GREG DOWNS Spit Baths

Reading Spit Baths by Greg Downs, it is easy to see why the collection won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Like Flannery O'Connor, certain of Greg Downs' stories engage in raw, unflinching examination of the rural South. As he notes in a recent interview with Rose & Thorn, "'Black Pork' is a difficult, disturbing story, and in fact a few good literary magazines did say it was too raw and painful for them." Also like Flannery O'Connor, he often throws in a dollop of humor as with "Adam's Curse" where "all the women in the family made a pact to live without men."

Some stories have a more contemporary feel. "Field trip," for example, deals with that post-college, not-quite-ready-to-settle-down period in life when every decision leads to doubts and introspection leads to nightmares. "Freedom Rides" is a look at current race relations with the backdrop of a theme park based on the early Civil Rights Movement.

Greg Downs' history degree adds detail and authenticity to the historical themes, while the various places he's lived and jobs he's held add realism to settings and characters. His stories are often daring and raw, but at the same time sentimental and nostalgic. It all makes for a fascinating combination worth reading and then reading again.

Like many writers these days, Greg Downs––whose short story collection, Spit Baths , won the Flannery O’Conner Award for Short Fiction––keeps a day job. In this case it’s Assistant Professor of History at City College of New York. Before that, he had a string of careers, including basketball coach, reporter, and high school English teacher, many of which he drew on for his stories. Prior to coming together as a collection, Greg’s stories appeared in Black Warrior Review, Glimmer Train, Meridian, The Greensboro Review, Sycamore Review, New Letters, and Witness. He has both an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania.


R&T: While it’s no longer unusual for writers to have another career, you've had several. How have these careers informed your writing?


Downs: None of it was planned; I wish I could say that I had some complex system for giving myself a range of experiences to draw upon, but in fact I was just living. Just trying to figure out what I was doing with my life, and how I could make use of the talents I had, and nurture my interests, and still keep a roof over my head. Now, I'm very grateful that I was able to learn a little bit about different kinds of lives and different types of work and workplaces, and I wish I had been forced to try out more lines of work before settling down.


It seems to me that many writers, including myself, draw first upon their individual history, in fictionalized and sometimes unrecognizable form, and then slowly start to draw inspiration from the rest of the world around them. My own personal and family history is interesting, but unfortunately it is more interesting to me than it is to you or to any other reader, so there's a danger in using it. I have an intimacy of knowledge, and a depth of feeling, that I don't have anywhere else, but I also have blind spots. There is something freeing and also terrifying about learning to draw material from other places in your life, from people on the periphery of your life.


R&T: Was any one career more influential than the others?


Downs: As a junior high school teacher, you live inside of an opera. The drama dial goes up to 11, sometimes among the parents and teachers as much as among the students. That is exhausting, but it's an incredible anthropological education. You learn to see around the edges of people, to see the comedy in tragedies and the tragedy in some comedies. You see into so many people's lives. Too many people, often. I remember getting home and going into my room and closing the door, so my roommates wouldn't touch me or talk to me. The reservoir of stories in my brain was filled to the top and spilling over. It's a great, exhausting, draining, exhilarating experience.


Unless you write about teenagers, though, the problem becomes translating those lusts and anxieties and joys into the often more muted terms of adulthood. I'm not sure I have figured that out. And adults are much more adept at hiding the operatic nature of their lives, at least most of them.


R&T: When did you start writing fiction?


Downs: I wrote stories casually in high school and more than casually in college, and I planned to keep writing after college. But then I didn't, for the first year and a half. I was busy and distracted and I had the typical 22-year-old's problem of too many goals and too little discipline. When I was 23, though, I decided that it was now or never, so I quit my job, moved 750 miles away, signed up for a class, and set a writing schedule. Two years later I was at Iowa in the Writers' Workshop.


R&T: You also lived in a variety of places––Kentucky, Tennessee, Hawaii––in your youth, and then cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and now New York, as an adult. Many young writers would choose the urban settings for their work, but your rural past seems to play more of a roll in your writing. Why do you think that is?


Downs: I always thought the life I saw as a child, both in the South and in Hawaii, was more interesting than the life I see around me now in the big cities of the country. Not more pleasant; I do, after all, choose to live in cities. I love cafes and specialty bookstores and city parks and all of those things. But there is, even in New York, a certain sameness about big-city life. The forces that make city life interesting are also the ones that make cities rich, and one of the things I learned as an historian is that big infusions of capital, which is after all what makes Boston and Chicago and New York go, has predictable effects. New York is different because its size lends itself to an unusual degree of specialization––cafes that only serve peanut butter, for example––but in the big picture there is a sameness about the lifestyles of upper-middle class educated, urban people.


The old world, the one that is getting changed more slowly, if at all, by the big money power, was stranger and more interesting. It, too, was a product of the money power, but a different stage of it, an older moment of rural capitalism, when people developed a family life around growing cash crops on medium-sized farms. That moment has passed, but the ways of living haven't, or haven't fully, and the conflict between those folkways and the changing world around them is to me one of the really interesting topics for fiction. It leads to stories; it delivers news to the people in the provinces (who in this case are people in the province of the city).


But Philadelphia, unlike Chicago or Boston or New York, does feel to me as if it still contains those same types of stories, as if it were "southern," in the way I think of that term, not as geography but as a legacy of defeat and its consequent pleasures.


In Philly, we lived on a rowhouse block alongside three different siblings from the same family, with more cousins a block or two away. There were truly eccentric local specialties and favorites—cheese steak eggrolls at the Chinese takeout, homemade buffalo sauce at the Korean-run steak shop. People belonged to the neighborhood. All of these things are wonderful and sometimes not-so wonderful, but they are also the flowers of defeat, although beautiful ones. Places are "homey" or neighborly because people didn't move out or move in, because the economy didn't make them richer or encourage outsiders to come in, because the fear of things getting worse draws people together in a shared pessimism. That was true of the South I grew up in, and the eclipse of cotton and the failure to develop other industries made the South what it was from the 1860s until the 1970s or 1980s.


Now, the South isn't the South, at least the stretch from Nashville to Charlotte to Atlanta, not because northerners have moved in but because people are flush with money, which makes them like people everywhere else who are flush with money. But maybe the South is going to be in the places that are still being left behind. Buffalo or Rochester or Detroit, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if those places produce the best fiction of the next 20-30 years, just as the South produced the best American fiction of 1920-1990. Victory makes you cheer; defeat makes you think.


R&T: "Black Pork" and "Freedom Rides" involve interaction between black and white characters. What inspired those stories? Did you see them as a comment on modern day race relations?


Downs: I don't know if they are a comment or not. They are an effort to tell a story, not to teach a lesson or advance a thesis. Black people and white people, especially in the South, grow up with each other. Not in a hold-hands-and-sing-along kind of way, but nevertheless in knowledge of each other. That doesn't necessarily seem true in other parts of the country, even where blacks and whites live close by. Watching those relationships--naive childhood friendships--change over time, deepen and draw apart, is one of the first ways we learn the hard fact that we aren't free agents in life; the world shapes us. We struggle against it, but we aren't usually able to throw off the chains. We live in worlds not of our own making, and we live with the consequences of it, if we are honest, and we recognize the limits and the hypocrisy of thinking that are internally pure thoughts make a bit of difference.


What was interesting about my experiences as a child is the way that typical clashes of children and parents become freighted down with much broader and more profound philosophical questions about how life works, about the nature of what people owe to each other. My family had the typical rural family's combination of neighborliness and suspicion, of fear of scarcity and a consequent disdain for lots of consumer goods. I had, in retrospect, a very typical attachment to privacy and to consumer goods, and fairly little fear of scarcity, even though we were poor for part of my childhood, so poor in fact that for one fairly brief stretch we did not have a refrigerator and ate food we kept in an ice cooler…. And what really makes it interesting is that, in retrospect, it is clear to me that I was arguing the wrong side, that I was coming from a pleasurable but shallow culture and was fighting against something much more interesting and profound, if also restrictive. That friction between my desires and my beliefs is what I like to write about. Writing as if one's own desires were in and of themselves virtuous or aesthetically pleasing--which is what I see in a lot of fiction—is not only dull but probably immoral.


R&T: In "Black Pork" you chose to use the offensive slang word for black people that many, these days, will not tolerate. Did you wrestle with that or did it seem natural in the context? Did you have any concerns about whether the story would be publishable?


Downs: In fact, "Black Pork" is a difficult, disturbing story, and in fact a few good literary magazines did say it was too raw and painful for them. They wanted to look away, which is a normal human reaction, and one I share. But the good folks at storySouth did publish it, lovingly, and I appreciate their courage.


I didn't write it in hopes of getting it into a certain magazine, though. I wrote it because I felt that these characters could tell a story I wanted to tell. A true story, even though none of the particulars are literally true.


So I didn't worry about the word. It reflected the lives under observation; to hide that word, to give those characters the etiquette of other people--of urban, educated people--would be to tell a grievous lie.


One of my teachers, James A. McPherson, used to say that that particular word hits so hard because we make a taboo out of it. By drawing a fence around it, we clad it in mystery, instead of exposing it to the world. Repressing the word, and feeling proud of ourselves for doing so, doesn't resolve any problems of the world, and it certainly doesn't eliminate racism or help us to understand it; it is a distraction.


Now, do I use the word in daily speech? I do not. But my obligation as a writer is to show the world as it is… [a]nd my obligation is to tell the truth about myself enough to know that I can imagine being the person who would use that word in the complex, unforgivable, understandable way that Big Pop uses it in the story.


R&T: Did winning the Flannery O’Connor award make it easier or harder for you to continue writing? Do you experience writer's block?


Downs: Writing isn't ever that easy. In some ways, the book resolves some of the doubts you have about whether you will ever write a finished, published book. In some ways, it can make you anxious about living up to it, or not just repeating it.


I really believe in the power of bad first drafts. Writing starts when I sit down and pick up my Sarasa pen and lay my clipboard on my lap. I might have coffee; I might have a book nearby so I can take a quick "reading break" for inspiration. But the act of writing is literally the act of writing. It is a muscular exercise, and the muscle is my hand. I really try to think of it that way. If I can get writing, the work of my hand stimulates my brain, not vice versa, and I find my ideas getting clearer and stronger. When I have writer's block, it's because I have forgotten this, and because I let my brain get in the way of my hand.


R&T: You teach and research history, and historical events play a roll in some of your writing like "Ain't I a King, Too?" where a man is mistaken for Huey Long shortly after his assassination.


Downs: I became obsessed with Huey Long many, many years ago, when I was in 8th grade. I was always drawn to wild, brilliant, difficult, troubled political characters from history, and Long more than anyone. He was…an artist in that he wanted to be simultaneously destructive and creative. He wasn't an accumulator; he was a maker. Very few politicians are artists, of good quality or bad. It is hard to think of any major politician now who is an artist…. They are simultaneously too good and too bad to be the kind of artist I am talking about. Huey Long was good and bad; he was like many artists almost comically overdrawn. He had every good and bad quality a person could have. He did not want you to like him; he wanted to dominate you and also to be you.


Regular politicians bored me, but someone like Long or, less pleasantly, someone like Tom Watson or Joe McCarthy fascinated me. Long was doubly special because I agreed with his politics, or at least at the time, and because he died for his art, on the Capitol steps.


