The author of four novels, five collections of poetry and a collection of short stories, a craft book on fiction writing, and a forthcoming collection of essays, McCown has served as a journalist, screenwriter, professional actor and professor.
His penchant for writing can be traced back to his childhood when his grandparents exposed him to favorites such as “Mother Goose,” “Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy” and the Golden Books series of fairy tales.
“I guess from the beginning, I thought the whole point of learning to write was to tell stories,” said McCown, Virginia Commonwealth University emeritus professor of English and creative writing in the College of Humanities and Sciences who retired in 2024 after more than 45 years of teaching, including two decades at VCU. “I’ve always been driven by curiosity, which may stem from my family’s background of five generations in the newspaper business.”
McCown has gathered more than his share of accolades during his writing career. He is the only writer to have twice won the American Fiction Prize, and he has also received the S. Mariella Gable Prize, the Midwest Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the Germaine Breé Book Award, a Distinction in Literature citation from the Wisconsin Library Association, an NEA grant, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Discover Great New Writers designation from Barnes & Noble.
He has twice received Notable Essay citations in the Best American Essays series. His stories, essays and poems have appeared in over 95 national journals and magazines.
Writing in various genres wasn’t a choice for McCown but rather who he has always been as a writer.
“I guess that has limited my career somewhat,” he said. “It’s hard to get a major publisher interested in a writer who won’t agree to write some version of the same kind of book time after time. It’s tough to promote a writer whose work is all over the map.”
But McCown’s career looks anything but limited.
Exploring his creativity
A native of Tennessee, McCown moved around as a child because of his father’s job as a special agent for the United States Secret Service. At one point in his career, his father served as deputy special agent in charge of the detail for President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
During that time, McCown was a “yard boy on the Eisenhower farm,” he said.
McCown received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Wake Forest University, where in 2021 he was inducted into the Wake Forest University Hall of Fame in recognition of his fiction, poetry and career as a teacher of writing.
He also has an MFA from Indiana University Bloomington and has received professional theater training at the highly selective Circle in the Square Theatre School, finishing in 1974 and working as an actor for a couple of years.
During that time, McCown learned what it was like to completely inhabit another character, which in turn helped him when he turned his attention to writing, he said.
He found he enjoyed the challenge and the sense of teamwork that develops with a cast in a play, the opposite of writing, which is a solitary pursuit.
“I learned a lot in my theater training that applied directly to my writing — creating dialogue, certainly, but also learning about the need for every line and action to have a motivation in the character’s backstory,” he said.
Investigating corruption in Alabama
After his stint in New York, McCown served as poet/dramatist-in-residence in the North Carolina Visiting Artist Program from 1976 to 1978 before becoming a reporter for the Alabama Information Network where his beat was organized crime and political corruption, following in the footsteps of the journalists in his family.
“It was a difficult beat to have,” he said.
McCown was based in Montgomery, but his daily broadcasts went out to 67 radio stations in Alabama, Tennessee and elsewhere. During his time there, he sought to expose the interference of New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello in the Alabama elections in the races for attorney general and governor.
“In connection to that, I was also trying to shed light on the need for changes in the election laws and the passage of the state’s first consumer protection laws,” he said.
For a while, McCown routinely checked his car for explosives and stayed away from windows.
“Two journalists had already been killed for investigating the same lines of corruption I was pursuing, and I had to deal with some death threats and other uncomfortable encounters,” he said. “But it all turned out okay in the end.”
As a broadcast journalist, he received an Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence for his investigations.
Journalistic writing carried with it a strong personal investment for McCown and a tangible impact on the world.
“I was also writing about what I believed in when I was a journalist, that there were bad things in the world that people needed to know about so those things could be corrected,” he said. “Naturally, I hope that my creative work will affect people in ways that make their world bigger and better, but I know my work as a journalist helped make a difference, because Alabama passed its first consumer protection laws, some crucial election rules were changed, and some very dangerous criminals failed to gain control of the state government.”
Journalism offered him a way to see the results of his work unfold in real time and helped him feel validated.
“Writing a poem, play, story, or novel is like sending out a message in a bottle,” he said. “Maybe the message will make a difference somewhere to somebody, or maybe the bottle will sink to the ocean’s floor, but either way, you may never know if the work mattered or not.”
A shift to academia
McCown left journalism to serve as a professor at Beloit College, where he worked for 20 years. During that time, he served as the founding editor of Beloit Fiction Journal, which he edited for two decades.
While he was there, he had the opportunity to work on a script for Warner Bros. as a side gig, which he refers to as both interesting and frustrating.
“I spent some time with actor Matthew McConaughey, who was set to star in the script I was working on,” he said, adding the project was eventually canceled.
McCown came to the VCU Department of English in 2004 from Beloit and retired in 2024. During his time at the university, he also taught part time in the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program.
“There are a lot of good people at VCU,” he said. “I loved and respected all my writing colleagues and the literature folks I got to spend time with.”
Poet and VCU Professor Emeritus David Wojahn, who was one of McCown’s colleagues in the Department of English, describes him as “perhaps the most mentally agile and versatile writer” he knows.
“His fiction is brimming with memorable characters and linguistic acrobatics. There’s humor and pathos in the novels, which are always vivid and cinematic,” he said. “On top of that, he’s written nonfiction and memoir that documents his years as an actor, as a journalist and as a motorcycle bum.”
McCown has set a powerful example for VCU writing students, he adds.
“It’s not hyperbole to call him a Renaissance Man,” Wojahn said.
During his career, McCown dabbled in playwriting. His plays have been performed at various theaters including the New York Cultural Center and Wake Forest University Theatre. He toured as a principal actor with the National Shakespeare Company and with the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre.
“I toured in a one-man show that I assembled based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. I loved working in the theater, and it’s always nice to see my work put on stage. I may go back to writing plays now that I have a little more time,” he said.
McCown will spend some of his retirement working on a new novel, his fifth, about generational post-traumatic-stress difficulties. His other novels include “The Member Guest,” a story of insiders versus outsiders set in a seedy small town country club; “Haints” about the baggage we carry with us from our past; “The Weatherman,” which examines free will versus determinism; and “War Memorials,” about the bridges and walls created in small town communities that result from overseas wars.
“Haints” is set during the week of McCown’s birth when a tornado destroyed most of his town.
“I was trying to give life to an era and a people that meant the most to me,” he said. “Growing up I always heard about the great tornado that destroyed the town the week I was born. I tried to imagine what it was like and the ramifications for the people who lived there.”
While the genres he has pursued vary, McCown said the thing he values most in his work is that he’s crafted every line to be the best that he could make it.
“In my view, you have to be committed to the smallest things first and foremost, because that’s the only way to make the larger things work.”
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