William Eakin is an author who has spent the better part of his life traveling and living abroad. Guided by wonder and awe that travel inspires, he authored Welcome to Redgunk: Tales from One Weird Mississippi Town. Through his fictitious Redgunk, Mississippi, Eakin has created a realm where opposites attract at all levels imaginable.
Though he has lived in many countries growing up and moved likely more times than you or I would like to ponder, Eakin currently resides in Arkansas, where he finds the beauty of inspiration in the form of a cliff overlooking a river, where he gets his best published work done. He continues to travel across the country to visit his children and their families.
In your opinion, what are the most important elements of good writing?
Start with a little Apollo and a little Dionysus, like a cut crystal vase that grows a hurricane inside. That is, formally we have to know what we are doing, like sentence structure, spelling, vocabulary, but then have a willingness to break a few of the rules to let energy and intuition and passion lead the way. The recent developments in artificial intelligence seem to yield easily the first Apollonian part. I think as it progresses it will develop what it already exhibits too, the humane and human parts, the passion, since these have their own rules for success, too. What we add I think is the interiority of the author. That, too, I think is showing up. Given that both the form and passion, that the generation and development of human characters may be developable by AI we still are left with the question, “what about human writing? Can we get to the interiority of an Author (dead or living)?” I think when we go to find it, we find a kind of emptiness. Buddhists call it sunyata. We see the interconnectedness of everything and our own work. Additionally, I advocate an aesthetics of uncertainty, doubt, (I think) and what Aristotle said was the beginning of philosophy: wonder. I understand that to mean awe as well. I suspect that is what saves us from an aesthetics replicated well by AI. And when AI really develops an ability to stand in awe, then maybe we can all stand in awe together and stop theorizing.
What was the inspiration behind your book, Welcome to Redgunk: Tales from One Weird Mississippi Town?
For a time, before I built my house and great-writing-spot on a clifftop, I was left a single dad with three kids in a temporary mobile home, surrounded by cows, deer, hay, and some old farmers. Turns out the farmers were pure rough country but the friendliest folks would stop me on my road to talk for two hours, and would help pull my car out of a ditch at the drop of a hat. They’d also turn a little redneck sometimes (one burned another neighbor’s barn down, apparently, when they had a disagreement about where a common road cut off). All good. What I learned is that from the heart of sometimes violent, sometimes junk-filled parts of the state, from the heart of the country, some of the best helpers, the most generous spirits show up. I wanted to show that very thing. That amazing wonderful and wondrous things happen as much with large, whiskey-drinking Lawnmower Moe as with Druidic mystic priests at Stonehenge, that there is a magic force luring all of us toward our own greatness. I want to show that such things happen with a developmentally delayed young boy that gets taken up into the stars because he has beauty. That the best things in life are here in the depths of the kudzu as well as on some temple-lined shoreline overlooking the Aegean Sea, and that the things that are mystic, starry, far-reaching might just be right outside, in us standing together to talk.
When working on a story, what comes first to you, the plot or the characters?
I have started stories with just a name. For some names I look into the phone book (though these brilliant source books are rare nowadays) and choose parts of several names, and therein find someone funny, brilliant, beautiful, moving. Like Opal Delashmit, one of the Ladies in the Auxiliary of the First Mount Zion Christian Church of Redgunk, who becomes an explorer of the meaning of music and the challenges of being a woman in patriarchy. Or insecure Idella May Sauerwein who grows in more ways than one into the 50-foot woman over Redgunk. Or Otis Onus Zebrowsky, Redgunk’s cable television headed engineer, who learns he too can write things in lines across the sky with a great depth of questioning and self-acceptance.
What advice would you give to someone writing their first book?
Write. Don’t stop. Edit when you are done. Let the stuff in you come out and don’t be afraid. Like my character Lawnmower Moe, we are so afraid of our own growth, our own potential greatness, that we do our best to trim it back so it can’t move us on. Move on. The Buddha says Strive on. I would add: Thrive on.
If you had a month off to travel the world, where would you go and why?
I am traveling as I do this. In the next few weeks, I will be in Florence and then for a month I will be on the west coast communing with the ocean. My bio says I began life at three months old swinging on a ship going across the International Dateline in the Pacific. I thrive on traveling. It is a significant part of what and why I write—the feeling of learning new things, of freedom. I have spent time in India, Japan, the Pacific Islands, Greece, Italy, and will continue to do so come heck or high water till the day I die. Quite often it means I end up at home, too, just being, having a glass of wine on my porch on a cliff overlooking the river, loving and laughing with my friends. That, too, is traveling.
