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Following Monday’s review of Swift River, here’s Essie Chambers: One More River to Cross.

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Essie Chambers earned her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and Baldwin for the Arts. A former film and television executive, Chambers was a producer on the 2022 documentary Descendant. Her debut novel, Swift River (Simon & Schuster, June 4, 2024), is a complex, place-centered coming-of-age reckoning with race and class.

What was the beginning kernel of this book?

I wanted to write about the experience of being a young person growing up in a small, weird, homogeneous town and being isolated, the only one. The image came out of nowhere, of a bigger-bodied person and her tiny mother walking on the side of the road. I knew that I had to write about these people. That was the powerful, impactful seed. I grew up in a small town; it’s a very isolating thing if you can’t get around. That very first sentence: “The summer after I turn sixteen, I am so fat I can’t ride my bike anymore.” That sentence came with such clarity. They have to walk. She’s a bigger-bodied person; what would it mean for that to be the way she got around?

Why include letters from Lena and Clara?

I grew up writing letters to my elders. I was forced to write thank-you letters, and I came around more willingly with my grandmother; we wrote regularly. I treasure those letters. I got to know a lot about my mom’s family through that correspondence. That form is a beautiful way to talk across generations. I knew the present-day story I wanted to tell. As I built the layers and came to understand how big a role history was going to play, I knew I had to connect the history to Diamond in a personal, meaningful way, to deepen the mystery of the community and what happened to Pop, and to give Clara, a character from another time, a real voice.

With Lena, I wanted Diamond to finally have a way to connect to the Black side of her family, but I wanted to maintain the sense of isolation that Diamond had with her mother; that would be gone if they met face to face. The letters were a way for a seed to be planted, and for me to show the ripples in Diamond’s life.

Inheritance is such a strong theme in this book. We think of inheritance as money; for her inheritance to be stories and letters just felt really powerful.

Your title is the name of the town. Is the book as much about place as it is about Diamond?

It’s absolutely just as much about place. The town is a character. But actually I thought of the title as being the river, rather than the town. River in these mill town communities is so central–it’s power, literally. Life-giving power. Rivers have many meanings across cultures. Crossing a river can mean transitioning from one phase of life to another. In Black culture and traditions and spirituality, river can mean life and rebirth, a place where you get baptized, where you wash away your sins and get renewal. All sorts of spirituals have “river” in their title. I started thinking about one called “One More River to Cross.” The notion was that getting to freedom was all about crossing many rivers. Just when we think we’ve crossed all the rivers there’s one more to cross. Freedom is so elusive. A river is also dangerous and fast and perilous–it’s just so rich.

When Clara is falling in love with Jacques, she talks about not being able to find language for it. It was like the experience of being held by God, when you don’t have language and you don’t have words, and something is holding you and you can’t see it–she likens it to floating on the Swift River, where she just feels held by something divine. What a beautiful feeling that was.

Was there research involved?

A ton, and research led me to the most important part of the book. I knew that I wanted to write about a Black person’s experience growing up as the only person of color in a community. I started thinking about Pop’s experience. I wanted to do more digging about Black people in rural New England. I was shocked at how little was written about them. I’m drawn to these hidden or forgotten histories. I was familiar with the sundown town, where a predominantly white community excludes Black people with laws, harassment, terrorism, or violence–the name comes from signs that were often posted right at the welcome sign, warning Black people that if they were caught after sunset, they might be killed. I had a lot of assumptions about racist violence in the North versus the South; I was surprised to learn that sundown towns were a very Northern phenomenon. It kind of blew my mind open. I found one book, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen. A detail jumped out at me: sometimes an exception for one or two Black people was made if they were serving an essential function. If they were domestics or something, they would be allowed to stay. And I thought, Diamond is going to be descended from a person who was allowed to stay after a violent expulsion of the Black community. Boom, that was it. That’s my connection. That gives her roots; that gives me a chance to explore another character who is experiencing a different version of being the only one. It cracked the story wide open for me. That came from my research. I highly recommend that book.

How does your work in film and television translate to writing a novel?

I am a very visual storyteller. I often see a scene first: the image of Diamond and Ma on the side of the road. It’s incredibly exciting. Seeing an image first generates an emotion, and then I get to find the language to channel the emotion. The image gives me confidence that I know what the shape is going to be.

I spent a lot of time telling stories for kids and young adults in TV. I love telling stories about childhood; that moment in life is just so rich. We’ve all felt the pain of living through this very particular developmental stage. The language is “never” and “forever.” The feelings are so big–it’s not necessary for big things to happen in order to feel that pain and create drama. That was very much a mantra in telling this story: big things don’t need to happen in order to be felt in a big way.

Is the perspective of big bodies under-represented? What does this add to Diamond’s story?

I felt like everybody should be able to see themselves in books. I want more, more, more: diversity of story, where weight is not stigma, where weight loss isn’t the goal. Bodies not being represented in a stereotypical way. That really had a massive impact on how I thought about telling Diamond’s story. I didn’t want her to be skinny and happy at the end. I didn’t want weight to define her journey. I just wanted people to feel what it felt like to be in that body. It’s a way that she feels like an outsider, and that’s a universal experience.

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This interview originally ran on January 24, 2024 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Following Monday’s review of The Safekeep, here’s Yael van der Wouden: ‘All That’s Left of Them.’

