reprinted with permission from Work-in-Progress, www.workinprogressinprogress.com
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
Bad Naturalist is a memoir about my attempts to restore native meadows on a mountain in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, about the obstacles I encountered, the (many) mistakes I made, the failures—and a few successes—and the discoveries I made along the way.
What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?
Hahaha, courage? Maybe it was foolishness! For me, writing a book-length memoir was something I hadn’t done before, and I was a bit of a reluctant memoirist in that I didn’t feel comfortable focusing on myself. The only way for me to do that was with humor, which is how I like to write anyway. I needed to feel free to make fun of myself. So if there is a “boundary” that I crossed, it’s that apparently it’s somewhat unusual for there to be humor in nature writing. And I wanted to bring nature, um, down to earth…for people like me.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
Well, for one thing, selling my book on proposal was an incredible high point and so different from the process I was used to, since my first book was fiction. I’ll also say that there has been a lot of interest in this book, which I really appreciate! I think the low point was when I was trying to figure out how to write the book, as if there was some special rule of approach, a key to writing memoir–and not exactly a traditional memoir, but one that tells a story not just about me, but about the natural world–a key that I didn’t possess because I hadn’t done it before. (There is no key, and every book is different. Heavy sigh.) But I guess it worked it out in the end?
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Write about what you’re curious about — that interest and passion will come through in the writing, and your enthusiasm is contagious. Don’t worry about writing what you “know”—but get to know it, so that your reader can get to know it, too.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
That I got it done! I was doing the work and the research on the mountain at the same time that I was writing about it. Both the project and the writing involved a lot of uncertainty, a lot of waiting, a lot of trial and error. I never knew what was going to happen on the mountain or if it would happen when I needed it to happen, so I hardly ever knew whether I’d be able to write about the aspect I was hoping to write about, particularly in time for my deadline. The exciting part for me was often the surprise of seeing what did happen—what grew in a place, what new interconnections I found. I took those surprises in the field and brought them to my writing desk, where I teased out further connections when I sat down to write. I was also intent on finding ways to describe plants and insects and birds that I hope are entertaining and accessible, to describe elements of the natural world so that an interested novice like me would be able to envision and connect with them, and I was often surprised by the ideas that occurred to me, like comparing a flower to a weird swim cap my grandmother used to wear. Where did that even come from?
Who is your ideal reader?
People who are curious and interested in reading about encounters with the natural world that are written with a sense of humor; armchair travelers who would enjoy reading about an adventurous endeavor that doesn’t always go right! I think the book will prove inspiring for those who are drawn to take on an ambitious project in an area that’s totally new to them; for those interested in trying something completely new in mid-life; and for readers who like the idea of reading about someone else’s foibles and failures, watching someone else mess up in what is still a hopeful story.
Reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
The Mary Years is a nonfiction novella that chronicles one young woman’s quarter-century love affair with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Part bildungsroman and part televisual ekphrasis, this is the story of Mary Richards re-seen through the eyes of Julie Marie Wade.
Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?
My students tell me about writing fan fiction, how satisfying it is for them to take characters that exist in books and films and video games and create additional stories, even alternative stories, for their lives. Mistakenly, for years, I’ve thought I didn’t know anything at all about fan fiction, but the truth is, The Mary Years is a work of fan nonfiction, and I think I felt compelled to write it for similar reasons to those that inspire fan fiction: I wanted to explore how a fictional character (many, actually—a cast of fictional characters) can have as much influence over our lives as the real people who live and breathe alongside us.
Maybe we all live between real and fictional realms anyway, so this memoir, arranged in chapters that were individually published as “essays in episodes,” is my attempt at showing the ongoing straddle between my personal history and the television show that has been a touchstone for it since The Mary Tyler Moore Show first premiered on Nick at Nite in 1992. I’m not sure if the writing of this collection exemplifies any kind of courage, but I knew I had to write the book after Mary Tyler Moore, the real person who embodied the fictional character who deeply informed my real coming-of-age, passed away in early 2017. The Mary Years is nothing if not an elegy to her and for her as well.
I loved writing each essay in episodes, considering my own childhood in an insular Seattle suburb called Fauntlee Hills as an analog to Mary Richards’s Roseburg, the fictional Minnesota town where the character was from (“Fauntlee Hills Was My Roseburg: An Essay in Episodes, Prairie Schooner, 2020); exploring my first residence as an autonomous adult in Pittsburgh, the early years of wondering whether my partner Angie and I would “make it after all” in a place neither of us had ever visited before moving across the country together and starting a new life there (“Pittsburgh Was My Minneapolis: An Essay in Episodes, Tupelo Quarterly, 2018); and of course these more recent years in Miami, my life as a professor and mentor, taking on a kind of work where I might become a role model for others in the way Mary—both the person and the character—became a role model for me (“Miami is My Tipperary: An Essay in Episodes,” The Normal School, 2020). Let’s hope!
