Claire Hamner Matturro: Congratulations, Joseph Eldredge, and thank you for taking the time to chat with me a bit over your new release, An Antebellum Oz, a creative, hard-hitting retelling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The story is set in April of 1861, which our readers will recognize as the beginning of the American Civil War, and involves six youths—three White and three enslaved Blacks. A hurricane sweeps them up and drops them down in Oz, where they meet a scare crow called Jim Crow, a tin man called the Klan Man, and a bloodhound called brer-Lion (“cuz I’m the biggest Hound in the House”). And, yes, there are witches and flying monkeys too! What a bold and imaginative undertaking. The foreword states your “vision is a nightmare of an old chivalric South that most certainly did exist in all its violence & racism.” It must have taken some courage to tackle such a beloved classic and so could you tell us where your ideas came from, when they came to you, and what motivated you to recast the classic Oz as a kind of Southern nightmare?
Joseph Eldredge: Thank you very much for your congratulations and the review. I feel very honored to appear in a publication like SLR. Like many people, I grew up with the classic Oz, both the book and the film, its images entwined with our dreams and collective imagination. The inspiration for this retelling came in a sudden moment: I saw the image of The Scarecrow in the trappings of that infamous Southern doggerel figure: Jim Crow.
Poets are always thinking not in terms of words, but in words-between-words, so I suspect the epiphany came from the almost pun-like association: Jim-crow, Scare-crow. The rest of the story followed from there. The intention of the original classic was, to me, a parable for the integration of the child’s psyche (intellect, heart, and impulse begin as external personifications, but become integral as Dorothy develops). The intention with Antebellum Oz is to tell the adolescence of a Southern Dorothy (and friends), simultaneous with the ‘growing up’ of the South into its own nation, the Confederacy.
CHM: Your bio in An Antebellum Oz says you are a poet, teacher, scholar, and family man who lives in Colorado. I wonder if you might tell us more. Whatever you are comfortable sharing but also, if you don’t mind, where and what do you teach? Have you ever lived in the South or have you always been a westerner?
Joseph Eldridge
JE: I grew up in the South, in Florida, not far from where the great American writer, Zora Neale-Hurston lived (to her I owe a great literary debt). I grew up never seeing snow or a mountain, so the alpine landscape became quite the mystique to me, in that childlike way which Proust has revealed so beautifully. I now live in Alma, CO, which feels like both the geographic center of the country and is its highest livable altitude. The American West, youngest child in our history, allows me a sort of imaginative disinterestedness towards the environment I grew up in. I think it’s the artist’s duty to have one foot in that personal history, but the other in eternity, as mediating agents of/to either/or.
A writer like Faulkner could live in the South and reveal it in a way which no one had ever seen before, but Mark Twain required distance to do the same while also keeping his savvy humor intact. Humor is very important to my work, and perhaps a certain detachment is essential to it.
I teach English History, Latin, Greek, and Poetry. I’d prefer not to reveal any more personal information than that. I write under a pseudonym, which I feel protects my professional and artistic autonomy, respectively, particularly in this current climate of political censorship and totalitarianism.
CHM: An Antebellum Oz is structured as a five act play, yet within that framework, it appeared to me to be an epic poem. The book touches the edges of gothic, supernatural, even a kind of mash-up quality, and certainly (again to me) an allegory, but never lands precisely into any one category. You call it a romance. Your publicist calls it a “work of literature,” which, of course, is a broad category. So my question is what would you tell bookstore owners if they ask you where they should place the book in their store—on what shelf, category, or section—and what genre is this work?
JE: Well, I’d probably request a front table placement if possible! Works of great originality and creative risk will always be difficult to place generically because the norm creates the genre. A great novel like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked was challenging to the fantasy book and its readers, raising important questions for feminism, ethics, and even economics. His book had a difference which made a difference, and the risk clearly paid off. I would ask booksellers to look at Antebellum Oz in the same way:
This book is salient to the social issues we face today, is funny and poetically original, and is highly marketable as a dark retelling of an extremely popular American fairy tale that continues to capture our cultural imagination.
It would be a dream come true to produce Antebellum as a musical one day, with original songs by Arianna Grande and Cynthia Erivo of course.
