Last night, Richard Ford read from his novel The Lay of the Land at the Center for Southern Literature in Atlanta.  The portion of the book that he read is also available at The New Yorker, so you can read it yourself if you are so inclined.  If you read it to yourself, do so standing with an impressive literary carriage.  You must also be able to pull off being deathly serious and disarmingly humorous simultaneously.  Good luck.
Mr. Ford spoke briefly before the reading and took many questions afterwards.  A few things that that I thought were interesting:

  • I didn’t know that he is a long-time resident of New Orleans.  No one tells me anything.  I haven’t seen him in any of the post-Katrina collections of writing about the city that I’ve read, but a quick Google search turned up this essay in The Guardian.
  • His wife was the City Planner for New Orleans before being summarily dumped by the current mayor, Nagin.
  • The Fords are not very optimistic about the prospects for New Orleans.  They are moving back permanently next week.
  • Ford grew up in Jackson, MS a few streets away from Eudora Welty.  He credits having his mother point out Ms. Welty at the neighborhood convenience store when he was 8 as the moment when he internalized that being a writer might be a respectable way to make a living.
  • Ford is distrustful of writers who speak of having a “burning yearning” to write their message, lest they go mad.  He says that he has no burning yearning to write what he “has to say” - in fact he spends a lot of time making up things to write about.
  • He became a writer out of a love of reading rather than a burning need to “tell his story.”  He always hoped that his writing would be something that would excite young readers (and the not so young), passing pass along his love of reading, which drew a round of spontaneous applause from the crowd
  • He dropped out of law school to become a writer. We learned in the Q&A after the reading that his wife supported him for 18 years before he made a dime from his writing.

He read to a full house, many of whom brought entire gym bags full of books to be signed.  It was a great Monday night out, and I’m glad that Mrs. Cayenne and I rallied to make it.  Having pre-paid the baby-sitter helped.  The book appears to be fantastic by all accounts.  The reading helped bump this one up several places in the “to read” pile.