Facebook X-twitter Instagram Linkedin

Carla Jean Whitley

Fiction

A family’s second chance

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Jesse Bennett’s life changes dramatically during the summer she’s 13. It’s a difficult age for anyone. But life becomes especially difficult for Jesse when she returns home one day to find neighbors gathered outside her house in the British city of Hull. Her mother has attempted suicide, and after she returns from a stay in a mental institution, the family moves to the nearby seaside town of Midham.

It’s a chance for her mother to start anew in the fresh country air, and Jesse also seizes the chance to recreate herself. She has always been an outcast at school, but in Midham that changes. While waiting for her father outside the town co-op on a rainy day, Jesse meets Amanda, a beautiful, older and clearly popular girl. When Amanda invites Jesse to stand under her umbrella, Jesse is immediately taken with her. She’s even more excited when she meets Tracey, a girl in her own grade, and realizes that the two are sisters, granting Jesse regular access to Amanda.

Another Life Altogether reveals Jesse’s struggle with the challenges of being a teenager: dealing with her parents—particularly dramatic, given her mother’s mental illness; fitting in at school; and coming to terms with her sexuality. And Jesse is often lost to a fantasy world where she and Amanda are romantically involved—a desire she can’t admit, for fear that such a revelation would cost her the social standing she has worked so hard to achieve.

With the release of Another Life Altogether, author Elaine Beale turns from the murder mystery genre of her first effort (1997’s Murder in the Castro, now out of print) to an exploration of psychological development. Though there’s plenty of action in the novel, it is Beale’s examination of Jesse’s relationship with a cast of quirky family members and classmates that propels the worthy story forward. 

Jesse Bennett’s life changes dramatically during the summer she’s 13. It’s a difficult age for anyone. But life becomes especially difficult for Jesse when she returns home one day to find neighbors gathered outside her house in the British city of Hull. Her mother has attempted suicide, and after she returns from a stay in […]
Fiction

Hornby’s fresh, funny musical tale

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

The fictional American singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe achieved critical success in the 1980s with the classic breakup album Juliet. Then, at the height of his career, Tucker canceled a tour and withdrew. In the years since, a small but committed following has sprung up on the Internet, tracking every rumor or tidbit suggesting activity from the reclusive Crowe.

When a stripped-down version of Tucker Crowe’s classic album shows up in the mailbox of leading Croweologist Duncan and his girlfriend Annie, the duo’s relationship is already on the rocks. They’ve remained together for 15 years—more out of habit and proximity than passion, given the lack of options in their bleak, seaside English town. Their polar reactions to the new album, Juliet, Naked, only heighten Duncan and Annie’s differences.

Duncan is the kind of neurotic fan who intimidates others, turning them away from music instead of toward it. Anyone who has obsessed over unreleased material or bootlegs of their favorite band’s shows will identify with him immediately. He knows too much, finding significance in every note his favorite musician plays and every syllable he utters.

That arrogance pushes Annie to the edge. After the couple posts their differing analyses of the album on Duncan’s Tucker Crowe fan site, Annie and Duncan’s paths split—and converge with Tucker Crowe’s—as they set out after their own lives.

Juliet, Naked is classic Nick Hornby, with characters internally debating what is worthwhile as their lives are lived out to a soundtrack. At the same time it’s a fresh story of these curiously interwoven lives and perspectives. Each Hornby venture exhibits his considerable talent, whether through a novel, memoir or collection of essays. But it’s the music-oriented books that often draw a cult following, not unlike that of Juliet, Naked’s Tucker Crowe. And Hornby’s insights into the rabid fan are as acute as ever—not a surprise, given his own obsessive listening.

Carla Jean Whitley attends way too many concerts and regularly interviews musicians in Birmingham, Alabama.

The fictional American singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe achieved critical success in the 1980s with the classic breakup album Juliet. Then, at the height of his career, Tucker canceled a tour and withdrew. In the years since, a small but committed following has sprung up on the Internet, tracking every rumor or tidbit suggesting activity from the […]
Fiction

Literature heals amid grief

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Ellie Lerner is devastated when her best friend Lucy is murdered while walking her eight-year-old daughter Sophie to school. Ellie immediately flies from America to London, helps Lucy’s husband plan the funeral and tends to Sophie, her goddaughter who has fallen silent after witnessing her mother’s brutal death.

As she copes with the loss of her best friend, Ellie attaches herself to Sophie, clinging to the child for purpose and meaning in the wake of her best friend’s murder.

Ellie and Sophie find escape in literature, as they read a chapter of The Secret Garden each night before bed. Ellie feels about books the way some do about cooking: sharing them with others is an act of service and love. It’s the act of reading that convinces Sophie to break nearly a week of silence.

But in the process, Ellie neglects her own marriage. There’s already distance between her and Phillip, an emotional remoteness that began when their own child died in utero, and now Ellie adds physical distance to the equation.

Julie Buxbaum crafts a tale filled with the nuance of broken relationships, just as she did in her debut novel The Opposite of Love. And though her first novel was widely acclaimed, Buxbaum’s writing has clearly matured. Her characters possess emotional depth that’s evident from page one, and her storytelling is more streamlined and precise.

While The Opposite of Love danced on the edges of chick lit, After You steps toward literary fiction. It’s a promising move for a young author who sidesteps the sophomore slump.

Carla Jean Whitley writes from Birmingham, Alabama.

