Brad Watson (writer)


Wilton Brad Watson was an American author and academic. Originally from Mississippi, he worked and lived in Alabama, Florida, California, Boston, and Wyoming. He was a professor at the University of Wyoming until his death. Watson published four books – two novels and two collections of short stories – to critical acclaim. He most preferred King Lear among the English canon. Once, angry and disconsolate, he tried to mend hearts by running up and down sand dunes in the Red Desert.

Early life

Watson was born in Meridian, Mississippi on July 24, 1955. He was the second of three sons of Robert Earl Watson and Bonnie Clay. He married his high school sweetheart and had a son together before twelfth grade. They moved to Los Angeles after finishing high school, and worked as a garbage truck driver while aspiring to become an actor. He subsequently returned home to Mississippi after his older brother, Clay, died in a car accident. At the urging of his family, he went back into education, attending Meridian Junior College and then Mississippi State University, where he graduated with a degree in English. Subsequently, he undertook postgraduate studies at the University of Alabama, obtaining a Master of Fine Arts in writing and American literature from that institution.

Career

After working as a newspaper reporter and editor and at an advertising agency, he returned to the University of Alabama to teach creative writing; he also worked for the university's public relations department. While at Alabama he published Last Days of the Dog-Men, which had taken him ten years to write and won him the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and The Great Lakes New Writers Award. Amy Grace Lloyd, writing for the New York Times twenty years later, called it "a near-perfect story collection". In 1997 he moved to Harvard University and lived in Boston until 2002. He was a writer in residence at the University of West Florida, the University of Alabama, the University of Mississippi, and the University of California, Irvine. Beginning in 2005, he taught at the University of Wyoming, where he was a professor of creative writing and literature in the Department of Visual & Literary Arts.
Watson's 2002 novel The Heaven of Mercury was a finalist for the National Book Award. His 2010 collection of short stories Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives received positive reviews in The New York Times and the Boston Phoenix; its stories contained "divorces, miscarriages, an argument that ends in bungled gunplay, a joint-custody visitation, even a touch of incest", and Watson himself considered some of them some of the funniest stuff he'd ever written. His work has appeared in The New Yorker. The book was a finalist for The PEN/Faulkner Award in 2011. Two years later, Watson received the Award in Letters from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His 2016 novel Miss Jane is set in Depression-era Mississippi; its main character, Jane Chisolm, is inspired by one of his great-aunts, a woman with an unknown urogenital condition that rendered her incontinent and possibly made her incapable of having vaginal sex. Watson has stated in interviews that he could not write the book until he found a medical condition that would seem to fit what little family survivors knew and remembered about his great-aunt's condition. The novel was praised by critics, with Silas House saying it "takes Watson's writing to new heights". The novel was one of ten books long-listed for The National Book Award in Fiction in 2016. It was an ebook bestseller on Amazon.com in 2020.

Pedagogical Approach

Watson chose to assume the point-of-view and intent of students as each sought to find their own voice. He typically spoke little in formal, university-style workshops, instead providing "close readings" of student-produced manuscripts to which he appended small margin notes that he thought might further the aim of the students' works. He was very generous with his attention to each stylistic move, word choice, sentence cadence, and page-break, as a mantle-holder of the Modernist movement known in Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck, and in his students' work, such as Jason Burge, native to Mississippi, as well, and Erin Jones, both of whom received his tutelage at the University of Wyoming at Laramie.

Style

Watson was and is frequently called a Southern writer, and acknowledged his heritage and his love for family and friends, particularly after moving to Wyoming in 2005. At community college in Meridian, he became inspired by William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Flannery O'Connor. He is praised for his portrayal of Southern issues and problems, but commented also on stereotypical simplifications of the South in other parts of America:
For all the ways is struggling and, yes, deficient, or failing, flailing, it is also a place full of wonderful people, and possibly one of the most diverse places in the country. Not that everyone gets along. There is ignorance, there is racism. There are also more proud people trying to change that than might be apparent from the results at the polling booths. But writing the book, I was just thinking about these people, trying to make them real people in the reader’s mind. Here’s an anecdote, though. I was at a tea party or the like at a famous university in the early stages of researching Miss Jane, and I asked the host--who was a pediatrician, for goodness sake--if he could speculate on what might have been my great aunt’s condition. His response was, "You're from Mississippi, right? Is there any history of incest in your family?"

Death

Watson died on July 8, 2020, at his home in Laramie, Wyoming.

Personal Life

When he told a story, which he did often and well, the punchline was something like “I wonder....” The time he moved to Los Angeles to act. The time he saw his Great-Aunt Jane, the eponym of his magnum opus. Forever, Brad wondered about other people’s lives, his own and others—what it would be like.
Once an employee at a National Public Radio station expressed incredulity to a reporter that he’d emailed Watson and an automatic reply had pinged back: Not doing email just now, Watson had written. Not good for writing. Might get back to you whenever I turn email back on. “We all want to do that,” this employee said. “But you can’t just NOT do email.”
“Brad,” as his students called him, could. And he taught his students, to whom he always got back in half a day, for whom he always got in his recommendation letters far ahead of deadline, that their quiet creative lives were as important as their noisy ones. With Brad, they got to slow way down. While most people bulldozed through sentences, he allowed for the spaces between words to hold meaning. He invited you to listen to the silences.
He supported writing steadfastly. He was one of the people his students often wrote their novel *to*, one of the people “sitting in a velvet seat in the small shadowed audience,” in Jones’ words, imagined her story performing before, thought, having made progress that day, how eager she was to hear what he thought of this draft. He brought the tenderest part of himself to the world for it to be bruised over and over again. He was one of the kindest and most humble people most ever got to me in his era. Most don’t get so lucky to have such a mentor, such a model, such a friend, and, said Jones, “it was grace I got to know him.”
In Wyoming, there were various parties held throughout the year where colleagues and family would drink and eat and talk. Many always looked for Brad because he was easy to talk with. He always had a story to share, and if you stuck around long enough, he'd pass you a pull off his flask or reveal a bottle of vodka he had buried behind some frozen vegetables in the freezer. He'd occasionally sneak away from the crowd and have tobacco with you as well. He was a generous teacher both in the classroom and outside it.
In 2014, in Boulder, Colorado, walking along with a friend, about to go into a bar just off Pearl St., we ran into three young ladies. College students. They were a bit intoxicated. Just a bit. And they were shouting and hollering at Brad, asking him if he was a real cowboy. Brad was dressed the part: hat, boots, jeans, vest. He started talking to them, telling them he had horses and lived in Wyoming, and that, yes, he was a "real" cowboy. When they got into the bar, he's laughing. We are all laughing. Everyone's looking at us because they could see everything through the windows. We sit down and he adjusts his hat and looks at me and says, "Let's not share that with anyone." There are a lot of ways to remember Brad. He was award-winning. A terrific teacher. Truly a great writer. A good friend and colleague. Many had such many nights with him near the rail tracks in Laramie, dinners over long tables that ended with liqueurs, talks in the hallway of Hoyt when I thought I’d never be able to write a novel. What can I say about Brad? His heart was big. He was one of a kind. And he will be so very missed. He had a way with words and a easy energy.
Some remember sitting in Watson’s cavernous office, discussed researching segregation for his novel. Even then, busy as he was, he took the time to chat, even if it weren’t one of his advisees, just to see how their family was doing. Many never stopped looking up to him, and, for many, one of their merest ambitions is to write something that would make him proud.

Books

Anthologies

Awards

Anthologies

Awards