Ed McClanahan still telling stories http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20090901/FEATURES06/909010315/1011/SCENE
By Larry Muhammad September 1, 2009 Maybe he's no Hunter Thompson, but at least the Lexington-based writer Ed McClanahan aka counterculture figure Captain Kentucky in the 1960s and 70s is still alive. "Hunter was a trip," said McClanahan, author most recently of the story collection, "O The Clear Moment". "Whatever his reputation was, he lived up to it. I was teaching in Montana, he came up there, and we ended up spending the night running around Missoula, and it was a blast." A congenital wit and gifted storyteller whom reviewers compare to Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., McClanahan is no angel himself. He fell in with Ken Kesey's hippieband, The Merry Pranksters, in the 1960s as a Stanford University student, a group including Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg that sometimes lived communally, used psychedelic drugs and famously travelled the country in a weirdly-painted school bus called Furthur. Now 76, he's one of its surviving members. "There are others," he said, "primarily Ken Babbs (Kesey's best friend of co-author with him of "Last Go Round"), George Walker, and Mountain Girl (Carolyn Adams). She was Kesey's squeeze, as it were, but also Jerry Garcia's wife." When Kesey, probably best known as author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", died in 2001, McClanahan was drafted to edit "Spit in the Ocean #7" a memorial edition of a literary magazine Kesey had founded in 1973 and sporadically self-published, ending with #6 in 1981. Contributors included Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Kentucky Poet Laureate Gurney Norman, folksinger Rosalie Sorrels, filmmaker Gus Van Sant, and novelist Larry McMurtry. "This was a chore that I just loved, really enjoyed doing it, and I think of that as a book that I'd written," said McClanahan, who also credited the project with interrupting work on his novel-in progress, "The Return of the Son of Needmore", a book he once dubbed "my entry for the Pulitzer Prize novel of 2032" some indication of his work ethic. He's published a handful of books in 50 years of writing his debut novel, "The Natural Man", was started in 1961 and published 22 years later in 1983 and has blithely described his literary output as "just a slightly hyper attempt to capture you attention." His latest, a collection of stories out last year, "O The Clear Moment", was published by Counterpoint Press and bears a nifty cover drawing by Ralph Steadman. The 9-story pocketbook volume received charitable reviews for its colorful characters and backwoods charm. One story, "Dog Loves Ellie", involves a class reunion featuring high school basketball heroes in Maysville and the object of an enormous schoolboy crush. As McClanahan writes, "the door to Miss Wallingford's 10 o'clock English class opened and into my life stepped be still, my heart! Ellie Chadwick! All that semester in English class, she sat in the row to the left of mine, one seat ahead, so that for fifty minutes every morning her immaculate profile was before me, a lovely enigmatic ivory cameo. In homage to its alabaster perfection, I taught myself to write "Ellie" in the margins of my grammar workbook in fat, overlapping letters resembling nothing so much as a handful of amorous caterpillars at the height of mating season." Some reviewers however noted that "O The Clear Moment" contained stories recycled from previous collections "Another Great Moment in Sports" and its predecessor "Great Moments in Sports" were both from his 1998 collection "My Vita, If You Will", and "And Then I Wrote…" from "Famous People I Have Known" in 1985. McClanahan said in a telephone interview, "It's true that some of those stories have resurfaced from other works, but the fact is that the ones that have been published before had been published in what I would consider pretty obscure places. The story 'Fondelle or, The Whore with a Heart of Gold' is a long story, novella length, and that was published in a limited edition, fine press book but they only printed 700 copies and I couldn't see any reason in the world why I couldn't put that before a larger audience if I could. Same thing is true of 'Great Moments' and "Another Great Moment'. Those two stories were in my book 'My Vita', which was certainly not a bestseller, it didn't have a wide audience, but I like them and thought they deserved a bigger audience too. I am far from apologetic." Native of Brooksville, Ky., McClanahan graduated University of Kentucky in English and attended Stanford on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He's taught creative writing and English at University of Kentucky, Northern Kentucky University, Stanford, University of Montana and Oregon State University. His reviews, essays and stories have appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. He lives in Lexington with his wife, Hilda, a concert pianist and teacher from Belgium whom he met at a Derby party in 1991. He has five grown children from two previous marriages. He's been known to lecture creative writing workshops in full Captain Kentucky regalia and continues to plug away on his unfinished novel, "The Return of the Son of Needmore". His website includes uncollected writing such as "This Just In! Old Hippie Gets New Hip!", and much of his work is admitted autobiographical. "Son of Needmore" is set in a factional town based on Brooksville, McClanahan's birthplace. And he's described "Clear Moment" as "an implied biography", explaining, "I remember when my friend Gurney Norman published his book of stories, 'Kinfolks', about a young boy who rose to manhood, editors wanted to call that an implied novel. Quite clearly they were separate stories, but all were about the same young man and he does progress through them. And that's the way the stories in 'Clear Moment' are. It's an implied biography because those stories are clearly about me." . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. 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