The Elemental World: An Interview with Taylor Brown

Taylor Brown is the author of the short story collection In the Season of Blood and Gold (see my review here), which was the finalist for the International Book Awards in the Short Story category. His debut novel, Fallen Land (preorder here), is due for release on St. Martin’s Press at the beginning of 2016. The novel is “set in the final year of the Civil War, as a young couple on horseback flees a dangerous band of marauders who seek a bounty reward… Fallen Land is a love story at its core.” Brown is the recipient of the Montana Prize for Fiction, and a finalist for the Press 53 Open Awards, Machigonne Fiction Contest, and Doris Betts Fiction Prize. His work has been short-listed for Best American Mystery Stories, and his fiction has appeared in The Baltimore Review, The Coachella Review, Chautuaqua, The New Guard, CutBank, storySouth, Crimespree Magazine, and many others. He was born on the Georgia coast and currently lives in Wilmington, NC. You can find him at www.taylorbrownfiction.com.

George Salis: There are thematic connections between the short stories in your collection, In the Season of Blood and Gold. Human frailty, the need for and lack of love, the oppression by power and violence. Were these connections premeditated or did it come about naturally and, perhaps, unexpectedly?

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Taylor Brown[/caption]

Taylor Brown: When writing a story, I rarely think of theme in any direct way. I’m mainly barreling forward at that point, trying to let the story write itself as much as possible. Hell, sometimes I just want to stay out of its way! It’s typically after the draft is done, when I’m re-reading and revising the story, that any themes seem to reveal themselves. That’s one of my favorite parts of the whole process: the unexpected discovery of a theme or motif or connection to something in my own life. That’s where the magic happens.

As for the connections between the stories themselves, I never really thought of the stories in relation to one another until I went to assemble the collection into a single manuscript. They were written over a period of several years, as I was trying out different modes and settings and such. To be honest, my first attempt at arranging them into a collection was a failure. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I placed the stories that were most similar right next to each other! Later, a writer and buddy of mine, Jason Frye, recommended writing the title of each story on a notecard, then trying out different arrangements. I actually mapped, as best I could, the arc of the stories — not so much in terms of plot, but energy or light — to find the right order.

GS: The content of your fiction is very much “Southern.” Did you grow up in this environment and culture, or are you fascinated by it from a non-participatory standpoint?

TB: That’s a good question. I grew up on St. Simons Island, Georgia, which is a barrier island located about halfway between Savannah and Jacksonville, Florida. When I was a kid, St. Simons was much less developed and sophisticated than it is now, but it was by no means the Georgia of peanut and cotton farms. It was a place of golf courses and fishing boats and live oaks and Spanish moss and marshes — much like the Lowcountry of South Carolina. It is very much a Southern place, but more gothic somehow, and I always felt like I skirted the edge of the culture, in that I was raised a Catholic (in a sea of Protestants) and I’m one-quarter Lebanese. My mother grew up in Illinois, spending her summers on a farm in Kentucky, and my father grew up in a lot of places, but mostly in St. Petersburg, Florida. They moved to Georgia in the late sixties, and I went to public schools and the University of Georgia.

It took me some time — perhaps the first twenty-five years of my life — to reconcile myself to the culture, and I’m still doing so. I left after college — I went to South America, I went to San Francisco, and yet I felt a powerful (and unexpected) pull back to the South after being away. I lived in San Francisco for four years, and I never set a story there. I didn’t have any issues to work out with that city. Not so with the South. It is perhaps the most beautiful part of our nation, with the bloodiest and most complicated history. Historically, it is the most uneducated part of the country, and yet look at the language and art and music it’s birthed. It fascinates me to no end, and it’s rife with story.

GS: Tell me about Fallen Land. What about the Civil War attracted you?

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Cover of ‘Fallen Land’[/caption]

TB: I was never one of those kids who could recite to you the various battles of the Civil War and their dates and victors (and I certainly knew some kids who could). I was never very much interested in the war as portrayed in the movies, the epic battles and charges and such. I became interested in the outer margins of the war, the irregular fighting. I do think that Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, which I read in college, had some influence on that. Then, at some point, I stumbled upon the guerrilla fighters of the war, men like John S. Mosby and Turner Ashby and John Hanson McNeill who commanded detachments of Partisan Rangers, who operated in somewhat similar fashion to today’s special forces. They engaged in sabotage and kidnapping and terrorism, and here I found a history, less known, that really engaged me.

For Fallen Land, this interest combined with my interest in Sherman’s March to the Sea. In driving home from college, I would pass through many of the towns that had been burned or raided during those latter days of 1864. In recent years, we’ve had a lot of fiction and popular entertainment that’s been set in a post-apocalyptic world, everything from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to the new Mad Max movie. How much the fall of 1864 must have seemed the end of the world to the people of Georgia, in ways both terrible and glorious?

