Franklin tells students about writing career, experiences

Novelist Tom Franklin spoke about how illustrative narrative works, such as comic books and graphic novels, have impacted his “over the top” writing in creativity and eccentricity with students on April 18 in Win Thompson Hall.
Franklin has written several published works including “Poachers: Stories, Hell at the Breech,”  “Smonk” and “Crooked Letter, Croooked Letter.” His title story in “Poachers” received the Edgar Allen Poe award for Best Mystery Story and he received the 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship award and the John and Renne Grisham Writer-in-Residence for 2001-2002.
Franklin began his speech by outlining the start of his comic book obsession during his younger years and showing how his passion for those works have influenced his own.
“I liked to tell stories and make up stories,” Franklin said about growing up in southern Alabama in the 1970s. “I found writing to be very hard. I would read ‘Star Trek’ novelizations, so I tried to write ‘Star Trek’ stories, but they were derivatives of the original. Then I tried to write ‘Tarzan of the Ape’ stories, but they were also derivative of the original.”
Franklin, along with his older brother Jeff and cousin Barry, began to create photo novels of “Star Trek” and “Tarzan of the Apes” for fun and entertainment. Franklin said those photo novels were a way for him to tell stories without writing.
“My brother and I would get in the car and drive to the drug store. We would get two rolls of 35 millimeter film and go out [into the woods] without a script, but with an idea and costumes and make photo novels,” Franklin said.
Franklin, with his brother and cousin, made about three to four photo novels and wrote captions for their photo panels.
“The first one we did was sort of a low-budget one, kind of like an independent photo novel. It was ‘Tarzan of the Apes,’” he said. “I had cut-off jeans on; we had a Chewbacca action figure to play the gorilla in the woods. And we found a lion, which was our really ugly dog named Epstein.”
Franklin said his enthusiasm for illustrative narrative works carried over into his writing in his 2006 novel, “Smonk.” The book is set in 1911 in a small Alabama town, where the main character, E.O. Smonk, has consistently destroyed the town’s property, murdered the town’s livestock and beaten the town’s men.
The town puts Smonk on trial for his crimes, whereby the story’s outlandish premise takes off.
Franklin said the story was many things: a parody on religion, a dark comedy and a re-telling of the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah story.
“The script is outrageous,” Franklin said. “Smonk is a monster…I didn’t know what he was [while writing], but I knew he wasn’t human.”
Franklin also named other stories he had written while he was younger and said they fell underneath the 100 bad stories he has written.
In one particularly striking story called “Borygmi,” Franklin wrote about a character named Calvin whose stomach was able to tell him the future.
Calvin later finds out in the story that aliens, who come from the salt he eats, are the ones telling him the future. Franklin said the story ends with Calvin becoming president.
Senior Sarah Wilson said she enjoyed Franklin’s speech and found him hilarious and engaging.
“I really liked him talking about the picture books. It was different and I hadn’t heard about those before,” Wilson said. “It’s not often that we have an illustrative narrative person come.”
Franklin’s lecture was part of the College of Fine Arts and Communication’s Artist-in-Residence program, where professional artists, creative writers, filmmakers and art exhibitions are brought to the UCA campus for one or more days to expand students’ learning experiences.