David Madden speaks on the power of memory and imagination, including a dramatic reading of Momma’s Lost Piano, a memoir, at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Black Mountain, NC on November 5th, 2023.
Nov 062023
Jul 262023
Listen to the interview with David Madden on Poets and Writers with Henry McCarthy at Emory & Henry College in 2023.
May 112023
When she is seventeen, Emily Merritt’s beloved father give her the piano she has always wanted. A few days later, having lost his job, he sells Emily’s piano and took the family out of their fine two-story house in Cleveland, Ohio and takes the family down to his hometown Knoxville, Tennessee and into his mother’s three-room house.
The loss of her piano casts a shadow over Emily’s life of poverty in Knoxville, a city she could never love.
David Madden, the author of 15 works of fiction, including Bijou, set in Knoxville, turns to the memoir genre to tell the story of his close relationship with his mother over seven decades.
Rather than develop a conventional narrative, Madden employs an impressionistic style that enables the reader to experience Emily’s memories as he imagines them, in brief, sharply focused scenes.
Throughout the rest of her life, Emily longs to return to Cleveland, Ohio, where she had an idyllic youth with many boyfriends and girlfriends, and where she had been a good swimmer, a good piano student, and had done well in school. Her great love of life in the present is expressed in her love of men and dancing in highway honky-tonks, along with her six beautiful girlfriends. Having divorced her lovable, alcoholic husband, Emily falls deeply in love with alcoholic married men. She doesn’t enjoy whiskey or smoking, but she’s not a church goer.
She moves like a nomad from house to house and from job to job, as a clerk in dress shops, cashier in restaurants and hotels, and as a practical nurse. Petite, she knows she is lovely and charming, but needs to control her gift for sarcasm when dealing with bosses who fire her and the many landlords who evict her for failure to pay rent.
Emily is a courageous fighter as she raises three boys in poverty. A third son dies soon after birth. She enlists the governor’s help in her fight to get paroles for two of her boys. Dickie, the dark brother, is a life-long petty conman, but little brother John, known affectionately as “Sunshine,” becomes a legendary rescuer of wayward boys and girls, and runs for mayor of Knoxville twice. A sometime provider for all the family, Jerry, the middle brother, becomes a merchant seaman, a soldier, and finally a professor and a successful writer in all genres.
A voracious reader, Emily Merritt is very articulate and witty, and uses colorful expressions. Having enjoyed all his life listening to his mother talk, David Madden’s memoir inspires the reader to listen eagerly too.
Apr 222020
Mar 062019
The Last Bizarre Tale
Mar 012019
Sep 262018
©2018 Blake Madden
David Madden at the Grail Movie Theater in Asheville, NC, talking about his days as a movie-crazy usher.
Jan 032018
(Photo: Paul Clark)
For me, the unimagined life is not worth living. “The Beautiful Greed,” my first novel, based on my two years as a merchant seaman, came out in 1961 when I was living in Boone, teaching at Appalachian State. For the past eight years, I have been living a life of creativity in Black Mountain.
“Marble Goddesses and Mortal Flesh,” my 15th work of fiction, came out this fall.
In November 2009, my wife Robbie and I moved from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Black Mountain to be near our son, Blake, a professional photographer, and our grandchild, Kuniko Nicole, a student at the Asheville School.
In making that decision, the charm of Black Mountain itself, as we knew it from several visits, was also an incentive.
Pam Hester, our local Realtor, was certainly right when she assured us that we would love the little ivory-colored house, now more than a century old, in the first block of Church Street. “These have been,” we often say, “the happiest years of our lives.”
The huge L&N railroad desk on which I have written more than 60 books while teaching at Centre College, University of Louisville, Kenyon College, Ohio University, and 41 years as writer-in-residence at LSU fits perfectly in my cozy study, where I have written eight books.
Out of her study on the opposite side of the house, Robbie spends each day storming North Carolina in her efforts to promote racial justice and to pass the Equal Rights Amendment at long last.
Started 10 years before in Baton Rouge, “London Bridge in Plague and Fire,” my magnum opus, was the first novel I thrashed out on my huge desk in Black Mountain. Continue reading »
May 312017
NEW BOOK OF FICTION FROM U OF TENN PRESS or via Madden, inscribed
May 302017
Abducted by Circumstance