Where Trouble Sleeps
by Clyde Edgerton

List Price: $12.95
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345426320
Publisher: Ballantine Books

While he was growing up in North Carolina, probably no one would have predicted that Clyde Edgerton would be a professional writer. Most would have placed bets on his being a baseball player or a rock musician, even though his parents thought he might be a missionary or a concert pianist. He loved to hunt and fish with buddies. But even without early signs of literary leanings, Clyde has become one of the most prominent contemporary writers. Even though he is a product of the South, drawing primarily from one segment of society, his insight into the human condition makes his work universal.

With degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he has taught writing and English education at various colleges and universities. He is very much in demand as a speaker about the writing process and as a reader of his own fiction. Clyde continues to write in Orange County, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Susan, and daughter, Catherine.

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Q: How did Where Trouble Sleeps originate? Is it based on your own experiences?


CE: The story started as a paragraph, a long time ago in my first novel, Raney. It was about a little boy sitting on a porch step looking across the road at a service station at an intersection where men were drinking beer. He was upset and delighted at the same time. This paragraph didn't work in Raney. I wrote five other novels after Raney. But when I started on this present one, I bought a hardback notebook and decided to write scenes from my early childhood.

One of my earliest memories is that of my mother taking me to see the electric chair when I was sixyears old. She did that to make an impression on me, to ensure that Iwould not stray in my life and would not succumb to temptation. Because if I did, I would know what would happen. So I decided that it would bea good scene. Also, my mother killed my kitten, Inky, when he got run over. She killed him because there was no chance of his living and she didn't want him to suffer.

Q: Something like losing your kitten when you are six years old, to a baseball bat, is something that you would remember.

CE: Yes, that was a particularly vivid scene in my life--also, watching men drink beer is something that stays with me for some odd reason. I think it's because I was raised in a very religious household. Anyway, I just wanted to write the scenes.

Q: How did you move from just a couple of scenes to a full-blown novel?

CE: I knew if I wrote those scenes--and put them together--I could begin to find out what a story that comes from this time in my life might be like. So, I started, and it was difficult. I knew that I would need a way to fit the scenes together. I needed to see the place where I would be, the place I would be writing about.

When I was growing up I would sit on the front porch of my uncle's grocery store and look across at the men drinking beer. At that intersection there was a blinker light. There were four stores around the blinker light. And there were several other stores and a few houses nearby. So I knew that I had my setting and that all the scenes I had in mind would work here.

Q: How did you begin to create your characters? How much is based on real people?

CE: Actually, most of my novels start with a character. In this case, it was the boy sitting on that porch. That six-year-old boy was me, in my memory. But I've also observed six-year-old boys since that time. So, out of my observation, I began to have ideas for this fictional character.

I start out with a character, and I had this character. And I had this character's mother, who, in some ways, initially, was my mother. There's a certain resemblance between my mother and the character who is Alease in the book. So I can draw on what I know and knew about my mother. I can also draw on what I imagine about this fictional character who is Stephen's mother. From my observation, imagination, and experience, I begin to get characters whom I can watch develop.

Q: What about some of the other characters? What was your inspiration for some of them?

CE: I knew that I needed to have a character who would make something happen. So what I decided to do was have someone visit this community and stay there for a few days. The best person to visit that I could think of would be some sort of criminal to shake things up a little bit. It so happens that I had written a short story about my version of a misfit, like the one from Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." In that story the misfit kills a grandma in a brutal way, and I had come to secretly wish that the grandma could have killed the misfit instead. So, I had decided to write a story about this, and I had this misfit murdered by a grandma--but that was separate from the story about the little intersection with the blinker light. I just decided to put the four and two together--could've been two and two, could've been one and one--and have the misfit show up at my intersection. I decided that I could make up two fictional ladies, based on two ladies I had known in my real life, and one of them would kill this misfit and I knew that right away, very early on.

So, my idea is beginning to come together. I've got a little boy, his mama and this criminal that's going to be murdered and I suddenly decide to just stick that part at the end of the book and I work towards a first draft.