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Yael van der Wouden was born in Tel Aviv and currently lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her debut novel, The Safekeep, a quiet consideration of the aftermath of World War II in the Dutch countryside, will be published by Avid Reader Press in May 2024.

What about this story needed telling?

The most common story you hear from Dutch Jewish people of my generation is they grew up not knowing they were Jewish. Around age 20, 25, when their grandparents got older, the story came out: they were Jewish and either had to hide during the war or decide to convert entirely. They were so traumatized by being recognized as Jewish that they just wiped it clean. I have a lot of friends around me who around that age started digging into that history. I think I leaned heavily into that.

My mother is Israeli but her heritage is Bulgarian and Romanian, and my dad is not Jewish. He’s Dutch. My Jewishness is not related to my Dutchness. I grew up within Jewish culture, so a lot of those friends came to me. I was always embarrassed to tell them I can give you the songs, the rituals, but the real, true, in-depth knowledge, I do not have. But I guess when you have nothing, then anything resembling a cultural narrative is a lot.

I spent a lot of my 20s in a turmoil of frustration and anger around how nonexistent Jewish heritage is in the Netherlands. It’s been cannibalized: taken apart and consumed by mainstream Dutch culture. There’s a lot of Yiddish in Dutch, which is very confusing when no one is Jewish but everyone says words you understand. How did this word get here? Mazzel, or punim which means face, or lef which means bravery, heart. There were traces. Empty synagogues, houses with David stars on them but no one lives there anymore… it’s as if–no, it is that an entire community of people has just disappeared overnight. And no one ever asked where they went.

All that’s left of them is the traces of language, and locale. The places where they lived. When I started to notice what was around me and what was not present, I (in very 20s fashion) became very frustrated and angry. It’s a conversation that I’ve been having with myself and with people around me ever since. What needs to happen with that history? What does an apology mean? Who is the apology for? Is it for the person who apologizes, or is it for the person on the other end, who receives it? I don’t want an apology. What kind of acknowledgement do I want? That’s the question that’s been on my mind for a long time.

What’s changed in the Netherlands?

If one person is born into responsibility, and the other person is born into misery, how do you marry the two? In that conversation I was having with myself, it’s more than acknowledgment. “Yes, this happened. Yes, I’m sorry.” What I wanted for these characters is for them to find the next step, which I believe is desire. Desire to have the other person around. Desire to have the other person stay. The other side of the coin.

The Netherlands had one of the highest percentages of deported people during World War II. The narrative is that the Dutch had a great resistance, they helped people hide, but actually a lot of people asked for money to hide people. Only people who had wealth could hide. The Dutch are very big on bureaucracy. So when the German officers and officials asked, where are the Jews and where do they live, the Dutch just said, here they are. That’s why it happened so quickly, across the board. They were very efficient. For me the flip side of not caring that someone is going to be taken away is desiring the person to come back, desiring them to stay. How do we take ignorance and prejudice and flip it into desire? I don’t think that tolerance and acceptance is the solution. I think desire is the solution. I wanted to take Isabel and crack her open and see what would happen if that small life, that small way of thinking, were filled up with desire.

The conversation about Jewish life in the modern-day Netherlands is either about the war, or Israel and Palestine. When the Dutch talk about Jews they talk about those who have died or those who are not there. It’s never about the present, the people who live here and how we are a part of society. It feels invisible–and at the same time, I don’t want my visibility to be connected to death. I want it to be about Passover or Rosh Hashanah, or anything else. When you talk about somebody only in the context of them not being there, you’re emphasizing that they don’t belong in your midst. And that goes back to the idea of desire. Maybe it’s a childish thing. I just want to be desired.

Your book includes some lovely erotic writing.

For me, erotica is about the knife’s edge of voyeurism and participation. As a reader, you want to feel like you are present, but if you are too present then I think the text tries to envelope you, tries to comfort, and I think good erotic writing makes you a little uncomfortable.

Zoom in, zoom out. Zoom in on a body part–ideally you don’t zoom in on a body part that is sexual. An elbow, the tip of the nose. Something unexpected. Then you contrast that with something that is very sexual or very obvious. I think that’s how you create that erotic tension.

People sometimes enter into it with their own discomfort, and rather than treat it earnestly, they make it either as weird as possible or as disgusting as possible. Every body part, all the filthy juices. They will not create something attractive, but lean into an element of disgust. I think you need a little bit of disgust, but it should be a palette. It needs to be a good goulash: the sour, the sweet, the savory. You have to be completely earnest about it or it will not work. You need to fully mean to write something personal and intimate.

What do you feel makes a fascinating protagonist?

Everybody will have a different answer. For me the answer is quite similar to the question of what makes good erotica. I think the answer is contrast. Conflict. My favorite line about protagonists is from E.M. Forster. When he talks about Maurice, he says he wanted to write the most normal, run-of-the-mill guy, and then give him something that upends his worldview. For Maurice, it is that he falls in love with a man. The entire mechanism of him has to change in order to accommodate this thing within him that doesn’t fit within the norm. I think that’s the most fascinating character. Somebody who has their idea of who they are, and then you throw something in the middle that topples that Jenga tower. Those are the most interesting moments in our lives, when you have this idea of who you are and something or somebody comes along and you realize, oh, no–I had no idea who I was.

