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-Coming up on Tennessee Writes, we're meeting Tennessee author Charles Dodd White.

He grew up in Georgia and says he had a difficult childhood and adolescence, even dropping out of high school.

He's been a Marine, a fishing guide, and a journalist.

Life eventually brought him to East Tennessee, where he teaches community college English.

He's an award-winning author, has written four novels, plus a collection of stories and a book of essays.

His subject matter has ranged from White supremacy and racial injustice to the suicide of his father, uncle, and son.

He says spending time alone as a boy in the woods hunting has giv.. the ability to write about what he sees.

We're excited to see him coming up next, so brew up a fresh cup of coffee and settle into your favorite comfy chair, because Tennessee Writes starts right now.

-Books about Tennessee.

-Books that come from Tennessee authors.

-Books and stories with a Tennessee twist.

-West Tennessee PBS presents Tennessee Writes.

-Hello and welcome to Tennessee Writes.

We're glad you're joining us for this unique show that goes beyond the book to let you get to know the author in a personal and revealing way.

My name is Peter Noll.

We are about to get up close and personal with another Tennessee writer, finding out about their childhood, how they began writing, where their stories come from, and what advice they have for you if you want to write your own book.

Plus, we put the authors on a stopwatch as they try and answer questions in the Lightning Round.

-Today, Tennessee Writes welcomes award-winning author Charles Dodd White.

Originally from Georgia, he now lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he teaches English at a community college.

He's been a Marine, fishing guide, and journalist.

He says he's learned the most important lessons in life through stories.

Tennessee Writes welcomes Charles Dodd White.

-Welcome to Tennessee Writes.

-Nice to meet you.

-Thanks for coming on into Jackson.

-Thank you.

-You've been here before, you sa.. for a book signing- -That's correct, yes.

It's been three years.

--that James Cherry, who's been on Tennessee .. was putting on.

-That's right.

It was a great chance to visit.

-Has Jackson changed at all in three years?

-It seems fairly much the same, but I've only seen a little bit of it.

I'm pleased to have another chance to visit.

-Originally, you said South Atlanta, you grew up in?

-I grew up in East Point, which is on the south side of town, right there.

-What made your childhood difficult?

-That's a difficult question.

I think that when I made that statement, I was thinking about a lot o.. growing up in what we would call today a dysfunctional family.

There was a lot of alcoholism and emotional abuse growing up.

That was a big part of that landscape.

Leo Tolstoy said that one of the great gifts for a writer is to have an unhappy childhood.

In that way, it was a fortunate thing for a writer to have, to have a kind of bank to go to of things that bothered you, so that you could then maybe work through it later on through life.

-If my research is correct, you dropped out of high school- -Correct.

--and went to wo.. for those not familiar.

You saved part of each check and went and got a book.

Is that true?

-Yes.

-Or is that folklore?

-No, that is absolutely true.

This was when you had bookstores and shopping malls.

It was a Walden's book.

I would go.

I would get a weekly paycheck.

I knew that I didn't want to bag groceries for perpetuity, so I decided that I was going to go ahead and try to educate myself.

I did that by going and looking at the classics section.

I didn't really know anything in terms of what was literary and what wasn't, but that's where I educated myself bit by bit, week by week.

-You must've finished up high school to become a college professor.

-I got a GED.

I moved to Asheville, North Carolina when I was 18, and then I took the GED there.

It was actually administered on a community college campus.

They saw the results, and they encouraged me to enroll there, and I did.

-Then you got your degree from a f.. are you still working on your PhD?

-No, I finished my PhD about 10 years ago.

-You have your doctorate, your PhD?

-Yes.

Right.

-Okay.

Wow, that's an incredible journey from dropout to PhD.

-Yes.

I left school early.

-What kept you going?

-I left school early, and I never decided to get rid of it, I guess.

The reason I kept going, to me, thinking and talking about books is a pretty great way to spend your time.

If I was able to work that into the daily routine, I felt like I was very fortunate to have a life that's shaped like that.

-You said you spent a lot of time alone in the woods hunting as a child.

That experience has really shaped how you see the world.

Tell us about that.

-Yes.

I would do a lot of deer hunting as a kid.

You would go off by yourself early in the morning before the sun came up.

You would sit in a stand or in a blind, and you could see the way that light came through the forest.

One, you were alone with your thoughts to begin with, but then the way that you could see the actual nature taking shape bit by bit as light entered the scene, I think it is, and it seemed even at the time to be a really good way of understanding what story is.

There's a mystical quality to it all.

