Dear Paul:
 
      Please answer the following questions in a conversational style—at any length that you desire.  Answers right off the top of your head are just fine.  Please feel very free to include anecdotal and personal material.
       I may send follow up questions for a few of these questions, if it seems that the change from one question to the next is too abrupt.  However, if you wish to lead into the next question with your closing remarks on the question above it, please feel free to use your literary skills to do so.   The effect I am looking for by the time we finish the process is that together we will have created an interview on paper that “sounds” as if we were sitting together just talking about writing and the literary process.—Deb 
 
Interviewer:  It is our pleasure to welcome Dr. Paul Ruffin of Sam State University to the Interview Forum of The Center for Southeast Texas Studies. Today I’d like to talk to you about your own writing,  about Southern literature, and about publishing.  Shall we jump right in?
 
Paul Ruffin:   Delighted to participate.  Fire away.
 
 
Interviewer:  Without a doubt, your writing style has a certain and unique style.  When I hear you read your own works, I sense a deep connection to personal  “roots.”  What are your roots, geographically and culturally?
 
Paul Ruffin:   I was born in Millport, AL, but we moved to Mississippi when I was seven.  I grew up on Sand Road, in Lowndes County, about five miles from Columbus.  Since my father had a third-grade education and had no particular skills, having grown up farming over in Alabama, he had to take whatever job was available.  Before we moved to Mississippi, he worked on a federal channelization project near Millport, and he sharecropped.  A year or so before we left Alabama, he took a job with a toilet-seat factory, where he worked on the assembly line.  (He once bragged that he was the best educated  man on the line.)  For a reason that I suspect only he understood, he would not let my mother work until I was a junior in high school—he wouldn’t even let her drive.

 

At any rate, I grew up very poor.  We didn’t even have indoor plumbing until I was in junior high.  My showers were sun-warmed water from a rusty 55-gallon oil drum mounted over a little outbuilding that Daddy used as his shop. 

 

I was essentially a loner, spending every minute I could in the woods along the Luxapalila River, which ran a couple of miles from the house.

 

I chronicle all this in a memoir called Growing Up in Mississippi Poor and White But Not Quite Trash.
 
 
Interviewer:   When did you first start writing, and when did you start to feel that writing was an important part of your life?
 
Paul Ruffin:  The answer is simple: from church, beginning with when I was maybe ten years old.  Boredom has always been my dark angel, and when she gets a grip on me, I will do just about anything to shake her off. This was especially so when I was a youngster forced to sit through long (looooooooong), tedious sermons twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday evenings in the Assembly of God Church on Waterworks Road in Columbus, Mississippi.

I don’t know how anybody could sit through all that preaching and not fidget a bit, and as a ten-year-old boy, who’d rather be just about anywhere else but Hell maybe, it was especially hard for me. I generally got a good dose of Daddy’s Bible Belt when I cut up in church, like breaking out in laughter, which I sometimes just had to do or blow a gasket somewhere in my head, or flicking BBs into beehive hairdos. And it didn’t take much to get me going either. Let a beetle fly in from the night and land in one of those beehives and watch the woman’s reaction–I dare anyone not to laugh at that.

So in time, just to protect my butt, as it were, I learned to turn my attention to more constructive means of passing time while the preacher droned on. For example, I diagrammed sentences from the Old Testament. I set about memorizing all the lyrics to the songs in the Broadman Hymnal. Sometimes I’d actually sing the songs while I was doing something miserable, like picking or shelling peas and butterbeans or hoeing in the garden. I had those lines down so pat that I would start rattling them off almost anywhere. To be sure, I found myself speaking more and more in iambic tetrameter, sort of like a character of mine in “The Boy Who Spoke in Hymns.”

My love of poetry, then, came from the Broadman Hymnal, and it turned out to be a profitable art to practice, once kids learned that I could rattle off a poem in a heartbeat. I racked up a lot of lunch money from boys who needed a poem fast for a class. Some from girls too, but mostly boys.