I wanted to be him, and it took me a long time to understand that the way I could be that kind of person was not through politics but through writing. It was the artistry, the stretching of the soul into the good and the bad, the bitter truthfulness, that I admired, and those aren't things you find in practical politics. An artist doesn't have to kiss ass and she doesn't have to get her ass kissed; that is one of the few things that you can honestly say about the profession and about very few other professions. It is what keeps an artist honest.


I always wanted to write a Huey Long story, and after I finished "Ain't I A King, Too?" many people asked if I was going to turn it into a novel, but I didn't have any interest in that. By that time, there were other stories I wanted to tell.


R&T: How did you manage to write a short story collection while, I assume, you were also working on your dissertation?


Downs: Not sleeping! No, seriously, by dividing time. I write fiction in the morning, history in the afternoon. I have a very understanding wife. I had been working on some of the stories for several years. I also have a year-old daughter, so that helps train you to avoid sleep. Actually I find the different types of work help recharge me. I don't have time to stew around or get bored. My unconscious mind is thinking about fiction while I'm reading history and vice versa.


R&T: Is there a historical novel in your future?


Downs: I am finishing up a novel set in the 1930s, so I guess that is historical, but it's not a costume drama. It's historical in the way that a lot of literary novels are historical. I think most really good literary novelists cared about the past because they understood that by looking backward they could separate the wheat from the chaff, all the distractions that circulate around us from the truly important things. Does that make them historical novelists? I don't know. Is Edward Jones an historical novelist? Was Tolstoy? If they count, then yes that's the kind of novelist I want to be. But Arthurian legends and bodices and scabbards, that's for somebody with different interests than mine.


R&T: What is the writing life to you? Could you imagine a time when you would not want to write fiction?


Downs: I remember reading The Sportswriter by Richard Ford and being shocked that such a committed writer would write so lovingly about someone who gave up on a writing life, in that character's case after publishing a book of short stories. Now, I think, I have a better understanding of why Ford would make that choice. That person--the one who walks away--is a writer's twin…[T]he life without writing is the life just the other side of the doorway every morning. So in a way there's nothing more imaginable, and more interesting and enervating and painful than imagining it. It presumably comes from the same place that leads Ford--a longtime married man--to write about a man who is divorced. There are some lives that are so near at hand that you can really see them vividly; they are the life you could choose at any moment but choose not to.


That friction between the known and the unknown, between the real and the fantastic, is really productive. I can't picture myself ever putting down the pen, but I can imagine the life I would lead if I did make that choice.


R&T: Many of our readers are also writers. What advice do you have for writers just starting out?


Downs: Write, whether it is good or bad. Read, but only if it is good. Find people who also write and who will read your work honesty and seriously and tell you the truth. Be good to those people, even when their criticism makes you want to hit them over the head with a baseball bat. Keep writing. Keep reading. Remember why you write. If all I get out of it is a lifetime of thinking better thoughts, of inching toward an understanding of the world through the daily act of writing and reading, then isn't that enough? Isn't everything else just gravy? A book, an award, the chance to talk to people who have actually read my work for pleasure, all of that is wonderful, but the real reward of writing is the process, the kind of person that the process makes you.

In short, it's very entertaining
Relationships and families form heart of collection of stories
By Reviewed By Chris Collins

When an author writes a book of short stories, all the stories should maintain their distinctive voices. The stories might take us from Cynthiana to Hawaii, but each story must be self-contained and able to stand alone. It also must fit effortlessly into the panoply of characters and voices the author is intending to convey.

That said, Greg Downs' Spit Baths is one of the most entertaining books of short stories in a long time.

Baseball, trains, populist politicians, colonial soldiers, school field trips figure prominently in these stories, which are quintessentially American and, by turns, serious, playful, maudlin, and humorous. The book captures the dissonance of a self-conscious region rising out of the bitter civil rights struggle, forced to face its failures and its subtle achievements and move ahead.

At the heart of all the stories are the beautiful, unforgiving relationships between men and women and, by extension, the families they produce. Downs' characters possess strong will and refreshing identity. Not entirely certain of their immediate futures, they are certain of themselves. It is an identity and ethos often missing in today's literature.

The 13 short stories are full of the complexity of family, race, region and past that make up our own history.

In Downs' pages live the remnants of the past juxtaposed with the new. It is a thriving past full of the mustiness that comes with age, but also a spry, magical past that takes a stark departure from the history you might have read in history class. It makes fruitful use of the politically opportunistic revisionist history in vogue in today's media to make everyone a participant.

For example, George Washington makes an appearance. Not as the physically commanding general depicted in George Washington Crossing the Delaware -- that Washington dies before the Revolutionary War is over, drowning in the Schuylkill River after the hull of his boat hits a rock. In Downs' The Hired Man, commanders replace him with a toothless farmer hoeing near their camp next to the Schuylkill. Their particular consternation is our gain. That our nation's father was merely a sentient clodbuster minding his own business turns history on its head. Like all good stories, it asks more questions than it answers.

In Ain't I a King Too, a man traveling to Texas to meet the program director of the National Youth Administration Office, Lyndon Johnson, gets sidetracked by a gas station attendant in Louisiana who thinks he resembles the recently assassinated governor of Louisiana, Huey Long.

They join the massive pilgrimage that has formed to view Long lying in state. Encapsulating the hope of a depressed region in mourning, Downs paints a somber picture of how Jacksonian democracy lives and dies by the populist sentiment it portends.

In Adam's Curse, it is the women, mother Memaw and aunt Farrah, who decide to live without their husbands. They go on a cruise in Nova Scotia and send the men a postcard. Left behind, the old men talk in cryptic phrases and recklessly play chess in the park. It is a tale of desperate humanity.

In all of his stories, Downs puts us in or near the maelstrom. He expertly manipulates the icons of our history to produce palpable characters more related to the outlanders we grew up with than the ideal reproduced in grade school. This book reads more like a collection of folk songs than of short stories. By toying with history, Downs might be getting closer to the truth than all the history books you had to read in high school.

Spit Baths won the Flannery O'Connor award for short fiction. It is a book you won't regret reading.

Realizing the past can never be escaped
Characters in Greg Downs' short stories have lost their way, with love elusive and hope nearly gone.


Spit Baths
By Greg Downs

University of Georgia Press.

174 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed by Martha Woodall

I was part way through Spit Baths, Greg Downs' singular short-story collection, when word surfaced that Downs lived in Philadelphia. No way. Apart from "The Hired Man" - a riff about a retired Philadelphia schoolteacher stumbling across a document that suggests George Washington died after falling into the Schuylkill in 1778 and was replaced by an impostor with false teeth - these 13 pieces of short fiction have scant ties to the Philadelphia area.

But sure enough, a check of Downs' Web site reveals that the city can claim him, if only for a while, now that he has completed doctoral studies in history at the University of Pennsylvania.

But based on this collection, which earned Downs the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, the Mid-Atlantic region has not yet captured Downs' imagination. Most of the stories in Spit Baths are tales from border states, slim shards from Downs' fevered dreams about odd characters and anxious teachers in towns where Kentucky brushes up against Ohio.

Emblems of the South are everywhere, from rented sharecroppers' cabins and battered hope chests to Little Debbie snack cakes. And even those characters who have moved North retain a Southern sensibility and a fixation on race that thrums beneath everything.

Many of the people in these tales are struggling to break from the racism of the past but discover that the weight of generations makes escape impossible. Even Charlie, the protagonist of "Indoor Plumbing," who has grown up in Ann Arbor, Mich., finds that a summer in Kentucky with a bigoted grandfather when he was 12 has left him with more than an abiding interest in the Cincinnati Reds.

The characters in Spit Baths are in transition, fleeing jobs or relations. Sometimes, they've been pushed aside, like the menfolk in "Adam's Curse," the short-short that opens the collection with the tantalizing sentence: "In June, all the women in my family made a pact to live without men... ."

At other times, the central figures are literally in transit. In "Ain't I a King, Too?", the most resolutely Southern gothic tale, a narrator abandons his family and job in Elizabethtown, Ky., in 1935 to head to Austin, Texas, to work as an aide in a National Youth Administration office for "a program director who became Lyndon Johnson." The narrator makes an abrupt detour when he arrives in Louisiana the day after Huey Long's assassination and discovers that he resembles the slain politician.

Downs uses his grounding in history to make the Depression vivid.

"It was a long way to Texas by turnpike, and longer still because my father's Chevrolet gave out oil... . I must have passed half the world in those two days down to Louisiana, thousands of men out on the road, hats rimmed with sweat, men dropping suitcases behind them to lose the weight, men walking alone along the desiccated fields."

That narrator and other characters in these stories yearn for emotional connections but have been damaged in some way. Their hopes are blunted, their horizons have shrunk, and they are filled with regret.

In "Snack Cakes," a grandfather's weary sixth wife tells the man's grandson: "I'm just tired, Charlie. Tired of being a woman and tired of him being a man."

While Downs shows that romantic and even familial love remain elusive, his characters want to leave their mark. In the title story, Maw-Maw, a grandmother, spends a summer caring for Crawford, her 8-year-old grandson, before he moves to Missouri with his mother. Her campaign to leave an imprint includes a ritual of spitting into a green towel.

"Then she started scrubbing his face. Every day she did this, and still Crawford hated it... .

" 'The spit catches what the soap won't,' " she tells him.

Downs' masterful story "Black Pork" centers on Branch, a young man who has returned home after one disappointing season with a minor-league baseball team in Iowa to discover that his grandfather is dying and that Ruby-Anne, a young African American girl who was Branch's childhood friend, loves him.

When Branch attempts to distance himself from Ruby-Anne's affections, he tells her: " 'I ain't going to make you happy. I'm going to make you sad, Ruby-Anne.' "

This story also directly deals with how the aftermath of the nation's toxic racial history intrudes on individual lives. A female college professor who lives nearby sends Branch notes, warning him: "No more white men chasing down black girls just because they can. There are laws now, and there are people who will make sure those laws get enforced until... statutory rapists like you are history."

With this rich and mesmerizing collection of short fiction, Downs underscores the enduring truth of William Faulkner's observation "The past is never dead. In fact, it's not even past."

Desperate lives viewed through the refracting lens of history
- Joey Rubin
Thursday, December 14, 2006

Spit Baths

By Greg Downs

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS; 174 PAGES; $24.95
Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men

By Randy F. Nelson

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS; 210 PAGES; $25.95
If Flannery O'Connor is right -- that we will be known not by our statements or statistics but by the stories we tell -- then we are in good hands with the winners of the 2006 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Both collections, "Spit Baths," by Greg Downs, and "Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men," by Randy F. Nelson, are first books by writers of promise; we can only hope their attention to social nuance and devotion to linguistic honesty will be the markers by which our current populace is understood.

Downs has written a book that explores the precariousness of history in our amnesiac modernity. "Ain't I a King Too?," which is set the day after populist Sen. Huey Long is assassinated, follows a middle-aged man as he flees his own domestic troubles only to become chauffeur to a new set when he is mistaken for the dead politician. Similarly, in "The Hired Man," the private life of a retired history teacher is interrupted when he discovers that the George Washington we know today was a hired stand-in.

But in his tales of historical intrusion, Downs also speaks elegantly of those ugly histories, namely of racism and hatred, that we'd rather forget, and paints a hopeful portrait of the role family can play in healing those wounds.

