Sallie Bingham reads from and discusses her final book, a collection of short stories entitled How Daddy Lost His Ear: And Other Stories.
Recorded June, 2025 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Chapter One – A Different Version of The West
Hello… My name is Sallie Bingham. I’m a writer and I’m with you today to talk about my newest book. As you can see from the way I’m dressed, I now call myself a Westerner.
I was not born in the West.
I was born in Kentucky but I’ve lived in northern New Mexico now for twenty four years which I think is enough for me to call myself a Westerner. Although really there are no westerners here everyone is from somewhere else which is part of what How Daddy Lost His Ear is about. All these newcomers, these strangers, these oddities coming from all over the place even all over the world to congregate in New Mexico.
These stories are a different version of the West.
Chapter Two – From How Daddy Lost His Ear
Now I’m going to read a few pages from that title story “How Daddy Lost His Ear” to give you a sense of the flavor of these short stories and as you will see they’re very different from anything I’ve written before.
Living here I’ve absorbed stories.
They seem to come in through my pores as well as through my ears. Stories about people that have never been a part of my life until now.
That’s what makes it interesting.
How Daddy Lost His Ear.
They was fighting, my cousin Tara tells me.
She’s the only person I’ve ever known named for a house.
They went down to Georgia one time to find it but didn’t.
Tore down a long time before.
They wasn’t fighting, I tell her.
Mama Blacksleeves took the truck and got stuck in the mud a yard from the house.
Daddy was trying to help her get out.
Tara says those black sleeves always getting themselves into pickles.
We’re sitting on the porch of our old house.
This was years after it happened and Tara being as nice as she is brought out some store bought lemonade, too sweet for me but let that pass.
Ever since my days at the Jesuit boarding school in Helena, I’ve stayed off sweets and it wasn’t something they told me, just instinct.
I aim to stay strong.
At the time of this talk, I was twenty four, Tara a year younger.
We’re cousins, both half breeds, with white mamas gone since early.
I take after daddy, dark with the same long shiny hair I wear mostly braided.
Tara’s pretty like her mama, a Salt Lake City girl didn’t care for the Rez. I never expected Tara to stick around either but she found herself a boyfriend, Joe Pinchbelly, a crow, we don’t hold with that tribe but nothing was going to stop Tara once she fixed on him.
Visited him regular for two years at the prison down in Deer Lodge and married him soon as he got out. He’s off working the oil patch now and so she come home for company.
So what happened? Tara asked me digging a loose cigarette out of her jeans pocket. She takes a while getting it to light with her pretty pink lighter.
I tell her daddy got behind the truck to push and told mama to rock it back and forth to get out of the mud hole. I was in the house heard him shouting at her. She had the tires screaming digging down deeper in the mud every time she stepped on the gas. Daddy was hollering at her to stop, but I guess she didn’t hear him because she went right on trying to rock the truck, flew back and knocked daddy flat.
Well, she didn’t kill him. Tara says, not too fond of old daddy. He always grabbing at her. Caught him with the edge of the bumper and drove over his ear.
How’d she do that?
Only part of him was under the tire.
She starts to laugh. I tell her to shut up. You wouldn’t have been laughing if you’d seen the blood, bled like a stuck pig. I ran him on in the house found some rags bound up his head.
What about his ear? she asked.
Put it in a plastic bag and throw it in the freezer. Got it out when I drove him down to the IHS. They sewed it on but crooked. How in the world?
I don’t know but crooked it was and crooked it stayed why he always wears his cap pulled low.
Now that will give you an idea of two of the characters in these short stories.
It began by hearing a story.
A friend of mine told me a story and it seemed hard to believe at the time which of course makes it hard to believe and even funnier of somebody who did lose his ear because his former girlfriend ran over it. Well of course if you’re a rational human being you say how in the world is a car going to run over somebody’s ear and not run over the rest of him. Well I’ll leave that to your imagination. Anyway I loved it. I loved the idea of this man who lost his ear and had it sold back on crooked and as you will see when you read the story the fact that the ear is crooked leads him into something you would never expect which is he finally in advanced middle age gets married.
That’s the kind of romance that we find all through these stories. Not the usual moonlight and roses kind of romance but the romance between difficult people who have missed a lot of their opportunities earlier in life and later in life finally learn how to compromise since I think all relationships are based on compromise. Some of these compromises are actually very funny.
Some of them are a little bit less funny and many of these relationships are observed through the eyes of children who have to live with us crazy adults and and try to make sense out of what’s going on.
These stories are a different version of the West. It’s not the West of the old John Wayne movies. It’s not the romantic, glamorous West. It’s the West that’s bedeviled by modern problems like all the rest of the world. Alcoholism, drug abuse, spouse abuse, all kinds of problems but for these characters they are not really problems, they’re the texture of their lives.
These are problems that we can’t solve. We all know that. We can we’ve tried now for decades to solve them. So I felt when I was writing these stories that really the best way to deal with it is to find the humor. There’s always humor, particularly in these chaotic situations. If we’re not so intent on fixing things, we are all great fixers so we don’t want to just let things go wild the way they’re going to do anyway.
I’m going back to my first love as a writer.
When I was first published just out of college it was a collection of short stories and I’ve always found short stories to be really a very beguiling form.
We know that novels take a lot of organizing, a lot of long term planning on the part of the writer and since I’m a very spontaneous writer these shorter forms really work for me. For this particular collection of short stories is actually my fifth I think.
I found that the kind of humor I’m writing really can’t be extended I don’t think to the length of a novel. It’s almost more like a joke, a pithy joke, and you get to the end of the joke in twelve pages and there’s no reason to go on any longer.
More like a really short sharp punch in the jaw, in the belly, that you have immediate rather powerful reaction instead of the long drawn out reaction that you would have reading a novel.
I always go about it with a visual image. In this case, obviously, it’s the ear and the plastic bag in the freezer.
There has to be a visual image there. It can’t be just an abstraction.
And the visual image is then tied into the plot in some way that is often to me quite surprising.
I love surprise. I think surprise for the writer and surprise for the reader is absolutely essential.
Question: Three of these eighteen short stories have won awards prior to publication. Two of these were international. What is it about these stories that resonates with people internationally?
I think they’re very open to the idea that there is a new West.
They perhaps haven’t been as glued to the idea of the Old West as us, I call us U.S.-ers because we’re not really Americans, we live in the United States, as we have been. They’re very open to exploring these new ideas and finding them fascinating and funny.
Really a lot of my audience is in Europe which is kind of fascinating to me. In fact, I just was approached by a program in Africa to be interviewed because they’re reaching out to U. S. writers for African audience. It’s very interesting to me because it’s a widening of the whole sphere of audience which I don’t like to believe is just encapsulated in one state or one country. I think if the ideas make any sense, have any resonance, they should find receptors all over the world.
Chapter Seven – International Recognition
Question: Have you had this type of success before with your short stories?
Yes. Once a collection of mine called Mending was translated into French and published by a subsidiary of Gallimard which is a big Paris publishing company. In that case it was more the cliche about France being the home of romance and sex.
These stories were largely about (if you can put those two terms together, romance and sex) and the French edition which I read at, seemed to be a pretty literal translation of my English. I was very pleased. I don’t know how what the reception was like in France. I never heard anything about that. That’s the only one of my now almost seventeen books that’s been translated into another language.
I just feel so privileged to have this book published. It follows very rapidly and within a year on my last book. A historical novel called Taken by the Shawnee. So I feel as though with these two books a whole different possibility for me as a writer is opening up.
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