SoMa Literary Review - The Resident Redneck

The Resident Redneck

By Dustin Wells

Writing is one thing. Getting a story out there is quite another. And getting people to read it is the final and increasingly the most tricky part of the three stage writing rocket. So when I got a story published on StorySouth.com, I was begging for readers. I mass emailed everyone while feigning humility-- If you have time, I got a story out there. I harangued my people in the offices around me. Did you read my story? When Michah asked me to lunch, I replied, “Read my story.” Bobby needed my keys to get to the fax machine. “Read my story,” was my only answer. The copy machine ran out of toner because I printed out fifty copies of my story and handed them out like a newsy by the water cooler.

I didn’t get the reaction I expected. No one hoisted me upon their shoulders and carried me to the bar for free drinks. Nor did people feel humbled in my presence. My friends rolled their eyes. My most honest friend, Ardis, threw her hands up in her very Cuban way and told me I had a sick mind. My girlfriend gave me a nervous laugh.

I ascribe all those reactions to the fact that I’m a Southern Writer. Not the nostalgic Southern of catching fireflies in mason jars, but rather more in the Southern Gothic tradition, like when a family picks up a hitchhiker in that Flannery O’Connors tale and he kills them all, like that Steel Magnolias movie where the bride dies, like Fried Green Tomatoes where latent lesbians kill an abusive husband, like that Tom Franklin story where young parents daydream about killing their colicky baby. For whatever reason, Southern folk are comfortable with violence. It’s just a lamentable but acceptable fact of life.

For the most part, people in San Francisco accept my Southern ways. I’m like the Resident Redneck. I pick my banjo when I’m supposed to be working. My penchant for whiskey. My co-dependant relationship with my dog. My guns. The stars and bars nailed over my backdoor. Yeah, I’m not sugarcoated pop country music, where crooners evoke you to be good and love America and Jesus. I’m more rockabilly, a nasty genre of poor white trash with electrified guitars who wail about drinking shine and fucking in cars.

Looking for a more literary audience, I contacted the manager of the MFA in Writing and Consciousness program I attended. She had access to these mass emailing lists that can hit everyone from the various cohorts over the years. Being that writing victories are so few and far between, I thought that the alumnae might like to see that a fellow graduate was writing and publishing. I was showboating too, you know, the hey-look- at-me, strutting in the end zone kind of thing. Well, the manager refused. Said my story was . . . how’d she say it . . . “was making fun of women’s studies.”

I was pissed off. First off, you’d have to be an idiot to come to that conclusion. And secondly, even if I was lambasting women’s whatever, storySouth.com won the Pushcart Prize for best literary website, and they liked my story, and it wasn’t for her rash judgment to censor it from a prospective audience. I mean, if people want to hate me, they can hate me themselves. Anyway, it wasn’t like she was sending it out with a Redneck Advisory Label, she just wasn’t sending it out at all.

It just brought up everything I hated about that writing program, which was run by a bunch of upper-class housewives, who imagined themselves to be risky, cutting edge radicals, who were changing the world from their fancy houses in the Berkeley hills. I had always butted heads with them. They told me that as a writer I had to imagine a solution to the problems that I wrote about. Shit, if I had any answers to anything, I wouldn’t be a fucking writer. They imagined writers to be shamans with the ability to magically change the world; I knew that writers were losers, derelicts, and near crazy people who were so surly and hateful that they chose to spend hours everyday alone with a computer screen while swilling coffee and chain smoking, rather than really interacting with the world. My professors always wanted me to tag on a happy endings to my stories in which the characters were redeemed. In their stories, Nazis saw the errors of their ways. Incest victims turned into lesbians and happily shunned the world of bad men forever. My attitude was, writing was just letting some of the poison out so it doesn’t kill you from within, and that in itself was good enough. And reading about the bad stuff was like taking a little rattlesnake venom as a preventative antidote.

The manager of the writing program always bugged the shit out of me. A Stanford graduate living in a $1400 one bedroom in the ghetto, she ranted against gentrification daily. She spent her spare time in bridal chat rooms calling people who were trying to get their weddings in the New York Times classists and bourgeois, yet she toted an engagement ring which she acquired at her fiancé’s summer home on the Russian River . She called yuppies “clones,” yet she dressed in the required boho outfit of a colorful third-world sarong wrapped around her thrift-store jeans.

My girlfriend asked me if I minded being a misunderstood artist. I said no, but it did bug me that the literate people of this city just wanted feel-good drivel. You know, the shit that lambastes the government, that preach-to-the-choir bullshit. The thing that bothered me most was that the people toting diversity the most were the very purveyors of censorship. But with their blinders, they only saw impoverished immigrant transgendered people-of-color as suitable diversity. It’s a weird time we live in. The Clean Air Act. No Child Left Behind. Celebrate Diversity. In my opinion, the so-called “activists” of this city are about as diverse as vanilla soy milk, the fancy kind you can only buy at Rainbow. That’s not a good metaphor, so I’ll try again. The “activists” of this city are about as diverse a vanilla soy milk, the fancy kind you can only buy at Rainbow, and when you open it up, you get 100% homogeneous, watered-down, politically-correct bullshit.

Also by Dustin Wells on SoMa Literary Review:

Writers Anonymous, Book Camp, Why Donna the Buffalo Sucks, H-U-S-T-L-I-N-G, Oranges in Niggertown & Loser School

Dustin Wells lives in San Francisco and is the author of the novel Cappuccino Cowboy. He currently has a very good story out on storySouth.com under the pen name Dusty Whales.