I got my start in fiction in church too. I grew weary of some of those same old stories told the same old way that I started rewriting them. Jonah would whip out his pocket knife and make that whale real sorry that he swallowed him. (I mean, if you’re going to be whale excrement by morning, you might as well make him pay a price for so rendering you.) I would have three really dumb guys following that star on their camels, or I might make them dwarfs and have them riding donkeys, and they’d bring stuff like a silver rattle and candy and a cuddly little doll made out of camel hair for Baby Jesus. Lot’s wife got to sit on a rock and look back at her hometown as long as she wanted to, and sometimes I’d get down and dirty and turn Lot, nicknamed Morton, into a block of salt and just see how he liked it. Noah would kill every ant or snake or mosquito that tried to get on the ark. And there was Moses showing off, walking down that corridor he made in the Red Sea, and I’d just let the water close on him and drown him or feed him to a whale. I rewrote just about every one of those old stories. (I know it wasn’t a nice thing to do, and I should have been ashamed, but I had to do something to pass the time.)

My early poetry was, naturally enough, governed by the hymn beat, and it was only when I took some modern-poetry courses at Mississippi State that I loosened up and started writing what I would call publishable poetry. 

I wrote stories all through my childhood and later, in the Army, I would stay on the base on the weekends and write both poetry and fiction.

When I began my doctoral studies in the Center for Writers at Southern Mississippi, I started writing seriously—that is, for publication—and my real writing career (if you can call it that) began.

Interviewer:  What role does humor play in your life, your philosophy, and your writing? 
 
Paul Ruffin:  Well, as Flannery O’Connor put it one time, every story ought to have a little humor in it, as all of hers do.  Sometimes the humor is downright sick, but it’s there, even in the darkest, most violent stories you can imagine.

I try to work a little humor into most of my fiction, largely through what characters say.  When you’re using redneck characters—most of mine are—and the redneck idiom, the humor comes easy.

Almost all my column pieces and familiar essays attempt humor, though I’m sure that sometimes readers don’t recognize it—just stumble over it and go on as if they found nothing funny in it.  There are times that I find myself cracking up over my own characters and what they say, especially the made-up Segovia characters that I use in so many of my column pieces.

One night in Fort Worth at the William Eddrington Scott Theater actor Barry Corbin read my story “Lamar Loper’s First Case” as part of the Texas Bound Series.  It was the first time I had ever heard one of my stories read aloud by someone else, and I laughed almost to the point of embarrassment over my own lines.  Corbin was so good in his interpretation of my characters.

So I regard humor as indispensable in my writing. 
 
Interviewer:  When you were younger, were there writers who were a great inspiration to you, or that influenced your style?  If so, who were they and why?

Paul Ruffin:   The earliest influence in fiction was Mark Twain—I must have read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn twenty times.   Twain initially taught me the necessity of humor in fiction.  And since I grew up just down the road from Faulkner country, which is in essence the same country, it was only natural that I would be caught up in his work.  Indeed, I read everything he ever wrote—did my master’s thesis on his Snopes trilogy.   Later I got into O’Connor, Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter.  Robert Penn Warren.  All the major Southern fiction writers.  Frost was the strongest influence on my poetry—and Southerners John Crowe Ransom, James Dickey.
 
 Interviewer:  Referring to authors from Texas and The South,  from any time period, who do you admire and why?
 
Paul Ruffin:  I just named the Southern writers.  As for the Texas writers, I’ve always admired the work of Elmer Kelton, and Cormac McCarthy fascinates the hell out of me.  I don’t care much for McCarthy’s early work, which reads too much like an imitation of Faulkner—as a matter of fact, his first editor was Faulkner’s last editor at Random House (no wonder he liked McCarthy’s work)--but his later books, beginning with Blood Meridian, are really something.  I just ordered No Country for Old Men and The Road off the internet—I can’t wait to read them.  I don’t guess you can call him a Texan, but he does have a feeder root or two here.  Don’t know where his tap root goes.  I mean, he was born in Rhode Island but now lives—or did the last time I heard—in New Mexico, but he lived in El Paso for some time.  Maybe every state he’s ever slept in claims him.  I suspect that in time he just might end up being as great an icon in American fiction as Faulkner.

I’m asked from time to time how I feel about McMurtry’s work.  I have read several of his books, but I don’t find him nearly as good a writer as McCarthy.  Plot and character he has—but his prose is quite unimpressive.
 

 Interviewer:  Speaking specifically again about Southern and Texas literature, what characteristics do you find to be prevalent and admirable in regional writing ?
 
