A mere 1,400 feet from Flannery O’Connor’s family farm in Milledgeville, Ga., a brand new Super Wal-Mart spreads across the land. The irony isn’t lost on writer and history professor Greg Downs, a former Nashvillian whose newly released collection of short stories, Spit Baths, won the 2005 Flannery O’Connor Award from the University of Georgia Press. “O’Connor always feared that ‘town’ was coming to eat up their world, four to five miles away, and it surely has,” Downs says. ”So you can be standing in the house, looking at her perfectly preserved bedroom, with her crutches leaning against her bed, her desk still facing the back of her wardrobe, and hear broadcasting from the Wal-Mart down the road, loud calls for customer service on line three.” Downs doesn’t write about this new South of homogenous big-box retail and diversifying populations, of booming exurbs and shriveling small towns. The world he conjures in Spit Baths is closer to O’Connor’s own—informed by his observations of Elizabethtown, Ky., and Middle Tennessee—and it’s distinctly Southern. His characters are both obsessed with the past and in flight from it; they struggle to make sense of life where things are domestically or historically off-kilter. Downs seems to have taken to heart O’Connor’s adage: “To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world.” Though Flannery O’Connor Award-winning books are not required to be the least bit Dixiefied in tone or subject, it’s hard not to see Spit Baths as a particularly apt choice for the honor. Downs is both of the South and apart from it—by choice. His voice bears not a trace of Southern accent, and he teaches at City College of New York, where he’s working on a book of essays about “the meaning of Southernness in America” (working title: The History of the Nation of Defeat). To get literary purchase on his home region, Downs has mostly kept it at arm’s length for more than 10 years, calling Boston, Iowa City and Chicago home. Today he lives in Philadelphia with his wife Diane and their 10-week-old daughter, Sophia. (They also have a cat named Waylon—after Waylon Jennings.) In fact, his childhood was barely more wholesale Southern than his peripatetic adulthood has been. His first 12 years were roughly divided between Elizabethtown, where his mother’s family was rooted, and Kauai, Hawaii, where his father Monty Downs, an emergency room doctor, moved when Downs was 6 weeks old. Monty had grown up in Trinidad, the son of a research scientist, Wilbur Downs, who studied tropical diseases. He never lost his taste for island life, Downs says, and for a few years in the mid-’70s he gave up practicing medicine and joined a loose commune—“people who went out to sea to fish for fairly long stretches.” He and Downs’ mother had an off-and-on relationship for a while; they separated for good when Downs was around 10 years old. Monty still lives in Kauai, but he and Downs are close, talking on the phone weekly and playing online chess. They see each other once or twice a year. It was during college at Yale—where his father attended both college and medical school—that Downs first realized he should be writing about the South. “The people in my classes were writing stories about college or about their bland suburban towns, and I knew right away that the stories I had to tell were wholly different, and a lot more meaningful than most of theirs, even though some of them were more proficient writers,” he says. So far, those stories have often been inspired by Downs’ memories of Elizabethtown, a community that has long struck him as a sort of endangered species, and of his grandparents, who loomed large in his boyhood there. Downs was close to his maternal grandfather, who divorced his grandmother (“a good person but a fairly stern figure”) before he was born, and married several more times. (There’s some dispute, Downs says, as to whether his grandfather had five or seven wives.) “My grandfather was, to me, a kid in a big old body,” he says. “He taught me to whistle while we were watching the Miss America pageant on TV. He loved inconsequential things like that, whistling and weeding and frying bacon and listening to the Reds games.” Grandparents are central figures in several of the Spit Baths stories, such as the title piece, in which a young boy bonds with “Maw-Maw” before his mother shuttles him off to live with her in Springfield, Mo. “Last night,” Maw-Maw tells him while they’re sipping Grape Crush at a Laundromat, “the angels let me hear your record.