Show notes
Here’s a transcript of the video: When I was a little boy, I had a terrible recurring nightmare. It wasn’t about a specific thing—it was just a kind of feeling, a sort of thrumming in my head that scared the hell out of me. And inevitably I would end up going into my parents’ bedroom and crawling in between them to feel safe from that nightmare.Then I developed the technique of telling myself a story at bedtime to get to sleep. It’s really where my serial fiction began in that form. I would tell a story and then make it continue the next night. I’d usually have a couple of stories going at the same time.I remember one was set in Florida, in Tarpon Springs—or at least that’s where the movie was set. I saw something called Beneath the 12 Mile Reef that really affected me in terms of making me fascinated by the undersea world. It was about these Greek-American fishermen who were going underwater with those big steel diving helmets, and it just made me think about the whole world of the undersea.The other one was something I called The Secret Crossroads, which was inspired by the Hardy Boys, really. A lot in those days was inspired by the Hardy Boys.I still tell myself stories sometimes at night. It’s an old habit, and I haven’t broken it easily. But that’s where most of my stories came from—from that habit of putting myself to sleep, a sort of self-hypnosis when I was a little boy.So storytelling really came first. Writing kind of crept up on me.I kept a diary when I was nine years old in which I recorded all sorts of useless information—but I still have that diary somewhere. I would write about movies I had seen and what I’d had for lunch. It was all over the place, really.I would write about my friend Bobby Ballance who, on the bus with me, would make up stories about mysterious murder cases and how we were going to solve them. Bobby was the only person I knew who had a tape recorder—a reel-to-reel recorder—and we would go over to his house and record the clues on the tape recorder.About the same time, I took shirt cardboards from my father’s shirts and used them as things I could write on, and I created a comic book called Little Tallulah, which was a merger of the two things I loved most: Little Lulu, the comic, and Tallulah Bankhead.As a child I would hear Tallulah Bankhead on the radio doing her “Big Show”, and I loved her. She had a voice that was as deep as a man’s, and a very warm way about her that was appealing to me as a little boy.At Ravenscroft School—which is where I went to grade school—I had a teacher named Mrs. Robertson. She brilliantly gave us an assignment called Word Pictures, where she would give us a postcard and ask us to describe what we saw in the postcard.She gave one to me which evoked a whole story about the Old West—a saloon at night with lights coming out of the window—and I built a story around it. I wrote about a piano tinkling at night, footsteps on the path, and a mysterious stranger coming into town. It started to build my imagination.I count her as one of my first really serious influences when it comes to telling stories—to writing. She read my story aloud to the class, which thrilled me and made me very proud.I wrote a story in the seventh grade about a boy that’s fixating on a girl—a beautiful girl in his class—and he thinks of her as a goddess, really, until he discovers that she has a vaccination mark, you know, a sign of her human nature. I was obviously trying to talk myself out of having a romance with anybody… I must have been dealing with that.But the person who really made a difference to me was Mrs. Phyllis Peacock, who was my senior English teacher.We’ve all had one of those teachers—or if we were lucky, you’ve had one of those teachers—that you remember all your life, and who changed the way you think and work and create.A lot of people thought she was kind of a loony because she was melodramatic. She would jump on a chair to make a point. But I thought she was charming—and the fact that she liked me had something to do with it, I suppose.She had two other students, Anne Tyler and Reynolds Price, both of whom became famous writers, and she was always telling me that she thought of me in the same way—that I could do that.She singled me out, in other words, and paid special attention to me. And while it must have annoyed the hell out of some of the other students, it charmed me and made a difference.I think she sensed that I was a bit of a wallflower—maybe even a prude—and so she gave me an assignment to explain the origins of the maypole.I had no idea what that meant, but I went home and asked my parents and saw great embarrassment in their faces… they couldn’t talk about it. So my mother left an Encyclopaedia Britannica on my bed with it open to “Maypole,” where it explained that it was a phallic symbol.So I went in to talk to Mrs. Peacock the next day, and she sat there, eyes twinkling, while I explained about penises and whatever symbolism was involved. She knew exactly what she was doing. She wanted to get that out of me—I look at it as an act of benevolence now.So the big finale for the year was a stage performance that we would do in the theater of the high school. I was comfortable with this because I had already been in the production of The Desperate Hours at the Raleigh Little Theatre—a grown-up play where I was the little boy on stage. The hardest part about being in that play was coming in with a football and throwing it around as if I knew what to do with it.So Sarah Pierce and I, a classmate, were assigned to do this performance that I called Sleep in Literature. We dressed all in white. We made columns out of Pine State Creamery ice-cream cartons—made Corinthian columns—and we read “The Lotus Eaters” by Tennyson.At the end of the reading, I looked out into the audience to see what kind of response I was getting, and Mrs. Peacock was feigning sleep. Her head was over to one side… and then she very melodramatically woke up.It was her way of telling me that it was doing exactly what I thought it would do—that she had fallen asleep in the course of listening to my poem.She was one of those rare teachers who really inspired me to do better—to create, to write, really.She died when she was in her nineties in 1998, I believe. And I certainly didn’t keep up with her at that point, but she lives in my memory so vividly. And a lot of other writers as well—not just writers, but people who loved her—remember what she was like, how inspirational she was, and how much she cared about what she did. It was an amazing thing to be a part of.The last time I saw her was when I went back to Raleigh for a book signing. I was signing a book for a couple of leather queens in full regalia when I looked up and there was Mrs. Peacock behind them, sort of twiddling her fingers at me and letting me know that she was there.It’s a perfect last memory of her, really.I was so blessed to have her—as well as my English grandmother—to be a kind of fairy godmothers to me in my youth. I don’t know what I would have done without them. They made a difference.So the person I turned out to be, for better or worse, was greatly due to those women, and I shall always be grateful that I had them in my life.Thank you all for coming along, and I’ll see you next time.A bit more about Phyllis Peacock (1904-1998):Reynolds Price who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction wrote of Mrs. Peacock- “She was a formidable guardian at the gates of good old censorious, rule-ridden, clear English and a magical teacher who worked a sort of inexplicable voodoo on her students.”Anne Tyler who won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Breathing Lessons, dedicated her first novel - “To Mrs. Peacock, For everything you've done. Anne.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit armisteadmaupin.substack.com/subscribe