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10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP)
00:46:37
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- [00:00]
Aaron Gwynn
Hi everyone.
- [00:01]
Podcast Host (Chronicle College Matters)
I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Check out College Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:46]
Sean McCann
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:56]
Jon Plotz
Hello and welcome to Novel Dialogue, a podcast sponsored by by the Society for Novel Studies and produced in partnership with Public Books. I'm Jon Plotz, the founder and fossil host, still somehow up here on the shelf for season 10, along with this season's hosts and co producers Emily Hyde and Chris Holmes. So, as loyal listeners will recall, the podcast involves a novelist in conversation with an admiring scholar. I guess maybe not always admiring, but in this case, certainly admiring.
- [01:25]
Sean McCann
I'm an admirer.
- [01:26]
Jon Plotz
Okay, good. Glad that's out of the way. Today we're honored to bring you Aaron Gwynn in conversation with my colleague and beloved friend Sean McCann, professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan, Keenan, professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan, longtime editor of Post 45, acknowledged Maven of 20th Century Literature, his rangy scholarly work, and he has an incredible range of articles. Includes two monographs, A Pinnacle of American Literature and presidential government from 2008 and and gumshoe, hardboiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism from Duke in 2000. And Sean, I'm very glad to be zooming with you today.
- [02:05]
Sean McCann
I'm very grateful to be here and I'm very grateful that you're joining us.
- [02:10]
Aaron Gwynn
Aaron Honored, honored that you would ask.
- [02:13]
Jon Plotz
Great. So the two of us are here today to speak with Aaron Gwynn, associate Professor of English at UNC Charlotte, whose published work includes the story collection Dog on the Cross, and four novels, the World Beneath Winds War, which I was just listening to on audio. I love that book. And yeah, and more recently, two wonderful linked historical novels, All God's Children, which won the 2020 Oklahoma Book Award, and Cannibal Owl, praised by the New York Times for its starkly poetic storytelling, which I totally agree with, but and so much more. So, Aaron, yeah, as Sean says, welcome. We're so glad to have you. And we Were hoping you might actually want to begin by reading to us out of Cannibal O Owl, just to set the mood.
- [02:57]
Sean McCann
Sure.
- [02:57]
Aaron Gwynn
I'll just give a. Give a little taste of a couple of pages. This is the very beginning of the book. They lived within earshot of the slap and sigh of that muddy river. Their home was a dugout among the black oak and cedar. Bailey would run his traps before dawn each morning carrying Levi and a pine frame papoose. By the time Levi was three, he was toddling beside his father through the forests and swirling mists. They trapped beaver, they trapped badger and raccoon selling the pelts downriver at La Harpe's trading post, though the Frenchman by that point had been gone a hundred years. The post was a two room cabin separated by a dog trot. For years it had been the only settlement in the region. Then in 1820, Little Rock was surveyed. 1821, the town became the capital of Arkansas Territory and the Pulaski county seat. Levi's father said the country was settling up. Soon there would be more trappers than game. His mother had died of milk sick the previous year. To Levi, her passing was like the passing of the moon. She was gleaming. She was gone. The fever that burned through her seemed to make her brighter for a spell. Her face shone like a jewel. Then she was laid out in a cherry wood box with coins over her eyelids as men filed past holding their hats. Later, Levi would wonder if this woman in his memory was the flesh mother who'd borne him into the world or the story mother. His father talked about a figure painted on the sailcloth of his skull. And he came to believe Susanna English would return to him someday, though, just as the moon climbed back into the sky after its absence. Oh, wow.
- [05:03]
Sean McCann
Thank you, Aaron. That is very powerful opening to a novel and it works beautifully, I think, to set up everything that's coming in the story of Levi English. And I'm hoping you just tell us more about why you want to tell his story and about the challenges and rewards of doing it, I guess. And let me just say for our listeners, if they're not familiar with the story and please correct me if I'm getting any of this wrong, Aaron. The novel tells of a real historical person, Levi English, who was a boy in the Arkansas territory in the 1820s and 1830s. He loses his parents. He's adopted into a Comanche tribe. At one point, he is raised among Comanche. Later in his life, he returns to Anglo society and becomes a founding figure in Texas history, an important person in developing Texas. And your novel focuses almost entirely on his time with the Comanche.
- [06:07]
Aaron Gwynn
Right.