The young lovers of "Black Pork" must learn to ignore society's disapproval before they can forge a biracial union -- and they do so only because of the support of their ad hoc parents. (It's a tale that could serve as a founding myth for a racially integrated South, if such a place could be said to exist.)

Likewise, in "A Comparative History of Nashville Love Affairs," Andrew Jackson inspires an empty-nester husband to wonder if he loves his wife enough. Some of the best poetry of the collection occurs when the husband compares his own confusion to his idea of Jackson's shame about his wife's previous marriage: "Every day, the pain must have been solid and sour as sliced lime tucked inside his cheek. When he ate at the pain, it must have flooded his mouth, chewed at every sore his nervous teeth gnawed inside his lips, must have reminded him always that he loved her."

Downs is gifted at presenting the tension that accompanies familial love -- be it the bafflement those tied by blood feel at the depth of their attachment, or the anxiety those bound by choice feel when realizing affection alone may not hold them together. His historical scope serves to enliven, not obscure, this uncertainty.

While Nelson's "Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men" focuses more on the experiences of individuals, his stories are equally vivid in portraying helplessness in the face of history. His 13 offerings, which vary broadly in topic, voice and tone, are united by his ability to enmesh downtrodden figures in situations that highlight our biggest contemporary dilemmas.

"Mechanical Men," set in a vast medical research compound, uses its hard-boiled plot to question biomedical ethics. It's a face-off between an honest detective and a husband who, because of his wife's illness, is desperate for a scientific breakthrough. The story works because Nelson withholds explicit judgment, choosing instead to embed his points in stinging bits of ironic dialogue. ("This is one of the reasons that chimps in general are such great subjects," a lab tech says to the detective. "They're greedy.")

A similar irony unearths ethical dubiousness in the stunning "Breaker." A lawyer, while ducking his child-rearing duties, travels to an African island to close a hazardous ship-breaking yard for his employer. There, however, his predecessor, who has "gone native," accuses him of complicity in globalization's most heinous crimes and forces him to seek atonement. With dramatic circularity, the lawyer's only idea for reconciliation is to bring a local child back with him to the United States to care for as his own.

Nelson's talent for irony does more than simply point out our cultural hypocrisy, it also elucidates our most personal dilemmas. Whether it be in the basement catacombs of outmoded factories ("In the Picking Room"), on the horrendous beats of disaffected tabloid writers ("Abduction") or accompanying investigative journalists on their most alluring assignment ("Cutters"), Nelson is expert at crafting scenes of desperation resolved, zealotry succumbed to and disaffection upended -- all while refusing to repeat instance, image or idea.

This is impressive at a time when people seeking cultural understanding have come to rely less on the stories our finest writers tell us and more on familiar melodramas. But, as the desperate husband says in "Mechanical Men": "Even if you're spinning the absolute truth, you can never tell what kind of lies people will believe." And Nelson is, most definitely, spinning the absolute -- and perfectly crafted -- truth.

Joey Rubin is an editor at Flak magazine.

Page F - 1

EDITORS' CHOICE

Greg Downs, Spit Baths: Stories. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2006.

Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction, Spit Baths takes us straight to the heartland and lets us into the strange inner lives of an array of characters who are defined by where they are—whether in Kentucky, Tennessee, Hawaii, or yes, even the bathroom.

Like Flannery O’Connor, Downs gives us a nuanced view of an imperfect life in the South through hints of racial tension, outlandish actions, and the sometimes self-inflicted social displacement of people from all walks of life. Adding to their sense of displacement is the frustration these characters experience as they struggle to navigate flawed relationships using language that fails them more often than not. The characters that populate Downs’ debut fiction are hauntingly vulnerable; their unique voices capture their desperation—be they poor Southern whites, confused teenage boys, or gutsy matriarchs.

Downs captures with visceral accuracy the longing that children feel for a missing parent or a place they’ve called home. In the title story, Crawford’s mother temporarily leaves him in Kentucky with his grandmother while she starts a life in Missouri. As Maw-Maw offers Crawford life lessons over baseball—a language her eight-year-old grandson speaks—the boy begins to doubt his mother for deserting him. At first Crawford can’t wait to leave his grandmother and “her silly rules and her strange smells,” but in the end he cannot take the step forward to his mother and their new life. This ultimate moment is dreaded, painful; he punches himself in the stomach. We feel the impact of that punch, what it means to leave and be left.

In “Domestic Architecture” an adulterous father thinks he can fix his family’s problems by moving them to Hawaii for a fresh start. The father calls his son Eugene by the nickname of “Champ”—not because he won anything—but “because he’s my Champ. . . . It doesn’t get any simpler than that.” The boy resents his father for moving the family and is forever searching for a way to feel at home. As Eugene tries to find solace in the wind, we are witness to some of Downs’ most beautiful prose: “When the gusts battered the mountainside behind the house, they gave up their haul of rainwater, and shuffled off to the coasts. His father called it their own private concert, the Kauai symphony. . . . Eugene thought it was a message coming to them from home, a language he could no longer understand.”

In “Indoor Plumbing,” it is the language of racism the protagonist, Charlie, struggles not to heed: The boy develops a hang-up about public restrooms after his bigoted grandfather tells him that white people should use the stalls and black people the urinals. In “Black Pork,” a black and a white family live side by side and are friendly in the yard; they look out for each other. However, the adults only set foot in each other’s houses twice a year—on Thanksgiving and Christmas, while a nosy neighbor writes venomous letters warning the white boy to stay away from the black girl he’s known his whole life. Here, the children break the barriers, “pass[ing] back and forth between the two homes all the time,” creating a language of their own that originates in love.

These are, at the core, stories of miscommunication and disappointment. In observing a friend’s dysfunctional relationship in “Nashville Love Affairs,” Leonard recognizes a true, desperate love there—and realizes that his friend’s wife will never love her husband the way he loves her. Leonard looks at his own marriage; when his wife Embee touches him, he thinks: “You can’t tell someone you don’t love them as much as you should, as much as you want to. Soon as you say that, they’re gone thinking you don’t love them at all, don’t want to be with them. What you say and what they think you mean are not the same. So you can’t say anything at all.” Downs consistently shows us people’s insecurities during starkly honest moments. Yet he seems to suggest through these revelations that imperfection is not just to be borne, but that real beauty lies in this bared humanity.

In this book’s most experimental story, a teaching intern named Eric finds himself on a class trip to see his parents at his childhood home. A bizarre fantasy, “Field Trip” humiliates the protagonist on the most basic level: Eric repeatedly gets dressed and is told at every turn that he is naked. His father presents a slide show with photos of Eric’s life—fully exposing his son’s messy relationship; he reveals that Eric would not use birth control “but instead kept himself above it, entertaining himself with video games while his girlfriend sat alone in a doctor’s office.” Throughout the day, Eric’s mistakes are shockingly disclosed to his students and colleagues—leaving him to wrestle with the question of how, if possible, to explain himself and make things right.

When it comes to making things right, Downs’ characters arrive at breakthrough understandings about their lives and ways of talking to one another that rarely yield clear-cut answers. Instead, Downs leaves the door ajar.

Christine Condon

Downs’s collection of short stories is about men beleaguered by an America still tarnished by racial and sexual prejudice even after the so-called successes of feminism and the civil rights movement. Personal and collective history are conflated for men and boys deformed by their own entitlement; Downs’s protagonists are often earnest yet ultimately impotent in their desire for love. In “Freedom Rider,” a teacher accompanies his eighth-grade students through ill-conceived reenactments of the civil rights movement, while utterly distracted by his lust for another teacher. In “Snack Cakes,” a boy newly initiated to sexuality is forced to join his cad of a grandfather as he visits each of his ex-wives, living and dead. In “Adam’s Curse,” an extended family of women discard their men with the exception of a single son, certain that he in turn will be rejected by any woman he loves. The story’s protagonist says that America is “not a single thing, good or bad. It’s big enough to be worth arguing about, to be worth keeping together.” This collection reflects a similar notion that America deserves scrutiny, in all its beauty and ugliness. While Downs explores the failure of affection among a doomed masculinity, he also creates a strong and generous femininity. His prose is evocative and finely tuned to his gritty material, and his narratives illuminate his characters and their concerns while acknowledging that the social forces that inform both are impossible to explicate, not because they are too far outside the reader’s experience but, rather, because they are too close.
—Sierra Bellows

If the unofficial gospel of the new century holds that The World is Flat, Philadelphia-based author and historian Greg Downs begs to differ. In his debut story collection Spit Baths, which recently won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Downs defines his characters by the places they come from and the people they leave behind.

Small towns in Kentucky and Tennessee loom large in this collection, most poignantly when strip malls and chain motels threaten to erode their unique character. But Downs isn't trafficking in simple nostalgia: For many of his characters, escape from the quaint or not-so-quaint past can't come soon enough. Some flee with their feet only to find the past has somehow followed them. Others discover that even if you never physically leave it, you can never come back home again.

In Downs' best story, "Between States," an older woman returns to her childhood town and tries to impose her idea of what the place used to be onto what it has become--going so far as to paint almost-forgotten family names on the doors of the houses that have passed into new hands. There's a sense that the other residents feel some pain over what's been lost, but in the end, they prefer to turn away from the town's past entirely, literally taking the highway bypass around its center so they don't have to be reminded of what it used to be. Yet the very effort they put into forgetting is revealing. As Downs shows repeatedly in this strong collection, even the places we think we've behind never quite let go of us.

Interview follows at the link:

I'm also happily making my way through Spit Baths, a new collection of short stories by Greg Downs (University of Georgia Press). Downs is my kind of writer, and I am enjoying this book immensely. In describing how the women of a family have decided to live without men, Downs says, "They simply exhaled the men like sighs from their houses." This is a beautifully crafted collection.

--Christian Bauman

The University of Georgia's Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction has proved to be a good barometer to my literary taste. I have read almost every honored book, and have yet to be disappointed. When Greg Downs' debut collection of short stories, Spit Baths, arrived, I read it in one sitting, directly after opening the parcel.

Downs' characters often straddle the old and new South, and wear their geographical location as a birthmark. These stories sit proudly on my bookshelf next to George Singleton's Drowning in Gruel and Sidney Thompson's Sideshow as evidence that the southern short story is alive, well, and evolving. Flannery O'Connor would be very proud.

In his own words, here is Greg Downs' Book Notes submission for his collection of short stories, Spit Baths.

The characters in Spit Baths listen to the radio compulsively while they fight with their ex-wives and eat bacon fat with their grandparents and plot their escape from central Kentucky, but they almost never listen to music. Usually, the radio is playing a Cincinnati Reds game, or occasionally news reports on assassinations and other national tragedies. I blame my wife, an attorney, who put a healthy fear of copyright violations in my heart, but even more my tone-deaf, tin-eared family.

I think they liked listening to sports on the radio because they didn't have to worry about a guitar lick or a drum beat getting in the way of their funk. By which I mean not James Brown-style funk, but the kind of morbid and gloomy mood that settled over our kind of people in Central Kentucky in the 1980s, as their towns continued to die, and a whole pantheon of deities like Johnny Bench and Tom Seaver and Tony Perez aged into mediocre, human form and then disappeared, and even closer to home our beloved UK Wildcats fell into mediocrity and then probation.

