Here you can listen to four excerpts from their conversation. You will need REAL PLAYER in order to listen. Scroll down to read the transcription of the excerpts.

On writing about the very familiar; blinding intimacy.

On writing about one's own family members

On the people of Appalachia and whether or not they are stereotypes. Who is an "Appalachian."

On the power of parable and storytelling -- the truth contained in the story itself.

JO: One of the things, one of the difficulties that I had was writing AT HOME was, as it turned out, I knew West Virginians and West Virginia too well. I couldn't quite get them down because I knew them as well as you know your own family, or you know your wife. Not as a subject for research, that you can quantify or make statements about, but with an intimacy that was in the end blinding.

After my father died, I was able to have a certain distance. A fishing pal of mine, he'd catch a bass and say, a fish don't know a thing about water until you take him out of it. I thought that point was exactly so, that a person immersed in a culture might not be the best person to write about that culture.

TK: John, this problem of blinding intimacy, as you put it, this isn't the kind of thing I experience when I am deep into the writing of something I've done all the research on and I happen to see one of the people I'm writing about on the street and I want to say, go away, go back into my computer or typewriter. This is a little different. Is this the kind of thing that you've lived in a town so long that you don't see it anymore?

JO: No, the people that I met on the streets downtown were as familiar to me as my family. The way they talked, the way they acted, I felt very comfortable with them. This landscape around me I had seen all the time.

TK: Did you find that you had to go back and listen to them again? What happens to me in those situations is that I stop paying a certain kind of attention. I'm so aware of how they talk that I couldn't possibly reproduce it.

JO: That was part of it, I couldn't see what was distinctively Appalachian about these people because they seemed so familiar to me. I struggled time and time again. This one guy, George Dice, the blind guy downtown, every time I would sit down to write about George Dice, he seemed to be just George Dice, not an Appalachian, not this, not that. I didn't understand what about him made him distinctively anything except George Dice.

TK: That may after all be what makes him distinctive...

JO: I understand that it's a delusion of some kind, one of the mind games that you get into, that I got into, but I couldn't sort that out. I kept becoming defensive and trying to insist that he wasn't a caricature, wasn't a cartoon, but a real person.

TK: I remember this. I remember having some arguments with you when you were struggling to carve out something like a special species of human being called the Appalachian. And a lot of when I visited you that time, a lot of what we talked about sounded fairly universal. I think that when it started to work, oddly, or paradoxically, to catch the real character of this place, is when you stopped putting so damn much pressure on yourself to find it.

JO: You're quite right, I stopped trying to defend, create. What I wanted to do was just get George Dice as a knew him on the page. TK: What Wordsworth calls emotion recollected in tranquility.

JO: And forget whether this fits a pattern or doesn't fit a pattern, to try to dig down into the people themselves, and into the experience itself and try to get that as economically as I could, as cleanly as I could, on the page, and the same with my own feelings, my own reactions to the community.

JB: In my mind, there were certain areas, beyond whether the book was reviewed well, beyond those things, there were other areas that were terribly important to me. One was my wife's family. Her family is portrayed in there. they came from a generation - Becky's aunts, they are in their seventies now -- they came from a generation where you simply did not talk about mental illness. That was right up there with being a criminal. You didn't talk about it. As it turns out, one of the most moving things I found in the research for the book was Becky's grandmother, who grew up in the boomtown/lumbertown of Cass, after I think the fourth child began to have serious emotional troubles. She began to pull away. Finally, Farmer, her husband, had to take her to the mental hospital. And she would seem to recover, and come back, and then pull away again, and finally it got to the point where she's be alright until they reached a certain point on the mountain road when she could see into Cass, and she would pull away, it was just the sight of the town. Farmer, the husband, kept a journal where he kept weather, the events of the town, not a big deal journal. It was in first person, I saw this or I saw that. There was only one entry in the journal written in third person. It just reads "Farmer took Bess to the hospital for the last time today." And that's it. Right there in the middle of all that first person. He apparently didn't have whatever it was to write that in first person. He had to go into third to write that. Anyway that story was so moving and evocative of what it was like to grow up in a boomtown and what boomtown conditions were like in the twenties that I wanted to use that, and I did use it.

TK: I don't think so, not on the page. The point is, it's out of the fear of writing stereotypes I suspect is how you end up writing stereotypes. First of all, West Virginia does not have a corner on the market for good ol' boys drinking beer.

JO: That's one of the ways I tried to handle it. What I said was, these guys come as close to hillbillies as anyone I've met, since I moved in, but I've met men like this -- deckhands in Kodiak, cowboys in bars in Montana, I'm sure there are Louisiana oil field roughnecks, lumberjacks in Maine. I mean, there's nothing distinctly Appalachian about these knockabout American guys. You can find them -- their accents are different, but you can find people like this, in fact, I have, all over the country. But at the same time, let readers know, don't be jumping to the wrong sort of conclusions.

TK: My point is that I think you've avoided this nicely. One of the things that anthropologists sometimes do is that they become such advocates for the people they've been studying and writing about that they will not include true information that they think might suggest anything negative about these people or even worse, that might make them seem condescending. But that's part of the writer's job to make sure that doesn't happen.

