One of our great writers, Barry Hannah, died yesterday at age 67. Tin House had the privilege of publishing an interview last summer, conducted by Tom Franklin. They discussed Hannah’s vast body of work, his illness, fishing, and firearms. At one point, Franklin asked if shooting, a hobby of Hannah’s, got him closer to his characters. “The wholesale shooting has become so awful in America,” Hannah said. “Not only are guns cheap and used by cowards but they’re also too convenient to end things or give tension to stories.” True. Then again, at the beginning of the conversation, Hannah produced a derringer that sat between the two men while they spoke. As a tribute, we’ll considering an editorial policy that mandates all interviews be conducted as so.

Below is the interview that first appeared in our Tenth Anniversary Issue, Summer ‘09:

Barry Hannah: You’ve got to be good and lucky too, to catch a good fish. I’ve been neither in the five years that we’ve tried. You’re talking two charmed fishermen here, and we cancel it out of each other.

Tom Franklin: I used to be a good fisherman, until you came along.

BH: Yeah. That was my story.

TF: A couple of the times we’ve fished, at Wall Doxey State Park, I noticed our different styles, approaches. I’d go to one corner of the dock and put a cork out there, or two corks out there, and just watch them the whole time, moving one here or there, a few feet maybe. And you’re wandering all over the docks and around the banks, climbing onto limbs.

BH: Probably trying for the big bass.

TF: You’re not going to let me make this a metaphor, are you? How most of the rest of us find our little spot and sit there safely on the dock. And you’re on the other side of the lake, on a log, about to fall in, casting some lubed-up space-age lure?

BH: [Laughs.] As the writer, I’m always the last to know. I’m just doing what I can at the time.

TF: You’ve had at least one fishing story in each of your collections. What is it about fishing that draws you to that subject in your writing?

BH: The pull of the unknown, underwater. That tug, that tug. Ever since I was old enough to hold a cane pole, fishing’s been a joyful, natural sport and feast, you know. And you also gotta be crafty to catch a good fish, one you want to eat. We ate largemouth bass here in those days. Nowadays I let them go because I don’t need them.

TF: [pointing his pencil at the pistol on the table]: You’re a collector of firearms—pistols, rifles, shotguns. Does shooting get you closer to your characters?

BH [looks stricken]: No, no. Shooting is just a hobby, a target hobby. Now I shoot beer cans, not mammals. I get a peckerwood thrill out of seeing this thing in my hand lurch and blow something up in the air. That’s all.

It may get me closer to history if I hold a weapon of an era, so you would know how heavy the weapon was, say the derringer in the 1880s. Or up to the 1920s. But you don’t really need to own it, all you need to do is see it. But lately I’m horrified by guns. The wholesale shooting has become so awful in America. Not only are guns cheap and used by cowards but they’re also just too convenient to end things or give you tension in stories.

TF: Can you talk about how your short stories, as you see them, have progressed? How, say, are the stories in High Lonesome different from the ones in Airships?

BH: I know my Bats Out of Hell stories are longer. I just had a fit of writing after my father’s death. And it was almost like glossololia or something, I couldn’t quit writing stories, they just kept coming. Short, long. I’m typing like a fiend, or writing by hand. Which is something I trust. And Airships was edited beautifully by Gordon Lish. He was getting me the most out of every sentence. He would have probably pared down the stories of High Lonesome a good deal. I became my own short story editor after learning from Gordon, in workshop. I like a long story, but nobody wants to publish a long story unless you’re, say, Richard Ford. It’s just a mode that’s unfortunately not hot now.

The short story was what it absolutely was when I was in college: Hemingway, Cheever, J. D. Salinger, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Faulkner. Their short works were, I guess, the best to teach in the classroom. I mean, I’m like most dudes, I didn’t read much in college that wasn’t assigned. I thought I was doing plenty. I’d read the things that were assigned in other courses and just hated them—what I didn’t want to know, I didn’t learn.

TF: You mentioned Gordon Lish, and I wanted to ask, in a little more detail, about your own editing process.

BH: The Sick Soldier at Your Door has come back from my editor at Grove—

TF: This is the new book.

BH: Yeah. And I was in such despair. I love the voice so much, but I’d forgotten what I try to teach students, and what I love myself. I had done the book in monologues and forgotten the tension a book needs all the way through. Monologues were the wrong way to do it . . .

