GH O TI
f i sh
Issue No. 2
The Architecture
of Stay More
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Ghoti: In your nonfiction book, Let Us Build Us a
City, you describe a narrator who seems to be on the verge of giving up
writing. Were you on the verge of giving up writing at this time? Harington: Yes, at that
particular time my life was a mess; I had suffered several staggering losses
-- father, job, wife, home, publisher, health -- my four published books had
failed to attract much attention, and I couldn’t find a new publisher. Of
course I should have known (although it took me eleven years to find it out)
that a true writer will always go on writing despite any setbacks. Ghoti: Your
work seems so experimental, and yet so intrinsically readable. Have you had
trouble getting published over the years?
Harington: Yes,
enormous trouble, although not because I am experimental or readable.
Publishing is, next to roulette gambling, the most unpredictable game on
earth, and I was under some kind of jinx that scared off most publishers. My
latest novel, With, broke the
records of Malcolm Lowry and David Markson for total number of rejections. Ghoti: You have
written 13 books and have a steadily growing, devoted fan-base. You have had
many publishers and currently have no agent. Any advice on the business end
for young writers? Should writers worry about agents? Harington: For young
writers, agents are a necessary evil...extremely necessary and unimaginably
evil. One can only hope to reach the point eventually of not needing them any
more. After eight different indifferent agents in my long career, I have
sworn them off forever. Ghoti: In a
dream come true for Harington fans, Toby Press has recently begun reissuing
several of your previous novels. What led you to Toby Press? Harington: After
exhausting all the resources for finding a publisher for With, I chanced upon a website which a fellow sufferer had set
up, chronicling his own long sordid history of trying to find a publisher, and giving the names and email addresses of all
publishers, and that’s how I found Toby. I highly recommend the website http://www.everyonewhosanyone.com/index.html not only for young writers but for old writers like myself who
couldn’t find a publisher. Ghoti: Any
plans to do another nonfiction novel? Maybe an autobiography? Harington: I’m thinking
of doing a silver anniversary sequel to Let
Us Build Us a City – that would be in 2008. But I’d like to save the
autobiography for my ripe old age. Ghoti: In many
of your books, you describe folk remedies, folk names of plants, and
traditional ways of living, for example, in With you give much detail concerning
coopering, the manufacture of barrels. Do these things come from your
experiences as a child, or is much research involved? Harington: I have had
very little experience, as a child or as an adult, on which to base such
things. Most all of that has come from research – in the library, and now,
increasingly and easily, on the Internet. Ghoti: Did you
study writing in a college environment? Harington: I took a
course or two, but learned absolutely nothing...except not to trust anyone’s
critique but my own. The way to study writing is by reading and writing, not
sitting in a classroom. Ghoti: You
teach art history at the Harington: It wasn’t a
shift so much as a split. I keep my art historical self distinctly separate
from my Ozark novelist self. The one supports the other, but the two are not
even brothers; they’re strangers from different planets. In fact, they’ve
never met...and I hope they never do. Ghoti: Do you
produce art other than writing? Harington: I
illustrated one of my novels with drawings and another with photographs, and
I try to take a deep interest in the jacket design paintings that the great
Wendell Minor is doing for my books at Toby – ten so far, but I simply don’t
have time to be a practicing visual artist. Ghoti: I personally think you are one of the most
talented writers at U of A, and yet you don't teach writing. You've mentioned
the teaching of writing in, I believe, Ekaterina. Was this based on
your experiences; did you have a bad experience with teaching writing? Harington: Not a bad
experience at all. Like the character in Ekaterina,
I spent one term teaching writing at the Ghoti: In Butterfly
Weed, you present a story as told by Vance Randolph, the folklorist. What
led you to write this novel in this way? Did you know Mr. Randolph well? Harington: I didn’t
know him well as a person; I met him briefly only a couple of times. But his
body of work has been of inestimable value to me. He is my spiritual father
and my literary godfather. I wouldn’t exist without him. Ghoti: Have you
based any of your stories on folk tales? Harington: Folk tales
from Vance Randolph play a part in every one of my books, and Butterfly Weed is one big folk tale
with much Greek mythology thrown in for good measure. Ghoti: I attended
a reading of yours in Harington: That’s The Pitcher Shower (pronounced
“shore”), and Toby will bring it out in September (with the best of Wendell
Minor’s covers). The Ozarks during the Depression had several such itinerant
motion picture projectionists, and I even attended a few of the shows myself. Ghoti: Anything
else on the burner? What's next for Donald Harington? Harington: Latha Bourne, the heroine
of Lightning Bug, the narrator of The Choiring of the Trees, the
grandmother of Governor Vernon Ingledew, a beautiful woman who has served the
town of (For more information about Donald Harington's
books, check out his website (www.donaldharington.com) -CL Bledsoe |
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