JO: Well if the anthropologist is doing that, the anthropologist is writing fiction. George Dice, the guy has one eye, is a sort of savant, and if you tell him when you were born, he'll stand there, his head rocks back, like a man in trance for a second, and then he'll tell you the phase of the moon the night you were born. And if you go to an almanac and check it you'll find out it's true. He also has every region of the country memorized. He could look at your license plate and tell you what part of the state, what city you came from. Apparently most states have the numbers for their license plates regionalized. He had the whole damn table memorized for all the states. He's an eccentric guy.

TK: In the category of very useful knowledge...

JO: I didn't say it was useful, I said it was interesting!

TK: It is interesting.

JO: He walks around town -- he's only got one eye, he walks around town with a pair of binoculars. I could write about the lawyer the doctor the banker the minister, and readers are going to remember George Dice and the people in the laundromat because they are Appalachians.

TK: I was just thinking about a doctor I'd heard of who came to West Virginia and talked about what incredibly strange and awful things he encountered there. And I'm sure he did, and one does, anywhere one goes, but it's this perspective. I'm writing about a guy now who looks at the whole world from the bottom of the barrel. It's a very simple shift, but if you looked at the world through the eyes of the poor, it's not the same as looking at it from the point of view of a wealthy man, obviously. But it's really profoundly different. This is part of the justification for writing a book like yours, you see this stuff fresh again. But what you see is not just this guy is kind of freaky, but you see this guy as a human being and that he's really not that different from you and me. There's a great line -- I'm, not saying this very eloquently, but there's a line I keep coming back to that's in one of Joseph Mitchell's collections, the great nonfiction writer who wrote for The New Yorker, I'm paraphrasing:

"Some people have taken to calling the kinds of people in this book the little people. I find this phrase obnoxious -- They're just as big as you are, whoever you are."

I'm not trying to make some kind of great socio-political point here. Once you really enter into this compact with yourself, you try to see things through the eyes of someone else, or at least to look at those people who are outside or who are different from you, to try to begin understand why they do what they do, and why they are who they are...

JO: That brings me back to Nikki Giovanni's poem again, and the problem that she was talking about. How do you at one and the same time, talk about the experience of being black in this black community was immeasurably rich and something she wouldn't trade for all the world. And at the same time, not defend poverty, not defend racism, in the present or in the past. It's a complicated thing for people who write.

TK: I guess it is, John, but I think the solution is to tell stories. There's that deep human response to narrative. For me, you can perform all the exegesis you want on the stories you've heard, that you are going to assemble into your book, but what you're really looking for are stories for which there is no exegesis that is as satisfying as the story itself.

JO: I got it. No question in my mind about it. At the end of AT HOME, I tried to say...

TK: Don't give the ending away!

JO: One of the things I was struggling with was my best, most composite, most accurate definition of Appalachia. One of the things I realized was that I understood it best in stories. I grew up with my father, who saw the world as linked parables. Everything shaped itself into a story for my father, when he told a story or a parable at the table, the truth wasn't in the analysis of the story, the truth was the story somehow. Without realizing it until recently, that had a profound effect on me.

TK: The thing is you now have a really good editor. You were going to write a paragraph that said all of that, but didn't illustrate it, didn't show it, just said it all, and he had you cut it. Good for him!

JO: But anyway, I ended up in the end using those stories. There's one story about Henry Ford, who loved to come down here to go trout fishing. He sponsored uplifiting schools, paid for them. So every time he came down he would visit that school. The people who ran the school were obviously quite eager to please their benefactor. Ford referred to the people down here as "my Anglo-Saxons." He loved them the way people love their pets, beyond the fact that "Anglo-Saxon" makes no sense describing these people. Anyway, he would come down, and the people at the school had an ox cart that they kept only for the purpose of picking Mr. Ford up at the train station--an old English ox cart -- and the kids dressed in weird, hillbilly outfits, anglo-saxon outfits, and they would drive Ford to the school and talk in By-Cracky English to Mr. Ford while he handed out dimes, and do authentic Appalachian dances invented in England. And so on and so on. That story helps me to understand Appalachia more than pages and pages of analysis.

TK: It reminds me of something I'd heard the other day. I've been in Haiti a lot as you know. I was thinking the people at the bottom of the barrell ten to understand the people in power better than the people in power understand them. The reason is, they have to, in order to get those nickels and dimes.

JO: But the people at the bottom have their own set of delusions. They are as deluded about the big show, and they have their own preoccupations. It isn't that they see truth more clearly. They see certain truths more clearly. They see the dynamic of power and understand the way it operates and if they want the M&M's they have to push that button. And that is something that the people at the top don't have to know. I used to think the people at the bottom knew America better or had a clearer picture, but I don't think that's so.

TK: I do think its probably true that they understand the people at the top better than they understand them.

JO: Well, they understand the dynamic of power better, because they are on the end of stick that hits them. They understand it more clearly. There were stories, and there were other stories. Here's a really quick one.