Tag Archives: #Fiction

The Christ-Haunted Low Country: Kyler Campbell on Everything That We’ve Buried

Blog, , ,

By Jo Underwood

I interviewed Kyler Campbell on his debut short story collection, Everything That We’ve Buried. Campbell’s collection is set in the low country of South Carolina; he skillfully encapsulates, and diverts, Southern Lit traditions. Campbell incorporates his personal life into his work to tell stories that are both intimate and gritty, following characters that confront their faith, violence, and loss.

This is a deeply Southern collection. In writing it, were there any elements of Southern Lit traditions that you purposefully adhered to or subverted?

Adhered to, yes. Subverted, never intentionally. My first year at Converse, the best advice I got was from Marlin Barton, that “your first job as a writer is to just tell a good story.”

Flannery O’Connor said that the South is “certainly not Christ-centered. It is most certainly Christ-haunted.” That idea always stuck with me as I portrayed faith in my work. “Zombie Jesus” does that, as well as “Floodlines.”  Southern fiction is about life in the South, and our experiences and trials. A lot of it is about tradition and family, too. I leaned into that a lot, especially with how family dynamics haunt the characters in “The Last Dreamer.”

That was one of the big things for me: How do family dynamics define us, and how can we redefine them to become our own person? How does religion do the same?

As for the setting, some are set in a generic South but several are implied or confirmed to be in the Lowountry of South Carolina. What draws you to writing in that setting, is it writing what you know, or is there something creatively special about the low country?

The Lowcountry of South Carolina is defined by Charleston. Nobody talks about anything that’s outside of downtown Charleston. My goal was to show that the Lowcountry is way more than just Charleston. I wanted to go into the working, blue-collar Lowcountry.

I helped my wife while she worked for the Salvation Army, and I spent a lot of time in Moncks Corner and talking to people. People who grew up in and around Huger and Cross and Eutawville, which is a little outside of Berkeley County, around the Lake Moultrie area. Their stories were fascinating. They’re quintessential, traditional Southern stories about Al Capone and The New Deal, but with their own experiences laid into them. A lot of it came from just working in the area and talking to people and not being the writer in the ivory tower, but working in a thrift shop for a while, sorting through books, sorting through memorabilia, and having conversations with people who run a bread store down off White Street in Moncks Corner or whatever else and just hearing their stories.

At a reading of “How Will They Remember You?”, you mentioned this story and perhaps others holding personal connection to your own life. Are there any stories of that personal connection that you think enrich the experience of reading your stories?

Three of them in particular connect to my life. One of them is “Zombie Jesus,” which I mentioned before, because I grew up in a very religiously intense church. The story is about a family who doesn’t celebrate Halloween and a boy who’s kind of wrestling with why, and then a father who decides to proclaim the gospel to the neighborhood with a seven-foot-tall crucifix in their front yard. That one, in particular, is very personal to me. It’s kind of a goofy story compared to the rest of them, but it still deals with some of those same themes we were talking about—religion and how religion shapes us and causes us to do wild things sometimes. That one’s born out of my own experience when I was a kid. My family and I decided one year we weren’t going to celebrate Halloween, so we put a sign out in our front yard that said, “We don’t celebrate Halloween. We celebrate Jesus.” Then we sat in the living room with all the lights out. No porch light, no interior lights, like nobody was home. People still came to our door trick-or-treating. I just remember sitting there thinking, “This has got to be weird. This can’t be normal.” My parents and I have laughed about this for a while.

The second one that is deeply personal to me is the last story, “The Last Dreamer,” the novella that’s at the end. That one, in particular, deals with the aftermath of a parent’s suicide and a kid reeling from that and trying to find his own identity through it. I’ve had a lot of mental health struggles in the past. That one, in particular, came out of a conversation with my own counselor about how suicide affects the next generation. This story was me exploring mental health struggles as a generational curse.

The third one is “How Will They Remember You?” I did a genealogy project in school and found a father son pair that were both drafted into the Confederate Army together. They ended up in a POW camp up in Maryland. During the next census, only the father is reported. Piecing it together, my professor and I realized that the son probably didn’t make it.

Most of your stories in the collection feature scenes that do not play out in order of when they occur. How do you make the decisions on when to shift the chronology and when to go into flashback?

For me, it’s just a feeling thing. Some stories need to be in chronological order. A couple of them are. One like “Chucklehead,” in particular, is just one afternoon between two brothers. For me, I like a linear story, but I also like having those gaps filled in. The flashback is always kind of essential to understand what’s going on. I think you always want to make sure that they are correlating in some way. I’m thinking about the story about the parking attendant who finds the lost little girl on Folly Beach. Every time he mentions something that’s happening in the present, we’re kind of flashing back to a relevant part of his past. The same thing for “The Last Dreamer,” the novella at the end, where you’ve got a character who’s seeing these visions of his mom in a bloody bathtub. We flash back before that, and it’s kind of, “Here’s the scene, and this is what he sees. Here’s the scene, and this is what he sees.”