GS: What kind of research did you engage in for this historical novel? Do you find it more difficult to write about the distant past than the present?

TB: Most of my research came from simply reading books on the subject. I started at more of a “macro” level, reading histories like Noah Andre Trudeau’s Southern Storm, then moved gradually to a more “micro” level, with first-person accounts written by embedded journalists and such.

Do I find it more difficult to write about the distant past? Yes and no. There’s an initial barrier, in that I have to “download” sufficient information into my brain to write about the subject with any clear vision. On the other hand, I love the research, learning the small details of the world as it was in 1864 or 1929 or 1952. People are still people, I think, no matter the year they were born. Their prejudices and scruples and expressions and shoes evolve, but I’m not sure they change very much, which is interesting, too.

Of course, I’m working on something more contemporary at the moment, as I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a “historical novelist.” The whole pigeonholing thing seems a real danger these days, and I aim to avoid it.

GS: What about the distant future? I ask because “Sin-Eaters,” a story from your collection, is set in the post-apocalypse.

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Cover of ‘In the Season of Blood and Gold’ by Taylor Brown.[/caption]

TB: Yeah, that was a fun one. I liked how that story, in setting, reflected “Rider,” a story set sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. I think, in these increasingly techno-centric times, we do have an almost suicidal impulse for the world to go to complete hell, just so we can be freed of our digital chains. How many survivalist programs are on TV? How many post-apocalyptic movies, like we’ve already discussed? There’s an impulse to revert back to a world we perceive (rightly or wrongly) as more elemental. I was simply interested in what that world might be like, and the world I saw was largely informed by the time I spent with an artist and buddy of mine, Blaine Capone, who lived for several years in a very “off-the-grid” manner in the mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina. Blaine trains horses, and he’s the one who taught me about horses while I was writing Fallen Land, and that story largely stemmed from seeing the blend of modern and antique technology jangling from Blaine’s saddle and belt and back, the archetypal “rider” transported into a post-apocalyptic world.

GS: What writers or works influence your writing? Where else do you get influence and inspiration?

TB: I get a lot of inspiration from music, actually. In fact, Fallen Land was partly inspired by the ballad “When First Unto This Country,” performed by the likes of Joan Baez and Jerry Garcia. It was first recorded in the 1930s, but the roots of the song likely go back more than a century, connected to the old Irish ballads. Those songs came across the sea to a new world, where they were transformed, not unlike the main character of Fallen Land. “Rider,” the first story in the collection, was inspired by another folk ballad, “I Know You Rider.” There’s something timeless and elemental about those authorless old ballads, which have nearly as many different versions as they have singers. I’ve said that I’m a musician with absolutely zero musical talent — in some ways, I think of my stories as songs.

As far as writers, I do find myself going back to the canon often: Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and early Hemingway. I love the work of William Gay, and I’ve long been awed by Cormac McCarthy. I find James Salter’s writing pretty much sublime, and a book that’s bowling me over right now, with a second reading, is Beryl Markham’s West with the Night.

GS: What do your writing habits consist of?

TB: Pretty darn regimented. I typically write for one hour in the morning before heading into the office for “work-work” (I run a non-writing business), and I leave the office at 4:30 in the afternoon, writing at a certain table at a certain cafe from 4:30 until roughly 7:30. Then I head home, eat, maybe have a cocktail, and try to relax — although I often end up circling back to the writing until bedtime. Having such a ritualistic approach keeps me highly productive, but it does make it tough to socialize, date, etc. Sometimes it doesn’t seem worth it, but mostly it is.

GS: Rejection seems to be a rite of passage for writers. Could you reflect on this?

TB: Absolutely. I love it, honestly. When I get something published, it feels like I’ve truly earned it. I love the legends of Larry Brown having his stories rejected a hundred times, or Tim Gautreaux pasting his rejection slips all over his office. I see people on social media whining about their rejections. Hell, I think it’s a mark of honor. I’ve submitted stories more than five hundred times. I know exactly what percentage of those have turned into publications. Each rejection is one step closer to publication.

It is a rite of passage. It shouldn’t be easy. It teaches you to have a thick skin, to surrender your feelings of entitlement, to get up when you get knocked down, and what could be more important to life in general? Coolidge said, “Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” I truly believe that.

GS: You could interpret this as a simple question or a complex one: Why write?

TB: I’ve realized, as I’ve gotten older, what a gift it is to know your mission in life. I’ve felt drawn to writing from a very young age. Since kindergarten, first grade. It’s hard as hell, sure, but so is most anything worth doing, right? For me, it’s simply in my cells. That’s why I write.

Why write in general? I think story is foundational to our nature, and writing exhumes and preserves the moments most powerful to us, fictional or not. It helps us discover what we already know. In these manic times, it’s cohesive. It binds us to one another and to our own histories and futures and fantasies. It’s both outlet and archive. It’s an effort to sink into the heart of the matter, and that seems pretty damn important.