'Finding purities in the confusion'

 

“I'll tell you why I like writing: it's just jumping into a pool. I get myself into a kind of trance. I engage the world, but it's also wonderful to just escape. I try to find the purities out of the confusion. It's pretty old-fashioned, but it's fun.” – Barry Hannah

 

Born on this date in 1942 (he died in 2010), Hannah was a novelist, short story writer and professor of writing at the University of Mississippi.   A “mostly” lifelong Mississippian, he was born in Meridian and died in Oxford, which is both the location of the University and the home of Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner.    

 

A two-time winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters’ “Fiction Prize” and the Governor’s Award for his representation of Mississippi in artistic and cultural matters, Hannah wrote 12 books – 5 of which were highly lauded short story collections.  Among his many other awards were the PEN/Malamud prize for “Excellence in the Art of the Short Story;” a Guggenheim Fellowship; and the Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award.  

 

Hannah said that music always played a role in his writing, both on the pages of his works and filling the air around him as he did his writing.  

 

“Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them,” he said.  “For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well.  Musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.”