Two who write with fire in their bellies

As Tim McLaurin and Ann Hood spoke at Catawba College recently, I was struck by the thread that ran through their speeches and their lives.

Cancer.

Maybe I’m just supersensitive to that, since it’s run through my life, too.

McLaurin said it at the beginning of his remarks. “The chemotherapy is working well,” he said, after walking slowly to the podium, clearing his throat and apologizing for his raspy voice.

In Ann Hood’s books, she writes of a father with cancer, McLaurin said. “It’s a universal confrontation that touches many lives.”

But even more universal, surely, are the words McLaurin and Hood use to tell stories — real and fictional.

McLaurin has a way with descriptive words that’s almost too much — words like a supersaturated rainforest. He paints a picture with layers of words, filling his landscape with images as vivid as an oil painting.

Not a photograph. Too flat. Too real. McLaurin sees in a more sensual way.

His memoir, “The River Less Run,” recounts a trip out West with his family, retracing a trip he took years earlier with his first wife. On this trip, he said he realized how much his life had changed.

How could he tell? “I see things so much differently. ... The colors of the rocks in the Badlands are different.” He feels the colors now, instead of seeing them.

His vision has changed on many things.

He took his daughter, Megan, to New York when she was 15, keeping his hand on her arm the entire time. “I thought if I let go, she’d be sucked down in the gutter and sold into white slavery,” he said, deadpan. But when he did lose touch and later found her, he realized he was looking at a young woman, not a little girl.

McLaurin’s appearance as he stepped on stage was shocking people who had seen him before. Some of us at the Post heard him speak many years ago, as his publishing odyssey began.

Up popped this wiry man, casually dressed, voice twanging with backwoods drawl. And he told us snake handling stories. He was remarkable, fascinating, and like nothing we’d ever encountered.

And he could write. His early works of fiction had a violent undertone, but were incredibly creative and vivid. Reading his memoir last year, I saw a man mellowed by addictions, illness, age and experience, but still passionate and still writing with a multi-colored fire burning at his edges.

His quiet voice and weak eyes are just an old blanket covering the fire that burns within — that keeps him alive.

Ann Hood had a tough act to follow after McLaurin spoke. Her fire burns in a far different way — steady, colored by a rich Italian background, a fire of saints and mysteries, miracles and superstition.

It’s just as real, and almost went out when Hood’s father died of cancer. He was her best friend, the kind of father a woman can never leave — caring, understanding, strong, delighting in her children and sharing in all the important parts of life, from morning coffee to visiting the doctor.

Losing him, Hood lost her faith, her belief in miracles, her ground, her star, her inner strength.

Empty and grieving, she went on a search for another miracle to rekindle her fire. And so, her memoir, “Do Not Go Gentle,” takes that journey. First, she fights the cancer, then she must fight herself to regain her sense of self and belonging. It’s a trip that takes her deep into her Italian family’s roots, superstitions and all, and rejection becomes a loving embrace that fuels her fire.

Hood, who is used to writing fiction, said she likes what Eudora Welty says — fiction is a lie. She found she liked lying that way.

She lived with her crazy grandmother, a woman she described as 4-11, who swore like crazy in Italian and was always criticizing or dismissing her as stupid or crazy.

She invented stories to make up ways of getting rid of her Mama Rose, with whom she shared an iron bed in a house full of relatives and ghosts.

She spent most of her nights scared to death of the ghosts who might visit her and almost as scared of Mama Rose, who pushed her away when she sought comfort.

When she grew up, she wanted to write. People told her she had few choices: teacher, nurse, wife, mother — through the fear of uncertainty, she started writing anyway.

How could she not write, with a family that believed wholeheartedly in the power of dreams and would report their dreams each day for interpretation?

How could she ignore things like Mama Rose dreaming of what numbers to gamble on? Even after Mama Rose died, she came to Ann in dreams, revealing numbers — but they were always off by 1.

Her memoir is full of people and feelings, maybe more feelings than anything else, and she’ll capture you with her emotions, jumbled as they are at times. It’s a search worth following with her, with a quiet, hopeful resolution.

Neither Hood nor McLaurin has written about cancer, in and of itself, but rather as a part of life, a bump in the continuum. It’s just one of those coincidences that surfaces.

Hood is heading back to fiction, and McLaurin has a novel in the throes of publication. He’s taken a semester off from teaching creative writing at N.C. State, but, despite his ghostlike appearance, his slow walk and hoarse voice, his handshake is like iron, and shows the real strength in a man who keeps meeting his demons, then driving them away again.

Contact Deirdre Parker Smith at 704-797-4252 or dp1@salisburypost.com .