Recently, Ellis took time to discuss his work with Southern Lit Review contributor, Philip K. Jason.

Can you tell us something about your selection process for In That Sweet Country?

Because all of Harry’s books have fly-fishing at their core, I knew I wanted to feature the uncollected work that speaks to his readers about that shared pleasure, along with a generous sampling of stories about hunting—“Gobblers in the Mist” and “Hard Winters and Crazy Birds” are two of my favorites. I also wanted readers to experience Harry’s writing about nature in general, which is always beautiful and informative. And since Harry’s self-acknowledged addictions were mountains and cold trout-water, they figured into the selection process, too. The cover painting, Boy Fishing by Winslow Homer, seemed the perfect visual representation, on so many levels, for Harry’s beloved “sweet country.”

Of the selections in this book, do you have any personal favorites?

I’m rather fond of “Downriver, Again,” “High-Country Trout,” and “A Hunting Dog’s Days Afield,” since these stories contain the “germs” of stories that Harry would build on for his first two books, The Earth Is Enough, his widely acknowledged masterpiece, and the superb On the Spine of Time. I also love “Buffalo River Sequence,” a rare poem from Harry, and his eloquent and magical nature essays, such as “Song of the Whippoorwill” and “Southern Lights.” 

What are the qualities of Harry Middleton’s writing that you most admire?

Harry’s ability to draw wonderfully full characters and to create a magical sense of place fascinated me from my very first reading of The Earth Is Enough. After that, I could not get enough of his stories, as is the case with so many of Harry’s very dedicated fans. His prose draws you into the story so completely that you clearly see the trout rising to the fly, feel the swift mountain water tug at your legs as you wade, and taste the fizz of an ice-cold cold root beer, while sunning on a rock beside a favorite trout stream with any number of Harry’s deftly drawn characters, people like Elias Wonder, Exie Sopwith, Roth Comers Tewksbury, Dr. Raul Yarp, or  Swami Bill and Kiwi LaReaux. All good company amid perfectly wonderful storytelling!

For those who lead indoor lives in manmade habitats, what does Harry Middleton’s work offer?

Readers enjoy Harry’s stories and books because they are transported into the magic of the natural world that Harry knew and loved and conjured so well. His renderings of lovable characters and a reverence for place resonate with readers, many of whom have never been to a wild place, while still others long for and yet find, for whatever reasons, they are no longer able to return to favorite haunts. In either case, Harry leads readers on a journey, away from the din and gray of cities and toward the bright enchantment of wild beauty and solitude, toward the mountains and icy trout water, toward the “sweet country.” Who doesn’t want to go along!

Any thoughts about another gathering on Middleton’s previously uncollected writings?

I am beginning to hear from readers about how much they have enjoyed reading In That Sweet Country, and a few are already asking if there are plans for a second collection. We’re all Middleton fans and extremely pleased with the reception In That Sweet Country is enjoying. A second volume of Harry’s stories is certainly something I think about, as does the publisher.

Learn more by visiting Ron Ellis’ website.

Do you think Kathryn was able to correctly capture the dialect of that era?  

I think Kathryn Stockett does an excellent job in capturing the voice of that era especially in regards to Aibileen. Using dialect to portray characters of a certain social class is not a new concept. I’m reminded of Twain’s Huck Finn, or various characters (all white) in Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights.” When done well, it’s quite an effective device that enriches the narrative.

Some people say that writing the black dialect is, in itself, a racist act. Most blacks here I’ve spoken to disagree and say she got it right for that time period and location. What do you think?

In my opinion, Stockett’s use of dialect is authentic and not at all racist. Again, she’s writing characters in rural Mississippi with limited education. If all of the blacks portrayed were written in the same voice, i.e. Aibileen’s as hers is the most distinctive, then the argument for racism might be plausible. Clearly that is not the case as ministers, teachers, and more educated blacks are written with no dialect at all. 

Even today, there is a dialectal difference across classes and a lot of people code-switch depending on the situation. This is not so much a race issue as a socio-economic issue. I’d like to talk openly about that and encourage people to see the dialects as equally beautiful ways to relate to each other, and not one as being superior to the other. What are your thoughts about modern-day dialects?

While I agree that there are dialectal differences today, I don’t believe that there is a certain way that blacks “speak” as opposed to whites: English is English. Ascribing to that belief is where racism begins, because it encourages people to amend their speech when in the presence of other ethnicities. Often when I am approached by whites who are only familiar with me via characters that I play on screen, they change their dialect and grammar because of who they perceive me to be. It’s insulting. I usually respond with a tight smile and silence. If that doesn’t convey my disdain for their behavior, I say a polite hello and move on because for me the conversation has ended. I can’t say that I know much about “code–switching.” What I do know is that people relax in familiar environments. I attribute that to education, age, social status and technology. Let’s not forget, the vernacular is constantly evolving to include the use of acronyms and slang in place of standard, proper English. And that, sadly, is within all racial lines.

