The Victim, Detective, and Criminal All at Once: An Interview With David Payne

I was a student at the low-residency MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte North Carolina in 2013 when I asked David Payne about the memoir he was working on that would become Barefoot to Avalon — was finding the transition from fiction to nonfiction difficult? His answer has stayed with me. He said writing fiction in the past was as if he had a ventriloquist dummy on his lap who was turning the themes of his own life into stories.

Payne’s first book, published in 1984, Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and was translated into several European languages. He went on to write novels set in the landscape of his youth, Early From the Dance, Ruin Creek, Gravesend Light, and Back to Wando Passo. 

He was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in Henderson, North Carolina, and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he graduated with highest honors in creative writing. After college, Payne worked as a cabinet maker and commercial fisherman while completing his first novel. He’s taught at Bennington, Duke and Hollins and is a founding faculty member in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte.

We discussed the recent reissue of three of his early books, how personal history informs his work, and why family is such a compelling canvas for story.

What motivated you to get the rights back to three of your early works, Early From the Dance, Ruin Creek, and Gravesend Light, and reissue them?

A lot of it had to do with a bookseller named Gee Gee Rosell who owns Buxton Village Books near Hatteras on the Outer Banks. She would ask me every year when I was going to reissue them. I couldn’t get them back from Doubleday. They don’t release rights easily. I finally did get those back with the help of one of my old editors, David Gernert, who’d published Early From the Dance and Ruin Creek. I started getting back into the text, and that was when it got interesting to me as a process. Standing back from them, the books started to feel like this long investigation that I had been engaged in without realizing that I was engaged in it, until some point maybe in the in the middle. It’s a matter of asking who I am and who my family is and exactly how one comes out of the other. The books were a lifelong investigation in which I saw myself or see myself as the victim, as the detective, and ultimately as the criminal as well. And by criminal and crime I mean my tendency to repeat many of the same harms that I’d been harmed by, the very ones I’d set out to understand, expose and put an end to for my own sake and my children’s.

Why did you persist in getting back the rights?

These books are the most intimate products of the years that I’ve spent on Earth. Why should they be consigned to the vaults of some indifferent corporation? It wasn’t easy to get them back and, frankly, they didn’t give them back to me for a long time. I think that’s fairly typical. So what I would say to young writers is, if possible, get a clause that says if sales fall below a certain threshold the rights will revert back to you automatically.

We were talking about the books in relationship to you. Let’s shift gears a little bit. These books are firmly rooted in the culture and customs of Eastern North Carolina. Talk to me about the importance of place in these books and how you focus on this area to such great effect.

I often say to younger writers that I think all of us have a particular treasure in the form of our childhoods. We only have that that one time. For me, this is the rural North Carolina area that I grew up in along the fall line between the piedmont and the coastal plain. These books were artifacts of that place and time. In Ruin Creek, which is the story of Joey Madden, who’s watching at 11 years old the breakdown of his parents’ marriage and the dissolution of his family during a summer on the Outer Banks; in the sequel, Gravesend Light, he’s grown up and become Joe Madden, who’s now an anthropologist who’s doing an ethnography of this fishing village that’s very much like Wanchese, one that’s under pressure from modernity, development, all those sorts of stresses. As a young kid, Joey has trained himself unwittingly as an observer. And then he matures and ‘participant observation’ becomes his professional endeavor as an ethnographer. And the interesting thing is that Joe ends up repeating with his lover, the same process that happened between his parents that ended in the dissolution of his first family. So, there’s something about that kind of repetition compulsion. I think that also plays through all the books and it goes right up into Barefoot to Avalon, my memoir, which really is part of the same cycle just from a later, non-fictional perspective.

These books deal with the complex ground of family relationships. As The Washington Post Book World wrote of Ruin Creek: “It celebrates the power of family love, even as it chronicles its dying…” What is it about family that draws you as a writer?

One of my earliest memories of trying to define who I was as a person, and who we were as a family was a story that my mother used to tell us. My very pretty, young at that time, mother, putting myself and my younger brother to bed would tell us the story about eloping with my father when she was 18 and he was 20. They snuck out one midnight and drove to South Carolina, across state lines, and woke up the Justice of the Peace and his wife, who had curlers in her hair, and they got married. Because they were so much in love, this is the quote, ‘They couldn’t stand to wait another minute.’ So we would hear this story and it delighted us to hear as it seemed to delight her to tell it. So this was the origin story of our family, this special love, and we were the children who came out of it. 

Flash forward several years into the future and here I am, a little 14-year-old kid reluctantly going away to boarding school in New England at my parents’ urging. I’m in Boston the night before I’m supposed to matriculate and I’m on a rollaway in a hotel room and I hear glass breaking and my mother crying in the bathroom. It turns into this awful scene where my father attacks and sexually assaults my mother in the room in front of me. And then my mother, after he passes out, takes my face between her hands and says, ‘I have to go. I’m so sorry.’ And I say ‘I know, go mama.’ and she leaves me there. The next day I wake up and I’m in this new world, a northern boarding school, wondering how I got there. Wondering how we as a family got there, from so much in love we couldn’t stand to wait another minute to the rape scene in that hotel room in Boston. Who were we? Whatever the answer, it wasn’t the one I’d grown up uncritically believing. 