TF: Can you describe your process of working on The Sick Soldier At Your Door?

BH: The overview took a long time on this book. Now, after seven years of dither, Sick Soldier will be short stories. It was never a novel. I just couldn’t find this simple truth and punished myself needlessly by thinking too much, gathering too much. I’ve done this for three years before so this was a record and hell to live. However, I’m excited by the stories. Now, I can jump to with zeal and purpose every morning.

TF: I’ve heard it was a sequel to Ray.

BH: The book will be no sequel. A possible son of Ray, El Burden, appears in one story as a lay preacher on a yellow Triumph motorcycle. He has fallen on hard times. His alcoholic nephew is an arsonist holding Burden’s last forty thousand dollars.

TF: So how will you go about putting the tension in, or—

BH: Well, it’s there already, just buried. I need to cut it down to a nub, I hope, about like Ray. The original Ray, where I started with about seven hundred pages. And now it [The Sick Soldier] is around three hundred pages. In the end I’ll probably get it down to a 130-page book. I hope. That’s what it needs. A reason to read it.

TF: Is that typical for your process, to write a lot more than you use? With both novels and stories?

BH: Yep. I can’t bear to revise. I want to give it away to an editor. “Please, do it for me!” I can’t revise myself very well. [Richard] Bausch, a very fine writer, he hates the first draft. But me? I love the first draft. It’s just different with us. Richard Ford, I asked his wife, does he ever sit down and dash off a story? She says, “Absolutely not.” He’s very meticulous. For Tim O’Brien, a paragraph a day is a miracle. He works slowly, like a gem cutter, to see if this is true—if this is true, if it’s natural, if it’s right. And that’s the way, that’s the measure of a writer.

TF: Can you talk about the autobiographical aspects of Ray and Sick Soldier?

BH: I’ve fought autobiography because, in my sick days, it’s kind of shut-in literature I don’t like. My work always requires me in the world, living and trying. Otherwise I might end up writing self-conscious meditative poetry, for God’s sake.

TF: What’s it like when you’re on fire with a story? Like the ones in Bats Out of Hell?

BH: I’m typing like a fiend. Or writing longhand in a number of school journals.

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TF: How has illness affected your work?

BH: Lately, I think medication has gotten in my way. I’m in remission, but there’s still some pain, some depression. But there are no excuses, finally; you don’t lose a minute, if you’re alive. It’ll all count. Every sentence. If you become one of the suffering, you’re apt to become more tender in your stories. The illnesses, having been lived, do not invite me as a subject. Sickness stops my creativity. I’m no Proust. I must feel a mild ecstasy for my writing to be any good. You don’t get this with catheters, depressive trips to the doctor’s offices, chemotherapy—believe me.

I mean, finally I got of an age where age was interfering with my work. I don’t have the energy for everything. And I don’t think I was born to be more than a lieutenant. Possibly. I don’t like responsibility for everybody, I don’t want to know everybody, I don’t want to micromanage, I don’t have these—I don’t need power.

TF: Obviously you have less time and energy, but has it affected your writing process?

BH: I’ve become a major movie buff. I used to scorn people like me. But now I have all kinds of videos, DVDs, and I passively sit back and watch them. Even a bad movie can teach you something. They are the art of our day.

[William] Harrison taught me that back in the sixties. But for a writer the Hollywood experience is so stupid and devastating. Harrison’s spent much time out there. And had a little success, finally, one or two financial bonanzas.

TF: Does becoming a movie buff make you want to go back and start writing movies again?

BH: No. I made the mistake of trying—well, it wasn’t a mistake, it was a financial necessity—of wanting to be a screenplay writer, with [Robert] Altman getting me some jobs. There was a writers’ strike going on out there then, and I wasn’t a member of the union. We were just pitching back and forth at each other and being pleasant. But I was no good at it because I depend on everything else that a screenplay does not do. None of my good stuff is in a screenplay, nothing of it.

TF: And your work would be very hard to adapt, for obvious reasons.

BH: See, things are so simple. I think Altman won an Oscar once for a screenplay he did overnight. See? The great smash Aliens, Tom McGuane told me, was written by a couple of guys on speed in about two days. I don’t doubt it, but it’s so simple, I might not be able to do it. And I think that’s what writers often realize—that is so simple, so true, what have I been thinking man, this guy is on it, he’s on the bean. It’s the simplicity we’re after, isn’t it?

TF: Yeah. Why is it so hard to achieve?

