Photos by Russ Houston

The [not quite] elementary Watson

Meridian native and Mississippi State graduate Brad Watson has been a teacher, carpenter, truck tire changer, fire alarm system salesman, and Hollywood garbageman. Now, he's the author of a stunning and highly acclaimed collection of short stories-a new career, perhaps, but not one that came out of nowhere.

By Allen Snow

When Brad Watson left Mississippi fresh out of high school, he headed for Hollywood with the intention of making a name for himself. And he did, but not as an actor in Tinsel Town, and not until more than two decades down the road.

Today, dressed in faded jeans and a khaki shirt and exuding absolutely no trace of pretension, Watson looks to the casual observer like anything but a star of the silver screen.

He has found success, though, as author of Last Days of the Dog-Men, a highly acclaimed collection of short stories with an unusual theme.

Part good old boy, part literary savant, and keen observer of the human condition, the soft-spoken teacher of creative writing at the University of Alabama discovered his true calling almost by accident. After his sojourn in Hollywood, where he paid the rent by working as a garbageman, he came home to Meridian and got a job as a carpenter. College wasn't in his plans, but thanks to the cajoling of relatives, he finally took the preparatory exams and enrolled at Meridian Junior College.

He did well enough on the entrance exams to get into an Honors English class, where he studied Southern literature. It was there that he found one of the great passions of his life.

"I hadn't had any previous interest in writing. I wasn't even that big a reader as a boy. Well, I always read, but not anything 'literary.' I got turned on and started trying to write. I thought I would be a teacher. We read a lot of Faulkner and Welty and Flannery O'Connor and Robert Penn Warren. And we read a book by Madison Jones who used to teach at Auburn, A Cry of Absence, a '60s civil rights novel-a really good book. So that's how I started trying to write stories."

Watson's decision to continue his education at Mississippi State also was influenced by family. "My step-father and my then-father-in-law had gone to State, and some of my cousins had."

He came to the Starkville campus in the summer of 1976 and graduated in 1978 with a bachelor's degree in English, then went on to the University of Alabama, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and American literature.

"I wrote what I consider to be my first half-decent short story my first summer at State. Price Caldwell read it and said some nice things about it. He encouraged me and was really helpful. E.O. Hawkins was department head then. Also, Joe Stockwell was teaching there at the time, and I always enjoyed his classes. Bob Phillips was one of my professors; he taught Southern lit. And Pat Creevy was one of my favorite teachers. He taught British lit. He was fresh out of Harvard when I got there."

Watson's first published short story appeared in Intro, an anthology of stories by people in writing programs around the country. He was 23 years old.

"They used to do it as a little book, and it was a pretty prestigious publication for a student. But nothing ever came of it. You always hear that you'll get calls from editors and agents after something like that, but as it turned out, the publication went out of business that year halfway through the printing. It really flopped.

"Then I published a couple more stories in the Black Warrior Review. After that, I basically stopped trying to send things out. I didn't like the way my work was going, and I wasn't very happy with my life, so I just went off and quit for a while, to reassess things."

"Quitting" meant working briefly for a political campaign, working on the Alabama Gulf Coast with a weekly newspaper, and then becoming a correspondent for the Montgomery Advertiser, where he eventually was promoted to state editor. When he left the newspaper, he worked for an advertising agency in Montgomery writing ad copy. "I didn't like that. I only stayed a year."

He returned to the University of Alabama in 1988 to teach part time and to get back into writing. Years earlier, a seed had been planted, and during the intervening years of reassessment it had germinated.

"When I was a graduate student here, I was at a party and I overheard someone tell a story about a woman who had gotten back at her boyfriend or husband for cheating on her by having his dog put to sleep. I thought, 'Jeez, what a thing to do.'

"That got me to thinking about the idea of someone using someone's pet for revenge. I was writing stories about 'love gone awry' at the time, and that was the germ. So I started writing about it, and I wrote a couple of drafts of a short story that was vastly different from the one I ended up writing. I started kind of collecting dog stories from friends and from the newspaper, and from observations-watching people with dogs. I became a real observer, thinking that I would write a novel that somehow incorporated all these dog stories and anecdotes. But it never really worked out. I wrote a lot of pages over the course of a year or two, and then I just put it away.