Ellie Lerner is devastated when her best friend Lucy is murdered while walking her eight-year-old daughter Sophie to school. Ellie immediately flies from America to London, helps Lucy’s husband plan the funeral and tends to Sophie, her goddaughter who has fallen silent after witnessing her mother’s brutal death. As she copes with the loss of […]
Fiction

From despair to hope in Rwanda

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Baking Cakes in Kigali begins as a series of vignettes, with author Gaile Parkin introducing characters and plot elements through visits to cake baker Angel Tungaraza’s apartment. The residents of Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda, turn to Angel for their celebrations—and sometimes just a weeknight dinner party—and in the process share their lives and hopes with the Tanzanian transplant.

But as more characters enter the fold, their lives and these vignettes intertwine. Angel’s cakes are the route into relationships and people’s lives. She charms her clients with tea and conversation as she learns what occasion each cake will mark. Baking is a way to show you care, even if the cake is for hire.

She meets women with cheating husbands, women longing for love, men who have traveled the continent searching for their families. And Angel brings people in her community together, introducing one friend to another and building community through relationships.

After the premature deaths of her children, Angel has become both mother and grandmother to her grandchildren, and her love extends to others in the neighborhood. She serves as mother of the bride for shopkeeper Leocadie’s wedding, and when sex worker Jeanne d’Arc comes to her to order a cake for her sister’s confirmation, Angel offers the girl her grandchild’s confirmation gown.

Throughout, these interwoven friendships reveal despair turning to hope as people find trust and faith in each other. So much in Kigali is colored by AIDS and genocide. It seems the lives of everyone Angel encounters have been touched by those perils. Angel herself saw her son diagnosed with the virus. But as Angel celebrates weddings, confirmations and life with her clients, Baking Cakes in Kigali reveals a hope and joy not often associated with Rwanda.

Zambia native Parkin’s own experience as a relief worker in Rwanda inform this first novel, creating a complete view of life in this African nation.

Carla Jean Whitley writes and bakes in Birmingham, Alabama.

Baking Cakes in Kigali begins as a series of vignettes, with author Gaile Parkin introducing characters and plot elements through visits to cake baker Angel Tungaraza’s apartment. The residents of Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda, turn to Angel for their celebrations—and sometimes just a weeknight dinner party—and in the process share their lives and […]
Fiction

When your mind is your enemy

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Harvard psychology professor Dr. Alice Howland is only 50 years old when she begins to experience frequent and unusual memory loss. A BlackBerry forgotten at dinner, a mysterious item on her to-do list and an out-of-town conference she forgot to attend all make Alice wonder what's happening to her.

First-time novelist Lisa Genova self-published Still Alice before the book was picked up by Pocket Books. But the knowledge she has gained from earning a doctorate in neuroscience and serving as an online columnist for the National Alzheimer's Association, shines throughout this debut, a realistic portrayal of an intelligent, independent woman facing early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

It's painful to witness scene after scene of forgetting, particularly as Alice awaits and then denies her diagnosis. But through those incidents, Alice's plight evokes the reader's sympathy and understanding. Still Alice tracks her mental decline over a two-year period, revealing how early-onset Alzheimer's affects Alice's relationships, career and sense of self. During the disease's rapid progression, she becomes more and more dependent on her husband and three grown children to guide her through each day. Once-mundane tasks become to-do list fodder. Alice makes notes to remind herself to take medication every morning and evening. She's even prone to forget to teach classes.

Alice discovers who she is and what her relationships mean as the disease advances. Memories fall away, but the heart remains. And though the novel is heavy on explanation of the disease's effects, Genova writes in clear language that even the least medically inclined will understand.

Those who have lost a loved one to Alzheimer's will find particular comfort in this sensitive tale. The novel portrays both the patient's and the family's struggle with Alzheimer's disease in a more heart-rending way than medical literature ever could.

Carla Jean Whitley writes from Birmingham, Alabama. 

Harvard psychology professor Dr. Alice Howland is only 50 years old when she begins to experience frequent and unusual memory loss. A BlackBerry forgotten at dinner, a mysterious item on her to-do list and an out-of-town conference she forgot to attend all make Alice wonder what's happening to her. First-time novelist Lisa Genova self-published Still […]

When love has your number

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

“Everything counts.” The opening line of Addition is an appropriate mantra for Grace Vanderburg’s life. Numbers dominate, to the point that the 35-year-old Australian is unable to work. From the time she wakes at precisely 5:55 a.m., Grace’s days are carefully measured. Five minutes to gather herself. Twenty-five paces to the bathroom, followed by 160 strokes of the toothbrush. She selects the day’s outfit from a rotation of 10 shirts and 10 pairs of trousers. Grace even carefully plans the numbers of each grocery purchase. When she mistakenly finds herself at the grocery store cash register with nine bananas instead of 10, Grace rounds out the bunch by plucking a banana from the basket of an attractive man in line behind her.

By measuring the dimensions of her world, Grace forms a place where she feels in control and safe. Creating routines helps her avoid the unexpected. Or, well, she thinks she can avoid it, until she shows up at her preferred cafe at her prescribed time and finds every table occupied. Panic begins to set in—and then the man from the supermarket waves her to his table.

Slowly, Grace’s world shifts. Her life breaks from its prescribed pattern when she agrees to go on a date with Seamus. It’s an acceptable change, Grace tells herself. She can break routine if she wants to—she simply chooses to live by the numbers. But when Grace and Seamus are together, numbers recede to the background. Their relationship changes Grace, challenges Seamus and illustrates how a relationship can bring out both the best and worst in a person.

In her debut novel, Toni Jordan invites readers into Grace’s mental world, making Grace’s thoughts become their own. Jordan paints a sympathetic portrait of a young woman suffering from (and often embracing) obsessive-compulsive disorder, never talking down to her character but offering insight into her thoughts. In the end, readers will be left counting the days until Jordan’s next release.

Carla Jean Whitley lives, writes and carefully minimizes her contact with numbers in Birmingham, Alabama.

