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

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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.

Godhunger & the Commodification of Faith: An Interview with Emma Galloway Stephens

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By Renee Kalagayan

Emma Galloway Stephens is a poet, a native Appalachian, a professor of English literature and creative writing, and, most recently, a book author. Her debut collection, No Billboard Gospel (Solum Literary Press, 2026), is driven by the question, “If God exists and is good, then why does he allow evil?” Written in the Southern Gothic tradition, her poems lead readers along a kudzu-ridden, red Carolina clay path to uncover the answer. I asked Emma a series of questions that each deal with a subject, technique, or quality present in No Billboard Gospel.

This collection is very outspoken against “the commodification of faith.” I especially love your use of the term “Godhunger” to describe your insatiable drive to uncover the roots of your doubt and your anger toward injustice and hypocrisy. How have you seen faith emerge as a commodity in modern times, or even in the arts? How is poetry uniquely suited to answer this issue? Did anything ultimately quell your Godhunger, and if so, what?

I think faith, and Christianity in particular, has a centuries-long history of commodification. Christ drove out money changers from the temple. The Protestant Reformation happened in part as a response to indulgences—the church collecting money from parishioners to buy their loved ones’ passage out of hell—allowing church authorities to live in luxury at the expense of the poor worshipers. There’s a reason Jesus spent so much of his time warning against the dangers of hoarding wealth. There’s something about religion’s universality that attracts those who would use it to manipulate people. Godhunger is universal—I think we’re born craving a knowledge of something higher than ourselves. Godhunger makes us want to know and be known. It’s a good desire—but it’s unfortunately an exploitable one.

Poetry, I think, is an inherently spiritual art form, and therefore a good vessel for articulating this universal Godhunger and condemning those who would exploit it. Poetry is among the oldest art forms in human history, and we’ve used it for communicating with and about the Divine for as long as we’ve had it. It connects to the soul in the same way music does because it depends on musical conventions of patterned sound and rhythm. I think it’s significant that so many of the Bible’s books of prophecy are written in verse—poetry has always spoken truth to power. I think its inherent spirituality is part of why it’s less marketable than fiction or nonfiction—and that is a mercy. You won’t find many billionaire poets.

Godhunger is insatiable, I think. The more you know of God, the more you want to know. This unending curiosity is exciting to me. I think I’ll get many more poems out of it.

How did you select the title of your collection?

I wrote “No Billboard Gospel” (the poem) in one hour-long writing session. It’s one of the few I’ve written that arrived fully formed, and not in need of significant editing after I wrote the draft. This poem was among the last I wrote for this collection. After around two years of ruminating on its themes and images, I sneezed out a poem that summed up what I felt the collection was about—that faith is a redeeming force that crushes the sins that cripple us, and not a cheap commodity or cultural identifier or easy answer to hard questions. Up to that point, the book was called River Songs. I retitled the book to match the poem I decided was now its centerpiece.

You said in an interview with Skipjack Review that your favorite way to end a poem with a “gut punch” is to use rhyming couplets. Are there any heroic couplets in No Billboard Gospel that surprised you? Which one is your favorite?

There’s a couplet at the end of “The Devil Beats His Wife” that surprised me. It’s not quite heroic—the final line is only two iambs, not five—but most of my formal verse follows “the rules” selectively, anyway. The poem in the book is a revision of a much longer poem that I wrote in the fall of 2024. I’d sent it around to several magazines without success, so I decided to revise it a yearish later by cutting out some couplets. The line “and so’s the sky” was a new line I added after I cut whatever else I’d had after “She knows his oily well is nearly dry.” It’s a poem about the inevitable end of evil—that it’s self-exhausting and self-devouring—and will end with the same certainty that we know a rainstorm will end. I liked the parallelism it offered to the opening image.

No Billboard Gospel is rife with critters. You describe them in “Roadkill Sonnet” (my favorite poem) as “saints of every shape.” How did you come to connect animals with sainthood/priesthood? Also, St. Joan the Opossum is a recurring mascot throughout the book. How did St. Joan come to be? What is she symbolic of, or the “patron saint” of? Do you plan on writing more about her or Friar Raven in the future?

I’ve always suspected that animals intuit more about the nature of God than humans have riddled out over centuries of arguing. The idea of a possum as a kind of priest is not original to me—I got the idea from the song “Possum by Night” by The Mountain Goats, which is in the voice of a possum going about his nightly routine, calling on the bugs on his body to “praise the Lord” and naming garbage collectors “true sons of the living word.” Possums are “sin eaters” of a sort—they eat disease-spreading insects, trash, things other creatures won’t touch. They aren’t well-loved, as their appearance can be off-putting, and their lifespan is short. You’re more likely to see them dead on the road than alive in the wild. If any creature were to become a sainted martyr (venerated for their short, difficult lives; known better for their deaths than their lives), a possum fits the bill.