Q: When you are writing a novel do you consciously have a theme in mind?

CE: I, on purpose, try not to think much about theme or what this is all about. Although I know, when I finish, that the book needs to be focused in such a way that it is about something in general rather than just a little travelogue or a bunch of incidences that happened in the lives of these people.

About halfway through--about a year into the book--one of the themes that became apparent to me was this whole business of how Stephen's father was pulled away from his mother slightly by his relationship with his brother, Big Steve. At the same time, Alease, Stephen's mother, was being pulled away from Stephen's father by her attention to her brother, Raleigh. I realized that this married couple was being pulled apart because of their loyalty to blood kin. It was exciting to me to think that I could have Stephen, the six-year-old boy, seeing this pulling apart without realizing what he was seeing.

Another theme, I think, centered around the community. It was a community based on very strong cultural and religious norms, running head-on into this stranger in the Buick Eight, who had a different outlook on the way things are and should be.

Q: You once told me about your use of hypnosis in helping you remember for your writing. Did you use hypnosis in this book?

CE: Yes, it's true that I used hypnosis to see the past. A few years ago I was in therapy for depression. I do get depressed occasionally, as some of us do.

My hypnosis took place with a psychiatrist who asked me to close my eyes, count to five, and put myself in a setting--a place where I would return to each time I was hypnotized. Now don't leave now. Don't get up and walk out because I'm talking about hypnosis. I used to think the same thing. I thought about somebody holding a little thing in front of you and then you act like a chicken. You run around and squawk like a chicken. But hypnosis can be a kind of relaxation. You know where you are. And it can help you reach in for your unconscious in certain ways. That's what this was about.

In any case, what happened as I drifted off into a hypnotic state was that I returned to that intersection of my childhood, this intersection that was providing the place for my novel. But it focused in on a store that is presently at that intersection. I visualized that place during my first session. That's all I did.

Well, later in hypnosis, I devised a handle on an imaginary telephone pole. And I could pull that handle down and that whole intersection would go back to the way it wasin 1950. I saw the store that belonged to my uncle, in real life, the one that my father helped him run. In my mind I turned around, looked across the intersection, and saw my father walk out onto the porch. I started crying, and I cried and cried and cried. It was quite an experience to get back into that intersection.

Q: How did you select the title of the book?

CE: After I had the very last full draft I suddenly realized one day that I didn't have a dog in this book. I thought, for some reason, that I needed a dog. I should have a dog at the service station. Then I had an idea about the dog: where the dog sleeps determines whether or not it will rain that afternoon. Well, by golly, where the dog sleeps will be a good title if I can come up with a good name. For some reason, I had Trombone in my mind--Where Trombone Sleeps. Then I got the idea of naming the dog Trouble. Where Trouble Sleeps, I decided, would make a good title--and I could connect it to the plot in some way.

Q: You have a reputation for being a major contemporary southern writer. How do you feel your writing fits into the realm of this literature?

CE: When I was growing up I didn't know that there was such a thing as southern literature. I knew something about the name Faulkner. But I didn't care. I didn't know. It didn't make any difference to me. Actually, at that time I wanted to fly airplanes, which I ended up doing. But once I was married to Susan Ketchin, she asked if I had read Faulkner. I said no. She told me that I needed to do that. She said, "Have you read O'Connor?" I said no. She said, "Have you read Welty?" I said no.

So I started reading these people and found that they were writing about, in some ways, my past. And I suddenly realized that my past was worthy of fiction, whereas before I always thought I had to be in a war and write about the war. I had to do "heroic" kinds of things before I could write about it. But here were writers writing about similarities to my past in the South. On the other hand, Hemingway, for example, was writing about people in places around the world. And I couldn't quite identify with that. But I could identify with the fiction of these southern writers. So I started writing my own fiction.I soon learned that there was this big subject out there called "southern literature."

Clyde Edgerton Interviews Jack Umstead