As far as when to break it and when to say, “Okay, now we go to a flashback,” or, “Now we go back to the present action,” it all depends on where you feel like the story ends. There’s so much instinct in writing, and instinct comes with time. Instinct also comes with failure. The more you fail, the better your instincts get.

What is something about the collection that you hope people will notice that they may be less likely to?

I hope people notice that there is faith in this book, that there are elements of redemption, elements of forgiveness, and maybe penance in some ways, too. There are stories here that seem very anti-religion in some ways, but, like I said at the top, I’m a religious person and count myself as that. What I hope people take from it is that there is a lot of faith in this book and a lot of faith-based themes and ideas, even though it may not seem like it on the surface.

The other thing that I hope people take from this is that the Lowcountry of South Carolina is a complex place. It’s not just beaches and downtown and Francis Marion Square and all of that. It doesn’t always look the way that we want it to, but it’s still there, and it’s still kind of present and active.

I just started the MFA program from which you graduated. How did the program prepare you for writing this collection?

What the MFA program did for me was help me build habits of writing. You have to carve out that time to write. One of the things I learned going forward is that it gets more complicated as life goes on. You add in a family, you add in kids, you add in a full-time job, a second job, whatever else, and things get more complicated. But the MFA program taught me how to discipline myself and how to expect better things from myself as well, and how to push myself.

~~~~~

Kyler Campbell lives and teaches in Charleston, South Carolina. His work has been featured in Driftwood, Cumberland River Review, and elsewhere. This is his first book.

Jo Underwood is a writer from Greenville, South Carolina. She is an MFA candidate at Converse University. Her creative work has been featured in Ambient Heights, Trace Fossil Review, The Library of Poetry Collection, The Lindenwood Review, and Olive & Ash. She is the recipient of the 2024 Gilmore Award for Excellence in Creative Writing. When not writing, she spends most of her time teaching English or playing Dungeons and Dragons on Youtube.

Write Like a Boozehound and Keep Looking: A Conversation with Dan Leach About Junah at the End of the World

Blog, , ,

By Jo Underwood

I sat down with Dan Leach for a nostalgic conversation about his 2025 Hub City novel, Junah at the End of the World, which received the South Carolina Novel Prize and the Kirkus Star. Dan Leach reaches into the heart of the cracked sidewalks of southern suburbia and pulls from it a time capsule of the small apocalypses that every child must live through. His novel, via fragmented prose, reflects the inner mind of sixth grader Junah in the face of the impending Y2K, but his masterful storytelling can only be seen as complete.

Can you talk about the setting of the novel first? You’re a southern writer, and you chose to set the novel in a neutral, “Carolina,” but while also namedropping Northwoods Middle [a middle school in Greenville]. What made you choose this small corner of South Carolina, and how did you navigate writing about somewhere you’ve lived and worked for such a large section of your life?

This is my fourth book, but I would say that this is the first one that takes place in my South. That’s a very pretentious way of saying that in my first two books, I was still writing out of the shadows of writers like Ron Rash and George Singleton. They are interested in the South, but a South that is a little more rural, a little less suburban, a little more mountainous. Whereas I grew up in the Upstate of South Carolina, and I think it just took me that time to be comfortable enough to write something that was really close to autobiography. So I attended a middle school called Northwood Middle in Greenville. The characters, the places, and the events of this novel, with the exception of two details, are drawn from my lived experience.

One of those details is Junah’s age. Junah is twelve, and in Y2K I was a little older. I fudged that because I needed him to be a little more innocent and tender. The other is the fact that the parents are divorced in the novel, whereas in my lived experience they stayed together. Except for those two details, the book functions very close to autobiography, and I think that that makes it a special book for me. Looking back, I think with my first few books I was trying to write the South of back roads and dive bars and trailer parks. I grew up around that, but I also grew up in the world that Junah moves through. I grew up in middle-class suburban neighborhoods, cul-de-sacs, shopping centers, and little league fields.

During a reading at M. Judson Books in Greenville, South Carolina, you said that Junah was “a novel about COVID disguised as a novel about Y2K.” Can you talk about the role of isolation and dread in the novel in terms of your intentions to implement both?

I think that books, in late-stage capitalism, are treated as products. There are things that you work on according to a certain set of intentions or plans, and then you produce them, and they look awfully pretty, and then they get covers and make their way to bookstores. But books aren’t really products.

In 2020, I relocated my family from the Upstate to Charleston. I was trying out a one-year contract with a liberal arts college, and I was told that it probably wouldn’t even renew because the world was ending. Nobody knew if academia, or civilization, would still be standing after 2020. I was working out of a little garage that we had all our boxes in; we hadn’t even bothered to unpack yet because we thought we would have to leave soon. And in that space, under those circumstances, I became strangely reminded of the late 1990s, which was another moment that split the country in terms of what people thought would happen, called into question the intersections of religion and politics, and really forced you to reckon with things that were outside of your control. As a kid, you’re being told that computers don’t understand the year 2000, and so planes could fall out of the sky, and Jesus might come back on a cloud. You’re not happy about it, but it’s more complicated than being afraid. You just have to sit with it and still do your daily life.