I might have had the most conspicuous fun writing “Lamonts Might Be My WJM” (Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, 2019) which explored my first real job—the one that wasn’t babysitting or teaching piano lessons or walking neighbors’ dogs—the first job where I earned a proper paycheck on a grainy blue background with those little perforated tabs you have to tear along the sides. The Mary Tyler Moore Show kindled in me a desire not only to work as part of a professional team but a desire for the friendships and camaraderie that might be forged because of working together. At seventeen, just before graduating from high school, I was hired by the (sadly now-defunct) department store Lamonts as a sales associate. Even the title sounded fancy to me! And I started meeting all these people—mostly middle-aged and older women—who had so much life experience in addition to their decades of retail experience, and most of whom were more than willing to share that experience with me. I wanted to bring my initiation into that workplace—but also into that new realm of womanhood—onto the page. I still think so often about my colleagues at Lamonts, who were really mentors, and all that I learned from them. They didn’t seem like Mary Richards, not one of them, but they shaped my life in significant ways, too. And when I finally left that job and moved onto a commissioned position selling shoes for JCPenney, I remember one of my mentors hugged me good-bye in the break room and said, knowing my deep love of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (everyone knew about that!), “We’re going to miss you, our sweet Mary girl.”
Probably the hardest part of this book to write was near the end of the essay-chapter “Miami Is My Tipperary,” the night I learned Mary Tyler Moore had died. I was teaching when it happened, which seemed fitting—I was doing the thing I love most—and my phone was filling up with voicemails and texts offering condolences from people across my life. But I didn’t see these messages until hours later. Usually, as a writer with strong commitments to memoir, I’m writing at a distance from my memories, not trying to document events so close to when they actually happened. As I was writing that part of the essay, splicing the messages I hadn’t seen yet with what we were talking about in class—ekphrasis, of all things—writing in response to various kinds of art, including television—I realized I was crying. Tears were pouring down my face as I typed. It may be the first time I have ever experienced such an immediate and intense catharsis while shaping memory into scene on the page.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
I’m actually astonished—and so grateful, beyond grateful—that Michael Martone chose this book for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize in 2023. I don’t remember offhand how many times I circulated the book to various possible publishers—mostly memoir and nonfiction book prizes—or even what possessed me to send The Mary Years to a novella prize. It’s about 40,000 words, so it qualifies as a novella length-wise, but I wasn’t sure if novellas were restricted implicitly to fictional works. Then again, Mary Richards is a fictional character, and WJM is a fictional workplace, so certainly this is a nonfiction work that interacts in a sustained way with fiction—just the fiction of someone else’s creation!
I was astonished every time one of the individual essay-chapters found a home in a literary journal (and ultimately, they all did), but I wasn’t sure if the idiosyncratic nature of my project would set it apart from other manuscripts in an enticing way or a limiting way. As writers, we never really know, do we?
I circulated this book as a book for far less time than many of my other collections, and I’m used to waiting a long time for a project to find the right home. So I think it was all highs really, the biggest high being the fact that I wrote it, the homage I needed to write, and in the process, I discovered so much about my own history that I would never have learned without my eye poised to the lens of the MTM kaleidoscope.
Sometimes people ask memoirists, or those who work broadly in the self-referential arts, how we don’t “run out” of material. I think it’s not about the quantity of material at all but about finding new ways of looking at our lives and considering all the lenses we have available to facilitate that looking.
An ekphrastic lens is so exciting and revelatory to me that I’m actually building a multi-genre graduate seminar around this expansive concept. In “The New Ekphrasis,” I want to consider with my students some recent innovative works of contemporary ekphrasis including—but not limited to!—Ander Monson’s Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession, Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies (literary ekphrasis), Patricia Smith’s Unshuttered, Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Till They Kill Us (aural ekphrasis), Sibbie O’Sullivan’s My Private Lennon: Explorations from a Fan Who Never Screamed.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
I’m not sure it was intended specifically as writing advice—maybe as life and writing advice—but when I was graduating from college and preparing to head to my first graduate program, one of the great mentors of my life, Tom Campbell, said this: “Let nothing be wasted on you.” Tom was my undergraduate English professor and advisor, an exemplary teacher who I still channel in my own classrooms.
I take his words to mean, simply put, use everything; learn from everything; value everything. If you love a particular television show, write about it. If you have a strange or surprising hobby you think no one would else appreciate, write about it. Whatever is important to you in your life can be shaped for a reading audience. Your reader will care if you care enough and are artful enough in translating your own experience to the page.
And in another sense, don’t let rejections and disappointments (which every person and every artist experience) stop you from pursuing what you love. I am thousands of rejections deep in my 21 years of submitting work for publication. I have lost far more contests than I have won or could ever hope to win—as is inevitable—but I work hard to learn from those rejections, to let them spur me forward rather than hold me back.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
Oh, that’s wonderful advice! I’m always surprised when writing. I look forward to being surprised. In The Mary Years, I was surprised by the small things I discovered through sustained attention. For instance, I discovered that WJM, the newsroom where Mary Richards works for all seven seasons on the show, mirrors my own name’s initials, each time I am asked to print my last name first, followed by first and middle. Also, after all those years watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show and reading biographies (and autobiographies!) about her life, I had realized the framed picture on Mary Richards’s table, the one just outside her balcony doors, was a picture of her real-life son, Richie Meeker, but it did not dawn on me until writing this book that her character’s last name Richards was most likely an homage to her son, whose given name was Richard.
How did you find the title of your book?
