Hello.
[CHUCKLING]
Thank you, Garett.
That was awesome.
My stay here is short, but Tucson is really cool.
I was saying that, wherever I go,
I say wherever I'm at is cool.
But here, I actually mean it.
[LAUGHTER]
Got to walk around 4th Street today,
and had some nice tacos and a piece of pie.
And the temperature was right, but I
was feeling the mojo of the place a little bit.
And I liked it quite a bit.
I'm very happy to be here, in this beautiful venue.
I get to stay in what I-- just right next door, here,
there's a little--
I don't know if you guys know-- it's this hidden little room.
Beautiful modern little apartment
that I get to stay in.
And have many new friends on the faculty,
here, who are writers who I have admired, and still admire,
and who are also very nice people.
Which is always a good thing.
This is all to say I'm glad to be here.
[CHUCKLING]
The book's been out a couple of years, now,
which is amazing to say, because it just seems like yesterday it
came out.
But I've been interviewed well over 100 times.
And there's a question, or a line
of questioning, that follows me everywhere I go,
which is this question of why.
Why did you write these stories?
What's the matter with you?
[CHUCKLING]
And it's an interesting question.
I remember the very first interview I gave,
this was the very first question.
And I had no idea what to say.
I just stuttered around and said some stuff.
I listen to that, now, as nostalgia.
Oh, the naive young man with his first interview.
But it's an interesting-- it's a very important, I think,
artistic question to have to answer.
I'll give you an example of what I mean by this, just
to have you guys participate a little bit.
If I ask you, what's your favorite color, some of you
might go, I don't know.
Panic.
Say, you say red.
Red's my favorite color.
Then, if I asked you, why is red your favorite color.
Uh, well, I like the Chicago Bulls,
and their uniforms are red and black white.
In high school, our school colors were red and white.
I once read a book on feng shui, and red is a power color.
You have to track your way back to what
might be the influence that would
make you say red, as opposed to green, or blue,
or anything else.
And it was the same sort of process
of going back through what I had written, what I had done.
What have you done?
Why did you do this?
And I got some very, very interesting results
in thinking about the answer to this question.
One of the things I learned, pretty early on-- it was
the third or fourth interview that I did,
and it was one of those--
I did a radio interview.
And it's one they put on the internet.
So my relatives all over the country could hear it.
And in that interview, I said, I come from a long line
of storytellers--
which is true-- though I am the first writer in my family.
And I immediately got a message from my Auntie Cheryl.
And she's like, you are not the first writer in the family.
I'm like, who else is writing in the family?
No one even reads books, let alone writes.
What are you talking about?
She's like, I'll send you some stuff in the mail.
She sent me 11 typed pages that would be--
someone had typed it up--
the translated version of the diary
of my great, great, great, great, great grandfather
on my mother's side, a man named Floyd Barker.
And it was reading just those few pages,
I had this extraordinary, enlightening feeling,
for a couple of reasons.
One was, I always wondered, why do I have words in me.
It's one thing to say I'm a storyteller,
but there's another thing to say that I have words in me.
I'm interested in words.
I'm passionate about words, and putting words together.
It's not that when we were telling stories,
we didn't care about how we were telling them.
We always tell them as well as we can.
But it's a different thing to say,
I need to put the words down the page.
And I'm like, I don't know where that came from.
And I felt like a freak in my own family.
Like this thing that had emerged out
of a weird, brown egg, instead of all the white ones.
But then I read Floyd Barker's diary.
And I'll read you a passage.
And again, this is a man who's just a farmer.
Just a farmer.
Here.
Let me read you a passage, and you'll
understand what I'm saying.
Says, on the return trip, William
cut a cottonwood width at the river, and used it for a weapon
after arriving at the home near Old Pigeon.
He stuck it into the damp earth near the spring,
and the resulting tree blew down only a few years ago,
and saplings may yet be found about the stump.
Wow.
It's a beautiful sentence, right?
Nine years of graduate school, to write sentences
like this man, who was just a farmer, and probably only
had the family Bible in the house.
I'm like, OK.
Maybe words have always been in there.
I'm more convinced, now that my book is out,
and I have conversations with my other family members,
and find out that they had been secretly reading.
And what my dad said, no, no.
I love Robert Frost.
What are you talking about?
I've never seen you read a book in my whole life.
And then he recites a Robert Frost poem.
The things you learn.
The other thing is the content of what I write about.
Why are these preoccupations in me?
There's a certain amount that is where I grew up,
and the things I saw, and the things
I was in close proximity to, that have imprinted,
forced me into thinking about certain things.
But the main thing in reading Floyd Barker's diary
is that I found his preoccupations are
my preoccupations, in a strange way.
I'll read another paragraph.
