I have a soft spot for blue collar American stories which I blame on reading too much Raymond Carver when I first started reading short fiction twenty-five years ago. I love straight-talking, hard-drinking, pool-playing, reckless-driving protagonists and I will never love college-educated, over-thinking, emotionally-needy, city-living ones. I want coonhounds and drunk preachers and alligator-hide boots and prose so muscular it can throw its own punches:
“When I was a kid we had a coonhound that got into a skunk, then had the gall to sneak under the porch. He whimpered in the dark and wouldn’t come out. Dad shot him. It didn’t stink less but Dad felt better. He told Mom any dog who didn’t know coon from skunk ought to be killed.”
Ahh, I can practically taste the bourbon just reading this, forgetting I’m a college-educated, over-thinking, emotionally-needy fool. Who doesn’t even know what a coonhound is.
Published in Kentucky Straight, Vintage 1992
A Personal Anthology 