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This interview originally ran on January 17, 2024 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Following Friday’s review of Fruit of the Dead, here’s Rachel Lyon: This Is an Ancient Story.

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Rachel Lyon’s debut novel, Self-Portrait with Boy, was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. An editor emerita for Epiphany, Lyon has taught creative writing at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Bennington College, and other institutions. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., she lives in western Massachusetts with her husband and two young children. Her second novel, Fruit of the Dead (Scribner, March 5, 2024), is a smart, chilling, richly detailed retelling of the Demeter-Persephone myth in modern times.

Was it the Demeter and Persephone myth that struck you? Or was there a different impetus?

The myth actually came in midway through the writing process. I was working on a book about a young woman who becomes entangled with a middle-aged man and all the power dynamics of that. I started thinking about precedents of this story, and landed on the Persephone myth. There were many structural similarities to the book already, so I worked on a pretty massive rewrite with Persephone as a model. There was a version of the book that involved Zeus and other mythological characters, but I ended up sticking pretty close to my original characters, just infusing the myth into the book that I had.

It was the beginning of the #metoo movement, and I was frustrated by a lot of men’s reactions. A lot of “gee, how is this suddenly happening now?” And I was like, it’s not sudden! This is an ancient story. So that’s what I hope people get from the mythological element here, the idea of how ancient this story is.

Why did your story need Spenser and Fern?

I don’t know if I knew that Cory was going to be a caretaker, but babysitting is just one of those jobs that so many young women have. Caretaking became a really central theme as I began to include her mother’s voice. I myself was in the process of starting a family as I was working on the book, so it was inescapable for me on a personal level, writing about caretaking and young children.

I love writing children. I taught elementary school for a couple of years before grad school, and I did a bunch of babysitting myself before I had kids, and I just think kids are so funny. I don’t think they’re always given enough dignity or personality on the page. So I was really interested in taking a stab at that.

And Cory couldn’t really go work for Rolo without any experience. So on a plot level, it had to be something easy that she was going to go do. Rolo uses them as signals: “I’m a dad. I’m a friendly character.”

Did you always know the story would be told in alternating points of view?

No. When I was beginning to incorporate the mythology, I started looking specifically for texts told in Persephone’s perspective, and I couldn’t find any. So my first project was to write a story for her, from her point of view, and to give her some agency. Because honestly, in so many versions, she’s abducted, she’s raped, she’s negotiated over, and she’s saved. She has no agency at all. In a contemporary novel we want our characters to have some agency. I wanted to do that for her, for this conceptual Persephone. But as I continued working on it and I became a parent myself, I felt more and more like I needed to include Demeter’s voice. And it was particularly useful because I was writing this teenaged character who’s not well equipped to make intelligent thoughtful decisions for herself. Without an extra pair of eyes or an extra voice that could look at her from the outside and communicate her to the reader, I felt like it was possible that the reader would not be able to see her from the outside. I needed this character to be a loving, worried, invested, exterior voice.

Tell us more about your research.

I read several versions. I kept coming back to the Homeric hymn to Demeter. It felt manageable–it’s only a few pages long–and it’s very strange. There’s this weird tangent in the middle of Demeter’s hunt where she loses hope, and becomes involved as a caretaker in a family. She’s a wet nurse for this baby. She’s in drag as an old woman, and she ends up dipping this child, anointing him in flames, and his mother rushes in and freaks out at her, and Demeter flies into a rage and reveals herself. She says, “How dare you question me? I’m a goddess!” and the woman of course is like, “Oh god no” and they build a temple to Demeter there… the child ends up half immortal or something. And then Demeter goes on with her hunt. It’s a really weird moment in this retelling, because it has nothing to do with the main plot. I struggled for a while: Do I just elide that moment? Or is it even possible to make the novel work with that bizarre tangent? I was talking to another writer about it and she was like, you gotta try. So I tried. Emer loses it and she becomes involved with another family for a moment before resuming her hunt.

How different was this one from your first novel?

Very different. Everyone says when you write your first novel, you have to teach yourself how to write a novel. I think that’s true. It was true in my experience. I relied pretty heavily on suspense. That book is a will she/won’t she book. Its main thrust comes from the reader wondering if she’ll ever tell this secret. And that’s what keeps you turning the pages. With this one I didn’t really have that. You’re not waiting for something to be revealed, although you are waiting for the other shoe to drop. So I maybe taught myself how to do that with Self-Portrait with Boy, but, no, it’s a totally different book.

Self-Portrait with Boy is based on an incident that occurred in the building that I grew up in when I was a kid. A boy fell off the roof. It was a very sad thing that happened in that community. The book is totally fictional, but I drew on that one event, and then the pastiche, that world that I had grown up in for the book. On that level it’s vaguely autobiographical, aesthetically. This book is not aesthetically autobiographical, but it’s much more personal. I think I got annoyed writing a character who was different from me on so many levels. It wasn’t as interesting to me in the end. You work on a book for so long, and if you can’t get something out of it, I feel like it dies on the page. It felt important for me with my second book to write something I was really struggling with. At the time I started working on this book, that [struggle] was mistakes I made in my youth and substance issues and all this kind of naughty, feminine stuff. I’m hoping that the more I work on these long projects the more personal I can get, because it felt really good to get to work hard with that material and I’d like to continue down that road.

