And so we'd like to welcome you all to an evening of conversation with Charles Frazier, author of the 1997 National Book Award winner Cold Mountain. He's here tonight to speak to us about his book "Thirteen Moons," which is a historical novel that is epic in scope, rife with rough and tumble adventure of American style, and brimming with the same romantic spirit that enlivened "Cold Mountain." We're very excited, so please welcome Mr. Charles Frazier. Um, first of all, in a recent interview I read you described a childhood spent surrounded by books. And I was wondering what writers influenced you growing up, and whose style you most admire. From childhood? From childhood. From childhood. Um, Frank Dixon.. Yaaaay Anybody know who that is? The author of the Hardy Boy books. Yeah, I loved those books. I was totally indiscriminate as a reader when I was a kid. I made no distinction between a Batman comic book and Edith Wharton's, you know, books, I just, I read everything that was in the little tiny town library in the little tiny town where I lived. It was 1200 people, maybe. It was at least 2 hours to the nearest town that was significantly bigger than that. So it was very isolated, very quiet, and that little Carnegie library was the center of my world. But you didn't come to writing until later in life, or into professional writing. So were there writers later on in life whose style you feel helps enrich you as a writer, or anything? Oh yeah, well lots of them. I mean now, I love pretty much any of the big 19th century writers. A year hardly goes by that I don't go back and read some Turgenev novel again, something by Tolstoy again, something by Hardy again, Dickens I don't do every yearI've got our mutual friend sitting on the books to be read pileand I think once the book tour is over with and I can settle down, that's one of the first things I'll go back to is Dickens. And then of contemporary writers, I like a lot of different things, but Cormac McCarthy is up thereCormac and MarquezGarcia Marquez are the two that I have a kind of special place for in my personal list. And then somebody like, well, we were talking awhile ago about Barry Lopez and his book that Barry's put together called Home Ground, definitions of regional, geographic terms, regional landscape terms, from North America. And he's been a writer who's just been a writer hero of mine since the Wolves and Men back in the seventies. So for those of you who don't know, this collection that came out this year, a bunch of American writers going around the nation and describing the local geographical features of America, and it's a dictionary of sorts, and Mr. Frazier is actually a contributor, and so I was wondering actually if you would read to us one of the entries that you wrote? Barry'd been talking about this book for just about a decade, and he kept saying, "I'm looking for funding, and I'm trying to, I want to collect this group of writers to do it, and I want it to be like a WPA project. And we won't even put your name by the entry, it'll just be a list of contributors," and you know over the years I begin to think, this isn't going to happen. And then just about the time I started working on Thirteen Moons, and was really getting going on it, Barry called and said, "Hey, Home Ground is a go, we're gonna, you know, can you do it?" and I thought, this could not be a worse time. But I said yeah I'll do it, and I stopped working on that and did this. So this is a definition of a word from my home, in the Southern Appalachians, and the word is "hell." In 19th century America, hell was a generic term for a rough or difficult stretch of country such as the wildly eroded Hell's Half Acre in Wyoming. Similarly, the thermal features of Yellowstone Park were originally called Coulter's Hell, after the explorer and mountain man John Coulter. The word was also used to designate the most lawless sections of frontier towns, like Fort Worth and San Antonio, as well as particularly rough and dangerous parts of the urban landscape, such as Hell's Kitchen in New York City. In the Southern Appalachians, a hell is a dense, extensive growth of laurel or rhododendron. Horace Kephart in our Southern Highlanders, defined the term this way: "A hell, or slick, or woolly head, or yeller patch, is a thicket of laurel or rhododendron impassable, save where the bears had bored out trails." And the book's just full of that from all over North America, these little bits of landscape terminology, and it's a remarkable work that Barry's spent years putting together with a really amazing, I mean if you can see just the length of that list of writers that he's pulled together for it. So the research that you did for this is similar in scope and depth to the amount of research you had to do for the Thirteen Moons and Cold Mountain. Was there anything when you were researching, such as the Cherokee Nation, or historical civil war contexts, that sort of thing, was there anything that surprised you that came out of your research for Thirteen Moons or Cold Mountain? Well, one of the things that surprised me about the Cherokee, I think a lot of people, a lot of Americans have this