{"id":4063,"date":"2012-07-09T06:14:54","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T10:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jmusportsblog.com\/?p=4063"},"modified":"2012-07-09T06:20:45","modified_gmt":"2012-07-09T10:20:45","slug":"qa-with-lawless-author-and-jmu-alum-matt-bondurant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jmusportsblog.com\/?p=4063","title":{"rendered":"Q&A with Wettest County in the World author and JMU alum Matt Bondurant"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This post really spe\"Lawlessaksfor itself, but we’re very excited to present JMUSB’s first “long read.” \u00a0At least the first one that’s really worth printing out and taking with you to lunch or the can. \u00a0After all, it’s All Star week in baseball and there’s not squat else going on right now. \u00a0JMU won’t even release gametimes for football. \u00a0Fellow Duke Matt Bondurant has gone on to a successful writing career. \u00a0His second book, The Wettest County in the World, is based on his actual grandfather and his involvement, along with his brothers, in the moonshine business in Franklin County, Virginia during Prohibition. \u00a0The book has been turned into a movie coming out next month called “Lawless”<\/a>\u00a0(IMBD Link with trailers) and featuring a serious cast of Hollywood heavyweights – Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Guy Pearce, Shia LeBoeuf, Mia Wasikowski, and Gary Oldman. \u00a0Screenplay written by all-around badass Nick Cave. \u00a0Needless to say, this isn’t your average JMU story. \u00a0The book is great, and we can’t encourage you enough to read it before the movie and to check out Matt’s newest book, The Night Swimmer<\/a>. \u00a0Lastly, a huge thanks to Matt for taking the time!<\/p>\n

You went to JMU for both undergrad and your masters. How did your experiences at JMU (in and out of the classroom) help you develop as a writer? Did you have any particular professors that made a significant impact on your development<\/strong>as a writer?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I took classes from many excellent professors at JMU.\u00a0\u00a0At least I think I did.\u00a0\u00a0In truth, I just wasn\u2019t what you would call attentive.\u00a0\u00a0Of course there are exceptions, and it is to these moments and the professors who facilitated them that I likely owe much of the life I have now.\u00a0\u00a0Here are two, from my undergraduate career that affected me in very different ways.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The first was during a Survey of Poetry course in my junior year.\u00a0\u00a0At 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.\u00a0\u00a0We 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.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0\u00a0I think she was an adjunct or part-time, the teacher who is listed on the class schedules as \u201cstaff.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0I do not remember this woman\u2019s name, which is a shameful thing.\u00a0\u00a0She liked to stand at the small podium and read poems to us, often with great earnestness and emotion.\u00a0\u00a0On this day she was reading us some Sylvia Plath \u2013 that great pied piper of the college aged wandering soul \u2013 and as she read one poem, I do not remember which, probably \u201cDaddy,\u201d 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.\u00a0\u00a0And on this day, for the first time, I remember suddenly being struck with the thought: Wait, what is it that she is feeling there?\u00a0\u00a0What is happening to her?\u00a0\u00a0Why don\u2019t I feel that way when I read it?\u00a0\u00a0Why can\u2019t I?\u00a0\u00a0And then, wait, I want to feel that way, I want to know what that feels like.<\/p>\n

And from that moment on it wasn\u2019t just pretty words and good stories anymore.\u00a0\u00a0Things got suddenly serious in my world.\u00a0\u00a0Endless afternoons of beer and volleyball and the tantalizing prospect of throwing someone into the lake began to seem\u2026trivial.
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\nThen in my senior year I took a Major Author course from Dr. Jean Cash.\u00a0\u00a0Edgar Allen Poe.\u00a0\u00a0Again, almost on a whim \u2013 I think it just fit into my schedule, didn\u2019t cut into my volleyball time or something \u2013 but it turned out to be one of the most vital course in my college career.\u00a0\u00a0Of 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.\u00a0\u00a0For our major paper I wrote on Poe\u2019s\u00a0Mss. Found in a Bottle<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0I forget what my angle was, but I loved that story and enjoyed writing about it.\u00a0\u00a0On 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0Previously 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.\u00a0\u00a0They weren\u2019t\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0people.\u00a0\u00a0Of 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.<\/p>\n

I did take a poetry workshop and a fiction workshop as an undergrad.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0\u00a0The rumor was that he was drunk and smoking in bed.\u00a0\u00a0Poets.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0And that the class was taught by a very quiet woman in blue jeans with sad eyes who sat behind a desk.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0\u00a0Of course we were silent.\u00a0\u00a0After a while she offered this: \u201cI like to drink a lot of coffee.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0That is the only thing that stuck with me.<\/p>\n

