Thursday night at Ouachita Baptist University’s Young Auditorium Edgar Award-winning author Eli Cranor, whose newest novel Broiler came out last July, did a reading from his book which concerns a kidnapping by desperate chicken plant workers, and then sat down to a conversation with his mentor and friend English Professor and poet Johnny Wink.
During his introduction, Wink recounted meeting Cranor in a seminar room that once existed just behind the back wall of the auditorium stage. Cranor took a course 15 years ago from Wink and another English professor, Jay Curlin, on Shakespeare’s sonnets and another course from Wink only in creative writing.
“What Eli went on to do is then star one more year at Ouachita in football, and I went out to all his games and actually became an honorary captain. Got to stand on the sidelines and realize just how rough football is,” Wink said. Later during the conversation, Cranor would say Wink had actually been made an honorary coach, and he remembers during a break from play having Wink whisper into his earhole, “In winged speed no motion shall I know” from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 51.
Cranor would go on after graduation to play American football in Sweden, even appearing in a European Championship game. After a stay back in the U.S., he was all set to return to Europe to play for a team in Cannes, but something happened that changed his mind.
“He came home to visit his folks, and he met a girl that he had grown up with and gone to school with … And all of a sudden it was romance, and they married, and he did not go back to France, but instead started coaching football, and he and JR Eldridge had these great teams in Arkadelphia,” Wink told the audience.
After coaching football at other high schools and continuing to work on fiction despite many rejections from literary agents, Cranor has by now published three novels, Don’t Know Tough (2021), Ozark Dogs (2023), and Broiler (2024) with a fourth, Mississippi Blue 42, to be published in August. (But don’t forget his middle-school age appropriate fiction work Bookz Make Brainz Taste Bad,illustrated by Daniel Freeman, which came out in 2020.) He also teaches as Writer-in-Residence at Arkansas Tech University.
When he came to the stage, Cranor said he would be reading from Broiler, but not in the typical way authors read from their work at such events. Instead, he would read particular sections from Wink’s copiously marked-up copy, in which Wink, as he often does when grading student papers, draws lines and makes comments to indicate passages of which he is especially fond.
Broiler concerns the collision of two couples, Edwin Saucedo and Gabriela Menchaca, both workers at a chicken processing plant across town and the other, living in a two-story mansion, Luke and Mimi Jackson. Luke manages the plant and oversees seven chicken houses while his wife Mimi maintains their house, with efficient cleaning-service help, and tends to their oft-vocalizing six-month-old son Tuck.
When Luke fires Edwin, who shows up two minutes late for his shift, to impress inspectors visiting the plant, Edwin, whose past attempt to unionize the plant had failed, comes up with a means of collecting $50,000 that involves child-napping and ransom. That amount is the total of unpaid off-the-clock work Gabriela estimates she has earned. Edwin’s decision sets off a series of events that will keep you turning those pages or swiping left on your Kindle.
After Cranor’s reading of some of Wink’s favorite passages, all of them either showing flashily precise description or especially snappy dialogue or both, he sat down on a plush chair to the left of the one Wink had already taken on stage.
Wink complimented Cranor as one of the trinity of favorite writers he had been reading lately along with Michael Ray Taylor, writer of several nonfiction books including Hidden Nature: Wild Southern Caves (2020) and several others and William Boyle, a graduate of University of Mississippi’s MFA program who has written several crime novels set in Brooklyn but who lives in Oxford, Mississippi. Taylor, a neighbor of Wink’s who happened to present at the reading, explained that Wink had written a poem called “God’s In His Garden” about Taylor’s father-in-law who Wink would see ministering to his vegetables from next door.
Then Wink brought up Cranor’s use of the absolute phrase, a grammatical construction in which a phrase, placed at any point in the sentence it is in, has the effect of describing or modifying the meaning of the entire sentence. “In grammar books, you read it doesn't really work as well in English as it does in Greek or Latin or other languages … and then you go out and start reading novels, and you find them all over the place,” Wink said.
“I have a Johnny absolute phrase story,” Cranor responded. “We were actually at an event like this, and he was in the audience, and he was kind of a plant out there. And then he raises his hand at some point and he asks a question, and it’s about an absolute phrase, of course, in one of my novels.
“And so we finished the whole event, and people are doing the book signing and this guy comes up to me who I didn't recognize at the time. It turned out to be Kevin Brockmeier.” Brockmeier is the Little Rock-raised and prize-winning author of four novels and three short-story collections.
“He comes up to me, and again, I might not have answered this way if I had known who he was, right? But he says, ‘Excuse me, Eli, what's an absolute phrase?’ I said, ‘I don't know.”
There was laughter here. Wink called Brockmeier an exquisite writer and said the story showed that just as you don’t need to know anatomy to digest, you don’t need to know the absolute phrase to write well. But Wink said he had made a count of how many absolute phrases Cranor used in Broiler, which is 318 pages.