fixed image of Native Americans that's the Plains Indians from the second half of the 19th century. The war bonnets and Crazy Horse, and that sort of thing, and in fact I just got a proposed cover for Thirteen Moons from I think it was the Dutch translation, and it had this Plains scene with an Indian with a headdress on, all of that, but the thing that I found about the Cherokee that really amazed me is that by the time of this book, by the time this book begins in the 1830s and the years before the Trail of Tears, the removal of the Cherokee from the East, that there were Cherokee leaders who owned plantations that were as lavish as anything in South Carolina or Georgia or Alabama. And these men who were really more Scott in heritage than Cherokee, some of them like Chief Ross, who was the head chief of the Cherokee Nation at the time of removal, was three quarters Scot, didn't speak Cherokee, didn't like to be around people who did speak Cherokee. Cause it made him nervous. But those people owned slaves and in some cases quite a few slaves, and therefore, I think this is the thing that surprised me the most, that on the Trail of Tears, something close to 20% of the people on the Trail of Tears were black. And it's something that I would never have pictured from my previous understanding of that event. Is there something sort of inherently hypocritical about the main character, who defends the Cherokees so fiercely, yet owns slaves? Yeah Yeah, absolutely, he's like a lot of men of the class that he eventually came to occupy, a guy who's made a lot of money, who's lifted himself in that American archetypal way by his own bootstraps and become powerful and rich, he still has this sense of connection and obligation to the Cherokee who took him in when he was an orphan as a boy, but when it comes to talking about being a slave owner, about all he can say is, "Gee, I don't know why they didn't all cut our throats in our sleep." And just kind of wants to move on from there without examining that farther, in the same way that he does that in a number of cases in the book, where he'll expand on some things, contract some other things, he's a 90 year old man, telling the story of his life, and he's doing a great deal of self-editing. Since this story as well as Cold Mountain were based on actual people, is it difficult in looking at the story of the actual person to draw the line for yourself between fact and fiction, where do youdepart from the fact and embellish and that sort of thing? Well, it can be a difficult decision if you make it a difficult decision, but for me, I'm a novelist first, the requirements for character and story I think always come first. I did this thing with the Smithsonian a few years ago, was like an auditorium full of people and the topic was historical fiction. And so I talked awhile about historical fiction, and then asked for questions, and this woman got up and she said, "My husband thinks he knows exactly where in Cold Mountain you started making things up." And it was like, there were probably 500 people in this auditorium, and a kind of uncomfortable question like that, you know people kind of get really quiet, and so I said, "Okay, well I'll tell you where I think I started making things up, and then you tell me where your husband thinks I started making things up. We'll see how they match." And she said okay. And I said, "Page one." And she just said, "Never mind." And sat down, but I just feel that way. This book has a little author's note in the back saying, "I make things up." And it's mainly aimed at people at home in Western North Carolina, so they won't stop me quite as often in the grocery store and say, "You know that thing you wrote that says that something happened over here, well it didn't, it happened over here." I've had that occur enough times that I just wanted to say, I am a novelist, not a historian. I make things up. Your fiction isn't just sort of contemporary fiction, you also do a lot of alluding to sort of a great classical mythological stories, the Odyssey in Cold Mountain and the Arthurian legend in Don Quixote, and this book and I was wondering if you felt like there was a similarsort of source, American source, for you to drawn on, you know? Because these are sort of ancient European texts that you're drawing on. Is there an American canon, will there be an American canon eventually given time and space, and that sort of thing, what belongs in that canon, according to you. Well, you know, I mean we don't go back as far, at least if you look at European culture roots, there is in this book a lot of reference to older Cherokee stories, and I have in this book, Will has, what I wanted was for him to have internalized Cherokee culture so much that he doesn't make a distinction between history and myth, that he'll say, well, I went into this valley, and in that valley, there was a giant leech that lived in a deep hole in the river, and there's a bald mountain up there, and there's a giant lizard that lives up there in the rocks on that peak. So he's kind of internalized some of those orally transmitted stories. In terms of kind of beyond this book, the canon of North