Rain pelted the streets of Oxford, Miss. on a Friday afternoon in June, while Bobbie Ann Mason checked into the Downtown Motel. She had traveled to Oxford to promote "Midnight Magic," a compilation of brilliant short stories originally published during the eighties.
When I dialed the number given me by Mason's publicist, the desk clerk politely but firmly insisted that no such Mason had registered. "I'm scheduled to interview her," I told him. "Let me look at the new arrivals," he said. Moments later he came back on line, "I'll connect you."
Mason answered on the first ring, speaking in a surprisingly colorless accent. From her voice, she wouldn't necessarily be identified as a native of western Kentucky. She seems friendly, although her answers to my questions are succinct , without elaboration. In nervous reaction, I find myself spouting off at embarrassing length. She probably wonders what she has gotten into.
In research I had skimmed three books that discuss Mason and her work. "Conversations with Kentucky Writers" contains a long interview, which Mason said is partially incorrect. "It was supposed to be an oral interview, but some of the quotations were incorrectly transcribed from the tape. My whole point about language was lost."
Mason's last major book previous to "Midnight Magic" (a compilation of previously published short stories) was 1993's epic novel, "Feather Crowns," which detailed life in 1898 and the birth of a set of quintuplets to a Kentucky couple
There also was "With Jazz" in a limited edition done by Larkspur, a small publisher, using hand presses to manufacture the books, which Mason described as "beautifully done." The book consists of a short story published in The New Yorker, where Mason received her first public acclaimed two decades ago..
In addition to assembling the story collection that makes up "Midnight Magic," Ecco Press also decided to bring out a new paperback edition of "Spence + Lila," a touching 1988 novel about a couple's reaction to the wife's bout with breast cancer. "This is a good way to introduce those stories to a new public," Mason told me.
She is now finishing work on a family history, a memoir, which she expects to be published next spring by Random House.
Asked to describe an average day when writing, she said, "I write in the afternoons. When I focus on work and get really involved on it, I keep at it until I get hungry. I have writer's block all the time. That's what writing is. Breaking it comes gradually by letting go. A block prevents you from having access to yourself."
She declares she doesn't plot out her stories or novels. "I have no plan when I start to write," she said. "If I did I'd probably end up somewhere else. A plan would be too hard to follow. You look for where characters can lead you, what they can tell you. I'm looking for something interesting, something I can work with. I'm trying to get at feelings and things that are buried in the unconscious. It's more fun to try to follow the turns, to see what happens. You can let anything happen; you always can cut it out."
Mason writes in a flurry of energy, getting the words down as fast as she can. She once told an interviewer, "I just try to find the muse, try to activate it, try to take advantage of it, try to get it out quickly and as painlessly and as intensely as I can, and then I've got something to work with." Next comes the real job of writing, the revisions, which can be frequent and extensive. If it takes her years to get it right, she's willing to wait. "There are two stages in writing: the creative, flowing art, then the editing, revising and shaping."
Mason has said that she finds writing often selfish and self-centered. "What you're doing is playing with your toys by yourself and not sharing until you get finished and then you give them away."
To find her stories, Mason told students in 1995 that "Sometimes I'll just see something or hear a snatch of conversation or remember something, and I'll get interested and wonder what it means, so I'll start turning it over in my mind. So then I'll make up a story about it to try to see what sense I can make of it."
She has said it's not her role to decide what a story means. "I think (a reader) should reach (their) own conclusions. A story should stand on its own. The author can't always be around to explain it."
Mason has been lucky to escape the label as a regional or southern writer, which becomes attached to any writer living below the Mason-Dixon Line. She thinks such categorization can damage an author;s career. Because she gained notice first in the pages of The New Yorker, which has published the fiction of a long line of distinguished writers, she appears to have wiggled out of that unwanted appellation.
Mason, after many years in Pennsylvania, now resides in central Kentucky, although she's reluctant to name the exact location, saying only that it's "not far from Lexington."
Asked what she does when she's not writing, she replies with a chuckle, "I am mostly writing." She admits to no real vices or avocations, except for her collection of three dogs and five cats. We talk about the love affair between dumb animals and their masters, a blind affection in which the animals offer unconditional love. "The cats are just pretending" when they act like they don't love their owners, she announces, and I imagine her smiling.
Other than a brief respite as a journalism teacher years ago, Mason says she has no vocation except writing. She has been married for 29 years to Roger Rawlings. They met at the University of Connecticut in 1968 while she was in graduate school and wed a year later. They then moved to Pennsylvania, where he taught for nine years at Mansfield State College.
I asked her if writing can be taught? She laughed, paused for several beats and responded quietly, "I don't know."
Her favorite writers include James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, (she wrote her dissertation on Nabokov, which was later published as a book, "Nabokov's Garden.") Among contemporary writers she enjoys Alice Munro, Ann Beattie, Roy Blount, Jr., and Charles Baxter, "especially his beautiful book of essays."
"In next five years, I will get back to short stories, and see what kind of new directions appeal to me. I haven't written any short stories in a while. Then I hope to do another novel."
I asked her what, if she could choose, would her epitaph say? A moment passed in silence. "I've never, ever, thought of that," she finally said.
Although she composes her work on a computer, she has no interest in getting wired, doesn't surf the Internet or have an e-mail address. "I don,t have the time and I don't need to be a technophobe," she said firmly.
In her revealing (although much too brief) introduction to "Midnight Magic," Mason discusses the writing process. "The mystery of writing is much like driving into the darkness in the middle of the night," she writes. "It's both dangerous and fraught with possibility."
She says of the stories in this book, all written in the eighties, that "it is a mystery to me where they came from. It's hard to pin down their exact sources." She goes on the mention a clear memory about the title story.
"Early on a Sunday morning in the parking lot of a supermarket, I saw a guy get into a snazzy blue Thunderbird that had Midnight Magic painted on the rear," she says. That set her off, as she created a background for the driver, at first deciding he must have suffered a disappointment. She thought the character she had imagined might have killed someone, or perhaps lost his girlfriend. "But, as the story proceeded, he got nicer as I understood him better."
For Mason, the creative act is "a challenge to inhibition, a delving into the hidden and forgotten."
The seventeen stories contained in "Midnight Magic" are uniformly excellent. Mason possesses the ability in just the barest few words to create characters that seem so realistic we almost believe she's writing about neighbors from our own pasts. It's a gift of magic, in that she writes with feeling and a thorough understanding of the trials and travails of average, everyday folks, just like us.
Sample this wonderful paragraph from "Big Bertha Stories":
"It occurs to her than even though she loved him, she has thought of Donald primarily as a husband, a provider, someone whose name she shared, the father of her child, someone like the fathers who come to the Wednesday night all-you-can-eat fish fry. She hasn't thought of him as himself. She wasn't brought up that way, to examine someone's soul. When it comes to something deep inside, nobody will take it out and examine it, the way they will look at clothing in a store for flaws in the manufacturing."
From one of her earliest published stories, "Shiloh," there's this stunning observation: "Nobody knows anything, Leroy thinks. The answers always are changing."
Bobbie Ann Mason not only knows all the questions, she's got a good grip on the answers, too.
"Midnight Magic," indeed!
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