Nov 4 2008
Ten Questions with Keith Lee Morris
I haven’t done a “Ten Questions” with an author in a while, but when I read the creative and interesting The Dart League King, Keith Lee Morris seemed like a great candidate. Â Luckily for me, he graciously agreed to answer some questions via email. Â
Here is a brief bio:
Keith Lee Morris is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Clemson University. His short stories have been published in A Public Space, Southern Review, Ninth Letter,StoryQuarterly, New England Review, The Sun, and the Georgia Review, among other publications. The University of Nevada published his first two books: The Greyhound Gods (2003) and The Best Seats in the House (2004). He lives in Clemson, South Carolina.
Questions and answers below:
1) What was it about darts and a small town dart league “king” that sparked a story like this?  Or how did the title and that part of the plot come to be?
The book started out as a short story called “Russell’s Thursday Night,” which was about Russell Harmon’s attempt to win the dart league championship while being chased by an angry drug dealer and a woman who wanted to make him take a paternity test. As I was writing it, I started getting more and more interested in the secondary characters, and the possibilities for a novel began to take shape. The characters morphed some, new characters came in, new elements of the plot surfaced, and then I saw how I could bring all the stories together in one moment late in the evening. The small town setting, the bar, the bar games, etc., are all part of my experience, more or less the same material I draw from all the time in my work. I grew up in a small town in Idaho and saw this kind of drama played out over and over again. It’s not even exaggerated all that much, really. And the “dart” element was inspired by the fact that I founded a dart league in my home town at one time.
2)Â Were you worried about creating just another trapped in a small town type story?
No.  Almost all of my fiction contains some element of that kind of story. I think it’s just a fact about most people from small towns–there’s an internal tug of war going on that has to do with a desire to get out, make something more of yourself, etc., and I desire to stay there close to people you care about, places you know intimately, a way of life that’s comfortable. I don’t think there’s any end to its possibilities as fiction, just as I don’t think there’s any end to the story of the outsider or immigrant who comes to the big city and feels lost, displaced, what have you. It’s a familiar story type because there’s an strong element of truth to it, and the interest in the story runs as deep as the interest in the individual characters–it’s up to the author to make their stories important.
3)Â What prompted you to tell the story using alternating chapters and perspectives?
I knew I didn’t want to go to first person. There was something in the tone of the 3rd person account of Russell’s evening that I liked. But I also wanted a distinctive style for each character, a third person “voice” of sorts, and I didn’t think I could capture that with a free-floating POV. So that’s where the separate sections came into play. Then I started thinking about the narrative structure of As I Lay Dying, and that gave me the idea for some of the overlapping in the time frames, the incidents witnessed from multiple perspectives.
