Interview: Alice Randall, Novelist and Songwriter

Photo: Bob Delevante

Alice Randall is the author of The Wind Done Gone; Pushkin and the Queen of Spades; and Rebel Yell. Born in Detroit she grew up in Washington, D.C.. As a Harvard undergraduate majoring in English she studied with Julia Child as well as Harry Levin, Alan Heimert, and Nathan Huggins. After graduation Randall headed south to Music City where she founded Midsummer Music with the idea she would create a new way to fund novel writing and a community of powerful storytellers . On her way to The Wind Done Gone she became the first black woman in history to write a number one country song; wrote a video of the year; worked on multiple Johnny Cash videos and wrote and produced the pilot for a primetime drama about ex-wives of country stars that aired on CBS. She has written with or published some of the greatest songwriters of the era including Steve Earle, Matraca Berg, Bobby Braddock, and Mark Sanders. Two novels later, the award winning songwriter with over twenty recorded songs to her credit and frequent contributor to Elle magazine, is Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University. She teaches courses on Country Lyric in American Culture, Creative Writing, and Soul Food as text and in text. Randall lives near the University with her husband, a ninth generation Nashvillian who practices green law. Her daughter is a graduate of Harvard College. After twenty-one years hard at it Randall has come to the conclusion motherhood is the most creative calling of all.

THE DAP

Artists are passionate people. What keeps you up at night?

ALICE RANDALL

Creating and worrying. I prefer the time spent creating. I do love the late night write. When I was a younger writer 10 PM to 2 AM was the only sure time I had to write so I treasured it and I used it. I also spend the late hours ruminating over the day.

THE DAP 

In your most recent book Rebel Yell (Bloomsbury 2009), you write: “Later, you translate an utter and tender, complete and mutual defeat into the oldest and most powerful male story you know –domination and transference. When you tell the rape tale, you elevate, you believe, father and son. At long last, love.” How do you think the history and legacy of oppression has impacted black communities, and particularly black men?

 ALICE RANDALL

Our history has been hard on our men. Freud wrote that protection by the father was a deep need of the child. For much of black history in America it has been difficult, but not impossible, for our fathers to protect our children as much as they might like, and tragically, even as much as the children might need. I believe some of the unvoiced triumphs of the black community are to be found in the unusual and sometimes invisible and more often than noted effective moments black fathers are able to protect black children. Some of these moments are moments of great psychological insight and originality.

THE DAP

History, memory and family are very important to you and your work. How do these three related concepts influence your writing about black Americans, a people often disconnected from yet in search of their history, memory and family?

ALICE RANDALL

History, memory, and family are all aspects of identity, places to choose. What is remembered? Who is acknowledged as family? What action do we choose to take in the present aware that as we take it, we construct our own history?   History, memory, and family can be burdens and they can be great assets. I typically use relations to history, memory, and family as ways of revealing my character’s most elemental identity. Last night I watched Magnolia with writer friends up at Yaddo where I am on retreat. I think of it as a quintessentially Southern film precisely because of its obsession with history, memory, and family which I consider to be elemental southern themes. Over and over the characters recite words to the effect of, ‘history is not through with us.’ But are we through with it? As I stand in the middle of middle age, I like to think I have taken myself out of history’s grip and am taking the risk of riding with the future. A focus on the future is far less contained and predictable. There is even the risk that it will be less meaningful –as you are not balancing or rebalancing a set past.

THE DAP

When you signed copies of your parody The Wind Done Gone (Houghton Mifflin 2001) at the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta in 2001, people protested outside the house; some even held up Confederate flags. What does it mean to be a black southern female writer? How do you navigate among these intersecting identities?

ALICE RANDALL

When I teach country lyrics as literature at Vanderbilt I typically say that what makes folk music in the south different than folk music all throughout the United States, what makes it “Country,” is strong evangelical Christian and African-American influences. For me to be a southern female writer is to be deeply concerned with family and place, with history, and memory, as well as with good and evil and redemption. It is to explore the Saturday night/ Sunday axis on which much of life in the South spins.

THE DAP

Tell us about Country Music. Are you still writing music?

ALICE RANDALL

I still write Country Music. I love Country Music. I consider the best of the great Country lyricists to be great American poets. Some of my favorite are Merle Haggard, Steve Earle, John Prine, Bobby Braddock, Bob McDill, Loretta Lynn, and Gillian Welch. This year I had The Band Perry over to my house to give a talk for a Vanderbilt Class. Kimberly Perry is a brilliant young southern gothic writer.

THE DAP

The life of a writer is complex; few writers simply write. Tell us about Vanderbilt University, your teaching and Nashville Review.

ALICE RANDALL

I love being associated with a great university. Great universities are the salons of our time, the place where ideas are exchanged in their most nuanced and complex forms…before publication and sometimes more profoundly than when published. Even here away at Yaddo, I am reading the manuscript of a Vanderbilt colleague from a completely different discipline. And here at Yaddo I receive emails from former students, emails about their successes and emails about their reading, and emails even about my writing. I love helping young writers find their voice, their subject, and learn some craft. With the Nashville Review I have been a kind of den mother giving them a clean space for parties and wine and food. The life of a writer is complex, but what is wonderful is every day you have an obligation to your art and to your work to create and to construct honestly, to see self and others as honestly and significantly as possible. For me writing life is tied deeply and closely to family life. I learn most by the everyday movements of caretaking and loving, generations above, below, and beside me—as I am loved by them.

THE DAP

What advice do you have for an aspiring writer?

ALICE RANDALL

Write everyday. Write messy drafts. Write clear outlines with which you can interrogate those drafts. Don’t feel a page or line is wasted if it does not appear in the final draft. It helped you get to the lines that are in the final draft.

THE DAP

What are you working on now?

ALICE RANDALL

Ada’s Rules. It’s a novel that will be out with Bloomsbury in the Spring. And it’s a novel that will, I hope, save lives. It steps into the health crisis facing black America in very practical ways. That is the audacious radicalism of this book—the pragmatism of the language. I am working to frame that pragmatism in a way that it achieves, I hope, a rough poetry that speaks to love of imperfect bodies.

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