TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe!
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
The
stories of Call a Body Home explore the borderlessness between nature,
violence and memory against the Appalachian backdrop of Virginia’s
Shenandoah Valley. Its characters are working class parents, children and
siblings struggling to maintain the familial ties and traditions that bind them
together, even as time and trauma threaten to uproot them. By turns savage and
soulful, Call a Body Home offers a portrait of the modern South and how
we fight through hardship and grief to find a way home.
Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And, which story gave you
the most trouble, and why?
The
opening story of the collection, “Shrimp of the Dirt,” was the most pleasurable
to write. I’m a sucker for stories centered around animals and natural
phenomena, and this particular story, which revolves around two cicada
emergences, gave me an excuse to do research on the ecology of the Shenandoah
Valley where I grew up. It’s one of my favorite pastimes. The story also
contains a few moments that are deeply personal to me, including the game
described in the second section, which is based on a real game my mother played
with me and my twin sister when we were children.
The
story that took the most work was “Texaco Station.” Writing convincingly from a
child’s perspective seems simple enough on the surface, especially if our first
inclination is to present that point-of-view as limited, but the reality is of
course more complex. Children are hardly limited in their ability to perceive
deeper truths. It’s their ability to communicate these perceptions and turn
them into agency that might be limited. On the latter point, I had to revise
the ending several times before I was satisfied enough to leave it alone.
Without spoiling anything, it rhymes with the ending of the story that comes
before it, which I hope makes it feel as though the two moments are speaking to
each other.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road
to publication.
The biggest challenges with a manuscript like this one were 1) recognizing that it should be a chapbook, and 2) finding a publisher willing to take a chance on a very short collection of stories. While the chapbook has a rich history in poetry, it’s certainly less common for prose writers to publish very short collections, though things are starting to change. Call a Body Home began as a full-length collection of stories, but as I revised the project, I began to obsessively cut out stories I wasn’t satisfied with and shorten those that remained. At first, I was dismayed: even though it felt like each new, shorter version of collection was tighter and more cohesive than the one before it, it also felt like I was getting farther and farther away from a length where the project would be publishable.
That
feeling changed once I attended a reading by Kathleen Rooney shortly after Lillian
Boxfish Takes a Walk was released. She shared some advice that helped her
as both a writer and publisher (at Rose Metal Press) who often works in
shorter, experimental prose: approach the world of publishing not as a ladder
you have to climb to place your manuscript with the largest possible venue, but
rather as an ecosystem of lily pads, big and small, that you can hop between,
depending on which venue is the best fit for your project. If you look at her
career, she’s been prolific in publishing books across a wide range of genres
and lengths this way, and recognizing her success gave me the confidence to
stop conforming to the standards I imagined a larger publisher might want in a
project, and instead follow my gut, cut the manuscript down to its simplest
form, and hope to find the right lily pad. It took some time to do both, about
2 years, which was probably the low point in the journey.
There
are maybe a half dozen independent presses that consider chapbook-length
collections of stories, and I count myself as extremely lucky to have worked
with Mason Jar Press. Michael Tager, Ian Anderson, and Heather Rounds are
compassionate readers and supremely talented at what they do, and they quickly
became champions of my work and my vision for the collection, which they picked
as the winner of MJP’s 5th anniversary chapbook contest. Getting that news was
certainly a high, even if the pandemic upended everything just a few months
later. Throughout all the challenges this last year posed, Michael, Ian, and
Heather went out of their way to make me feel deeply involved in each step of
the publishing process. I’m beyond grateful to them for their help in bringing Call
a Body Home into being.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
This
is going to sound bizarre, but it’s “Don’t forget to make your drug dealers do the dishes.” You
could insert any personal or professional title into this phrase, but this is
the version I received from my first mentor, Hanna Pylvainen, in the context of
an undergraduate workshop discussion about a story where the characters behaved
purely as facilitators of plot. Her point being: your characters are meant to
behave like people, so take the time to get to know them through their everyday
routines, however ordinary they might seem. The action doesn’t have to be
remarkable for you to discover specific and surprising truths about your
characters.
Another
piece of advice from the same workshop: “Your competition is the laundry.” Readers
have their own chores and routines that might threaten to interrupt their
reading at any moment, so the onus is on you to keep them engaged. When it
comes time to revise, it helps to ask yourself the question, “Is this
scene/paragraph/sentence going to hold the attention of a reader who is also
thinking about the laundry they have to fetch from the dryer?”
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
There
were a few times where I got to that point, but one moment that stands out came
at the end of “Goshen Pass” where I describe one character touching his wife’s
scars, with his fingers “tracing their topographic map of a valley, searching
for a sign of home across a distance too great to tell.” That line wasn’t
anywhere on my radar when I was writing the scene, but it emerged more or less
as written, and changed the way I saw the story. Once I had that line, the
characters, and the larger questions of the collection about home, belonging
and grief, all clicked into place. For that reason, I arranged the sequence of
stories so that “Goshen Pass” sits at the heart of the book.
I’ve
always struggled when it comes to titles. Call a Body Home takes its
name from the second story of the collection, which didn’t even have that title
until just before I submitted the manuscript to Mason Jar. Originally, it was
titled “Sow.” I was looking for a title that could give voice to the themes of
the collection, one of which is the pull of home, which is especially strong in
the Appalachian mountain communities I write about. There’s a moment where the
character at the center of the title story, a girl who has been left behind
with the rest of her family after her mother runs off, experiments with “testing gestures, such as slapping her brother when he
tells her to chew with her mouth closed, hoping to find one that might summon
their mother back from her new home.” That desire— to call her mother back
home, to be made whole with a family and an ancestral place—rhymed with the
imagery contained in the last line of the story, and once I saw how the former
motivated not just her character, but a majority of the characters in the
collection, I realized that it had to be the title. I like that it carries more
than one meaning—it can refer to both the act of calling a person home, and
finding that home within ourselves.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
Blackened Cicadas with Grilled Onions and Peppers
4-6 servings
INGREDIENTS
30-40 cicadas (gathered as they emerge from the ground,
remove heads, legs and wings)
1 red pepper, thinly sliced
1 green pepper, thinly sliced
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 Tbsp. butter
Salt and pepper to taste
1 1/2 Tbsp. blackened seasoning:
1 1/2 Tbsp. paprika
1 Tbsp. garlic powder
1 Tbsp. onion powder
1 Tbsp. thyme
1 tsp. ground black pepper
1 tsp. cayenne pepper
1 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
PREPARATION
In a small saucepan, bring 2 cups water to boil. Add cicadas
and boil 4-5 minutes. Drain and set aside. Grill peppers and onions until al
dente, season with salt and pepper. Set aside.
Heat saute pan until hot. Add olive oil, then cicadas. Saute
1-2 minutes. Add blackened seasoning, onions and peppers. Saute 1-2 minutes
more. Finish with butter.
Serve
over grits as a substitute for shrimp.
***
READ
MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER: http://masonjarpress.com
ORDER
THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: http://masonjarpress.com/chapbooks-1/call-a-body-home
READ
A STORY, “Shrimp of the Dirt”: http://www.ninthletter.com/winter-20/winter-20-fiction/393-alessi