That’s what COVID felt like. It was like being a child again. We don’t know what this thing is. We don’t know where it came from. And yet we have to go on. We have to buy groceries, attend church services, work jobs, and pay bills. That sense that the apocalypse was here. I tried, in my own way, to translate that feeling into a book about Y2K.

You also have been quoted saying that Junah talks about the “Little apocalypses that every child must survive,” giving the examples of experiencing your first love, questioning your religion, or standing up to your middle school bully. How many of these small-apocalypses that Junah experiences were from yourself or a former student?

Every damn one of them. What I did in the book, and what I have so much fun doing as a writer, is creating composites. There’s a character in the book, Coach Mac. Every day after school he goes up on the roof, brings with him a box of beer, lifts weights, and listens to Clearwater Revival. The kids at the school throw rocks up at him.

Now, if the question is, “Did you actually have a coach named Coach Mac who went up on the roof, lifted weights, ripped cigarettes, and threw beer cans through the halls?” the answer would be no. But if you’re asking whether he’s a composite of different people from my past, absolutely. I actually did have a coach who was a Vietnam veteran. He teared up in front of us one day while listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival, and that memory stayed with me. I remember him talking about the song “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” and saying something like, “The rain is war. No one’s going to stop it.” Then I have this other memory of a guy I worked with on James Island who would go out onto the roof to sneak cigarettes and sneak drinks. He was this audacious figure who would drink on the roof, and everybody kind of knew it, but nobody did anything about it. So I had one memory, and then another memory, and I sort of combined those two.

Most of the characters in the book and most of the places are like that. They’re actually two or three very real people blended together. For me, that’s the easiest way to say that something is both true and fiction. People think that’s a contradiction. We’re not journalists. It’s not a matter of reportage. We’re not trying to capture exactly what happened with surgical precision. We’re trying to tell you what it was.

Can you talk to us a little bit about what your writing process was like for Junah? This novel is written in fragmented prose rather than chapters, obviously to emulate the different entries Junah is putting into his time capsule. If another writer is hoping to pull off this hybrid between an epistolary/fragmented prose novel, what craft tips do you have for making this non-traditional form work?

As George Saunders says, “Inspiration finds me at the writing desk.” I’m a big fan of structure and a big fan of discipline. But for me, the best way to write a fragment is to write across the fragments of your day. Which is to say, write at a red light. Write on the clouded door of a shower. Write in the bathroom. Write on a coffee cup. Write on scraps of paper, on the backs of receipts, in the Notes app on your phone, and in voice recordings.

To me, we live such fragmented lives. Unless you enjoy an enormous amount of privilege, most of us move through different roles, responsibilities, and spaces throughout the day. My life has always been a little chaotic. You can respond to that chaos by saying, “I don’t have time to write at all because I need a large block of uninterrupted time.” But if I took that approach, I would never write.

So my craft tip is this: you should write the way a boozehound drinks.

Have you ever known a true alcoholic? They’re always drinking. Every time they step out. Every time they pull over at a gas station. It’s in their orange juice. It’s in their milk. It becomes part of the rhythm of their day. Fragmented writing can work the same way if you’re willing to open yourself to it. You write a little paragraph while you’re stuck at a red light. You write a little scene during a fifteen-minute break between classes. Then, when you have a larger block of time, maybe you write something more developed. The beauty of fragmentation is that you can take all of these things you’ve created throughout the day and then step back and see the thematic threads that emerge. This fragment is about a crush on a girl. This fragment is about praying to God. This fragment is about a relationship with a parent. Suddenly you realize they’re all related. Then you get to take those seemingly chaotic pieces and do the real work of arranging them, almost like meticulously organizing a collage.

I think one of the deepest insecurities any writer has is reaching out for connection and worrying that someone won’t be able or willing to meet you there. The text exists in that space between writer and reader. Fragmentation pushes that relationship right to the edge because you’re relying on a certain kind of reader: a smart, careful reader who pays attention to the fragments and the ways they connect to one another.

The narrator, Junah, has a very mature and existential voice, considering the first person and epistolary format. In many ways the novel needed that mature narrator. Was this voice for Junah intentionally wise beyond-his-years, or was that something you stumbled into?