“Everything counts.” The opening line of Addition is an appropriate mantra for Grace Vanderburg’s life.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

American Rust

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Buell, Pennsylvania, is a dying town. Though it was once home to a thriving steel industry, the mills have closed, the workers have been laid off and the remaining residents are just trying to get by.

Or get out, in the case of Isaac English and Billy Poe. The young men missed their chance to leave after high school. Isaac, the smartest boy in town, was expected to follow his sister Lee’s footsteps to a prestigious college. He instead remained in Buell, caring for his disabled father. Poe is left languishing, jobless, after turning down offers to play college football. They seem unlikely friends—the brain and the jock—but in high school the boys were both the best at what they did.

When Isaac decides he can’t take any more, he takes his father’s money and his friend on his way out of town. But an unintentional murder stops the boys and becomes the impetus for all that follows.

In American Rust, debut novelist Philipp Meyer employs the voices of the boys and four others as narrators to reveal the ensuing action. It’s a tactic that has been used by novelists many times before, but it is amazingly effective here. Meyer captures personalities with each depiction; instead of merely stating that Isaac was the smartest kid in his grade, Meyer reveals Isaac’s intelligence in the distinction between his words and Poe’s. Poe’s rambling, run-on sentences capture the energy with which he must have played high school football. When the reality of the murder sets in, Isaac’s narration becomes less coherent, dissolving into a frantic internal monologue.

As the story unfolds, layers are revealed. These are unraveling lives in a town that’s long since unraveled as steel mills closed and industry left the valley. Meyer’s tale reminds us there’s so much more below the surface of what we see—more to the smart kid, the jock, the parents who raised them, the good cop and the little steel town.

 

Carla Jean Whitley writes from Birmingham, Alabama, a steel town that has adapted to include new industries.

 

Buell, Pennsylvania, is a dying town. Though it was once home to a thriving steel industry, the mills have closed, the workers have been laid off and the remaining residents are just trying to get by. Or get out, in the case of Isaac English and Billy Poe. The young men missed their chance to […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

Leila Meacham

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Although it’s been eagerly anticipated as a debut, the epic novel Roses isn’t the first outing for author Leila Meacham. In the mid-1980s, Meacham wrote and published a handful of romance novels. But it wasn’t a process she enjoyed much. At the time, she was teaching English, and the solitary process of writing took her away from preparing lesson plans, learning about new techniques and enjoying hobbies like gardening.

“I guess the difference is the years. I had other things I wanted to do,” Meacham says from her San Antonio home during a recent telephone interview. “I just didn’t want to spend the time cooped up.”

But after retiring, Meacham ran through her list of retirement goals. She and her husband traveled. Thirteen years into retirement, at age 65, she was left with a question: Now what?

The answer was Roses.

“One day I was in bed, drinking my cup of coffee, and I just thought to myself, ‘I’ve got so much to offer somebody somewhere or something. I just don’t know what to do with the rest of my life,’” Meacham recalls. “I will defend this to my dying day: A voice in my head said, ‘You will get down Roses and you will finish Roses.’ I like to believe that’s a divine inspiration.”

Meacham had begun the novel in 1985, when a bad case of pneumonia forced her to temporarily resign from teaching. As years passed, the typewritten pages of the novel were stored in a box in a closet, almost abandoned as Meacham and her husband moved from one house to another. “My husband said, ‘Oh, go ahead and take it. You’ll regret it if you don’t.’ ” Six years ago, his suspicions proved accurate as Meacham pulled the box off the shelf and resumed writing.

The novel traces nearly 70 years in the history of the Toliver family, owners of a cotton plantation in a fictional Texas town. When patriarch Vernon Toliver dies, he entrusts the land to his daughter, Mary, because he knows she will love and care for it. His wife and son are outraged.

That decision and the stubborn love that motivated it determine the course of Mary Toliver’s life. She’s unwilling to compromise anything that would negatively affect her beloved Somerset plantation, whether it means sacrificing her fair complexion to work in the field or the man she loves because he won’t settle for second place in her heart. The decisions Mary makes, and the lies that accompany them, alter the history of the Toliver clan and its relationships with the town’s other founding families, the department store-owning DuMonts and timber magnates the Warwicks.

Through a series of flashbacks—first Mary Toliver’s, then Percy Warwick’s and finally Mary’s great-niece Rachel’s—Meacham reveals just how much Mary lost by dedicating her life to the land, and why she has sold the land in her determination to save Rachel from the same fate.

It’s only appropriate that this 600-page epic took Meacham five years to write. The narrative sprawls across geography as much as time, stretching from the fictional Texas burg of Howbutker to Lubbock, Dallas and points between. (“The two together—cotton and timber—you don’t find that in the same state” anywhere but Texas, Meacham says.)

The five years Meacham devoted to the story were filled with as many interruptions as the book has plot twists. “But I persevered because I felt like I promised God I would complete this book,” she says. “Just as sure as I’m talking to you, I was assured from the get-go, you write the book and I’ll take care of the rest.”

Now the 71-year-old Meacham is not only anticipating book signings to support the book, she’s also hard at work on another epic novel, this time with a more modern focus. So what happened to the woman who so disliked the solitary nature of writing?

“I didn’t like the confinement, the frustration of trying to get your thoughts on paper,” Meacham recalls. “Oddly enough, I’m happiest when I’m writing now. And I’m all by myself and anything in the world can come out on the page.”

“What this has done for me has made me aware that I can write. Now, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me. But I feel that I can write. I can tell a story.”

 

Carla Jean Whitley reads, writes and lives near three generations of her family in Birmingham, Alabama.

