A CONVERSATION WITH STEVE EARLE  (continued)

SE: The sonnets are songs, they were written to be sung. Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited. The Italians were a huge influence on everyone and everything in Shakespeare's time. In that period they were the ones that were really doing something. I think there are really only four original Shakespearean plays. The rest are either historical, or the plots are wholly lifted from this Italian novel form, like melodramas. That's why so many of them are set in Italy. "Romeo and Juliet," "Much Ado About Nothing," and many that are not set in Italy, they came from a populist form of literature.

PM: Italian templates, blueprints. What are the four originals?

SE: Yeah. Are there four? "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Tempest," that's two... Can't think of them right now. I hate brain damage, it takes up half my time.

PM: What prose writers are motivating you? Do you have a novel in you?

SE: I've started a novel. I've got so many other things going on that I basically wrote the first chapter, marked it up for a rewrite and set it down. I sent it to my editor, and he dug it, so it sort of became a project at that point. But I marked it up for a rewrite and set it down until I finish the play I'm working on, I've got too many unfinished things out there.

PM: You're knee deep in a play, then?

SE: Oh yeah, I've been working on it for about a year and a half, two years. That's the get up in the morning and work on it project for some time now.

PM: So what about prose writers, you want to get into that?

SE: God, there's a bunch. Madison Smartt Bell is probably my favorite historical fiction writer, he's from here, but teaches somewhere in Baltimore. He's written 11 novels, and is two years younger than me. He's written two great historical novels about Haiti, he spends a fair amount of time there, and a bunch of other great stuff. Then Tony Earley, who lives here, has written some incredible short stories and a great novel, called Jim and the Boys. I just recently met him, but I've been a fan for a while. He teaches at Vanderbilt. I believe he's from North Carolina originally. I love Annie Proulx, and recently discovered Mikhail Bulgakov.

Bulgakov's really a playwright, and I'm trying to find his plays, but he wrote a couple of novels, including one called The Master and Margarita. It was written in the thirties, he died in the forties. He scared Joseph Stalin bad enough that Stalin didn't kill him, and gave him the creative directorship of a small theater instead, to keep him in the Soviet Union. The guy was so nuts he actually wrote Stalin demanding an exit visa, because he was being artistically compromised, when Stalin was killing everybody. So Stalin called him personally and gave him this directorship. The Master and Margarita is about the devil showing up in Moscow with a small entourage of creatures, including a giant cat that drinks vodka and plays chess, and basically leveling the place. At the end the devil and his cohorts are hanging out and watching this huge section of Moscow burn.  continue

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