It seemed very meaningful to me, and it also attached me very directly to nature.

That's something that's never really changed.

That's always been a central part of my writing and the way I've tried to live as well.

-You were in Asheville, North Carolina, before you came to Knoxville?

-Correct.

Yes.

I lived there for a number of years.

I actually moved there again at 18.

I was really enamored of the writer Thomas Wolfe, who wrote Look Homeward, Angel.

I really set my sights on trying to live a literary life, even at that point.

I moved up there, and I read, of course, all of Wolfe's work.

-Did you move there because he was from there?

-Yes.

That was a big part of what drew me up there.

That, and I also seemed always to have an attraction to the mountain landscape.

It always seemed like a place where my home was going to be more authentic if I was there.

Even though I didn't grow up in the mountains when I was there, it felt very different and real to me.

I was there for a number of years, and then after that, I did enlist in the Marines, and then went off for four years, but I came back.

-Where did you serve in the Marines?

-I'm sorry?

-Where were you serving in the Marines?

-I was stationed in Twentynine Palms, which is out in the Mojave Desert.

I was a tank crewman for four years while I was out there.

-Well, thank you for your service.

-Thank you.

-Then you were a fishing guide.

Was that before or after the Marines?

-That was after.

That was after I moved back.

-In the Appalachian Mountains?

-Yes.

It was there in Western North Carolina.

I actually was on the Little Tennessee River.

I went to school there at Western Carolina University.

That was one of the things I did to earn a little extra dough at the time.

-Your eyes lit up, and you got a smile.

You must've liked being a fishing guide.

-It was fun.

It definitely taught you a lot .. through as well.

Absolutely, to be on the moving water, I think, is one of my favorite things.

-Are you still a deer hunter and fisherman?

-I fish, for sure.

I haven't hunted in a number of years, but I try to stay involved in as many outdoor activities like rock climbing and trail running and things like that.

I feel most myself when I'm in the wilderness in some form or fashion.

-The community college is called what?

-Pellissippi State.

-Pellissippi.

-It's a hard one.

-It is, and you said it's a made-up word.

-There's some debate about that.

I think what I had heard, it's supposed to be based on geographical feature that's supposedly Cherokee, but my understanding is there's no P in the Cherokee alphabet.

I'm not exactly sure the details of it.

-It's spelled like Mississippi, but it's Pellissippi.

-Exactly.

It's just part of it.

-In state, we have Jackson State Community College here, also in the view, Dyersburg State Community College.

-Yes, it's part of the same system.

-I heard that enrollment is up at universities, thanks to community colleges, recently.

Have you guys seen an influx of students there?

-We have, yes.

Since COVID, we've bounced back.

Obviously, that was a really difficult time.

Trying to transition to teaching online was a challenge for everybody, and then getting back in the classroom was difficult .. We have.

We've seen steady upticks through our fall and spring semesters.

-You're married, and you said you have one child almost out the door?

-He's 20, so yes.

He's a community college student himself right now.

-How do you encourage your students at the community college if you see that they maybe have a gift for writing?

-Well, the thing that I always try to see or emphasize is that writing, when it's done well, is not something that's either right or wrong.

It's a matter of discovering your own voice and finding a way to really name the world in a sense that feels authentic to you.

I really encourage them to just try to not hang themselves up with what they think they should write, but rather what really drives them, to come find and discover their own obsessions and their own detours in life that might really show something that nobody else can really do.

It's a tailor-made effort, I think.

[music] -Charles, let's talk about your book, A Year without Months.

It's a collection of several essays, correct?

-That's correct.

-When I read through it, it is very.. you need to be prepared that it's not a light read.

It deals-- -Yes, it's not [crosstalk].

-It's not a [crosstalk] Harlequin romance.

It's not a quick, fun read.

It's not a cozy mystery, but it deals with real subjects that we all deal with.

-I think so.

-It deals with suicide.

-Correct.

-Was your book a way of dealin.. -I don't know.

I've been asked that question before.

I think that once you get to the place where you're trying to write for publication about something that maybe you've already worked through those things, at least to the point that you feel like you have .. to say already, I know that some people feel that writing can be an act of therapy.

I think that's true, but as far as this book, some of these story or these essays had already gestated for a period of time, and I had worked through those ideas.

As far as the writing itself, I was interested in trying to show the fragmentary quality of grief.

That's the reason that I've sometimes called it a fragmented memoir as well as an essay collection.

A memoir to me, a more straightforward memoir, reads as though it's a non-fictional novel.