Although it’s been eagerly anticipated as a debut, the epic novel Roses isn’t the first outing for author Leila Meacham. In the mid-1980s, Meacham wrote and published a handful of romance novels. But it wasn’t a process she enjoyed much. At the time, she was teaching English, and the solitary process of writing took her […]
FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Bruce Machart

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

In his powerful debut novel, Bruce Machart has created characters who are as unforgiving as the blazing heat in which they toil. A father who works his sons like horses. A husband who lies and cheats on his wife while she’s giving birth to their first son. Brothers who defend each other, but not their youngest brother.

Set in the harsh landscape of south Texas in the early 1900s, Machart’s The Wake of Forgiveness has drawn critical praise (and comparisons to the work of Cormac McCarthy) for its evocative portrayal of a man coming to grips with his family’s great divide. Karel Skala’s mother dies on the novel’s first page, while giving birth to Karel, her fourth son. The boy endures life without a mother, and under the painful rule of a Czech-immigrant father who is so distraught by his wife’s death that he’s never able to show his youngest son any affection. The story skips through time, unveiling bits of Karel’s past and insight into his present with each vignette.

A compelling part of that past is the split between Karel and his brothers, which comes to a head after a high-stakes horse race, described in thrilling detail. After the race, Karel’s brothers are promised in marriage to the daughters of a wealthy Mexican, while Karel is left to fend for himself—and ultimately, to come to terms with his self-imposed isolation.

Reached at his office at Lone Star College in Houston, where he teaches writing, Machart says that while in graduate school in the late ’90s, he began work on a novella that he never could seem to finish. The story focused on young male characters with a rift between them that he simply couldn’t figure out.

“What was at the root of this animosity or this conflict between these two boys? I just started imagining going backward in time. I arrived at a moment where a father was heartbroken, and for a certain kind of man in a certain place with a certain upbringing and a certain culture, it seems to me easier to share violence or easier to share meanness or easier to basically not share than it is to share grief.”

The author, on the other hand, is a self-declared mama’s boy who grew up in a family of demonstrative, loving men. “I believe in writing what you want to know, rather than writing what you know,” Machart explains.

“Writing fiction gives us the opportunity to live somebody else’s life, to gain a new layer of empathy. That’s the writer’s first job, to find empathy for characters unlike him- or herself.”

Even so, Machart did find inspiration in his own family and the Texas country they call home. Though the author is a Houston native, Machart’s father was raised on a cash-crop farm by a stern, but loving, Czech father. Machart has always harbored a connection with the rural area where his father was raised and where the extended family remained. He traveled to an area very much like The Wake of Forgiveness’ Lavaca County for every Easter, Christmas and family reunion.

 

“Writing fiction gives us the opportunity to live somebody else’s life, to gain a new layer of empathy. That’s the writer’s first job, to find empathy for characters unlike him- or herself.”

 

“I think the place had a hold on me because that country setting and those ranching and farming endeavors and that way of speaking, the idiom and the social sensibilities, were so very different from what I experienced growing up,” he says. “We lived in the big city. I felt kind of an outsider in my own extended family. That seemed like something worthy of investigation.”

Although Machart’s grandfather ruled the farm, Machart recalls that his grandmother couldn’t get much rest at family reunions as her husband twirled her across the dance floor. “They had this beautiful, loving relationship, even though he did have a little bit of the devil in him.” 

The father of the novel, Vaclav Skala, is in some ways an imagined foil for Machart’s grandfather. “What would’ve happened to my grandpa if there hadn’t been a grandma?” he muses.

Although the female characters in the testosterone-fueled novel rarely grace the book’s pages, Machart took care to create an emotional landscape colored by the presence (or absence) of women.

“I wanted to use some of the conventions of Western or Southwestern writing,” Machart says. “But I didn’t want to write one of these novels you stumble upon every now and then where there’s just not a strong female character in the whole thing.”

Karel chooses a strong, self-possessed woman in his wife, Sophie. Even when Karel’s demons lead him away from his home life, Sophie knows how to confront her husband. “She knows she’s married a wounded man,” the author says. “But she’s seen the part of him that needs her. Even the slightest tenderness on his part is an affirmation of a kind of love.” And in Machart’s riveting first novel, Sophie’s steady patience allows Karel the freedom to come to terms with his past.

 

In his powerful debut novel, Bruce Machart has created characters who are as unforgiving as the blazing heat in which they toil. A father who works his sons like horses. A husband who lies and cheats on his wife while she’s giving birth to their first son. Brothers who defend each other, but not their […]
Memoir

Gabrielle Hamilton

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Prune, an unpretentious, 30-seat restaurant in New York City’s East Village, drew attention upon its 1999 opening. And so did its chef-owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, who was quickly approached by people suggesting she write a book.

“I remember at the time thinking, oh man, this is so cheap. Everybody gets a book? You open a restaurant and you get a book?” recalls Hamilton, whose essays about the intersection of food and life have appeared in the New York Times, Food + Wine and other publications. The flattery would have convinced others, but Hamilton wasn’t so easily persuaded. “I love books. I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.” And so she said no to every offer of a book contract or agent representation, choosing instead to focus on her restaurant business.

But as Hamilton’s skills developed, both with a pen and with a stove, she thought she could make a greater contribution. The result is Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a riveting memoir that explores her sometimes tumultuous family life and years spent in catering kitchens before opening Prune. The book has drawn ecstatic praise from fellow chefs, including Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali.

Hamilton’s story begins with idyllic childhood family dinners with her French mother, artist father and four siblings at their rural Pennsylvania home. But when Hamilton’s parents divorce, the children’s lives are flipped on end. During one summer, weeks pass when then-13-year-old Hamilton and her brother Simon are literally left alone. That’s when Hamilton steps into a professional kitchen for the first time, trying to make money to support her prematurely adult life. She wanders into a kitchen in her tourist town and is put to work peeling potatoes. “And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start,” Hamilton writes.