Said, after passing the present side of Brandenburg, Kentucky,
the party was attacked by Indians, and those not killed
were made prisoners.
It is said that one of the Barker boys
tried to escape by swimming the river,
but was killed in the water, and his body caught,
and the heart taken out and broiled,
and an effort made to compel his mother to eat it.
However, this she refused to do.
What?
I write fiction.
This is a man putting down stuff that happened.
It was an extraordinary moment for me
to say, why, why do I write?
Why do I Write?
The same reason this man wrote that paragraph.
He's not sending it off to The New Yorker,
trying to get published.
This stuff, no one even knew about it.
This man is writing because he's trying to express
that these things happened.
And I can read you other paragraphs, too,
of seeing him struggle with some of the things that
were happening, trying to make sense of the world.
And this is what we do.
We have these stories that are in us.
And for some of us, the impulse is
to get them out of us, to put them down, to write them,
to find words to express them.
11 pages of extraordinary stories, family history,
which is important, but a man sitting by himself
and writing down words to express things
that he has seen and felt. It's a powerful thing.
The story that I'm going to read from tonight
is also based on a family story.
In a similar fashion, it's based on a man
having to tell a story.
It's a story my grandfather told me
when I was just a little boy that's nine years old.
And my grandpa Heathcock told me about a time
when he was a foreman for Sinclair Oil.
And his job was to drive all around the oil wells,
and make sure everything was working properly.
And one day, his truck came nose-to-nose
with another truck.
Now, the roads were so narrow, and the ditches were so steep,
that there was no way for the trucks
to get around one another.
My grandfather told me that he got out of his truck,
and went and told the other driver
that he was the foreman for Sinclair,
and that that other man needed to put his truck in reverse,
and drive in reverse for miles, back the other way.
And the other man did not care for my grandfather's
suggestion.
They had some words over it.
And this is what I remember vividly.
Because my grandfather, he was a very genial man.
He can play 100 country gospel tunes on his guitar by ear,
and he liked telling funny stories, practical jokes he
played on his brothers, fishing stories, that kind of thing.
So this was kind of unique, a little bit.
But I remember he balled a big, meaty fist, and he leaned in,
and he said, so I went and got me a tire iron,
and I hit that man until he went back from where he came.
And that's the type of story that'll stick with a kid.
I thought a long time about, why did grandpa tell me that story.
I think, for a while, I thought there was some edifying
purpose to it.
Like he was trying to teach me something about what
it means to be a man.
We're not macho people, so that never set well with me,
but that's what I thought maybe it was.
And I was 18 years old.
My grandfather had passed away for a few years,
and I was on a fishing trip with all my cousins.
And I remember saying, do you guys--
I was talking to my brother.
And he said, you remember that story
that Grandpa told about hitting a man with a tire iron?
And they're all like, what are you talking about?
I'm like, well, Grandpa told me this story.
And I told them the story I just told you guys.
And they're like-- even back then,
I was known as the storyteller.
Patting me on the head.
Oh-- I was the youngest--
oh, little Al, telling stories.
I'm like, no.
No, no, no.
Grandpa told me that story.
And I said, let's go ask Uncle Bob.
He's the oldest uncle.
I said, let's go ask Uncle Bob.
So we went and asked Uncle Bob.
And uncle Bob was, yeah, yeah.
No, I remember that story.
Grandpa got in some bit of trouble over that.
How did you guys know about it?
And they're like, Al told us.
Come to find out, I was the only one he told.
This was not a story that was the lesson that he taught
all of the boys in the family.
It was something else.
And so, it's again, why?
Why did Grandpa tell me that story?
The same reason I write stories.
The same reason Floyd Barker wrote this down.
These stories can be a burden to us.
They're a burden.
And there's something in us that says we have to get them out.
We have to get them out.
We have to let people know the way the world has
worked for us, or against us, however we want to look at it.
I had to write a story about it, to try even
further to make sense of my grandfather's story.
And I wrote a story called Smoke.
And I'm going to start--
for time's sake, I'm going to start in a little bit.
I think all you need to know is, in my story,
there's a confrontation on a road.
And the only-- a couple of things I changed from the story
my grandfather told me is, in my story, I had--
he hit the man with a tire iron, and he actually
killed the other man.
I think about that a lot.
I grew up in Hazel Crest in South Chicago.
And I think there's a very small difference in watching
some of my friends who have had bad things happen,
and some of my friends who've had almost bad things happen,
and the divergent paths of their lives.
And I think about, for my grandfather,
who hit a man with a tire iron.
If that man would have done this, or that,
a couple of inches more.
You hit someone with a tire iron, that's serious business.
And what that would have done to my father's life, and my life,
and the way the name Heathcock is
known, at least in the region, and all those different things.
I put that in my story.