The only bad review I have on Goodreads is a single sentence: “Twelve-year-olds don’t talk this way.” And they don’t. Twelve-year-olds do not have the metaphors, the vocabulary, or some of the intellectual range that Junah has. What I’m doing here is an old trick. It’s a Catcher in the Rye trick. It’s a J.D. Salinger trick. You make the character intellectually mature, and then you make the emotional and social dimensions of that character childlike. Junah is book-smart. People-smart, no. He’s so smart that he can process his parents’ separation in terms of the subjunctive mood. But he’s also so dumb that he doesn’t know how to take his sunglasses off to talk to a girl he likes.

There’s a line from Richard Hugo that I always come back to: “The town that you put into a poem is not the town that is. It’s the town that the poem needs.” For me, this was the speaker I needed. I needed someone who was scared and emotional and vulnerable, but who was also grammatically and linguistically gifted enough to carry the book.

What is something in the novel that you wish more people would ask you about or comment on?

First, I wanted the book to feel musical. For people of my generation who grew up in the mid-’90s, one of our great currencies was the mixtape. We made mixtapes for the people we were obsessed with but were too scared to talk to. But something strange happens. At some point, you become more obsessed with the mixtape than with the person. That’s kind of Junah in a nutshell. He’s supposed to be processing reality, in this case, an announced apocalypse. But at some point he becomes really obsessed with the mixtape itself. I wanted the book to feel musical in that way. Then, later in the novel, he falls in love with this older, tougher, wiser punk girl, and she introduces him to a ton of those great punk bands of the time. That was one of the great thrills of growing up: discovering some guy from England in a leather jacket with tattoos who was voicing all the frustrations you had with the government, your parents, religion, and authority, and doing it in a way that felt exciting.

The second thing is religion. The mother in the book, not unlike my own mother, is a sort of iconic evangelical. She’s processing this announced apocalypse through the lens of Christian mindset, which was very much a part of the culture at the time. In some ways, the book is a defense of spiritual curiosity. Junah cannot accept God as God has been handed to him by his mother. She prays with him nightly. She’s pushing spirituality through this classically Southern, evangelical vocabulary: Let Him into your heart. Build a relationship with Him. Turn your life over to Jesus. Trust in the Lord. These are all clichés and platitudes that you’re bombarded with while you’re trying to figure out the world for yourself. Junah, though, is completely earnest. His mother says, “Look to God,” and he takes that literally. He goes outside and throws rocks into the sky, almost as if he’s asking, “Is there a piece of glass I need to break to have God hear me?”

Your book is published by Hub City Press, a small press located in Spartanburg, SC, home of the Converse low-res MFA program that supports this literary journal. What are some of the benefits (or drawbacks) of working with a small press?

The drawbacks are what everyone already knows: regional presses mean regional exposure. There’s no small press on earth that can compete with the Big Four. Penguin is going to be able to put your book in more places physically, but also in terms of publicity, visibility, and exposure. It’s simply a matter of resources. Hub City has three employees. That’s different from a company with three thousand people who can throw their time and expertise behind your book.

That said, within that smallness there is a level of attention and support that’s really special. Hub City, specifically, takes on projects they believe in, and they care about every step of the process from developmental edits to cover design. I had month-long conversations with them about fonts, images, colors, and design choices. We also had very intimate and fascinating conversations about the title of the book. The book was not originally titled Junah at the End of the World. It was originally titled Challenger, which is the name Junah sees on the shoebox. I suggested titles like An American Reliquary; they weren’t convinced. Then they proposed Junah at the End of the World, and I hated it. I never saw Junah’s name as the title, but this was a group of people having a genuine conversation about how to make the book better. I genuinely think it’s one of the best small presses in the country right now. Their roster is incredible, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.

Do you believe your novel should inspire hope for people, or is it one that will send its readers further into their “world-is-ending” doom?

I hope it’s the first. The first line that ever came to me in Junah’s voice was: “Hey, Dad, do you think it’s dumb to love the world?” I wanted a protagonist who would love consistently, not someone who is constantly turning away from that. There aren’t a lot of happy literary traditions. There’s a tendency in fiction to make things more despairing, more cynical. Writers like David Foster Wallace talk about how good writing comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.

Without giving anything away, there’s a moment at the end of the book; it’s December 31st, the ball is dropping, and Junah is trying to keep his eyes open. He’s watching closely. He wants to know what’s going to happen. And that, to me, is the point: we want to know what’s going to happen.

One of the best descriptions of this I heard was, I was talking to Sebastian Smith, who is Gen Z, and I asked him what COVID did to his generation. He said, “It put a question mark at the end of every sentence.” It is no longer “I will go to college. I will get a degree. I will get married.” Now it is: “Will I?”

Everyone has some kind of “shoebox,” even if the world feels like it’s falling apart. Within this endless sea of questions, you can either shut down, or you can keep looking. I hope my novel encourages readers to keep looking.

