Winter's Bone

by Daniel Woodrell

  Well, I’ve always written women into my novels, and many readers have felt I could do it convincingly, and I really didn’t feel Ree’s vibe in terms of gender but of heart.

  There will be many, I suspect, who will find Ree to be plenty wild and rough, but she is also brave, resolute, and capable of deep and compassionate feeling. Long ago, when I would read about women mired in poverty, one of the things these women frequently had in common was that they’d had to become household bosses at young ages. Quit school, care for siblings, and so on. The meth world requires this, basically, because serious meth users are incapable of summoning much in the way of domestic effort and neglect the welfare of their kids at least as much as they neglect their own.

  And I do often observe families (like next door, where the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old has one child, her mother has a few, there is no regular husband figure, and mom is a grandma in her thirties) who have shaky jobs and lots of kids, so that a child who might or might not be capable is left in charge of the toddlers and so on. Ree turns out to have broad shoulders.

  You left high school to join the Marine Corps and ultimately ended up with an MFA from the Iowa Writers’Workshop. What led you from point A to point B?

  In third grade I stated publicly that I wanted to be a writer, and I meant it. What a blessing this has been to me—it gave me a direction, a direction suited to my temperament and social attitudes. I was generally an excellent student, boosted to grade levels above my age and given accelerated work in some subjects, but this was on a street where being a good student did not enhance one’s standing among those bastards, one’s peers. The principal of my last high school was so odious to me that I dropped out in lieu of plotting his demise, and I thought a bit of combat in Vietnam might be just the tonic I needed. I never did get there and am so glad I didn’t. I got my bachelor’s after years of hot-tar roofing, night-clerking at 7-Eleven, loading trucks, and so on, at age twenty-seven. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was the only graduate program to which I applied, and, quirk of quirks, I was admitted. A couple of faculty members would later loudly regret that I had been admitted, but I got through and learned what I needed to know.

  You’ve lived in the Ozarks for most of your life. How has this part of the world influenced your writing?

  I’ve lived in plenty of places besides the Ozarks, but the Ozarks, and many of the values of the place, are anchored deep within, I’m afraid. Values like: it’s better to be poor than be beholdin’; wealth is not the object of life in any of the good deities’ eyes; personal honor yet means a great deal, so be polite as long as you can and don’t run when you can’t be.

  Your style has been described as “Southern,”“gothic,”“country noir,”or all three. If you had to classify yourself, where would you say you fit?

  Afraid the ol’ hyphenate may be required. Something like semi-Southern, kinda-gothic. My writing style seems to me to be clearly based in Southern literature. Faulkner, Caldwell, Foote (novels), Shirley Ann Grau, Madison Jones, Andrew Lytle, John Yount, Cormac McCarthy, and many others have had their seasons with me. But James Agee and Flannery O’Connor have impacted on me hardest, I think. Agee may not be reflected in my style, but he is heard in my writer’s mind most all the time. Flannery, well, I think even the Dixie Special should be careful about running into her cart, stalled on the tracks or not.

  The use of the term noir is too limiting. When I first used country noir to describe my work I didn’t realize that, but the word noir is defined so many ways by so many people that it is essentially useless as a descriptive term. And my own definition is very strict, has definite requirements, especially for endings, and I don’t always want the music of the ending to be preordained by allegiance to form or structure. So I just think of myself as a dramatic writer. A semi-Southern, kinda-gothic, dramatic writer.

  The Academy Award winner Ang Lee directed a movie based on your novel Ride with the Devil, originally published as Woe to Live On. What was that experience like?

  I was introduced to Ang by his assistant, who led me to a large, bland room where Mr. Lee sat alone, waiting for me. We shook hands, nodded a few times, then sat there silently for ten or fifteen minutes, until the assistant fetched Mr. Lee for his next appointment. In a few minutes the assistant returned and said, “He likes you. Ang likes you.” Mr. Lee and James Schamus, Ted Hope, and the rest, were very good to me, and I had the rare experience of having a project go quickly into production. I was on the set for a few days of shooting, watched dailies in a flooded old church they’d set up on location, and learned plenty. They took my wife, Katie Estill, and me to London, where we opened the London Film Festival at the Leicester Odeon, got a standing ovation, had dramatically posh digs at the Dorchester, and were left with a sort of dreamscape that Katie and I will not let fade away.

