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BIO
Carter Coleman, a graduate of Vanderbilt University, has written for the Los Angeles Times Book Review and Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Life, and Rolling Stone. THE VOLUNTEER, Coleman's debut novel, is the story of a Peace Corps worker in Tanzania determined to escape his past in Memphis, Tennessee and forge a new life. Carter Coleman lives in London with his wife and daughter.
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AUTHOR TALK
 January 2005
In this interview Carter Coleman, author of THE VOLUNTEER and CAGE'S BEND, talks about being a southern writer and some of the recurring themes in his books (such as mental illness and sexual addiction). He also explains how he developed his ideas for his first two novels and offers advice to aspiring authors about getting published.
Question: CAGE'S BEND focuses on a single family, the Rutledges. They are Southern, from Tennessee and Louisiana, just as you are. You also used the name Rutledge in your first novel, THE VOLUNTEER. So let us ask right off the bat, who are the Rutledges --- purely fiction, a composite, or real people? Is your writing autobiographical? If so, how much of this family's history is your own?
Carter Coleman: Rutledge Jordan of THE VOLUNTEER is a cousin of Cage Rutledge and his family of CAGE'S BEND. Using surnames as Christian names is a southern idiosyncrasy. Interconnecting novels through shared characters is aping Faulkner. Like Rut Jordan, I spent several years in Africa --- though I was never in the Peace Corps and never seduced an African girl to save her from circumcision. Like Cage, Nick, and Harper Rutledge, I have two brothers and an Episcopal bishop for a father, though I never spent time in an institution, died in a head-on collision, or worked on Wall Street. I am very close to someone who suffers from bipolar disorder. My fiction is a mixture of fact and imagination and sometimes wishful thinking. Some of my characters are inspired by people I've met and others spring fully formed from my mind.
Q: You've been called a "powerful new voice in southern fiction." Do you think of yourself as a southern writer? If so, why? If not, why not?
CC: On a superficial level, THE VOLUNTEER was a Hemingway imitation with a southern twist, and CAGE'S BEND mimicked Faulkner. I think of myself as a southern writer because my characters come from the South, though they don't always stay there. Because of the preoccupation with the past in the present. Because of the strength of the family bonds. I wonder if within another twenty years the South will have been homogenized to the degree that it will be indistinct from the rest of the country. In CAGE'S BEND there is a chapter called "The End of the South," in which the boys' grandfather declares that the region has lost its unique identity.
Q: The South has produced an immense body of outstanding American literature. And you write that "Every good southern family has a manic-depressive." Do you see a link between growing up in the South, mental instability, the creative spark, and the tendency, perhaps, to drink?
CC: I think that most families --- North, South, East or West --- have at least one problematic member, someone suffering from mental illness or addiction, someone who doesn't fit into the workplace as easily as the rest. I'm not sure that there is more craziness in the South. It appears to me and others have observed to me that southerners more often tend to be heavy drinkers. Of course lots of manic-depressives drink to self-medicate. And there have been a number of brilliant bipolar and unipolar writers across the country. In Southern Lit at Vanderbilt, if I recall correctly after twenty years, it was taught that the defeat of the South after the Civil War and the hardship and poverty that the region endured accounted for the South's outsize contribution to American letters. I don't have a theory that ties everything together.
Q: It might be argued that Cage is the protagonist of this novel. But which character, if any, is most like you and speaks with your own voice?
CC: Nick, the ecologist who dies at twenty-seven, the middle son, occupies the same position in the sequence of siblings as I do in real life. I have dedicated much of my life to planting millions of trees in Africa and, like Nick, believe that the last great cause is the fight to save the planet.
Q: You write movingly and realistically about mental illness. How were you able to do this? How accurate are your shocking descriptions of mental and penal institutions?
CC: I spoke at length to people who suffer from manic depression. I read everything I could find on the illness. I sat down for long months at the keyboard, pretending that I was manic or depressed or recovering. I visited several institutions and I would say that my descriptions are pretty accurate.
Q: Do you believe mental illness is misunderstood by most people? Do you advocate a better social response to mental illness than institutionalization and punishment? What are your ideas?
CC: Most people have very little understanding of mental illnesses. How could you unless you are close to someone who suffers from manic depression, schizophrenia, or another disorder? And, unless you have an intimate knowledge of such disorders, your natural response will be fear and avoidance. Who has the time to let someone nutty into one's life? Clearly a paranoid individual will never recover in a horrific institution. I have heard that during the Reagan era many thousands of mentally ill were turned loose and ended up homeless. In America, the social net to catch the mentally ill is in tatters. Those without family support are pretty much doomed. A better response, a better place to get better, might be a big farm where the "mental-health consumers" could tend organic vegetables and hold group therapy sessions in sunny meadows.
