Monday, October 7, 2024

TBR: In the Sky Lord by Mary Troy

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 


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

 

A restaurant worker steals from a donation jar meant to collect money for a dying boy; a young woman held up at gunpoint is asked to choose which of her coworkers should be shot; a woman in her fifties suffers near debilitating guilt over all the small things she should have done, the times she looked away; a woman who believes herself to be mean operates a kennel for  stray and dumped dogs against a city ordinance; a newlywed hides her dying husband from his mother; a woman takes her father to the Kalaupapa leper colony for what they both know is a non-existent award; a former Archangel from the Pearly Gates Men’s Cub tries turn her life around as she operates a marina in a poverty stricken area of Missouri. These stories and more are in IN THE SKY LORD. All ten stories are about inventiveness, resilience, survival, yearnings, strength, and hope, but mostly they are about the strong need to connect to another.

 

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

The title story, “In The Sky Lord,” gave me the most trouble because the character, Belinda, became more complex with each draft, never stopping to become someone I could grasp. Not for years. And though she is the second oldest woman in here, she changes in unanticipated ways, maybe changes more than others. Because “In The Sky Lord,” was the hardest, it was also the most enjoyable, that is if enjoyable means frustrating and haunting. Also “Rent-to-Kill,” the first story in the book, is about Millie Kick, formerly Millie Holmes who was the protagonist in “Do You Believe In the Chicken Hanger?” a story I wrote 20 something years ago that was one of the runners up for the Nelson Algren Award. It was fun to do a sequel.

 

 

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

 

Oh, IN THE SKY LORD has a great story. In 2018 it was accepted as a collection, nine stories I had published over the previous 6 years as I was working on the novel, Swimming on Hwy N. The publisher, though, soon decided he would prefer to use the new work in a larger book of New and Selected, highlight it as part of the press’s 50th anniversary celebration.  I was excited, humbled but excited. But the press was connected to a university, and as COVID lingered, the press lost funding. The publisher told me not to worry, at first, as they were getting endowments and would continue to publish as an independent. But alas, that never quite worked. In the meantime, partly because I had just retired and partly because COVID kept me isolated, I decided to take each of the nine stories apart and make them even better. So I did, eventually dropping two of them but writing two new ones. I saw a chance—with lots of changes—to connect the stories, and I enjoyed that, too. So sometime in ’21 I sent the new collection to Braddock Avenue Books.  Why Braddock? I had just read Kerry Neville’s collection, and discovered not only her but also Braddock, a press I’d not heard of yet, but one that does great stuff. Nine months after I sent the manuscript, it was accepted, but set for publication two years away. I continued to refine the stories in those two years, and even at the very last minute added a very new one set in the town of Wolf Pass, Illinois, a town I created for the book.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

True characters are flawed and frightened and weird and absurd and confused and much more, just like us. If they are squinted at just right, though, seen from different perspectives, their stories told “slant,” as Emily Dickinson advised, their uniqueness can come through. Not one of us, not one character, is what they seem.

 

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

 

That the endings changed so from the way they were originally published, that they all now end in a sort of hope. I don’t normally consider myself a hopeful sort, but I believe in the inventiveness and inner strength of all these women.

 

How did you get the title?

 

“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” is a hymn from 1907 or so, yet more than a hundred years later still recorded by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, The Neville Brothers, the Staple Singers and many others. The lyrics tell us there is a better world a’waitin’,  “in the sky, Lord, in the sky.”  That line always made me laugh. A world in the sky! A better one! I said long ago, someday I will write a book titled IN THE SKY LORD. This was long before I wrote the short story with that title, and decades before the book was even an idea.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

 

Many of my previous books, most especially Beauties, about two women running a cafĂ©, are about food and recipes. In fact, my cousin makes my meatball recipe from Beauties every year over the holidays, and his children call it Mary’s meatballs. But this book is full of diner fried fish and chips, waffles and home fries, pulled pork and macaroni salad, delivered pizzas, fast foods, canned chili and cheap hot dogs, etc.. I had not realized that until you asked. Maybe because these are all foods I no longer eat but did like at times. Well, “Butter Cakes” is about a man who makes butter cakes for last meals in prisons, but he has not revealed the recipe except to say each contains a pound of butter.

 

*****

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://shop.braddockavenuebooks.com/pages/books/133/mary-troy/in-the-sky-lord