My book’s title—The Mary Years—comes from an idiosyncratic reference that I have used since I first became a devotee of the series as a twelve-year-old. On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, we meet Mary Richards when the character is 30 years old, and the series ends, seven seasons later, when she is 37. So all those years as I was moving through my adolescence and then through my 20s, I was anticipating my own “Mary years,” wondering what my 30s would be like—and how they would differ from Mary’s. I always talked about people, specifically women, in that age range as being “in their Mary years.”
Here’s a sweet story that also appears in the book: when I entered my own Mary years, I was a PhD student living with my long-time partner in Louisville, Kentucky, and some of our friends from my academic program conspired with Angie to surprise me with a Mary-themed birthday party. Our friend Carol hosted, and she served Brandy Alexanders as the signature cocktail—which all you MTM fans will recall is the drink Mary asks for on her job interview with Lou Grant when he insists she have a drink with him. Our friend Elijah listened to the Mary Tyler Moore theme song “Love is All Around” so many times that he learned the song by heart and then brought his band to Carol’s house to play that song as I walked through the door.
Then, when I reached the end of my own Mary years, Mary Tyler Moore passed away, and I knew it was time to write—from the other side of that milestone era—what my own journey toward and through “the Mary years” had meant to me.
Memorable characters guide much of the work of Ellen Birkett Morris. Her story collection, Lost Girls, gave us a splendid cast of female protagonists dealing with loss, grief, and acceptance in and around Kentucky. Her new novel, Beware the Tall Grass, goes even further in developing strong characters. It tells the story of the inexplicable connection between Eve Sloan, a modern mother whose young son has past life memories of war, and Thomas Boone, a young soldier in Vietnam. This is a book ripe with the truth of its characters; this is a book that successfully explores the big themes of life such as loss and love and family. As we read page after page, we want to know–have to know–how the stories of Thomas and Eve will end.
It was a pleasure to be able to talk to Morris about her writing.
Bradley Sides: Ellen, you are so good at creating and building characters. I want to start by asking you about them. As you begin a project, whether it’s a story or a longer project like Beware the Tall Grass, how do you find your characters? Do you feel like you know them well as you get started? Or do they develop as the project grows?
Ellen Birkett Morris: Thank you. I built the character Eve with the idea that I needed a character who would have the hardest time with the uncertainty and pain of her young son being traumatized by memories of war. Eve had a rough childhood and dreams of giving her son the perfect childhood, so Charlie’s challenges were a nightmare for her. I have come to believe that my job is to develop a character with specific traits and then put them in situations that test their nature in every way, forcing them to find a new way to look at the world.
One way I get to know them as I start is to give them passions (sculpture for Eve, horse for Thomas), past memories, friendships, family relations. These choices begin to come together to form the characters. The more I populate their world with specific detail the more real they become to me and readers.
Eve developed as I wrote, her emotions got deeper, and her understanding of relationships got more nuanced. It was fun to see her develop on the page. I had to take my time to let that happen. The same was true of Thomas, who went to war as a naive boy and had his values tested at every turn.
BS: With the kind of depth they have, do you ever have trouble letting them go once the story is over?
EBM: The women and girls from Lost Girls have stayed with me. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them come up again in short stories. I think I have told the stories of Eve and Thomas to completion. That said, I think of Thomas a lot. I love his character and commitment to doing the right thing.
BS: Expanding just a bit, but how did your writing process differ from creating stories for Lost Girls to creating a longer narrative with Beware the Tall Grass?
EBM: I really considered myself a short story writer when I started writing the novel. I was so used to drawing characters sharply in a small space and dropping in on their peak moments. So, I wrote Eve’s story as a short story first. I was published in Upstreet under the title “Landing Zone Albany.” I was at the Antioch Writers Workshop in Yellow Springs when my instructor Erin Flanagan suggested the story would make a good novel. I knew I needed a way to make myself comfortable with the process, which for me meant pretending I was writing something much shorter and tackling it short chapter by short chapter. I also knew I needed another POV character, so I came up with the idea of a soldier fighting in the same war that Eve’s son Charlie has disturbing memories of. Adding Thomas’s story allowed me to create a braided narrative that had echoes between each section and held more meaning and significance. I also made sure I had a narrative roadmap for each character, a step-by-step sense of places they would go either in the quest to help Charlie with his disturbing memories in Eve’s case or areas/battles in Vietnam in Thomas’s case. I won’t lie, the writing was hard work. I jokingly compare the creation of this novel to chipping away at a mountain with nail scissors.
BS: To play off construction, I’m always so impressed when I read novels that balance multiple perspectives and timelines as well as yours does. Did you write the book going back and forth with Thomas and Eve? Or did you write the stories separately and later combine them to form a cohesive narrative?
EBM: I wrote the novel alternating between the Thomas and Eve sections. I like an intuitive approach and knew that I could clean things up later if needed. The best thing this did for me was to allow for unconscious (and later, in revision, conscious) echoes in the text, repeated images, tone or mood that helped heighten the bond between the different sections for the reader. One example is a section midway through the book where Eve revels in a peaceful evening at home, while Thomas goes walking in the night and encounters deer. Both characters got a moment of grace before the drama ratcheted back up.
BS: Beware the Tall Grass explores the idea of past lives, which I find to be absolutely fascinating. When did the inspiration come?