I guess in undergraduate I did begin to contemplate the possibility of being a writer.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Because for the last two years in undergrad I thought I was a poet.\u00a0\u00a0Oh yes,\u00a0a poet<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0I 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.\u00a0\u00a0I would sleep in the woods at night, drunk out of my mind, clutching a copy of\u00a0Leaves of Grass<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0I memorized some Byron, hoping for that opportunity that never came.\u00a0\u00a0While 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.\u00a0\u00a0I watched firelight, sunrises, and small birds with a serious turn of mind.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0I 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.\u00a0\u00a0I was spending my lunch hours in a bookstore on 19th<\/sup>\u00a0and K street reading the collected works of Langston Hughes, dog-earing the pages so I could find my place the next day.\u00a0\u00a0I 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.\u00a0\u00a0The world outside of the university can be strange and cruel for the English major, in more ways than you think.<\/p>\n

So I applied to my alma mater, for an MA in English.\u00a0\u00a0Surely, they would have me.\u00a0\u00a0I remember that Dr. Hoskins kindly agreed to write me a recommendation, he who taught me to appreciate movie musicals, westerns, Fellini, Wings of Desire.\u00a0\u00a0Somehow, with my mediocre grades and test scores, they let me come back.<\/p>\n

So began the second part of my life at JMU.\u00a0\u00a0This 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.\u00a0\u00a0And I met some serious, intelligent people who knew a lot more about books than me, and this time I actually paid attention.\u00a0\u00a0My 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n

But I remember many things about Mark Facknitz\u2019 class.\u00a0\u00a0Ashe was in all of his classes, he was tough, delivering skillful critiques always couched in sound and reasonable discussion of narrative craft.\u00a0\u00a0He also required us to read a lot, something that I do as well.\u00a0He introduced me to a lot of writers, but none more important than John Cheever.<\/p>\n

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Editor’s Note: Dr. Cash was my favorite teacher at JMU as well and I was thrilled to hear Matt’s comments. \u00a0After graduation, I once called her slightly intoxicated from the beach to read her a passage from Stephen King’s “On Writing” in which he says “the road to hell is paved with adverbs.” \u00a0Dr. Cash used to berate me for words ending in “ly.” \u00a0Secondly, I’m amazed at Matt’s ability, well really anyone’s ability, to handle Dr. Facknitz’ Literary Theory or Literary Criticism courses. \u00a0Mistakenly signed up for it junior year, dropped out after two weeks because I had no idea what was going on, but vowed I would take it again my last semester. \u00a0Still had no idea what was going on and I think he only gave me a C- so I could graduate and wouldn’t retake any of his courses.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Wettest County in the World is unique because it’s a novel based on a true story and the main characters were your relatives. What made you want to tell your grandfather’s story and how much of it were you aware of before you began researching and developing the book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was young, a few times a year my family would make the drive down to Snow Creek, four hours from Alexandria, to visit my grandparents.\u00a0\u00a0My father\u2019s brothers and sisters all lived in the area as well, so the gatherings usually bloomed into full scale Bondurant family reunions each time we came to visit; all the uncles, aunts, cousins, and others crowding into my grandfathers old farmhouse for giant breakfasts and long, slow talks before the woodstove in which very little was ever actually said.\u00a0\u00a0I spent most of the time wrestling in hay-filled barns with my giant cousins, riding tractors in the early morning along muddy creek beds, and grabbing electric cattle fences because they dared me to.\u00a0\u00a0My grandfather died in his late eighties; he had just bought a new truck the day before and was building a new house.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0I also remembered the back utility room where he had a gun rack up on the wall.\u00a0\u00a0This wasn\u2019t so unusual; in those days in Franklin County shotguns and rifles hung from nearly any flat surface, and in many houses they still do.\u00a0\u00a0What struck me about this particular gun rack was the pair of rusty brass knuckles hanging from a nail just below the gun rack.\u00a0\u00a0As a young boy the idea of a man putting on the heavy, metal implement, purely designed to crush another man\u2019s face, was a thrilling prospect and I spent long periods of time gazing at those brass knuckles.\u00a0\u00a0To me they represented something remarkably primal, hanging there below the guns, as if to say:\u00a0if 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<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0Back at the dinner table my grandfather\u2019s heavy, placid face would take on a whole new light.\u00a0\u00a0I was terrified of him and fascinated about the life he had led.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know of his true past and involvement in the events of the early 1930\u2019s until much later, just a few years before his death.\u00a0\u00a0My father didn\u2019t even know he had been shot until a few years before my grandfather\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0When 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.\u00a0\u00a0Not much more was said about it after that, which is the way my father\u2019s family communicated about such things.\u00a0\u00a0This was almost twenty years ago, and it is fair to say I\u2019ve been working on the novel ever since.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Reviews for the book compared you to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner. There were also parts of the book (the still built inside the house) that reminded us of Mark Twain. Who are your favorite authors to read? Which authors do you think have had the biggest influence on you as a writer?<\/strong><\/p>\n