So these aren't songs the characters in the stories would listen to. But these are songs that get at the mood I was aiming for in these stories--small-town suspicions and family feuds and the sense that the world is rotting under your feet with no new world yet in sight.


1. "Adam's Curse" (audio reading): "Bastards of Young" (The Replacements)

This story is my version of Paul Westerberg's iconic, graceless scream, and of The Replacement's bitter mythologizing. In "Adam's Curse," a group of women decide to live without men, and so expel all their men from their lives, including the story's narrator. "No pacts, no summits, no negotiations, they simply exhaled the men like sighs." It's a story about turning family into myth, and about becoming an adult in the knowledge of your own limited fate. And it's also about speed chess, which is as good a way of learning the limitations of your fate as any.


2. "Black Pork" : "Pledging My Love" (David Allan Coe)

The prologue of this song is set in the Boys Industrial School in Lancaster, Ohio, which is very close to the part of Ohio I was working with in this story. The main characters--a failed baseball pitcher, his dying grandfather, a softball coach who lives next door, and her prodigy daughter--are trapped in a forgotten part of Ohio, and yet they do sing in their chains like the sea. And I think the main character--a boy who is in love with his neighbor and who loves her enough to hope that she for her own sake will not love him--would sing this song, if he could.


3. "The Hired Man" : "Sure Thing" (Marah)

I heard this song live for the first time at the North Star Bar in Philadelphia. Marah are local Philly guys, mostly, and lead singer Dave Bielanko dedicated the song to his brother Serge, who had just married. It's a jarring song, about tough people opening themselves up to vulnerability. Not despite but because of the "blood upon my hands" and the "devil dressed up in my past," the singer tells a lover that he wants to "give myself to you," to be a "sure thing, that's for sure." "The Hired Man" is a story about similarly flawed and vulnerable and improbable lovers. An illiterate and toothless farmer who stands in for George Washington after Washington (fictionally) dies in 1777 and ends up successfully wooing Washington's widow. A history teacher who pretends to believe in the country that he doubts. A white man who covers up what he discovers about his wife's black family. It is, like the song, about love after the loss of the illusion of innocence.


4. "Snack Cakes" : "People Who Died" (Jim Carroll)

It's hard to imagine a song the main characters would like less than Jim Carroll's ode to dead friends, but it's a good match, even if they wouldn't think so. "Snack Cakes" follows an old man as he leads his grandson on a parade of his ex-wives. These encounters leave them with the kind of resignation that Jim Carroll's characters would have recognized. The story ends in the town cemetery, sitting on top of the plot that holds one ex-wife, and both the grandfather and his grandson dream of escape, not through the drugs Jim Carroll's characters use but through drugs much older than those, sugar and fat.


5. "Spit Baths" : "Look at Miss Ohio" (Gillian Welch)

In "Spit Baths," a woman wants to remake her life, "to do right but not right now" and to drive (though to Springfield, Missouri, not Atlanta) to "live out that fantasy" and in doing so she tears her young son from the grandmother who loves and lives for him. It's about the pain that comes with doing what you want to do or even need to do, with being a selfish dreamer, in Tennessee Williams' famous phrase.


6. "Field Trip" : "Chill Out Tent" (The Hold Steady)

"Field Trip" is a dream story, one of a couple in the collection. In this one, a teacher realizes that his school is taking a field trip to his old house, populated for the first time in decades by the father who abandoned him and by the girlfriend he abandoned. Like The Hold Steady's song, it's meant to be funny and claustrophobic and a little sickening. "Chill Out Tent" is also surprisingly moving, partly because it doesn't indulge any self-pity. That's a hard lesson to learn, and one I had to teach and reteach myself in these stories.


7. "A Comparative History of Nashville Love Affairs" : "For You I Will Pretend" (Farmer Not So John)

Like some of the Nashville deities this story describes (Hank Williams, Frank Goad Clement, Andrew and Rachel Jackson), this Music City band is defunct. Knowing that pessimism proves out in the long run, but struggling to be optimistic anyway is the single most difficult aspect of love, at least for me. The story's narrator feels the presence of doom, yet does not want to let that despair color his love for his wife. The song catches this feeling perfectly: "I'm not optimistic, but for you I will pretend."


8. "Indoor Plumbing" : "Berks County Boy" (Frog Holler)

"Indoor Plumbing" describes the painful and complicated way love and hate get tied together in ways that don't make sense. A man remembers with affection and also discomfort the way his grandfather taught him to piss in stalls, not urinals, to separate himself from black people. The story is also about the impossibility of conveying those types of mixed feelings to the people you love, particularly to the main character's wife, who is disgusted by the tale. There is a part of the old Rust Belt that is now more Southern than the South, if by Southern we mean what we used to mean: A life grounded in the presence of defeat. Reading, Pennsylvania, is only about 60 miles from Philadelphia, but the hometown boys in Frog Holler play some of the best Southern music around. It isn't Southern just because they use banjos; it's Southern because it's about taking pride in places that don't necessarily deserve it, because it's about loving a place that's not only flawed but defeated.


9. "Freedom Rides" : "Labor Day" (Dead Milkmen)

"Freedom Rides" is one of two stories about field trips gone nightmarishly wrong. They are also the only two truly unrealistic stories in the collection, and yet they are the two that people--especially teachers--most often tell me ring true. During my first field trip as a teacher, I forgot to read the description of our undertaking, dressed normally, and ended up trudging my only good pair of shoes through knee-deep mud while rain blasted a miserable island off of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where we had ventured for the noble purpose of showing our students a movie set. I spent hours wringing rain out of my slacks (one of two pairs that I owned.) The shoes I threw away. The rage at hating something that is allegedly a holiday, and the recognition that this rage was ludicrous, is what I have always liked about "Labor Day."


10. "Ain't I A King, Too?" : "Puttin' People on the Moon" (Drive By Truckers)

Like the narrator of "Puttin' People on the Moon," the main character in "Ain't I A King, Too?" knows that he is no one. But then he encounters a group of people who think he is someone, because he resembles the just-assassinated Louisiana kingfish Huey P. Long. As he accompanies a motley band of rednecks to Baton Rouge for Long's funeral, the narrator knows what they don't: that despite his looks he still is nobody, and this gives him a certain freedom to lie to them, and to escape. The certainty that no one cares about you and your kind is something that the Truckers get at in song after song. That alienation doesn't produce outrage or any kind of organized politics; it makes for a kind of hard-edged nihilism, a sense that you should live life on your terms since no one will notice anyway. If being Southern means living with the constant awareness of the presence of the past--the real past not the Dollywood version--the Truckers at times seem like the only Southern band the South has left.

11. "Domestic Architecture" : "La 'Elima" (Israel Kamakawiwo'ole)

In "Domestic Architecture," a boy is yanked out of one past-drenched place in Tennessee to a place where the past is even more troublesome, the islands of Hawai'i. This song by the late, great Iz is the story of a tragedy and a miracle: The destruction of a famous old Hawaiian fishing village in 1868 by an earthquake and tsunami, and the unexpected survival of the town's children when they hid for five days in an upland cave. The boy in "Domestic Architecture" is trying to find his own path out of the storm.


12. "Hope Chests" : "Buckeye Mile" (The Junkers)

Central Kentucky, where I lived as a boy, and Middle Tennessee, where I went to high school, may be the only places in the world that construct a mythology around Ohio. The glamour of Cincinnati, the power of the Reds, the whispers about the beer-drinking Germans made Ohio a strange and magical place when I was a child. I could not imagine that I would ever live in a place as extraordinary as Ohio. Boy, was I surprised. In this story, I got my revenge on the Buckeye State by exiling a character there into almost exactly the kinds of doldrums that we Kentuckians knew all too well, and then bringing them back, defeated, to Kentucky. Apparently I wasn't the only one with an Ohio complex. In this song by the now-defunct Madison band The Junkers, an old high school classmate of mine sings, "Baby forget Ohio/Remember me." I'm all about forgetting Ohio.


13. "Between States" : "Nashville to Kentucky" (My Morning Jacket)

In "Between States," a woman returns to her hometown on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee after decades away. Finding that everything about it has changed--not just the stores and population but even the street names and numbers--she sets about trying to change it all back personally, and in the process goes crazy. My Morning Jacket, good Kentucky boys, describe the conflicted views of home in many of their songs, but particularly in "Nashville to Kentucky." My book is about the reverse leg of that trip, Kentucky to Nashville, the flow out of the old towns of Central Kentucky into the city we not always so lovingly called Nation-ville or Nash-vegas.


14. (blank page at the end) "My Old Kentucky Home" (Amy Pickard)

The last song on the play list is a version you almost certainly have not heard. Amy Pickard, a Tennessean-turned-Philadelphian, tears apart Stephen Foster's standard and rebuilds it from the studs up. If you listen to Governor A. B. (Happy) Chandler's version (sung at dozens of University of Kentucky Senior Night celebrations) and then Amy's, you can map out the passing of an era within the last 30 years, and also the strange ways that era has been revived in out-of-the-way places like South Philadelphia, which are in some ways now much more Southern than the South is.

Spit Baths: Stories by Greg Downs
University of Georgia Press, 2006. 174pp. $24.95.
Reviewed by Brendan Hughes
11.16.06

In the early years of the republic, when the United States was still a collection of semi-autonomous provinces wedged between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains, the American frontier began in the bluegrass country west of the Ohio River. It was an isolated place, accessible on foot through the Cumberland Gap or by riverboat from Pittsburgh, and the people who settled there eked out a hard living—rail-splitters who turned the kudzu forests into tobacco fields. After the Erie Canal opened in 1825, the wagon trains left Kentucky, Tennessee, and Southern Ohio for the Great Plains, but the tobacco fields and the kudzu and even a few of the people who had come over the mountains a generation before stayed on, and they are the subject of Spit Baths, Greg Downs’ luminous new collection of stories.

Spit Baths is set in what is known today as the Mid-South, an antiseptic though geographically accurate name for the old frontier. Never wholly a part of either the Midwest or the Confederacy (Tennessee and Kentucky stayed with the Union, although the Confederacy controlled Kentucky for part of the Civil War), Downs’ Mid-South is a tangle of borders, beset by rivers and torn between the North and South. Living in a place where the present blurs into the past, Downs’ characters are often childlike adults or precocious children who display an innocence bordering on ignorance, until a moment of sudden and bitter epiphany.

A forlorn ache flows through many of Downs’ stories, none more than “Black Pork.” Branch, a young and washed-up minor league baseball player, returns to his grandfather’s cabin, where he begins a chaste love affair with Ruby-Anne, his fifteen-year-old African-American neighbor. The local university professor in the big house at the top of the hill thinks the relationship unchaste and warns Branch that he’ll be “history” if he touches the girl. Meanwhile, Big Pop, Branch’s grandfather, has spells of dementia, wandering over to Ruby-Anne’s mother and asking for “black pork, Congo cut, nigger meat.” That’s four generations, black and white, on one Ohio tenant farm, and Downs lets that tension drive the story to its climax.

At fifteen, Ruby-Anne seems like the oldest character in the story, and she is sure of her love for Branch and their future together. “The things we’re going to do,” she tells him. “I just feel like I can’t get too excited about whether we do them now or six months from now or a year. Because it’s like in my head, it’s already done, and I’m just waiting for our life here to catch up.” There’s a pang of desire and nostalgia in those words, the words of a child who is “too solemn, trying too hard to hold the moment in her hands,” but Branch knows better than to believe her. “You can love something and still not be able to keep it alive,” he tells her. “You don’t know that yet.” He’s talking about baseball, about Big Pop, and as he finally gives in and kisses Ruby-Anne, he’s talking about their love, too.

