Q&A with Wettest County in the World author and JMU alum Matt Bondurant

The first was during a Survey of Poetry course in my junior year.  At least I think it was a survey of poetry, all I know is we were reading a lot of poems, using that fat Norton Anthology of poetry.  We were in one of those small, sharply raked classroom in Keezel Hall that always felt like a block of stadium seats in an elevator shaft.  The instructor was a kindly, soft-hearted woman, middle-aged, prone to wearing loose cotton tunics, carved amulets on leather thongs around her neck, Stevie Nicks hairstyle.  I think she was an adjunct or part-time, the teacher who is listed on the class schedules as “staff.”  I do not remember this woman’s name, which is a shameful thing.  She liked to stand at the small podium and read poems to us, often with great earnestness and emotion.  On this day she was reading us some Sylvia Plath – that great pied piper of the college aged wandering soul – and as she read one poem, I do not remember which, probably “Daddy,” her voice began to crack and she reached that neat intersection of an emotive reading and full-on weeping, which in the reading of a poem can be so wonderfully devastating.  And on this day, for the first time, I remember suddenly being struck with the thought: Wait, what is it that she is feeling there?  What is happening to her?  Why don’t I feel that way when I read it?  Why can’t I?  And then, wait, I want to feel that way, I want to know what that feels like.

And from that moment on it wasn’t just pretty words and good stories anymore.  Things got suddenly serious in my world.  Endless afternoons of beer and volleyball and the tantalizing prospect of throwing someone into the lake began to seem…trivial.

Then in my senior year I took a Major Author course from Dr. Jean Cash.  Edgar Allen Poe.  Again, almost on a whim – I think it just fit into my schedule, didn’t cut into my volleyball time or something – but it turned out to be one of the most vital course in my college career.  Of course Dr. Cash was wonderful, navigating us through Poe like a steamship captain, and by midterm I was convinced that he was the greatest writer America ever produced.  For our major paper I wrote on Poe’s Mss. Found in a Bottle.  I forget what my angle was, but I loved that story and enjoyed writing about it.  On the day Dr. Cash was to pass our papers back, she announced that she was going to read my paper aloud to the class, so that everyone could hear what an excellent paper sounds like.

Nothing like that had happened to me before, and the confidence that experience gave me made it possible for me to even consider a life as an academic and writer.  Previously academics, my professors, seemed like rare birds raised in darkened, silk lined rooms and fed pomegranate seeds with long precise tweezers by bearded men in black gowns.  They weren’t real people.  Of course I came to find out later that they were, or at least mostly, but at this moment I began to consider that maybe I might be like them, whatever they were, that perhaps I could do what they do.

I did take a poetry workshop and a fiction workshop as an undergrad.  The Poetry workshop was unremarkable to me, save the fact that I remember writing some horrible sonnets about girls I was infatuated with, some of whom were in the class, and that the professor died at the end of the semester when his mattress caught fire one night while he was sleeping.  The rumor was that he was drunk and smoking in bed.  Poets.

And about my first and only undergraduate fiction workshop, I remember almost nothing, except that I wrote a ridiculous story about a evil serial killer who never actually did anything except sit on a iron bench by the beach, leering at people in his three piece suit.  And that the class was taught by a very quiet woman in blue jeans with sad eyes who sat behind a desk.  The only thing I remember her saying is one day she wanted to talk about strategies to help us write, and asked us if we had any thoughts on the matter.  Of course we were silent.  After a while she offered this: “I like to drink a lot of coffee.”  That is the only thing that stuck with me.

I guess in undergraduate I did begin to contemplate the possibility of being a writer.    Because for the last two years in undergrad I thought I was a poet.  Oh yes, a poet.  I was the guy who lured girls up to his room in the fraternity house to read them poems I had written, Morrissey wailing in the background, a few candles flickering.  I would sleep in the woods at night, drunk out of my mind, clutching a copy of Leaves of Grass.  I memorized some Byron, hoping for that opportunity that never came.  While working in a restaurant in Ocean City, Maryland one summer I used to lug an old manual typewriter out to the deserted beach at night, perch on the lifeguard stand and hack away at terribly sincere odes to the moon, the ocean, and to all the girls that I fell in love with but who never knew I was alive.  I watched firelight, sunrises, and small birds with a serious turn of mind.

