Jack Neely
This April Harmony Republic has the honor of featuring Knoxville author Jack Neely. Neely's work has a unique yet noble focus on the subject of history. His writing gives voice to the untold and sometimes quirky stories of Knoxville, TN. Born in Japan, Jack Neely is a UT graduate and, among other things, a former truck driver, piledriver-crew supervisor, Egyptian museum guide, and a criminal-defense investigator. In 1992 he debuted his award-winning column, "Secret History," in Metro Pulse, Knoxville's weekly newspaper. He has been a staffer for the paper since 1995, and is now associate editor of that weekly, as well as a monthly humor columnist for Knoxville Magazine. He is the author of From the Shadow Side and Other Stories about Knoxville, Tennessee, and, with Aaron Jay, of The Marble City: A Photographic Tour of Knoxville's Graveyards. Neely's most recent book, Market Square: A History of the Most Democratic Place on Earth, was published this past Fall. Every town should have a Jack Neely to chronicle the past and give perspective to the present. His creative charm and historical integrity are engaging yet accessible. Neely's unedited answers to our exclusive Harmony Republic interview are no exception.
The Harmony Republic Interview
Check out the exclusive Harmony Republic interview with Jack Neely:
1. You seem to have a very intriguing personal history: a UT grad, a truck driver, piledriver-crew supervisor, Egyptian museum guide, and criminal-defense investigator. How did all of this lead you to becoming an author?
It may have been a little bit the other way around. I became a writer because it was the only thing I was any good at. I may have been more open to taking some of those jobs because I thought the experience would help me make a living. Experience is valuable to a writer, and everything is material. An aspiring writer can intern anywhere. The longest of those particular jobs was the criminal-defense investigator gig, which I kept for two years. It was really not much different from journalism: a lot of interviewing folks and surveying crime scenes and typing up coherent reports for the lawyers to use in trial.
2. What attracts you to the city of Knoxville?
As a subject, it's an especially interesting place. I grew up here, but had little affection for it until I was an adult. I was actually introduced to my home town by newcomers, especially those I worked with at a magazine company headquartered here in the '80s. They noticed things I'd never noticed about my home town, and asked me about them. That was when I started learning about the city's often strange history.
Knoxville's big enough that it offers at least samples of most of the cuisine, music, crime, etc., everything good and bad that's found in any big city--but not so big that people can easily segregate themselves by age or profession. We still have bars, for example, where you might meet nearly anybody, UT undergrads or architects or buskers or eccentric 90-year-old retirees. Kind of an irony of big cities is that I think you lose that kind of mixing when you get much bigger. The city also has an interesting socioeconomic diversity. We've got Dollywood on one side of town, Oak Ridge National Laboratories on the other. More people with graduate degrees, and more high-school dropouts than in America as a whole. It makes for some interesting dynamics. Lots of tension and misunderstandings, but for a reporter or a historian that's raw material.
The rivers and the ridges come together to make for kind of a chaotic street grid, which makes it even more interesting. I like its old brick buildings; most of downtown was built during the city's boom years, about 1870-1930. And I love the green lushness of it in the summer. After a rain, it can seem almost subtropical, like somewhere in Guatemala. It all makes for an interesting setting.
Knoxville has unsettled, but never bored me.
3. Describe community of authors in Knoxville? For those that are not familiar with the city's history, are there well known authors from the area?
Knoxville's got an interesting literary heritage, starting before the Civil War with folks like George Washington Harris, humorist, creator of Sut Lovingood, and maybe founder of the Southern Gothic sensibility. Knoxville writers better known today are James Agee and Cormac McCarthy, both of them kind of iconic, charismatic authors who wrote novels with rich Knoxville settings. Rich and in McCarthy's case maybe hyper realistic.
Then there are also some curves, like Frances Hodgson Burnett, who's thought of as an English writer, though she began her writing career in Knoxville during the decade or so she spent here as a young woman, and used it as a setting of one novel-and Nikki Giovanni, the poet who became famous during the Black Power movement. She has written movingly about her youth in Knoxville. And now there's a funny pseudo-noir detective series set in Knoxville, by Richard Yancey, who doesn't live here but finds it useful as a setting, kind of an Everyman's American city.
