The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog. That, folks, is a pangram, a phrase, sentence or verse composed of all the letters of the alphabet—and the genius of a thesis behind Mark Dunn's highly praised Ella Minnow Pea. The novel was published by MacAdams/ Cage to rave reviews in the fall of 2001 and was followed this October by Welcome to Higby, while the trade paperback of Ella Minnow Pea made its debut from Anchor Books.
The South has given us many great writers—Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner, Welty and McCullers come to mind immediately—and Dunn with his mighty reviews and soft Tennessee drawl, certainly looks to be the latest in a distinguished line. "There's that real-strong storytelling element that I absorbed while I was there," says Dunn over lunch at a Greenwich Village restaurant not far from his home. "That's what I know. I guess since I been in the North, I can be a little more comfortable writing stories set here, writing characters based here, but not totally comfortable with it yet. I was blessed by growing up a block from Graceland so there's a real-strong Elvis element in my life. I have a couple of Elvis stories to tell.
"Yeah," says Dunn with delight as he begins to describe his true-life Elvis encounter, "I spent a night with him. Believe it or not, I have a twin brother Clay and on our 18th birthday—and this is totally coincidental—we worked at a movie theatre in Memphis as ushers. Elvis liked to rent out movie theatres and bring his friends and his family and just crash there for the whole night, within a protected environment. That particular night he had rented out the theater and someone needed to be there to serve him popcorn, so I spent the whole night there."
PW is forced to ask the obvious: Lots of butter? Dunn laughs. "I can't remember if he liked a lot of butter or not. Elvis hung out there till dawn with his small entourage and we just palled around with him." For Elvis's fans, Dunn is happy to report that the King was a regular guy. "This was in '74. It was actually before the enormous weight gain and before the drug problems, so we sort of saw the last of the great stable Elvis before he went on the slide."
Of course Dunn couldn't resist fodder as rich as this. He's written a play about that night called Elvis and Eleanor, where the other character is an actor playing none other than Eleanor Roosevelt. In fact, playwriting came to Dunn long before his novels were published. "I was writing plays from a real early age," Dunn recalls. Born in 1956, he went to the University of Memphis, then called Memphis State University, and majored in film. "At the same time, I was trying my hand at other formats. I actually wrote my first novel in the early '80s, one of the early failed efforts. So I was stretching my muscles in a lot of different ways. It's just that playwriting kind of came to work for me because I started getting productions." Dunn has had his plays staged in over 150 productions around the country. "It's very, very difficult to make a living as a playwright," he warns. "I've had nine plays published, and they're all being licensed to amateur theatre groups around the country, and even still you can't make a living."
The difference in playwriting and novel writing? "Play writing comes real easy for me," Dunn says, "because I enjoy writing dialogue. I've also learned how to use all the tools of telling stories within the constrictions that you have in a theatre. Writing novels is more of a challenge because I'm a lot more skilled at writing dialogue than I am on description. I'm getting better at description, but as one who becomes familiar with my novels, one can tell that they are strongly dialogue driven works because that's what comes to me a lot easier."
In fact, one of his plays had a momentous effect on his ability to sit home and write novels. "Basically what I did," recalls Dunn, "was sue Paramount and three different producers of The Truman Show for stealing a play of mine called Frank's Life, which was done here in the Village in the early '90s and was favorably reviewed by the New York Post. It got more attention than your usual off-off Broadway play, and it did well. It was like this little cult play. We were selling out every night because everyone loved this whole Twilight Zone aspect to it. Through an agent, I was asked to send copies of the script, and it wound up in a couple of studios out in Hollywood. When The Truman Show came out, I got an attorney who handles copyright infringement and sued Paramount, and after a year we settled out of court. The amount of the settlement—while I'm not allowed to tell you what it was—allowed me to leave my day job at the New York Public Library and to write full-time, which was a nice sort of silver lining to this whole thing."
As one can glean from Frank's Life, one of the big influences on Dunn's work was Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame. "I like the whole area of fantasy. A lot of writers don't really understand all the nuances to fantasy—it's not just about science fiction, it's about creating a whole different world in which things are not what they appear to be and there's all kinds of plot twists and O. Henry kind of endings. I like that whole world and I've always been real comfortable in that kind of world. Serling's always been one of my favorite writers. I have very vivid memories of watching the Twilight Zone as a small child. In fact, I remember 'The Eye of the Beholder' episode and being frightened into running out of the room watching that show."
