Bestselling author, Professor William Eakin, chatted about his book “Welcome to Redgunk: Tales From One Weird Mississippi Town.”
Eakin is an author and a retired professor with a passion for traveling. He has lived in over one dozen countries throughout his life. As an author, he much prefers to create his own genre, Eakin has perfected this in his collection of tales about fictitious Redgunk, Mississippi.
Today, Eakin calls Arkansas his home, where he enjoys writing on a cliff overlooking a river, great friendships, and wine. He continues his traveling adventures from the east to west coast of the United States, where he visits his children and their families.
When did you first realize you wanted to be an author? Did your early childhood shape this?
I wanted to be an author from early in my childhood. Of course, I read Lewis Carroll, Wind in the Willows, the Hardy Boys, The Hobbit. But more than that I was captivated by a workbook in third grade where we were encouraged to finish a story on our own. It began with: A squirrel jumps from a tree into a moving truck. And it asked, “what’s next?”
In seventh grade I read Edgar Allan Poe—mystery, charm, delicious excitement. A lot of us read EAP [Edgar Allan Poe] then, understanding maybe half the words. But it was all slightly erotic, dangerous, mystifying.
Drawn to the mysterious and beautiful just beyond my reach, I turned to science fiction classics like Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. That led me to philosophy, world religions and some of the most amazing and deepest questions. My most recent book, “Welcome to Redgunk: Tales from One Weird Mississippi Town,” represents a tongue-in-cheek exploration of those questions, and it always aims at sheer wonder.
In eighth grade, I wrote a story and tried to publish it in the important science fiction pulp zine Analog. A very supportive personal rejection letter came back that gave me a kind of fire that has supported me for decades—exciting, knowing what I loved and wanted. My life goal became to have a story in a pulp magazine I happened to find on a ten-cent sales table at a used bookstore.
Wishes really do come true! And better, nearly forty to fifty years later, after publishing 100 stories in some of the biggest magazines from Fantasy and Science Fiction and Amazing Stories to the magazine associated with the science fiction channel, I finally, finally got an acceptance from Analog.
By then, many of my funny, strangely written tales had been recommended for the genre’s highest awards, nominated by numerous pro authors for the Nebula Award. But even better, a collection of thirty years of work, “Welcome to Redgunk” is now on Kindle.
What I realized in all that writing was that I wanted to invent stories; to make something beautiful, and something as alluring as that original tale about the squirrel. To continue doing so now I experiment out beyond the limits of genre to create an experience for my readers to let the words melt into something moving and undeniable: a feeling of what we are and can be as humans that makes us cry and laugh and stand in awe.
Reading my work should be like sitting in front of an ocean, like listening to spring peepers singing from a pond at nightfall, like looking into the eyes of someone you love more than the word “love” can express. Maybe like seeing the world for the first time.
You have a new book out, Welcome to Redgunk: Tales from One Weird Mississippi Town. Can you describe Redgunk? Does it have any resemblance to a town in your life?
If you open any story about Redgunk, Mississippi you find a kudzu-covered little town with 200 to 400 people or so, a smelly yellow dog named America, and a mummy. The mummy is a mannikin from Macy’s New York, dressed up in knee bandages, but I think he makes a nice metaphor for the kind of claim most folks in Redgunk have to reality.
For 50 cents at Uncle Joe’s Corner Liquor Store and Gas, you can go see him and listen to him tell stories. Redgunk: swamp gas illusion, slimy frogs and bumpy toads singing to the stars, and people, who like the frogs, produce even in their most vulgar talk and actions, something like a melancholy ringing of bells and of the holy.
Redgunk resembles precisely where I and a lot of folks live. In fact, for a time, before I built my house on a local clifftop, I was a single dad with three kids in a mobile home, surrounded by farmland. Turned out the farmers there were pure rough country. What I discovered was that they were also the friendliest folks. They’d stop me on my road to chew the fat for two hours, would help pull my car out of a ditch or come by to help clear away fallen trees.
One burned another neighbor’s barn down, apparently, when they had a disagreement about where a common road cut off. Even so, from among these folks in the heart of country, some of the sweetest, most generous spirits showed up. I wanted to show that in my Redgunk tales.
And I hope they show too, that amazing, wonderful, and wondrous things happen with Lawnmower Moe, a large whiskey drinking man, as well as with Druidic priests at Stonehenge. I wanted to show in a cow-patty dotted field that the grasses of an ancient mystic Celtic magic force can sing in us all. And if Redgunk can show that, I suspect it can lure all people toward their own greatness.
After you’re done working on a story, who is the first person who reads it?
My seven-year-old granddaughter says, duh, I (me, the author) am the first who reads it. She is kind of right – on best days I wake up, start writing, finish by evening, I then take it outside and read it aloud (as all the stories are designed to be read aloud—like, as one pro reviewer said, it’s your crazy uncle reading stories on the porch) I read it again the next day for sound and rhythm and typos, and then send it off, which means the editor who takes it is the first to read it.
On very rare occasions a friend (like my friend John) will appear in a story, and I will ask them to read it first. I do that rarely because my friend John becomes a guy looking for things out in Redgunk Swamp he shouldn’t be looking for and encountering voodoo near a giant tree.
I try to limit that kind of direct involvement – it once got me in trouble with his wife, since she got killed off quickly in the tale.
Can you describe your ideal environment where you feel your writing is most productive?
On my porch, looking over the earth, with the sky open wide.
Can fans expect more books from you in the future? Do you have any sneak peaks you can provide on what you might be working on currently?
Yes! I have two completed novel manuscripts now being revised. One is a horror tale about a family that moves to a mountaintop in Oklahoma, only to find a devil lives in a labyrinth of tunnels inside the rocks. This devil has been collecting, learning from, and growing out of stories of the gods and goddesses. He constructs himself through the ages from what amounts to a library beneath the earth, a collection of all the things folks through the years have called evil. In truth he, like Satan in John Milton, is made beautiful and desirable even if horrible by a drive to become God.
A second novel is part biography, part essay, mostly fiction: a man whose wife is dying must come to understand himself—sexually, morally, socially—in new ways that dismantle his memories and self-identity. This also demolishes his writing, the writing itself. Deconstructed, it becomes a kind of madness.
The author is drawn through desire, exploration, fear and hope to his deepest self, his innermost flaws and to a radical self-emptying. He loses everything. A friend commits suicide, his wife dies, he is left empty. But he also encounters in this how the Buddhists speak of emptiness, sunyata, a kind of open listening. And here he gains new and real freedom to be who he chooses.
His bestselling book “Welcome to Redgunk: Tales From One Weird Mississippi Town” is available on Amazon by clicking here.
