ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9607010023
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-17 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: WYTHEVILLE
The influences of a family of readers, a high school band director and one particular English teacher provided the writing foundations for author David Huddle.
Huddle, who has published 10 books of fiction, poetry and essays and is an English professor at the University of Vermont, was the featured speaker for creative writing day during the Wytheville Chautauqua Festival earlier this month.
He is a native of Ivanhoe, which has figured prominently in his work, including the semi-autobiographical short story collection, "Only the Little Bone." He was going to call it "The Undesirable," the name of one of its stories, but said his publisher insisted he could not sell a book with that title.
Admitting that the book's stories are "not unlike the family life I grew up in," Huddle said Wythe County readers might wonder why someone writes about his own family. One reason, he believes, is to "make the people that you care about become visible and tangible." If he were a photographer instead of a writer, he said, he would have taken pictures of them and, if an artist, painted them.
"You want certain stories of your own to live in the world with you," he said.
Huddle talked about story-telling traditions being important in the Ivanhoe community where he grew up and how the importance of reading in his family convinced him that books were a key to success.
"Stories were of interest to everyone in Ivanhoe, but words were important to my family," he said. They would even sacrifice a night of listening to radio programs to read to one another instead. "Had they belittled me, I would not have thought myself worthy of setting down arrangements of words that people might like to read."
When he came to Wytheville to attend high school, he said, people made fun of his Ivanhoe accent, so he worked to get rid of it and speak as Wytheville people spoke. Then he went to the University of Virginia, where everyone made fun of how he and roommate Fred Hilton from Wytheville spoke.
"I sound like what I am, a hillbilly trying to speak correctly," he said.
He credited an English teacher at George Wythe High School, Araga Young, with giving him the basic tools with which to write. In her class, he said, he actually enjoyed diagramming sentences.
He also played in the school band under director Jack O. White, who proved how successful "hillbillies" from Southwest Virginia could be by building up a band good enough to perform nationally on television and in President Eisenhower's inaugural parade.
White, who went on to a musical career at Elon College in North Carolina, has moved back to Wytheville since his retirement and organized a community band that includes many of his former students.
"My first serious aspiration was to become a band director," Huddle said. "It has been 38 years since I lived here, but the most important thing I know to tell anyone about me is that I grew up in Ivanhoe."
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: David Huddle\Author, English professorby CNB