~~~~~

Dan Leach has published poems and short fiction in The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, and The Sun. His most recent novel, Junah at the End of the World, won the South Carolina Novel Prize and was awarded a Kirkus star. He lives in Summerville and teaches writing at Charleston Southern University.

Jo Underwood is a writer from Greenville, South Carolina. She is an MFA candidate at Converse University. Her creative work has been featured in Ambient Heights, Trace Fossil Review, The Library of Poetry Collection, The Lindenwood Review, and Olive & Ash. She is the recipient of the 2024 Gilmore Award for Excellence in Creative Writing. When not writing, she spends most of her time teaching English or playing Dungeons and Dragons on Youtube.

Interview with Kate Christensen

Blog, , ,

reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Okay, here are three (it’s very hard to boil it down): A middle-aged, midlist novelist named Julia Heimdahl spends a weekend at a literary festival at Baldwin College, her alma mater, to promote her memoir. She’s on a panel with a fawning, unctuously charming fellow first-time memoirist, a literary biographer named Ellis Blackwell. Her alliance with Ellis threatens her hard-won stability, and excerpts from her memoir interspersed with the present narrative illuminate exactly why he’s particularly dangerous for Julia; simultaneously, she’s forced to reckon with the past as it intersects with the present.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I had the most fun creating Ellis Blackwell. I seem to have a troublesome soft spot for men who hate women—in fact, that is exactly what Good Company is about, my own complicity in misogyny. I enjoy inhabiting the point of view of horrible men because I understand them so deeply, I’ve studied them so closely, the dialogue writes itself. My survival, I thought when I was younger, was predicated on winning their approval. Good Company turns this idea on its head and explodes it.

The hardest character for me to write was Lexi/Alex Shapiro, a composite of women I’ve known in my life, women I’ve been deeply attracted to both sexually and emotionally. I think that Alex was complicated for me primarily because of my own largely unexpressed queerness, which has been largely latent all my life. Creating this character meant not only facing the attraction but acknowledging the reasons it has stayed underground: fear; internalized misogyny; and an innate conventionality, a kind of homophobia. Writing about all this made me sad, but it also ultimately felt bracing and clarifying.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I conceived of this novel in the summer of 2024, when I was teaching in the summer graduate program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I had written a story based on a passionate, complicated friendship I’d formed when I was a student there in the 1980s with a woman I call Norah who died when we were in our early 50s, estranged for many years. I chose that story for my faculty reading. The audience’s response was unlike any I’d ever had before after a reading: electric, excited, buzzing. Normally any enthusiasm was muted: this was a roar. They asked, “When is this book coming out?” And I realized over the next few days, thinking about it, that this was in fact part of a book, and that the book was going to play with time and memory and identity.

There haven’t been any lows (yet): my editor at HarperCollins, Sara Nelson, bought the manuscript and gave me incredibly helpful edits, and the book’s road to publication has been smooth (so far). But internally, I’ve undergone a long inward reckoning with what I’ve written. Good Company contains many hard truths, many levels of exposure, and a lot of difficult subject matter. It’s a raw, honest book, and it was galvanizing to write—but now that it’s emerging into the world for people to actually read if they want to (and I hope they do want to), I’ve had to overcome my terror and fear. Actually, I haven’t entirely overcome it. But that’s just the price you pay for telling the truth.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

This is something I tell my writing students over and over: you can only write like yourself. Your authentic voice is the only one you have. Banish the anxiety of influence. Don’t try to be someone else, don’t try to be “great.” It won’t work. It never works. Trust your gut, let yourself tell the truth, give yourself permission to write “badly” (meaning authentically), and always remember: no one is watching you.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I was surprised by how inevitable this novel’s form felt while I was writing it, how necessary, apt, and urgent. Inspired by Heidi Julavits’s brilliant memoir, “The Folded Clock,” I wanted this book to take a structural risk with temporal sleight of hand, simultaneously spanning both a weekend and a lifetime. I wondered if would work and was prepared to fail. But to my surprise, not only did it strike me as right and organic while I was writing it, but this strategy also felt inevitable. Every time I finished a chapter in the novel’s present, the next memoir excerpt presented itself as the obvious next step.

How did you find the title of your book?

I chose the title “Good Company” because it’s something a certain kind of man has called me since I was a teenager. I used to see it as a badge of pride: I was good company! That meant I was fun, easygoing, a good sport, smart, sexy, and—most importantly—not a killjoy.

But then, when I started getting older and wiser, I saw the term for what it really is: a misogynistic, backhanded compliment that’s actually a means of keeping me under control. The book is about my own complicity for much of my life in trying to please such men, to win them over. And the title is meant to be loud and clear: no more.