  What books, music, and art inspire you? What are you reading and listening to now?

  I am still, relentlessly, reading Agee, and Flannery, too. Two of the writers who fired me to write post–Marine Corps, when I needed it, were Mr. McGuane and Mr. Harrison, and their books are always nearby, well thumbed. And Kawabata and James Salter, both of whom floor me.

  In film, I see a lot (with Netflix I can, even in the Ozarks, bag my limit of French films and the like), and I am, strangely I guess, but I can’t help myself, much taken with the films of Robert Bresson. He also had several notions of editing and storytelling that I have found to be of great usefulness in my own approach to things. And my favorite filmmakers of the moment are the Dardenne brothers of Belgium.

  Music: Chris Whitley, Jim White, Kevin Gordon, Lucinda, Iris DeMent, Ralph Stanley, Johnny Dowd, Trailer Bride, Danielle Howle, Freakwater, Greg Brown, Jimmy Lafave, and the great, great McMurtry (no, not him—his son, James).

  Painters: I am much taken with Charles Burchfield, Chaim Soutine, Hiroshige, Cézanne, and an obscure fellow from the West Coast via Scotland named Matthew Barnes.

  August 2006 marks the twentieth anniversary of your career as a published author and the release of your eighth novel. How has the process—writing, publishing—changed?

  I was recently looking at a new photo of me, with a shocked, sorrowful sort of expression, I guess, when the photographer (older than I am by a few years) patted my shoulder consolingly and said, “I know, you used to be a much younger man, didn’t you?”

  That’s the big change, as I see it.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Ree Dolly is only sixteen. How, in the first pages of Winter’s Bone, does she prove herself a mature caretaker and teacher of her little brothers? Given her use of strong language, how does she reveal her tenderness toward her dependents?

  2. Ree’s mother is medicated for her mental illness, and neighbors donate painkillers to Ree after she takes a beating. The Dolly clan makes a living by producing illegal methamphetamines, and Ree smokes marijuana when it’s offered to her. How do mind-altering devices both destroy and make bearable the fabric of life in Rathlin Valley? Do you think moonshine wreaked as much havoc on rural American populations as crystal meth has?

  3. How does the fearsome Uncle Teardrop reveal the potential for loyalty and humanity in some of the most hardened members of the Dolly family? Even Merab, the fierce Mrs. Thump, proves herself willing to help Ree save her house and land. What do you think is at the root of this clan’s rigid, sometimes brutal moral code? Poverty? Deliberate isolation and separation from mainstream values?

  4. Can you imagine better lives, in an earlier time, for people with the Dollys’ background? Perhaps before the advent of chemically manufactured drugs and after the first immigration to America? Ree’s mother was once a happy beauty who loved to dance, for instance, and Mamaw Bromont—her mother—seems to have been a steady matriarch.

  5. Ree’s married friend, Gail, becomes an intimate of Ree’s. How does their passing physical relationship speak to each girl’s lack of unconditional love? How is Megan also a purely benign, if misguided, sup
port for Ree?

  6. Nature and the elements contribute greatly to the atmosphere of Winter’s Bone, for better and for worse. How does Daniel Woodrell convey both the harshness and the beauty of the natural world? In what ways are Ree’s walk in the pine woods with her ailing mother and her trip to Bucket Spring to wash her wounds enhanced by Woodrell’s description of the landscape? Did you feel Ree’s arduous journey to find her father more sharply because of the icy cold?

  7. Critics have compared Ree to such classical literary figures as Antigone, Psyche, and even King Lear, and have seen reflections of the Old Testament in the Dolly family’s code. How, for you, has Woodrell given his story a mythical stature that reaches beyond its particular Ozark-ian hollow?

  8. The tension raised by Ree’s quest for her father is at times intense for the reader. How does Woodrell temper this anxiety with both humor and tenderness? How does his use of authentic dialect bring his larger-than-life story and characters back to earth?

  9. Do you think Ree would have been better off pursuing her dream of joining the military than staying with her dependent family? If not, why?