Of course it was all horrible, and after messing around a few years after college I was rejected by every MFA program I applied to.  I was working at the Associated Press in DC at the time, not a bad job but I was desperate to get back into school, to read more books, take more classes, be surrounded by people like all of you.  I was spending my lunch hours in a bookstore on 19^th and K street reading the collected works of Langston Hughes, dog-earing the pages so I could find my place the next day.  I found myself coming home from work so exhausted that all I wanted to do was eat dinner and do something mindless like watch TV, which is what nearly everybody else in the world does, by the way.  The world outside of the university can be strange and cruel for the English major, in more ways than you think.

So I applied to my alma mater, for an MA in English.  Surely, they would have me.  I remember that Dr. Hoskins kindly agreed to write me a recommendation, he who taught me to appreciate movie musicals, westerns, Fellini, Wings of Desire.  Somehow, with my mediocre grades and test scores, they let me come back.

So began the second part of my life at JMU.  This was the best thing that ever happened to me because in graduate school I re-read all those important books and actually got something from them.  And I met some serious, intelligent people who knew a lot more about books than me, and this time I actually paid attention.  My graduate school experiences were formed by the small, enthusiastic, and essentially romantic group of peers, and by a handful of professors, but if there was a star around which we grad students orbited, some powerful mass that put off a gravity that was hard to escape, it was Dr. Mark Facknitz.   I took several courses from Mark, including the History of Literary Theory, an extremely difficult course, Literature of the Great War, and perhaps most importantly my first graduate level fiction workshop, only the second one I had taken up to that point.

But I remember many things about Mark Facknitz’ class.  Ashe was in all of his classes, he was tough, delivering skillful critiques always couched in sound and reasonable discussion of narrative craft.  He also required us to read a lot, something that I do as well. He introduced me to a lot of writers, but none more important than John Cheever.

I have many important memories of my time there, and of my grandfather; his quiet, hawk-like face, early rides in the pickup to feed the cattle, the staggering stoicism of this man.  I also remembered the back utility room where he had a gun rack up on the wall.  This wasn’t so unusual; in those days in Franklin County shotguns and rifles hung from nearly any flat surface, and in many houses they still do.  What struck me about this particular gun rack was the pair of rusty brass knuckles hanging from a nail just below the gun rack.  As a young boy the idea of a man putting on the heavy, metal implement, purely designed to crush another man’s face, was a thrilling prospect and I spent long periods of time gazing at those brass knuckles.  To me they represented something remarkably primal, hanging there below the guns, as if to say: if you are still alive when I run out of bullets I will pull this hunk of metal off the wall and pummel you into unconsciousness.  Back at the dinner table my grandfather’s heavy, placid face would take on a whole new light.  I was terrified of him and fascinated about the life he had led.

I didn’t know of his true past and involvement in the events of the early 1930’s until much later, just a few years before his death.  My father didn’t even know he had been shot until a few years before my grandfather’s death, when as part of his genealogical research he came across a series of newspaper articles documenting the events at Maggodee Creek in December of 1930.  When asked about the shooting my grandfather merely said: oh yeah, shot me through here, and raised his shirt to show my father the entry wound under his arm.  Not much more was said about it after that, which is the way my father’s family communicated about such things.  This was almost twenty years ago, and it is fair to say I’ve been working on the novel ever since.

I have had two pictures above my writing desk since 1995: John Cheever and F.S. Fitzgerald.  They are my prose style idols.  I don’t really write like them at all, but I always want to.  In the pictures they are both wearing tweed jackets and uncomfortable expressions.

Best JMU memory?

Streaking the quad, of course.  By the way, the quad is really, really long.  Especially when about five hundred people show up to watch you do it.  I was with a group of guys and the last hundred yards we were gassed and just walked.  I was the only dude who didn’t have a mask (I was a late entry) and we all piled into a van on Main Street, which is a whole other set of homoerotic subtext to deal with.

Favorite on-campus eatery?

In my day D-Hall was legendary for good food.  And it was.  I think now that kind of quality is normal on campuses, but in the early 90’s the offerings at D-Hall were solid.  PC Dukes had a decent pizza.