Race relations have improved significantly in the south over the years. However, many wealthy white families continue to employ minority workers in their homes, and many white children are still raised by African-American nannies today. While those workers may be allowed through the front door, at the dinner table, or in the restroom today…these relationships are still very delicate, intricate, and complicated. What would Minny — with her sharp tongue and brutal honesty — say about the modern south?

To be quite honest, it’s difficult to say how Minny would respond to the modern day south. We have to remember that her interaction with whites was limited, and at a time in history where social injustice was prevalent and accepted. It takes time to build trust. I’m not sure that Minny wouldn’t continue to have a watchful and suspicious eye on any non-African American save, of course, progressive whites like Celia and Skeeter. However, she would be proud that her contributions effected change in social mores.

Finally, who will be portraying the other characters in the movie? We’re all hoping for real southern actors who have real southern accents.

Aibileen will be played by Viola Davis.

Emma Stone will play Skeeter.

Bryce Dallas Howard will play Hilly.

Celia will be played by Jessica Chastain.

While I’m not sure where these talented women are from, I know that their accents to my southern ear sound realistic and not at all contrived. Also remember that the film’s director, Tate Taylor, is southern.       

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Thomas Wolfe was born in 1900 in Ashville, North Carolina.  His parents split when he was a child and he lived with his mother in a boarding house.  Wolfe’s loneliness was his greatest resource for writing, He rarely saw her as she worked to provide for her children.

He was an avid reader and an excellent student. He attended the University of North Carolina where he wrote plays and performed them.  He graduated in 1920 and went on to earn a master’s degree at Harvard, but had no luck publishing his work.

Eventually, Wolf found a publisher for his first novel, Look Homeward Angel.  The novel was met with both praise and criticism.  The main character, Eugene Gant, is Thomas Wolfe, and Wolfe carried this character forward in another novel, Of Time and River, published in 1935.

He was near completion on two novels, having full drafts and many revisions completed when he died of pneumonia in 1938.  The Web and The Rock, and perhaps his most well-known novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, were published in 1939 and 1940.

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Daniel Woodrell was born, raised and remains in the Missouri Ozarks.  He dropped out of high school and joined the marines when he was seventeen. He later realized that the military was not for him so he returned to civilian life and went to the University of Kansas then on to the prestigious Iowa Writer’s School on a Michener Fellowship. He tried other things, and lived a lot of places, but ultimately decided he had to do what he loved –write. He lives in West Plains, Missouri.

His first novel, Under the Bright Lights drew critics’ praise. Since then he has published several novels including Muscle for the Wing, The Ones You Do, Woe to Live on, Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir, The Death of Sweet Mister and Winter’s Bones (SLR’s review).

Woodrell coined the phrase “country noir” in an effort to describe the area in which he works.

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Robert Penn Warren was in Guthrie, Kentucky in 1905 and remained a resident of the South until his late thirties.  It would be the South, however, that would always rise to the surface of his writing, and the spirit of the South that would evoke the passionate and poetic language that became synonymous with his name.

In 1920 the course of his life changed—Warren lost sight in one eye when his young brother, Thomas, accidentally hit him with a stone.  Prior to the accident, he was awaiting an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy.  Forced to forego his aspirations for the Naval Academy, Warren enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee to study engineering.

While attending Vanderbilt, Warren’s roommate, Allen Tate, introduced him to a group of young writers, men brought together by their interest in writing poetry and a nostalgia for the culture of the South.  Also included in this group was one of Warren’s teachers John Crowe Ransom.  Both Tate and Ransom were at the beginning of their writing careers.  The group published a magazine called The Fugitive, and though they never aspired to create an intellectual movement, they did manage to sway the young, impressionable Warren. By the time he graduated from Vanderbilt in 1925, he was committed to his writing.

He went on to study at the University of California and Yale University and in 1928 he was named a Rhodes Scholar allowing him to enter Oxford University. In 1930 he returned from England and with a degree in English literature.  Quickly thereafter, he married Emma Brescia, and accepted a position as instructor of English at Southwestern College in Memphis, Tennessee.

After one year at Southwestern, he accepted an offer from his alma mater Vanderbilt. He taught there for three years before taking another position at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.  From 1934-1942, he established a reputation as a great poet and an influential academic. He helped found the Southern Review, and wrote three novels during this time. Two of these were never published, but the third, Night Rider was published in 1939. The success of Night Rider established his literary standing and gave him a name beyond academia.

In 1950 Warren moved to New Haven, Connecticut to accept a professorship of playwriting at Yale University.  He and Emma divorced and he quickly remarried Eleanor Clark in 1952. They had two children.  Another change was his attempt to return to his poetry.  He collected his early works in Selected Poems, 1923-1943 (1944), but he was unable to produce new poetry.  Instead, he published an autobiographical narrative in verse, Brother to Dragons (1953), Finally, in 1957 he published, Promises, Poems 1954-1956 (1957).