 

"I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.”

The ensuing journey takes her down a path seasoned with trials, errors and colorful relationships. Hamilton moves to New York, is in and out of college (it takes her three tries to graduate) and kitchens, often scraping by financially while learning about hard living from her fellow kitchen staff. After years of work in restaurants, catering kitchens and even a summer camp, Hamilton decides to pursue her long-held desire to be a writer. And so, with 30 on the horizon, she leaves her final freelance cooking gig and her girlfriend to head for the Midwest and the University of Michigan’s MFA writing program. It’s not long before she finds herself back in a catering kitchen, and upon her return to New York, Hamilton is seduced by the idea of her own restaurant—and later by an Italian man who pulls her into a green-card marriage, all while charming her with family summers in Puglia, Italy, familial joviality and Italian cooking. The result is a beautifully told tale of a colorful and sometimes spicy life. 

The book’s conversation unfolds at an easy pace, like getting to know a new friend, tale by life-defining tale, and Hamilton’s writing becomes almost electric when she sees a restaurant space that could become her own. Her style mimics both the winding life path she’s traveled and her casual, conversational attitude. “Basically, it’s an invitation. So here, I’m going to start the conversation,” she explains, “and hopefully people will reciprocate.”

The time Hamilton spent crafting the memoir mimicked her story’s more exhilarating moments. As she wrote, she juggled two children under the age of three and a bustling restaurant. Sleep wasn’t a priority, and in the process Hamilton gave up on striving for balance.

“If I keep pursuing it, I feel like I’ve failed constantly. So now I’m resigned to the idea that it is not balance. It’s a binge and purge,” Hamilton explains from Prune’s dining room. “I just have to change my mind about whether that sucks or not.”

Sometimes that meant seeing her children only when they were asleep. On other occasions, she left her restaurant staff to run the kitchen while she spent time with her sons. And when it came time to transform the first draft of Blood, Bones & Butter into the finished product, the restaurant’s office became Hamilton’s refuge.

But she wonders, what’s the alternative? “I have this restaurant that was very popular, I have this book deal, I have these incredible children. What was I going to do, say no to all of that? It sucks that it all happened at the same time, but that’s a high-class set of problems right there,” she says, laughing. “I could die now and feel content.” 

 

Prune, an unpretentious, 30-seat restaurant in New York City’s East Village, drew attention upon its 1999 opening. And so did its chef-owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, who was quickly approached by people suggesting she write a book. “I remember at the time thinking, oh man, this is so cheap. Everybody gets a book? You open a restaurant […]
Fiction

Josh Ritter

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Josh Ritter is a writer’s writer, a singer-songwriter whose lyrics have always reflected a love of reading and enthusiasm for learning. So it wasn’t a surprise when the Idaho-born Ritter announced a book was in the works.

“Books have always been such a huge part of my life, and my own writing,” Ritter says during a telephone interview from his Brooklyn apartment. “Normally, when people ask me about my influences, they just always assume I’m influenced by other songwriters. That couldn’t be any further from the truth. It’s always been about writers of any kind. Aside from all the other things that happen in life, writers of any kind can influence.”

Just as Ritter’s inspiration is drawn from both books and music, the story that became his debut novel, Bright’s Passage, started with a song. While writing 2010’s So Runs the World Away, his sixth full-length studio album, Ritter began crafting a song about a man who occasionally heard an angel. “I’d been thinking about when angels show up. It’s often not an uncomplicated thing,” explains Ritter, who points out that much of literature softens angels’ appearances, while religious texts show them in more startling contexts.

“A novel, I always felt like it was something that could be unfolded from a song. You go through a door, and a novel is describing everything you find behind there.”

But the story wouldn’t stay within the bounds of a single song. “This song felt like there was more there than I could fit without the structure collapsing,” he says. So Ritter began to explore writing a novel. “As time went on, the song totally disappeared. It bore no relation to what I ended up with, but it was a good starting point.”

Henry Bright, the protagonist of Bright’s Passage, was followed home from World War I by an angel, which now speaks through Henry’s horse. After Henry’s wife dies in childbirth, the angel tells him to burn and leave his home before a neighbor tries to take away the child, whom the angel calls “the future king of heaven.” The novel follows Henry as he travels, on foot, away from both the ensuing wildfire and the neighbor.

It’s fitting that Bright’s Passage began life as a lyric; though his songs vary greatly in structure and subject matter, Ritter is a master of the story song. “The Temptation of Adam,” from 2007’s The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, and So Runs the World Away’s “The Curse,” among others, play like short stories set to music.

“I always had sort of blithely said—and believed, without really totally examining it—the idea that a good song should be able to be unfolded into a much larger story. I think a song is a tool. It’s a hallway. You’re building a hallway, and when we listen to a song, we can walk down a hallway into all the worlds of our own minds. There’s no directing traffic there, and at a certain point you’re off into your own thoughts. That’s an amazing, beautiful thing about a song,” Ritter says. “A novel, I always felt like it was something that could be unfolded from a song. You go through a door, and a novel is describing everything you find behind there.”

In Bright’s Passage, Henry spends a great deal of time on his own as he traverses West Virginia. During World War I flashbacks, Henry’s internal monologue remains the story’s engine, though he is surrounded by his fellow soldiers. During the two months Ritter spent writing the book’s first draft, and the subsequent year of editing, he was similarly surrounded by people on tour and isolated as he wrote. “On the road, you have some chunks of time that are best filled with that sort of thing, mornings or after sound check,” Ritter recalls. “In the end, [writing a book] is a more lonely process than writing songs or writing a record and recording. You’re by yourself.”