The name Saint Joan the Opossum is just a pun on Saint John the Apostle, the disciple who wrote the prophetic Book of Revelation. Saint Joan’s vision of God both empowers and disables her, with one eye retaining regular sight but the other going white and blind, yet able to perceive the spiritual world. In my mind, she’s the patron saint of childlike faith. Her poems are intentionally whimsical and light. Faith is as natural as breathing to her because she’s capable of understanding more than the book’s human speaker. She embodies the notion that faith can be natural and even feral.

I’ve floated the idea of a children’s book featuring St. Joan and friends, but writing for children is a precise and sacred science I’d need to take the time to learn first.

Your poems largely employ the use of form, specifically what you call “messed-up sonnets.” Can you elaborate on how form serves your work, and how it guides your writing process? Are there any forms that jump out at you in No Billboard Gospel that helped you to communicate your message more effectively? How is form in conversation with content in your collection?

I enjoy writing in forms. My best poems are “messed up”/slant sonnets. And most of those sonnets are accidental. I’ll try to write something longer, start revising, and end up with a 14-line poem with a discernable five-foot rhythm pattern, a volta, and a rhyming couplet at the end. I just like the shape and brevity of a sonnet. But I’m an imperfect formalist—the rules don’t always serve me, so I don’t follow all of them for every poem.

There are a lot of sonnets in NBG—over a quarter of the collection. Sonnets are great for creating swift, memorable impact. They’re not long; you have to be selective in the images that you choose. They require some manner of rhyme, at least at the end, which allows for the one-two punch of a rhyming couplet to the gut. The journey from beginning to end is short and satisfying, in the reading and the writing. Most of the sonnets in this collection grapple with some kind of grief. The form doesn’t prolong the grief, but contains it. I think I gravitated towards sonnets in this collection because they’re good for making difficult subjects feel more digestible.

I’ve tried to branch out to other forms, like villanelles and pantoums and sestinas. Usually they turn out stilted instead of inviting surprising revelations or phrases. One day I’ll figure out how to write well in other forms, and then I’ll be unstoppable.

You’ve mentioned to me that you have a friend who has prayed through a few of the poems in No Billboard Gospel, like a liturgy. Faith is very important to you and your work. How did your faith inform the writing of No Billboard Gospel, especially in relation to the commodification of faith and the political threads you touch on? Did any poems begin as prayers?

Most of the poems in NBG are prayers. I wrote the book when I was having a hard time praying the way I’d grown up praying—in silence, with my hands folded and eyes closed. I couldn’t sustain the practice. So I started writing poems as a way of processing what I’d wanted to pray about. “Psalm 4” became a prayer—it started as an interpretation of the images of its namesake psalm in the Bible, but became a genuine expression of my own frustration. All of the “River Song” poems, “Contusion,” the last two lines of “The Last Summer of the Kumquat Tree,” “Poetry of Witness,” “River Wade,” “March on Paris Mountain,” “The Whirlwind,” “This Feral Faith”—all [these are] prayers of a sort. I had many questions (and complaints) to bring to God, and they all took this shape.

While I wrote the poems for this book, I was assessing my faith after years of running on spiritual autopilot. The poems reflect this process of assessment—others have called this process deconstruction, but that’s not the term I prefer for my experience. I prefer restoration, which is why the last poem of the collection has that title. The more I understood about Christ—the originator and center of Christianity—the more dissatisfied I grew with how American cultural Christianity functions more like a brand identity and a useful voting bloc. Christ offers radical transformation and relationship—even friendship—with God. His promises have outlasted many empires, and will outlast today’s. I gravitated towards older expressions of the Christian faith that include liturgy, early Church creeds, and focus on the centrality of the Gospel. My faith simplified and solidified the more it engaged with Christianity’s mysteries. I’ve learned I don’t have to have all the answers. I’ve learned that loving Christ should transform me into a more loving neighbor. That perfect love casts out fear. I think the poems in NBG reflect this arc.

My favorite way you’ve ever described writing poetry is as an avenue of “soul care.” How has No Billboard Gospel served as soul care for you? What do you hope your poems do for others?