What I wanted to see or demonstrate in the book was this kind of jarring quality of grief and the way in which time seemed to break apart at times.

For me, I was aware of the content of the difficult stuff about my family.

Also, I wanted to try to give a kind of experience for the .. that would reflect their own, maybe, experiences.

I think the more that you get into your own particular experiences, you're able to access the more universal with others.

That was the goal behind why I wrote it.

-I read that you were at a book signing, and a woman who had read your book and had also been impacted by suicide just came to talk to you because you spoke the same language.

She knew where you were coming from, and you would understand where she was coming from, and it really touched you.

Tell us about that.

-Yes, that was a very, I would say, unique experience for me.

That was when I was first-- as you can imagine, it's a difficult kind of book to promote.

It was at a book festival where I was just sitting at a table, and this woman introduced herself and had recently lost her son, I think within the year, even.

It was meaningful to me because a book about these sorts of subject matters, you're not necessarily writing it to try to hit a certain kind of bestseller list.

You're trying to find the people who really-- or it will really resonate with them.

The fact that she shared that with me was meaningful because so often the work that we do, particularly this kind of work with emotional writing, you do it in isolation, and then it goes out into the world, and you don't really know how much purchase it might have.

I've never actually heard from her again, but it was very personally meaningful that she made the effort to drive out and then to tell me that she had read the book and had found things that helped her.

[music] [thunder effect] -Now it's time for the Tennessee Writes Lightning Round, where we ask our authors a series of quick book-related questions and see how many they can answer in two minutes.

Now, if you don't know an answer, just say, "Pass."

We'll put two minutes on the clock, and once I ask my first question, it'll start counting down.

-Sounds good.

-Charles, are you ready to play the Tennesse.. -I am.

-Okay.

Two minutes on the clock.

If you were stranded on an island with only one book, what would it be?

-Light Years by James Salter.

[music] [timer bell] -What book have you re.. -Madame Bovary by Flaubert.

-How many times?

[timer bell] -Three times.

[timer bell] -What food item or dri.. -Glass of wine.

[timer bell] -On average, how many books do you read in.. -between 40 and 50.

[timer bell] -What book are you most to admit you've read?

-At most?

-Embarrassed.

-Oh, probably the Crawdad book.

Where the Crawdads Sing.

[timer bell] -Whose autobiography book is you.. -Probably a John McPhee book, maybe The Survival of the Bark Canoe.

[timer bell] -How many pages are in your latest book?

-287.

[timer bell] -What's the last audiobook you'.. -Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs.

[timer bell] -If you could have a book signing in any.. where would it be?

-Paris.

[timer bell] -What distracts you the most when you're trying to write?

-Phone.

[timer bell] -How many words are in your latest book?

-80,000.

[timer bell] -What's your favorite magazine.. -MAD.

[timer bell] -If you could have any celebrity narr.. who would it be?

-Kevin Costner.

[timer bell] -What author do you most admire?

-Ernest Hemingway.

[timer bell] -On average, how many audiobooks do you listen to in one .. -How many audiobooks?

One.

[timer bell] -Do you prefer to write with p.. -I write on a computer.

[timer bell] -Name the book you think ev.. -A Farewell to Arms.

[timer bell] -How often do you check your Amazon book reviews and ratings?

-Too frequently.

[timer bell] -What's the most money you've spent on one book?

[timer] [buzzer] [thunder effect] [music] -Charles, we always love to hear the authors speak the words from the pages that they wrote.

Would you mind reading a short selection from.. -Absolutely.

This is a section.

It's an essay later in the book called Self-Taught on the Tuck.

Tuckasegee is a river in Western North Carolina.

"The kind of fishing we did when I was a kid usually involved live crickets and a cork, a great deal of sitting in the sun .. to happen.

The electric thrill hit when something took hold of the line, and you had your heart in your ears while you tried to play it in, but that was periodic and chancy.

When the fish were biting, everyone carried an easy joy, but when the water remained smooth and undimpled, you felt the same liquid heaviness settling into your own blood.

Only when away from the water did I realize what I missed from those fishing trips, even the long, profitless ones.

This is one of the ironies that the Marine Corps taught me, the branch I'd joined to see the world via its oceans, but being posted in Twentynine Palms, California, in the center of the Mojave taught me that water was something you could miss as sharply as if it were a person, perhaps more.

It would be unjust to dispute the profound beauty of the American desert.

Its aesthetics, existing as they do on their own terms, burn away sentimentalism.

So much rock and sun and distance make you understand the wilderness a lot more than a mere word, even if the word is a totem in and of itself.