Downs, a professor of history at City College in New York, uses the Mid-South’s complicated history like a stage prop that neither overwhelms nor becomes window dressing. In “Ain’t I a King, Too,” a man walks out on his wife and child at the height of the Great Depression and heads for Louisiana, where he’s mistaken for the recently assassinated Huey Long. When the false Huey falls in with an up-country family on their way to the funeral, the dustbowl landscape and the family’s hollow desperation, like images from a Walker Evans photograph, perfectly capture the historical moment, while the man’s farcical masquerade through the bayou provides an absurd counterpoint to the bleakness. Another story, “Freedom Rides,” concerns a middle-school field trip to the Freedom Rides Museum, an educational amusement park with a civil rights-era theme, where the class is invited to reenact the police brutality of the Alabama sit-ins and to embark on a tunnel of love complete with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X mannequins. The story will resonate with anyone who has been to Colonial Williamsburg or Plimouth Plantation, those museums where history literally lives on, in painstaking reenactments.

“I can’t say as ever I was lost,” Daniel Boone once wrote, “but I was bewildered once for three days.” So it might be said for the men of Spit Baths, cousins of Binx Bolling on the less genteel side of the family. They are too much a part of the Mid-South landscape, like the rivers and tobacco fields, to be lost. Destined to wander “in the warren of things we pass over but do not often remember,” they wonder how it all came to be—how the histories of a place and a person can become the same; how the borders have changed, but not much else.

Review of Spit Baths by Greg Downs
by Scott Yarbrough


We're particularly proud here at storySouth to review Greg Downs' book Spit Baths, the 2006 winner of the University of Georgia Press Flannery O' Connor Award for Short Fiction, since two of the stories included in the collection have been published by us ("Indoor Plumbing" in our last issue and "Black Pork" in this one). Spit Baths offers a multifaceted and exquisite rendering of the modern (and postmodern) south, the stories' realism and detail no less effective for their imaginative, poetic depictions.

Downs has one of those extraordinarily diverse backgrounds listed on his book jacket that those of us who have led more mundane lives envy. Basketball coach, investigative journalist, karaoke performer, history professor. His varied interests are fully displayed in Spit Baths. First story collections are all too often monochromatic in terms of voice, tone, themes, and characters. Often we readers don't really mind this so much (take, for example, Raymond Carver, on the one extreme, and George Singleton or Flannery O'Connor on the other), but it can get redundant after a while. Spit Baths manages to capture the richly changing tapestry that makes up the modern southern experience.

No writer since Faulkner—hell, since Twain, at least, and maybe since Frederick Douglass—has written convincingly about the south without tackling race. Too often the result in latter-day southern letters is a bad pastiche of the Atticus Finch stereotype—the one lone, noble voice of progressive views in the face of a relentless bigoted ideology—or we see a photo negative of this stereotype in an updated use of the "tragic mulatto" stock character. Some of the stories in Spit Baths, however, bring a subtle and nuanced view to the race questions in the south. We see the slow, cancerous growth of prejudice in the aptly and metaphorically named "Indoor Plumbing" (previously published by storySouth) which is counterbalanced with "Black Pork," published in this issue, which Publisher's Weekly refers to as a "simultaneously excruciating and deeply insightful commentary" about race.

Downs doesn't limit himself to one theme; some of the more successful stories in the collection deal with the frail and tenuous webs men and women spin between each other in both the waxing and waning days of romantic relationships. "A Comparative History of Nashville Love Affairs" describes how a husband and father weighs the progress of his own marriage through watching the dissolving relationship of his neighbors; "Hope Chests" tells the story of a tough young woman who marries her teacher in the hope that he'll challenge her, help her grow, and develop with her; instead, her indomitable will proves more than he can handle. One of the most entertaining stories in the book, "Freedom Ride" is about a young teacher who is chaperoning fifty-five seventh graders on a field trip to a civil rights amusement park (to quote Dave Berry: I promise I am not making this up); one of his fellow teachers and chaperones is his reluctant lover. The field trip devolves into chaos, with the students fighting each other over reenacted lunch counter boycotts and sit-ins, boats spinning out of control in some kind of Pirates of the Caribbean ride through civil rights history, and talking mannequins matched with the wrong voice tapes. Somehow, the narrator's attempts to help the hapless tour guide (on what must be the worst museum to the Civil Rights era ever created) and his reluctant bonding with one of his young charges helps him gain perspective on his own budding romance.

The other element that Downs brings to the table of short fiction, however, is that thing which is so unteachable in MFA programs and so hard to discuss in fiction workshops—a vital and inventive imagination. In a few stories he seems to owe more of a debt to writers like Ron Carlson and Frederick Barthelme than he does to such southern realists as Richard Ford (yeah, Richard, we know you don't like to be called a "southern writer," but hey, you're from Mississippi). For example, "Ain't I a King, Too?" is the story of a man whose marriage and life are falling apart who finds himself in Louisiana the day after Huey Long's assassination in 1935; more to the point, he finds himself meeting some people at a filling station who seemingly take him for Long.

"Field Trip" does what I thought was impossible to do, which is to write an entertaining and interesting story about a dream. "Snack Cakes" is about a young man, just out of the eleventh grade, who is run out of his house when his mother finds he's been having sex with his girlfriend. In need of help, he seeks out his grandfather, who has just been kicked out of the house himself by his sixth wife. Together, the two visit each of his grandfather's living former wives, depositing boxes of the old man's mementos, the collected talismans of a life not so well lived. "I know you're in trouble," his grandfather tells him. "Probably I'm supposed to tell you to say you're sorry or something. Probably that's why your mother let you come. But, Charlie, nobody ever told me anything that meant anything to me. Except get out. . . . Words don't mean very much, Charlie. Or they mean something that's different than what they say. Do you know that?"

In Spit Baths, Downs manages to be part of the vital current of southern literary tradition and absolutely free from its restrictive ties. At a time when short story collections seem to be an endangered species (more to come on this), you have to seek out the good ones and treasure them when you find them. Buy this book. Hold onto it, loan it out, force it on friends. You'll be glad you did.

History also lurks in this debut short-story collection by West Philly's Downs, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award: "The Hired Man" is a revisionist take on Washington's winter at Valley Forge, while "Domestic Architecture" features a house with an eerie past. "Field Trip" is a slide show through a lifetime of poor decisions (though it may all be a dream). Downs writes with a Southern twang, and handles interracial romance frequently and delicately, as in "Black Pork," with a white teen resisting a black neighbor's advances. Themes and symbols tend to recur: State lines spell betrayal; kids are in the care of grandparents. But there's immense heart to Downs's quirky but controlled storytelling, spiked with such observations as, "Truth, that's just a four-letter word, with another letter added on for bad luck."

Greg Downs: USN grad awash in Southern culture in 'Spit Baths'
By ANGELA PATTERSON

When you hear the title of the book, you can't help but think, "Surely he's not talking about what I think he's talking about." But rest assured that when author Greg Downs named his book "Spit Baths," he was talking about that time-honored tradition of Southern mamas and grandmas using saliva and a thumb to clean the dirt off their children's faces.

But the title is just a glimpse into this award-winning book, which weaves history, politics and the complexities of small-town life into colorful short stories. Below, the University School of Nashville alumnus talks about his book and the Nashville haunt he remembers well.

THIS IS YOUR FIRST BOOK. HOW'D YOU COME UP WITH IT?

It all started when I went to college (at Yale University). I'd lived in Elizabethtown, Ky., and then moved to Nashville. I'd lived in Hawaii. So the gap between my experiences and the experiences of people around me (was quite different), and I was speaking to them about a world different from what they knew.

A lot of the stories are about the conflict between tradition and change. They're about parents and grandparents impressing these traditional ways of life on their children in a changing world. And it's about life in the South, about life in smaller towns in the South.

WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE STORY?

The two I usually think of are the first and the last ("Adam's Curse" and "Between States").The first one was a serious story that I tried to write. It was 57 pages, and melodramatic — it was a disaster. So I put it away, wrote some of the other stories. And when I finished those, I started thinking about that first story. I took it out and took it from 57 pages to two. I came back (to that story) as a different writer and a different person than I'd been at the start. It was fun to take a story that started out as melodramatic and make it almost funny. The last
one is the story I like to read most.

WHEN YOU COME BACK TO NASHVILLE (HE NOW LIVES IN PHILADELPHIA), WHAT'S ONE PLACE YOU HAVE TO GO TO?

It used to be Uncle Bud's Catfish. It was a big catfish barn. There used to be one in Franklin, and there was one off of Charlotte Avenue and White Bridge Road, not far from where my mom lived. It was fun because, of course, I missed the food, but it was also fun because you could go in and see Nashville. Ancient people and kids. People with SUVs and people with cars that had their fender tied on. You could really see Nashville. One of my friends said one of the most integrated places in Nashville was Uncle Bud's at 2 p.m. on a Saturday. That's what really unifies people a buffet of fried food."

Small Town Boy

Greg Downs’ stories capture the essence of life in a vanishing South—and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction

by Susannah J. Felts

A mere 1,400 feet from Flannery O’Connor’s family farm in Milledgeville, Ga., a brand new Super Wal-Mart spreads across the land. The irony isn’t lost on writer and history professor Greg Downs, a former Nashvillian whose newly released collection of short stories, Spit Baths, won the 2005 Flannery O’Connor Award from the University of Georgia Press. “O’Connor always feared that ‘town’ was coming to eat up their world, four to five miles away, and it surely has,” Downs says. ”So you can be standing in the house, looking at her perfectly preserved bedroom, with her crutches leaning against her bed, her desk still facing the back of her wardrobe, and hear broadcasting from the Wal-Mart down the road, loud calls for customer service on line three.”

Downs doesn’t write about this new South of homogenous big-box retail and diversifying populations, of booming exurbs and shriveling small towns. The world he conjures in Spit Baths is closer to O’Connor’s own—informed by his observations of Elizabethtown, Ky., and Middle Tennessee—and it’s distinctly Southern. His characters are both obsessed with the past and in flight from it; they struggle to make sense of life where things are domestically or historically off-kilter. Downs seems to have taken to heart O’Connor’s adage: “To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world.” Though Flannery O’Connor Award-winning books are not required to be the least bit Dixiefied in tone or subject, it’s hard not to see Spit Baths as a particularly apt choice for the honor.

Downs is both of the South and apart from it—by choice. His voice bears not a trace of Southern accent, and he teaches at City College of New York, where he’s working on a book of essays about “the meaning of Southernness in America” (working title: The History of the Nation of Defeat). To get literary purchase on his home region, Downs has mostly kept it at arm’s length for more than 10 years, calling Boston, Iowa City and Chicago home. Today he lives in Philadelphia with his wife Diane and their 10-week-old daughter, Sophia. (They also have a cat named Waylon—after Waylon Jennings.)

