Nordan’s fame has yet to fully reach him, however. “The words ‘Lewis Nordan’ and ‘Fan Club’ just don’t seem to go together very well to me.” He jokes about the appreciation week, saying, “Of course, we always celebrate with parades and confetti and barbecues, and there’s usually dancing in the streets in most of the cities around the country, and I try to make as many as I can.”

Though he has become what he terms “semi-famous” as a writer, it did not always appear that he would. Now teaching creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, the native of Itta Bena, Mississippi, came to writing in a rather roundabout way. After a stint in the Navy, Nordan enrolled at Millsaps in the summer of 1960. “Millsaps was great for me,” says Nordan. “I didn’t do especially great in my classes – my mind was still more at sea than in the books, but I loved Millsaps immediately. I was in sociology briefly and psychology briefly; actually for one course each until I found out I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Finally I settled on English as a major. But I didn’t write, and I didn’t write for a long time after that.”

After graduating from Millsaps, Nordan completed his Ph.D. in English at Auburn University with a focus on Shakespearean studies. But as much as he loved the bard’s masterpieces, the scholar’s life was, for him, “a dead-end road.”

“And so, I literally never taught a course in Shakespeare. I never got a job that asked that I teach a course in Shakespeare, and I was out of work for a long time. But I was teaching at the University of Georgia in a kind of temporary job, and when that ran out is when I decided, ‘I’ve tried this Shakespeare thing as hard and long as I know how, I’m not good at it,’ and so I started to write fiction on a full-time basis. It was just sort of running out of other options that led me to be a fiction writer.”

Nordan’s growing readership is very happy that life steered him to fiction writing. But while his passion for fiction is immediately evident as he speaks, he remains humble about his writing.

“I think I would have been just as happy being a blues singer or a rock’n’roll singer, or a harmonica player or anything else. I even think I could be happy as a wood carver, I just didn’t have any of those talents. I was no singer, I had very little manual dexterity, and so really I just gravitated toward the thing I could do, which was to work in language rather than wood or music or something else. In a way I write, as Flannery O’Connor said, because it’s what I can do,” he says.

“I find myself in such complete sympathy with all my characters, even my worst characters, because in some way the worst and the best of my people represent just parts of myself. When somebody asks me, ‘is this autobiographical?’ it’s hard for me to answer that question because I want to immediately say yes, meaning I’ve had all those feelings of this father, of this son, of this mother, every person in these books is somehow an autobiographical experience of my own, and yet so often the answer is more truly no, since I never truly jumped on that train or did any of many of the events in the stories.”

Nordan has become known for his humorous characters. His fiction include a young boy fishing for chickens from his porch with a genuine Zebco rod and reel; a cross-dressing, cross-gendered football contest put on by a small Mississippi high school; a young boy named Sugar Mecklin who spends the night with Roy Dale Conroy in the only house in the Delta to have a cellar; and a man who hopes to the put the zip back in his marriage by taking his wife on a second honeymoon to the Gulf coast – immediately after a hurricane has passed through and destroyed the entire beach. However, beneath this comic vision is a tone of sorrow and loss, which Nordan cites as the reason he was drawn to writing.

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Millsaps Magazine  |  Millsaps | Last Edited August 12, 1999