  Preview of The Maid’s Version

  Daniel Woodrell’s The Maid’s Version is “a beautiful engine of a novel, whose cogs were not entirely made by human agency, one might hazard to say. As regards the level of reading pleasure, the highest. As regards the level of literary achievement, the highest” (Sebastian Barry).

  Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.

  She frightened me at every dawn the summer I stayed with her. She’d sit on the edge of her bed, long hair down, down to the floor and shaking as she brushed and brushed, shadows ebbing from the room and early light flowing in through both windows. Her hair was as long as her story and she couldn’t walk when her hair was not woven into dense braids and pinned around and atop her head. Otherwise her hair dragged the floor like the train of a medieval gown and she had to gather it into a sheaf and coil it about her forearm several times to walk the floor without stepping on herself. She’d been born a farm girl, then served as a maid for half a century, so she couldn’t sleep past dawn to win a bet, and all the mornings I knew with her she’d sit in the first light and brush that witchy-long hair, brush it in sections, over and over, stroking hair that had scarcely been touched by scissors for decades, hair she would not part with despite the extravagance of time it required at each dawn. The hair was mostly white smeared by gray, the hues of a newspaper that lay in the rain until headlines blended across the page.

  She spooked me awake daily that whole summer of my twelfth year, me awaking to see her with the dawn at her back, springs squeaking faintly, while a bone-handled brush slid along a length of hair that belonged in a fairy tale of some sort, and maybe not the happy kind. Her name was Alma and she did not care to be called Grandma or Mamaw, and might loose a slap if addressed as Granny. She was lonely, old and proud, and I’d been sent from my river town near St. Louis by my dad as a gesture of reconciliation. She was glad I’d been sent and concerned that I have a good time, a memorable summer, but she was not naturally given to much frolic; the last hours of play she’d known had been before World War I, some game now vanished from childhood that involved a rolling wooden hoop and a short stick. She tried taking me for long walks about the town of West Table, going to People’s Park so she could watch me splash in the pool, let me pull weeds in the garden and throw a baseball against the toolshed door. It was the summer of 1965, but she still did not have a television, only a radio that seemed always to be announcing livestock prices and yield estimates. There was a twang stretching every word Alma said, but for days and days she didn’t say much. Then came a late afternoon when I was dramatically dispirited, moody and bored, foot idly kicking at things I’d been told not to kick, a sweltering day that turned dark as a sinister storm settled overhead, and we sat together on her small porch in a strong wind to watch those vivid actions break across the sky. Storm clouds were scored by bright lightning, and thunder boomed. Her dress was flapping, her eyes narrowed and distant, and she cunningly chose that raging moment to begin telling me her personal account of the Arbor Dance Hall explosion of 1929, how forty-two dancers from this small corner of the Missouri Ozarks had perished in an instant, waltzing couples murdered midstep, blown toward the clouds in a pink mist chased by towering flames, and why it happened. This was more like it—an excitement of fire, so many fallen, so many suspects, so few facts, a great crime or colossal accident, an ongoing mystery she thought she’d solved. I knew this was a story my dad did not want me to hear from her lips, as it was a main source of their feud, so I was tickled and keen to hear more, more, and then more. Dozens were left maimed, broken in their parts, scorched until skin melted from bones. The screams from the rubble and flames never faded from the ears of those who heard them, the cries of burning neighbors, friends, lovers, and kinfolk like my great-aunt Ruby. So many young dead or ruined from a town of only four thousand raised a shocked, grievous howling for justice. Suspicions were given voice, threats shouted, mobs gathered, but there was no obvious target for all the summoned fury. Suspects and possible explanations for the blast were so numerous and diverse, unlinked by convincing evidence, that the public investigation spun feebly in a wide, sputtering circle, then was quietly closed. No one was ever officially charged nor punished, and the twenty-eight unidentified dead were buried together beneath a monumental angel that stood ten feet tall and slowly turned black during year after year of cold and hot and slapping rain.