- [06:08]
Sean McCann
And then the rest of his life is kind of an afterthought. And the novel ends with this very concluding, this very powerful concluding scene where we see Levi at his death, thinking back to his youth.
- [06:19]
Aaron Gwynn
Levi English was a man who founded Carrizo Springs, Texas. And he had been many things over the course of his life. He had been in a ranging company, Texas Rangers. He'd been commissioner of Atacosa County. But earlier on in life, as. As we were talking about, he was born in Arkansas territory, so outside the United States, but in. In the province of the. Of its territorial holdings. And then he gets taken to Texas after his father is killed. And then his son Bud says that one summer he ran away and he went to live with a Comanche. And there's nothing about his time with the Comanche. And so that's where the kind of imaginative and research into the Comanche people had to come in.
- [07:14]
Sean McCann
Yeah. Can you tell us more about what the challenges and the rewards of doing that kind of historical writing are? And let me just preface by saying, if you don't mind, Aaron, that your first several books are set in the contemporary United States. They're set in Oklahoma and Afghanistan. They present, I think, very vivid pictures of a world that is not often treated in literary fiction, I would say. And they are very accomplished at the task of realist narrative. The dialogue, the characters, the settings, they're all very vividly rendered. And it seems like you kind of made a departure with All God's Children in this novel and turning to the past. And I'm curious about what's the motive? What are the challenges? What are the rewards?
- [08:05]
Aaron Gwynn
That's a great question. I had written Winds War, which is about US Special Forces doing horseback operations in Afghanistan, which is something that we did and something we continue to do in other countries. We do it in South America at the present moment, in Colombia specifically. And so I decided I wanted to write a Western, a present day Western, but set in Afghanistan. Yeah.
- [08:34]
Jon Plotz
Right.
- [08:35]
Aaron Gwynn
And then my literary agent at the time said, like, have you considered just writing a western, you know, for your next book? He was like, you. You know, you write about horses.
- [08:48]
Sean McCann
He.
- [08:48]
Aaron Gwynn
He liked the way I wrote about large animals. And I grew up on a ranch. I grew up on a farm with horses and cows and everything. So I began to do research and nothing, nothing was really kind of grabbing me, grabbing my imagination. And then I ran up on Robert Lemon's story.
- [09:06]
Sean McCann
Yeah.
- [09:08]
Aaron Gwynn
And at that Point almost as soon as I started reading about lemons, I started writing, just writing pages. And it was. I had had. I had three books out at that point. And I thought, okay, I'll just read a little bit and I'll write this stuff. Everyone knows it. And then I realized I knew nothing about this. The stuff I'm writing about, right? I thought I had a pretty good command of 19th century American history. And I. I grew up in Oklahoma and Texas and. And good grief. I didn't know which plants grew at what time of the year. I didn't know what cowboys actually did other than stuff I'd gotten from movies, which is almost all completely made up. And so then I read about 200 books, one after another on 19th century America, Texas, specifically, biographies of men like Sam Houston, and just one thing after another. And I realized that to do the kind of writing I wanted to do, I had to read histories until I began to spot errors in them. Right. That's a. That's a kind of point for me that I've discovered is if you become familiar enough with your subject to where you go, okay, SC Gwinn says this thing about Jack Coffey Hayes, but TR Ferenbach says this thing. And these dates don't match up. It's only important in that as a writer, it gives you the confidence to throw yourself into the space because you feel like you have some footing. Whereas before I started off with this kind of arrogant notion, I knew this stuff. I realized I knew nothing. And then the way I'm kind of constructed, and I think a lot of writers are constructed, the moment that I. I start off with this arrogant notion, I'll just go write about these people. I understand. I come to the understanding I know nothing. And then I completely throw myself into the research. So, you know, I did all the, like, stuff that. I really hate hearing novelists talk this way because it sounds dramatic and grandiose, but I did all the stuff that I needed to do. I learned how I grew up shooting compound bows and that, but I learned how to shoot a recurve bow. I started making bows, not very good ones, but I. I learned how to make bows. I started, you know, talking to my Comanche friends. I started, you know, doing everything I could to. To create kind of sense memory and sensation. I bought all the firearms or replicas of the firearms that are in Cannibal Owl and All God's Children. I learned how to use them. I learned how they. They malfunction. I learned their history and that I'm not saying writers need to do that. I'm saying that in whatever world you're throwing yourself into as a fiction writer, the more you can create that sensory data for yourself, where this world you're entering into doesn't feel like the ideal, it feels more commonplace. And it feels. It feels real. And by real, I mean it has. It leaves a sensory impression.