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This interview originally ran on November 28, 2023 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Following Friday’s review of A Short Walk Through a Wide World, here’s Douglas Westerbeke: “It Might as Well Be Infinite.”

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Douglas Westerbeke is a librarian in Ohio, at one of the largest libraries in the United States. He began writing with screenplays, and has served for the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award. His first novel, A Short Walk Through a Wide World, coming from Avid Reader Press on April 9, 2024, is the dazzling story of a woman who must keep moving to outrun a mysterious curse, and a library that seems tailored perfectly to her.

Did reading for the Dublin Literary Award help you write this novel?

I was reading 50 to 100 novels a year, and some I loved and found really inspiring, and some of them were awful. I thought: I can do better than that. The more you read, the more story ideas you keep having; it snowballs, I guess. I used to write short stories when I was a little kid. My mom always told me, you should write a novel. I said no, I can’t be a novelist, those are real writers! I can’t be like them. The Dublin Literary Committee opened my eyes. It’s achievable. You could be like one of these guys–mostly gals, actually. That’s what inspired me. I thought, I’ll give it a try. It’s hard. I’m not used to working on prose that hard, at a sentence level. That’s where all the work really is, for me anyway. And structure. This one is particularly hard for structure.

What impact did your screenwriting background have on the novel?

I lived in Los Angeles for a while, writing screenplays and sending them out. I did pretty well–four of them got optioned, but they never got produced. I gave up. Well, I shouldn’t say that, because I kept writing. In fact, the day I was going to give up, I had another story idea, about a guy who tries to give up his life as a musical composer.

I had kids, and that slowed things down, and I had cancer, and that really slowed things down. And then the Dublin Literary put me on a different path. Forget that, I’ll try this. My odds were better. Back there it was like a million to one, and this is like 100,000 to one. I thought, those are pretty good odds!

Where did the idea of Aubry’s illness come from?

This all began as a short story idea. It was kind of a comedy. It was an old lady in the same time period–if you put it in the modern day, everybody would just be hanging out in airports, right? Older days, you get to ride trains and ships. Old lady goes to her doctor and says, I’m feeling arthritic, something small like that, and the doctor says, maybe try traveling. Go somewhere warm and dry. And all she hears is “travel.” She just takes off, and she’s so scared of her ailment, she ends up in these dangerous situations traveling around the world. She’s this doddering old fearful lady–the joke is, the cure is worse than the ailment. But then I kept thinking, how am I going to end it? She’ll be on a cruise ship, and it’ll break down in the ocean, they have to anchor, and in the middle of the night she passes away. She was so concerned that what the doctor said was true that she just passes away. And then all of a sudden I was like, this isn’t a comedy anymore!

I thought, maybe she should uncover some great mystery of the world before she goes. She ended up being a nine-year-old girl instead, because now I have so many ideas, I’m not going to get it all with just this little old lady. It’s got to be a whole lifetime.

You are a librarian whose novel, naturally, involves a very special library.

It’s the best place ever to work. I love working there. And working there, you’re doing your stuff, you’re processing the new books, you’re answering questions, you’re doing research, and all the while some book will be sitting on the corner of the desk, and you’re just looking at it the whole day, and it looks really interesting, but you have so much work to do. That’s the life. But then maybe at the end of the day you’ll have some time to yourself, and you’ll open it up. It’s like a treasure trove. Random stuff. I’ve studied an analysis of Shakespeare, I’ve learned how to invest in the stock market, I’ve compiled hundreds of recipes to cook, all because random books kept coming across my desk. And then you start to realize, I’m not reading even the tiniest fraction of the books in this collection. I will never live long enough to read them all. It might as well be infinite.

I was always struck by the impossibility of all this knowledge no one person could ever get. And we have these libraries all over. I mean, I’m in a pretty big library, but even in a small branch I wouldn’t be able to read it all. The idea of the infinite library, I guess, comes from that. But I’m not the first guy. Borges does this all the time. It’s also a riff on him, I suppose.

You are yourself well-traveled. What kind of research was necessary?

I’ve traveled a bit, but almost nothing in this book happens in places I’ve been. I’ve been close to Thailand, or Siam–I was in Malaysia. Doesn’t count! And I certainly wasn’t there in 1900. The whole world is different now, so you really have to research it in the library anyway.

I read all up on the gold rush, and how all these women got rich up there, and I read all about North Africa and people’s experiences, Westerners who got shipwrecked and tried to make their way across the Sahara… the best book I got, I found up in the storage in our library. It was all about the Indian royalty during colonial Britain, and it had all these photographs.

You have the story first. The research is really useful–it helps add color, detail. If you’re way off on an aspect of the story you can correct it. But for the most part, the story I had when I started was the story I ended up with. You want to be sure you’re not doing any blatant anachronisms or anything. I love Braveheart but there’s no historical accuracy whatsoever. But this novel takes place in a lot of obscure little corners of the world, a century ago. All these places no longer exist. And it’s a fantastical story as well, which gives you a lot of wiggle room. You don’t necessarily have to be a nitpicker when it comes to the research, but it does help you to not mess something totally up. You can describe the Arab woman with the copper coins.

What’s next?

I’m working on another with similar themes to this. It’s tricky because it’s modern-day and the characters are two little kids, and I’m trying to write it in their voice. I’m reading a lot of Emma Donoghue.

