Miracles Ain't What They Used to Be by Joe Lansdale

Author:Joe Lansdale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2016-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

“THAT’S HOW YOU

CLEAN A SQUIRREL”

JOE R. LANSDALE INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON

Where does East Texas end? (And don’t say the Louisiana line.)

It doesn’t stretch as far as Dallas, heading west, since that is what used to be called The Plains, though today The Concrete is more accurate. Simply put, if you go west and the trees disappear and the dirt gets black, you are not in East Texas anymore. Going north, it dies out before the Red River by some distance. Go southeast to Houston and you have gone too far. Houston is in the Coastal region, which though similar is still different.

East Texas has lots of shade, running water, and a meth problem.

Everyone (Hollywood included) agrees you have a gift for dialogue, but I think it goes deeper than that. There’s a vein of indirection and understatement in all your prose that I identify as a southern thing. Just saying.

I think that’s true, but East Texans can be very direct. It’s said that we drawl, but if we do, we drawl fast. We speak faster than most southerners, and our culture is more southern than southwestern; and though those two overlap, we are more farmer types than rancher types.

I think one reason I do pretty well with dialogue is that we are storytellers here, or at least have been in the past, and that’s a southern tradition. If the story has to do with somebody dead and their body tossed down into an old water well, or something dark in the woods, then all the better.

I always loved to listen to the older folks when I was growing up, how they talked. It impacted my writing by quite a bit. My parents were older when I was born, and they had gone through the Great Depression and therefore had a different viewpoint than the parents of many of the other kids I grew up with. My personal culture overlapped that of earlier periods, the Great Depression, and that of the fifties and sixties; in our family I was probably the only counterculture kid, so I have that to draw on as well.

My father had a lot of great sayings from having been born in 1909 and having heard as he grew up sayings from the 1800s. His relatives, many of them, had fought in the Civil War. My grandmother on my mother’s side was close to a hundred years old when she died. Came to Texas in a covered wagon. Saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show when she was a child and was forever enraptured by it. My father had boxed and wrestled a little for money, riding the rails to fairs to fight. He couldn’t read or write, though at the end of his life he got so he could read a little—newspapers, comics, simple paperbacks. But he could never actually be called literate.

My mother was a great reader when I was growing up and encouraged me to read. So did my dad. He knew how hard it had been for him not being able to read or write.

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