For the past seven years, Anthony (Tony) Grooms has been a Professor of Creative Writing at Kennesaw State University near Atlanta, Georgia. He teaches a range of writing and literature courses, but specializes in creative writing and American literature.
He is the recipient of the Lillian Smith Prize for Fiction, the Sokolov Scholarship from the Breadloaf Writing Conference, the Lamar Lectureship from Wesleyan College, and an Arts Administration Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published a collection of poems, Ice Poems, a collection of stories, Trouble No More, and a novel Bombingham. His stories and poems have been published in Callaloo, African American Review, Crab Orchard Review, George Washington Review, and many others.*
I was fortunate enough to spend a morning with Tony Grooms in early March, as he addressed a fiction class at the University of West Georgia. The following is an interview that resulted from that meeting. Thanks and enjoy-Jesse Bishop, April 2004
Professor Grooms, how long have you been writing, I mean seriously dedicating yourself to the task?
I have been writing since elementary school, but I only began to think of myself as a writer after undergraduate school. My mentor Richard Bausch had a lot to do with helping me see myself as a writer.
Your novel Bombingham is set, primarily, in 1963 during the time of the Sixteenth Street Church bombing, but you never actually lived in Birmingham. What was your inspiration for writing a novel like this?
Though I didn't grow up in Birmingham, the pivotal events in that city and indeed throughout the Deep South, were profoundly important to me and my family. We knew that if Birmingham could become integrated, then everywhere would become integrated. It is sometimes hard for people to imagine the extreme limitations put on black people by segregation. It was not just the logistical limitations such as where you could or could not eat or live, but the psychological humiliation, the sense of worthlessness that the system tried to instill in us, and the limitation on educational and personal achievement. It is hard to fathom now, but there were black men who were lynched because they bought new cars.
When I moved to Georgia in 1984 and began my relationship with my wife's family, I saw an avenue into story telling about this profound time. It was through the voices of ordinary folks, not the major players in the movement, but the people who, nonetheless, were indispensable to the movement that I found my stories.
Are you from the South? I ask because of the location of your novel Bombingham:
Yes. I grew up in Virginia, just east of Charlottesville and about 50 miles west of Richmond. I have always considered myself a Southerner, though the Upper South is somewhat different than the Deep South. We had the same patterns of segregation that existed in Birmingham, and integration was resisted, but without the same degree violence that we saw in the Deep South. Even though we were very much aware of the iconology of the Civil War (for example, my high school newspaper bore a confederate flag, which I tried to get changed to an American flag, without success) but Charlottesville is still Mr. Jefferson's town and much of iconology there is colonial.
My personal connection to Birmingham comes through my wife and her family. My wife was six at the time of the Birmingham movement and has strong memories of it.
I understand that you had no real basis for some of the characters, yet they all seem so real. How do you as a writer take what you know and feel and make new people/things out of it?
This is a hard question to answer simply. It is a matter of years of reading, observing people, and writing stories. The simplest answer is to say that writing is an act of imagination. I dream these characters up. Certainly, I borrow from people I know, but over a series of drafts, the characters become individualized. Characters, you must remember, are not real people, but abstractions of real people.
I am particularly struck by your decision to frame the 1963 tale within the Vietnam War. You said you did not have a didactic purpose in mind when writing, but this novel is one of the best representations of the period. Why frame it this way?
The decision to include the Vietnam War in a story set during the civil rights movement was difficult for me. I thought that to have two weighty events in one novel might throw the novel out of balance. But the more I drafted, the more I realized the events are connected in several important ways. They are connected historical, as many boys who were the age of my character went to Vietnam. Also Martin King spoke against the war, as he saw that it drained resources from domestic problems. They are also connected through the Cold War. But most importantly, is that both the Civil Rights Movement and The Vietnam War represented moral crises for my characters and for our nation.
Walter, your protagonist, struggles to writes a letter home for a fallen comrade and in the process remembers his childhood friend who was murdered. Tim O'Brien once said, "We keep the dead alive by telling stories about them." How do you think your novel works in this same vein?
I think O'Brien is right, but my interest isn't so much in keeping alive the memory of any particular person, as I am interested in examining the period. When I begin a novel, it is wise for me to think of nothing more than writing an entertaining book. But as I draft and re-draft, I begin to see what beyond entertainment the book can provide. I think Bombingham provides to the readers an examination of the myths of the civil rights movement, as well as, a challenge to consider the meaning of morality and faith.
