Charles Frazier at the Decatur Book Festival

I went to the keynote address by Charles Frazier at the second annual Decatur Book Festival last night. Held in the impressive Presser Hall at Agnes Scott College, a timber-framed chapel complete with pipe organ.

Frazier is definitely low key. They chose a format where he was on stage with a book critic, and they sat in stuffed armchairs.  Definitely not as good an impression as, for instance, the talk given by Joyce Carol Oates at the Atlanta History Center, where she was on stage alone and standing at a podium.

This interview was targeted at readers, not writers, but I still gleaned a few interesting tidbits. The questions were about equally distributed between his first novel Cold Mountain and his new novel Thirteen Moons. I have not yet read his new novel, and it was a surprise to me that it was set around the Cherokee removal. If I had known that I would have read it earlier, since that is one of the events in local history that really interests me. Poor marketing?

• Frazier works slowly - a couple of pages is a good day for him


• He revises extensively. He said some passages had been revised twenty times.


• The pressure after the success of Cold Mountain was considerable. I can only imagine. He mentioned having to deal with the expectations of publishers.


• He didn't directly criticize the Cold Mountain movie, but did say he would have done some things differently if he had been able to. He was surprised, after seeing how movies are made, that any good movies are ever produced.


• Film rights have already been bought for Thirteen Moons.


• He writes every day. If he doesn't then he gets rusty.


• But he did not say that he is writing another novel. When asked that question he sort of danced around the answer.

Also present was a Cherokee translator who had translated part of the novel into Cherokee. They did tandem readings. Interesting, but a little bit of Cherokee goes a long way.