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This interview originally ran on October 12, 2023 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Following Friday’s review of America Fantastica, here’s Tim O’Brien: Route 66 Meets MAGA America.

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Tim O’Brien is the author of the novels Going After Cacciato; The Things They Carried; In the Lake of the Woods; and others, as well as memoirs including If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. He has won the National Book Award for Fiction, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize, and the Katherine Anne Porter Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. O’Brien has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His eighth novel, America Fantastica, a wild ride through a paranoid nation, will be published by Mariner Books on October 24, 2023.

What brought you back to writing a novel after more than 20 years?

The character of Angie Bing. She came into my head, I don’t know, 20 years ago, as did the antihero, Boyd. I tried to push them away for a long time. They just kept yapping at me. Put me in a book! Especially Angie. It was that voice inside my head for all those years that convinced me to at least try. And it was fun. I enjoyed her.

I was pretty determined not to ever write another novel. It’s hard work and often frustrating, all the things that go with a 400-something page book. Five years of my life. I was a little reluctant to do it, but once I started, I got a kind of perverse pleasure out of it.

America Fantastica contains so many characters, events, places. How do you stay organized?

The organizational tool is my head. It’s nothing much beyond that. Occasionally I would lose chronology, but then I simply go back and reread and rediscover.

The novel switches voices among many of those characters. How fun or difficult is that?

It was a great pleasure, going from voice to voice. There are some pretty nasty people in the book–most of them, in fact–and it was fun being nasty. I see it around me so much. It was a sort of Jonathan Swift/Mark Twain fun, curmudgeonly. You call a bank or an airline and they’ll have that message on: “Our phone lines are unusually busy; please hold.” They’re not unusually busy. They’re usually busy. In fact, they’re always busy. Things like that were fun to strike back at.

Do you have a favorite character?

No. Characters, probably for all writers, are like your own children. You don’t pick them. They’re very different. I don’t approve of most of the characters in this book, but I don’t approve of most of the people I see on CNN and Fox, either.

This work of fiction is centered on the lying or fictionalizing of its characters.

It’s been a theme that’s gone through my entire work and probably my entire life, going way back even to my childhood. I grew up in a small town and spent a lot of my time in my own head, imagining I was not in this godawful place. That followed me to Vietnam and has followed me through adulthood. It’s astonishing the things that we witness that seem almost impossible, incredible, especially during the Trump years. How can this be happening in a country I really had loved as a kid? It seemed as if I were living in a fairy tale that couldn’t be true, and yet seemed true. And so all of my work has to do with this blend of our imaginations and the realities we see around us. This book probably is the most blunt about it. Boyd seemed to represent for me what I’m witnessing socially, culturally, and politically in this country, a kind of shameless lying or deceit. I wanted to have as a foil someone who was pretty certain about the world–Angie has a kind of religious certainty about the world. The tug of war between them was fascinating.

Angie came first?

They came together. I imagined her originally as a bank teller, and then almost instantly I imagined Boyd as a small-town entrepreneur (later a JCPenney manager), and within 20 minutes or so I had him robbing that bank as the novel begins. Robbing it essentially for entertainment, as a way of making himself move out of his lethargy and do something in the world. When he invited her along, or made her come along, a kind of Route 66 theme dominated, and it stayed throughout the entire book. It’s sort of a Route 66 meets MAGA America kind of book.

I knew it would be set during those years. They were the years that I was living through, with my mouth agape as I watched the television set. It seemed appropriate to have a character who was a shameless liar and had been his entire life, and to find out why. Why do people do this sort of thing? There’s a quote at the beginning of the book by Yeats: “We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” That’s what I saw happening around me, that sort of fantasy: of a lost election being a winning election, for example. I wanted a hero who was part of the conspiracy world, coming up with these bizarre fantasies about the world and apparently believing in them, repeating them enough to believe in them.

By having such a human being as one of the two main characters in the book I felt I was trying to get into what made people do these sorts of things. For my hero, Boyd, it goes back to his childhood, as we learn late in the book. He began, even as a kid, living in a fantasy world as a way of escaping the world he was in. It can have terrible consequences, and did for him: a broken marriage, a lost career. But on the other hand, fantasy keeps us going. The fantasy that tomorrow will be better than today. Maybe fantasy isn’t the word, but the hope or the dream that things will improve for all of us. I’ll win the lottery, I’ll have a great time in Yellowstone, I’ll meet the girl of my dreams or the boy of my dreams. I think we need fantasy. So there’s that tug of war, when what we need can have terrible consequences. That will always fascinate me, and has since I was a kid.

What are you working on next?

I’m working on my golf game.

Nothing. I’d been working on this book all the way through page proofs and so on; it still feels like in my head I’m working on it.

Are you one of those writers who’s never done, even when it’s printed and published?

I am. I’ve made changes in The Things They Carried; In the Lake of the Woods; [Going After] Cacciato. I slip them in when they print a paperback edition. Most of them minor and none of them noticed, except by scholars. I did have a letter from a high school English teacher once who disputed my changes.

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This interview originally ran on July 27, 2023 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Following Monday’s review of Let Us Descend, here’s Jesmyn Ward: Finding Those Erased by History.