Dunn is one of those rare breed of novelists who managed to get their work published without the help of an agent. "It's a sad story with a happy ending," says Dunn, "because with first novels it's very, very hard to separate yourself from the crowd and get publishers to pay attention to what you're doing. And I had a devil of a time with this book. I think I sent this book out maybe three different rounds. First, of course, you try and hit the big houses. And without an agent, that's impossible because they hardly even read query letters from people who are not represented. Then I kind of moved down to the next level. I sent it to a small publishing house in Florida and the woman wrote me back and said the novel has a lot of problems and, by the way, just because you're a good playwright doesn't mean you're a good novelist. One thing that eventually happened was that MacAdam/Cage got started up. When they made their first appearance in Writer's Marketplace I jumped at it. This is the happy ending to the story. After over two years of struggling to get Ella Minnow Pea at least read, much less picked up, I got a response from Pat Walsh—who is now my editor—to my original query letter with an invitation to send the full manuscript. Within two weeks I had an offer to publish. I felt this is incredible!"
Ella Minnow Pea is a novel built on a pangram. "It's about a fictional island in which the islanders have decided that language is all important," says Dunn, "and they elevated it to the point of nearly deifying the fictitious author of the famous pangram The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog. They erect a monument to him and when letters from this pangram, which are up on the monument on tiles, begin to fall, the high elders of the island decide that this is Mr. Nevin Nollop speaking from the grave, directing his people not to use those letters of the alphabet. So as the book progresses those letters disappear from the story. And I can't use them either because I'm writing in an epistolary format which requires not telling in the third person, so I'm forced to speak in the voices of my characters, in their letters, to each other. It was very difficult. It was an incredible challenge, but it was fun."
Ella Minnow Pea has been called a "progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable." The book, although light-hearted at times, confronts serious questions about fascism, tyranny, resistance, and the ambition of zealots. "I was trying to say," explains Dunn, "that when you lose certain rights, you lose certain intangibles in addition to those rights. You don't just lose freedom of expression, you're inconvenienced in lots of other ways too. As the story progresses people start losing their houses. All of a sudden the access to food becomes a problem and you start to lose all those basic parts of our existence because our ability to communicate with each other has been undermined. We can speak of freedom in the abstract, but when we start to really apply it in a tangible way, you realize how horrendous it is. I also wanted to address the whole idea of religious zealots and what they can do to sometimes damage our very existence if they are allowed free reign over our lives."
So the manuscript that Dunn had to beg publishers to even read, went on to become a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers title, a Top Ten Book Sense Pick and the recipient of a Borders Original Voices Award. Thus began Dunn's love affair with American booksellers. "I think one of the reasons that booksellers and I have gotten along so well," says Dunn, "is because I tend to give them things that they've never seen before. For example, Ella Minnow Pea is a book that really doesn't have anything to compare it to. I think that the people who get excited about that book like the fact that they can say to a customer who walks in the door 'you've never seen a book like this before; you've never read a book like this. I think it'll be a fun read for you.' A lot of the independent booksellers have nice relationships with their customers; they're on a first-name basis. And because of that they know which customers like which books, and I think that really helps a lot in terms of putting this particular book in people's hands."
Publication of Welcome to Higby was certainly made easier after Ella Minnow Pea pioneered the way. Dunn estimates that Higby, written before Ella Minnow Pea, was rejected by over 100 publishers in its various forms. MacAdams/Cage wanted to know if there were any other gems sitting in Dunn's desk drawer. "I have this Southern novel," he told his publisher, "that I've been working off-and-on for about eight or nine years." Several months later MacAdams/Cage snatched up Welcome to Higby also. Welcome to Higby takes place in the small hamlet of Higby, Miss., over a Labor Day weekend and features a band of off-beat characters that Dunn has lovingly embraced. In fact, Dunn has called Higby "a novel without a villain...a book about love.
"I wanted to tell a story about characters," Dunn continues, "who don't really include a prototypical antagonist. I find a real goodness in these people, an inherent goodness in each of the characters who struggle with their love lives and with their faith. Because they are struggling so much on their own it didn't seem really important to me to impose some prototypical villain."
And the difference between the two books? "I want to say Higby's more traditionally written," says Dunn, "although there are some areas in which I have a lot of fun with narrative and format. It's got five different storylines and this huge cast of characters that sort of weave in and out of each other's lives over this three day period. I think the scope of it, or the scale of it, is a little ambitious in that respect. But I think the fact that it is a straight-forward story that's told chronologically in 75 chapters, it does lend itself to a more traditionally kind of looking novel."
