Old times on the Haw: an interview with Dale Ray Phillips.(Interview)

Dale Ray Phillips grew up in Haw River, North Carolina. After taking a B.A. at the University of North Carolina and studying in workshops at UNC-Greensboro and Hollins College, he earned an MFA at the University of Arkansas. Subsequently, he has taught fiction writing at the University of Arkansas, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Clemson University, and Georgia College. His stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly Harper's, GQ, and elsewhere. His story collection My People's Waltz (2000) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. This interview was conducted in October 2002 over several pitchers of draft beer at 15[th] and Olive Bar and Grill in Murray, Kentucky.

George Hovis: Starting out as a writer, what sorts of obstacles did you encounter in trying to get your stories published?

Dale Ray Phillips: I'm terrible at grammar, or I was. I had to work really hard at that. Hell, I'm a hick, basically. I sent some stories out. The first story I published, I was about twenty-four. It's an embarrassing story--about my grandfather's pecker. That was in third person. I was writing in first person, and I'd go back and change it to third. That would help me clean the grammar up.

Timothy Williams: What made you want to write?

DRP: I don't know. It beats digging ditches. For my stature and size, I've done a whole lot of manual labor in my life. I've been a journeyman house painter, a bartender, a waitress--wait a minute, not a waitress a banquet waiter, a respiratory therapist, hack when I was in high school; that was before you had to get a certification. I worked second shift in an emergency room, and I could do electrocardiograms. When I was a kid, I worked on a giant sky slide. They don't have them anymore. A big ole slide that kids were dumb enough to pay fifty cents for ten minutes. I was the guy at the top--the opposite of the catcher in the rye. They'd catch 'em, I'd push 'em. I've done some construction. I've been involved, perhaps, in an insurance seam. And I've been a teacher. Teaching is an honorable profession. It does drain you. When I taught, I would put almost as much time into reading the story and thinking about the story as some of my students put into writing them.

TW: What do you think the relationship is between writing and teaching?

DRP: You teach to make some money so you can write [laughs]. No, now come on. Okay, you're reading some student's work, and you see what you don't like in it, and sometimes you see what you don't like in your own work in it. Also, you're thinking about writing. There's a lot of difference between teaching and writing and laying brick and writing. You know? You're not talking about writing when you're laying brick. Then again, you hear the best stories out there laying brick.

The other thing about teaching is you get to watch students do good. You might teach a thousand students, and then you have a couple who do okay. People have been nice to me, so why shouldn't I he nice back?

Doris Betts was an amazing teacher. ,If I'm bored, my face visibly shows it. Can you imagine all the boring stories she s listened to. Everybody comes to her, and she's like a Mama Theresa of creative writing. Everybody comes to her and just yamma yamma yamma, and you know she would never show her boredom. I've been lucky to go to really nice places [as a creative writing student and teacher]. I might have been an MFA bum is what Jim Whitehead said. I quit Greensboro.

GH: Why did you do that?

DRP: I wanted my head turned around. I went to New York City. I lived there. For about a year. I needed to get out of North Carolina. I had never been out. And then I came on back and I painted for a while. Greensboro taught me what I should write, what my material was. And Jim Whitehead at Arkansas kicked my butt. They taught me structure, which is very valuable.

GH: I'd like to talk a little about My People's Waltz. I was struck by the recurring themes of the discovery of the New World and the first moon walk--Manifest Destiny as the need endlessly to reinvent oneself as kind of a cultural obsession. How did that come into your fiction?

DRP: Okay. I'm from …