Conversations with Ellen Douglas

This collection of interviews from three decades features one of the Souths most prominent contemporary writers, one of Americas most dazzling practitioners of postmodern fiction.

From the early sixties, when she published the award-winning A Familys Affairs, to the late nineties and the publication of Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell, Ellen Douglas has written novels, short stories, essays, and a book of fairy tales.

These conversations with Douglas reveal her earthy frankness and her disdain for portentous declaration. In them, just as in her fiction, she expresses her love of people, language, and stories, her constant moral values, her inclusive compassion, her deeply felt obligations to others, and her keen sense of humor. She explains that comedy is as serious as tragedy -- its just funnier. Because she is an excellent, candid conversationalist, her light touch with portentous matters makes these interviews both dead serious and very funny.

The first is with Hodding Carter III, who in 1971 was a young journalist and family friend from Greenville, Mississippi, the town where Douglas was living and rearing three sons. Carter is among her early interviewers who explore the mystique of the southern writer and the southern climate for literature. Douglass string of new novels took her work forward into civil rights, womens roles, and questions about the institutions of family and marriage. The conversations illuminate this shift from southern tradition to concern over contemporary issues. Arranged chronologically, the interviews testify to the growth of Douglass narrative sensibility and to the profound use of allusions in her work. As she discusses A Familys Affairs; Black Cloud, White Cloud; Where the Dreams Cross; Apostles of Light; The Rock Cried Out; A Lifetime Burning; The Magic Carpet and Other Tales; Cant Quit You, Baby; and Truth, her remarks exhibit a consistent concern with technique and craftsmanship, for which she is much admired.

Of these sixteen interviews ten originally appeared in print between 1971 and 1999. Six have never before been published. Resurrecting lost material and exploring new insights, this collection offers the only comprehensive introduction to Douglass lasting body of powerful work. It also provides the tools for the in-depth studies of her art which are sure to follow.