ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 5, 1996 TAG: 9602050051
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
William Fox Conner's writing is an exercise in daydreaming and memory.
He summons up the sights and sounds and images from his boyhood in Botetourt County: the smell of sour milk and disinfectant soap in the milking barn...the long, sweeping hammer strokes of the railroad gang as they laid track across the farm...his father moving through the underbrush in fading hunting coat and cap, speaking quietly to their dog.
"I like to be up close to things," Conner said in an interview. "Things you can see and touch and smell. It engages the senses....I have trouble in museums - because I want to put my hands on things."
He has put his hands-on way of seeing the world to use in writing his first book, "Memory's Glass," a collection of essays just published by Pocahontas Press of Blacksburg. It's a book about people in all their grace and frailty, about family, about growing up and about the rural life. Conner says one theme that runs through much of his writing is "that life is very worthwhile in its very basic elements."
Conner, 55, has taught literature and creative writing at Principia College in Illinois for the past 16 years. He began working on "Memory's Glass" - or the individual pieces that eventually would make up the book - more than a decade ago.
"Memories are sort of like dreams," he says. "You can practice - and you remember more than you think you do. It's all back there....If you write one thing, you jar something else loose."
The farm, which his family owned from the 1940s to the 1960s, lies at the foot of Tinker Mountain. It's along Virginia 779 not far from Daleville.
Conner was born in Roanoke in 1940, but the family lived in Newport News and elsewhere for a few years before buying the farm around the end of World War II. They purchased it from a man named I.O. Bower, and for years his dad relished saying, "I owe Bower, I surely do."
His father was a stocky man with long, powerful arms and a taste for bootleg whiskey. Before settling on the farm life, he went through a series of less-than successful careers. He played baseball for a few months with a New York Yankees farm team, ran a fix-all appliance shop, worked as a movie projectionist.
He was a hunter who loved nothing more than roaming the countryside. He took Bill along sometimes, but Bill often went off on his own. He loved the smell of the woods in the winter.
While Conner's dad was a dreamer, his mother was more practical.
"She had strong opinions about what was useful and what wasn't," he writes. ```You look only in one direction at a time,' my father often teased her. ``Don't be so twenty-four-hour-a-day practical. Dream a little!'''
Bill was always a daydreamer himself, something his mother didn't approve of. But she did introduce him to the dreams conjured by the written word. She read to him often. Hearing the stories out loud, he grew up "listening to the sound of language and music....When I'm writing I read aloud so I can hear the music of the language."
He started writing poetry in high school and went on to get degrees in English - from a bachelor's to a Ph.D - at Roanoke College, the University of Arkansas and the University of Missouri.
Some of the essays in "Memory's Glass" first appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Sou'wester and other publications. The title essay has already been reprinted in two college freshman writing textbooks.
Conner's parents and a good number of the folks he writes about are dead. But that didn't make it easier to write some of the more personal sections of the book - especially those dealing with his father. "I remember giving up on some of it - telling friends I couldn't do it."
Now that "Memory's Glass" is complete, he's working on a new book, about the history and changes in the Illinois countryside where he now lives. Farther removed from the emotions of children and family, the writing has been less of a struggle. "It's just spilling out, compared to the other one," he says.
Still, it's much the same process - a sort of constructive dreaming.
"You daydream about your version of the real world," he says. "You imagine different scenes....I think a lot of writing is pacing and percolating. You just let your mind play over things."
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Conner with his wife (before they were married)by CNBstanding next to "Big Red" in 1969. color. 2. William Fox Conner
began working on "Memory's Glass" more than a decade ago. 3. William
Fox Conner sits on the shoulders of neighbor Theodore Dove (above)
accompanied by his uncle David Douthat in 1941. 4. Two family
portraits: in the spring of 1941 (rar right) 5. and in 1947 (right).
6. His mother watches as Conner rides Ruby in this 1952 photo
(left). 7. Conner stands near the farm's swimming pool (above) in
1950. Graphic: From "Memory's Glass."