I wrote these poems as a way of sorting through my personal doubts and griefs. Writing the poems helped clear a besetting fog. My habit is to write poems about subjects that trouble or puzzle me. In this way, writing feels a bit like praying. It’s an inherently spiritual process to me.

I’ve had a reader or two tell me that my poems captured many of the complex feelings they’ve had about their faiths—I think, from their reports, that I’ve done what I set out to do. I would like those who read my poems to feel less alone in their doubts. I want them to feel hopeful in the ongoing mystery that is the process of living out our faith.

~~~~~

Emma Galloway Stephens is a neurodivergent poet and professor from the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Red Branch Review, The Christian Century, Door is a Jar, Salvation South, and many others. She is a co-founder and the Educational Director of Arbor Institute for the Arts in Greenville, SC. Read more at egstephenspoetry.com.

Renee Kalagayan, an Asian-American writer and native South Carolinian, is an MFA candidate in poetry and nonfiction at Converse University, where she is the assistant poetry editor of South 85 Journal. Her work is featured or forthcoming in, among others, HAD, Relief, About Place, SoFloPoJo, and the city-wide GVL Poetry Trail in Greenville, SC. Find her on social media @rkalagayanpoet.

Interview with Kate Christensen

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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

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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 Jamy Bond

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reprinted with permission from workinprogressinprogress.com

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

After my sister, Shelby, is killed in a car crash while serving in the Peace Corps, I travel to Mozambique to locate her boyfriend, Idasse, who survived the crash. Together we retrace Shelby’s steps across a landscape of memory and loss. Part memoir, part investigative journey, The Island of Ghost Ships navigates the wreckage of grief through a series of short essays and a central haunting narrative.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why?

Writing about grief is very cathartic for me; it’s a way of processing emotional pain, so I guess I felt that kind of enjoyment while writing every essay in this collection. “Your Broken Hands,” however, was the most difficult to write. It is a letter to my sister’s friend who fell asleep at the wheel. The car accident didn’t just kill my sister, it killed his father, too, and gravely injured his sister. I‘ve felt every emotion toward him from rage to compassion to forgiveness. I know it was devastating for him, and I often wonder how he carried on and where he is today. In that essay, I had to take all of these emotions and funnel them into just a few poignant words. That is the beauty and the challenge of the short form: how to convey enormous things through a single image, sentence, phrase, or word.

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

Oh gosh, where to start. I began this book about 20 years ago when I was awarded a Fulbright scholar grant to spend a year in Mozambique researching and writing about my sister’s death. Based on just a handful of pages, I ‘d signed with an agent, and she had a high-level editor at Knopf interested in the book. It was a lot of pressure. On top of the pressure, I was still drowning in grief over losing my sister and learning new details every day about the crash that killed her. Every sentence I wrote was painful. When I completed a page I’d get up and jump rope 100 times. I was in excellent shape by the end of it! The Knopf editor passed on the book. My agent sent it to dozens and dozens of publishing houses and they all passed. We’d get glowing letters about how wonderful the writing is, how moving the story, but in the end it was “too hard to sell.” I was devastated. I put the manuscript away for a long time. Then I pulled it out and started cutting huge chunks and reshaping what was left. I asked the amazing Meg Pokrass to help me expand it again, because I was still in this mindset that it had to be longer, but she said, “I think it’s beautiful as it is, just submit it,” So I did and a few months later Finishing Line Press accepted it.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

It comes from Richard Bausch. Read your work out loud. It’s the single most important thing I’ve ever learned about writing. I do it a gazillion times with everything I write. It trains your ear to hear where even the smallest edit (a word, a comma, a period) will improve the clarity, refine the prose, and perfect the lyrical rhythm of your sentences. I do it so much that I can almost recite every one of my pieces from memory.

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

There’s one piece, “Shipwrecked,” where time is compressed into a kaleidoscopic reality. I was surprised by how effective this technique can be at capturing both the feeling of my sister being gone forever, and the feeling I often have that she’s come back to me in form of my daughter. Time, of course, is a construct, and emotions know nothing about its passing, especially in the case of grief. Still, the details of an experience can blur and change and give way to new definitions: Here I am walking through a game park in South Africa with my sister, and here I am walking through a field of bluebells in Virginia with my daughter. There are 25 years between those two experiences and yet, they are happening simultaneously.  

How did you find the title of your book?

The book’s title, The Island of Ghost Ships, comes from something my sister said to me when we were visiting Catembe, which is an island in Maputo Bay off the coast of Mozambique. This was before they had built the suspension bridge that now connects the island to Maputo and we had to take a ferry to get there. As we pulled in to dock, we saw the wreckage of a ship and a few small boats in the sand. It was strange to see these abandoned pieces of history glistening there in the bright sun. We invented stories about where these boats had started their journey, who they carried, why they were left there to rot. And my sister said, “Welcome to the Island of Ghost Ships where even decay can be beautiful.”

