Visiting with Clint McCown
by Claire Guyton
What inspired “Jerry Lee Statten”?
This is a novel excerpt set in a version of my home town in Tennessee. Growing up I heard many stories about the real-life tornado that leveled much of Fayetteville on February 29th—Leap Day—in 1952, one week before my birth. That provided the context and the setting. The character of Jerry Lee Statten grew from a friend of mine who lived up the hill from my grandmother’s house, and the character of Herb Gatlin grew from a man I knew who worked at the local newspaper office there. Neither portrayal is even remotely biographical, however. As with all my fiction, I took elements of people, places, and events from my life and combined them in fictional ways—like building a new house from recycled bricks.
Tell us about your writing process—either generally or specifically with regard to the birth and development of this story.
My process is one of slow discovery. The chapters in Haints move through a dozen different character points of view, but I had no idea that would happen when I began the book. Jerry Lee Statten was one of the early discoveries as I sought out different perspectives on the tornado destroying the town. I realized that I didn’t have a child’s point of view in the narrative, and Jerry Lee rose up to handle that chore.
Is there something you would love to write about but you can’t? Or something you did write about but you wish you hadn’t?
I’m working on a memoir now about some run-ins with Organized Crime that I had when I was a journalist back in the 1970’s. It has taken me a long time to gain the distance from that experience to write about it objectively, but I think I’m ready now. I’d already treated some of the same material in my novel, The Weatherman—and even though that book was essentially fiction, it took me a dozen drafts over a twenty-five year span to shape it. The “real” story kept getting in my way.
Do you have any guilty reading pleasures?
I read Golf Digest every month. I’ve had a long-standing connection to the game and have had a couple of pieces published in that magazine—a short story and an essay. It’s the kind of reading that I can approach in a relatively mindless way, and for someone who spends a great portion of each day doing substantive reading, a mainstream magazine can be a pleasant respite.
