So, like many another lonely insecure isolate before me, I started a literary magazine, Lillabulero, with a fellow isolate from the north, the poet William Matthews, and gathered together a batch of similarly alienated young writers then in Chapel Hill - Newt Smith, David Mallison, and Doug Collins - and imagined that we were a movement, a budding school, a not-so-loyal opposition to the then prevailing theories and practices of writing, which is to say, to the New Critics and their fashionable acolytes. Walker Percy was intriguing, but too High Church, too cerebral and cool, for me to learn from, and Miz’ Welty seemed sui generis, especially to an angry young man from New Hampshire. A blue-collar boy from New England, I was unable to locate the sources and techniques for my fiction among the writers who surrounded me then - Reynolds Price at Duke, the ghost of Thomas Wolfe at Chapel Hill, Flannery O’Connor in Georgia, Peter Taylor in Virginia, and the spirit of Faulkner that hung like a solemn miasma everywhere kudzu grew (and it grew everywhere). In the early 1960’s I was a very young writer, married with children, as they say, and an undergraduate student at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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