- [12:30]
Sean McCann
It's got texture.
- [12:32]
Aaron Gwynn
That's right. I love Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I think it's a masterpiece. I think it's one of the three great American novels that people are always trying to find. McCarthy makes a conscious choice in Blood Meridian to frame only the violence.
- [12:51]
Sean McCann
Yeah.
- [12:52]
Aaron Gwynn
And it sure does. And it completely works. Right. That book would be diminished if. If the camera panned out a little bit and showed you something else. Right. So it.
- [13:03]
Jon Plotz
It.
- [13:04]
Aaron Gwynn
It's a world of. Of apocalyptic, biblical violence.
- [13:09]
Jon Plotz
Brutality. Yeah.
- [13:10]
Aaron Gwynn
Yeah. The truth is that that was never Texas. There's plenty of. There's plenty of violence. There's plenty of massacres. But there's also, you know, extraordinary kindness. There's community. There's belonging. There's. And a lot of the Anglo settlers who moved there, they were, you know, Scots, Irish, hill people for the most part, but they also love to dance. They also loved a gathering.
- [13:36]
Sean McCann
They also loved before the Baptists come. Right.
- [13:38]
Aaron Gwynn
Before the Baptists come. Right. So I'm. I'm interested in that fuller picture.
- [13:47]
Sean McCann
You know, you mentioned frontier and, of course, the various conflicts that are taking place on the frontier and the inevitable displacement and conquest of Native Americans and how this is all in the background of your fiction. And there's a way in which Levi is a version of a classic character in American literature. My colleague Richard Slotkin, who's written brilliant books about this history and the methods.
- [14:13]
Aaron Gwynn
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [14:15]
Sean McCann
He calls this figure the man who knows Indians.
- [14:18]
Aaron Gwynn
Yes.
- [14:18]
Sean McCann
The Anglo character who has become familiar with the ways of Native Americans and frequently better skilled at them than the natives who have taught them those things. And the. The implication of that character, you know, stretches, of course, stretches back to Daniel Boone, to Fannimore Cooper.
- [14:38]
Aaron Gwynn
Natty Bumpo. Is that. Is that figure right?
- [14:41]
Sean McCann
Natty Bumppo, the class.
- [14:42]
Aaron Gwynn
Right. Yeah.
- [14:44]
Sean McCann
And in Natty Bumppo, there's often a kind of tragic atmosphere around that character because the freedom of the frontier is bound to go away. The world that he has known is gonna disappear. But the usual implication is that that character in some way symbolizes the legitimacy of white possession of the territory of North America. It was bound to happen. Usually it was just that it happened. It points. It was fateful, and it points toward a future that is in some ways legitimized or justified by the experience of this character. Sometimes the implication is, well, this character must be savage in destroying Native Americans that he has learned from. Sometimes there's an implication that it's ugly and pathological in some ways, like the Searchers. But, you know, usually there's a suggestion like, it has to happen. It's right that it happens. But am I wrong to say that with Levi that you're telling a slightly different story?
- [15:49]
Aaron Gwynn
I think I am. I think that there are two ways in which Native Americans are written about and portrayed in stories that. That bother me personally. I'm not saying other people. Other people should be whatever they are, but that bother me personally. The. The first way is the way of old Hollywood, where anyone who was, you know, Commanshee or Chippewa or whatever, you know, indigenous tribe, are portrayed as savages, you know, and godless and all the other kind of stuff. Right. So we obviously recoil from that. Now, the opposite, I think, is equally a problem where all, you know, all Native Americans are noble and, you know, as if these aren't complex human beings with their own material culture and their own, you know, divisions with other tribes and their own conquest other way. In other words, that they're thoroughly human and imbued with all the good and the bad that other human beings have. So I wanted to situate Levi as this kind of interloper and wanting very badly to belong to something. And then we know that this. I think we know this experience is doomed for Levi in part because we know the Comanche, as they existed in the 19th century, were doomed, that they'd be forced onto the reservation at Fort Sill and all the depredations. And so I think when you are a person in Levi's situation and you make the choices he makes, you end up with a demon. And whether you want to talk about demons, metaphorically, whether you want to talk about demons metaphysically or psychologically, it kind of amounts to the same thing in. In terms of the suffering. And so I. I'm very interested in the idea of the violence of the west resulting in a kind of possession.