The Watersmith: An Interview with Yance Wyatt

Blog, , ,

By Harris Quinn

This interview was conducted over a series of phone calls between Yance in California and me in South Carolina. We talked for several hours, mostly about trying to find time to write while raising kids and reading books. It’s funny how much we find we have in common with people we’ve never really met. 

Why did you write this novel?

I’d say I’m most at peace when I’m in, on, or around water. I started wondering why that is. What finally occurred to me is that water seems so mundane on one hand, but on the other hand there’s something sacred about it. Something that draws all religions to it. All origin stories are centered around it. Most things tend to be either finite and temporary (our food, our bodies, fossil fuels) or infinite and eternal (space and time, the universe, love). Water is one of the few things that splits the difference. It’s finite yet eternal. There’s only so much of it, and yet it’s been around since the beginning of time. And if our bodies are mostly water, then it’s the same water that ran through our ancestors. It’s the throughline, the thing that animates and sustains us. I suppose I was trying to say that all of us, past and present, are connected through water. With this family’s story I was trying to get at that connectedness, that sameness in all of us.

How long did it take you to write?

It took a total of a decade. I started drafting in 2015 and it went under contract with Regal House in 2025. But it was incredibly bottom heavy. By that I mean I wrote the first draft in a manic caffeine binge way back then. I went to my aunt and uncle’s cabin in Tennessee, which very much resembles the cabin that serves as the setting of the book, to just get away, to focus, to put both feet down. And I was able to write it, start to finish, in about nine weeks. Then I spent the next nine years revising it.

Are you a Southern author, and is this a Southern novel?

It’s a Southern novel if you define it by setting or dialogue. But not if you define a novel by intangibles like theme and conflict. I would say that forgiveness, or the inability to forgive, regret, redemption, grief, all these are part of the human condition. So, I don’t necessarily think it’s a Southern novel outside the setting and speech. Those are important veneers, but I think what’s underneath them—the heartwood—is more universal.

I did grow up reading Faulkner and Welty and Flannery O’Connor. And I still read that stuff, but now I’m into more contemporary Southern authors like Padgett Powell and Silas House.

You play with point of view in this novel. In particular, at the beginning and at the end. Was that planned out beforehand, or was it a spur of the moment decision?

I always planned on JJ (one of the main characters) returning to The Reservoir, let’s say, and doing so in a way where he and his voice gradually ebb like the tide going out. That was planned. What I didn’t know was that the novel would start from his perspective too, which creates a set of bookends. It opens with him telling his father’s story, a prologue that I call the Inlet (noun: a narrow strip of water extending from a larger body of water). Then at the end, we return to his perspective in an epilogue that I call the Outlet. I wanted all the sections in between—Fog, Water, Vapor, Ice—to reflect JJ’s literal state as he changes material form throughout the book. In other words, he actually is a water molecule at one point. And he is an ice cube at one point. And he is melting. We’re all melting. Ultimately, we will all shrivel up and spill our water back into the earth. I’d been pondering these themes for years but never had a vehicle for them until JJ came along. Paralleling the life cycle with the water cycle gave shape to the book so I could write it.

Which novelists do you go back to for inspiration?

The southern lit folks that I’ve already named, and I would add William Gay. He does some stuff I really love on the sentence level. And tonally, he has a very bleak sensibility, but also a deep sense of humanity. Plus, he’s from Hohenwald, Tennessee, a stone’s throw from where I grew up.

I was reading Charles Frazier while writing this. I’m a big Cold Mountain fan, but I was on Thirteen Moons at the time. I have to be careful with what I read while I’m writing. It rubs off. Though if a little Frazier rubbed off on my book, it’s all the better for it. 

Waffle House features fairly prominently in this novel, doesn’t it?

I was getting sick of microwaving burritos and pounding bitter coffee at the cabin. I started dreaming of Waffle House, but the nearest one was ten or twenty miles away.

How do you take your hashbrowns?

Scattered and smothered!

I figured, because that’s what the character always orders in the novel. Yeah, you’re definitely a Southern author.

