photograph courtesy margaret renkl
Readers of this magazine may know me as the book-review guy, but I’m also the editor of the Memphis Flyer. In that role, I write a weekly opinion column. As I have settled into the editor’s chair, I’ve looked to a few guides in my journey to become the best essayist I can be. Former Flyer editor Bruce VanWyngarden’s recent essay collection, Everything That’s True, has been indispensable. And I keep Margaret Renkl’s Graceland, At Last (Milkweed Editions) on my desk at home as a touchstone for inspiration.
Renkl’s essays sparkle with wit, a wealth of wisdom, no few clever turns of phrase, and compassion for her subjects. Drawn from her op-ed column in The New York Times, the essays in the collection explore the politics and religion, ecology and environment, social justice movements, and art and culture of the South. Renkl writes about family, about America’s obsession with lawns, about protests and heritage and stage fright, and about the time she finally made it to Graceland (at last).
Her voice is as strong and welcoming as any I’ve had the good fortune to read, and when she writes about “driving over Monteagle Mountain with a cat latched to my head,” I felt as though I sat in the passenger side next to her, grooving along to a Paul Simon cassette tape in a “chugging old Pinto” buffeted by the wind.
“As a very young woman, I thought leaving the South would mean leaving behind everything the South so often gets wrong. What I learned in my brief time away is that every place gets crucial things very wrong.” — Margaret Renkl
Most importantly, one feels that Renkl understands the South, or, perhaps paradoxically, she knows that the South defies total understanding or explanation. “I’m not the voice of the South, and no one else is, either, because in truth there’s no such thing as ‘the South,’” she writes. “The persistent and pervasive notion of this place as a homogeneous region, a conservative voting bloc, is as much a product of the American media’s imagination as any episode of The Dukes of Hazzard.”
Hoping that her felicity with column-writing is catching, I spoke with Renkl about storytelling, journalism, and the New South.
Memphis Magazine: Have you always been a reader?
Margaret Renkl: Always. Even before I learned to read, I was completely desperate to know how. I felt so powerless, always having to wait for an adult to have time to read to me.
Have you always thought of yourself as a storyteller?
That one’s a little more complicated. I think most Southerners of my generation grew up in storytelling families, and I committed those stories to memory far earlier than I ever realized before writing my first book, Late Migrations. But as a writer I was drawn to poetry first and only came to prose much later.
In the acknowledgments section of Graceland, At Last, you write about censorship of the student magazine and how that event prompted you to leave the South. That story — or a version of it — is so familiar. What makes Southern expats repatriate themselves? What keeps others from ever leaving?
I wouldn’t want to speak for other writers, but for me the answer has something to do with simply getting older, I think. As a very young woman, I thought leaving the South would mean leaving behind everything the South so often gets wrong. What I learned in my brief time away is that every place gets crucial things very wrong — racism, for instance, is not a uniquely Southern trait — and that leaving home wasn’t going to mean finding Shangri La. More to the point, it’s possible to love what we get right here without forgiving what we get wrong. Maybe I realized I’d rather work toward a better South than be an expatriate forever. Or maybe I was just homesick.
Can you talk a little bit about the (excellent) title for the collection?
The title of the Graceland essay itself is a simple reference to the fact that it took me 30 years to get to Graceland after moving to Tennessee. But I hoped that title would carry a little more weight as the title of the book. I wanted those words to convey a subtle sense of movement, even progress. In the South we are moving — slowly and not at all directly — toward the goodness I truly believe we are capable of.
It was a lovely surprise to see Wendi Thomas and MLK50 come up in an essay devoted to the importance of journalism. Is there a correlation between some of the economic and social issues that impact the South and the rapidity with which newspapers have closed here?
No doubt. As McKay Coppins writes in a recent issue of The Atlantic, “When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. Misinformation proliferates. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. The consequences can influence national politics as well; an analysis by Politico found that Donald Trump performed best during the 2016 election in places with limited access to local news.”
I can’t put it any more clearly than that. And the South has lost more newspapers than any other region. What Wendi Thomas is doing is nothing less than heroic. She’s working to save American democracy.
In “Reading the New South” you write about “celebrating the artistic innovations of the region but refusing to gloss over its manifold shortcomings.” Do you see Graceland, At Last as doing that work as well?
I hope so. I truly, desperately, hope so.
In some senses, to me at least, the “New” really means “Newly Visible.” The South is incredibly diverse, but that diversity hasn’t always been reflected in the “moonshine and magnolias” aspects of the region’s art, literature, and reporting. Am I way off the mark here?