"When I worked as a journalist in the '80s, I basically quit writing fiction for several years, and it just sat there.

"I finally went back to it, and a couple of years after I started writing fiction again, I picked it up with a fresh approach.

"But in the meantime, I had collected so many stories that I had more than one dog story to tell. I knew by then that it wasn't going to be a novel-I couldn't make that idea work. But I had several dog stories that were worth writing, and because I was sort of on a roll with it, I kept going."

When Watson's big break finally came, he wasn't really even looking for it.

"I wasn't sending the manuscript around. I had decided that I was going to write a novel and that I would publish a collection of short stories maybe some day after that if anybody wanted it.

"But I had a couple of stories in Story magazine, and my editor at W.W. Norton & Co. was then at Harcourt Brace and she also was on the advisory board for Story. She liked one of my stories enough to contact me. So I told her I had a collection and sent it to her, and in a few weeks she called back and said that she'd like to represent it to the publisher.

"In the meantime, while we were in preliminary discussions about the editing, she got an offer from Norton and accepted it. She said she wanted to take my manuscript with her if I agreed, and I said yes.

"Norton is not a big, faceless conglomerate. They're still a publishing house, one of the older ones and one of the few that hasn't been swallowed by some giant corporation. They're pretty old-fashioned and low-key, but very stable."

Watson signed a two-book contract with Norton. Last Days of the Dog-Men was published in April, and he currently is at work on a novel that he hopes to finish in about a year.

"Last year, I only wrote about a hundred pages on it. Now, I'm going back and revising a lot of that and rethinking some things. I tend to work pretty fast on first drafts. I hope to have the first draft pounded out this fall and be working on the second draft by spring. I don't want to say too much yet about the plot."

Sales of his first book have been impressive, beyond the publisher's-and Watson's-expectations. It's in the third printing now, and Norton has sold the rights to a German publisher for translation and to a British publisher. In addition, Dell Publishers has purchased the paperback rights and will publish it, probably next spring.

"It's had more than 30 reviews, and not a negative one in the bunch. I've been lucky with it."

Those positive reviews have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Elle magazine, Publishers Weekly, Newsday, and Globe.

The Times reviewer calls the stories

". . . weird and wise, sometimes gruesome and often brilliant. . . . Written in crisp, rhythmic prose, Mr. Watson's work manages to avoid the showboating and fey self-esteem that infect so much contemporary short fiction. His men, women and dogs-those wonderful dogs!-are superbly imagined. And in each and every story they come alive with honest, thrumming energy."

Watson's work on Dog-Men wasn't finished when he sent the last proofing galley to Norton. In fact, the really exhausting part was just beginning.

"I've driven about 15,000 miles this summer, between April and August, all over the Southeast and up the East Coast to New York and back down, and out to the West Coast. I've had something like 60 book signings and readings, and about 25 interviews, mostly with local media.

"When I got back, I felt like I could sleep for a month. It was chaotic. Then in August I went up to the Breadloaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. It was 10 days and was a very good experience. We had something like five or six readings each day and panel discussions and workshops.

"I had been working on the novel last winter, but I've gotten away from it-not intentionally. Traveling so much, and especially when I caught the flu on the road, I just lost all my work habits. I've been trying to get back to it. I'm doing some work this week on it, finally, and I feel pretty good about it."

Watson spends some quality time with Binx, named after the narrator in Walker Percy's novel, The Moviegoer. Binx has achieved celebrity status as one of the fattest cats in Tuscaloosa County.

What are his future writing plans?

"Well, I'm still fooling around some with short stories, but I really want to concentrate on writing a novel. I've got, as a matter of fact, about four I want to write-that I have blocked out and partially written. But I'm trying to not stray ahead, because it dissipates your energy. So I'm trying to stick with this one, but yeah, I have plenty of novels that I want to write and they all seem viable.

"As for short stories, I'm not really driven to write them anymore. I used to be driven to write the perfect story-and sometimes I still think the perfect short story is the most beautiful literary form you can work in-but now I'm more interested in the novel.

