Sharyn McCrumb - St. Dale

I’m grateful to the Junior League of Bristol for their help and encouragement. Mike Smith of the Martinsville Speedway let me observe two races from the press box, and he very kindly shared his reminiscences with me on the Earnhardt Era of racing. Thanks, too, to Dean and Teresa Mayer, Henry Knight, Kyle McCurry, JoAnn Reeves, Cal Royall, Amelia Townsend, Tresha Lafon, Chrissie Anderson Peters, Linda Wilson, Gale Whigam, Kathy Calaway, and Laree Hinshelwood for their help and enthusiasm on various facets of this project.

Jerry Bledsoe, the greatest expert on stock car racing that I knew, heard me out at the very beginning (“You’re doing what?”) and was an inspiration and a great critic. Jerry’s Down Home Press also published an early biography of Dale Earnhardt by Frank Vehorn that was most helpful in documenting races that happened decades ago.

Tom Deitz, who knows more about cars than a medievalist and fantasy novelist has any right to, kept me straight on mechanical details and the fine points of drag racing.

And thanks to you who are reading this, for being willing to read a novel set in the world of NASCAR-that makes you part of the miracle.

Sharyn McCrumb

An Interview with Sharyn McCrumb

1. Why did you write a novel about a pilgrimage in honor of a NASCAR driver? Where did you get that idea?

When I studied The Canterbury Tales in grad school, I was struck with the idea of grassroots canonization, and I thought that lately saints were being popularly elected. Like Elvis and Princess Diana. I toyed with that idea for years, but never really felt moved to write the book, until Dale Earnhardt died. He was from my state and my generation, and even though I wasn’t a NASCAR fan, I thought I could understand his world and the reasons for his secular sainthood.

Ultimately this is a story about people’s search for something to believe in. Living in a secular age has not made that yearning go away. It has simply produced a collection of unusual saints. Like Dale.

2. Wasn’t Dale Earnhardt “The Intimidator,” known for knocking people out of his way in a race? A saint? Him?

Dale Earnhardt? A saint? …Well, no more so than Elvis or Princess Diana, I guess, but like them, he has mourners who continue to grieve long after the date of his death. Cars to this day bear memorial stickers on the rear window-a number 3 with wings.

Although Dale Earnhardt dropped out of the ninth grade, when he died he was ranked #40 on the Forbes List of 100 Richest Americans. Despite his wealth and fame, he continued to live a few miles from his birthplace, and to act as unpretentiously as ever. He is a twenty-first century St. Thomas a Becket: a poor boy who made good in a system stacked against him, and who retained his humility to the last.

3. But doesn’t there have to be some sort of miracle connected to a saint?

Oddly enough, there really are mystical elements to the tale of Dale Earnhardt.

Although Dale Earnhardt won the NASCAR championship seven times, the Daytona 500-the crown jewel of the sport-was always his nemesis, almost to a supernatural level. Out of twenty-three tries, Earnhardt won only once. The thing was, he didn’t lose because people outraced him. Some years he’d win every race they ran at that track, except the one that mattered.

He’d hit debris that wasn’t supposed to be there and wreck. He’d run out of gas. His engine failed. Once he hit a seagull. (A seagull?) Many of these accidents happened only a few yards from the finish line in the final lap of a 3½ hour race-as if he were fated always to lose it.

His one Daytona 500 victory came when a little girl in a wheelchair visited him before the race and insisted on giving him a lucky penny to help him win. Earnhardt glued that penny to the dashboard of his number 3 car-and that day he won the Daytona 500. He lived for exactly three years and three days after that victory, and died in the 2001 Daytona 500-eleven seconds from the finish line on the last lap.

There are other miracles in the book, and I wish I could tell you the ones that happened to me while I was writing it!

4. In what sense is ST. DALE a departure from your previous books? In what ways is it consistent with them?

St. Dale is certainly a departure from the Ballad novels. But remember that I also have a smartaleck side. In tone St. Dale is reminiscent of some of my other books, most notably If I’d Killed Him When I Met Him , so I think that my readers will like it. The ones who have read it so far certainly do. This is also an opportunity to reach many new readers, who will be interested in the motor sports setting of this book without caring who I am.

The common factor between St. Dale and the Ballad novels is that I am still exploring traditions of the Appalachian mountain culture-after all, stock car racing started on Thunder Road in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. I have always battled the casual bigotry of mainstream culture against Appalachian traditions, the hillbilly stereotyping, etc. It seems to me that there is no sport more maligned by the self-appointed cultural elite than NASCAR. In this book, I treat the sport and its fans with respect and understanding-fighting the stereotypes as usual. I hope I make a difference in the general perception of motor sorts. Stock car racing is a great sport.

“My heroes have always been cowboys. And they still are, it seems.”

5. Will fans of our Ballad novels enjoy ST. DALE?

I have been pleased to see the overlap between racing fans and my readership. People I never knew were NASCAR fans have turned out to be long-time readers of my work: college librarians, booksellers, historians, teachers, poets. There are 70 million NASCAR fans. You might be amazed at the erudition and sophistication of NASCAR-fan readers, but nothing surprises me any more.

6. What was the most surprising thing you discovered as you researched this novel?

My original intention was to learn enough about stock car racing to write a credible novel. I did not expect to fall madly in love with the sport. I discovered that once racing made sense to me, I loved it. A NASCAR commercial asks: How bad have you got it? Oh, let me count the ways. Once I was stuck in the Chicago airport at race time; all the TV’s in the terminal were turned to baseball. So I called a friend on my cell phone and made her talk me through the race until my flight boarded. In June I was in England, on the computer in the basement of thousand-year-old Wroxley Abbey, checking the qualifying results for the Michigan race. My own favorite driver, 2002 Daytona 500 winner Ward Burton, had a run of bad luck in 2004. I haven’t cried this much over a guy since junior high school.

7. Did writing this book change you?

I have had so many wonderful adventures. If I have to pick just one, let me tell you about The Outlaws.

Last March I was invited to Young Harris College in the Georgia mountains to lecture on my Ballad novels. Hearing that I’d be in the area, the local high school asked if I would stay over the weekend and visit there on Monday because the high school English classes had been reading one of my Ballad novels. They put me up in a tourist cabin over the weekend. Saturday night I went dirt track racing with one of my long-time readers who turned out to be a motor sports journalist. On Sunday I settled in to watch the NASCAR race on television, only to discover that the satellite dish was out, the cabin phone was dead, and the mountains blocked the signal to my cell phone. I was in an information vacuum.