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Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received a MacArthur Genius Grant and a Stegner Fellowship. She has won two National Book Awards, in 2017 for Sing, Unburied, Sing; and in 2011 for Salvage the Bones. She is professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi. Her fourth novel, Let Us Descend, begins on a rice plantation in the Carolinas, and is narrated by an inspiring enslaved young woman in transcendent prose.

What freedoms and challenges do the historical setting present?

It offered me a freedom to write from a time and place where I was less constrained by the present moment. That is, I didn’t feel pressured to write about current politics or manners or modes of behavior or even geography, as the world of the novel had its own.

It was beyond difficult to write about a person who has little to no physical agency for much of the novel. That reality is so far removed from my own that it was nearly impossible for me to draft a beginning. I wrote that beginning over and over for years because I could not figure out how to inhabit Annis; I was flailing because I couldn’t understand where the narrative was supposed to go. It took me a long time to figure out that Annis would have other kinds of agency–emotional, imaginative, and spiritual–and that these would carry her through the story. Once I began putting words on the page, living with Annis’s voice, she led me.

Where did this novel begin?

I heard an episode of WWOZ’s Tripod called “Sighting the Sites of the New Orleans Slave Trade.” In it, historian Erin Greenwald tells journalist Laine Kaplan-Levinson that there were only two plaques in New Orleans that accounted for the slave trade, and one of them was in the wrong location.

I felt a hot blush in my chest and had to fight back tears when I heard this. It was devastating to know that so many enslaved people had been sent for sale to the lower south, had endured barbaric conditions and treatment, and then had their experiences erased. It was painful to know that I moved through this landscape, a landscape that had soaked up their sorrow and pain like a sponge, and I was blind to it. It seemed immensely unjust. I immediately asked myself: What if I write about it? What will happen if I bring it to life through a character, a woman? This is how I first began to get glimpses of Annis.

How much research was required?

I knew next to nothing about the domestic slave trade. It was embarrassing to realize that my high school and college education had failed me so miserably in that aspect. It made me wonder about active erasure, about how the active suppression of knowledge can make it possible for a well-known rapper to say slavery was a choice, 150 years later. For folks on Black Twitter to talk about slavery and say: I am not my ancestor–couldn’t be me. We have these ill-informed reactions to American slavery because we don’t know anything about it beyond what we see in pop culture. We are not educated about it.

I read general books about American slavery: The Half Has Never Been Told, They Were Her Property and The Great Stain. I read books about Louisiana: The Sugar Masters, Slavery’s Metropolis and The Free People of Color of New Orleans. I read about slave pens in Soul by Soul. I read about maroons in Slavery’s Exiles, and I read slave narratives, too, the most helpful one being Six Women’s Slave Narratives. This is not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the books that were most helpful to me.

As I wrote I discovered there was still more research I needed to do. I read about African-American slave medicine, the amazons of Dahomey, flora and fauna of the southeast United States, and more, driven by panic and anxiety. The last thing I wanted was to kick an academic out of the story when I got some fact or bit of ephemera wrong.

I’m sure I made mistakes, but I tried really hard not to. I hope I read enough to render the world real and present for the reader, to crowd them into Annis’s reality, to make it impossible for them to look away.

Does this offer an allegory for present times?

I think at its heart that this novel is about someone struggling with grief. I can strip away all the material circumstances of Annis’s enslavement, and underneath the brutality and cruelty of the forced work and punishment and dehumanization, I see a person who is swimming through grief. She has lost so many loved ones, so she is navigating mourning and the strange reality of the slave markets and the lower south at the same time. She is all longing and bewilderment and grit. I think many of us can identify with those emotions, especially post-2020, as we maneuver our way through this new reality, so many of us saddled with loss.

Annis enters adulthood because she has fought to survive a very American crucible. I believe that in a way, Annis saves herself in telling stories, in remembering, in creating community and relationship with those she meets on her way, in empathizing, in living. I like to think that she gives us a blueprint for how to survive and thrive in the present moment.

Is this a triumphant story?

I believe it is a triumphant story for Annis, for the character, but I also think it is a triumphant story for all the enslaved and maroons in the world of the story. In allowing the reader to inhabit this world, we empathize with them, we feel with them as they live and love and resist and persist. I hope this novel contributes to the conversation that writers of African descent have been having in books like The Water Dancer or The Underground Railroad, and that it does its part to enable readers to witness and to understand enslaved people anew.

How has novel-writing changed for you?

I find my motivation for writing novels changing. In the beginning, I wanted to write about people who could be part of my community or family because I wanted to make us visible. I wanted readers to love us and bleed with us and cry and laugh with us. I still want all that, but in the last two novels, I’ve discovered that it is also important to me to find those erased by history and to write them into the present, into common knowledge. I want readers to know about kids like Richie, sent to Parchman Prison at 12 and 13. I want readers to know that teens like Annis existed: that she and others like her walked from the upper south to the lower south, that they encountered demeaning horror after demeaning horror, and yet they persisted. They lived in spite of all that was done to them.

I intend to write a YA/middle grade book next, and my next few novel ideas revolve around characters who live through moments of upheaval, when the world is turned on its head and the logic of everyday life does not apply. I’m really interested in how people cope in those moments, in how they hold onto themselves in those moments, in how they navigate realities that defy their expectations and their experiences.

I believe Let Us Descend could count as the first flower of that motivation as well.