I think it’s worth making a distinction between the way the South is represented nationally and the way it’s represented here at home. I also think it’s worth noting, with any show or story or song, who the target audience is.
As a rule, mainstream productions — those aimed at an audience untroubled by stereotypes, even invested in stereotypes — rely on one of two Southern tropes: the rural idyll of church potlucks and cool green swimming holes, or the open racism and outright brutality of the Jim Crow era. Such representations, of course, aren’t entirely fictional.
But the South, as you point out, is also more urban, more culturally and ethnically diverse, more artistically innovative than such stereotypes allow. And there are far more homegrown novelists and journalists and songwriters and poets and playwrights who are working to highlight that diversity and who are adding to that innovation than I could possibly enumerate in this space, or even in a weekly column.
It seems that part of what allows for greater diversity in the South — particularly when it comes to art-making — is that it’s not expensive to live here. But the nation is undergoing a housing crisis, as we also struggle with gentrification. Do you see these issues eroding access to this region? Another way of putting it, can the South ever lose its charm?
Well, sure. Plenty of people would argue that it already has. Have you taken a walk down Nashville’s Lower Broad lately?
People have been wringing their hands about the Walmartization of this country for a long time now, for extremely good reasons, and yet somehow there are still enough small towns and quirky little crossroads communities left to keep the South alive as a distinct, recognizable place. How long that truth will hold is harder to say. The places down here that have most visibly retained their Southern identity are also the places that grow smaller by the day as employment opportunities wither and young people move away from home.
Would you talk a little bit about moving to Nashville?
My husband and I had taken teaching jobs here and were planning to stay for two years. That was in 1987. We made friends who will be our friends for life. We had three babies and raised them here. We planted trees. At this point it’s pretty clear I’ll be leaving Tennessee in a box.
Tell me something you love about Nashville, or about Tennessee in general.
The Middle Tennessee countryside — the fields, the forests, the rivers and creeks and little ponds — is so beautiful it takes my breath away.
Is there something about Nashville — or Tennessee or the South — you would like to see change?
That list is very, very long.
Speaking of change, I loved the tone of “These Kids Are Waiting for Change,” in which you write about young Nashville residents who organized a peaceful protest in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. A year and a half later, do you still feel there’s reason to hope?
I spend a lot of time actively looking for reasons to hope, and the thing about looking for something is that sometimes you actually find it. The George Floyd protests were not followed by the huge cultural transformation that so many of us deeply hoped for. But the guilty verdicts in Ahmaud Arbery’s murder give me hope that all is not yet lost.
Your story “The Fox in the Stroller” really resonated with me. Would you agree that the best way to show our appreciation for wildlife is to do all we can to ensure they stay wild?
It’s human nature to want to be close to animals because we evolved together as neighbors. The trouble is that we now live in a way that’s unnaturally divorced from the creatures we share the world with. So it’s very hard for many people to resist the desire to tame a wild squirrel or to adopt an orphaned baby bird.
But this longing to be close to wildness never makes it right to keep wild animals as pets. The best response to a longing for wildness is to work as hard as possible to live in a way that’s compatible with wildness — to keep our wild neighbors wild by protecting their habitat and living in a way that gives them room to be wild and free and magnificent.
Would you talk a little bit about your use of your family members’ wedding rings as “talismans against fear” on your book tour? That was such a moving piece.
It’s easy for me to forget that much of what I experience as stress is something my ancestors — who survived wars and droughts and floods and fires and every imaginable kind of medical crisis — would have found almost laughable. Wearing their wedding rings reminds me to set my own worries into a bigger context.
What’s it like writing an opinion column about the South for The New York Times? Do you have to keep two audiences in mind?
It makes sense that I would, but I don’t generally think about my role that way. I try to write as clearly, as accurately, and as persuasively as I possibly can. After that, I just hope for the best. The Times is truly the country’s newspaper of record, with subscribers from all over the country — all over the world, really — including here in the American South. Some of them are going to agree with me, and some of them aren’t, and that’s the beauty of a robust national discourse.
When you were writing these essays, was there a point when you realized you would collect them in a book? Did that change the way you approached the individual essays?
I would not have dreamed of proposing a book like this myself and never considered that possibility as I was writing these essays. It was Caroline Que, the editorial director for book development at the Times, who had the idea for a book, and I’m grateful she did. It was lovely to step off the treadmill of a weekly column long enough to put together a carefully considered, better organized record of what my homeland really means to me.