Flash forward yet again to an autumn afternoon when I’m on the Outer Banks in my mid-20s; I open a dressing table drawer looking for a match to light a fire and find a photograph I’ve never seen before. It shows my parents at the time they got married. My young, tall, skinny father and my mother, in a sort of wide brimmed hat and elbow length gloves. What was this? Was this the famous elopement? But curiously enough, it wasn’t simply the eloping couple. Their parents were there with them, both sets, the Paynes, my father’s people, on one side, and the Roses, my mother’s, on the other. And it wasn’t nighttime either. There, sure enough, was the Justice of the Peace and his wife, too. Only not in curlers and her nightie, but coiffed and dressed and proper. 

I couldn’t grasp what I was seeing. But then, I focused in on my father’s face, my 20-year-old father, a college junior, and there was something so sad and tragic in his expression as he faced the camera. He looked like someone who’s listening to the lonesome whistle of a freight train he’s supposed to be on as it’s heading off without him. I knew that expression better than I knew my own reflection in the mirror. I’d never seen it before. I didn’t know anything about it, but that look defined what had set the emotional tone of our family. It was the worm that had been hidden in the apple. The photographer had stamped the date on the verso of the picture. September 15, 1954. I was born the following April. So, seven months. Not quite seven. It was like an unfolding mystery story, not exactly a murder, but a story where the initial facts turned out to be falsehoods, disinformation, a cloud of ink meant to obscure the truth of what had happened.

What had happened, of course, was that my mother had gotten pregnant and they’d had to get married. My mother had pressed that and my father’s response was what I saw and recognized in that long-hidden photo. So that scene in Boston, the sexual assault, which was so hard to square with my mother’s assertion of a love so powerful it couldn’t wait another minute took on the aspect of something extracted or coerced against the wishes of one partner, who wasn’t strong or confident enough to speak the truth of his own feeling. Yet neither did he step up to the plate and accept the situation; no, he took revenge in his own way over the next 14 years, my childhood, and the culminating scene and outcome of their choices and avoidances was the sexual assault in Boston, which left me adrift the following day at 14, a shattered little southern kid in what was for all intents and purposes a foreign country: aka, New England. 

After a year or so of trying to regain my bearings, I began to wonder how this happened. I began to wonder who they were, my parents, and how this happened. And if they weren’t who I thought they were, then maybe I wasn’t who I thought I was either. And if I wasn’t who I thought I was, who was I? And if I wasn’t who I thought I was are any of us who we think we are either? That was my dim beginning as a writer. Behind the spoken story, the avowed story, this sort of beautiful love story I’d taken as the true one, there was another story that no one told that had been playing out since the beginning. And in order for me to understand what had happened to me in that hotel room, and subsequently, I had to try to figure out what the hidden story had been. And so in a sense I, as victim, began to play the role of the detective, and the crime scene so to speak was my own family, which at first I thought was interesting because it was unique and later came to think was interesting because it wasn’t, because it was so completely common and so many of us live some version of it and set out in our own way on the same investigative journey I took and am still on. 

Did it feel like a betrayal?

Yeah, of course. But, as I went farther and farther into what I’ll call the investigation, I began to realize that at a certain point, I repeated much of what had been done that harmed me. Sort of in the same way that Lear and Oedipus end up implicated in the ultimate wrong or crime that they themselves have suffered. I suspect we’re all implicated in one way or another, at least I see myself as implicated in it. We want reality to be one thing — the way, for instance, Lear wants his daughters to love and honor him and show him gratitude for passing them the kingdom — but when Cordelia says, “I love according to my bond, no more nor less” — that is, when she, unlike her sisters, tells the truth — Lear is so incensed he banishes and disinherits her, and from there he brings the whole kingdom crashing down, all because reality is not as he requires it and so he tries to bend and force it — bend and force his children– to his wishes the same way we do, so many of us, or at least I have been guilty of myself, and that refusal to accept reality is the crime of which he’s guilty, and in my own life and my investigation I’ve come to see myself in many ways as like him. So yes to the betrayal I felt from my family, but also yes to my own implication in it. As a human being, I don’t think any of us are completely innocent in that, even with the best intentions, even after forty years in the role of the detective.

What do you hope the next generation of readers get from these books?

The movement toward selfhood as an evolving lifelong journey, that I think pays enormous reward. To me, it feels as if something in me wiser than I was set me on that path before I even knew the path existed. Do you know James Clerk Maxwell’s deathbed remark? “What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me.” Looking back, I feel something like that, something in me that was not me that was outside the reach of my awareness, compelled me toward a path before I understood there even was one.

When I look back, for instance, at my first novel Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street, and I see this kid who is an orphan, who’s in a remote Taoist monastery in China, whose father is an American, whose mother is a Chinese, who’s left in that monastery and grows up there practicing qi gong and then later sets off looking for his father and arrives in New York City. If you had asked me at the time, ‘David, do you feel like you’re an orphan, like you were exiled to a remote region in a foreign country, aka New England, and that writing would turn out to be the qi gong you practiced?’ I would have laughed at that idea, but now it seems like pretty much what happened. Something in me foretold the whole journey before I even took the first step. As time went on, my investigative process became more conscious. I zoomed in on more concrete aspects of my past and my family, but what drove and drives me to this day was never more than partly conscious. 

What are you working on now?

I’m working on another book, currently titled, What I Forgot to Tell You. It is still to be determined whether it is fiction or nonfiction, but it’s a continuation of the family story.

For more from David, check out his recent interview on the “Ideas” podcast, a Canadian Broadcast Corp. show. 

Early From the Dance
Ruin Creek
Gravesend Light
By David Payne
Cedar Lane Books
April 13, 2023