High praise, indeed. \u00a0But realistically I don’t belong in the same sentence as those two.\u00a0\u00a0I love McCarthy, particularly the early work up to and culminating with\u00a0Blood Meridian<\/em>, and I have done my time with Faulkner.\u00a0\u00a0Clearly I think Sherwood Anderson is an unacknowledged genius of American prose.\u00a0\u00a0Melville and Moby Dick remains central to all that I do, and my last novel,\u00a0The Night Swimmer<\/em>, is essentially an homage to John Cheever and Melville.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I have had two pictures above my writing desk since 1995: John Cheever and F.S. Fitzgerald.\u00a0\u00a0They are my prose style idols.\u00a0\u00a0I don\u2019t really write like them at all, but I always want to.\u00a0\u00a0In the pictures they are both wearing tweed jackets and uncomfortable expressions.<\/p>\n

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Do you draw inspiration from other artists other than authors? We swear you must have been listening to tons of Drive By Truckers when writing the Wettest County in the World for instance.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Absolutely.\u00a0\u00a0And I love the Drive By Truckers.\u00a0\u00a0I listened to a lot of period-specific music when doing Wettest County, such as The Carter Family, and plenty of bluegrass and old-time country.\u00a0\u00a0Music is a huge inspiration and I always work with a set of large headphones on, which my wife hates.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0Your book is being developed into a movie that already is generating a lot of buzz. What is like to turn over your own work to a screenwriter, director, and actors so that they can develop their own interpretation of it? Have you had any influence or input into the screenplay or other elements of the movie?\u00a0 And on a lighter note, are you going to get to go to any premieres, film festivals, awards, etc?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When you sell the film rights to your book you never really think it is going to get made, so it wasn\u2019t much of a deal back then.\u00a0\u00a0Even after they wrote a script I didn\u2019t think it would really happen.\u00a0\u00a0It wasn\u2019t until the project started shooting that I had to consider the implications, and in the face of such generous good luck there is little to ponder.\u00a0\u00a0I do consider it a work of art separate from my book, and try to view it as objectively as possible, which is difficult.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019m extremely fortunate that such talented and kindly people made it, and they kept me involved every step of the way, even though they were not contractually obligated to.\u00a0\u00a0But they are contractually obligated to bring me to the premiere event, so we\u2019ll see how that goes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0Finally, since this is a JMU blog, we need to ask a couple quick JMU related questions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Favorite JMU area watering hole?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, back in my day there really was only a couple of options.\u00a0\u00a0JM\u2019s took a bunch of my money.\u00a0\u00a0I sort of favored what was the little Greek place then called Gus\u2019s Taverna, which I think became Dave\u2019s, and I\u2019m not sure what it is now.\u00a0\u00a0Pitchers were crazy cheap.\u00a0The Little Grill is legendary for good reason and I saw a lot of crappy poetry readings (and participated in some) there and loved every minute of it.\u00a0\u00a0I worked at The Artful Dodger for three years, which back then was the only coffee shop around so all the freaks hung out there. Loved it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Best JMU memory?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Streaking the quad, of course.\u00a0\u00a0By the way, the quad is really, really long.\u00a0\u00a0Especially when about five hundred people show up to watch you do it.\u00a0\u00a0I was with a group of guys and the last hundred yards we were gassed and just walked.\u00a0\u00a0I was the only dude who didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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Ever been back to JMU since you graduated (you wouldn’t believe the stadium\/tailgate scene)?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was there a few months ago to speak at the Sigma Tau Delta conference.\u00a0\u00a0Not during football season, but I did spend the evening downtown and was amazed at all the nightlife offerings.\u00a0\u00a0How many fucking roof-top decks do they have now?\u00a0\u00a0I was in a basement bar like a cave playing cool music surrounded by 20-30-something hipsters.\u00a0\u00a0Since when does Harrisonburg have 30-something hipsters?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Favorite on-campus eatery?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In my day D-Hall was legendary for good food.\u00a0\u00a0And it was.\u00a0\u00a0I think now that kind of quality is normal on campuses, but in the early 90\u2019s the offerings at D-Hall were solid.\u00a0\u00a0PC Dukes had a decent pizza.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Thing you miss most about your time at JMU?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sand court volleyball nearly every day.\u00a0\u00a0Loads of leisure time (I wasn\u2019t a \u201cstrong student\u201d).\u00a0\u00a0The valley, in every season.\u00a0\u00a0Having a still unformed set of aesthetic principles.\u00a0\u00a0Mennonites.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n