In all, Warren wrote ten novels.  All of his novels deal with the South and southerners.  In chronological order, the novels include: Night Rider (1929); At Heaven’s Gate (1943); All the King’s Men (1946); World Enough and Time Band of Angels (1955); The Cave (1959); Wilderness (1961); Flood (1964); Meet Me in the Green Glen (197l); A Place to Come To (1976). (1950);

Among these works, All the King’s Men was his most popular with readers and critics alike. The widely read novel chronicles the rise and fall of Willie Stark, addressing the political processes of democracy as practiced in the South of the 1930s.

In 1986 he was named poet laureate. Robert Penn Warren died in 1989 in Vermont.

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Born in 1931 in Richmond Virginia, Tom Wolfe had dreams of playing baseball professionally.  While he came closer than most with the same aspiration, he had to settle for writing.  He earned an education at Washington and Lee, and attended graduate school at Yale University.  His doctoral thesis studied Communist Organizational Activity among American Writers, 1929-1942.

Wolfe took his first newspaper job in 1956 and soon worked for the Washington Post, and the New York Herald Tribune.  While there he experimented with fictional techniques in feature stories.  He is credited with being the inventor of New Journalism. That is, he wrote feature articles ignoring all conventional journalistic rules, instead, simply writing the story the way he wanted.  He used italics, free association literary techniques, even exclamation points!

His career advanced further in the mid-60’s with the publication of The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.  In 1979, he published The Right Stuff, which won his the American Book Award for Non Fiction, and in the eights became a household name with the Bonfire of the Vanities. He was paid extremely well for the rights to the movie.

He continues to write novels, among his most recent novels, the highly successful, A Man in Full and his latest work release, I am Charlotte Simmons.  Tom Wolfe lives in New York City.

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Born, Thomas Lanier Williams, in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911, Tennessee Williams was the first of two children born into a prestigious Tennessee family.  The family lived for seven years in Clarksdale, Mississippi, before moving to St. Louis in 1918. He went to college at the University of Missouri, but he did not stay long.  He returned to St. Louis and worked for a shoe company, and struggled to find a way to make a living writing.  His literary career did not show promise until six years later when he produced his first play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, in Memphis.

Building upon the experience he gained with his first production, Williams had two of his plays, Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind, produced by Mummers of St. Louis in 1937. He briefly attended Washington University before transferring to the University of Iowa where he graduated in 1938.

In 1939, just one year after graduating, he produced Battle of Angels in Boston. In 1945,   The Glass Menagerie found its way onto Broadway with both commercial and critical appeal. Containing autobiographical elements from both his days in St. Louis as well as from his family’s past in Mississippi, the play won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award as the best play of the season.

The next eight years produced Street Car Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, A Rose Tatoo, and Camino Real on Broadway. He received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for Streetcar. In 1950, his work reached an international audience when Streetcar Named Desire was made into a movie. The following year, The Glass Menagerie found a home on the silver screen.  Williams had now achieved a fame few playwrights of his day could equal.

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His financial success allowed him to divide his time between a home in New York, New Orleans, and Key West.  And for the next thirty years, from the early fifties to the early eighties, his reputation grew and more of his works were produced on Broadway and made into films.  His play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was a tremendous success and earned him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1955, Orpheus Descending, and Night of the Iguana. There is little doubt that as a playwright, fiction writer, and poet, Williams helped change the contemporary idea of the Southern literature. He helped the South find a fresh, strong voice by which to convey their experiences.   As a Southerner he not only led the way for other southern writers, but also helped the South discover the strong, true voice buried beneath its history and hushed culture.

Tennessee Williams died on February 24, 1983, at the Hotel Elysée in New York City.

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Alice Walker was born the youngest of eight children in Eatonton, Georgia in 1944.  She went to college on a scholarship and rushed off to New York soon after graduation.  Her stay in New York was brief.  She moved to Tougaloo, Mississippi in the mid-1960’s and gave birth to her daughter. During this time, Walker became active in the Civil Rights Movement during and remains active today.

In 1982 she published The Color Purple, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.  Soon after, she started her own publishing company, Wild Trees Press.  She immersed herself in the controversial issue of female circumcision in Africa in two books:  The Temple of my Familiar (1989); and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992).   Her work largely depicts the struggles of sexism, racism and poverty that women have shared throughout history.  She balances these struggles, however, by portraying women’s strength as the solid rock of a family, the leader in a community, and spiritual-being. Walker has also written In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness and Meridian a compelling novel about a young woman who goes to  college in Atlanta in search of her place in society.

Alice Walker currently resides in Northern California.