Claire Matturro
CHM: Now a few questions about technique: Why did you opt to structure this as a five-act play and not an epic poem in, say, the style of Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body? Your prior book, An Andrew Jackson, is identified as an epic poem on the back cover. What do the five acts and format of a play or script add to the story in An Antebellum Oz?
JE: I’m very excited to talk about this because I feel the technique is unique in today’s literature, allowing me access to numerous literary techniques which nothing else could provide. I think of the style as “Play for the theatre of the mind”, a name I’ve gotten from Wallace Stevens. I create the stage and the characters, and the readers’ mind brings life, with all sound and fury, to each scene. The actual format reads very closely to that the sprawling, chthonic, and often bawdy ‘Circe’ section from James Joyce’s Ulyssess. However, the work is not modernist, but outrageously American.
This form allows for creative, surreal prose in the action descriptions, but careful iambic pentameter in the dialog, which all the characters speak in.
CHM: In the story, you use dialect and a generous share of idioms. Terms and phrases are often so obscure you felt the need to provide footnotes—sometimes as many as four footnotes on a page. Dialect can be controversial, it can also be difficult for readers to read, and footnotes slow down the flow of reading. So, I assume you were aiming for accuracy, but want to ask specifically: why did you choose to use obscure dialect and idioms? And why also footnotes? And, what are your sources for some of the dialect and idioms, which are by the way rather fascinating?
JE: Well, the words may be obscure to us, but they aren’t to its speakers! That’s the beauty of writing in a dramatic mode, each character has a language unique unto themselves, as do we all. I am certainly a lover of philology (alluding to Emily Dickinson), and gathering a wordlist for this book was a great challenge. Many of the unique words I’ve coined myself, but I owe much in that creation to Zora Neal-Hurston’s great study on old Southern idioms and folk tales, You Don’t Know Us Negroes (Collected Essays), from Mark Twain, many primary historical materials, and I even threw in some words from Finnegan’s Wake for seasoning. Since the book mostly takes place in a dreamscape, it was important that the language feel only uncannily familiar, as our deepest dreams do.
CHM: Your writing is full of lyrical phrases, rhythm and occasionally rhyme, plus there is music in it in the sense of characters singing or just the musical flow in the meter of the verses. I am curious as to the rhyme—sometimes it’s there and more often it is not. Is there a pattern I missed with this? And the music—do you envision this (as I did) as a musical production on a stage?
JE: The blank verse I wrote allows for a range of possibilities, with rhyme, alliteration, cadence, and rhythm being available without the restriction of a regular rhyme pattern. The meter is iambic pentameter, but is written in such a heavy dialectic, that the poetics of it can occasionally become unclear. I’m reminded of this quote prefacing Twain’s Huckleberry Finn: “In this book, a number of dialects are used… I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.”
I think that the rhyme therefore brings forth a certain artificial element to the reader’s ear, drawing their attention to the poetry as poetry. Within the story, characters will also use rhymes to draw other characters’ attention to an ironic statement. The character, Ferdinand, often speaks in this way, rather defensively so in fact, which I would classify as ‘ambivalence’.
Lastly, I think that some of the more trite rhymes will show the playfulness of the language, that nothing is taking itself too seriously. Rhymes like ‘South’, ‘out’, and ‘mouth’ are very simple and playful, but they’re still able to convey a lot of meaning when they’re used in a certain way.
For a musical production, I’m open to any offers that come my way!
CHM: An Antebellum Oz is a very complex and compelling undertaking, and again, I congratulate you. The poetry alone would be a commanding project, let alone the research and the extensive formatting. Might you share how long it took you to write this? And with teaching and a family, how you found the time? And, finally, are you at work on a new project?
JE: It took me about four months to write the book, and then another 4 to rewrite and edit it. I draft it in its formatted state, so I’m able to see how it will look on the printed page at the same time I’m creating it, which also saves time. I would read about two to three hours a day of history, literature, etc. for six months to do the research. I enjoy the process, and I don’t write for money or for fame; it is its own reward.
For future endeavors: Yes, absolutely! I publish one book every year. The next book will be about Abraham Lincoln, looking at this point in history from a more Northern perspective. It will be written in the same style, although I do believe that my skill has advanced, and I hope to become better at what I do with every new book.
I also publish a free monthly poem through my Substack, Songs of Sonnets, which is the best way to follow my work.
CHM: Thank you, Jospeh Eldredge. And best wishes for a successful future with An Antebellum Oz and your other projects.
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