An Interview with Kyle Minor

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

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

These essays are interested in all varieties of disappearance: Voluntary, involuntary, coerced, professional, intellectual, transcendent, mortal. Ghosts of dead friends, driving Uber after Hollywood work dried up, narcissism in writers, social class and upward mobility, the Polish diplomat Jan Karski who failed to stop the Holocaust, folk art and synesthesia and transcendence, Bernard Moitessier and c. diff. and the sickness that might find its way into our song.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why?

The real pleasure was writing “Junk Temples,” a novella-length essay-in-digressions toward the end of the book that is intensely interested in the notion of transcendence in art and the idea of how we make temples out of all kinds of things, including junk, and ascribe elevated meaning to them. I got to visit the folk artist Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens, a couple of acres of his life’s work in junk collage and painting on everything, which is located right across the street from a state prison, and in a neighborhood full of Rottweilers chained to rickety stakes in every other front yard. And I got to spend time in the work of Henry Darger, who left behind one of the largest books ever assembled, which has at its center a phalanx of Charmin-girl angels with penises fighting a Civil War in some kind of troubled heaven. And I got to think about the nature of love and forgetting and music and books alongside Susan Sontag and William Goyen and a lot of poets, all through an overlay of synesthetic color and light.

 And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

The most difficult essay was the one at the end, “The Sickness and the Song,” which is an attempt at a personal reckoning with what art and writing are for, and how narcissism distorts, and what matters in life, even if you are chasing art. I was thinking about an around-the-world boat race in which the Frenchman Bernard Moitessier was in the lead, but he quit because the sailing—the water, the wind, the sky, the fish—had come to matter more than the race.

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

I injured my brain a little playing hockey, and for a little while I had some trouble reading. Then I got sad. Then there were some complications with clearing permissions. The book was a little late to press. By then, the world had changed again, and it started to mean new things it hadn’t meant when I wrote it. Maybe it was for the best.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Quit this shit and go to medical school, so you can make enough money to eat.

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

I think I might have found a path out of despair and into hope.

Who is your ideal reader?

You.

Interview with Serena Agusto-Cox

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reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

Echoes Carry is a collection throughout which familial and ancestral echoes weave through each poem in subtle and stark ways. It raises the question of how much we are influenced by our families and friends, including ancestors or distant relatives we’ve never met face-to-face. Tangentially, it seeks to understand the connections humans have with one another.

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this book? Where does that sort of courage come from?

I wouldn’t say I’ve broken any boundaries per se, but I wanted to create a collection that could speak to readers, not just academic readers. I wanted my audience to see the possibilities in their own lives and the connections they may have to family, friends, ancestors, without really knowing that their influence has been present since the beginning. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about. The human condition and where we get the impulse to choose one action or feeling over another and how much of that can be nature and how much can be nurtured. Even things that seem unique to us, like writing poems, can be something that our ancestors did before us, and we may never know. The possibilities are endless.

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

The high is seeing a print copy in a box that you open at your house with your child videotaping the unboxing. Yes, I did this social media craze. Why? Because I want to share that joy, if not with the internet world, at least with my child. Definitely a fun moment: videotaping goofy mom. The lows are the length of time between when you’ve finally got the manuscript where you want it and you send it out over and over and over ad nauseum to places that reject it. You have to put your energy into another creative project or that process will depress you.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I think Billy Collins once said, “Write the poem only you can write.” That’s probably the best advice you can have with regard to poetry. But I’ve also taken Stephen King’s advice to heart about manuscripts. In On Writing, he mentioned that manuscripts should have a period of rest in a drawer. I believe he says six weeks, but sometimes, my poetry manuscripts have needed far longer than six weeks.

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

It wasn’t the writing that surprised me or the collection of poems or the ordering of poems. What surprised me was the fun I had creating a book cover on Canva. Yes, I had help with the design, but the vision is all mine. I loved that creative part of the process. It was unexpected. Thinking about all the possibilities suggested by others and by the publisher, but knowing what I wanted to see and then being able to create it was the biggest surprise.

How did you find the title of your book?

The title of the book is a modification of a line in one of the poems. I’ll leave that mystery for readers to uncover.