Tony Earley
1961 ~
“
Writers do
not write about a
place because they
belong there, but
because they
want to.
“
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www.mtsu.edu/tnlitproj
By DINA BARABASH
“The best line I ever heard about the South,” says Earley,
“was from Lee Smith: ‘We’ll make you a casserole, but we’ll kill
you, too.’ That about sums it up” (IdentityTheory). Earley is a
southern writer who believes that what universally separates
Southern writers from others is that storytelling is, or at least was,
a significant part of the culture.
Earley was born in San Antonio, Texas, and was raised in
Redford County, North Carolina. For two hundred years, his
family, on both sides, remained detached from pop culture and
instead farmed in the same place in western North Carolina.
In fact, Earley’s parents’ generation was the first to have been
touched by outside media. After being exposed to an idealistic
picture of suburban America through radio, TV, Life magazine,
and the Sears Roebuck catalogue, his parents left the farm. Earley
and his cousins were the first in the family who were not born on
a farm nor had they ever worked on one. “I’m a writer, that’s what
I do...but I’m more open to…I want to know where I came from,”
says Earley, “I thought everyone was like me...I realized everyone
is not like me and I’m real interested in the ways that has shaped
me. Especially when measured against television and popular
culture and college. That sounds kind of navel-gazing, but I really
do want to know” (IdentityTheory).
Earley is known for his writing about growing up in the
South during the 1970’s, the oddity of love in most families, and
the desire to feel connected to a community. “I go around telling
anyone who will listen that I am from the country, but deep down
I know it’s a lie. I grew up on Gilligan’s Island, in Mayberry, I’m
not sure where. My family is from the country. They are waiting
on the porch to see what I will do (BookPage).”
In 1983 Earley received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English
from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. For four years he
worked as a newspaper reporter and editor in North Carolina, as
a general assignment reporter for The Thermal Belt News Journal
in Columbus, and as a sports editor and feature writer for The
Daily Courier in Forest City. “For some reason people want to herd
all writers from the South into the same corral. There are vastly
different aethestics,” says Earley, “There are some writers I am
happy to be in the crowd with and other writers that I would
just as soon not be associated with. But ultimately putting that
‘southern’ in front of the word ‘writer,’ it’s limiting: you are a
good regional writer” (IdentityTheory). Earley earned a Master of
Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama
in Tuscaloosa.
Some of Earley’s short stories, his first published works, were
Tony Earley
Bibliography
Here We Are in
Paradise
(1994)
Jim the Boy
(2000)
Somehow Form
a Family: Stories
That Are Mostly True
(2001)
The Blue Star
(2008)
featured in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Esquire, The Oxford-American
and many literary magazines. He was also added onto Granta’s
list of the 20 Best Young American Novelists. “I was the only
practicing Southern writer on that list, and a lot was made of
that in newspaper articles and all,” Earley says, “I can’t really go
anywhere without people asking me about that Southern-writer
appellation” (IdentityTheory). The New Yorker has also named
him one of America’s top 20 young fiction writers. Earley believes
that without stories there would be no life because “history
doesn’t exist until somebody comes back from the war and tells
a story about what they saw. We can’t function without telling
stories” (IdentityTheory). His work has been in several collections
including New Stories from the American South and has been
included in Best American Short Stories.
His first story collection, Here We Are in Paradise, introduced
the memorable character of Jim Glass, but what audiences
were not exposed to was Earley’s troubling personal life at the
time. ‘’After ‘Here We Are in Paradise’ came out, I got sick, and
stayed sick for a couple of years,’’ said Earley, ‘’I was on the
suicide watch for a while. I didn’t know if I’d ever write again”
(NYTimes).’ Then he bought some cheap paint at Wal-Mart
and began painting “big words” on a stack of discarded storm
windows and before long was writing as well. Earley says that he
came out of his depression “one big word at a time.” As for the
book and his now famous character Jim Glass, Earley denies that
his book was therapeutic but he says that he wrote the book that
he thought he needed to read.
The Blue Star, the sequel to Jim the Boy, was featured as one of
the New York Times’ best books of the year. Furthermore, he has
won a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and a National Magazine
Award for Fiction. Despite all of his success, he admits that there
are two very different sides to him. “Being Tony Earley the writer
is completely different from being Tony Earley that writes books.
They’re different creatures,” Earley says about himself. “One is
out soaking up adulation and the other is miserable in a closet
somewhere (IdentityTheory).”
With so much recognition for his work, you might be surprised
to find that Earley’s writing process is anything but a pretty story.
After dragging himself to his office, which Earley says is “filled
with self-loathing,” he begins to write for a while and then finishes
the day by dragging himself back to the house. Most often, after
Earley returns to his house he is somehow convinced that the
work he did in his office has made whatever he is working on
worse. He says, “Occasionally there will be a day where it comes
very easily–five or six or seven pages–but usually it is much,
much slower than that” (VanderbiltView). Nevertheless, he says
that writing is not so much grueling as it is challenging, but that
is what Earley likes most about it. He enjoys writing because it is
hard to do well, and doing it well is all that he will allow.
In Earley’s opinion, book touring is much more exciting than
book writing itself. But he admits that the problems he faces with writing are good problems, so he
does not find it a big deal when he is booked for countless stops on a book tour. He even has a sense
of humor when it comes to being chosen for Oprah’s famous Book Club. “Any fiction writer who
tells you that he or she does not occasionally secretly think about Oprah is not telling the truth,” says
Earley, “Now every time the phone rings, I think, ‘It could be her.’ It’s not going to be, of course, but
it could be. You never know” (VanderbiltView).
Back when Earley lived in his hometown he began going to an Episcopal church to impress a
woman that he was dating at the time. Unexpectedly, he began to fall for a girl who sang in the choir.
“Sitting in church I felt like just a complete heel, because I was there with my girlfriend, but I was
longing for this girl in the choir.’’ Earley went on to say, “I married the girl in the choir” (NYTimes).
He now lives with his wife and daughter in Nashville, Tennessee, where he holds the Samuel
Milton Fleming Chair in English at Vanderbilt University. Earley has been at Vanderbilt since 1997
and currently teaches beginning, intermediate, and advanced fiction workshops, and a seminar on
Hemingway and American fiction. Earley says, “I’m actually drawn to those wild-eyed kids that I can
tell want desperately to be writers because I can see that’s what I looked like when I walked into a
creative writing class. I wind up doing the most with and for those kids” (IdentityTheory).