Due to rights issues, the audio of this interview is not available online. Please contact San Diego State University, Special Collections and Archives if you wish to be granted access to the original audio. Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory interview Barry Hannah in their home in San Diego. They begin by asking Hannah how he reacts to being labelled a “Southern writer” which transitions into a discussion of violence and then sex. Hannah explains how he makes fictional use people he knows in his writing. Hannah discusses the way artists aren’t appreciated in their lifetime in the South. Hannah explains how his novel The Tennis Handsome evolved from a novel into separate short stories and then back into a novel. Hannah talks about drinking, both among his characters and in his own life. The last half-hour of the interview has the Bruce Springsteen album The Wild, The Innocence and the E Street Shuffle and then the Elvis Presley album The Sun Sessions playing in the background. Hannah discusses the “unlikability” of many of his characters. An edited version of this interview appears on pages 111 to 125 of Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s, ed. Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, University of Illinois Press, 1987.