Paul Ruffin:  The colorful characters and the language.  Frankly, much of Texas is just like the Deep South, so far as the people go.  Their traditions and beliefs are very much the same, and they speak the same language—largely, I suspect, because Texas was settled by people migrating from the Southern states, especially after the Civil War.

 

There’s such a wonderful gothic element in our literature.  As O’Connor once said, “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it’s going to be called realistic.”  I don’t know where realism ends and the grotesque begins. And maybe that’s good.
  
Interviewer:  Many of our readers are young writers who would love to be published someday. What advice in general would you give young writers and, along with that,  how would you advise young writers to look upon rejections?

Paul Ruffin:   The more you send out, the more you are going to be rejected.  That’s just common sense.  On the other hand, the more you send out, the more you are going to be accepted.  It’s like fishing—you can cast a few times and not get a strike and go on home and have a beer in front of the television, or you can beat that water to a froth all day and come home with a sore arm but a stringer full of fish.  You might get a fish every hundred casts.  A hundred casts, you get a fish.  A thousand  casts, you get ten.  That’s just an analogy, but it’s a sensible one.  The main thing is persistence.  The best part comes when you no longer send things out, and people actually ask you for stories, poems, and essays.  That’s happening to me some now, and it’s a good feeling.

  

Interviewer:   What inspires you? [Do anything you like with this question, go in any direction you please.]

 

Paul Ruffin:  Anything and everything.  I always have my eyes and ears open for a story—when you write a column a week, you have to be receptive everywhere you go.  Generally when I’m on the road--doing readings, signings, workshops, whatever—I carry my camera, digital recorder, and notebooks.  If I see something interesting, I’ll figure out some way to use it.

 

I watch and listen to people, especially at places like Wal-Mart, where characters like mine are always performing.   I like to travel the backroads as much as I can, looking for weird little cafes off in the middle of nowhere, and I’ll interview colorful characters I encounter.

 

Now, about this inspiration business:  I heard Cormac McCarthy on Oprah say that he wrote whenever he was inspired to write, and he quoted Faulkner:   “I write only when I am inspired, but I am inspired every day.”  That’s pretty much the state I am in.  It doesn’t take a hell of a lot to inspire me to write.

 

Just this afternoon I destroyed around twenty fireant mounds with this wonderful stuff that takes out every vicious sonofabitch in it.  I’ve already written some five articles on waging war on fireants, but killing all those today has awakened a new desire to write more.  I just finished a five-column piece on bottled water.  Why not five more on fireants?  (I became such an authority on them that USA Today actually had a quote from me on the role of the fireant in Southern literature and myth.)  It was just a trace of what all I had to say, but you take what you can get.
 
 
Interviewer:   I want to thank you so much for giving us this space in your valuable time to talk about writing and, to some extent, about  matters of the heart.  One last question:  How important is it to love your characters?
 
Paul Ruffin:   You have to love your characters—or, on rare occasions, hate them.  Either passion will do.  I tend to fall in love with most of mine.  Almost every story—short story or novel—begins like this:  At first you are dragging your characters along on a leash, trying to make them go where you figure they need to go, and then they take life and shoot past you, and it’s all you can do to keep up with them, and they go where they want to go.  That’s when writing is the most fun . . . .

 

My second novel, Castle in the Gloom, came from a story of mine in The Man Who Would Be God titled “The Beast Within.”  I got so intrigued with that estranged couple that I decided I wanted to know more about them, so I just let them fill me in on how they got to that old converted store in East Texas and what went on in the storeroom they were held captive in that night.  I wasn’t satisfied until I knew everything I wanted to know about them.

 

My first novel, Pompeii Man, began as a short story, but I became so involved with the characters that I wrote forty pages before I realized that I had not even begun to tell their story.

 

You create them, so you have to have passion and compassion for them.

 

 Interviewer:   Thank you so much, Paul, for being with us here in the Interview Forum, and we want to thank you once again for all your great contributions to Texas Literature!
  

 Paul Ruffin:   It has been a pleasure.

 

 

 
[The End of the Paul Ruffin Interview on Literature]

 
[Note to Paul:  The interview will either begin or end with a blurb about your work and your credentials, similar to the introduction we gave when you visited us here at Montgoemery College.   Is there anything in particular that you would like us to make sure that we include here? --Cheers!   Debbie Cox]