INTRODUCTION After learning that his mother has taken ill, indie-label folksinger Cyrus Harper returns to his hometown of Apogee bereft of success, estranged from his former family and friends, and still haunted by the loss of his sister who disappeared years ago. While Cyrus struggles, through a haze of pills and alcohol, to reconcile with his past, a mysterious woman roams the woods on her journey to reunite with her daughter. As their paths hurtle toward their fateful intersection, a murder ignites the town, a death pits Cyrus against his brother, and a long-lost, horrible truth is finally unveiled. Miss Me When I''m Gone is a mythical tale of music and of loss, of memory and its effect on what we call home. It is a story about the lengths we go to reckon with our pasts and the ways some old ghosts tend to linger on. ABOUT PHILIP STEPHENS Philip Stephens is the author of the poetry collection The Determined Days , which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA West Literary Award. His work as appeared in The Oxford American , Southwest Review , and Bomb , among other publications, as well as in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2004. He lives with his wife and sons in Kansas City, Missouri.
A CONVERSATION WITH PHILIP STEPHENS Q. There is much attention to scenic detail in this novel, specifically in terms of flora and geological features. What role, for you, do these natural details play in shaping a novel? Place is character; character is place, though some folks might argue that place forms character, and I expect that''s fair enough. But if we can agree that a story at its most skeletal tells of someone who wants something and what he''s willing to go through to get it, then place--in my case, hills, rocks, springs, streams, backroads, caves, trees, tarpaper houses, doublewides, town squares, and barns--becomes a character through which each character must interact. I feel like my writing has to bring to life, to a reader''s reality, what could happen. I want to make myth real. Wakoda County and Apogee Springs, Missouri, may not appear on the state map, but one of my jobs is to make the places appeal to senses, to a reality that can be seen, heard, tasted, smelled, touched, and tossed around. My grandpa Stephens used to cut and ride ties down the Osage River to Bagnell, Missouri, where he sold them to the Bagnell Line.
He had to know white oak from red oak, walnut from hickory. The differences meant food on the table for five boys, one daughter, and his wife. Later, he used to send his boys to clear brush on property across the road from their house. No matter the season--leafy summer, barren winter--they had to know which trees to cut, which ones to leave. That''s a writerly metaphor straining to be--knowing what to leave in, what to leave out--but what has impressed me, and made an impression on me, is how my dad can name a tree or bush by looking at bark or shape, and how he knows where such and such a tree will grow. Nobody hopes to be ignorant, but I don''t want to be ignorant of the physical world. I''d end up lost as a person, let alone a writer. So just as I have to know where I am as a writer, I have to say on the page, "You are here.
" I have to show just what is here and where to go. Chert differs from karst. Cave-spring water looks, tastes, smells, feels, and sounds nothing like dammed river water. Second growth timber varies from cedar and blackjack oak encroaching on a knob. Each resides in its place; each appeals to senses in a different way. If I can''t make that clear and real, I lose the reader, which at first is me, and the reader is lost. Q. Each character has a distinct way of speaking throughout the book.
How difficult is it to maintain consistent dialogue? How do you go about capturing authentic, realistic speech patterns for your characters? My forebears traveled out of east Tennessee and Virginia into the Ozarks. Language is culture, or switch that around. They hauled their language with them, and I guess it got passed to me from my folks, who came from south Missouri, and from their folks, whom we visited regularly. Such as: "You''d complain if you were hung with a new rope"; "He doesn''t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of"; "It''s black as ole Coalies'' ass"; "I''ll do that soon as I eat this hot bucket of shit"; "He don''t know shit from Shinola"; "Shit or get off the pot"; "You were born tired and never did get rested"; "He don''t do nothing and don''t know when to stop"; "He don''t know beans from buttermilk"; "He don''t know his head from a hole in the ground"; "She could talk the bark off a tree"; "I''m so hungry I could eat the ass out of a bear"; "You would argue with a fencepost." Sometimes these got cleaned up for a little boy''s big ears, though mostly I heard, "You''d complain if you were hung with a new rope" and "You would argue with a fencepost." Music, metaphor, euphemism--these were part of my day, and I loved to hear old people talk. In my house, "Foot," was a substitution for "fuck," at least when employed as a term of disgust. When my mother dropped a bowl of batter, cut her hand on broken glass, figured an error in the checkbook, she''d say, "six and two is eight.