"It's been a real leap. But it seemed to be a natural progression. My concepts before were short story concepts, but now they seem not to fit as well into the short story form. So I hope they fit into a novel. I'm doomed if they fit into novellas, because nobody will publish manuscripts 60 or 70 pages long anymore [laughing]."

Watson lives in a quiet neighborhood in east Tuscaloosa with his wife of six years, Jeanine, their three-year-old son Owen, and two cats. His 23-year-old son Jason graduated from Mississippi State last May with a degree in forestry.

His own taste in reading tends toward contemporary Southern writers.

"I really like to read Richard Ford and Barry Hannah. And Larry Brown-I just finished his new book; it's not even published yet. I had a galley copy of it, and I really like Larry's stuff. And I like Cormac McCarthy. Everybody's reading his work now, but I like his early novels, before he came out with All the Pretty Horses.

"I also love Tim O'Brien's work, and Padgett Powell's, Jim Harrison's-and some foreign writers, like Ishiguru and Ondaatje. I recently read a wonderful collection of stories by Randall Kenan called Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. Thom Jones' stories, and Tim Gautreaux's, and a new collection by Charles D'Ambrosia called The Point. I've got a huge stack of novels by new writers beside the bed. And I read some pop fiction, too, mostly mysteries in the old hard-boiled voice, Chandler, McDonald, and nowadays some of James Lee Burke. I had read him before he turned to crime fiction.

"I was through El Paso this summer and I went into a bookstore there where McCarthy shops. I asked the clerk about him, and she said, 'Yes, he's a good customer-he looks like a golfer.' And I said, 'I hear he is a golfer.' I guess it's that Scottish blood, you know.

"I enjoy golfing, too. Jason, my oldest son, and I played over at State about three weeks ago. That new course is nice."

Regardless of the level of success he achieves as a writer, Watson plans to continue teaching. Although it's difficult to quantify, he is a firm believer in the symbiotic relationship between writing and the teaching of it.

"Writing is such a private act. But you can go into class and open up and talk to the students about your habits and you can encourage them to develop good writing habits, and you also can talk to them about attitudes. Not just about enduring all the years of rejection, but about developing healthy attitudes toward the work ethic in writing.

"It has to be something you do every day in your life, a part of your life, and not something you treat as an occasional activity. Talking to students about that sort of thing and looking at their work helps me to keep a workaday attitude myself.

"I feel good, now that this book is out, about being able to go into class and encourage those writers and tell them that everything they're going through is normal and that all their doubts are normal. If they're talented, it's possible for them to get to where they want to be if they'll work at it. I think it's healthy to do both: to write and to teach others to do it.

"Some people criticize the network of academic writers and the concept of 'teaching' writing, but it's a bad rap. Why should we think that writers don't need the same kind of apprenticeship and the same kind of encouragement and mentoring that musicians or painters do? Or any craftsman or artist, for that matter. It's no different than having music schools and art schools."

Since the publication of Last Days of the Dog-Men, Watson has been asked the inevitable question more times than he cares to remember, so we thought it would be appropriate to ask it once more. What about your dog?

He laughs, but not jovially. "I don't have one."

Then he shifts slightly in his chair and looks toward the one window in the room, and when he begins to speak again, the mystery of why some people write becomes less of a mystery.

"We always had dogs when I was growing up-a couple of German shepherds at one time and a little runt dog one time. We also had cats. And I had an uncle who had beagles.

"We lived on a deadend street where there were a lot of dogs. Everybody had dogs and they roamed free. There were no leash laws or anything like that. These people up the street, the Temples, had a dog named Lonesome, an old collie. And the personality of the Temples was embodied in Lonesome as much as it was in their sons. He was sort of the king of the street, old Lonesome was. He was certainly the defender of our honor.

"Another dog named Lucky, a bad German shepherd from the next neighborhood, would come over and Lonesome would whip him and send him on his way. He defended us, you know.

"There were always dogs around, then. But I haven't really had dogs since I went to school. I've moved around a lot."