- [18:02]
Sean McCann
Yeah.
- [18:04]
Aaron Gwynn
And a large part of the conquest by Americans takes place post Civil War. I don't think it's lost on any historians that these men who saw the kind of carnage that people saw in the Civil War, you know, Cold Harbor, 8,000 union dead in 15 minutes. In Shiloh, 26,000 casualties in 24 hours, like that kind of. It's almost unimaginable, that kind of unimaginable suffering that the men who saw that many of them north and south, went west after the war was over because they couldn't sit still.
- [18:44]
Jon Plotz
Bringing the technology of the war with them too. Like bringing the gun and.
- [18:49]
Aaron Gwynn
That's right.
- [18:49]
Sean McCann
Revolver. Yeah.
- [18:50]
Aaron Gwynn
Sam Colt's famous revolver. Right. Which no one wanted, by the way, until Jack Coffey Hayes in 1844 liberated a crate of those Patterson revolvers from the Texas Navy. Up until then, no one saw the utility in a gun that you could fire five times without reloading. Yeah, right.
- [19:13]
Sean McCann
Good for fighting Indians.
- [19:15]
Aaron Gwynn
Yep. Close quarter combat.
- [19:17]
Jon Plotz
I've been sitting here racking my brains trying to figure out what your other two novels are, and I think I'm just going to ask you what your other two novels are besides Blood Meridian. But I was thinking when you said that the idea of possession, I was thinking about Mark Twain and, you know, the way. And even Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court, you know, that vision of bringing with, you know, bringing the barbed wire and the electrified fence and the machine gun that, you know, even if you're going back to Arthurian, you know, you can create as imaginary and bucolic a space as you want, but you bring your own weapons of death with you.
- [19:49]
Aaron Gwynn
Yeah. For me, the. The three that, when I think about the great American novel everyone's looking for, I think of Moby Dick, Absalom, Absalom and Blood Meridian. Those are the three that always come to mind. I think Toni Morrison's Beloved obviously gets there for a lot of people and is a brilliant masterpiece of a book. I'm not personally the biggest fan of Thomas Pension, but I think he's a genius. And I think Gravity's Rainbow certainly has many of the characteristics of a great American novel. Even though Pension's humor isn't quite to my taste. That's a. That part is a subjective observation on my part. And he's. He's very, very skilled.
- [20:37]
Jon Plotz
Can we stick with Beloved for a minute? Because it gets at. I mean, really, I'm. Sean. I've been turning your question about why history over around in my mind. That question of, like, because, you know, Pynchon is writing about his own century anyway, and Melville is certainly writing about an industry that he knew well. But Morrison does the same thing you do, which is that she looks back to this formative mid 19th century moment to try to figure out something.
- [21:03]
Sean McCann
There's a scene too. I'm curious whether you were thinking about this but there's a scene in All God's Children where you kind of rewrite a classic scene from Beloved. The scene Cecilia's in the attic of the barn looking down on the cotton gin.
- [21:18]
Aaron Gwynn
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't. I haven't made that connection, but that's a great connection. I also. I'm indebted to Morrison's. I mean, she said things later in her life kind of objectively about Beloved that I'd rather not know. Because, you know, one of the tensions of Beloved is, is this ghost real or is this ghost, you know, psychological or projection or whatever it happens to be? I think that's. That's one of the main tensions of the book. But just. And you fall down in that first chapter of Beloved, and these things are happening and these people are having this experience, and it ultimately doesn't matter where the. Whether the ghost is real or not, because the people are haunted. And that was instructive for the turn Levi takes.
- [22:10]
Sean McCann
Oh, so he's kind of haunted by the mupitzi and the memory of his experience.
- [22:18]
Aaron Gwynn
Yeah. And I think because I grew up. I grew up in rural Oklahoma, I grew up in a Pentecostal family in the Pentecostal Church. And because I saw and experienced religious ecstasy, and it's in its, like Greek connotation, possession, you know, I, you know, sought a lot of that. It's much easier for me to believe that. That people in extreme circumstances have extreme reactions and extremity of feeling and consequence.