EBM:In 2014, I was on a road trip with my husband and heard an NPR story on the University of Virginia Medical Center program that attempted to corroborate the past life stories of young children with the experiences they describe. These children talk about being in war, the Holocaust and being present during terrorism. The researchers would hear the stories and look at news accounts and records to see if they matched the details of the story the children told. A surprising number of times they did match. The idea was so big, so fascinating. The only way I had the courage to try to tell a story based on this phenomenon was to let myself off the hook when it came to explaining the unexplainable. I wrote the story in as straightforward a fashion as I could, deeply exploring each character’s experience of it and letting them draw any eventual conclusions as to what was going on. I was anchored in the telling by my desire to explore a truth we all know: the life we get often isn’t the one we expected to get. We are all tested. What matters is how we rise to the test.
BS: In what ways, if at all, do you see your books as being in conversation with one another?
EBM: I think they are both books about courage in the face of adversity and what we will do for love.
BS: Since we both graduated from the Queens MFA program, I think it’s only fitting that I ask you this question to end our time together: How did earning an MFA impact your writing career?
EBM: It reinforced lessons I had already learned about craft and provided me with a wonderful community. The most important thing it did was help me grow in confidence as a writer. One of my mentors, Steven Rinehart, called me a “prose stylist.” Susan Perabo said she believed the truth of what was happening in a short story I shared with class. David Payne has been a great supporter of my work post-MFA. That has been an enormous gift as I have found my way as a writer.
***
Bradley Sides is the author of two short story collections, Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, and the upcoming novella, The Volcano Keeper, which will be out from Regal House in the fall of 2026. His fiction has been featured on LeVar Burton Reads. He lives in Madison, Alabama, with his wife. On most days, he can be found teaching writing and literature at Calhoun Community College. For more, visit www.bradley-sides.com.
This interview is reprinted with permission from Work in Progress (www.workinprogressinprogress.com)
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
THE BOOK OF LOSMAN is about a literary translator in Copenhagen with Tourette Syndrome who becomes involved in a dubious and experimental drug study to retrieve his childhood memories in a tragicomic effort to find a cure for his condition.
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
Daniel P. Losman—who goes simply by Losman—was very much a fun character to write. I’ve written 7 completed manuscripts over the past 30 years, five novels and two collections of stories (there were more manuscripts I simply abandoned). Nearly all of those manuscripts contain stories and characters that involve background research. This is especially so with one manuscript, a retelling of Beowulf set in the Southern Tier region of New York State. I spent 10 years writing that book, which is called IN THE COUNTRY OF MONSTROUS CREATURES. To do it properly, I had to read and reread Beowulf, I had to research the process of fracking (which plays an outsize role in the novel), and I had to invest a great deal of time learning more about this region of the state. I am from New York State—I love New York!—but I grew up in the Finger Lakes. There are great differences between these regions. Since I was after a certain degree of verisimilitude, research was necessary.
I pitched agents and eventually signed with one who loved the Beowulf retelling. He shopped it around and I got a lot of wonderful responses from major editors and publishers, though all of which were, ultimately, rejections. So I ended up giving up on the novel. Now it’s just a lonely Word doc on my laptop. I mention all this because, with The Book of Losman, I wanted to tell a simpler story, one that didn’t take a decade to finish or force me to spend countless hours doing research. I felt I knew Losman from the start. The two of us share some commonalities. He is a literary translator with Tourette, like me, and because of this his character traits slotted into place rather easily. Also, he lives in Denmark as I once did. Losman is not me, far from it. But because my life experiences are close to his, I didn’t have to do as much research. As a result, I was able to write the first draft in less than two years.
The hardest character for me to write was Losman’s crush, Caroline Jensen. She’s an artist, and a bit of an odd duckling. I had to figure out a way to create her character without resorting to caricature. I didn’t want to write a story with a traditional romance, either, so there’s this awkward tension between them throughout the novel. Balancing that tension took some effort.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
One interesting tidbit: this book actually started as a memoir. But the writing felt forced, and I limped along, not certain how to go about putting together a memoir. Besides, I kept asking myself, who wants to read a sad story about a boy with Tourette? I sure didn’t. I wanted to write something that contained both sadness and humor but was still entertaining. I’d been chewing on one particular idea for years—What if there was a pill that could return our childhood memories to us?—and it dawned on me that this was the perfect story for that idea. So I pulled one small scene from the memoir, the “truest” scene, and reimagined the entire book as fiction. Once I did that, the flood gates opened and the writing gushed. Fiction has always been my preferred medium. (Though I will add that I published a personal essay in HuffPost that served as all I wanted to say, or would have said, in a memoir.)
My agent loved this manuscript too, and he gave me some feedback that I incorporated. The book went out on submission but, like with the Beowulf retelling, I ended up getting only rejections. They were nearly all uniformly praiseful of my writing, but such praise often feels hollow when it’s accompanied by the words “it’s not right for us” or “we hope it finds the right home.”
While the book was out on submission, I began writing a middle grade novel. Once it became clear that The Book of Losman was going to suffer the same fate as In the Country of Monstrous Creatures, I made the decision to drop my agent (it was an amicable split; he does not represent middle grade books). I assumed, wrongly, that I would be able land another agent. I still don’t have an agent—and it’s not for lack of trying!
