NORDAN, Lewis (Alonzo) 1939-

PERSONAL: Born August 23, 1939, in Jackson, MS; son of Lemuel Alonzo and Sara (a teacher; maiden name, Hightower) Bayles; married Mary Mitman, April 28, 1962 (divorced, January, 1983); married Alicia Blessing, July 3, 1986; children (first marriage): Russell Ammon (deceased), Lewis Eric, John Robert (deceased). Education: Millsaps College, B.A., 1963; Mississippi State University, M.A., 1966; Auburn University, Ph.D., 1973. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Episcopalian.

ADDRESSES: Home—Pittsburgh, PA. Office—Department of English, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.

CAREER: Teacher at public schools in Titusville, FL, 1963-65; Auburn University, Auburn, AL, instructor in English, 1966-71; University of Georgia, Athens, instructor in English, 1971-74; worked variously as an orderly, nightwatchman, and clerk, 1975-81; University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, assistant professor of English, 1981-83; University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, professor of English, 1983—. Military service: U.S. Navy, 1958-60.

AWARDS, HONORS: John Gould Fletcher Award for fiction, University of Arkansas, 1977, for short story "Rat Song"; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1978-79; Porter Fund Prize, 1987; Notable Book Award, American Library Association, 1992; Best Fiction Award, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, 1992; Southern Critics Circle Award for Fiction, 1993, for Wolf Whistle

WRITINGS:

Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair (short stories; also see below), Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1983.

The All-Girl Football Team (short stories; also see below), Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1986.

Music of the Swamp (novel), Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1991.

Wolf Whistle (novel), Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1993.

The Sharpshooter Blues (novel), Algonquin Books (North Carolina, NC), 1995.

Sugar among the Freaks: Selected Stories (includes selections from Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair and The All-Girl Football Team), Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1996.

Lightning Song, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1997.

Boy with Loaded Gun: A Memoir, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 2000.

Contributor to periodicals, including Harper's, Redbook, New York Times and Playgirl, and to small literary magazines.

SIDELIGHTS: Published in 1983, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair is Lewis Nordan's first collection of short fiction. Critiquing the volume for the NewYork Times Book Review, Edith Milton pronounced Nordan's tales "splendid," an illustration of the diversity that the short-story form can take. While Milton commented that the variety exhibited within the author's collection works against the book as a cohesive compilation, she did note as a recurrent theme "the juxtaposition of an unglamorous modern reality, comically reduced, against an equally comic but larger-than-life mythology about the past that surrounds it."

Most of the stories included in Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair and Nordan's follow-up, The All-Girl Football Team, have been reprinted in Sugar among the Freaks. This 1996 collection exhibits Nordan's characteristically outrageous humor based on the often unpalatable doings of the eccentric characters who inhabit the fictional town of Arrow-Catcher, Mississippi, and its environs. In "The Storyteller" a retired football coach sipping spiked coffee in a local diner recounts the story of a renegade circus elephant who was executed by hanging. In "John Thomas Bird" an unattractive high school girl goes swimming with a handsome boy and saves him from drowning, although she realizes why he may be sorry she has. Reviewers familiar with Nordan's work have remarked that the stories contain the author's signature blend of immoderate humor with bleak tragedy and sincere emotion, all held together by a style Brad Hooper in Booklist characterized as "Nordan's back-porch-and-grits kind of magic realism."

Nordan's short-story collections introduce a recurring character named Sugar, who also appears in his first novel, Music of the Swamp, as well as the town of Arrow-Catcher, which reappears in several of the author's more recent novels, including Wolf Whistle. A critically acclaimed work, Wolf Whistle is Nordan's fictionalization of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black boy who was lynched for whistling at a white woman and whose death ignited the civil rights movement. "Though the subject would seem to demand almost religious gravity, Nordan's version is astonishing: he conveys the horror of the murder and the injustice of the killers' acquittal in scenes that recall Gabriel García Marquéz and other magical realists," remarked Sam Staggs in a review for Publishers Weekly. Nordan's treatment of the wellknown historical event was widely considered audacious—he includes the point-of-view of some local buzzards, among numerous others—and remarkably successful. "Truly, Lewis Nordan has written an outrageous, audacious book that should be applauded not only as a brave social act but as an extraordinary aesthetic achievement," exclaimed Nation contributor Randall Kenan. Though Kenan complained that Nordan ultimately withdraws, out of apparent timidity, from the sorrowing hearts and minds of the murdered boy and his family, this flaw "does not obscure what is an immense and wall-shattering display of talent." Nordan was irresistibly drawn to the story, as he told Staggs of Publishers Weekly, because of his proximity to the historical event and what it taught him about his own unthinking racism. Nordan was fifteen years old and living in a town nearby when the lynching occurred, and he and his friends even joked about it until another boy told them to stop. "He said, 'That's not right. I don't like that kind of joke. That boy they killed was just a boy like anybody, I don't care if he was colored.'" That sequence of events "changed my life so abruptly, so profoundly, that I have a hard time even telling about it," Nordan admitted to Staggs. "Almost no other event has had such an effect on me."