Ritter worked to create in Henry a character that was a blank, a person with the “thousand-yard stare” of someone focused on putting together a jigsaw puzzle, solving a problem on his own. The reader is left to puzzle out what happened to Henry to leave him with an angel guiding his life.

With the novel’s publication, Ritter will now sort through a labyrinth of overlapping book and concert tours, with summer dates scheduled across the United States and in Canada.

“I remember the first time I ever got a record back, and how nervous I was, and this was an equal level of nerves,” Ritter says. “At a certain point, you start to miss that nervous feeling, the nervousness of the idea that stuff could go totally wrong. This book has been a great reintroduction to that kind of excitement.”

 

Carla Jean Whitley writes about books, music and culture in Birmingham, Alabama.

Josh Ritter is a writer’s writer, a singer-songwriter whose lyrics have always reflected a love of reading and enthusiasm for learning. So it wasn’t a surprise when the Idaho-born Ritter announced a book was in the works. “Books have always been such a huge part of my life, and my own writing,” Ritter says during […]
Fiction

Wiley Cash

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

In his lyrical debut, A Land More Kind Than Home, North Carolina author Wiley Cash uses multiple perspectives to tell the story of an event that divides a community. Here, he talks about the importance of place in fiction, the power of faith and what he’s working on next.

You were raised in the evangelical church. How did that factor into your writing A Land More Kind Than Home? Did your church share any characteristics with the church in your book?

I was raised in a Southern Baptist church in Gastonia, North Carolina, and although I’ve never picked up a snake or taken sips of strychnine, I can say that I’ve witnessed things and felt both a peace and a turmoil that I can’t explain. I think once you’ve experienced that, regardless of how skeptical a believer you are or how jaded you become, there’s always power in the purity of original experience. A few years ago, my wife and I were watching The Apostle. My wife was raised Catholic, and she didn’t know what to make of the scene where Robert Duvall, who plays a fallen preacher who’s running from a murder charge, is baptizing people in a roadside creek. “What in the world are they doing?” she asked, her eyebrows lifted in disbelief. I had a hard time explaining it to her, mostly because I was fighting back tears at the beauty of the scene.

This is probably going to irritate people on both the right and the left side of this issue, but I’m interested in and respectful of any religious group that adheres to a system of belief with real conviction. If that conviction compels you to pick up a serpent and speak in tongues, I say go for it. I feel the same way about the person who’s compelled to pray toward Mecca five times a day. That Holy Ghost Christian and that devout Muslim might find each other strange and perhaps even threatening, but they probably have more in common than is apparent to either one of them.

You were raised in North Carolina, which is also the setting for the book. Your characters clearly represent the area without ever teetering into a caricature of rural folks. I’ve certainly read books that didn’t succeed in that regard. Was it challenging to capture those voices?

I feel the same away about caricatures in literature as I do about stereotypes in life: they’re for lazy people who don’t want to invest time or energy in discovering the truth about people who are different from them. When I teach creative writing, I tell my students that caricature, stereotype, and cliché exist because they elicit an automatic response that is always based on something the reader has seen before in the form of image, character, or plot. That’s why these things are so pervasive, but that’s also why they’re so useless during the creative process. When writers give a reader a caricature, what they’re saying is, “All right, I got lazy with this one, so feel free to insert a stock image here.”

I want readers to care about the characters I’ve spent time and energy and blood creating. I want them to feel they have a stake in the characters’ lives because they see something of themselves in them, especially the worst characters. It’s hard to be invested in the lives of caricatures; it’s almost impossible to care about what happens to stereotypes. I tried to create characters who seem real, and I gave each of them a stake in what happens in the story and how the story unfolds in the community’s life. If I would’ve relied on stereotypes then it would have been impossible to give any of these characters the necessary agency to respond to this kind of tragedy.

You switch between character perspectives with ease, but it seems as though it would be difficult to do so while also providing insight from the characters’ pasts. Did you write the chapters in the order they appear? How did you keep the chronology straight?

I relied on a multi-voice narrative for two reasons. One, I’ve found that when something happens that involves a number of my family members or several of my friends, everyone narrates their version of it based on their individual perspective. I suspect this is the same with other people’s family and friends, but hearing that chorus of voices narrate separate stories that coalesce around a single event always stuck with me. Two, this is a pretty popular model with Southern novels and stories; I’m thinking of Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, and Thomas Wolfe’s novella The Lost Boy. Each of these works is focused around a single event, but the authors rely on the community or the family to fully communicate that event’s importance.

I felt that the story of A Land More Kind Than Home, especially the tragedy behind it, belonged to the community. It wouldn’t have felt right to assign the narration of the story or the point of view to any one particular character. I believe this is the community’s story; this is why the community has to tell it.

Keeping the chronology straight was pretty difficult sometimes. The biggest challenge was staying clear on what each narrator knows at each point in the story, a problem amplified by the fact that the novel takes place over six days. Aside from the opening scene, the novel is pretty linear, so that made it a little easier to keep the narrators’ stories and their knowledge of events chronological. Toward the end of the revision process, I made calendars to track the development of the story over those six days. I really wish I’d done that earlier. Structuring a novel is a lot like solving an equation, and it helped me to see all the values and integers in the visual equation instead of trying to keep them straight in my head.

How long did it take you to write the novel? Will you tell me more about the process?

In the spring of 2004, I wrote a short story from the perspective of a grandfather whose autistic grandson is smothered during a healing service one Sunday morning. The grandfather and the autistic boy’s father find out the terrible news after the local sheriff comes out to the farm to tell them. The story was about 25 pages, but it wasn’t really a story; it was more of an event. I sat on it for about a year before I went back to it and tried to reimagine the scene. I realized that the story was much larger than one person’s perspective. I decided to attempt to write a novel with the autistic boy’s death at the center. I experimented with several different narrators, and, as a result, the grandfather’s narration was cut even though he remained a very important character.