… They played it, and it told me you were going to be a good boy, even when I won’t be there to tell you to be one. It told me no matter how old you were or what you ever saw, you wouldn’t let the world dirty you. There are going to be days when you won’t want to be a good boy anymore. But I want you to remember what I’m telling you. It’s who you are. You’re my good boy. You can’t escape that.” Though the women of Spit Baths are often feisty, self-sufficient females with a formidable presence—“She wouldn’t let a bird teach her how to fly,” another character says of Maw-Maw—these stories speak most forcefully about the lives of boys and men. And they’re infused with history, both real and invented: the middle-aged narrator of “A Comparative History of Nashville Love Affairs” distracts himself from his rickety marriage with thoughts of lovers past: Andrew and Rachel Jackson, Frank Goad Clement and his mistresses, former Nashville Mayor Bill Boner and his fourth wife, lounge singer Traci Peel. “It’s a shame that another person’s pain makes your own easier to take,” he muses. In “Ain’t I a King, Too?” a man on the run from responsibility hits Louisiana on the day after Huey P. Long’s assassination and takes up with some hardscrabble folks who point out that he greatly favors the late populist. “Emperor of the rednecks,” one of them jeers. And in “The Hired Man,” a professor nudged into early retirement imagines a watery death for George Washington: “[He] tumbled southward, through Philadelphia, the Delaware Bay, the Atlantic Ocean,” Downs writes. “The currents lifted his shoes, his fabled gold watch chain, his ivory teeth. His bare feet cartwheeled above his unwigged head; his body danced over the sharks.” At age 3, Downs was already obsessed with history. He begged his mom repeatedly to read to him from a book in a series on U.S. presidents, Meet John Kennedy. (That probably also had a lot to do, he says, with the fact that his grandfather’s last wife was Catholic and had installed a picture of Kennedy in their house.) He devoured several titles in the series and later picked up other obsessions, among them military board games and baseball statistics. But he never lost his taste for history and books. One evening at Pizza Hut when he was around 7 years old, a cousin spilled a Coke, which spread quickly across the table. Downs recalls that he was reading an older cousin’s history textbook and—determined to finish a paragraph—he stayed in his seat, eyes glued to the page, until the soda had dripped onto his pants. In his grandmother’s eyes, he recalls, “this was not an indicator of future success.” Many young writers work adolescence into their first books, but Downs—who spent his teen years as a student at University School of Nashville—is more interested in the “less told and more peculiar” material mined from his childhood than any adolescent coming-of-age tropes. “When you’re 7 you’re still free to be weird because you like things that other people don’t like, or you like things you’re not supposed to like.” In fact, he says, 7-year-olds are an awful lot like writers. “You spend more time thinking and doing things by yourself than you should, and you’re not interested in the things you’re supposed to be interested in—or you’re caught up in the vulgar, or the gross, or the mundane.” But maybe it’s that Downs’ young-adult experiences are just a bit more difficult to translate to story than the things he saw and did years earlier. Alys Venable, who taught Downs seventh- and eighth-grade English at USN, remembers him as “unusual in many ways. His reading and his vocabulary were way beyond his years, and so was his knowledge of history and of current events. He was not only well informed, he was quite opinionated, and he had data to support his opinions.” She remembers that Downs got into an argument with Margaret Thatcher’s son Mark, who came to speak to USN students one day. Thatcher, she says, “gave an impassioned but rather vague speech in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament (the U.S.’s disarmament), and Greg disagreed. At the end of the period, most of the other students left, but Greg and a friend or two remained to continue the debate. Greg had all the information, and his opponent finally admitted defeat—or at least admitted that he couldn’t make Greg change his mind.” For Venable, this event was a precursor to Downs’ success as a writer. “Writing takes a lot of courage, and good writing requires the ability to stick to your own vision, regardless of the pressure of authorities.” Academics came easily to Downs, but he struggled to succeed in sports, persevering in basketball even after his coach, the late Larry Matthews, advised him to quit. Downs never became a star player, but “going from an F to a C+ basketball player meant a lot to me,” he says. At Yale, Downs started taking fiction writing seriously, but he also tried journalism as the city editor of the Yale Daily News. From 1990 to 1992, during summers home, he interned at The Tennessean. He had fun soaking up the small-town political rallies, getting a bead on inner-circle Nashville politics. He even got a crack at reporting on an outsize personality when another reporter grew weary of covering Tony Alamo, and Downs got assigned to Alamo’s trial in Florida. “He told me I personally was going to be condemned to hell,” Downs remembers. After earning a B.A. in history and teacher preparation in 1993, Downs returned to Nashville, thinking that immersion would help him write about some of the ideas he’d been working through at Yale. The Tennessean wanted him on staff, but Downs worried that a reporting job would sap his will to write on his own. So he wound up back at USN, now the English teacher rather than the eager student, the varsity coach instead of the team center. “I had this fantasy that I’d be this great basketball coach,” he says, “while also teaching English and writing novels and chaperoning school trips, as if time could be stretched like a rubber band.” The two years he taught at his alma mater were “very exciting, but surreal at the same time. You walk out one door, and four years later you’re back in the same place but in a totally different costume. There was the feeling that ‘there’s been a little bit of a mistake.’ ” Ultimately, the experience gave him fodder for fiction—such as a dreamlike story called “Field Trip,” in which a young, insecure teacher boards a school bus with his passel of students, only to find himself naked, his testicles “flat on the bus’s plastic brown seat like two deflated balloons”—and en route to his childhood home. But Downs needed distance; he was living too close to the source to write about it. “Probably now I could,” he says, “but I couldn’t at 22, 23.” He took a teaching job at a day school near Boston and enrolled in creative writing classes at Harvard Extension School, where one of his teachers, Tom Bailey (now at Susquehanna University), encouraged him to apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for an MFA. “Tom Bailey was the person who made me understand that writing was hard, that it was—like my experiences in basketball—something you had to fail at and fail at and fail again, hopefully failing better,” Downs says. The workshop, he says, lived up to its reputation: challenging, inspiring, intensely competitive. “From day one you’re surrounded by—and at times choking in—writing,” he says. “It was a big shift from treating writing as this secret thing I did at night, literally on a portable typewriter in my car, so I wouldn’t wake up my roommates.” At Iowa, he wrote a novel, Kentucky’s Daughter, which bagged the James Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. He’s now revising the book. Set in the Great Depression, it tells the story of a woman who goes on a cross-country crime spree after her father, a bootlegger, is assassinated. Downs started getting his first stories published after he moved to Chicago in 1999, where he took a job as editor of the Hyde Park Herald and later taught at DePaul and simultaneously earned a master’s in history at Northwestern. Ultimately, he decided a Ph.D. was in order: “I wanted to be able to get a better job than I could have gotten at the time with an M.F.A. I wanted to actually learn something, and I knew that going back into history would lead me into more stories.” During this time he revisited some existing stories, many of which had sprawled to 30 or 40 pages each. That’s a hard length to place in a literary magazine. It’s also off-putting to many readers. So Downs got ruthless. “Adam’s Curse” was his most dramatic cut: he distilled it from a 57-page story he’d been toying with for years to a 600-word piece that Publishers Weekly called “as disorienting as it is beautiful.” Putting the same principle to work in culling stories for the manuscript that became Spit Baths, Downs withdrew a few of the stories, such as the first one he’d published, at 28, after—aspiring writers, take note—some 200 rejections. (He estimates that he’s now received around 500 no-thank-yous.) He ended up with a collection that was more thematically focused, less a grab bag of solid stories than “actually a book that someone might read from start to finish,” he says. Last fall, when Downs got the call telling him he’d won the O’Connor award, which typically draws 250 to 300 entries per year and is among the top national honors for story collections, he thought it might be a prank played by one of his old high school friends. Ever the skeptical reporter, he Googled the number on his caller ID. Sure enough, it was University of Georgia Press. Editor Andrew Berzanskis says there was no set criteria upon which Spit Baths was chosen. It was simply “one of the most interesting and lively” submissions they received in 2005. “Greg is a writer’s writer, using his intellect and sense of history to play character and landscape against literary forms in an original way,” Berzanskis says. “But he’s also very much a reader’s writer, and his stories are consistently interesting, funny and well-told.” Downs says he’s heard from people who grew up in small towns all over the country that the book resonates with their memories of home. “There is something about the experience of small towns in decline that isn’t particularly Southern, but part of many people’s experiences for the past 60 or 80 years.” But the regional honesty of the work is what many of his readers embrace. Ann Wheeler, who taught him in AP English at USN, says she’s interested by how “deeply Southern” the book feels. “Greg’s stories really tap into that deep feeling of place that is peculiarly Southern. The voices feel like the voices of people I grew up with.” And Downs was careful to include certain objects and places that quietly but poignantly signify the South—Little Debbie treats, for instance, appear in a couple of the stories. To Downs they read as Southern (and indeed, they’re made in Tennessee), but they aren’t a cutesy cliché. “I thought Goo-Goo Clusters would be a little too precious at this point,” he says. He’s now working on a story set at a Waffle House, a setting he knows, for his audience of literary fiction readers, is loaded with double meaning. But Downs simply loved the place growing up. “When I was kid, there was no irony about Waffle House.”
