January 30, 2006
By Wil ShaneLyon College News Bureau
Lyon College’s visiting writer and guest instructor Phillip McMath seems to have the number “3” following him around like a warm shadow lately.
First off, he holds the three jobs of attorney in Little Rock, respected novelist and, thirdly, he was a creative writing instructor at the college in the fall semester.
He’s also about to complete the biggest writing job of his career when his trilogy of novels culminates when the third book in the series, Lost Kingdoms, is completed in the coming months.
The first and second installments in the series, Native Ground (1984, August House), and Arrival Point (1991, M&M Press), are both available in the Mabee-Simpson Library.
The books’ plots revolve around a young Marine Corps officer, 1st Lt. Christopher Shaw, his time spent fighting in Vietnam and what living under those conditions does to a man, internally as well as externally.
McMath based Shaw on his own experiences in the war handling two platoons and two companies of tanks with the First Division, working near Da Nang. The novels’ descriptions of the fighting, the fears, the hardships and the friendships encountered by fighting men put the reader in the thick of the action. But it’s McMath’s realistic use of dialog that really brings the characters to life, infusing them with something many fictional characters lack – a soul. Long stretches of dialog sing past the reader, inflected with rhythms and cadences that often make the use of attributes unnecessary.
For McMath, the act of writing is both torturous and enjoyable. “If it were just one and not the other, it wouldn’t be worth doing,” he said.
Writing a novel, like surviving close encounters with the ever-present threat of death in guerrilla warfare, requires diligence in paying attention to detail, knowing your terrain and its inhabitants intimately and staying focused until the job is done.
“With writing a novel, you have to work on it every single day,” McMath said. “You have to work even when you don’t feel like it. Talent only takes you so far. Hard work takes you all the way.”
McMath does his writing early in the morning, before he heads in to work as an attorney. Though his stint as a creative writing teacher at Lyon is his first foray into teaching at a college, McMath has taught writing at seminars hosted by the Arkansas Literary Society.
“I’ve had a great time teaching the class here at Lyon, and if they ask me back again, I’d love to do it,” he said. “It’s been fun and I enjoy it. I think my students have had fun, too.”
While studying for his undergraduate degree in English at Hendrix College, McMath took a single course in creative writing, but the bulk of his training as a writer came from reading as many novels as he could get his hands on, he said.
His favorite writers are Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Tolstoy, Chekov, Patrick O’Brien and Virginia Woolf. Her stream of consciousness writing style has always appealed to McMath. “She’s just wonderful,” he said.
Those influences are visible in the characters McMath has created. When reading about Shaw and the rainy jungle firefights, the deadly open ground of flooded rice paddies and the red flash of tracers streaking out from machine gun nests, one can readily see the thread that connects writers like McMath and Hemingway.
However, where the legendary “Papa” of the Hemingway legend served as Red Cross ambulance driver, journalist, correspondent and rumored sub hunter and resistance fighter, McMath was a hardcore Marine Corps officer, and his real-world experiences breathe life onto the page so realistically as to leave the acrid scent of spent gunpowder burning in the nostrils of a reader.
In addition to his novels, McMath has also authored Dress Blues, a full-length play produced by the Weekend Theater in Little Rock in 1999. He also had two short stories published in the Timberland Press.
With the completion of his trilogy, McMath will lessen the load he imposed upon himself to get the sprawling project completed. But he will continue writing. Real writers don’t have a choice. They have to write.
Like Shaw, caught up in the deadly fighting in the jungles of Vietnam, McMath has a job to do. And like Shaw, he will get the job done or die trying.
“It just won’t go away,” Shaw says at one point in the trilogy’s first installment, Native Ground, referring, perhaps, to the images of war burned into his psyche.
It’s like that with writers like McMath. The stories, the characters and the eternal moments of their lives all exist within him. They just won’t go away.