BH: Noise. You allow the world to get in. When I was young, I drank socially, in revelry, but I got into trouble with booze because it closed things out beautifully for me. It was a medication, and you even get physically deaf—I didn’t know that until a few years ago—through beer. That’s why people at bars are just screaming, it seems. See, if you’re straight and you go in there, everybody’s screaming at each other, even if there’s not a band. You actually go deaf, and it’s not just because you’re hard of hearing; the alcohol numbs the hearing. So, it was getting in that zone, the quietness where I could find my own voice, and alcohol helped. It’s a crying shame that it’s bad for you, or that you must increase the quantity if you’ve got a disease, you know, you must increase until you’re ill.

TF: And people worried that you wouldn’t be able to write more when you stopped drinking.

BH: I did, hugely. That was one of the major problems I had stopping. I was in great fear that I would lose all of my stuff.

TF: But then, Bats Out of Hell.

BH: Yeah. I really put more effort or was more on fire with natural juice for Bats Out of Hell, so I like that book probably a little better than Airships, because Airships was thirty years ago. I love it that Airships has gotten fame and notoriety now that it is being taught.

TF: You know, you’ve had some famous students over the years. I thought you might just talk about Larry Brown a little bit, you know—what’s it been like seeing him start, and then seeing his entire career?

BH: Okay, number one, Larry was never my student in a class. But it’s like my relationship to Jim Whitehead up at Arkansas—he’s a beautiful poet but he never taught me. Except he taught me everything, he taught me when we shot pool, he taught me in the bar at Roger’s Recreation [in Fayetteville, Arkansas]. Big, tall man, passionate about poetry, quoted Yeats, you know. He was a bad pool shot, though. [Laughs] But I said, “My God, you know, that’s a good life.” If you’re that big and athletic and feel that much for poems, I mean, they gave me a shot in the arm and I’m a smaller guy, but I never had any interest in being ultra-sensitive. But I wanted to write—so did Larry.

Larry started out wanting to be Stephen King, wanting to entertain so hugely, that he wrote for vast financial success, which is a really wonderful motive. Except he hadn’t found the voice yet. He took a course here at Ole Miss under Josephine Haxton—whose nom de plume is Ellen Douglas—and that’s the only college course he had as far as I know, ever. But he started reading Conrad and Flannery O’Connor, and he found his own voice, that natural Mississippi hill country voice, after a hundred failures. All of his early stories were deeply bad, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings because he was so sincere. So I looked them over, and I don’t remember teaching him anything, but maybe he learned something. He learned that he wanted a little pain and that he wanted out of that fire station [Brown was a fireman for nineteen years], didn’t want to be trapped there anymore, that was part of his life that he’d like to quit. But his financial motivation was right honest, and the fact that he finally learned all the craft he needed in one class is not surprising. Because he was a brilliant learner, a fast learner. At the firehouse, you don’t get to be a captain just for showing up. And he was in his thirties when he was captain. That’s pretty good, I think.

TF: How has your teaching changed over the years?

BH: It’s gotten a lot simpler. The things that I do well in my own work, I didn’t ever think about, because I’d been trained on good storytelling and helped by a few good teachers. But outside of beginning, middle, and end and “thrill us,” what else is there to teach? There’s no theory, there’s nothing that guarantees publication. I’ve never been interested in intellectual experiments. I prefer to thrill people in their guts rather than in their heads. With some of the MFA writing I read now, I wonder, “My God, didn’t anybody get it across that you’ve got to entertain?” You’re fortunate if what entertains you entertains the crowd also.

It’s impossible for me to behave as if I were thirty-five when I was writing Airships—it’s impossible. And I must say you don’t necessarily gain a lot by age; you sometimes are in danger of becoming the old hack plagiarizing his own former work. That’s probably why the old often bore people, they just say the same damn things over and over, and they just deal in truisms. That’s the mass of America, one truism after another. For instance, the word motherfucker is a truism now. It’s just empty. It used to be an exciting word because it’s the worst thing you can imagine, you know? But now it’s just a weak flat noun.

It may be just my time of life, but I’ve been teaching better, I hope. My essays have gotten a lot better. But what I want is what I had in Airships and High Lonesome and Bats Out of Hell and Captain Maximus: joy. Joy, just joy, just jump in there because you’re onto it. You’ve gotta write it. You feel it deep in the pit of your stomach.