I finished reading Poachers, a book of short stories by Tom Franklin, last night while sipping hot chocolate at Charlie’s Coffeehouse. The book was so good the pages seemed to turn by themselves. It's a book that really pulls you into its world, that “vivid continuous dream” built out of the author’s imagination that Dr. Bailey's always talking about.Franklin’s world is backwater Alabama, and it’s full of vivid characters you have to despise, pity and love all at the same time. The characters really drive his fast-paced stories. My favorites were “The Ballad of Duane Juarez” and “Dinosaurs,” but the whole book was great. So good, in fact, that I even recommended it to a business major who lives on my floor and she finished it before I did.
These past two fiction classes we took a little bit of time away from workshopping to read and discuss Poachers in preparation for Tom Franklin’s visit today. Every year Susquehanna brings six accomplished authors to campus to give readings and to speak to students. Tom Franklin is the first writer coming to campus this year as part of the Writers Institute’s Visiting Writers Series.
Today right after fiction class ended, my classmates and I headed over to the Seibert Faculty Lounge for a writers-only question-and-answer session with the author. Franklin introduced himself by telling funny stories about growing up in southern Alabama (not just Alabama, southern Alabama). He talked about how his parents got kicked out of their Baptist church when he was a kid for speaking in tongues, how they started their own Pentecostal church in their living room.Franklin’s reading this evening was really great too. He read two short stories and the opening chapter of his new novel, Smonk. Afterwards he signed my two copies of Poachers (I bought an extra copy for a friend back home). He wrote his name in each book and then drew a little picture of an armadillo below his name, the only animal to survive all the poachers lurking around the backwater Alabama that exists in the pages behind the cover.
