An Interview with Richard Ford
The first story that Richard Ford wrote for Granta appeared in the eighth issue of the magazine, ‘Dirty Realism’, in 1983. At that time, Ford, who was born in Jackson, Mississippi, was about to turn forty and had published two novels, A Piece of My Heart, and The Ultimate Good Luck. Neither had sold in any numbers and when Ford’s Granta story ‘Rock Springs’ came out neither was in print.
Alongside Ford in that ‘Dirty Realism’ issue were other writers who seemed, at least for the purposes of selling literary magazines, to share a similar take on the world, in particular Raymond Carver. If magazines could be said to have characters or souls (or even consciences) Ford and Carver did as much to shape those things in Granta as anyone.
A couple of years after ‘Dirty Realism’ appeared, Richard Ford wrote The Sportswriter, the novel that made sure that subsequently all of his writing would be in print. The Sportswriter introduced the character Frank Bascombe, a failed novelist, who, after his son had died and his marriage ended, had moved from the south of America to take jobs covering baseball and football in New Jersey. His was an indelible fictional voice: troubled, eloquent and stubborn in its hope.
Ford has continued to write stories, and many of the best of them have appeared in these pages. He has edited three anthologies, The Granta Book of the American Short Story, The Granta Book of the American Long Story, and The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, which are not only wonderful primers in the art, but also a good guide to the rigour and generosity that inform his writing.
He followed The Sportswriter with a short novel, Wildlife, and then with another Frank Bascombe novel, Independence Day, the only novel to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award. After two more collections of stories, Women with Men and A Multitude of Sins, the trilogy of Bascombe novels was completed by The Lay of the Land in 2006. Richard Ford now lives in Maine, with his wife of thirty-nine years, Kristina Ford. This interview took place in July, 2007.