Nordan creates a llama farm just outside Arrow-Catcher for the setting of Lightning Song, a comingof-age story set within a Southern gothic tragi-comedy. Leroy is twelve years old and just discovering the trials of romantic love and sexuality, courtesy of a local baton twirler, when his uncle moves in and begins wooing Leroy's mother. "In plot summary, [Lightning Song] might sound like one of those depressingly perky and eccentric white Southern stories, but it isn't: it's deeper and richer and more complex," averred Valerie Sayers in the New York Times.

The Sharpshooter Blues features another cast of Southern misfits working just outside Arrow-Catcher in a small store surrounded by swamp. An encephalitic boy of about twenty years of age, Hydro sells gas and bootleg whiskey. He also enjoys comic books and hanging with his friends, ten-year-old Louis, and Morgan, the midget sharpshooter of the title, until the day two other teens attempt to rob the store and plan to have a little sexual fun with Hydro before killing him. Hydro ends up killing the thieves and, although no one believes he did it, everyone's life is changed. "The characters' rhythmic dialogue and their striving for redemption set a biblical tone, lightened by infusions of quirky humor," wrote Karen Angel in her review of The Sharpshooter Blues for the Washington Post Book World.

Boy with Loaded Gun is Nordan's autobiography, a work written strictly from memory without additional research. In it he recounts his upbringing in the small town of Itta Bena in the Mississippi Delta. His father died while Nordan was a baby, and Nordan—known as Buddy while growing up—had a hard time accepting his stepfather, at one point trying to shoot the man with the mail-order gun of the title. (He missed.) Nordan's mother called her son an "odd child" because of his dreamy interest in television and comic books; but television, when the family finally got one, showed the young boy a world beyond his small southern town. Nordan's memoirs follow his self-destructive path as, longing for what he has lost and making stupendously bad decisions along the way, he has a series of misadventures, marries and divorces, suffers the tragic loss of two sons, and sinks into alcoholism. Ultimately, he recovers himself, remarries, gives up drinking, and achieves success as a writer and teacher of creative writing. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly said of Boy with Loaded Gun, "Nordan avoids self-flagellation and solipsism, fashioning instead a memoir that achieves hard-won introspection and strikes a tone of weary sadness and wonderment that Buddy turned out okay after all."

Nordan once told CA: "I was a storyteller a long time before I became a writer. Everyone in my family is a storyteller, though none of the others are writers. For a long time I thought I was somehow defective for not being able to tell the truth—the 'truth,' I should say—without changing it, amplifying it, or romanticizing it. This seemed to be a flaw in my character. Now I think that it may be a flaw, but it is also a gift for which I am grateful."

Citing his talents as a storyteller in the Southern tradition, critics have commented on the magical realism and grotesque characters that align Nordan's works with those of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. On this subject Nordan told Staggs in a Publishers Weekly interview, "My theory about the grotesque in my own work, and in storytelling generally, is that it's a way of saying, 'This is more remarkable than anything you've seen today; this is even more remarkable than your own crazy family!'" Still, as reviewers have noted, Nordan's humor does not disguise the deep, often painful, emotional lives of his characters, making human even the least likable of them. "Nordan is a very funny writer, and his stories are moving in a way that summary cannot convey," wrote Mark Childress in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. But Nordan is also, Childress continued, "not the kind of writer to forget that people tend to laugh when the pain is greatest."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Atlanta Journal and Constitution, November 28, 1993, p. K8.

Bloomsbury Review, July, 1996, p. 25; September-October 2000, pp. 17-18.

Booklist, October 1, 1993, p. 254; March 15, 1994, p. 1350; July, 1995, p. 1836; January 1, 1996, p. 737; March 15, 1996, pp. 1241, 1272; March 1, 1997, p. 1068; November 1, 1999, p. 482.

Carolina Quarterly, summer, 1994, pp. 79-81.

Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1993, sec. 5, p. 3.

Entertainment Weekly, May 24, 1996, p. 89; May 23, 1997, p. 61; March 10, 2000, p. 66.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 1993, p. 885; June 15, 1995, p. 806; April 1, 1997, p. 493.

Kliatt, November, 1992, p. 10.

Library Journal, September 1, 1993, p. 223; April 15, 1994, p. 140; August, 1995, p. 119; April 1, 1996, p. 121; April 1, 1997, p. 128; December 1999, p. 134.

Los Angeles Times, November 1, 1993, p. E3.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 6, 1995, p. 6; October 29, 1995, p. 2.

Nation, November 15, 1993, p. 592.

Newsweek, November 29, 1993, p. E78.

New York Times Book Review, January 15, 1984; January 2, 1994, p. 14; November 5, 1995, p. 23; May 25, 1997, p. 9; June 1, 1997, p. 35; February 13, 2000, p. 34.

People Weekly, January 15, 1996, p. 36.

Publishers Weekly, August 2, 1993, p. 61; October 18, 1993, p. 50; July 10, 1995, p. 43; March 10, 1997, p. 47; December 6, 1999, p. 66.

Southern Living, December, 1993, p. 89; November, 1995, p. 23; June, 1997, p. 60.

Voice Literary Supplement, October, 1995, p. 14.

Voice of Youth Advocates, June, 1994, p. 88.

Washington Post Book World, October 3, 1993, p. 4; February 4, 1996, p. 8.

World & I, December, 1995, pp. 233, 245, 253.