- [22:55]
Sean McCann
It's a really striking feature to me of your whole body of work, I guess, the seriousness with which you take and depict the kind of spiritual experiences, the religious convictions, the longings and frustrations that your characters have. The fiction is very spiritually informed, I would say.
- [23:16]
Aaron Gwynn
Thank you for saying that. I think it grows out of my personal belief that whether a person is a believer or isn't a believer, I would hope that we can agree that belief and religion and faith plays an enormous role in a lot of people, millions and millions of people's lives, and has played an enormous role, an outsized role in the American kind of psyche and is always balanced against our love of vice. I mean, Americans love vice. Like, you know, does anyone love our vices more than Americans? Do anyone love their vices? And also, you know, there's the puritanical strain of, you know, we're going to be fit and perfect and we're going to. Everything's going to be logical and. And then, you know, there's this thing in the woods. Calling to us, you know, which is represented by the freedom of the Comanche or something like, you know, Sam Houston experience. Sam Houston didn't have a particularly bad childhood. He just began to run away from home and kind of like sleep over with the Cherokee on this island. Right. And they adopted him. I mean, he was their son. He became the Raven. And that, for me, like, Sam Houston is a far more interesting and foundational figure in my imagination than Martin Van Buren or someone like that.
- [24:53]
Jon Plotz
I love that we talked about McCarthy, and I love that this James Fenimore Cooper, the importance of Fenimore Cooper. But can I ask you about a few other writers I thought of? I also like. Sean. I really love your writing, and I love the you from history, you know, in the present and in history. So I thought about a few other writers who also, it seems to me, move in really interesting ways between writing about the contemporary world and the past. And I just. If you had thoughts about any of them, one is Larry McMurtry, one is Charles Portis, and then. Yeah, I thought you might. And I. Yeah, I. I mean, I really. There's a true grit quality that comes through.
- [25:30]
Aaron Gwynn
It's amazing.
- [25:31]
Jon Plotz
And then the other is John. Is John Williams. I don't know if you thought about him.
- [25:35]
Aaron Gwynn
I went to John Williams University. I did my PhD in the creative writing program I founded at the University of Denver.
- [25:42]
Jon Plotz
Denver. Wow.
- [25:43]
Aaron Gwynn
I'm a. I'm a. Not only am I a fan of Williams, I'm an enormous John Williams defender. I'm periodically defending Stoner on Twitter, which is a book that has most loved
- [25:55]
Sean McCann
and most hated novel.
- [25:56]
Aaron Gwynn
Yeah. It's incredible. It's incredible. Like, people I love and respect, I'll see on there, you know, they'll be like, what is this thing? How do people love this? And then there'll be people in the replies. You don't get it. He's a genius. But Butcher's Crossing, of course, that's what I was saying.
- [26:14]
Jon Plotz
More.
- [26:14]
Aaron Gwynn
Yeah, Butcher's Cross, I think it's a. It's a tremendous book. And it's. He did something from book to book. He does something so different. And I really admire that about him, that he'll write Stoner and. And then he'll write Butcher's Crossing and then he'll write Augustus, which won the
- [26:33]
Jon Plotz
National Book Award, I think. Pulitzer. Yeah.
- [26:35]
Aaron Gwynn
And he moves in that really bizarre way. I haven't read enough McMurtry to make any kind of. I've started lonesome dove about 10 different times, and I get a little tripped up. Don't yell at me. Too many people who I respect adore McMurtry. And I'm going to like, I'm going to sit down and, and, and give it a good go. But I love Portis in particular, I love True Grit. He's a ventriloquist at his best. And that voice. Yeah. For that girl is so incredible. Yeah.
- [27:14]
Jon Plotz
Like Mark Twain. It's not comedy, it's humor. It's the humor.
- [27:18]
Aaron Gwynn
Oh my gosh. And it's so. Everything that happens, that book and there are many extraordinary things. It's all so credible. And he sells it with that voice. And one of the. Another thing I appreciate, the seams of his research don't show. So, you know, he's clearly done all the reading. He understands where all, everything is and why it's. But he doesn't, he doesn't do these self conscious things to trot out the details to let you know how, how smart he is. They're fully incorporated into his fictional world. And so, I mean, there's a great scene where Cogburn and the Texas Ranger argue about lebeef, they argue about William Quantrill, and that's not explained if you don't know who William Quantrill is or you don't know about the, you know, Bloody Bill Anderson, if you don't know about that stuff that goes over your head.