But I never stopped believing in The Book of Losman, so I submitted the manuscript to SFWP’s Literary Awards Program two or three years ago. I’ve known the publisher, Andrew Gifford, for years. SFWP published my translation of Simon Fruelund’s collection of stories, Milk, in 2013, and I even published a number of interviews with translators at SFWP’s online literary journal for a few years (“Translator’s Cut,” I called my interview series). Since I playfully incorporate stories and characters (and themes) from Simon’s work in The Book of Losman—the opening chapter is very much a reimagining of Simon’s story “Kramer” from that collection—the manuscript found fertile soil at SFWP. The manuscript didn’t win the contest, in fact it only made the longlist, but Andrew liked the story and decided to take a chance on publishing it. Around the same time, another indie publisher offered me a contract to publish the book, but I knew SFWP was the right choice. This has absolutely proved true.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Don’t take rejection personally. Your work can be rejected for many reasons, but you’ve got to keep plugging away, chasing your vision, and getting better. Once you find your stories, good things will happen. It may take 30 years, as it did for me, but if you’re patient and willing to work through all the rejections, you’ll publish your work eventually.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I don’t write with an outline. I put a character in a situation and see what happens, building the story as I go along. So in this sense, everything that happens is a surprise. It’s this kind of creativity that excites me enough to wake up at 5:00 a.m. to get back to work. It’s not until after the draft is complete that I go back and make sure things connect properly. Sometimes I have to rewrite or remove scenes, but generally speaking, in the first draft, I want to write as though I’m a reader engaging with this story for the first time. Which I am.
The biggest thing that surprised me in this particular novel is just how much Simon Fruelund’s work influenced the story. Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise, since I’ve known him for more than fifteen years and I’ve translated three of his books. Simon’s ideas on literature and fiction have also proven hugely important to me. And he’s a friend. The Book of Losman is, in a sense, an homage to his work.
Still, even though I deliberately began The Book of Losman with a reimaging from one of his stories, I didn’t quite anticipate that Losman would share certain character affinities with Pelle, say, the main character from Simon’s novel The World and Varvara (published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2023) or that Losman would also be working on a book, like Pelle, with a publisher breathing down his neck. It was only after writing the manuscript that I realized how deep the connection ran. I don’t mind this at all. I love Simon’s books, and I think it’s wonderful that my novel is engaged in a dialogue with them.
How did you find the title of your book?
The Book of Losman has been the title for as long as I can remember, though I did hem and haw a bit once I realized there were already a lot of books that included “The Book of—” in the title. I debated just calling it Losman. But I couldn’t shake one important thematic significance that would justify me calling it simply Losman. There’s a kind of meta-quality to this novel, right from the opening sentence:
“When he moved to Copenhagen with his Danish girlfriend, Kat, fifteen years ago, Losman imagined his life like a Fodor’s guidebook, rich with possibility and adventure.”
Simply put: As a character, Losman is a kind of “book” to be read, translated, and understood. The narrative follows a circular pattern that only becomes clear at the end. So, to me, The Book of Losman always had to be the title. I’m happy with it.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
My favorite Danish pastry makes an appearance: Tebirkes! They are hunks of buttery deliciousness.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
When Noreen is eight years old, her beloved aunt Nonie dies from suicide. This loss, compounded by the family’s fears that Noreen will follow her aunt’s troubled path, reverberates through her life, planting doubts about her own judgment and landing her in the novel’s present day. The same age now as her aunt was when she died, Noreen is a young mother stuck in an increasingly precarious marriage whose imminent crisis will force her to choose between allowing history to repeat itself or setting a new course. (More details below!)
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
Both Noreen and her aunt Nonie act as point-of-view characters. Of the two, Nonie arrived in my mind more fully formed. She’s a deeply complicated person who struggles with self-worth and mental illness, but I enjoyed every moment of bringing her to the page. I loved her whimsy, her close-to-the-bone vulnerability, and her big, beautiful heart.
Noreen’s character demanded more from me. The sweep of the novel’s timeline encompasses a much broader swath of Noreen’s life than Nonie’s, following her from eight to twenty-seven years old. Rendering her character consistently, but with believable growth across decades, was tricky. Sometimes I resorted to writing letters to her in my journal, posing questions about her personality and motivations. Asking the questions implied answers could exist, so the rhetorical exercise nearly always yielded them.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
By the time the world started opening up again after pandemic lockdown, I had two books ready to shop around—my story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better and Without You Here. I’m a careful vs. high-volume submitter, so I curated my way through lists of agents before turning to small presses and curating my way through them, over months and months. Without You Here came awfully close to acceptance at a different publisher in spring of 2021. That rejection after a particularly close call, punched me in my hopes. I felt like I’d already queried the universe, so where was I meant to turn now?
In a wacky turn of events, Cornerstone Press accepted my first book, the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, in September of 2021, then that December, Flexible Press accepted Without You Here. Going from zero books to two within three months after achingly long years of near misses, new projects, rewrites, and busts, knocked me sideways—in the best possible way. For a long while, it felt like a few hamsters were galloping on their wheels in my head, stopping short every now and then to say to each other, “Two books? Two?” before hopping on again. And both presses have been truly lovely to work with.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
I have a couple. In a writing conference workshop, someone asked Tim O’Brien about how to avoid sentimentality, and he said, “Don’t worry about sentiment. Worry about fraudulence.” Which I love, because a lot of writers favor action over poignancy or skew in the opposite direction by overtelling emotional reactions. So don’t avoid feeling, embrace it. Show its ugly neediness or extravagant beauty with precision and honesty.