Edward Abbey said wilderness was music, and I get that too.

Strange and remote and hypnotic, like lost love, but while four years in the American desert might teach you respect and a kind of severe admiration, it also bleaches out what is immaterial.

A monochromatic world does something to the human eye over time.

Green, piney life of an outdoor Georgia boyhood, it can begin to seem like a fairy tale.

What matters in the Mojave is line of sight and horizons.

True north and back azimuths.

Cardinal directions are a great deal more immediate and useful than fables.

When my enlistment expired, and I drove back across the country to North Carolina, civilian life was a vertiginous shock, not only with the pressures of making a new life while balancing young fatherhood and a teetering marriage, but with the literally physical differences of daily life.

I was so accustomed to the bland regiment of military order that color itself induced anxiety.

It may seem like an exaggeration to say that variety can cause upset, but in my case, that was the result.

Simply too much of everything happened at once.

Everyone seemed to have adjusted to a frequency that, to my ears, was a persistent, agonizing buzz."

[music] -Charles, the book A Year without Months is a collection of essays.

You also have short stories, but you've done novels too, ranging about White supremacy and racial injustice in the South.

What advice do you give to someone sitting out here, watching the show, Tennessee Writes, who says, "I've got a story to tell"?

You've got a wide variety of different types of books.

What advice do you give to them on how they go from, "I got an idea," to published book?

-I think that you have to really love nitty-gritty work, detail work, really sitting with your stories and trying to .. as you can.

There is, I think, with the way that we're so accustomed to media today, people want immediate satisfaction.

A lot of times, people rush their work a little bit more than they should.

I would say that allowing yourself to have the time that you need to improve, to really commit yourself to an apprenticeship phase, is significant for a writer because that's what you really discover what it is you want to say.

You might have a story, but the thing is, most stories have been told already in one form or fashion, but the way that you find the means of telling it is really what's going to be s.. It's going to make it stand out.

The other thing that I always bring to-- you sometimes hear people say, "Write what you know," or "Write what you're interested in."

Something that I've always taken as a watchword or a piece of advice is to find out the things that bother you that are going on out in the world and then to write about that, to try to explore those things and really give yourself a new way of seeing.

In that sense, the writing, you obviously want it to go out and have other people read it, but you also want it to change you, I think, as you go through the writing process.

-What's bothering you now?

What's coming up next?

What bugs you?

-A lot of things are bugging me right now.

-Are you working on a book about something like that?

-I am.

I've changed a little bit with working on what we would call a literary thriller, I guess you would say.

I don't want to give too much away because it's under submission right now, but it's a person who has maybe been maligned in the past, a little unfairly so, and I'm trying to show the complications, a historical person.

For me, one of the things that bothers me is it's too easy to judge historical figures without trying to see how complicated their lives may have been, and really understanding that the inside-out experience of history is every bit as disorienting and challenging as the world we live in right now.

-What's the best way for people to purchase your books?

People want to buy this book or other books that you've written, or stay in touch with you; where do you send them?

-I would like them to go to their local independent bookstore if possible, and they'll be happy to order it for you there.

Or you could go to the press.

This book was published by West Virginia University Press.

I do think if you can support the individual bookstores, that's always best.

-How can people contact you?

-I have a website.

It's just charles.whiteauthor.com, and it has my contac.. there, but also my email is just charles.white@gmail.com.

-We have come to the end of this edition of Tennessee Writes, but we want to thank you for joining us and sharing about yourself, your journey to becoming a writer, advice, and about your book and books.

Before you leave, would you mind signing your book for us?

-Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thank you, Channel 11.

[music] -Thank you so very much.

We want to give you a Channel 11 writing kit.

-Stunning.

-It's got an organizer, a messenge.. water bottle, latte mug, notebooks, and a plethora of pens, all to help on your future writings.

-Great.

-We want to thank you for joining us, watching us, or maybe you're streaming us.

We invite you to join us again as we get up close and personal with another Tennessee author.

Remember, you can stream all of our past episodes on YouTube and the PBS app.

Remember what Walt Disney said, "A good story can take you on a fantastic journey," so keep on reading, Tennessee.

-For comments about today's show or to suggest a Tennessee author for a future program, email us at tennesseewrites@westtnpbs.org.

Tennessee Writes, on air and streaming now.

[music continues] -The program you've been watching was made possible through the generous financial support of West Tennessee PBS viewers like you.

Please visit westtnpbs.org and make a donation today so that we can continue to make local programs like this possible.

Thank you.