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This interview originally ran on May 17, 2023 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Following Friday’s review of My Name Is Iris, here’s Brando Skyhorse: Life Under a Perpetual Dark Cloud of Fear.

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Brando Skyhorse was born and raised in Echo Park, Calif., and has degrees from Stanford University and from the MFA Writing Program at UC Irvine. He is an associate professor of English at Indiana University in Bloomington. His debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Take This Man: A Memoir was named a Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by Kirkus. Skyhorse also co-edited the anthology We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America. His dystopian novel My Name Is Iris will be published by Avid Reader Press on August 1, 2023.

Does a novel like this begin with story or character?

I tell my students: it always begins with character. But not this one. It actually started with an image. I think you can guess: it started with this wall, just kind of growing out of the ground. I was finishing up my last project, an anthology of original essays on ethnic and racial passing, and it was summer of 2016, and let’s just say there was a certain word that was getting bounced around, this relentless drumbeat. I started thinking about it. I remember talking to my agent, and she said that’s interesting, but seems kind of topical. When Clinton is elected president, who’s going to be there to buy it? And I said, I’m going to keep thinking about it.

The more I thought about it, the more I had questions. That word, wall–the most banal thing imaginable, became coded. It was a very specific kind of reference, and a relentless barrage. Where is this wall? Who is attached to it? What’s the situation? I said, I’ll finish this in a year. Because I didn’t start with character, but with an image, it took me another five years to figure out the specifics of character and situation. Iris is trying to take care of herself, to take care of her child. She has a community that she’s estranged from, and she’s doing the best she can. Once that part of the story got laid out–it’s about safety for her. Her American dream is safety. That’s it for her. And that’s something a lot of readers can relate to, I hope.

What is it that makes Iris a compelling protagonist?

Based upon the experiences Iris has had, she decided early on, I want to be safe above all. I want to protect myself and my family–that’s the trade-off that I’m making, and if that makes me brusque or unlikable, I’m rolling with it. But what does that leave for Iris in the life that she’s attempting to live? Has it been fulfilling; has it been satisfying? What kind of reckoning is afoot for her?

Once you get the totality of her situation, she becomes very easy to understand. I realize it’s a bit of an authorial risk to put this character out there and have her say the things that she says, and put up her own wall. She has lived a very structured and specific life. My family, my daughter, my household. Very intentional. The idea of what it means to be a woman of color at this time, in this place, at this part of American history, what’s that experience like? At least as I see it, there’s probably a sense of guardedness, apprehensiveness. I’m not sure what the next day is going to bring me so I have to be on guard. What’s out there waiting for me?

I didn’t want to turn it into a Twilight Zone episode where this is a character who is being punished because she’s bad. What’s her backstory? Where’s she from, what kind of life is she trying to live? I had to move that character development forward while at the same time pressing her from all sides. Every chapter, another bad thing happens. How to create a character who isn’t solely reactive? If it’s not the wall, it’s the bands; if it’s not the bands, it’s what’s going on with her family or with her daughter. She needs to take some control, some agency, but each time she does, there’s something else another step ahead of her. Thinking about the lived experience that all of us have had over the last few years, I think this book is what it was like for me.

And the technology. Oh look, it’s this cool little thing from Silicon Valley, and it’ll track how much garbage you throw away. And very suddenly it becomes this whole other thing altogether. We have a collective embracing of certain technologies, if we feel there’s going to be a benefit, and sometimes there’s a flipside, unintended or intended consequences. Iris has traded away an essential part of her identity for the convenience of being American. Her community has traded away the idea of citizenship because there’s a little thing that can tell them how many steps they take in a day. What does that mean for us? I don’t know. But I don’t know if it means anything good.

Are there heroes or villains in this story?

I don’t think so. If there’s a villain here, it’s just fear. It’s very simple. Fear leads to paranoia leads to a series of decisions… everybody in this universe in this novel is living under a perpetual dark cloud of fear.

Do you feel your readers need knowledge of Spanish to follow this novel?

My goal is not to confuse or alienate anybody. When you write a book, you’re trying to connect with as many readers as possible. What I ask myself is, what’s most important for this character in this situation? English, Spanish, switching back and forth? When she’s with her mom, at the house, having dinner… it flows freely, and I wanted to capture that. I wanted it to be correct for that experience.

So much of the conversational nature of this book was influenced heavily by my family. My biological father left me when I was three, and I found him in my 30s. I was accepted into this family I didn’t know, and all of a sudden, I had three sisters. When I hang out with them the conversation varies based on who I’m talking to, the context, what’s being discussed. My Spanish is not great, but I can get what’s being said if they speak really slowly, like to a child. Part of this is trying to mimic that experience for me. That sense of what would it be like to have a relationship with this language, which is important for communicating with your family, your community–lose it, and then work your way back. I hope that’s one of the themes in the book. Our main character goes through this journey–if I’ve done it correctly–with the Spanish language. If I’m going to take the readers on that journey it has to be correct.

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This interview originally ran on May 10, 2023 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Following Friday’s review of All the Sinners Bleed, here’s S. A. Cosby: The Light in the End.

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S.A. Cosby is an Anthony Award-winning writer from Southeastern Virginia. He is the author of My Darkest Prayer, Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears. His fourth novel, All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron Books, June 6, 2023), introduces Sheriff Titus Crown, who has returned to his Southern hometown and is out to right some wrongs from the inside. When not writing, Cosby is an avid hiker and chess player.

