You are regarded as a Southern humorist, yet the events in the stories of A Congress of Wonders are often quite dire and the characters' lives quite bleak. Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Erskine Caldwell, for example, were all fiercely realistic or naturalistic writers who were nonetheless often very, very funny. Tempered by privation and mockery, they gain the strength to effect their own deliverance. It's all for their own good, so to speak. Magic has been around in literature since David Copperfield wrote the first words of Genesis.
Critics always search for autobiographical tidbits in a writer's work.
And I and a teen-age buddy once treated a couple of Burdock County belles named Big Sue and Little Sue to the freak show at the county fair. And of course there are many other moments and details that are drawn from my own experience. For one thing, Famous People I Have Known was published just two years after The Natural Man. So I don't think The Natural Man's success, such as it was, slowed me at all. The kind of prose I write requires a certain amount of precision, a good deal of coaxing, and vast quantities of patience.