American stories, I've always been very interested in those captivity narratives. Where the Puritan times, when there were lots of people who were kidnapped. In Massachusetts, especially. But by the Indians, and taken to Canada. And Mary Rollinson is kind of a primary example of that. And it's the place where to me where American literature really begins, when people who were essentially European, essentially British, English, had to confront this continent and the people of this continent in a really direct and in most cases very violent kind of way. So those things interest me, I don't know whether I'll ever get around to using them fictionally, but I'm fascinated by those captivity narratives. On a much more frivolous note, and sort of something I was curious about, um, because the movie was made of Cold Mountain was so successful, the film rights to Thirteen Moons have already been optioned, correct Well, let me get all movie-ish here. They were bought, not optioned. Sorry, bought. Um. Did you think about a movie at all when you were writing Thirteen Moons because there was one already of Cold Mountain, or subsequently, have you thought about some of your dream cast, who would play those people in the movie Thirteen Moons? For the first part of the question, did I think about movie when I was working on the book, I've had one conversation with the people who have the film rights for this, and I said, when you've read the book finally, did you just scream at the notion of a story where the narrator, the main character, starts out as a 12 year old boy, and ends up as a 94 year old manand the arc of the story occupies almost a century. And he said, it will require some movie magic to do. So I think I can pretty honestly say that the thought of a movie being made from this book didn't affect one thing about the book. And then what was the second part of the question again? Subsequentlythinking about it now, a dream cast, or anyone that Oh, okay. Yeah, I haven't been to a lot of movies the past few years, and for this book I would think that the main character Will should probably, I mean if I were doing it, I would be looking for an actor under 30, and I'm having a hard timeI have a hard time even thinking of actors under 30. So like who. Who's good. And 27 or 28. So I get to cast the movie? Yeah! For Will. Umlet's see, that's a hard one, I'll have to think about that. What about Claire though? For Claire? Claire, Natalie Portman. Did you like her performance in Cold Mountain? Yeah, she's just, she's really bright, really great. Um, did you want to talk at all about the Cherokee Translation Project for Thirteen Moons? Yeah, the Cherokee language is at the current rate of expert speakers of Cherokee dying, and new expert speakers replacing them, it'll be a dead language in about 20 years. Which is a really sad thought to me. Occasionally I read a kind of thing where the last speaker of some language in Australia or Polynesia or somewhere has died and feels like some whole way of looking at the world has just ended. And I was over on the Koala Boundary, which is the name of the land of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, the people that this book is about in a large way, and they were talking about some of the initiatives they have. And one of them is an immersion program for little kids, so they go in to day care in the morning, and all day long, not a word of English is spoken, it's all Cherokee, and in a couple of years they come out speaking Cherokee fluently. And Cherokee's one of the few languages, Native American languages, where there is a written form of it, and in Thirteen Moons, if you have a copy, the end papers here are in the Cherokee syllabery. So I said, you know, is there anything for those kids to read? Is there anything for anybody to read in Cherokee? And he said, well there's hymns, there's parts of the Bible, there are 19th century documents. And I said, well why don't we see what the process of translating now, translating modern things, into Cherokee is? So we're working on a project to translate the middle section of this book, the removal of the Cherokee section, into Cherokee, and the goal is to have a bilingual edition of it and we hope audio in Cherokee, and in Eng. well, there's already an audio in English, but an audio in Cherokee. As an educational project and as just an experiment. To see what it's like. Because there are no professional translators of Cherokee. We're having to find people who are willing to try to do the work, and see if it can happen. To see if we can put together. well like publishers are interested in doing it, but they've said, we can't do the normal things that a publisher does. We can't copy the Cherokee. So all of that will have to be done in the community. And we're lining up people, and we're moving forward on the translation, and then the idea's to do children's books and to have an ongoing publishing enterprise in Cherokee. So we'll see. It's been fun getting it going anyway. Seeing what some of the issues and problems are, and trying to overcome them. Well, thank you so much. Do we want to open up for some questions from the audience?
