Part One of the Series, “Where Kentucky Writers Write”

By Tom Eblen and Bill Goodman

Photographs by Tom Eblen

While we were teaching at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School in 2018, we talked over lunch one day about doing a book of photographs and interviews with Kentucky writers about their workspaces. Progress on our project, Where Kentucky Writers Write, has been slow because of other demands on our time. It didn’t help that a global pandemic made visiting other people in close quarters unsafe for several years. But we are back at it, and we plan to share a few of our interviews with Undermain in the coming months. We visited with Ed McClanahan in his home office in 2019, the year he was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. He died Nov. 27, 2021, at the age of 89.

Ed McClanahan was a master storyteller. He wrote tales of rollicking misadventure, often with himself as a main character. His stories were filled with clever wordplay, keen observations about human foible and characters so colorful you knew they had to be real. 

McClanahan grew up in Brooksville and Maysville. He spent the last 30 years of his life in an old house in the Mentelle neighborhood near downtown Lexington. At his grandfather’s desk beneath a big picture window, he wrote most of his dozen books surrounded by photographs and quirky mementoes. They reflected a counterculture life that ranged from farming with Wendell Berry, the author of The Unsettling of America, to tripping acid with Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“I like being in a place that reminds me of where I've been and who I've been in various phases of my life,” McClanahan said. “There's not an item in here — and there must be thousands — that doesn't have some story attached to it in my head. It's like I walk into my own mind, or my own memory, when I come in here.”

McClanahan’s most famous book is the hilarious 1983 coming-of-age novel The Natural Man. Others include Famous People I Have Known, A Congress of Wonders and Not Even Immortality Lasts Forever. He also published stories, essays, profiles and reviews in Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone and other magazines.

Digging through a desk drawer, McClanahan pulls out a magnifying glass, a tube of toothpaste and finally finds what he’s looking for: a laser pointer to site things in the office he wants to talk about.

“I used to bring students in here and tell them about this stuff,” he said, pointing to his Acid Test graduation certificate, signed by Kesey, and original illustrations for two of his book covers by Ralph Steadman and Robert Crumb.

His antique desk and spool cabinet once occupied the Bracken County Circuit Court clerk’s office, which his grandfather, great-grandfather and aunt presided over for decades. Every wall and furniture surface is covered with posters, photographs and knickknacks. 

There is a framed Guy Mendes photograph of McClanahan dressed as Captain Kentucky, a persona he adopted after hippie friends in California gave him the nickname. Another Mendes photo shows Carlos “Little Enis” Toadvine with scantily clad go-go dancers from Boots Bar, a long-gone Lexington honky-tonk. McClanahan, Toadvine and the dancers are recreated in bobbleheads on a corner shelf. McClanahan wrote a memorable profile of Toadvine, whom he described as “the world’s greatest left-handed upside-down guitar player,” for Playboy magazine in 1974. 

“It's important to me to have a space like this,” he said. “I've always had one.” To write well, he said, “I think you have to get comfortable with who you are, and you can't get very comfortable on a train or an airplane or a hotel room.”

McClanahan recalled a time in the 1960s when he and Gurney Norman, a fellow Kentuckian and Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, rented offices above a nightclub in Palo Alto, California. As McClanahan wrote each night, The Grateful Dead, Sonny Terry and other now-famous musicians played on the stage directly below his desk. “That was a wonderful place to work,” he said.

For several years, McClanahan lived, wrote and did a little farming near his friend Wendell Berry, Kentucky’s most acclaimed contemporary writer. That helped inspire the favorite of his own books, A Congress of Wonders, which Paul Wagner made into a film in 1994. “I could never have written that book if I hadn't lived in Henry County,” he said. “Living next door to Wendell was an education; a really important one.”

Beside the iMac keyboard on his desk, McClanahan kept a stack of index cards he used to jot down things he read or heard that he thought might find their way into a story someday. He said it was a habit all writers, especially young ones, should practice.

“Just pay attention,” he said. “Everything has artistic potential, every moment in time, if you just pick it up and single it out and shape it and look into it and see what it consists of. It’s all there. I used to tell students that any one of their faces could be the ‘Mona Lisa’ if the right painter came along.”

Watch for Part Two in the Tom Eblen/Bill Goodman series “Where Kentucky Writers Write”, coming in October, '24.