Memorial Messages
Lewis Nordan, John Updike, and Me
by Shannon Ravenel
I first encountered Lewis Nordan's fiction in 1983. He had a story--"Sugar Among the Chickens"--in Harper's Magazine. It was just one of the some 1,500 magazine stories I read that year in my job as series editor of The Best American Short Stories. The story was such a funny insider's take on American southern "culture" that first I found myself laughing out loud and then immediately re-reading the story from start to finish, something I never did as there was never enough time in that job. When I made my selection of 120 "best" stories to send to the Guest Editor for BASS 1984, I included "Sugar Among the Chickens" on the top of the pile, crossing my fingers that the Guest Editor would choose it as one of the twenty stories to be reprinted in the 1984 anthology.
No such luck. That Guest Editor that year was John Updike, a writer about as different from Lewis Nordan as Ipswich, Massachusetts, is from Itta Bena, Mississippi. And not only did Updike reject the Nordan story for inclusion, he asked me to remove it from the list of "100 Other Distinguished Stories of 1983." He felt it was "ridiculous." John Updike was very famous back then. Lewis Nordan was not. John Updike was the boss. I was not.
I have, ever since, hated myself for acceding to Updike's demand. I promised myself to do whatever I could to make up for it.
As it happened, 1983 was also the year that Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill was established and published its first five books. I was a founder of that small publishing house having accepted the invitation of my former professor, Louis Rubin, to join him in starting it up. We were tiny, we were underfunded, we were located far from the US publishing center, New York City, and we were dedicated not to bestsellers, but to "literature." The very first day I sat down in my Senior Editor's chair at Algonquin Books, I started a search for Lewis Nordan. I wanted to sign him up. To my regret, what I found was that he already had a publisher. That very year, 1983, Louisiana State University Press published his first book, a collection of stories titled Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair.
Then the New York City publishing world discovered him and in 1989 Vintage published his second collection, The All Girl Football Team. A year or so later, I was at some kind of publishing convention somewhere having lunch at a table of editors from various houses. One of them, an editor at Vintage, mentioned the difficulty of selling collections of short stories. "One of the best story writers we've ever published is Lewis Nordan, but our first book with him has sunk like a stone and the word has come down――we won't do another one."
I went straight to a pay phone (no iPhones, no Google back then) to call the office and set somebody to finding out where I could reach Lewis Nordan. We found him; I called him. And Algonquin Books published the rest of his work, five books beginning in 1991 with Music of the Swamp and ending in 2000 with Boy with Loaded Gun. "Sugar Among the Chickens" was included in his 1996 collection, Sugar Among the Freaks.
So there, Mr. Updike.
Actually, I should be indebted to John Updike for his blindness to the genius of Lewis Nordan. It was Updike's insult to my taste that kept me on Nordan's trail. Before I became his editor, I had read only a single story by him and had only the faintest glimmer of his importance. By the time we had published his last book, his "fictional memoir," I had come to understand that Algonquin had had the privilege and honor of publishing the work of a phenomenon in American literature.
Lewis Nordan wrote like no one else ever has or ever will again. He wrote from a stance and from circumstances unlike any other writer's. His particular genius is so complex as to be nearly impossible for anyone to aptly describe--impossible for anyone except Lewis Nordan himself:
"...my intention and my point: to render the natural world as itself and, at the same time, as unearthly."*
* From an essay, "Growing Up White in the South," by Lewis Nordan
Shannon Ravenel grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. She has had a long career in publishing working first for Holt, Rinehard & Winston in New York and later for Houghton Mifflin Co. in Boston. She served as Series Editor of Best American Short Stories annual anthology from 1978-1990. In 1983, she joined her former professor, Louis Rubin, in establishing Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and was Editorial Director there from 1990 until 2003 and now directs her Algonquin imprint, Shannon Ravenel Books.
A Memorial to Lewis Nordan
by Christopher Barzak
I still remember coming across Lewis Nordan's stories quite by accident when I was 20 years old and an English major in college. I was reading an anthology of literary criticism, essays, and stories that a professor had given me to do research for an essay I needed to write for his class. He had told me to read three specific essays in the book, but I began browsing the anthology to see what else it contained beyond those three essays. The book turned out to have two Lewis Nordan stories in it (the editor of the anthology, I later discovered, taught at the University of Pittsburgh with Buddy Nordan), and I began reading the first story, "Music of the Swamp" only to find myself laughing so much I cried within the first few pages. Then I read the second story and laughed and cried all over again. When I was done, I shouted for my then girlfriend to come to our bedroom where I was reading, and I read both of the stories out loud to her as soon as I had finished reading them silently to myself. She laughed as hard as I did, and cried too. We had to take breaks to get our breath back. That was one of the only times I've experienced such a complex emotional reaction to reading a story. Usually, a writer can make me laugh, or make me feel sorrow, or they can make me think more deeply about a situation or a type of character. Usually, a writer can evoke complex moods or atmosphere. But it's the rare writer who can shuttle me back and forth from humility to sadness to humor within the turning of a page, sometimes the turning of just one phrase. I was hooked on Lewis Nordan immediately, sought out every book of his I could find afterward, and was lucky enough to meet him a few years after I became a fan, when he came to my university to give a reading that brought out tears and laughter in the audience that night as well.
I wish he would have had a bigger audience. He certainly deserved one. But along with being a southern writer, he was also a somewhat quiet man, and from what I understand, he was not the sort of writer who promoted himself so urgently and vigorously as we see authors doing today in the wide world of social networking. In many ways, he was "my kind of guy".
Christopher Barzak grew up in rural Ohio, went to university in a decaying post-industrial city in Ohio, and has lived in a Southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, where he taught English in rural elementary and middle schools. His first novel, One for Sorrow, was published by Bantam Books in Fall of 2007, and won the Crawford Award that same year. His second book, The Love We Share Without Knowing, is a novel-in-stories set in a magical realist modern Japan, and was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. His first collection, Birds and Birthdays, is just published by Aqueduct Press.
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(C) Copyright by Shannon Ravenel, Christopher Barzak