North Carolina Expatriate Writers
N C L R ONLINE
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“THE CURSE OF THE EXPATRIATE IS ALSO ITS GREATEST GIFT: WHILE YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN, HOME BECOMES WHEREVER YOU ARE. YOU LEARN TO DWELL. DISTANCE PROVIDES THE BEST SPOT TO PEEPING-TOM ON HOME. ALL HONEST SOUTHERNERS HAVE A LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SOUTH.” —Dale Ray Phillips
COURTESY OF DALE RAY PHILLIPS
DALE RAY PHILLIPS Dale Ray Phillips grew up in Haw River, North Carolina, where in the summers he worked at the local textile mill. He received an MFA from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he held the Lily Peters Fellowship in Fiction. He also received an MA from Hollins College (now University, where he won the James Andrew Purdy Award for Fiction. He held the Randall Jarrell Fellowship from UNC Greensboro and earned degrees in English and Anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill. He has taught writing at several universities, including the University of Arkansas, Clemson University, and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, and is currently on the faculty of Murray State University, where he has held the Watkins Endowed Chair of Creative Writing. He lives in Murray, Kentucky. Phillip’s short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Oxford American, Harper’s, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. They have been collected in Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best. His 1999 story collection My People’s Waltz, published by W.W. Norton, won the Discover Great New Writers Award and was an Editor’s Choice Pick from The New York Times. His stories are frequently celebrated for their combined lyricism and grit. He has professed confusion at the term “Rough South,” says he finds the phrase “dysfunctional family” to be “redundant,” and believes that “our hearts beat the same rhythms in most any environment and inside any chest.”2 GEORGE HOVIS: You left North Carolina initially to further your education. Would you say a bit about that decision and what you learned in each of the graduate programs in which you studied?
“IF MY STORIES MOVE A READER, IT’S BECAUSE OUR HEARTS BEAT THE SAME RHYTHMS IN MOST ANY ENVIRONMENT AND INSIDE ANY CHEST.”
DALE RAY PHILLIPS: I quit the MFA program in Greensboro in 1980 and moved to New York for around six months, working at Whaledent International, “manufacturers of fine dental equipment,” according to their letterhead. A warehouse worker, I offloaded trucks and kept the sweatshop-style assembly line supplied with tiny gold rods they cut to be used in root canals and implants. This was so long
—Dale Ray Phillips
ABOVE Dale Ray Phillips
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Quoted in Dale Ray Phillips, “What It Cost Travelers,” Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader, ed. Brian Carpenter and Tom Franklin (U of South Carolina P, 2012) 190–91.