In fact, his childhood was barely more wholesale Southern than his peripatetic adulthood has been. His first 12 years were roughly divided between Elizabethtown, where his mother’s family was rooted, and Kauai, Hawaii, where his father Monty Downs, an emergency room doctor, moved when Downs was 6 weeks old. Monty had grown up in Trinidad, the son of a research scientist, Wilbur Downs, who studied tropical diseases. He never lost his taste for island life, Downs says, and for a few years in the mid-’70s he gave up practicing medicine and joined a loose commune—“people who went out to sea to fish for fairly long stretches.” He and Downs’ mother had an off-and-on relationship for a while; they separated for good when Downs was around 10 years old. Monty still lives in Kauai, but he and Downs are close, talking on the phone weekly and playing online chess. They see each other once or twice a year.

It was during college at Yale—where his father attended both college and medical school—that Downs first realized he should be writing about the South. “The people in my classes were writing stories about college or about their bland suburban towns, and I knew right away that the stories I had to tell were wholly different, and a lot more meaningful than most of theirs, even though some of them were more proficient writers,” he says.

So far, those stories have often been inspired by Downs’ memories of Elizabethtown, a community that has long struck him as a sort of endangered species, and of his grandparents, who loomed large in his boyhood there. Downs was close to his maternal grandfather, who divorced his grandmother (“a good person but a fairly stern figure”) before he was born, and married several more times. (There’s some dispute, Downs says, as to whether his grandfather had five or seven wives.)

“My grandfather was, to me, a kid in a big old body,” he says. “He taught me to whistle while we were watching the Miss America pageant on TV. He loved inconsequential things like that, whistling and weeding and frying bacon and listening to the Reds games.”

Grandparents are central figures in several of the Spit Baths stories, such as the title piece, in which a young boy bonds with “Maw-Maw” before his mother shuttles him off to live with her in Springfield, Mo. “Last night,” Maw-Maw tells him while they’re sipping Grape Crush at a Laundromat, “the angels let me hear your record.… They played it, and it told me you were going to be a good boy, even when I won’t be there to tell you to be one. It told me no matter how old you were or what you ever saw, you wouldn’t let the world dirty you. There are going to be days when you won’t want to be a good boy anymore. But I want you to remember what I’m telling you. It’s who you are. You’re my good boy. You can’t escape that.”

Though the women of Spit Baths are often feisty, self-sufficient females with a formidable presence—“She wouldn’t let a bird teach her how to fly,” another character says of Maw-Maw—these stories speak most forcefully about the lives of boys and men. And they’re infused with history, both real and invented: the middle-aged narrator of “A Comparative History of Nashville Love Affairs” distracts himself from his rickety marriage with thoughts of lovers past: Andrew and Rachel Jackson, Frank Goad Clement and his mistresses, former Nashville Mayor Bill Boner and his fourth wife, lounge singer Traci Peel. “It’s a shame that another person’s pain makes your own easier to take,” he muses.

In “Ain’t I a King, Too?” a man on the run from responsibility hits Louisiana on the day after Huey P. Long’s assassination and takes up with some hardscrabble folks who point out that he greatly favors the late populist. “Emperor of the rednecks,” one of them jeers. And in “The Hired Man,” a professor nudged into early retirement imagines a watery death for George Washington: “[He] tumbled southward, through Philadelphia, the Delaware Bay, the Atlantic Ocean,” Downs writes. “The currents lifted his shoes, his fabled gold watch chain, his ivory teeth. His bare feet cartwheeled above his unwigged head; his body danced over the sharks.”

At age 3, Downs was already obsessed with history. He begged his mom repeatedly to read to him from a book in a series on U.S. presidents, Meet John Kennedy. (That probably also had a lot to do, he says, with the fact that his grandfather’s last wife was Catholic and had installed a picture of Kennedy in their house.) He devoured several titles in the series and later picked up other obsessions, among them military board games and baseball statistics. But he never lost his taste for history and books. One evening at Pizza Hut when he was around 7 years old, a cousin spilled a Coke, which spread quickly across the table. Downs recalls that he was reading an older cousin’s history textbook and—determined to finish a paragraph—he stayed in his seat, eyes glued to the page, until the soda had dripped onto his pants. In his grandmother’s eyes, he recalls, “this was not an indicator of future success.”

Many young writers work adolescence into their first books, but Downs—who spent his teen years as a student at University School of Nashville—is more interested in the “less told and more peculiar” material mined from his childhood than any adolescent coming-of-age tropes.

“When you’re 7 you’re still free to be weird because you like things that other people don’t like, or you like things you’re not supposed to like.” In fact, he says, 7-year-olds are an awful lot like writers. “You spend more time thinking and doing things by yourself than you should, and you’re not interested in the things you’re supposed to be interested in—or you’re caught up in the vulgar, or the gross, or the mundane.”

But maybe it’s that Downs’ young-adult experiences are just a bit more difficult to translate to story than the things he saw and did years earlier. Alys Venable, who taught Downs seventh- and eighth-grade English at USN, remembers him as “unusual in many ways. His reading and his vocabulary were way beyond his years, and so was his knowledge of history and of current events. He was not only well informed, he was quite opinionated, and he had data to support his opinions.”

She remembers that Downs got into an argument with Margaret Thatcher’s son Mark, who came to speak to USN students one day. Thatcher, she says, “gave an impassioned but rather vague speech in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament (the U.S.’s disarmament), and Greg disagreed. At the end of the period, most of the other students left, but Greg and a friend or two remained to continue the debate. Greg had all the information, and his opponent finally admitted defeat—or at least admitted that he couldn’t make Greg change his mind.” For Venable, this event was a precursor to Downs’ success as a writer. “Writing takes a lot of courage, and good writing requires the ability to stick to your own vision, regardless of the pressure of authorities.”

Academics came easily to Downs, but he struggled to succeed in sports, persevering in basketball even after his coach, the late Larry Matthews, advised him to quit. Downs never became a star player, but “going from an F to a C+ basketball player meant a lot to me,” he says.

At Yale, Downs started taking fiction writing seriously, but he also tried journalism as the city editor of the Yale Daily News. From 1990 to 1992, during summers home, he interned at The Tennessean. He had fun soaking up the small-town political rallies, getting a bead on inner-circle Nashville politics. He even got a crack at reporting on an outsize personality when another reporter grew weary of covering Tony Alamo, and Downs got assigned to Alamo’s trial in Florida. “He told me I personally was going to be condemned to hell,” Downs remembers.

After earning a B.A. in history and teacher preparation in 1993, Downs returned to Nashville, thinking that immersion would help him write about some of the ideas he’d been working through at Yale. The Tennessean wanted him on staff, but Downs worried that a reporting job would sap his will to write on his own. So he wound up back at USN, now the English teacher rather than the eager student, the varsity coach instead of the team center. “I had this fantasy that I’d be this great basketball coach,” he says, “while also teaching English and writing novels and chaperoning school trips, as if time could be stretched like a rubber band.”

The two years he taught at his alma mater were “very exciting, but surreal at the same time. You walk out one door, and four years later you’re back in the same place but in a totally different costume. There was the feeling that ‘there’s been a little bit of a mistake.’ ” Ultimately, the experience gave him fodder for fiction—such as a dreamlike story called “Field Trip,” in which a young, insecure teacher boards a school bus with his passel of students, only to find himself naked, his testicles “flat on the bus’s plastic brown seat like two deflated balloons”—and en route to his childhood home.

But Downs needed distance; he was living too close to the source to write about it. “Probably now I could,” he says, “but I couldn’t at 22, 23.” He took a teaching job at a day school near Boston and enrolled in creative writing classes at Harvard Extension School, where one of his teachers, Tom Bailey (now at Susquehanna University), encouraged him to apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for an MFA. “Tom Bailey was the person who made me understand that writing was hard, that it was—like my experiences in basketball—something you had to fail at and fail at and fail again, hopefully failing better,” Downs says. The workshop, he says, lived up to its reputation: challenging, inspiring, intensely competitive. “From day one you’re surrounded by—and at times choking in—writing,” he says. “It was a big shift from treating writing as this secret thing I did at night, literally on a portable typewriter in my car, so I wouldn’t wake up my roommates.”

At Iowa, he wrote a novel, Kentucky’s Daughter, which bagged the James Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. He’s now revising the book. Set in the Great Depression, it tells the story of a woman who goes on a cross-country crime spree after her father, a bootlegger, is assassinated.

Downs started getting his first stories published after he moved to Chicago in 1999, where he took a job as editor of the Hyde Park Herald and later taught at DePaul and simultaneously earned a master’s in history at Northwestern. Ultimately, he decided a Ph.D. was in order: “I wanted to be able to get a better job than I could have gotten at the time with an M.F.A. I wanted to actually learn something, and I knew that going back into history would lead me into more stories.” During this time he revisited some existing stories, many of which had sprawled to 30 or 40 pages each. That’s a hard length to place in a literary magazine. It’s also off-putting to many readers. So Downs got ruthless. “Adam’s Curse” was his most dramatic cut: he distilled it from a 57-page story he’d been toying with for years to a 600-word piece that Publishers Weekly called “as disorienting as it is beautiful.”

Putting the same principle to work in culling stories for the manuscript that became Spit Baths, Downs withdrew a few of the stories, such as the first one he’d published, at 28, after—aspiring writers, take note—some 200 rejections. (He estimates that he’s now received around 500 no-thank-yous.) He ended up with a collection that was more thematically focused, less a grab bag of solid stories than “actually a book that someone might read from start to finish,” he says.

Last fall, when Downs got the call telling him he’d won the O’Connor award, which typically draws 250 to 300 entries per year and is among the top national honors for story collections, he thought it might be a prank played by one of his old high school friends. Ever the skeptical reporter, he Googled the number on his caller ID. Sure enough, it was University of Georgia Press.

Editor Andrew Berzanskis says there was no set criteria upon which Spit Baths was chosen. It was simply “one of the most interesting and lively” submissions they received in 2005. “Greg is a writer’s writer, using his intellect and sense of history to play character and landscape against literary forms in an original way,” Berzanskis says. “But he’s also very much a reader’s writer, and his stories are consistently interesting, funny and well-told.”

Downs says he’s heard from people who grew up in small towns all over the country that the book resonates with their memories of home. “There is something about the experience of small towns in decline that isn’t particularly Southern, but part of many people’s experiences for the past 60 or 80 years.” But the regional honesty of the work is what many of his readers embrace.

Ann Wheeler, who taught him in AP English at USN, says she’s interested by how “deeply Southern” the book feels. “Greg’s stories really tap into that deep feeling of place that is peculiarly Southern. The voices feel like the voices of people I grew up with.”

And Downs was careful to include certain objects and places that quietly but poignantly signify the South—Little Debbie treats, for instance, appear in a couple of the stories. To Downs they read as Southern (and indeed, they’re made in Tennessee), but they aren’t a cutesy cliché. “I thought Goo-Goo Clusters would be a little too precious at this point,” he says.

He’s now working on a story set at a Waffle House, a setting he knows, for his audience of literary fiction readers, is loaded with double meaning. But Downs simply loved the place growing up. “When I was kid, there was no irony about Waffle House.”

Writer keeping Southern literary tradition alive

Sunday, November 5, 2006 9:03 PM CST

STORIES FROM THE HEARTLAND by JOHN FRIEDLEIN

Greg Downs thinks the world used to be stranger.
Not strange in a bad way. But particular.

Particular like the Whistle Stop in Glendale. Like an old-timer who, looking up from his meatloaf at so-and-so who just walked in, could rattle off the new arrival’s genealogy.