By the fall of 2008 I’d landed a great agent who represents several authors whose style and regional focus are very similar to mine. This agent submitted the manuscript to a few houses, but it was rejected by all of them. We worked on the manuscript for about a year and a half, and, eventually, it seemed like there was nowhere else to go in terms of revising it. We agreed to go our separate ways in January of 2010.

I turned to Nat Sobel of Sobel Weber. He’d contacted me after reading an excerpt of the novel that had been published in Crab Orchard Review in the fall of 2008, right after I’d agreed to work with my former agent. I called Nat’s office late on a Friday afternoon, and I was very surprised that he remembered my story. He agreed to consider the manuscript, but he made clear that I’d follow the same process everyone else followed, from submitting the query letter, to submitting the first 50 pages, to finally submitting the full manuscript. I was ready to give up on the novel at this point, and I probably would have if my wife hadn’t encouraged me to give it one more shot with Nat.

I submitted the full manuscript to him in February 2010. He read it and offered some comments toward revision. At this point, I had to decide whether or not I wanted to go back and revisit a manuscript that I’d thought was complete months and months earlier. Maybe it was hope, or maybe it was desperation, but I sat down at my desk and considered Nat’s comments. I worked on the novel the entire summer of 2010. Nat started submitting the novel in the fall, and the first editor who saw it purchased it in a two-book deal.  

Did writing while away from the region you wrote about affect you in any way? How?

When I moved to Louisiana in 2003, I suddenly found myself in a region that was very foreign to me. People’s accents were different, the music was different, the food was different and the weather was very different. After just a couple of months, I realized that I was desperately homesick. Because of this I began reading North Carolina authors like Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons and Charles Chesnutt. I found that in reading about North Carolina I had the chance to return home, and it wasn’t long before I realized that writing about home would make that place even more real to me. The result of that compulsion to recreate North Carolina is A Land More Kind Than Home.

Aside from reading fiction set in North Carolina, I poured through the collected, published photographs of people like Rob Amberg and Tim Barnwell, both of whom are photographers from western North Carolina. Their photos were important to me while I was living in the swamplands of Louisiana. I also studied a few books on the flora and fauna of western North Carolina just to make sure I got the names of trees and flowers correct. I never realized how important that was until I read authors like Fred Chappell and Ron Rash. Recently, I picked up Ron’s new book, The Cove, and saw that his heroine makes fence posts from black locust trunks, and I thought, Hey, I got that right in my book!

Music was also really important to me during while I was writing the novel, especially the songs of North Carolina musicians like Malcolm Holcombe (the best singer/songwriter in America, in my opinion), the Biscuit Burners, David Holt, and many others. Even now I can flip through the pages of the novel and remember exactly what I was listening to when I wrote particular scenes.

On your website, you mention your next novel, which you indicate is also set in western North Carolina. Have you completed this book? Are there any common threads between it and A Land More Kind Than Home?

I’m currently working on a second novel that is set in my hometown of Gastonia, North Carolina. At the novel’s center is a washed-up minor league pitcher named Wade Chesterfield who stumbles upon a cache of stolen money and then kidnaps his daughters from a foster home. Like A Land More Kind Than Home, my next novel has three narrators: 12-year-old Easter, Wade’s world-weary oldest daughter; Brady Weller, a private investigator who’s hired by the girls’ grandparents; and Bobby “Baby Boy” Pruitt, a steroid-pumping ex-slugger turned bounty hunter whose promising career was cut short by an errant pitch to the head by Wade Chesterfield.

How has the experience of publishing your first novel influenced your teaching?

I don’t know that having a novel published has influenced my teaching in any perceivable way. I’ve always been fairly pragmatic when it comes to teaching creative writing. I’ve always encouraged my students to understand that writing is not the overly-romantic process that is portrayed in movies and on television. You’re not supposed to take your leather-bound journal and a pack of clove cigarettes to a local coffee shop and make a public display of being a writer. I tell them that writing is a job; the only difference is that, unlike many jobs, writing is lonely, frustrating, and marked by failure. But failure makes you a better writer. Each rejection slip is an invitation to improve.

 

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of A Land More Kind Than Home.

In his lyrical debut, A Land More Kind Than Home, North Carolina author Wiley Cash uses multiple perspectives to tell the story of an event that divides a community. Here, he talks about the importance of place in fiction, the power of faith and what he’s working on next. You were raised in the evangelical […]
FictionDebut Fiction

Bill Cheng

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

One of the spring's most buzzed-about debuts, Bill Cheng's Southern Cross the Dog is the story of Robert Chatham, who was just 8 when the 1927 Mississippi flood destroyed his home and his family. As Robert wanders the Delta, in search of his kin and trying to outrun bad luck, Cheng creates a truly American story that mingles myth, music and a little bit of magic.

Writers are often admonished to write what they know, but you did the opposite with Southern Cross the Dog. You're a Chinese American from New York City; your characters are black and white Southerners from rural Mississippi. Why did you decide to set a novel in the South?

You have to write toward your interests. For me that was the Mississippi Delta of the great country blues singers. When I was a teenager I listened a lot to blues musicians like Robert Johnson, Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt. There was something about that music—the frustration, the melancholy, the resignation but also this great joy—that resonated with me. When it came time to write my first novel, I knew I wanted it to pay tribute to that world.

What kind of research did you do to help you establish the place and the characters' vernacular?