  Alma yet lived in a small room with a small kitchen in the back portion of her last employer’s house, and it was tight living. Her bed and the couch I slept on were five feet apart. Her sleep was chatty; she had one-way chats with people she’d once known or her sleep invented. She sometimes mumbled names I’d heard around the dinner table. She often wept without sound at night until tears shined her neck, and made dull daytime company for a boy unless she was adding wrinkles to her story. When in the telling mood she’d sit on the porch for hours staring toward the dry white creek bed out back while drinking tea to keep her voice slickened, leaving each used tea bag in the cup when adding a fresh one and more water, soaking every penny’s worth of tea into her cup until she sipped bitter trickles between four or five derelict bags. She would at times leave the public horror and give me her quiet account of the sad and criminal love affair that took her sister Ruby away from us all, left us with only pain, many dark mysteries, and a woman’s hat with a long feather in the band.

  Alma had been allowed to stay in school to the completion of third grade, then was sent to work some years in her daddy’s fields before finding her way to town and becoming a laundress, a cook, an all-purpose maid. She lost two sons along the way, her husband, her sister, and earned but little, always one dropped dish and a loud reprimand from complete and utter poverty. She lived scared and angry, a life full of permanent grievances, sharp animosities and cold memories for all who’d ever crossed us, any of us, ever. Alma DeGeer Dunahew, with her pinched, hostile nature, her dark obsessions and primal need for revenge, was the big red heart of our family, the true heart, the one we keep secret and that sustains us.

  It was years before I learned to love her.

  Our long walks that summer did if nothing else prepare me to accept an early bedtime, for they were tiring and detailed. At any corner or alleyway, empty lot or spruced old house, she was liable to stop and leave me in her mind, revisiting yet again insults she couldn’t forgive. “That place there was home to Mrs. Prater, who cheated me of near eleven dollars when your uncle Sidney was a-dyin’ in bed with no medicine for the pain. He moaned constant as the wind and couldn’t catch his breath. Not even fourteen years old. She had her a few daughters, and one has married here and stayed—her children are named Cozzens. Couple of boys. Your big brother could whup either of them pukes this minute without even needin’ to put his sandwich down. Years to come you’ll thrash ’em, too, if you should be so blessed as to
come across one somewhere behind a building, or in the trees, and hear that name.”

  Or she’d drift in thought while staring at an empty spread of dirt and grass between two homes, and say, “Used to be a house here had a porch that went all the way around, with strangler vines growing up the sides, had those windows like eyes up top. Mr. Lee Haas lived there. He run the last dry goods near the square that would give us anything on tick. But his wife squawked over me bein’ crazy and full of slander, the fool, and he cut me dead when most needed. That year was 1933, I think.” She waved a big old withering hand at the lot where the house had been, spit toward the grass but fell short, so she stepped fully into the lot and spit again. “But you can forget them—God done for them, and done ’em up good, too, during the war.”

  On these rambles the cemetery was nearly always our final destination. We’d make our way through the wilderness of headstones, gray, brown, puritan white, glancing at some, nodding at some, Alma turning her nose up at others, until we reached the Black Angel, the sober monument to our family loss and a town bereaved. Standing in the shadow of this angel she would on occasion tell me about a suspect person or deed, a vague or promising suspicion she’d acquired with her own sharp ears or general snooping, and when she shared the fishy details with me it would be the first time she’d said them aloud to anybody in years. She’d repeat herself so I’d remember. We’d then walk home, going into the fat shade under the fat trees on East Main, and stop at Jupiter Grocery, where she always said, “Your momma’s grandpa on her momma’s side worked here thirty years. He cut a good piece of meat.” We’d prowl the aisles and assemble the evening meal, a meal usually made of the cheapest foodstuffs, some of which I’d never before considered as food and was scared to touch—calves’ brains to be served with scrambled eggs, souse for sandwiches I’d throw behind the shed, pigs’ feet and saltines, pork rind and corn pone, chicken livers by the pound that she rendered into a bizarre gravy that was so surprisingly fine over egg noodles or white rice that I learned to whine for it as we walked. We’d eat together in her snug quarters, an early supper, always, elbow to elbow, watching squares of sunlight lose their shape along the walls, and return to the unending topic while forks clicked on her best plates, “What’d you learn today, Alek, and what use will you make of it?”