Chris Offutt: “90% of American writers don't know what it's like to join the army at 17 and have three meals a day”

He has a huge stone hanging from his neck.

It is a grayish stone with a hole.

That's how he found her.

“I already had the hole.

The only thing I did was find a cord and hang it on myself.

She's been with me ever since.

I must have been seven years old then.

Maybe eight.

The only thing I have done in this time has been change the cord.

So it can be said that I literally always carry the hills on me,” she says.

The speaker is Chris Offutt (Lexington, Kentucky, 65 years old), the king of grit

, or creek literature, the violent and desperate rural

of workers who live in small and painfully impoverished towns, shamelessly marginalized, light years away. of any type of dream, including the one that should belong to them: the American one.

“I grew up wondering why there were no books that talked about mine, where were we?

Did we exist?

I want to think that I am writing for anyone who, like me, searches and can finally find themselves,” says Offutt, and returns the stone to its place.

He buttons his shirt.

With abundant hair and a curious, sometimes lost look, we met Offutt in Spain through the story of his father, Andrew Offutt, the hyperbolic and wild, the unrecognized and multiple (there were at least 18 authors living with him, in his office full of porn, in fact, in his head) author of more than 400 novels.

He himself told the story in

(Malas Tierras).

He began by publishing stories about life in such a remote and damned corner of the world (don't miss his debut,

), and ended up creating his own detective, Mick Hardin, to explore the place, its injustices, its twisted charms, and itself.

“Yes, Mick it's me.

He doesn't represent the people there.

“He represents someone who has left there, and can see everything from the outside, but he also continues to see it from the inside,” he says.

It is no coincidence that he is a soldier.

“A military career sometimes represents the only way out for a kid from a certain part of America.

Myself, with three other friends, enlisted at 17. None of us got very far.

I didn't even pass the physical test,” he confesses.

He is not in Appalachia on the February day when this interview takes place, but rather sitting at a table in the hall of a hotel in Barcelona.

He says of Barcelona that it is a “sophisticated and beautiful” city but also that he “knows where it comes from.”

“It's funny, people here seem to be very clear about where they come from.

Everyone knows that there is someone in his family who came from a town like mine.

In the United States that does not happen.

The United States ignores its past, because social class is the only thing that matters.

When you get high, you forget where you came from.

“You don't want anything to touch you,” he says.

He believes that the vision we have of his country is the one given by middle-class writers.

An upper middle class.

Those who have a network.

Those who know that, no matter how bad things go for them, if they pick up a phone, someone will lend them money and their life goes on.

“90% of American writers are that type of people.

They have no idea what it's like to enlist at 17 thinking that at least in the army you will have three meals a day and a bed,” he says.

“I go to the forest and I lie down on the ground and wait to fall asleep, and I sleep, for a while, to wake up and observe the miracle, the trees, the birds.”

The law of the hills

(Sakhalin) is the most recent installment of the life of Mick Hardin, because yes, the novels starring Hardin are

- "in reality, it is curious about

because nothing is ever that simple, nothing is in black and white, I like to think that my novels explore grays,” he adds, “but they are also a

of the life of their protagonist, who here returns, for a few days, to his native Kentucky before going away—to Corsica.” after leaving the army.

There he meets his sister Linda, the county sheriff.

“I like the idea of ​​them being brothers.

Normally the lead cop is accompanied by another junior cop or something like that, and if she is a woman, she is never her sister, but rather someone he can stop seeing if things go wrong.

But what happens when you have to get along with someone because they are family? ”He asks.

Hardin is a version of himself, and if he is alone it is because he is too.

“Writers spend 80% of our lives in front of a page, completely alone,” he says.

And yet, I wouldn't want to not be.

“I like the idea that, when I write, I open a door and return to that place.

All my problems disappear as I write.

And I go back there.

Every time.

“To my idea of ​​the hills.”

That's what he calls his town in Kentucky, where he still, from time to time, visits the house where he grew up.

The last time he did it he ran into a friend who had just gotten out of jail — “that kind of thing happens there” — and yelled at him: “I thought your father was back from the dead!

You are identical to him!

When he travels writing nothing similar happens to him, although it could happen to Mick Hardin.

And his obsession with forests?

Mick Hardin tends to lie down in the middle of the forest and just sleep there.

“I do it too,” he confesses.

“I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone,” he says next, and swallows.

“I go to the forest and I lie down on the ground and wait to fall asleep, and I sleep, for a while, to wake up and observe the miracle, the trees, the birds,” he says.

He gets excited when he says it.

She wipes away a tear before continuing.

“The idea of ​​the world seems magical to me.

We are here, and everything is so beautiful.

There is nothing like waking up in the middle of the forest and, in that moment when you are still wondering what is happening, who you are, being bathed by a ray of sunlight, or the sound of the trees.

Hearing the birds sing,” she insists.

She loves birds.

She has a special relationship with them, she says.

Sometimes she does nothing but walk through the trees to find them.

There, somewhere in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where she now lives, far from the hills but still close to the forest.

“I feel at peace in there,” says the guy who became a writer after reading

, the children's classic by the indefatigable Louise Fitzhugh.

“Oh, yes, after reading it, I started carrying a notebook with me, like the protagonist, to write things down,” he confesses, and, amused, he takes a small notebook and a pen out of his pocket.

“I still do it,” he says, and smiles.

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