- [28:11]
Sean McCann
Cochrane is a veteran of, of Quantrill's Raiders. Right.
- [28:14]
Aaron Gwynn
Yeah, yeah. And Labif said, you know, I was in the army of Northern Virginia and I don't have to hang my head when I say it, but when he, when he bad mouths Quantrill, that's like, that's a. He's crossed a line with Cogburn. Right?
- [28:27]
Sean McCann
Yeah.
- [28:28]
Aaron Gwynn
And, but at no point does the narrator say, oh, I would later learn that Quantrill would. No, it's just, I mean, she doesn't really understand all of what's going on. And the reader may or may not understand, but we're looking on and she's reporting what these guys say. I mean, it's, it's so good, you
- [28:47]
Sean McCann
know, Aaron, in two ways. I hadn't thought about the connection before, but in two ways that reminds me of a lot of your fiction, I guess. And one, I suppose I'm repeating myself, but the kind of ambivalence of heroic character is great in that novel and that, you know, this backstory of Rooster Cogborn, you know, that he was forged by his experience in a terrorist army, basically.
- [29:09]
Aaron Gwynn
That's right.
- [29:10]
Sean McCann
And yet he is Also a heroic kind of figure and saves Matty, et cetera. And I guess the historical context of his formation seems comparable to me, to what you show in the formation of your characters. And what I'm thinking of are the various kind of, for lack of a better word, villains or antagonists who show up in your novels who are like the protagonist, people of sometimes extraordinary abilities, but they're damaged characters, and they've been damaged, it looks like, in most cases, by their experience of Empire, that in some way they have been tools of, or victims of imperial conquest.
- [29:57]
Aaron Gwynn
Oh, yeah, I'm. I'm just. I'm friends with too many veterans who. That, you know, all of whose service I respect, even though I. I was opposed to the Iraq War. And I don't see that we got anything good from it, and I see that we got a lot of bad things from it. But. But, you know, my buddies were in horrible combat, and many of them did very brave things, and they're brave to be over there in the first place. And I still honor that, even though the larger thing, which I see is not their fault. I see it's the fault of the policymakers. But, you know, those things have left their marks, and their experience with the things that they saw and the things they had to do stays with them their entire lives.
- [30:49]
Sean McCann
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You show that so vividly in kind of small and large ways, I guess, that, you know, I'm thinking about a character from your very first novel, that. The Hickson character. And then the characters like Juan and McCluskey and all God's children, that they share a kind of profile, I think.
- [31:11]
Aaron Gwynn
Yeah. The thing that I admire about McCarthy is his. He's got these villains who don't seem to be troubled by emotion, which is another way of saying they're not fully human.
- [31:27]
Sean McCann
Yeah, they're psychopaths.
- [31:28]
Aaron Gwynn
Yeah, they're psychopaths and like to. To speak of Judge Holden and Anton Chigurh outside of the context of the book. Yeah, they begin to sort of crumble.
- [31:40]
Sean McCann
Right.
- [31:40]
Aaron Gwynn
But inside the context of their stories, they're completely credible. They're entrancing, they're horrifying, they're mesmerizing, all the things. They're philosophical. My experience with truly bad people has not been that they're philosophers. My experience is that. That most of the truly bad people I've been around are. Have been through horror and. And there's. When you learn their backstory, so to speak, it's no surprise that they are the way they are. It's like, yeah, if you do these things to this person, they end up this way. Yeah. So the judge doesn't seem to have a history. It's impossible to think of Anton Chigurh at the Drive In Theater on a date when he was 17.
- [32:30]
Sean McCann
Right?
- [32:32]
Jon Plotz
Yeah.
- [32:33]
Aaron Gwynn
Yeah. They come from another place and I admire that. But I. I don't think I'll ever be able to create that kind of a villain because of. Because of the things I believe about people. The other.
- [32:45]
Sean McCann
I'm sorry, Go ahead, John.
- [32:46]
Jon Plotz
No, I was just going to ask John if you maybe had a final question before we turned from. For home with the signature question.
- [32:52]
Sean McCann
But you go, yeah, well, I could
- [32:55]
Jon Plotz
keep going forever, clearly. As you should.
