Lauren RabainoHe has come a long way since selling watermelons and poetry in Greece and using his bathroom breaks at Bay Area Corporations to edit his books. Cal Poly instructor Carson Medley has hit the big time and looks forward to continued success.
His controversial first novel “Ain’t Whistlin’ Dixie No More,” speaks of racism and interracial relations in the south (which starts out in Mississippi in 1994).
“(In the book,) Mississippi has still not ratified the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and in one week they are either going to elect their first African American governor and Republican or a white congressman Democrat who has ties to the KKK,” Medley said.
The book was published last October but is particularly relevant to American politics today. “It seems like it is a timely book right now; mainly because of the presidential election and the fact that we are kind of wrestling this idea of a black person being president of the United States,” Cal Poly English professor Glen Starkey said.
“In his book I think it is kind of drawn broadly; it is a real satire and the characters are kind of stereotyped really large but it deals with those issues about racism and sort of indoctrinated feelings that people have, Starkey said. “They have grown up a certain way and how hard it is to break that.”
The book’s main character, Spencer McDaniels, experiences discrimination when he is enrolled in an almost all African American school, while he himself is white.
“The congressman is about to lose the election so he pulls his son Spencer out of prep school on the east coast and puts him in Mississippi’s most violent school to show the people he cares,” Medley said.
Interracial relationships come into play when Spencer falls in love with an African American girl, Kim Wallace, whom he attends school with. “It is Spencer’s tale of revenge against the south and injustice and racism and a terrible act that his father did to his mother, which was murder,” Medley said.
The idea of the book was partly inspired by Medley’s real life. “The seed was planted because there is a girl Katrina who plays Kim Wallace and I was totally infatuated with her in high school but she was black and if I went out with her being the son of a lawyer in white Jackson, it just wouldn’t have happened,” Medley said.
Growing up in Jackson, Miss., he too went from a private to public school. “I was the white school prep kid that was at the almost all African American public school,” he said.
Other inspiration for the book came from Medley’s love for Shakespearean tragedies and Quentin Tarantino films.
“The way he constructed the story is he begins with the ending then you go through the rest of the book building up to where it started; so it is kind of borrowed from that post modern kind of fractured chronology,” Starkey said.
“Ain’t Whistlin’ Dixie No More” took just two years to write but four years to edit. “I did nine drafts and when you do nine drafts of 554 pages it is an everyday process,” Medley said. “I kind of wanted to create a hip-hop kind of novel because almost all of my dialogue is written in Ebonics or Black English Vernacular, which was awful to edit,” he said.
Medley has another book in the works called “Fat Dreams of Pushing Daisies.” It is a book about a suicidal man who moves to New Orleans and eats himself to death. The man went from weighing 180 pounds to 370 pounds in a year. The book took a toll on Medley and he too gained weight while writing it.
He also has two manuscripts that were requested by a major press company. One is called “Saving Holden” and refers to Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.”
“My argument is that the social pressures Holden experienced in 1949 are similar to what kids experience in 2008, college students and high school students; and that if parents and teachers and school counselors would read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ and look for those signs then they could find those same signs in their own kids and we could prevent events like Columbine and the Virginia Tech shootings from happening,” Medley said.
Besides being a published novelist, Medley is also an English instructor at Cal Poly.
He has taught at Cal Poly for four years and describes his teaching style as “organic.”
“I usually throw out the lesson plan two minutes into a lecture because that’s just me. I try and stay updated with what is going on with the younger generation,” Medley said.
Students that have taken his Reasoning, Argumentation, and Writing class agree. “He made it fun to go to class and cared about connecting with us,” liberal studies junior Nicole Frey said. In his class students come up their own theories and present them to the class.
“He encouraged us to come up with our own ideas. He was really open to any style of writing,” math junior Lindsay Weed said. “I hated English and writing papers before (his class),” she added. Medley wants his students to leave his class with, “the ability to think critically and examine not only their own lives but every form of popular culture and media that surrounds them. And that they master the colon, the semicolon and the dash.”
As a child Medley used his creativity to come up with good lies. “My father told me to speak the truth but make up good lies when I write,” he said.
His advice to aspiring writers: “Don’t expect overnight success and keep your day job. Better yet get a night job and write all day.”