I’ve never shot anyone. Yet, I mean. 

Wilton Barnhardt on writing ‘Lookaway, Lookaway’

What was the inspiration for your book, Lookaway, Lookaway?

Half a century of a Southern upbringing. I did my best to decamp from North Carolina, from eighteen to forty, and it was not my intention to come back here to live, but I returned in order to teach at a new MFA in Creative Writing program at NC State University, a university in which three generations of Barnhardts had taught or studied. I suppose that got me to thinking about belonging to a place, which got me to thinking further that maybe I did belong to the South, after all, despite much earlier noise about being a Citizen of the World.

Who are your favorite authors?

Anyone 19th Century (Henry James, Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert, et al). John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Willa Cather. Among current writers, Valerie Martin, Alice Munro, William Trevor, Allison Lurie, John LeCarre, William Boyd, the crime fiction of Ernest Gaines, the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel, and too many poets to list…

How and why did you start working on this book?

I declared I would write ONE and only one Southern novel, and always imagined I would write it near the end of my life (with all my accumulated wisdom about the South), but I was struggling to finish a Western book that was set in the Time of the Padres. I was teaching at Caltech and luxuriated in Huntington Library privileges… each afternoon, after class, I walked over to the great library and called up all sorts of arcane Spanish histories and prospector’s journals—you name it. But when I moved back down South in 2002, I couldn’t do that kind of homework and those materials aren’t anywhere but out West, so I asked myself, “What can you write that you can research right here in North Carolina?” And so the Southern Novel moved to the front of the line.

What kind of experience has writing your book been for you?

A blast from start to finish. Once I got the plot in my head, it became fun like a parlor game: how to tell a story among the eleven characters from their eleven different points-of-view, moving forward, and never repeating a viewpoint. I was going to have a NASCAR chapter and a good deal about country music, but as the plot deepened around the money troubles of the Johnston clan, many other detours and digressions fell away.

Tell us anything about you as a working writer that you think might be interesting or unusual:

I procrastinate—hence the long delays between books—I am lazy, I have no work ethic, I have to “feel like” writing in order to do it, but when I feel like it I can produce ten-to-twenty pages at a sitting. I write best in motels/hotels. I have gone to hotels a mile from my house in order to write.

Did you have any interesting experiences where you were researching Lookaway, Lookaway?

I wandered around UNC-Chapel Hill during Rush weekend, even getting a beer from some nice guys at a frat that shall, for their own safety, remain nameless; I also went to the NC Debutante Ball. I hadn’t worn my dinner jacket in five years and someone had, um, broken into my closet and shrunk that thing way down. I went to a small Civil War re-enactment in central North Carolina. The people were totally nice to me, utterly devoted to period detail and the music and habits of the time, and so I’m going to be vague about when and where since my book will likely appall them—I have quite a lot of fun at re-enactors’ expense. Additionally, I let myself hear every bit of good gossip from Raleigh, Winston-Salem, and Charlotte concerning High Society. Well, I might have eagerly listened to all that, book or no book!

Who do you feel is the reader for your book?

Anyone who might like a page-turning family saga, from the literary readers who admire Tolstoy or Trollope to the readers of good commercial, domestic fiction; any Southerner (who will recognize a lot of the stranger episodes as true); lovers of a good twisted tale of family mischief, secrets, mysteries; people with a passing interest in the Civil War. People with a sense of humor.

How is Lookaway, Lookaway different from other “southern” fiction?

This is a New South book, without dreamy nostalgia or olden-times romance—no Mawmaw and her Mason jars, no front porches, no golden late light through the Spanish oaks. This is the South in the Age of Obama, as it is, with all the excitements of modern American life, plus the inescapable Southern legacies.