“There are 152 absolute phrases,” Wink said. “So I realized that Eli uses .48 percent of an absolute phrase per page, and he's got a friend who I'll be meeting, another writer, Megan Abbot, who uses about two absolute phrases per page, so a much higher index. My question to Eli is, when you plotted out this book and wrote it, did you plan to use half an absolute phrase every page?” Cranor said this was one of Wink’s obsessions regarding writing technique and it had even figured in one of the quizzes Wink has emailed to Cranor and others over the years.
A questioner in the audience brought up the journalistic level of detail in Cranor uses to depict the experience of work in a chicken processing plant in Broiler. (This was your SWARK.Today reporter, who Wink recognized in an earlier audience response moment with the 35-year-old nickname Dutchboy, a name he based on my then-resemblance to a certain paint company mascot.)
Cranor said the depth of the book’s information about chicken processing was part of his intent to get as much of the state of Arkansas into his work as he could, likening this to statements made by UFC featherweight Bryce Mitchell, a Texarkana-born, Cabot-raised fighter also known as Thug Nasty.
“He won this really big fight at one point, and they got the mic in front of his face, and he took it. He said, ‘Anytime you put a mic in my face, I'm gonna say, Arkansas.’ … That's kind of how I felt once they gave me the mic, once they gave me a platform to write books. I've been trying to write about Arkansas. Chicken processing is a weird thing to choose in a book to write about, but it is, at its core, Arkansas,” Cranor said.
He further explained that in the 12 years he was a teacher and during the five years he coached he could see several of his students struggling with exhaustion. In speaking to them, Cranor learned they were working night shifts at the local chicken plant before coming to school.
“These people were working 10- to 12-hour shifts, then bicycling to school to get this last semester of their senior year done. Then I started asking questions. 'What's it like?' It's 40 degrees. It's freezing cold, because it helps prevent bacteria growth. They wear ponchos over layers and layers of clothes. There's antibacterial spray. It sprays. They have mesh metal gloves, kind of like chain mail, because they're making the same cut and don’t want to cut their finger off. So with all these, there's a primary source, kind of an interview that started it,” Cranor said.
He said Broiler was the first of his three novels to be developed, though it was the third to be published, so by the time of it being submitted he had built the credibility with his publisher to have them take on a book that did not necessarily have a conventional instant hook: “I don't think they would have ever said, ‘Eli write a book about chicken processing, motherhood and miscarriage. That's going to be your third book.’”
Cranor explained his theory about research in fiction. The process should go on only until the writer senses it is time to write. Then, as the writing proceeds, there will be need for additional research to fill in the information needed in specific passages. He said he had additional help, after submitting his draft, in identifying when that need arose.
“By the time I handed the manuscript to my editor, we were in this moment in time when the strikes were happening. There was so much more coverage about the chicken processing industry, and my editor--she's this amazing person that Johnny calls the Lioness--her name's Juliet Grimes. She would literally go through the manuscript. Anywhere that she wanted more details on the chicken processing industry, she'd make a comment in the document … 'Needs more chicken porn!'’” Cranor said.
Given that so many of the attendees of the reading were Ouachita English majors and faculty, it was natural a question was asked about how Cranor can be so productive as novelist, Sunday Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist and Arkansas Tech teacher. He said he abstains from social media and cited Cal Newport’s recommendation of isolating yourself from electronic and other distractions to do “deep work” for extended periods of time. These times for Cranor usually start every day at 5:00 a.m., when he spends two hours on his writing, usually having 1,000 words to show for it and, after 90 days of this, a book-length manuscript.
His next book, Mississippi Blue 42, is scheduled to release August 5th. He displayed an advanced copy of this novel, which follows a rookie FBI investigator with her mind set on a career fighting terrorists who is upset to be dispatched to the Mississippi Delta to investigate the football program of a large university. “It takes her about 24 hours to realize that this Delta town in Mississippi is skeevier and dirtier and more dangerous than any joint terrorism stuff that she could have possibly been doing,” Cranor said.
Somehow, amid the writing, the teaching, the family life and the book talks, Cranor keeps up his weekly habit of phone conversations with Johnny Wink, which the latter said he has a special chair for. Wink, in over 50 years of teaching, has helped steer many other students to writing and teaching, including Greg Brownderville, Hannah West, Andy Davidson and Darren Van Michael as well as this SWARK.Today reporter.
What do Cranor and Wink talk about? “Everything,” Wink said. “And Eli also reads a lot too. He reads beautifully. So I love to listen to these things that aren't deep books yet, but they’re going to be. And I love the fact that that I'm his second reader, and his principal reader is his mother.”
Cranor kindly signed copies of books that were on sale for all comers after Thursday night’s program. I brought my own copy of Don’t Know Tough, which Cranor signed, “To Jeff, the Dutchboy.” Typically for me, a solid gut-laugh was had, so solid that I forgot to tell him Dutchboy didn’t remember what an absolute phrase was either, until he used a phone to look it up.
