MARY HOOD_________________________________________________________
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Mary Hood's work, especially her short fiction, has found a home in the pages of The Georgia Review many times over the last thirty years. Her GR debut, in Fall 1978—“Doing This, Saying That, To Applause”—was among her earliest publications, and her latest story, “Witnessing,” is her ninth published here. A native of Georgia, she is the author of two collections of short stories: How Far She Went (1984), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and The Southern Review/Louisiana State University Short Fiction Award; and And Venus Is Blue (1986), winner of the Townsend Prize for Fiction and the Lillian Smith Book Award. Her novel, Familiar Heat, was published in 1995. Her short story “Manly Conclusions,” first published in GR Winter 1983 and reprinted in our Spring 1986 fortieth-anniversary fiction retrospective, won the 1986 National Magazine Award in Fiction for GR as part of an entry that also included stories by Lee K. Abbott and Gary Gildner. (Read the full text of “Manly Conclusions.”) Other awards include the Whiting Award (1994) and the Robert Penn Warren Award (2001).
About her unique narrative voice, she has said,
Because my father is a native New Yorker and [lived in] Georgia, where I have my life, I have never felt comfortable with the we/they dichotomy. Even if I could, I would prefer not to choose between these two identities: I am both. I am like Laurie Lee’s fabulous two-headed sheep, which could ‘sing harmoniously in a double voice and cross-question itself for hours.’
My parentage has given me a duty toward both no-nonsense brevity and encompassing concatenations: the Northern preference for sifting out why in twenty-five words or less, the Southern for interminably savoring how, cherishing the chaff of irrelevancy around the essential kernel. It must have been a Northerner who invented the questionnaire. A Southerner would have been more likely to think up the essay response.
(from “On Being a Southern Writer,” Smithsonian Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies, 1996)
The photo above shows Hood reading at the 2003 Athens Literary Festival. When we asked her about the book she was reading from, we got much more than mere information. Her response, pieced together from e-mail exchanges, carries both a gift and a caution: it allows us to share in the pleasures of language with a masterly writer while it reminds us of what can be lost daily to digital expediency:
The ledger is what I call it. The pages are green. Very smooth, lovely for fountain pen and ink. It has 517 lined and numbered pages. I suppose if one gets them filled, that's a book. I usually write on legal pads or any paper, and bring that to the ledger. It is sort of semi-final. I think of it as the “creel.” Minty and cool and where the day's little trout rest. Before dot dot dot.
[I] write by hand, bring rough draft and notes and photographs to this ledger, dated as though logging a journey, or illness. . . . Paper scraps get filed, flags claiming hills yet to be won. There are setbacks. Overuse of parentheticals. Sins against style and sense. Marginal repentance. Arrows sending whole sections forward, bringing whole sections back. More xs and asterisks than Tristram Shandy. Page 42 proves ink sold as waterproof isn't. This is not a holy scroll. It is proof that writing is manual labor. I need to “make my mark” on a page. I can't “feel” the shape so much, when it is a matter of wraparound and scrolling down. They say Henry James’s style went completely off the rails--into what I so resent about it today!--when he began pacing and speaking, and an amanuensis dealt the ink. I just wonder what it will be like--what it mostly is like now--when there will be nothing in archives, nothing for students to study, except final drafts. I am such a believer in and truster in process. Product is not the goal any more than destination is the journey.
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In 1996, Hood held the Grisham Chair at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She was the writer-in-residence at Berry College in 1997–98, Centre College in Kentucky in 1999, Reinhardt College in 2001, and Oxford College of Emory University in 2009. Additionally, she has taught classes at the University of Georgia. In the spring of 2010, she held the Ferrol A. Sams Jr. Distinguished Chair of English at Mercer University.