- [33:00]
Sean McCann
So my apologies to you both if this is too long and leading of a question. But the other thing that you reminded me of in referring to True Grit is my impression that running throughout your fiction, there's a kind of Decline and Fall story that Duncan Lammens puts this most concretely. I guess, in All God's Children, Cecilia has that perception of the world of machines in the future. Levi in Cannibal Owl is on his deathbed. And the implication is that everything has happened after his experience with the Comanches has been kind of worthless and even squalid and in a kind of still larger sense. My impression is that when you write about the past, you are able to describe these grand events and a kind of freedom for your characters, as you say. And when you write about their characters in the present, their lives are so constrained. There's such severe limits on what they can do and how they can act and how they can think. And my impression is that you're kind of drawn to a story of a kind of decline and fall, that there was possibility, there was hope, there was a chance for something. It didn't pan out.
- [34:16]
Aaron Gwynn
I believe that. And people are always yelling at me for not being more politically minded. And I don't quite know what they mean. I think they mean for not watching MSNBC and getting upset at everything I see on there, which. Which if you do that, that's fine. It's just. It's just not my thing. And maybe my attitude is more cynical, but I. I think that America steps off a cliff into the abyss in 1876, and it just. It just completely. One domino after another falls, and it falls within a few months. I mean, the. The efforts at reconstruction are summarily abandoned. Yes. You just give up.
- [35:03]
Sean McCann
Yeah.
- [35:04]
Aaron Gwynn
It's like, let's do all this stuff. Let's, you know, make, you know, the, the Freedmen's Bureau and then let's just math, forget it. So that's the last full year of, of Grant's presidency. Wabio Hickok is assassinated in Deadwood. The Comanche are, you know, run into the Agency 1874. The Sioux, Lakota, they're run into the Agency 1876. Barbed wire allows people to inexpensively fence off the West. So all this freedom of movement, all this freedom of motion is completely corralled almost overnight because a guy figures out how to create inexpensive fencing. So constraint is the right way to say it. I think the lives of Americans became constrained and, and set on grooves into this industrialized technocracy we live in now. And I. And by the way, I don't know how you get out of that. And I have no ideas about that. I think it's firmly entrenched and I'm aware I'm speaking into a microphone, talking into a computer. Right? I mean, we're in that.
- [36:16]
Sean McCann
You do sound like Thomas Benchen.
- [36:18]
Jon Plotz
Well, this, this actually seems like a good setup for the segue. To our final question, Aaron, which is that every novel dialogue season has a question signature question, and the one for this season, which I hope you've had a chance to think about, is who was your favorite teacher and why?
- [36:33]
Aaron Gwynn
Well, that's a very easy question for me to answer because I had a really singular experience. I didn't really do well in high school because I didn't go very much. I just. I wanted to play guitar and chase girls that didn't love me and run from ones who did. And. And I didn't really see how you could do much of that in, in a. In a seat. So I had to go. I had to start off at community college because that's the only place that would take me. I didn't really have much interest in being in. In a college of any kind. But the first class, my first day of that first semester, a man walked into the. The comp one room named Robert Hill. And Robert, that was his first semester and first class he taught there and he was in his 50s and he had been a rock musician. He was a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant drummer. And he was in one of these bands that has opened for everyone but never quite makes it. I mean, they were always on the edge of, on the verge of this great success. And like so many bands with, with tons of talent, they never, they made it, made it across the threshold. So in that comp one class, I was struck that, wow, here's this Guy who is talking about writing, but he likes Pink Floyd and he's got a Jimi Hendrix poster on the wall of his office. And you know, things that were important to me when I was 17, 18 years old were important to him at 50. And so for the first assignment, and no one in school was like, oh, you write Willy. Well, you should think about writing. So the first assignment, the personal essay, I, I handed in the essay and when I got it back there was like, there were, was a two page letter and it said you've. He called everyone Mr. Or Mrs. Or Ms. Right and said Mr. Gwen, you fooled me quite a bit actually. And he says, I predict that one day you will earn a fair living with a pen. And someone he might have, might as well told me I'm going to be an astronaut. No one was predicting that I was going to earn much of anything at that point in my life. But he saw whatever it is I've become. He saw that thing in Germ and that four page, you know, freshman comp essay and he said, come see me. And so I went to his office and, and I now realize that he worried that I'd plagiarized the essay because, because maybe he thought that a freshman couldn't have produced it or whatever he thought. But after we talked a little bit, he was satisfied. No, I, I had written it and then he just began to, he took, he just, just said ignore the syllabus, just start, just start writing stuff for me. And so I just write things given to them, maybe poems, they'd be stories, they'd be whatever. And we became, I took, you know, all the classes I could before I went off to a four year college from, from Robert and we became great friends afterward and up until his death. He's a brilliant man, a very like maybe the funniest guy I've ever met. One of the, the most talented drummer I've ever played with. I am just a really deeply compassionate human being who was passionate about literature and passionate about words. And it was, I would not be where I am today if it weren't for him. I, there's no question about it.