Q: Besides Cage's mental illness, the field of psychology and psychological theories, such as Jung's idea of the shadow self, figure hugely in this novel. You begin the novel with a quote from Jung's MEMORIES, DREAMS and REFLECTIONS. Would you talk about your interest in the shadow self? Should we embrace it or fight it?
CC: Everyone has a shadow. In some people it is stronger than others. Some people have to struggle long and hard with their shadows --- their demons, their addictions, their base inclinations --- while others don't seem so tempted toward straying and self-destruction. The concept of the shadow is a tool toward self-discovery. If you ever make the effort to record dreams, which is hard at first but becomes easier with time and practice, you begin to see that your unconscious mind creates little surreal vignettes that dramatize the needs and actions of your shadow versus your better self. You should embrace the knowledge of your shadow. You should fight to master it.
Q: Why did you write about three brothers? Why not two or four? Why not any sisters? Are the three brothers in any way symbolic of the different parts of the self? If so, why does Nick, "the good brother," die?
CC: Cage is the unbridled id? Harper is the highly adaptive ego? And Nick is the conscience, the superego, who, being dead, is unable to exert restraint upon his older id and younger ego? You could make the case, but it wasn't intentional on my part. Rather, as I said, I grew up with two brothers and took that as a starting point for my stab at a Southern family novel. Sometimes I considered trying sisters, which would be a more commercial subject. And Nick wasn't purely good. He had his faults. Three brothers was a handful. Perhaps that's why Nick died, to reduce my workload.
Q: You also begin the book with a quote from Dr. Seuss: "Dad is sad" (p. xi). Then you write on page 364, "like fathers, like sons." But the father in this story, Franklin Rutledge, is not like his sons. He has been shaped, at least partially, by a different set of generational experiences. The youngest son Harper says, "Our parents represent Depression Man, raised in austerity, while we are Consumer Man, spoiled by abundance" (p. 346). It's a complex issue to be sure, but do you think nature or nurture has a bigger impact on personality?
CC: After the pretentious Jung epigraph, the Dr. Seuss bit was a joke to break the spell, while at the same time serious. The very-sad-dad-who-had-a-bad-day is universal, and the industrial dads (and now moms) who see so little of their children, who bring home the frustration of their jobs, are responsible, often unwittingly and arguably unavoidably, for the anger and alienation of their children. The ideal environment to raise children is a situation where the parents are around most of the time and where, at the times when they are not, grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins are there to pick up the slack. The Rutledge boys are a reaction to their parents --- almost, as Cage says, a manifestation of Frank's shadow. At the same time, they resemble their father --- the way Cage and Nick quote poetry, the way Harper tithes, for example. Clearly, each generation is shaped by the mores and experiences of its time. How much is inherited genetically I cannot say, but I believe that mental illness is genetic, though I believe that it can be exacerbated by drug use and emotional trauma. The nature versus nurture paradigm strikes me as an oversimplification of a complex intertwining of factors.
Q: Another recurring theme in your fiction is womanizing and sexual addiction. Do you think American culture promotes promiscuity and discourages fidelity?
CC: I don't think our culture is any more promiscuous than any other culture. Europeans thought America's obsession with Bill Clinton's infidelities ridiculous, and the fact that Clinton was impeached for lying about an affair while Bush got away with lying about the justification of a war speaks to a deep puritanical streak in American culture. Infidelity in France is almost codified. In Africa promiscuity is an irrelevant word --- African cultures are described by anthropologists as "sex positive." One imagines America became more promiscuous in the '60s, and generations raised on MTV and pop music are more sexually active than their predecessors, but taking a global perspective, America probably encourages fidelity more than many cultures.
Q: You've lived in Tanzania and also in London. Have you become an expatriate? If so, why? If not, what has living abroad taught you about America? About yourself?
CC: I originally went to Tanzania on a Rotary Club international scholarship and stayed for three years because I fell in love with the beautiful country and the friendly, easygoing people. I launched a village-based rainforest conservation project, which takes me back every year, because I wanted to save a forest of extraordinary beauty. Now I live in London because my wife has a house and family here. As we have no plans to move to the States, I suppose I am an expatriate. Distance always gives one perspective and the ability to juxtapose how things are done differently in different cultures. One notices lots of differences. Maybe the most obvious is cars. On the whole, Americans drive huge cars and think cheap gasoline is a God-given right and give little thought to climate change, while Europeans...
Q: On a different subject, would you talk about the difference between writing a second novel and writing a first?