Another favorite comes from Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners: “It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.” Which is something I tell students and fellow writers when they’re trying something wild and new. Yes, it could work—Don’t let anyone tell you something’s impossible just because it hasn’t been done—but don’t expect it to be easy.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
The final (hard-won) draft of this book follows a nonlinear structure. I knew from early on that maintaining the pressure of a past event over the course of twenty years of Noreen’s life would require something different structurally, but I had no idea what. Jane Alison’s craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode, which explores a host of nontraditional plot shapes, assured me that an asynchronous timeline could work, and my adult children helped input chapter descriptions into a spreadsheet then organized them into a potentially functional sequence. I wasn’t sure until I’d finally fit all the pieces together that this spiraling timeline could achieve what I’d wanted it to; realizing that it did was a happy surprise.
Along the way there were plenty of other surprises. Nonie and Noreen are bigger risk takers than I am, so I had to create misadventures for them that I would never have joined. I was always surprised, and relieved, when those episodes rang true. It was also interesting and surprising when snippets of my own life experience showed up in a scene here or there, disguised completely as belonging to the characters in the book.
How did you find the title of your book?
For the longest time the title was Little Angel, which is Nonie’s nickname for her niece, and that title worked for me because it showed their fondness for each other and the depth of their affection despite the obstacles in their story. But it also accidentally made me think of those Hallmark Precious Moments angel figurines, which, pardon to anyone who likes those, but they strike me as cutesy and saccharine. This isn’t a cute story, so I didn’t want anyone making the same association.
A late-stage revision generated a scene where Nonie says to Noreen, “Without you here, I’d think this was someone else’s family,” and that line resonated right away. The whole novel is about a broken connection, about the absence that Nonie leaves behind. Almost as soon as I wrote the line, I knew I’d found the title.
Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of WITHOUT YOU HERE (September 10, 2024; Flexible Press) and WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO FEEL BETTER (October, 2023; Cornerstone Press). She serves as assistant fiction editor for The Los Angeles Review and teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, VA. You can visit her at jodyhobbshesler.com.
Synopsis for WITHOUT YOU HERE(September 10, 2024; Flexible Press)
Noreen, twenty-seven, is the same age as her beloved Aunt when she died by suicide.
When Noreen was little, she had a special connection to her Aunt Nonie, her namesake and kindred spirit. They seem to understand each other in a way that no one else can. But what Noreen is too young to understand is that her aunt is spinning out of control, her grasp on reality slipping, her alcohol use accelerating, her personal life in shambles. Noreen’s mom, Nonie’s sister, tries to help—jobs, housing, counselors—but Nonie is not getting better.
The only thing Nonie can hold onto is her niece, who she loves more than anything in the world. But when Noreen is playing on a tire swing under Nonie’s supervision there’s an accident, sending Noreen to the hospital and Nonie into a spiral from which she will not recover.
From that day in 1980 to the last months of 1999, Noreen’s life spirals around the axis of Nonie’s suicide, tightening the past’s pressure on the present.
Now an adult, Noreen finds herself a young mother trapped in a marriage with a controlling, manipulative husband. Or is she? She is haunted by the memory of her aunt, and she is afraid her own grasp on reality is slipping away. In the end Noreen is left to ask: Will her life forever be defined by her aunt? And can she stop history from repeating itself?
Andrew K. Clark is a self-described Appalachian Gothic novelist and poet. His book of poetry, Jesus in the Trailer (Main Street Rag Press) and his debut novel, Where Dark Things Grow (Cowboy Jamboree Press) both draw rich inspiration from the world of Appalachia, past and present. I had the opportunity to explore place, inspiration, and more with Andrew in the lead-up to his book launch on September 10, 2024.
Tell us a little about what Appalachia means to you. What do you want people to see of Appalachia through your work?
To me, Appalachia is certainly our beautiful geography which makes us famous, but it’s also about the uniqueness of our people. Appalachia is diverse racially, culturally, and in thought. If I could wave a magic wand, I would use it to let all the old caricatures die. In my work, I hope readers see what they’ve come to expect from great Appalachian literature (sense of place, family bonds, survivalism, dialect tradition, etc.) combined with the fantastical elements of magical realism and horror stories.
Your poetry collection, Jesus in the Trailer, is populated by people we feel we might have met before: struggling people, hard-edged people, generous people. Your novel, Where Dark Things Grow, draws on folklore, horror, and the preternatural. Do you see fundamental connections between these two works?
I think both books are exploring the same themes at their core. The religious traditions & superstitions of the narrative voices in Jesus in the Trailer are present, and perhaps more fleshed out, in Where Dark Things Grow. Family dysfunction and struggle are at the heart of both, along with a love story along the way. Also, my prose leans poetic, at least according to early reviews, so I think fans of one would be natural fans of the other.
What drew you to poetry, and what has since tempted you into the world of fiction? Do you see your future self as moving between these two worlds frequently?
When I was in high school, a friend gave me a collection of Langston Hughes poems. That flipped a switch for me; prior to reading Hughes I had thought of poetry as Shakespeare, and while I’ve grown to love Shakespeare, I didn’t immediately see it as accessible for someone like me. Hughes wrote in his natural vernacular and showed me I could do the same as a Southern Appalachian poet. I think the draw to fiction is a product of that same realization when I discovered southern writers, and the connections I later made to writers using fantastical elements like Murakami and Marquez. At my core, I love stories, and I love language. I cannot imagine not writing both.
