July 19, 2007

When Robert Olen Butler took up a faculty position at Florida State University, in 2000, he had already won a Pulitzer for fiction. He won that in 1993 for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Before 2000 he taught creative writing at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The short story is the forte of Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) and he has published them in all the right places, like The New Yorker.

We feel comfortable counting him among the cat people since in an interview, done on a book tour and published in Story, story, story: conversations with American authors, (Jim Schumock, 1999) we find out that his parents in Louisiana were looking after the cats because he and his wife, Elizabeth Dewberry, were together on that tour.

Elizabeth Dewberry is also a writer, (a southern writer with that special gothic accent) with a Ph.D in English from Emory University, and has been playwright in residence at FSU.

She and Butler were divorced on July 19, 2007. This was after she left him to be one of Ted Turner's girlfriends. Butler's email about this, sent to colleagues at FSU, was leaked to the press, and allows us a glimpse of how an intellectual can use a superficial objectivity as a weapon to protect their own ego.

This quote is from a WSBTV article, dated Aug. 1, 2007 and titled "Writer's Wife Dumps Him For Ted Turner" . The email Butler wrote says that Elizabeth had never been able to "step out of the shadow of the Pulitzer."

There's a book in there somewhere.