But these days, can diners waiting for shrimp scampi at Red Lobster even recognize other faces in the restaurant? And what if they’re travelers or recent transplants — do they pause while trying to remember what town they’re in, futilely searching the décor for some clue?

An assistant professor at City College of New York, Downs drew from his boyhood memories of Elizabethtown while exploring these themes — groundedness in place, homogenization of culture and connections between people — in his newly released collection of short stories, “Spit Baths.” The work earned the 34-year-old writer the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

O’Connor, famous for her own strange characters, probably would have nodded while reading his book. Even in the ’60s she was interested in holding onto tradition and manners as the outside world rolls over you, Downs said. Actually, standing outside her preserved farmhouse in Milledgeville, Ga., you can hear a loudspeaker blare from a nearby Wal-Mart.

Change freaks out one of Downs’ characters, who is based on a great aunt who moved away from Elizabethtown, traveled the world and was shocked when she returned. The character is so distraught she ends up painting old street numbers on houses.

The relatives who inspired his stories were in their 80s and 90s when Downs was a teen. They’d drive him around, pointing out seemingly unremarkable landmarks that really were rich with lore.

It wasn’t just the buildings, of course. They had been brought up to live a certain way — in a particular world that became progressively less familiar to their children and grandchildren.

They had roots. And they had stories, like when his grandmother, Dorothy Howard, helped lead the ’27 Elizabethtown High School girls’ basketball team to the state championship.

And they valued social connections. For instance, Downs’ grandfather, David “Russell” Howard, was a big talker and a big eater, and he was liable to drop in on his neighbors for a bite. In the modern world, this kind of closeness is hard to regain once lost. People move around so much.

It wasn’t that people back in the Howards’ day necessarily liked each other, and it was not that they sat around drinking tea, talking about how wonderful their connections were. They were stuck with each other — “born into being connected,” Downs said.

Downs, whose childhood was split between Elizabethtown, eastern Kentucky, Nashville and Hawaii, left for college feeling like he had to separate himself from his past.

Now he hears its call.

Just look at his MySpace page, which list his heroes: Tubby Smith, Huey Long and O’Connor — “three southerners who understand the world beyond their back porch, and stayed close to home anyway.”

Former Elizabethtown resident Greg Downs, author of “Spit Baths,” will give a reading and talk at 7 p.m. Nov. 16 at Western Kentucky University. His book was published by the University of Georgia Press.

Greg Downs

I have to say that there’s something intimidating about Greg Downs when I look at his bio. There’s the Ph.D. and the fact that he’s a professor of history at the City College of New York. He graduated from Yale and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is married to the Associate Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. If that’s not intimidating enough, there’s the fact that Spit Baths, his collection of short stories published by the very academic University of Georgia Press, also happened to win the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

Before I began reading Spit Baths, I wondered if there would be something too academic or inaccessible about the book. I wondered if the characters themselves might be academic and inaccessible. But right away, I found the stories to be populated with boys caught in the middle, boys staying quiet as other people direct their lives, boys with emotions and secrets they must keep to themselves.

So when I spoke to Greg, I was determined to find someone behind all the fancy credentials that knew about lonely boys, failures, and kids that don’t fit in.

But soon you’ll see the fancy layers peeled away until you get to something soft in the middle.

*

What are you afraid of?

Forgetting how ugly I looked with long hair. Boy, do I hope someone stops me if I ever get started on that project again.

Did you have any recurring nightmares, either as a child or an adult?

See above. That long-hair dream is a killer.

I hear you used to coach.

Yes, I was a helluva basketball coach. Right after college, I came back to my alma mater, took over the team with all my dreams of Pat Riley style stardom, and led them right into the cellar. The first year that they had the benefit of my expertise, they managed to go a robust 3-24. Now, lest those three big wins mislead you, I should also say that one of those wins was against a church school that played their games in the cafeteria on the tile floor - literally, another we won on a 30-foot-shot that banked in at the buzzer, and the third we won because the team we played suspended their three best players for drinking. I think their coach figured he didn’t need his good players to beat us, but he was wrong! So those three wins didn’t come cheap.

To start off the season, my best player tore his ACL, my second-best player was kicked out of school for carrying a gun in his car, and my fourth-best player was a freshman who weighed - literally - 120 pounds. There were times when the shortest player on the other team was taller than our tallest player. Good times, all around.

Have you ever been fired?

No, but that may be because I walked out the door before they could slam it behind me. I have, however, fired somebody, right before Christmas to boot. I think I cried more than she did. One nice thing about writing stories is that you don’t have to call anybody into your office to tell them they’re being let go.

What kinds of things do you do in your free time?

When I was wooing my wife Diane, we used to travel around with a group of hardcore karaoke addicts, people who sang 3-4 nights a week, all night, at bars around Boston. There was a famous karaoke deejay named China whom they followed from bar to bar. These were folks who carried their own slips with their favorite songs already filled in; instead of scrambling for the book, they’d coolly take out their slip, hand it to the deejay, then take it back at the end of the night.

These people actually had talent. A couple of them had been in bands when they were our age - we were in our 20s and most of them were in their 40s - but just didn’t have the patience to deal with people anymore. But they had routines, shtick, outfits, and decent signing voices.

I had none of those things, so I just made up for it with volume. You knew I was coming up when you saw China turn the volume knobs way down.

I did also try to distract people in the audience by dropping to my knees, tearing open my shirt, pounding the floor, and in other ways try to display an emotion that was sadly lacking in my voice.

My key songs–chosen for their limited vocal range–were “Wanted: Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi, “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain” by Willie Nelson (I liked to slow it down), and especially “Heaven” by Bryan Adams, who was clearly twice the artist Ryan Adams is.

Ha ha ha! I love it! See, now no one will ever forget you. You’re the Karaoke Writer.

Now tell me about your hometown and how you fit into it.

I have a couple of hometowns, which is confusing for other people (and sometimes for me) but was actually really useful. Anybody out there trying to raise their children to be writers (and who isn’t?) should definitely try this. First, divorce, which makes the 2-3 hometowns much simpler to manage. Then parents should move thousands of miles apart, to strange and isolated places. Then ship kid back and forth between said strange and isolated places. Shake, stir, leave to settle, and one writer emerges.

My mother’s family, who mostly raised me, have for 150 years lived in and around Elizabethtown in Hardin County, Kentucky. This is the place that Cameron Crowe used as the name for his movie (though not for much else.) Kirsten Dunst is not walking around, though. Neither was Cameron Crowe for that matter. It’s a medium-sized town near Fort Knox. My mother’s family had been farmers, mostly, and gravestone cutters and local politicians and self-taught “doctors” for a long time. There’s a street named after my great-grandfather who lived to be 102. Now, my cousin is the deputy chief of police there. Along with a taste for some foods, a slightly midwesterny version of the southern accent, and complicated feelings about army bases, the main thing I carry with me from there is a recognition that nothing is quite as important (or painful) as University of Kentucky basketball. Iraq? Pretty big deal, but not like UK losing to Louisville. George Bush’s election in 2004? That was a bad moment, but not as bad as UK’s loss in the NCAAs. As a kid, I once saw a neighbor throw his television out of his window after UK lost a game. From that day on, I set my sights on earning enough money to be able to afford to do that, but so far I’ve had to settle for kicking my toe hard against the wall. This year, though, the TV is a possibility. So 36-0, Tubby Smith, or the TV gets it.

My mother and I lived for a quite a while, though, in Nashville and for several years in Kapahi, Kauai, Hawaii, at the end of a dirt road that was itself at the end of a one lane road, just a valley over from the wettest spot on earth. We lived there a few times, and my dad lived there for the duration, alongside a commune of burnt-out hippies and groups of paniolos (Hawaiian cowboys) and Filipinos and assorted refugees from the life on the mainland. It was strange being a “haole” with a funky accent in 2nd grade, but I knew from day one that there were some far out places on the planet, and that the idea that the whole world is getting homogenized is, frankly, a lie told by people who live in boring places.

Now, I live in Philly, which is neither homogenized nor home, even though there are parts that do feel like the old South, which is to say homey, impoverished, and a little violent.

Were you one of those Iggles fans throwing ice balls? (Aurelio, the Eagles are a football team from Philly, but I like to say it with the proper Pixtburgh accent.)

My lawyer advises me not to answer that question. If I did throw an ice ball, though, it would only have been in the direction of a known war criminal like T.O., and never at a saint like Big Ben.

I don’t know, when you’re 2 and 5, “saint” isn’t exactly the word that comes to mind. But let’s not talk about my Stillers right now or I’ll get cranky.

How about you tell me about this Philly band you’re wearing on your t-shirt. And what were you doing that got you so sweaty?

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I like to call Marah the best Southern band around, which confuses people since the brothers who run Marah - Dave and Serge Bielanko - are from Philadelphia. But the kind of music they do is not Southern merely because they play banjoes and harmonicas but because they sing with the oldest Southern faith in the reality of pain, the recognition that anomie and displacement and soul-searching are luxuries of a rich world. In the Nation of Defeat, people experience loss of a more corporeal kind. “A History of Where Someone Has Been Killed,” a life making “nothin’ in a factory,” a record of a day with “seven dollars in my pocket and sixteen cigarettes that somehow I just ain’t smoked yet.” And a place that is haunted by failure, where people “walk out past the spot/ Where there used to be a swing set/ Where a little girl got shot/ I know you’re thinkin about your brother Richard, too/ I wish we could bring him back.”

Southern music, like a lot of Southern literature, was really about poverty, not necessarily about being poor but about the experience of living around poverty all the time. Not a political platform about poverty but just a take on life that grew out of an awareness of it. A lot of Southern artists weren’t poor themselves, but until recently if you lived in the South you lived around a whole bunch of poor people, and no chance of fooling yourself otherwise. The same thing for violence.

Now, there are poor people in the South, but as the South has suddenly got rich and put on its fancy shoes, it has become much more adept at doing what the North was always adept at, hiding them away. And now a lot of the poorest places in the country are northern cities. So it’s no surprise to me that really good Southern music - really Southern - comes out of places like Philly and Detroit and Chicago once you get off the lakefront. What people experience there is what people used to experience in the South.

So Marah are a hardworking band that plays honest, painful rock and roll and sings tough songs but without an ounce of self-pity. Going is like going to a revival, and even someone as self-conscious as I am ends up shouting by the end. So that photo is after a show they did at Asbury Park, New Jersey at the Stone Pony. A friend of mine had seen the author photo they were using for the back book jacket - which is beautiful - and told me that she was going to take a picture of how I really looked, and that is the picture she took.

On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, though, I say the best Southern band around is the Drive-by-Truckers who are actually from the South and who have a sense of history to keep them from turning the Southern thing into a cliche.

On Sundays, I say the best Southern band around is My Morning Jacket, because you’ve got to stick up for your fellow Kentuckians when they do good.

[Okay Greg is fun, but I suppose we should start talking about writing at some point.] What inspires your ideas for short stories?

I wish it were images. I always think it would be a better idea to start writing from an image and move out into the story. But I don’t think that way. I start with a character or a bit of the story or a voice and try to fill in around it. Often there’s a bunch of ideas floating around in my head, and I wait to see which one becomes an itch that I need to scratch.

Do you like doing readings? What do you worry about most before a reading?

