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David Bradley
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Associate Professor David Bradley grew up “on the verge of history.”
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Visiting Professor David Bradley recently accepted a full-time position as Associate Professor of Fiction in the Creative Writing Program. Author of the novels South Street and The Chaneysville Incident, Bradley is currently completing a nonfiction book on race in America, entitled The Bondage Hypothesis. We recently caught up with Professor Bradley to talk about his new book and his new job at the UO.
CAS: Congratulations on your new job in the Creative Writing Program. Why did you decide to take the permanent position here?
DB: This is my third stint as a Visiting Professor at the UO. The first time I was here, in spring 2000, I had a great time. The spring’s so nice in Eugene, I think I got snookered! But I like the Creative Writing Program. It has a lot of potential and flexibility, and it’s great for writers.
CAS: You write a lot about history and the idea of “home.” Does Eugene feel like a home to you?
DB: Well, once you’ve had a home, I think you can live almost anywhere. I like Eugene and that’s important. But the things I like here are off-beat. I like the Prefontaine running trail, and I love the river, and Springfield. I love the weirdness. Eugene is a real place.
CAS: Has Oregon influenced your writing?
DB: I’m not sure yet. It takes so long for things to influence my writing— I might not live long enough for Oregon to influence my writing! But I like to get into the history of things, the background. I don’t know enough about Eugene yet to write about it directly, but there comes a time when you want to get to know a place on a more ongoing basis, and I’m ready to do that here. But we’ll see. I’m still writing about my hometown!
CAS: Tell us about your hometown.
DB: I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, in a small town called Bedford. It’s a very historic place. I remember when I went to college my father told me: “never forget that where you grew up was once on the verge of history.” And I went to school, looked around in the books and found out he was right. At one point it was the outpost of western civilization.
CAS: Did a lot of your hometown history go into Chaneysville?
DB: Yes, basically that’s the town. Very little history in the novel is made up. Why make it up? People do so many cockamamie things.
CAS: For you, what is the relationship between “history” and a “story”?
DB: History is a story. I grew up with so many people behind me— aunts and uncles and all their stories—that for years I didn’t think I did anything of my own accord. There are fundamental reasons why people do things, and you can’t know those unless you know where people come from.
CAS: Is it especially important for Americans to pay attention to where they come from?
DB: I think so. Our personal histories are important. When I was about 30 or 35, after my father had died, I came across a book about the Ku Klux Klan. It mentioned a town very near the one I grew up in, and it talked about how the Klan in that town—in 1922 or so—was threatening to castrate a black boy. And I’m sitting there, thinking this has nothing to do with me, when suddenly it hits me that that boy was my father. Because he was the black boy who wanted to go to college, and the Klan didn’t like that idea. My father never told me about that experience, but looking back, I can see all kinds of behavior that must have come out of it. I understand him better now than when he was alive, and its not just age and distance; it’s that I know more about the conditions of his history.
CAS: There are a lot of untold stories in American history, and Chaneysville deals explicitly with the theme of repressed historical narratives. How do we tell these untold stories?
DB: Well, that’s what writers do: tell the stories. And if we don’t have the facts, we make them up. But we make them up knowing what we can about a place and the people who lived there. The wonderful thing about being a writer is that people now respond to the same stories people responded to 2000 years ago. You can dress stories up, but there are always the same rhythms. I mean, you can read Aristotle, you can read Shakespeare, and it’s remarkable: you will respond to them almost the same way an audience did eight hundred, a thousand years ago did. Because people still do the same things. We still get up every morning and drink whatever we drink, and do whatever we do, and God only knows why.
CAS: Your new book, The Bondage Hypothesis, examines some of the negative ways of thinking we’ve inherited from our past. Can you tell us more about this project?
DB: In America, we’ve fallen into this mode of living with problems instead of curing them. And we also have certain erroneous notions about how this country came to be. Some of our ideas of history take people out of the equation: that’s the basis of The Bondage Hypothesis. The book asks questions about history and race in America, but it also gets into issues of historiography: how and why we’ve inherited the particular theories of history and race that we have.
CAS: What do you hope people will take away from the book?
DB: I want people to stop repeating the same negative behavior. I hope readers will finish the book and reflect upon why, historically, people do the things they do. Then we can examine issues in the world today, give up some of the entrenched language, ask what we can do, and make it happen.
—Kate Westhaver
(Photo by Audrey Gomez)
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1245 University of Oregon • Eugene, OR • 97403-1245
(541) 346.3950 • FAX (541) 346.3282 • alumnidev@cas.uoregon.edu
Copyright © 2003 University of Oregon
Updated May 6, 2003
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