important that art represents all aspects of human experience, and “working class” is one such experience for a lot of folks.
McNally: Literature’s agenda—as opposed to popular entertainment’s (which I’m not opposed to)—has always been, “Walk a mile in these shoes.” It’s not necessarily to be didactic, but I think literature tries to give the reader a new worldview, a view they may not have seen before, even if through the eyes of a character who’s not unlike him- or herself. Working-class literature—like any category of literature (African-American, gay/lesbian…)—individualizes experience, often shaking up our expectations, all the while opening up our eyes to a new way of looking at these people and their situations. I think working-class literature is important because it’s an underrepresented group, and yet most people work. It’s also blind to race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
Straight: The importance of working-class literature is not only for those who are not like us to read about us, which is essential for those who never come down our block or to our jobs. It’s also for us to read our own stories, to get a laugh of recognition, and for me, to make me happy while I’m writing sentences about things I know and love passionately. In my recent story set in a prison, I hope someone who’s never been inside can see what it’s like to work there, sure, but also so that someone who has been inside or who works there everyday can get that feeling of camaraderie, that secret code, that nod I hope comes when they read it.

Larry, what has been the reaction of readers to your work?

Brown: I get all kinds of comments. I truly cannot remember how many times I’ve been told by somebody (always a woman) that she’s my number one fan. Makes you think of Misery, of course. I swear before God, I was in a mall parking lot in Jackson last weekend, going to put some stuff in the 4-Runner, when a woman in a white car slowed down, rolled down the window, and said, “Brown, I’m your number one fan.” Don’t know who in the hell she was. Generally, I’d have to say that I’ve had a very positive reception. I’ve won some prizes and grants, for which I’ve been very grateful. I’ve always had good reviews. Out of a hundred, I’ll see two bad ones. People will usually turn out if you’re not in the crappiest bookstore in the crappiest city they can send you to, which does happen. I’ve got an Absolut Brown ad up here on the wall. I’ve got a real movie poster of Big Bad Love up on the wall. I’ve been in a couple of other movies. Just got the parts because of who I was. I’ve read at the Folger-Shakespeare Library in D.C. and talked to inner-city school kids there. I’ve had some great things happen. I’ve turned some of my work into plays and seen them done onstage after a three-week rehearsal. I’ve had lots of opportunities. And writing brought all of it. And of course some people are just the opposite of number one fans, will walk up and say something like, “Well, I just read Father and Son and it just depressed the hell out of me.” You can’t have a comfortable conversation with somebody like that. Some people will just be rude. The old ladies will ask why are there so many cuss words in my books. Or they won’t like the ending of Fay. They’ll want to know why I ended it that way. What they mean is why did I kill Sam? And how do you explain all this shit when you know you went through all the revisions and different endings long ago and made all these decisions? There are a lot of different reactions to my work. I’ve never gotten used to all of them. I’m not comfortable around a whole bunch of people any more. I like things quiet and I don’t like to talk to people I don’t want to. Many of them are well-meaning, but I’ve gotten to where I almost flinch if some stranger starts coming over smiling. I know he’s recognized me. Many of them are very nice. But I just don’t get out much. I prefer to stay with my growing family and my work and my pond and my little house I build in the woods behind it. That’s plenty of life for me.”

Orman Day is a writer living in Durham, North Carolina. The product of a Southern California working-class family, he has worked as a handbell-swinging Christmas tree at Disneyland, a kitchen pot boy, a folksinger, a railroad carpenter, a newspaper reporter, and a public-relations professional. His short stories, essays and poetry have appeared in such journals as Third Coast, ZYZZYVA, Creative Nonfiction, Red Cedar Review, Rive Gauche, Flyway, Inkwell, and Bitter Oleander. Several years ago, he was mentored at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference by Larry Brown, who taught him to “pile trouble on a character and then pile on some more.” Contact him at OrmiePDay@aol.com.