I know several authors here, a couple of them nationally successful, but we don't hang around together very much. And when we do, we don't talk much about writing.
1. You seem to have a very intriguing personal history: a UT grad, a truck driver, piledriver-crew supervisor, Egyptian museum guide, and criminal-defense investigator. How did all of this lead you to becoming an author?
It may have been a little bit the other way around. I became a writer because it was the only thing I was any good at. I may have been more open to taking some of those jobs because I thought the experience would help me make a living. Experience is valuable to a writer, and everything is material. An aspiring writer can intern anywhere. The longest of those particular jobs was the criminal-defense investigator gig, which I kept for two years. It was really not much different from journalism: a lot of interviewing folks and surveying crime scenes and typing up coherent reports for the lawyers to use in trial.
2. What attracts you to the city of Knoxville?
As a subject, it's an especially interesting place. I grew up here, but had little affection for it until I was an adult. I was actually introduced to my home town by newcomers, especially those I worked with at a magazine company headquartered here in the '80s. They noticed things I'd never noticed about my home town, and asked me about them. That was when I started learning about the city's often strange history.
Knoxville's big enough that it offers at least samples of most of the cuisine, music, crime, etc., everything good and bad that's found in any big city--but not so big that people can easily segregate themselves by age or profession. We still have bars, for example, where you might meet nearly anybody, UT undergrads or architects or buskers or eccentric 90-year-old retirees. Kind of an irony of big cities is that I think you lose that kind of mixing when you get much bigger. The city also has an interesting socioeconomic diversity. We've got Dollywood on one side of town, Oak Ridge National Laboratories on the other. More people with graduate degrees, and more high-school dropouts than in America as a whole. It makes for some interesting dynamics. Lots of tension and misunderstandings, but for a reporter or a historian that's raw material.
The rivers and the ridges come together to make for kind of a chaotic street grid, which makes it even more interesting. I like its old brick buildings; most of downtown was built during the city's boom years, about 1870-1930. And I love the green lushness of it in the summer. After a rain, it can seem almost subtropical, like somewhere in Guatemala. It all makes for an interesting setting.
Knoxville has unsettled, but never bored me.
3. Describe community of authors in Knoxville? For those that are not familiar with the city's history, are there well known authors from the area?
Knoxville's got an interesting literary heritage, starting before the Civil War with folks like George Washington Harris, humorist, creator of Sut Lovingood, and maybe founder of the Southern Gothic sensibility. Knoxville writers better known today are James Agee and Cormac McCarthy, both of them kind of iconic, charismatic authors who wrote novels with rich Knoxville settings. Rich and in McCarthy's case maybe hyper realistic.
Then there are also some curves, like Frances Hodgson Burnett, who's thought of as an English writer, though she began her writing career in Knoxville during the decade or so she spent here as a young woman, and used it as a setting of one novel-and Nikki Giovanni, the poet who became famous during the Black Power movement. She has written movingly about her youth in Knoxville. And now there's a funny pseudo-noir detective series set in Knoxville, by Richard Yancey, who doesn't live here but finds it useful as a setting, kind of an Everyman's American city.
I know several authors here, a couple of them nationally successful, but we don't hang around together very much. And when we do, we don't talk much about writing.
4. Give us your favorite story from Market Square. The Square seems to be a place that is currently revitalizing, was it formerly a place of culture? Still is. There are almost too many great stories about the Square, from 150 years ago or yesterday. One of my favorites, which I tell in each of my new books, has to do with Adolph Ochs, who in the 1870s worked as an apprentice typesetter for the Chronicle, which was a morning paper, so he had to work at night. When his shift was over, he dreaded the midnight walk home past the old Presbyterian graveyard so much he begged to work extra hours, doing extra jobs until dawn, or until he had company walking home. In this way, he later said, when he told that story as an old man, after he'd become the New York Times' most influential publisher, he learned the business of journalism, partly out of his fear of a spooky graveyard. They say he always surprised the typesetters at the Times by how well he knew their job.