You were too young to serve in Vietnam, correct? How does this influence you as a writer writing about something you only hear stories about? (I am particularly interested in this topic because of my own goals as a writer who loves both Vietnam and Civil Rights material)
There are people my age who served in Vietnam, though they would have been 18. I was in the very last draft lottery during the time of the American involvement in Vietnam. Luckily for me I lost that lottery!
But just as the Civil Rights Movement was backdrop to my coming of age, so was the Vietnam War. Because I watched the news (CBS with Walter Cronkite) and because I read newspapers, I was aware of the war very early on. My family talked about it. My barber's brother served and returned to cut hair in the same shop; my aunt's boyfriend served and returned. So I am emotionally close to those stories. The Vietnam War was never distant from me.
(I think the period is still an extraordinarily rich one for writers and encourage you in this interest. So many lies are being told about the period that we need writers who are willing to look at the truth, good and bad. The secret, though, if there is any, for a fiction writer is to find your emotional link with the subject. After all, the entertainment we give to our readers is emotional.)
Since Vietnam, the presence of memoirs and autobiography has skyrocketed. As a fiction writer, do have an attachment to pure fiction? What are some of the advantages of writing fiction versus writing memoirs?
Though I have written memoir, I do prefer fiction. How pure it is, I don't know. If pure fiction is Tolkein or Edgar Rice Burroughs, then I guess I am not so pure, since my work is realistic and historical and I hope it connects with real and everyday issues. I do like to read escapist fiction, but I also like to read and to write stories that are grounded in the political issues of the day.
I can't say that there is an advantage or not to writing fiction rather than memoir. They are different forms that achieve different effects. My guess is that fiction offers greater possibilities because the writer can take the character from a realistic world into a fantasy world, for instance the way Kurt Vonnegut does in Slaughter House Five. My main beef about memoirs is that the bulk of them are boring, often celebrity driven, and offer no insights into the as lived by most people.
Your novel deals with very weighty themes and the delivery is very emotionally stirring, at least for me. Of the memoirs and fiction I have read from this era, your novel (along with Tim O'Brien's work) stands out as some of the most powerful language I have read. (No offense to Mr. Twain, Faulkner, and the rest of the old farts that I love so much.)
Thank you. This is high praise and much appreciated as I admire all of the above.
On that last question, do you think fiction has a stronger quality of rhetoric than memoir, perhaps?
I think well-written books employ various rhetorical strategies, after all, writing is an artifice-it is an art form. So I can't say that one form offers stronger rhetoric than any other; a lot of what is offered depends on the style of the writer.
Your novel is steeped in family conflict framed by the conflict in the South framed by the international conflict of Vietnam. What is your writing process like that you could come up with such a complex and intricate set of tales, but slip the reader into it like a pair of silk pajamas?
Please write a review for me! Thank you again for the kind words.
Certainly, I did not begin with this kind of complexity, but over seven drafts (and about three years) these ideas developed. Like Rome, novels are not written in a day.
You teach at KSU. Any chance you'll be doing local writing workshops or is that something you have even explored?
KSU keeps me plenty busy, believe me! But now and again, I will do a community workshop. I think it is important to give what you can to community-and teaching writing is one of the things I can give.
What do you think is the most important aspect of writing, things aspiring writers can focus on to improve their work?
The simple but true thing to say is that aspiring writers must write. Write often, a little while (30 min or an hour) every day. Practice poems and stories-whatever, but write, write, and rewrite. Then you must read. Read everything-not just the classics, but contemporary literature, domestic and international, old and new. And less important, but still important, you should network-that is, you should find community with other writers. Go to readings and conferences. Keep this in balance though, because you can't write and read if you are spending all of your time at book parties.
What are you currently working on? When can we expect it? Can you give us a juicy detail or two?
I am working on novels and a book of narrative poems. One novel and the poems are close to being finished, but there is no publisher at present. The other novel, I am still initially researching. The poems are travel poems set in Africa and focus on the reckonings of a black America in Africa. The novels are both historical: one set in Georgia and the other in Europe.
Professor Grooms, I thank you, FC BYTES thanks you, and have a good afternoon. Best of luck with you future projects, I am sure many people are awaiting something new-I know I am-Jesse Bishop
*Biographical information courtesy of www.kennesaw.edu
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