Gordon Weaver is the author of four novels and nine story collections, including Four Decades: New and Selected Stories (University of Missouri Press, 1997) and Long Odds (University of Missouri Press, 2000).

Weaver's short story "Hog's Heart" was selected as a Best American Short Story in 1980. Over his career, Weaver has published some 108 stories in 75 literary journals, including Agni, Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Confrontation, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, The Literary Review, New Letters, Ploughshares, and Southwest Review.

His novels include Give Him a Stone (1975), Circling Byzantium (1980), and The Eight Corners of the World (1988). The 1991 movie Cadence starring Martin and Charlie Sheen, was based on Weaver's first novel, Count a Lonely Cadence (1968).

Weaver's short fiction collections include The Entombed Man of Thule (1972), Such Waltzing Was Not Easy (1975), Getting Serious (1980), Morality Play (1985), A World Quite Round (1986), Men Who Would Be Good (1991), The Way We Know in Dreams (1995).

Founding Editor of the Mississippi Review, Weaver was the Fiction Editor of Cimarron Review from 1975-86. He also served as Managing Editor of the AWP (Associated Writing Program) Award Series for Short Fiction 1977-79, and was the General Editor of the Twayne Studies in Short Fiction (Twayne Publishers, Boston/New York), a series of book length introductory critical studies in short fiction, with 64 titles devoted to the short stories of such writers as John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Malamud, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger.

Weaver, who received a BA in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1961, earned a MA in English in 1962 from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in English & Creative Writing from the University of Denver in 1970.

He served as Assistant Professor of English and Associate Professor of English and Director, Center for Writers, University of Southern Mississippi from 1970-1975, and was Professor of English and Department Head at Oklahoma State University, 1975-1984. In 1984, until he retired in 1995, Weaver was Professor of English & Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. Most recently, he was an Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 1996-2000.

Among the numerous awards Weaver has received are two national Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, the O. Henry Awards First Prize in 1979, and most recently a 2002 James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction (Christopher Isherwood Foundation). An accomplished poet, Weavers’ collection of poetry, Small Defeats, was published by the Texas Review Press in 1999.


Derek Alger: You’re currently at work on a novel tentatively titled Kempe Dancing!, could you explain its evolution and what it’s about?

Gordon Weaver: Kempe Dancing! is a novel project that I’ve struggled with for years. I suppose it originates, somehow, in my reading of Shakespeare over the years, from the time of my undergraduate days. I’ve always loved the plays and the poetry, but am far from a scholar on the subject.

DA: That makes two of us.

GW: Will Kempe was a partner with Shakespeare in the Globe Theater, and the resident comic actor in the company of players. He was definitely a slapstick comedian, and very famous and popular in his time. He’s best known as the actor who played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You can see him dramatized as the actor who cavorts with the dog in the film Shakespeare in Love. In addition to acting in Shakespeare’s plays, he performed what was called “jigs,” comic sketches put on for the groundlings after a given play was over sort of like the cartoons they used to run alongside feature films in theaters years back. Kempe was most famous for a comic version of the classic Morris Dance he performed; apparently it broke the audience up to no end! We even have some music, by John Dowland, called “Kempe’s Jig.” Kempe sold his shares in the Globe in 1601, I think, and there is some thought that he and Shakespeare did not get along.

DA: Do you have any examples?

GW: In Hamlet, Hamlet's advice to the players "don't mug the audience, don’t ad lib, stay with the script, don't saw the air with gestures" (don't overact!) is felt to have been directed at the departed Kempe, who did just those things, I gather. It’s interesting, and a testimony to Shakespeare’s genius, that when Kempe left the players company, he was replaced by Robert Arnim, a much more witty comedian, and you get comic characters such as the Fool in Lear.