Ha! That’s probably true. Our true colors shine through in our appetites.

~~~~~

Yance Wyatt is from the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. He studied fiction at the University of Southern California, where he now teaches writing. His stories have appeared in dozens of nationally circulated literary journals and received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. He lives with his wife and son in the Pasadena foothills. The Watersmith is his first novel. To learn more or preorder, visit www.yancewyatt.com.

Harris Quinn lives and writes in South Carolina. He is a US Navy veteran and a graduate of the Converse University MFA program. He is working on a novel.

Interview with Wendy J. Fox

Blog, ,

reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

The Last Supper follows three months in the chaotic life of Amanda, who has just turned 40, has two young children, and is searching for something more in her life. She’s failed at being a momfluencer, she’s failed at MLM entrepreneurship, and she’s living in terror of what to make for dinner. Desperate for something more than the isolated world of her suburban home, but consumed by parenting, her illusory stability collapses when the cracks in her marriage finally split open so wide she sees a way out, and a pathway to reclaim her own creative and economic agency.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

The character I most enjoyed creating was the mother in the novel—Camille is a successful attorney who specializes in family law and clawed her way into financial stability after being a single parent. The reason I felt energized when I was in her perspective is because she’s a successful woman who is not defined by caregiving relationships. She’s just who she is and doesn’t really care what other people think about her.

The character who gave me the most trouble—and I think this will track for other writers—was the protagonist, Amanda. She is the hinge the door of the novel hangs on, and it is from her perspective the plot unfolds.

With the most space and time with a protagonist, there’s also more chance for narrative discontinuity or character motivation issues to arise. She goes through a period of awaking in the novel, and while I think it is fair to say all writers of literary fiction or character-driven fiction want to represent the change that occurs, sometimes I have to work on not being didactic or too interior.

Still, from a process perspective, I enjoy the building of a character, inclusive of the hard parts. (This is why I don’t understand would-be creatives leaning on generative AI.)

If you can’t sit with your characters and really think about them, what’s the point?

While sure, it can be difficult, there’s also so much joy in figuring out a tricky sentence, so much satisfaction in revising a critical scene.

How I have come to think about AI chatbots (which you didn’t ask about but is on my mind all the time) is that chatbots are all output, in contrast to creative writing being largely about input.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

This is my fifth book, so at this point I can mostly roll with anything. That said, for me there is always the high of getting to contract with a manuscript, and the low of worrying about it.

The thing that has not changed at all—the thing I roll less well with is worrying how the book will be received.

I often say to people that I have this conundrum of: What if nobody reads it? And then: Oh crap, what if they do?!

Writing and publishing are just two different animals.

However, I do want to say to anyone out there shopping a manuscript: you might (will probably) at some point have a weird interaction with an agent, an editor, a publisher that will shake you. You might wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you wasted the last five years or more of your life.

It’s fine. Not every editor will get you. Lots of agents won’t. Do your work.

When you find the right publishing partner/model, you will know.

The lows are getting through the doubt. The highs are knowing you honored your work—whether it is published or not.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Over a decade ago, before I had a single book in print, I went to a panel where Andre Dubus III talked about the need for tension in every narrative.

That idea has crystallized over the years into really thinking about stakes.

On the panel, Dubus III said something like “If there’s no tension, who cares?” I think about that a lot.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I love your writing advice.

What surprised me in writing The Last Supper was the way the manuscript changed over time. At first, I was writing from a character sketch, then I was developing in earnest. The beginning versions were very different, both in tone and plot.

But! That’s part of the whole point of the process. Which is also, again, why I can’t get down with AI, as there’s no process there.

How did you find the title of your book?

I am notoriously bad at titles.

Once, I turned in a book to my publisher called “Office Stories” – and talk about a snooze in the title department (thank goodness I was already under contract). And definitely no tension there, à la Dubus III. With some help, the title of the book became What If We Were Somewhere Else, which does have tension and also is appropriately descriptive of what it feels like to work in an office.

The title for The Last Supper came from a highly trusted reader.

I’m pretty transparent as a person and a writer, but my beta titles for what became The Last Supper are too embarrassingly bad for even me to share publicly.

Interview with Jamey Gallagher

Blog, , ,

reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 Bodies in Bags is a grit lit/crime collection so visceral you can smell it. A bad cop in New Hampshire dealing with the consequences of shooting an intruder, a drifter who wakes up next to her dead companion in Atlantic City, a veteran fleeing to South Jersey after an impulsive crime: these are stories of desperation and recompense, told in tough and sometimes tender voices. The stories deal with issues of masculinity, consequences, violence, and uncontrollable impulses.

 Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

Of all the stories in Bodies in Bags, I think “Night Moves” might have been the most enjoyable to write. The setting takes me back to a volunteer position at a hospital I had when I was a teenager. The world feels familiar, and the main character is someone I like a lot, a woman like some of the women I worked with at the hospital: tough but kind. The story “Dream a Little Dream” probably gave me the most trouble. It took me so long to finish. I had the character and the opening scene for years, and I must have started three or four novels based on that opening before finally coming up with a shape and a voice that I’m proud of.

 Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

This is the second book of short stories I’ve published in two years. For both books, many of the stories go back a ways. Once I had found the shape for my first collection, I realized that I had a bunch of noir/grit lit pieces that all seemed to hang together. After years of facing rejection, this book was pretty easy to get out there, thanks to the support and faith of Ross Tangedal at Cornerstone Press.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I tend to think all writing advice is pointless, unless it works. As a young writer, I was lucky enough to be in a writing group run by Andre Dubus III. Many things Andre said stuck with me, but I particularly remember him talking about perseverance. “If you put it under a magnifying glass long enough, eventually it’s going to catch fire.”

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

The best stories are almost entirely surprises. As a writer, especially when I’m between stories, I’m always listening for voices and waiting to hear one that works. This collection features a lot of voices that surprised me. I have no idea why they feel real to me or where they came from.

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

I think readers should know what they’re getting into. This book is definitely not for everyone, but, for people who like things dark, I think it will provide exactly what you’re looking for. It doesn’t flinch.

Interview with Tommy Hays

Blog, , ,

reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy, inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends him to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world. 

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why? 

They’re one in the same for me. Wendy is the college girlfriend of Mitchell, the son of Asa, who is the main character. She was one of the most difficult to write because she and I come from very different backgrounds and have dramatically different beliefs.  She’s conservative and very religious, the daughter of a minister of a small Pentecostal church. However as I spent time with her I discovered how sensitive and compassionate and wise she was. She surprised me a lot over the course of writing and the more time I spent with her and the more I got to know her, the more fond I became of her.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I worked on The Marriage Bed off and on for over a decade, writing several drafts between working on two YA novels. My agent at the time never felt my revisions were good enough to send out to publishers.  Finally, much to my hesitation, I had to tell my agent that I had no choice but to look for another agent. That was a hard decision, but it was a very amicable parting. I was grateful to her for all she’d done for me over the years, including selling two novels.  And we’re still friends.  I found another agent who believed in the novel and after a few months she found a wonderful home for The Marriage Bed at Blair, a small but mighty publisher out of North Carolina. I could not be happier. As long and as hard as I had to work on The Marriage Bed, I’m so glad I didn’t give up.   

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Lower your standards.

Thirty years ago, I was in a fiction workshop taught by the writer Allan Gurganus.  Another student in the workshop had asked what to do about writer’s block and Allan said, “Lower your standards.” As a writer, I was critical of my writing, hard on myself often to the point of paralysis. So the idea of lowering my standards, of settling for something less (for the moment anyway), of escorting the editor out of the room and leaving the writer to his own devices, was liberating. 

What surprised you in the writing of this book?

That I finished it. 

How did you find the title of your book?

I asked a trusted writer friend if she might think of one.  She went to bed thinking about it.  The next morning it came to her.

Interview with Megan A. Schikora

Blog, ,

reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

When the unnamed protagonist meets Dutch, she believes that he is her Johnny Cash, that she is his June Carter, and that theirs is a great love story. As the novel progresses, it tells a different story, one swirling with the chaos of addiction. It raises questions about our devotion to people who are terrible for us and at what personal cost.  

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I really enjoyed writing Dutch’s mom, June. She’s a powerhouse. At the same time, beneath all that strength and polish, she’s as vulnerable as the protagonist. I saw and heard her so clearly. I’d like to grab drinks with her. I’d like to be friends.   

I struggled with Tim, one of the protagonist’s romantic partners. Some find him endearing, the obvious “good guy” opposite of Dutch. But even as Tim pledged himself to the protagonist, I’m not sure he ever fully saw her. I’m not sure he was capable.       

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

This road has been a long one. I’m such an impatient person, and before A Woman in Pink, I had only ever written short stories and essays. To give this book the best possible shot, I had to slow down and hone my discipline. Books take time. Thoughtful editing and querying take time.  

I also had to toughen up. This process comes with so much rejection. It’s like drinking from a firehose.

One of the best moments was my first conversation with Jaynie Royal, Editor-in-Chief at Regal House Publishing. She had read my manuscript, and she wanted to talk.  

For context, I had struggled with a recurring comment from early readers: “You have to name your protagonist.” I didn’t want to withhold something readers felt they needed, but I also knew that the omission of the name was critical to the story. Jaynie Royal was the first person who not only understood but appreciated my decision. I felt like my book was finally being seen, and that I was, too, as an author. I signed with Regal House Publishing shortly after that conversation.             

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Those lovely people in your life who tell you how great you are? Don’t share your early drafts with them. Share your work with critical readers who will point out the weaknesses and tell you the truth.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

The ambiguity of the book’s conclusion surprised me. I didn’t know the protagonist’s precise fate, and I decided that I was okay with not knowing. I didn’t need or want a tidy ending. I wanted to leave some room for interpretation and hope.  

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

I want readers to know that A Woman in Pink is not a romance. It’s not cynical, either. It’s a messy story, one that veers away from “happily ever after” toward lived experience, one I hope will resonate with anyone who’s ever loved an addict.