You have seen author presentations perhaps on C-SPAN or YouTube. Maybe even attended a few for yourself. Say you walked into one where the first two rows were empty, despite no reserved signs and a packed house behind. Then, just as you have seen so many times - the author walks out from side stage to a podium. Only this time he is holding a box. The box is moving - shifting, clattering, and resembles a mystery about to lose control. The speaker then opens the lid and quickly reaches into the box to reveal - a snake.
North Carolina's late Tim McLaurin remains just such an author. Growing up in restrictive, rural North Carolina, McLaurin as a child was taught "When you see a snake, get the hoe." However, one day he thought what if I treat that creature like a squirrel or another of God's creations. So McLaurin read about them (to the point he wanted to become a herpetologist) and figured out how to control them.
The same fear of snakes is that which possesses a lot of writers. In the last two memoirs we discussed, Harry Crews laid his entire life out for evaluation and Anne Moody bravely told her story even as it was not ever expressed in that manner. The facet they have in common is the lack of sympathy. McLaurin wrote about himself and the events he saw in life, but it was a lot to embrace that fear.
His first book "The Acorn Plan" (1989) was all about his home in Cumberland County, NC. Like Harry Crews, he discovered writing as a young adult far away from home. Serving with the Peace Corps in Tunisia, McLaurin drew out the characters and sought to make them as individual as he hoped to be seen. For his second novel "Woodrow's Trumpet," McLaurin drew on his own experiences as a newspaper writer using the different sets of rules between news writers and opinion writers as a mirror of the gulf between generations in the South.
Finding success in expressing himself and fully telling about his life, McLaurin wrote a childhood memoir "Keeper of the Moon: A Southern Boyhood" in 1991 and his adult memoir "The River Less Run" in 2004. "The River Less Run" details the illuminations he encounters on a family trip to the Rocky Mountains. While he introducing himself as the patriarch of the traveling family reunion (including his mother, children, and even in-laws,) his habit of keen observations and memory derivations creates loving portraits even as he suffers from cancer.
As a writer, McLaurin describes himself as completely "lucky," never having to write in a "Hemingway phase" (for example) and always writing as himself. However, as he lets go of the fear to let us as readers into every aspect of his life, we begin to see what makes the man even if he never had that in mind while writing. "River" is a bit a of Zen journey where nature's guiding hand and the simplicity of life on the road blur the lines between what he is experiencing and how those events are making him feel.
As they cut their path across this land in his "Winnebago boat," the ongoing story of what his family is doing takes a backseat to McLaurin's internal dialogue. First, he sees such beauty and simplicity in nature that he takes every chance to experience it. As his flesh and blood join in, we get his paternalism and actions as an expression of undying love. Like Joseph Conrad or even Robert Pirsig, this journey takes on a religious underpinning ("And I am the father and the son, and on that morning, as I drove again toward the mountains they had never seen, we were immortal.") as he quickly realizing that his family is his life everlasting.
In just one year, he will return for more treatment. The next year, McLaurin will pass away from complications with esophageal cancer.
That willing embrace of fear to expose himself created a legacy in both his family and writing. Back to the aforementioned presentation, McLaurin knew exactly why the first two rows were empty, and even though he had been bitten seriously four times - back his hands descended into that box.
Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
