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 café, 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.
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