As a reader, the expectation I have for fiction is that the story be credible without it being obliged to hew too closely to fact. That’s where the real joy is in telling stories—asserting a reality that doesn’t exist and blurring the boundaries between what we believe and what is actual. For me, the research is a means of communing with the novel, fleshing out its contours and seeing what images the brain is pulled towards.

The more I read, the more tools I have. You never know when you’ll need to summon up Chandler or Shakespeare or Springsteen in the treacherous back swamps of the Delta.

Everything short of boarding a plane, I did—I went to the library; pulled old photos out of digital collections; summoned up land masses on Google Maps; read books by folklorists and ethnomusicologists (notably Alan Lomax and John Work); listened to records; perused the radio archive at the Paley Center for Media in New York City; photocopied pages on dynamiting out of an old handbook; read Honeyboy Edwards’s memoir The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing; watched PBS; pulled up clips on YouTube of Mississippi John Hurt on Pete Seeger’s 1965 series Rainbow Quest; watched flood footage recorded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, listened to a recording of Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and Sonny Boy Williamson talk about life during Jim Crow (“You didn’t say, ‘Give me a can of Prince Albert [Tobacco].’ Not with that white man on that can. You say, ‘Give me a can of that Mister Prince Albert.’”)

Most of that, however, never made it into the book. 

"Southern cross the Dog" is a colloquial term for the geographical point at which two railways intersect. Will you tell us more about the title and its significance?

Literally, there are two railroad lines that used to intersect in Moorehead, Mississippi—the U.S. Southern and the Y.D. or Yazoo-Delta line (colloquially referred to as the Yellow Dog). Apocryphally, the composer W.C. Handy first heard the phrase “Southern cross the Dog” at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903. According to Handy’s account, he heard a black itinerant musician playing slide guitar and singing “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.” The phrase was later adopted in his song, "The Yellow Dog Rag."

That’s really it as far as fact-based accounts go. But for me “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog” calls to mind something mythical—a place of peace and rest and final judgment. A coming home. A Beulah land.

The title also evokes other parts of blues folklore. There are the crossroads where souls are bargained for; there is the idea of being crossed or jinxed through hoodoo magic; there is the notion of dogs, particularly black dogs, as agents of the devil. This imagery shows up a lot, for instance, in the songs of Robert Johnson. It’s exotic and sexy and while there are definitely elements of those things in the book, the way I really think about the title today is that it is simply the story of a boy trying to come home.

The novel focuses on several different characters, and the story is mostly told in third person. But in two chapters, those focused on Dora and Ellis, you switch to first person. Why did you decide to switch between characters throughout the story, and how did you establish whose tales you would tell from the first-person perspective?

There are portions of this book that could only be told from the point-of-view of those characters. If I’d done otherwise, I would’ve been shirking my responsibility to those characters. From the beginning, I knew that Dora’s character would be the hardest for me to write. To render her convincingly I’d have to cross the divides of gender, race, as well as a history of abuse of which I have no first-hand experience. It was a challenge that I think tests the very core of who I believe myself to be as a writer. These are not easy things to write about, but I didn’t come here to write an easy book.

If I told Dora’s or Ellis’ story from the distance of the third-person, the book would be safer, certainly but that’s not what I think fiction should be. My characters—especially Dora and Ellis—experience a tremendous amount of loss. I owe it to them and the reader to try to understand and communicate that loss.

As a first-time author, what writers inspire you?

Depending on what I’m working on and how I’m conceiving it at the time, I’ll draw on different sources for my inspiration. For Southern Cross the Dog, I know Peter Mathiessen’s Shadow Country was hugely influential to me. It has the kind of scope and breadth that I wanted for my own book. There’s also Illywhacker by Peter Carey, which reminded me that books should also be thrilling and joyful and provocative to the imagination.

But when I’m working I try not to limit myself to any one kind of writing. Every book provides its own unique insight on structure, or syntax, or plotting or character development. The more I read, the more tools I have to fix the problems that might arise down the road. You never know when you’ll need to summon up Raymond Chandler or William Shakespeare or Bruce Springsteen in the treacherous back swamps of the Delta.

I will say, however, that a lot of how I think about fiction is informed by the novelist Colum McCann. I had the luck to study with him for my MFA. He really instilled in me this idea that when you write, you have to be unafraid. Every word you set down should be part of an ambitious undertaking—otherwise what would be the point?

I've read that you haven't visited the South, but your book tour includes stops in several Southern cities, so that's about to change. Is there anything you're particularly looking forward to seeing or visiting in the region in which your novel is set?

I’m not sure I’ll have much time to take in the sights, but there are a few things I’d definitely like to do. For instance, I’d like to spend an evening at a functioning jukejoint and listen to some live blues. I got married last year and my friends took me out to this tiny blues club for my bachelor party. They said the whole night I was like a puppy, looking up at the stage. It was like Christmas morning for me.

If I can, I’d also like to make it out to the Panther Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in Yazoo City—see how much of that I got right, how much I got wrong. My wife is also an avid bird-watcher so I think that’ll be something we’ll both enjoy.

What are you working on next?

A novel. At least I think it wants to be a novel. I can say that it’s not set in the American South and that it’s not about me—except in the way that every book is always about the author. With Southern Cross the Dog, the ambition was to make a book that was wide in scope. My inclination now is to go the other way. Something quieter and introspective, but no less ambitious.

RELATED CONTENT
Read our review of Southern Cross the Dog.

One of the spring's most buzzed-about debuts, Bill Cheng's Southern Cross the Dog is the story of Robert Chatham, who was just 8 when the 1927 Mississippi flood destroyed his home and his family. As Robert wanders the Delta, in search of his kin and trying to outrun bad luck, Cheng creates a truly American […]

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features