Where did you first encounter the folklore you draw on for Where Dark Things Grow? Did you adhere closely to real folklore, or did you make significant changes to suit your novel?
Once I knew I wanted to include fantastical elements in the story, I decided early on to use only folklore I could trace to my family heritage. The idea for wulvers came from Scottish folklore, but I twisted them into something new in the story, giving them some of the elements of the dire wolves from Game of Thrones books. Mr. Wake, one of the novel’s villains is Norwegian, which I can trace to my own heritage. The religious traditions explored in the book are mostly from my own personal experience growing up in a very conservative strain of Christianity. Some characters in the book wear wooden booger masks from Western North Carolina Cherokee tradition, but they’re white men co-opting this tradition; classic cultural appropriation.
In marketing, we talk about “comparable titles.” The best way I’ve heard comps described is as books that belong on the same shelf as yours. What books would you love to see your novel share the shelf with?
Where Dark Things Grow belongs on horror bookshelves alongside books like The Hollow Kind and The Boatkeeper’s Daughter both by Andy Davidson, and The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. It also belongs on the southern gothic lit bookshelf beside books like The Gods of Howl Mountain by Taylor Brown, Serena by Ron Rash, and Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell.
What was the publication process like for you? You’ve gone the route of publishing with small presses without an agent. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of that approach?
One thing I am proud of with Where Dark Things Grow – out 9/10/24(Cowboy Jamboree Press) and its sequel Where Dark Things Rise – coming fall of 2025(Quill & Crow Publishing House) is that they bend genre. They contain elements of horror, magical realism, historical fiction, and southern gothic. But this means that the work doesn’t fit neatly into a traditional marketing box understood by the agent querying process. Indie presses are generally bolder and more welcoming of books that defy such easy categorization. So, the positive of traditional indie press publishing, although still quite competitive, is being able to tell a story the way I want as an author. I also have a say in elements such as my cover designs. The negatives would be distribution (your book isn’t automatically in a large number of bookstores) and that I am basically my own marketing department alongside a publicist I hired.
What’s your next project? Do you always have a new project up your sleeve when you finish something, or do you need a creative break between endeavors?
I have started on a third novel and a second poetry collection, both of which are quite different. I don’t think I need creative breaks; I don’t think there’s any such thing for writers. Even when we’re not writing, we’re writing. But I do crave breaks from the marketing involved with book launches and promo; if for no other reason than to get back into the right headspace to create something new.
What do you wish people would ask you about your writing?
I wish more readers would connect or comment on what I am saying about class in my work.
For more information on Andrew and his work, visit the following pages:
Andrew K. Clark is a writer from Western North Carolina where his people settled before the Revolutionary War. His poetry collection, Jesus in the Trailer was published by Main Street Rag Press and shortlisted for the Able Muse Book Award. His debut novel, Where Dark Things Grow, is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press in September of 2024. A loose sequel, Where Dark Things Rise will be published by Quill and Crow Publishing House in the fall of 2025. His work has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, UCLA’s Out of Anonymity, Appalachian Review, Rappahannock Review, The Wrath Bearing Tree, and many other journals. He received his MFA from Converse College. Connect with him at andrewkclark.com.
Christine Schott, South 85 Fiction Editor, teaches literature and creative writing at Erskine College. She is Pushcart-nominated author whose work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Dappled Things, Casino Literary Magazine, and Wanderlust. She holds a PhD in medieval literature from the University of Virginia and an MFA in creative writing from Converse University.
reprinted with permission from Work In Progress (www.workinprogressinprogress.com)
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
Japa & Other Stories is about Nigerian immigrants yearning for a self in America, and sometimes in other parts of the world. One character bilocates in the heat of their yearning, another folds himself into a box on a journey to the fulfillment of his deepest desire. Others embark on a treacherous trek across the Sahara Desert trying to find home in foreign cities.
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?
Ahamefula (in “Japa Boys & Japa Girls”). A character who shows up in two stories, and in one of the stories he appears in different locations at the same time. He is deeply mutilated and frustrating, constantly making bad, humorous decisions. From the POV of a reader, a fantastic companion on the page.
And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
Rasaki. The protagonist who travels to Russia in “You Illegals” to watch the World Cup. Throwing a Nigerian character into a landscape I had never visited presented obvious problems of believability. Trying to figure out how he might act in his interactions with Russian culture, and the Russian people was difficult to accomplish. Eventually I read hundreds of blogs written by Nigerians living in Russia, and watched Vlogs by Nigerian immigrants in Russia to become comfortable enough to render this character with the kind of easy intimacy I look for in characters when I read fiction.
Which story did you most enjoy writing?
To be honest, I enjoyed writing all the stories, though I might be slightly partial to “Japa Girls” in which a character bilocates.
Why?
I like working out the supernatural in fiction. It’s such an important fabric of my understanding of the world, and also something which I do not fully understand—so it’s always giving. I believe every human being is part-spirit; whether you believe it or not, you’re what you are. The uncanny is a kind of wildness that attacks our sense of order, though we find it infinitely stimulating.
And, which story gave you the most trouble, and why?