CC: Being a writer is like being a musician. The more you practice, the better you get. So a second novel is easier because you've learned a lot writing the first.
Q: You choose to write provocatively about controversial subjects. As a result critics either love you or hate you. Do you expect people to get upset at what you write? Do you read reviews? How do you handle negative reactions?
CC: Women in particular loathed Rutledge Jordan, while I considered him to be an honest depiction of a young man of his time, and while many women found him irredeemable, I thought he redeemed himself through the course of the novel. As I recall, much of the criticism was about what a jerk Rut was and how he wasn't condemned for it. When Shelby Foote introduced me at a reading in Memphis, he quoted Stephen Crane: "Preaching is fatal to art in literature. I try to give a slice of life, and if there is any moral or lesson in it I do not point it out. I let the reader find it for himself...An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways, and every artist must be in some things as powerless as a dead snake." I keep Shelby's typed note on my study wall. I do expect that some folks will take umbrage to aspects of my writing. I might be trying to piss them off. I do read reviews and sometimes I curse and mutter about how the reviewer misconstrued it or how I'd like to see him do better, and later I either laugh about the reviews or forget them.
Q: What do you want to write about next? Do you have any plans for a next book?
CC: I've started a book about a psychiatrist in Baton Rouge who is having a midlife nervous breakdown. I'm drawn to psychological crisis. I'm drawn back to the South. I want to write about another southern family. I want to write about a dying mother, which strikes me as a great, universal subject. I want to write about changing social mores --- the doctor's teenage children. I want to write about a black character in the contemporary South, a woman in recovery from crack addiction. I want to write about the struggle for faith and redemption. I want to invade Walker Percy territory.
Q: Your style demands that you speak in many voices. Your book is lengthy. Your themes are "big" and emotionally complex. Is writing fun for you? Is it cathartic?
CC: Writing is like stumbling across a vast desert. Everyday you slog along, one foot after the other. But sometimes you hit an oasis of inspiration and for a few days you swim in cool streams beneath shady palms in a garden of delights. Then you have to leave the oasis and trudge along again toward another, a speck on the horizon, which might turn out to be just a mirage. Trudging through the deep sand isn't fun, but those days flowing along in the streams are exhilarating and make it worthwhile.
I wouldn't say writing is cathartic, but I do come to understand certain emotions and interactions between people better than I did before I spent so much time thinking about them.
Q: Would you talk about the process of writing your novels? How do you develop your ideas? What is your daily routine as a writer? Who, if anyone, reads your writing before it is published?
CC: I remember in 1990 sitting in a room in an old, run-down colonial hotel in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania with a knee infected from a motorcycle crash, so I couldn't walk for a couple of weeks. I had a manual typewriter and was going in circles, trying to start my first novel, about an American in Tanzania. That's all I knew and I wasn't getting anywhere. Then it came to me --- he would be a Peace Corps volunteer and he would try to save an African girl from genital mutilation. If Eve was born from a rib, Zanifa was born from her clitoris. I just started inventing around that premise.
With CAGE'S BEND, I knew I wanted to trace the course of a character suffering from manic depression, from its onset until the character learns how to control it in early middle age. I knew where to begin and where it would end, A and Z, but I didn't know what would happen in between. It was two of my readers --- my publisher and a friend --- who suggested after the first half of the first draft that I spend equal time with the more "normal" brother. My wife, Saskia Spender, my hilarious, sharp friend Scott Noland, and my publisher, Jamie Raab, all gave me great advice on CAGE'S BEND.
Q: Did you have an easy time getting published? What advice would you give to aspiring authors about discipline, finances, or getting published?
CC: I started off as a freelance magazine journalist, got my first assignment from Rolling Stone when I was just out of college --- because I knew someone who knew the owner and he liked a piece that I wrote. I wrote for Esquire, Outside, Life, Sports Illustrated. I lived in New York and traveled in literary circles. I dated a wonderful woman, a respected book editor. The great, late George Plimpton became a friend and mentor. So did Bret Easton Ellis, who spent dozens of hours with my first novel, as he has for many aspiring novelists. With their comments, I rewrote my first novel five or six times. When the book was presentable, it was easy for me to get to an illustrious agent. That said, it was never easy to get by. I was often broke between magazine assignments, worked painting apartments, even cleaning apartments, and as a bicycle messenger.
My advice is to set aside work hours every day. There's nothing more important than daily routine. Also, it's not the writing but the rewriting. Revise, revise, revise. Don't let rejection stop you cold. For those who don't live in New York and travel in literary circles, I suggest saving up your pennies and going to a writer's conference where writers and agents and editors will at least take a glimpse at your work. To get published you've got to get your work in front of an agent or an editor.
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