" Not simple addition, but a euphemism for "shit." Some years ago I went to tour the Ryman Auditorium with my wife. We sat through the introductory film, which, of course, features Minnie Pearl. When I heard her, I got teary, and my wife asked what was wrong. "She sounds like Memaw," I said. My mom''s mother, Memaw, we called her, had died twenty years before then. My wife gave me a quizzical look: "She sounds like your mom." I like to blame the Southern Baptist Church in which I was raised for teaching me that people fail to say what they mean or mean what they say.
There, I witnessed folks disguise their personalities--contrary, morose, hateful, baleful, violent--with Christian language and bearing. Of course, disguising oneself is not limited to church. Conversations are rife with agendas, which as a writer you have to keep, but words often serve as a false face for the character speaking. I feel like when I write dialogue I have to be as much aware of what''s not being said as what is being said. When I worked as a signalman for the Southern Pacific Railroad out of San Francisco, California, James Agee''s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men became a guide to me. The first sentence to his piece on Alabama tenant farmer''s overalls begins thus: "They are pronounced overhauls." From there, he conducts a verbose study of overalls in their forms and changes: new overalls, old overalls, sweaty overalls, overalls slipped down in defecation. The importance of the pronunciation of overalls stuck with me, but so did the obsessive attention to detail of an object, which in turn gave life to the situation of a people.
Agee went on and on about overalls, and I loved it. I fell for all things Agee, and, in turn, for the photographs of Walker Evans, which came to me not as nostalgic glimpses but as a documentation of lives and lifestyles and entire communities passing. I found a quote from Evans, made large-print copies of it, and I''ve carried copies with me ever since, sticking them to the refrigerator, pinning them to my corkboard: "Stare. It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long." Maybe, for me, it''s an edict.
At least it says that the way I prefer to engage with the world is OK. Or crucial. I make up voices--rubes, hillbillies, hermits, pirates, teenagers at the mall or on the street--to entertain my sons, though sometimes I''ll keep up a voice to the point where my wife says, "Stop it. You''re scaring me." One morning, a few years back, I sat in a rocking chair holding my two-year-old who was obsessed with The Beatles. "Talk to Paul," he''d say. "Talk to John." Which meant talk like Paul or talk like John.
Before my first cup of coffee, my son required me to engage in a six-way conversation between John, Paul, George, Ringo, Winnie the Pooh, and a stuffed dog we call Tennie Hound because he grew up in Tennessee near Grinder''s Switch and played sometimes with Hank Williams when he wasn''t hanging out at Tootsie''s Orchid Lounge. Just as I have to know Tennie Hound''s story, I have to know where a character comes from--physically and mentally--before I can make voices both consistent and distinct. I have to write to get there, though. Once I figure it out I can go back to drafts of dialogue and say, "Nope, he wouldn''t say that" or "Huh-uh, she''s talking above her raising." Then maybe I can fix it. I hope so. In notes at the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Mark Twain writes: In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect, the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary "Pike-Country" dialect: and four modified versions of the last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
Twain''s probably gilding the truth a bit, but that''s not for me to say. I don''t write in dialect. These days, dialect would come across as poking fun, or being judgmental or bigoted. But I hope I provide enough of the sound and cadence of a character''s speech to make the character real. I guess that''s done mostly by ear. In a recent New Yorker article, an author maintains that Twain wrote as much by eye as by ear. I don''t know what figuring the author had to do to come up with what I think is a specious equation. Twain probably had to read his words back to himself.