- [40:21]
Jon Plotz
That's great. Hey Aaron, do you want to shout out the name of your community college?
- [40:25]
Aaron Gwynn
Yeah, I believe they changed the name, the name to Seminole State College. It was Seminole Junior College. But like a number of, of junior colleges, they kind of wanted to get away from the junior college name. Seminole State College. Go Trojans. A wonderful, a wonderful school there in Seminole, Oklahoma. Great nursing program, which is what I had enrolled As I thought, well, I'll go be a nurse. You know, it only takes two years. And I didn't know I was going to end up with, with all these letters after my name. But yeah, when I, when I, like, was around Robert, when I saw him in his office hours or, you know, I'd catch him outside and we'd smoke and talk about Jimi Hendrix or Edward Van Halen or, you know, whatever. And he was conversant on pretty much everything, you know, history and politics and religion. I mean, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant guy. I was like, oh, I want to do that. Like, I, I don't know how you got here, but I want to do what you do. But, you know, he would always push me about my writing. He was like, you know, you have a gift and you really ought to be pursuing it. And there was no one else saying that to me, which, I mean, I forget. I've been a professor here at UNCC for 22 years now, and I think as a professor, and maybe you guys have experienced this, you become a little bit inured to the effect that you can have on students lives by just encouraging them or seeing something they do well. And I have to remind myself of that because I'm so far from it. But if I think back to what, to what Robert Hill did for me and means to me, I can, I can summon it up.
- [42:21]
Jon Plotz
Well, that's, that's awesome. So, Aaron, I don't know you, I imagine you're that kind of teacher. But Sean, I know, and I can guarantee he is because, you know, he comes to visit me at Brandeis and people walk up to him who've seen him lecture at his university. You just want to say, so, so, yeah, I love the idea of the person who's pushy and also conversant, know, being able to be in conversation about things that matter to you when you're young. So that's great. Thank you.
- [42:47]
Aaron Gwynn
Charismatic and passionate and a, and a deeply, deeply humane, like, good guy. Just a good dude who was, he's as smart as anyone I've ever met. He was as smart as the people who taught me when I was in my doctoral program, you know, or smarter. But, you know, he had toured around the country with a band for 20 years and was 50 years old and. Yeah, well, he had a, he had a PhD from University of Tulsa. So he's like, I'll just go teach comp somewhere.
- [43:20]
Jon Plotz
Yeah.
- [43:21]
Aaron Gwynn
And thank God for him.
- [43:22]
Sean McCann
Thank God. Yeah. Great story.
- [43:24]
Jon Plotz
Yeah. Well. So, Aaron, Sean, I just want to conclude by thanking you both so much for this.
- [43:29]
Aaron Gwynn
Oh my gosh, it's a complete pleasure. A complete pleasure. I really enjoyed it.
- [43:33]
Sean McCann
Thank you so much for being here, Aaron. And thank you guys for your writing. Yeah, glad you met Robert Hill.
- [43:38]
Jon Plotz
I just want to wrap things up if you guys don't mind. I just want to quickly thank the Society for Novel Studies and the Rick Adelman College of Communications, Humanities and Social Sciences at Rowan University for sponsoring the podcast and acknowledged support from our partner Public Books. As you know, if you listen, Beck Daly is our amazing production intern Connor Hibbert is our sound engineer. So please subscribe, rate us and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Novels from past seasons include Zhang Rae, Lee Orhan, Pama, Helen Garner, Secret Nunez, Carol Phillips and lots more and more conversations coming your way this season. So from all of us, thank you so much for listening.