Two stories gave me the most trouble. The frame story, “To You Americans,” and “Spain’s Last Colonial Outposts” where I switch perspectives—third person/ first person plural. Frame stories are by their very nature like matryoshka dolls. A story inside a story. Rhythm inside rhythm. The outside story and the inside one have to be expanding at just the right pace so that, in the end, the story doesn’t tilt. That’s usually difficult to do.
Switching narrators in a story can be confusing for the reader. So again, the rhythm has to be weighed right. The switches happening in a way that feels necessary, that makes the reader believe they’ve received a burst of energy and promise.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
In the three years before I won the Flannery O’Connor, my then-agent tried to sell my collection to several publishers with little success. I entered a few book contests, too. At some point it occurred to me that I needed to rearrange the stories in the collection and write new ones. I had a couple of stories that had been published in stellar journals but didn’t really belong in the book. It took tremendous courage to cut them out. I sought out a unity in the collection. It took about six months to arrange the stories in what I thought was the right order. Then I prayed for success.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Without conflict fiction is just a boring rendition of details. Which is another way of saying, your character must yearn for something. Every human being wants something. And to seek is to suffer.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
The incredible amount of research I had to do for each story. For “Urban Gorilla” I had about a hundred pages of research. Images included. I’m a very visual writer.
What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?
This is serious fiction that also makes you laugh. I appreciate humor in fiction. One of my wrting professors, Elizabeth McCracken used to say, “Don’t be afraid to be funny.”
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?
I drank a mix of hibiscus tea, plus ginger and garlic while writing this book. It improved my eyesight considerably.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
A loner teen accidentally unlocks a social life with his sense of humor—but can he unlock meaningful happiness that way, too, or will he first have to face and understand himself?
Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?
The book is told from the point of view of Jacob—that loner teen from the elevator pitch—and I really enjoyed spending time with him. He’s based (very loosely) on a teenaged me (and the book is set back in the late 80s, when I was a teenager), and so it was like hanging out with a version of my younger self, getting to observe all of the hopeful foolishness and chaotic earnestness—but from a semi-safe distance this time around.
His friends were harder to write, because of the particular nuance I was trying to capture: that these characters could be perfectly great people, and yet still struggle to supply whatever it was that Jacob ultimately needed. In that way, folks can be disappointing without actually being at fault.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
Well, the lowest low was when my agent told me that the book wasn’t to his taste and didn’t feel like he was the right person to submit it to presses. Yeah—that was a low point. He said it nicely, though—he’s still my agent—and he told me it was okay if I wanted to take it out to presses myself. He’s not a possessive guy. And so I did take it out myself, and luckily found people who connected with the book more than my agent did.
In particular, Regal House Publishing got excited. So one big high was them sending the contract, and me signing it. After that, there were the usual rounds of editing and proofreading and finalizing a cover and so on, all of which were smooth. And then, finally—I started working on this book back in 2016—Regal House sent me a physical copy of the book. That’s a very high point right there. As Salman Rushdie writes in his excellent new memoir, Knife, “the best moment of the whole process of book publication is this one, the moment when you hold your printed book in your hand for the first time, and you feel its reality, its life.”
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Don’t write what other people want you to write; write what you have to write.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
This is such an interesting question, and a hard one for me to answer. In a certain sense, everything surprises me when I write a book—I never know how it’s going to play out before I get to the page. Or at least I never know that I know. Because, in another sense, nothing about the process surprises me. In fact, I typically write not toward surprise but instead toward whatever is most emotionally difficult for me to get into. The hard stuff that’s already there and that maybe I’m somewhat aware of, the way that you’re aware of shadows in the room, but that I haven’t been willing to look at directly. And so, a lot of the time my writing process is more about uncovering than about discovering. Maybe the surprise, each time, is that I’m able to go there—and come back out unharmed.
How did you find the title of your book?
Coming up with Possible Happiness, the title of this book, was a process. Oy. For a long time I called it Fern Rock, after the Philadelphia Broad Street Subway stop—but that made it sound like the novel was happening in some rural paradise instead of in one of the grittiest cities in America. So I lost faith in that option and just called the book “that high school novel” for a long time. It remained “that high school novel” through failed experiments with titles like Where Do the Children Go (based on a song from the time), Subway-Surface (based on public transportation), and We’re Getting There (the actual, I’m-not-making-it-up slogan of SEPTA, Philly’s public transportation organization, for many years). None of it really suited this particular high school novel.
And then I thought about the scene where protagonist Jacob goes into a kind of occult shop on South Street where all of the purported potions have anti-lawsuit hedges in their names like “so-called” or “alleged,” and he sees something called Possible Happiness Syrup. I thought: that’s what my guy needs. He needs a possible happiness. He needs to stop fighting for some generic kind of happiness that works for everyone else or some magical kind of happiness that only works in the movies. He needs to turn his effort toward getting a real happiness, one that’s possible for him.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?
Well, the main character is a teenager, and not so great in the kitchen, so he’s not the kind of person who produces recipes. When he’s home alone, his single mother working yet another double-shift, he just heats up some frozen mac’n’cheese. So maybe that could make for a good book club treat? Though, if you want to be true to the time period (late 80s), you’ll have to find the Stouffer’s frozen mac that comes in a foil tray, and you’ll have to heat it up in a conventional oven. It takes a while, but it’s worth it.