Is Sheriff Titus Crown a hero?

He is, but like all heroes, he’s flawed. Flawless heroes are boring. It’s the reason they had to give Superman kryptonite. A perfect hero is aesthetically something to aspire to, but existentially it’s a bit of a dud. It makes the hero stronger that they’re able to overcome those flaws and still do the right thing.

How well does he fit the classic loner noir detective model?

He is a classic noir detective–even though he’s the elected sheriff, he has more in common with Philip Marlowe than with Wyatt Earp. But he has a strong support system that a lot of those classic heroes didn’t have. He has his dad, his brother–I really love their relationship–his girlfriend and some of his deputies. Even though he’s their boss, he does respect and lean on them. But at the end of the day, he is the lone man standing up for what’s right. He’s the one that has to face the devil, eventually, by himself, and that’s by design. I’m fascinated with what somebody does when they’re faced with a life-changing moment. How do they stand up? And it’s most interesting to me when they stand up in those moments alone. You know, character is what you do when no one is looking. I wanted to firmly put him in that situation.

How important is a character’s backstory?

Incredibly important. When I create characters, I do their full biographies, and a lot of the time none of that makes it into the book. I create long documents about their childhood, their past, their likes and dislikes, intrinsic quirks. Even things that will never be revealed completely still influence the character’s arc, their decisions, their decision-making process. You don’t need to know everything about Titus, but you need to know that the things that have happened to him have shaped him, have defined his morals and his idealism, and his small bit of nihilism.

Titus is part of that tradition of the lone wolf, but he’s also very much in the tradition of the local boy made good. Charon County is so much a part of who he is, whether he’s in the FBI or, now, the sheriff. There is a proprietary sense about him. He cares about this place, and he knows some of the people–most of the people–don’t particularly care for him because he’s the sheriff, but he still feels protective of this place. The roots of Charon are so deep in his psyche.

What makes for a compelling villain or protagonist?

Your protagonist is only as good as your villain. You need a villain that matches the protagonist in drive and intellectually, but also personality-wise. Eminem and Kid Rock were both coming up in Detroit at the same time as rappers, and people would ask him why he would never battle Kid Rock. And he said, because beating him wouldn’t have meant anything, because I don’t respect his skill. He didn’t see him as a worthy opponent. For Titus, I wanted the villain that he has to face to be a genuine threat, not just physically but intellectually, because I wanted his triumph to mean something.

When readers get to the end of the book, they’ll realize that Titus understands some of what the villain has gone through. That creates a pretty interesting dynamic, to show the differences between these two characters. There are elements in their background that are similar, but whereas Titus went the way of wanting to protect people and not giving in to the pain of his past, the villain chose another route.

How important is place to this narrative?

Place is important in all my stories, but I think it’s the most important aspect of this story. In my previous books I’ve written about place as a more general, macro idea. I’ve written about THE SOUTH, all capital letters, what that entails and what that means. I’ve spoken ad nauseum about how proud I am to be from the South but at the same time how much I recognize the flaws that are here. As an artist, I think it’s my duty to examine that. With this book I really wanted to delve into the micro of that, and what’s it’s like in a town like Charon, which has a deep history. It has this sort of mythic quality to it. The citizens experience it in totally different ways. The white citizens experience it differently than the Black citizens. The young citizens experience it differently than the older folks. This town can have a multiplicity of definitions based on who you are and what your background is. I think place gives the story its weight. Charon County is a secondary protagonist and antagonist in the book.

Is this a novel about race?

In Southern fiction four things will always come up: race, class, sex and religion. Those are the four pillars of Southern gothic fiction. All are represented to various degrees in All the Sinners Bleed. As an African American person, I’m always going to write about race, because race is always a part of the conversation for me. People ask, why do you have to bring up race? I didn’t bring it up. This country brought it up; my life brings it up. Race is important, because Titus is a Black man, the first Black sheriff in this town. But religion is also on the forefront, maybe even more so, because in the rural South, there is an incredible hypocrisy that comes up with religion. Small towns with 25, 30 churches talk about Christianity as a concept but not as a practice. Flannery O’Conner said she doesn’t believe the South is Christ-centered, but Christ-haunted. And I believe that’s emblematic of the hypocrisy of the modern Christian evangelical movement, that you purport to love your sisters and brothers in Christ, but you vote against helping people, you vote against empathy. You live in a world where you thump a Bible and worry about the lives of children, so to speak, but once those children are out of the womb you could not care less about them. I wanted to talk about all of that. Religion can be a hammer to break down doors or it can be a cudgel to beat you down, and I think it’s represented in both ways in the book.

Is it difficult or draining to write bleak stories? Or is there catharsis there?

It’s never as draining as you might think. I’m a pessimistic optimist; I write these bleak characters in these bleak situations, but my characters triumph in the end. Not without some difficulty, some wounds and some scars, but they triumph. I was raised Southern Baptist, and I have this Old Testament philosophy that “I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken,” to quote Titus’s father. I write these really dark, morally complex characters and situations because I want the good guys to win, because that doesn’t really happen in real life. If it’s going to happen anywhere, it should happen in my book; I’m the one writing it. So as dark as my characters and their situations can be, they come through with the light in the end.

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This interview originally ran on February 13, 2023 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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