I like the moment the reading is over. Not because I love signing my name - I actually was never one of those kids who practiced his autograph all day - but because I do like talking to people. Right after it’s over, you feel so vulnerable; you’ve just stood in front of people and read something that was written to read on the page, not heard aloud, and probably you’ve read something that wasn’t quite as funny as it should have been. And what will happen if everyone just scoots politely out the door without even acknowledging your presence? Will I have to stand up and wave my arms and say, “Hi Mom! It’s me, Greg!” But then people - strangers - come up and start talking about your story and about writing, and it feels like a real moment of intimacy between people you’ll never see again.

So, this book, Spit Baths, what was the hardest part about writing?

Finding ribbons for my portable Royal typewriter.

You did not write your book on a typewriter. Did you?

Some of the first drafts were written on a manual portable Royal typewriter that had belonged to one of my grandmothers. More recently, though, I switched to doing first drafts longhand. My wife jokes that pretty soon I’m going to be chiseling first drafts in stone.

Um. Okay, on the cover of your book, I have to say the little pencil drawing thing is very eye-catching, but what exactly is it? A puddle?

I think someone at the press spilled their beer on the cover mockup, and they drew the circle around the edges to make it seem artistic and not a mistake.

Or maybe that’s the explanation for the stories inside.

Why did the book cover designer write “Flannery O’Connor winner” around the sticker that says “Flannery O’Connor winner”?

No idea. It was so nice they decided to say it twice?

How long did you shop the stories in this book before you found a home for it?

Maybe a year and a half or so, not nonstop. I had an earlier, longer, uglier version of the book that included all the stories I had published. I was proud of those stories. Getting those stories made me want to keep on writing. I couldn’t imagine that they wouldn’t end up in my collection. Hadn’t people - strangers - at literary magazines flooded with submissions already accepted them?

I submitted to the Flannery O’Connor, and then I got a nice note from a judge asking why I was spoiling a good book with stories that didn’t belong. And I had to admit that she was right. Not that those stories were bad, just that they didn’t belong. A couple were too raw, a couple were repetitive, a couple were just in a different tone. So I cut them out, wrote a couple of new ones, submitted to the Flannery O’Connor again and got a phone call the next time around, which is always a good sign. What kind of fool calls to give you bad news, when it’s so much easier to send it by mail? So it was good news.

Have any of your colleagues in your department read your book?

None of my history colleagues, though a couple of English professors and administrators who work in the same division that I do. I think the other history professors are happy for me, but they don’t understand what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. Come to think of it, I don’t understand it either! One is sometimes reminded of the aphorism that writing is not a vocation or an avocation but simply a bad habit.

What’s next for you?

Right now, a bottle of Troeg’s Pale Ale, brewed in Harrisburg, Pa. Kentucky and Tennessee have the bourbon and whiskey down pat, but I do love the Pennsylvania beers. Troegs and Yuengling and Yards, especially.

But you probably meant beyond the next five minutes. Well, I’m turning my dissertation (don’t ask) into a book of academic history (which is a polite way of saying a book with a readership even smaller than a collection of short stories.’) I’m also revising a novel that I’ve been working on for a while and am ready to finish up. And I’m playing with some essays about Southernness (often in non-Southern locales) called “The Capital of the Nation of Defeat.”

And I’m obsessively checking the recruiting websites for information about high school sophomores and juniors the University of Kentucky is recruiting to play basketball. Clearly the whims of a 16-year-old with a glandular disorder are more important in the bigger scope of things than my family or my work. If only I were kidding.

But no more will we think of Greg Downs as a fancy, award-winning author with a PhD. Oh no. He’s the sweaty karaoke singer who spills his food and worries you’ll duck out of his reading without saying hello. He’s the one who knows about a boy standing in a parking lot in a catcher’s uniform and punching himself. He’s that guy.

DOWNS SYNDROME

Who knew an up-and-coming literary sensation was living in our own backyard? (And no, it's not that self-important freshman in your creative writing class.) West Philadelphia resident Greg Downs is the author of Spit Baths, a new Flannery O'Connor Award-winning collection of short stories. Like all good stories, the tales are Raymond Carver-esque, sad sagas grounded in the forgotten dirt roads of a neglected America. It makes sense that Downs has so many stories to tell; after all, he's done more in 35 years than most of us could do in five lifetimes. After being raised alternately in Kentucky, Tennessee and Hawaii, he worked as a teacher, karaoke performer, journalist and basketball coach. And, oh yeah, he's also got a B.A. from Yale, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a newly-minted History Ph.D. from dear old Penn. Wannabe overachievers, eat your hearts out and get your books signed.

From Philadelphia Weekly, Oct. 11, 2006

A Philly author’s short stories exhibit a rare sense of history.

by Doug Wallen

“History always softens me. Even bad history,” says a character in Greg Downs’ story “Freedom Rides.” The same could be said of Downs, who teaches 19th century American history at City College of New York and weaves traces of the past into every page of Spit Baths, his award-winning first collection of stories.

“I remember being a kid and running into my mother’s bedroom, trying to wake her up so she could read me these biographies my grandmother got of the presidents,” he says on the phone from his home in West Philadelphia.

A childhood split among central Kentucky, Nashville and Hawaii gave Downs a rare sense of how location and history shapes people. His characters devour biographies, attend politicians’ funerals, chaperone field trips, latch onto outmoded street names, unearth secrets about dead presidents and watch chain stores gobble up small towns.

“There are places where you grow up with a real awareness of what’s happened there,” he says. “It’s partly because they’re places where not much has happened recently, so that old world is actually right there.”

In a story about a teacher who marries a former student, Downs writes, “Without history as a topic between them, he did not know what to say.” Another depicts a town split by a state line, spurring the rival basketball teams to trade insults like, “Maybe they call that defense in Kentucky” and “Get that Tennessee shit out of here.”

Lovely descriptions of baseball float through “Black Pork,” while “Snack Cakes” finds an overeating senior touring his former wives with a reluctant grandson in tow. “Indoor Plumbing” and “Freedom Rides” brush against the specter of racism, and “Domestic Architecture” has a parallel tale in which a leprous man is forced to leave his family.

Just released by the University of Georgia Press, Spit Baths has already received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. In addition to a local book launch, Downs will give a reading later this month in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, Ga. The book’s odd title comes from a story of the same name, in which a woman uses saliva to clean her grandson’s face. “The spit catches what the soap won’t,” she says.

Willful, self-reliant women are a staple in Downs’ stories, cutting men down to size on a regular basis. In the first story “Adam’s Curse” the women in a family simply give up on the men one day. Meanwhile, a mother in “Black Pork” muses, “He probably don’t even smoke Marlboros no more. He probably isn’t even faithful to his habits.”

Elsewhere thick-skinned daughters and ex-wives dish out insults to nonplussed males. Downs dedicated the book to his mother and grandmother, calling each “a fighter.”

“They all worked. They could all fight back,” he says of the women in his family. “The flipside of them having to do all these things on their own is they realized they could do them all on their own.”

Downs and his wife moved to Philly from Chicago three years ago. He recently finished his Ph.D. at Penn while working on Spit Baths as well as other writing.

“I’d never been to Philadelphia. But we came and we liked it.”

Downs’ wife Diane is now the associate dean of Penn’s law school and runs the career planning office. Moving to West Philly ushered Downs through the finishing touches of Spit Baths.

“Some of the things I was stuck on just became clear because the detritus of the past is definitely not as easily swept away here,” he explains. “People’s lives, in a weird way, feel much more Southern, even more than a lot of the South does now. Being here and not back where the stories are set, I was just able to make a lot of quick judgments about what was and wasn’t important.”

History, politics and the South aren’t the only threads through the book. The Cincinnati Reds, who won the World Series when Downs was a kid, pop up in several stories, on the radio and TV or in conversation.

“They were very strong throughout [the ’70s],” he recalls. “The Reds were always in the background, like the background static of success. But it’s been progressively harder to be a Cincinnati Reds fan. The Philadelphians think they have it tough with the Phillies, but at least they’re in the game.”

From Kirkus Reviews:
A series of 13 punchy, white-trashy takes on displacement and youthful perplexity.

The first, "Adam's Curse," is a mere two pages long, and demonstrates nicely the strange beauty of Downs's imagination. The 19-year-old college-dropout narrator recounts blandly the decision by his female relatives to live without men-"they simply exhaled the men like sighs from their houses." The narrator, who lives in the basement of his aunt's house, observes both sides of the sexual divide, all the while simply aching to hop in the car of the willing Kroger checkout girl and take a ride with her.

The narrator of "Snack Cakes," as in many of the stories, is a high-school boy on the cusp of manhood, trying to navigate the dysfunctional trajectories of various family members-in this case, a grandfather who married six times still can't quite decide which wife he loves best.

In the title story, the boy's mother has left him for a month in the care of his grandmother, Maw-Maw, in Joelton, Ky., in order to find an apartment and new life for them in Springfield, Mo. The boy, Crawford, isn't sure what to think: "Every day your mother wakes up and says it's a new day," Maw-Maw tells him skeptically. "But the truth is there aren't any new days."

"Field Trip" fuses a young man's sexual daydreams into a schoolbus outing, while "Freedom Rides" pursues a soured middle-school trip through civil-rights history.

Perhaps the most ambitious and compelling story here is "Ain't I a King, Too?," involving the identity crisis of a middle-aged loner fleeing domestic tribulation back in Kentucky in 1935, who arrives in Shreveport, La., only to be mistaken for the recently deceased senator, Huey Long.

Downs, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, is a writer to watch. His work has a cerebral, surreal element that requires a little piecing together.

—Kirkus Reviews

from Publishers Weekly:
Examining the nooks and crannies of contemporary backwater life in the South and Midwest, Downs's debut collection opens with a kaleidoscopic description of an extended family breaking apart that is as disorienting as it is beautiful.

"Black Pork" follows a white minor league pitcher back to the former sharecropper's shack he shares with his dementia-plagued grandfather, and manages to be simultaneously excruciating and deeply insightful about race as it centers on the two men's relationship with the black single mother and daughter across the lane.

In "Ain't I a King, Too-" (set in 1935) a man about to leave his family finds himself abducted when he is mistaken for the then just assassinated Huey P. Long, the corrupt former governor of Louisiana. "Freedom Rider" turns similarly odd when a school trip turns into a physical free-for-all among the adolescent participants. Even more darkly, in "A Comparative History of Nashville Love Affairs," a middle-aged man considers the frailties of his own marriage after observing a colleague eyeing a group of the colleague's wife's students.

A strong sense of style and unfaltering command of his material allow Downs to take the kinds of risks in tone and subject that make his debut a love-it-or-hate-it proposition.(Oct.)

--Publisher's Weekly

"The American short story is in fine hands with Greg Downs and Spit Baths. The stories are often funny, always deft. Here, the conundrums of American life and family are put in bold relief. Readers are in for a treat."
—Christopher Tilghman, author of Roads of the Heart

"Always engaging, at times compelling, Spit Baths is both thoroughly original and completely authentic. Greg Downs unifies these disparate stories through their tone—deadpan, informed with preternatural wisdom, so real they verge into surreal. Working from events stranger than fiction, he explores the hard truths at the edges of our lives, especially regarding the lingering scars of racism. In the process, he draws back a curtain to reveal a world in which people are always searching, never finding someone or some place they can call home."
—Fenton Johnson, author of Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey