Goon was no sloppy man but look at all the ransacked pages off the clipboard on his lap. This moment marked a bad, a maybe terrible thing, she was certain of it. And not much else.
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“Reading and writing train our people for logic, grace, and precision of thought, and begin a lifelong study of the exceptional in human existence. I think literature is the history of the soul. Writing should be a journey into worthy perception.”
— Barry Hannah
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The publisher gratefully acknowledges Brad Watson, Howard M. Lenhoff, and Elizabeth Kaiser for their invaluable contributions in compiling this volume, and Jack Pendarvis and David McLendon for the extra eyes and ears. And Richard Howorth, for all of this and so much more.
Wilkes Bell’s dialogue regarding napalm on page 455 is taken from James Bradley’s Flyboys (New York and Boston: Little, Brown & Co. and Back Bay Books, 2003, p. 215). We gratefully thank Mr. Bradley and his publisher for allowing us to use these words.
The following pieces from this book originally appeared in other publications. “Trek” originally appeared in The Arrowhead (Mississippi College) in 1964. “Water Liars,” “Love Too Long,” “Testimony of Pilot,” “Coming Close to Donna,” “Return to Return,” “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet,” and “Two Gone Over” originally appeared in Esquire. “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed” in Black Warrior Review. “Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt” in The Carolina Quarterly. “Fans” in Atlanta Weekly. “Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter” in The Georgia Review. “Even Greenland” was originally published as a chapbook by Barry Hannah in 1983. “Evening of the Yarp: A Report by Roonswent Dover” originally appeared in The Quarterly “Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?” in Santa Monica Review “Drummer Down” in Southern Review. “Uncle High Lonesome” in Men Without Ties. “A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis” in Sports Afield. “Sick Soldier at Your Door” in Gulf Coast Review and in Harper’s.
Text and titles have in certain cases been altered since the original publication.
From Self-Portrait: Book People Picture Themselves from the Collection of Burt Britton
About the Author
Barry Hannah (1942–2010) was the author of twelve books: Geronimo Rex, Airships, Ray, The Tennis Handsome, Nightwatchmen, Captain Maximus, Hey Jack, Boomerang, Never Die, Bats Out of Hell, High Lonesome, and Yonder Stands Your Orphan. His work was published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Southern Review, The Oxford American, Gulf Coast Review, and many other magazines. His achievements in fiction have been honored with an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and he was nominated for the American Book Award for Ray and the National Book Award for Geronimo Rex, which won the William Faulkner Prize. He also received the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award for Airships, and his body of work has been recognized with the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction.
Hannah was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1942, and grew up in Clinton, where he received a Bachelor of Arts from Mississippi College. He went on to earn a Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas. Hannah was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford for three decades, also teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Sewanee, and Bennington summer writing seminars, and held teaching appointments at many other colleges and universities. He passed away on March 1, 2010 in Oxford.
Courtesy of Susan Schove Phillips and the Oxford Lafayette County Literacy Council
Notes
*James Bradley, Flyboys, (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2003), 215.