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Tom Franklin, the Writer Who Loves to Have Written

“I’m on my fourth novel now,” Tom Franklin tells the Seventh Annual Clarksville Writers’ Conference. “Hell at the Breech was a novel I hated to write. I’m one of those novelists who loves to have written, not to write.”

Tom Franklin, former John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) at Oxford and New York Times best-selling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, is married to poet Beth Ann Fennelly; together they have three children. When Tom took the microphone to give his first lecture at APSU last week, Beth Ann and he had just completed the journey from Oxford—with all three children—in a minivan.

Author Tom Franklin
Author Tom Franklin

“I got us lost,” Tom reports, “because I used mapquest instead of the GPS. We thought we’d be here in time to go to the hotel for a while, but that didn’t happen. That’s why I’m here in shorts and the shirt I usually play tennis in. I just came back from a grueling three-week book tour where I broke my watch and broke my glasses. I have airport cheaters.

No one in the audience cared that he wasn’t dressed up. Everyone was fascinated just to hear what this interesting and humorous individual had to say.

Hell at the Breech, by the way, is winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award and the Alabama Librarians Award; Tim McGraw holds the film option on the book.

Poachers, Tom’s short story collection, won the Edgar Allen Poe Award and the story itself was reprinted in Best American Mystery Stories of the Century.

Tom reports that people don’t quite know where to pigeon-hole him in literature. “First, I was called a literary writer because of my first book of short stories. Then I wrote a historical novel and was called a Southern historical literary novelist. Then I wrote a crime novel. I thought of ‘crooked letter, crooked letter’ and thought it was a great title. I moved to Mississippi where the letter‘s’ is called the ‘crooked letter.’ The reviews call the book a mystery and it keeps getting nominated for mystery awards. I had no idea how many mystery awards there are. Mystery readers like to read a lot of books.”

Tom read a couple of passages from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. The book revolves around two boys who became friends when they were in school. Larry is the white boy whose father owned the farm, and Silas, the African American youth, lived in a sharecropper’s house with his mother. By the time they grow up, Larry is an outcast in town because he had taken a girl to the drive-in when they were teenagers and she was never seen again. Silas is now the sheriff. Another girl goes missing and Larry is once again in the crosshairs.

After he reads, Tom asks for questions. A young man asks about Franklin’s experiences with Barry Hannah.

“In 2001, he called me and asked if I’d do the John Grisham Chair. It was intimidating. He would be so hard on students. Barry Hannah smoked at Ole Miss. You can’t do that! He took an ashtray out of his pocket.

“Barry and I went fishing together a lot of times.

“He was great in faculty meetings. He’d say, ‘That’s just BS. Let’s get out of here.’ One time they were discussing the title of a new course. The name was so long, it was unbelievable. He quipped, ‘I know what we can call it—the death of joy as we know it.’

“Barry’s message was ‘All you need to know about fiction is thrill us!’”

Asked about what his future holds, Tom said, “My wife is the one people want—Notre Dame and Johns Hopkins have been after her. But we’re settled in Mississippi. We have expanded our house. The critics and the writers get along at Ole Miss. We’re contemporary writers just trying to get along. We even play tennis together.

“Oxford has bout 20 bars for a town of 13,000. It has good music venues and restaurants. It’s an hour from Memphis. I want to be near the woods and Beth Ann wants to be near culture. We feel safe there to raise our kids. We’re ensconced in Oxford.

“Beth and I are writing a novel together now. We love our sweet little Nolen but it’s hard to write when you have a baby. It’s set in the Mississippi flood of 1927; it was my agent’s idea. Beth Ann is a better writer than I am. She’s smarter and she knows when the leader is a little dumber. We’ve written about 40 pages each. We had our first meeting about the book. I went first and told her how good her part was. I said stuff like ‘let’s fix this’ and I was condescending. She ripped up all my pages with a razor. I had to start all over.”

Tom Franklin tells it like it is. “There are two kinds of writers: one who knows everything about what they are going to do and another who is not in control of it, sort of bumbling in the dark. You’re trying to make crop circles. To write a novel, in my opinion, is like having a pair of scissors in a field at midnight and someone says, ‘Make a crop circle, dumb ass!’

“We’re both on schedules when we’re at home. It’s good because we’re both writers. I have a friend whose wife is not a writer. If he’s not typing, she interrupts. Other people don’t understand that if you’re not typing, that doesn’t mean you’re not working. You have to think sometimes.

“I’m a binge writer—200 pages in 10 days for one of my books. We try to work at least an hour a day, three or four if we can. I think writing comes from the subconscious. Sometimes it takes me years to write a book. I had five days a week with nine hours a day in Brazil so that’s where I wrote most of Crooked Letter.

“You can’t hold a novel in your head. It’s too wide.”

When the audience ran out of questions, Tom was ready to call it quits with these parting words, “I’ve been in a minivan with three children. I’m looking forward to cocktail hour.”

Sue Freeman Culverhouse
Sue Freeman Culverhousehttp://culverhouseart.com/
Author of Tennessee Literary Luminaries: From Cormac McCarthy to Robert Penn Warren (The History Press, 2013) Sue Freeman Culverhouse has been a freelance writer for the past 36 years. Beginning in 1976, she published magazines articles in Americana, Historic Preservation, American Horticulturist, Flower and Garden, The Albemarle Magazine, and many others. Sue is the winner of two Virginia Press Awards in writing. She moved to Springfield, Tennessee in 2003 with her sculptor husband, Bill a retired attorney. Sue has one daughter,  Susan Leigh Miller who teaches poetry and creative writing at Rutgers University. Sue teaches music and writing at Watauga Elementary School in Ridgetop, Tennessee to approximately 500 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. She also publishes a literary magazine each year; all work in the magazine is written and illustrated by the students. Sue writes "Uncommon Sense," a column in the Robertson County Times, which also appears on Clarksville Online. She is the author of "Seven keys to a sucessful life", which is  available on amazon.com and pubishamerica.com; this is a self-help book for all ages.
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