The Story Teller As Benevolent Con Man* COMMENTS ON HIS WRITING WITH SUMMARY OF HIS LITERARY HISTORY by DAVID MADDEN So who inspired you to become a storyteller? / The first voice I can remember was my grandmother's, like a Homeric scop, looking like Wallace Beery, telling me a story about an old man who used the money his wife saved for their twelve children's Christmas presents to buy himself a handsome tombstone. She's the muse whose presence dominates BIJOU. Then you in turn told stories? / Since I was three. Among my unpublished stories are the ones I used to tell older kids—sitting huddled on our high front steps in chilly autumn twilight, on the railroad tracks where we'd be waiting to hop a freight train to Bull Run Creek to go swimming, to my two brothers, curled under the quilts, afraid my mother would take a belt to us, to kids hiding under my cot in an orphanage where I spent a little time, and later to classmates during recess in grammar school. It's always been play—in many guises, through many stages, all my writing is play. When my son Blake was little and he'd streak through my study, I'd say, "Don't bother me, honey, I'm playing." In many of your stories, the characters themselves are telling each other stories; the act of story-telling is playful on the surface, but with an undertone of dead seriousness. Especially in "The Singer." / Three entwined themes in "Tre Singer" link it with CASSANDRA SINGING, BIJOU, BROTHERS IN CONFIDENCE, "The World's One Breathing," and "Nothing Dies But Something Mourns": Mann's idea of the confidence man as artist, the artist as confidence man; the relationship between a hero and his witness; and the compulsion to tell a story. Telling stories as a child, acting out all the parts, doing all the voices, I was an actor—con man, magician, sometimes hero—on stage, my spectators within reach. Even as a child, I was aware of the dynamic interplay between teller and listener. I have been fascinated all my life by the teller's compulsion to tell a story. And looking back, I see that my own compulsion, on one or another level of sophistication, has always, consciously and unconsciously, reached out to explore every possible medium—stories, novels, plays, poems, radio plays, movies, even criticism—in which to express what has always been a rich and abundant raw material. Each medium, each genre with in each medium has it's ?From previously published and unpublished sources. I've culled statements about my life and writing that I'd like brought together in one place, and I've added new comments on this occasion. The interviewer is a figment of my imagination. I may prove to be a figment of his. 70 own special alure, offers its peculiar way into the relationship between teller and listener. My reactions since child-hood to media, purely as media, explain my experiences as a writer. And giving dramatic readings of "The Singer" and other stories (my first public reading was at Pikeville College, and it was "The Singer"), I've experienced kinetically the relationship between the teller and the listener. Surrendering to this compulsion to tell a story has been a way of going back to where I started before I ever wrote a story: the burden of making up a story without any introduction or asides, so that I must, like an actor, sustain the illusion of being, at once, both Pete and Wayne, the characters who tell the Singer's story simultaneously. The relationship between a performer and his audience parallels that between the storyteller and his listeners; the obligations entailed are sacred, the experience somewhat religious. And so when I write a story, I feel the living presence of listeners, not readers. Some day, I'd like to wander—maybe in my old age—the world, telling stories that I never write down. Mosl of your stories are set in the mountains, often in Eastern Kentucky: CASSANDRA SINGING, BIJOU. BROTHERS IN CONFIDENCE. "God Proud." "The World's One Breathing." "The Pale Horse...
Read full abstract
Feb 1, 2001
Juliet Mcmaster 
Open Access