But a story maybe more telling about the Square's enduring dynamic is that in the 1950s, a successful music scout for RCA considered the Square kind of an American cultural nexus-a place where one might hear new music, and where one might get an idea of whether that music had a chance to go national. When a record by an obscure new artist from Memphis sold wildly well in a Market Square store in the summer of 1954, RCA set its sites on Elvis Presley. The story says a lot about how the daily population of the Square was a conduit for new cultural phenomena, and also demographically representative enough to indicate a new music's national potential. I think you can still see that today.
It was, and still is, a place with a lot of cultural interchange. You see that today, not only in the two or three bars that offer interesting live music, and the live weekly radio shows at the Square Room, but on a Friday evening, with the buskers and the pick-up bands of kids too young to go in the bars.
5. What are the primary resources for your Secret History column and novels? I depend heavily on the Knox County Public Library, and especially its annex, the McClung Collection, which is kind of a specialized reference library housed in an 1872 building once known as the Custom House. The reading room is the old federal courtroom where outlaw Kid Curry was tried on multiple charges, just before his final escape in 1903. Today it's kind of like a monastery of regional history.
Also, I listen to people's stories, and trust but verify. Legends, like most memories, are never entirely true, but never entirely untrue, either. It takes library work to distill it, if you can at all. But if some living person already knows a story, that sometimes seems one too many for me. I prefer to tell stories that surprise everybody. Some of the things I did up in old newspapers are stories that no one alive has ever heard.
6. As a writer and historian, how do you feel that literature shapes perceptions of the past?
Broadly speaking, literature is our main access to the past. I think some authors kind of reinvented the past, sometimes in warped and troublesome ways, like Thomas Dixon's novels that glorified the Old South and may have prompted the resurgence of the Klan in the early 20th century. And even before that, Twain claimed the Civil War itself was provoked by the images of a mythic past Southerners gleaned from Sir Walter Scott's popular historic novels.
Speaking of the Civil War, I think the sheer volume of literature, fact and fiction, published about it over the last 150 years has skewed our perceptions toward it. There's such a weight of published information that the war has become almost the black hole of American history, warping reality and sucking everything toward it. Sometimes in timelines and thumbnail sketches (as in Wikipedia entries), the Civil War is the only thing people mention happening in the 19th century, and people can get the impression that it was the only thing that happened before the invention of the airplane. People can get confused when they hear something about, say, the Jacksonian era, because it doesn't fit handily into our simplistic assumptions about the Civil War.
The war was only four years of the 400 years people of European (or African) heritage have been living in the South. But every time someone finds a bullet in the dirt, they're pretty sure it's a Civil War bullet. Every old house is a Civil War house, every old bridge a Civil War bridge. There was a whole lot of other interesting stuff before and after the Civil War, but people aren't used to hearing about it.
Sometimes literature can be a corrective to oversimplified impressions of history. Cormac McCarthy's Suttree contains some vivid, almost clinical descriptions of the Knoxville underworld in the '50s. You can't read Suttree and think of Eisenhower America as all suburbs and station wagons. By the way, the title of my last collection-- Knoxville: This Obscure Prismatic City-comes from a McCarthy description of his home town.
7. What advice can you give those that are considering a career in writing?
Read a lot, everything you can get your hands on, to see what works and what doesn't. Write a lot-keep a journal or write essays or anything. The more you write, the easier it gets. And copy stuff and write it again, but better. I think it was Hemingway who said there is no writing, but rewriting. And be open-minded to new experiences, which help any writer's perspective. Not just bungee jumping or freight hopping, or extreme sports. Just go to a play or an experimental rock show you don't know much about, or try a strange restaurant, or explore a town where you don't know anybody--or catch a bus to work. It doesn't have to be anything dangerous, just something to flex your mind and perspective a little. Don't ever live the same day twice.