Books

Susan Puckett

Teresa Weaver — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 13:00:00 GMT

Maybe we all believe our home turf is the most fascinating, unusual, complex place on earth. But Susan Puckett makes a compelling case that her beloved Mississippi Delta actually is. Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler’s Journey Through the Soul of the South—equal parts travelogue, cookbook, memoir, and photo gallery—captures the modern-day realities of a confounding region most often in the news for persistent poverty, racial tension, and low literacy rates. Despite all that, the Delta has become a tourist destination in recent years, luring people who want to experience the music, art, and food—and perhaps play the slot machines in Tunica.

For nearly two decades, Puckett was the food editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she crafted award-winning stories about food not simply as a practical matter but as sustenance for the soul. Now a free agent (and regular Atlanta magazine contributor), she explores her native Mississippi through that same lens.

Puckett grew up in Jackson, less than an hour’s drive from the southern tip of the Delta—a fat tamale-shaped area that stretches from Memphis, Tennessee, to Vicksburg. From the first pages of the introduction, it’s clear she is the perfect driver for this road trip. “You know when you’ve arrived,” she writes. “The highways narrow, billboards and streetlights disappear, and the gently rolling hills dissolve into tracts of farmland as flat and wide as a calm, dark sea. Flocks of blackbirds swoop in ribbonlike formation across the expansive sky. Snowy-white egrets dot the edges of shimmering man-made catfish ponds and sinuous, swampy bayous. At times these are the only visible signs of life for miles.”

Though Puckett includes plenty of recipes, you don’t have to be a cook (or a Mississippian) to appreciate the beauty of this book, published by the University of Georgia Press. The language is stunning and the photographs—by Langdon Clay—are frame-worthy. Puckett pays proper homage to the standards: barbecue, meat-and-three specials, mile-high meringue pies. But she also dishes out catfish pâté, Lebanese kibbeh, dill pickles marinated in Kool-Aid, and chicken brined in sweet tea. At the beginning of this mesmerizing journey, Puckett cites Faulkner: “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” To which she adds her own invaluable tip: “Enter with an empty stomach and an open mind.” Even beyond the Delta, it’s the only way to travel.

Photograph by Joann Vitelli. This review originally appeared in our February 2013 issue.

Q&A with Taylor Branch

Teresa Weaver — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:00:00 GMT

Taylor Branch published Parting the Waters, the first volume in his definitive three-part history of the civil rights movement, in 1988. In the quarter-century since, virtually everything has changed about the way books are published and how history is consumed. Branch said for years he had fielded complaints from college professors and high school teachers that, although they loved the storytelling approach of his MLK trilogy, they simply could not compel students to plow through all 3,000 pages.

Branch responds now with The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (Simon & Schuster), considerably less daunting at 200 pages. Branch chose eighteen pivotal moments from his original three-volume series and wrote new introductions for each, adding concise historical context. The result is a surprisingly effective primer.

Branch, a product of the Westminster Schools in Atlanta, has lived for years in Baltimore. He dedicated this slim volume to “students of freedom and teachers of history.” Even in the digital age, Branch believes in the power of narrative history. “The further away we get from something, the harder it is to put it in context,” he said. “Stories and details and characters are vital.”

Branch, who turns sixty-six this month, taught a course in civil rights history at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last year and he’s developing a similar online course through the University of Baltimore. And he continues to ply his trade as a journalist, sparking the most controversy of his career with a 2011 piece he wrote for The Atlantic called “The Shame of College Sports.” “My son teases me all the time that a toss-off history of college sports generated more heat than my life’s work in civil rights,” Branch said.

From his home in Baltimore, Branch talked recently about history, publishing, and staying relevant.

An interview with the author

How did you choose the eighteen moments to focus on in this book? I slaved over the introductions as much as I did the choices. For example, the chapter on the political conventions of 1964 is a very short [one], but it makes it clearer than ever that the conventions together were really a pivotal moment in American history, when the Democrats and the Republicans essentially switched places. The race issue was powerful enough to reverse the whole partisan structure of American politics in a way that lasts to this day.

Why dedicate this book to history teachers? High school history teachers kept telling me that they are beleaguered. Schools aren’t evaluated on what their students learn about history; they’re evaluated on reading and math. So history is an orphan. You’re at the low end of the totem pole for textbooks, and the textbooks aren’t very good anyway. And a lot of American history teachers told me that when they get to the civil rights movement, they’re Googling for something they can use that’s not boiled oatmeal.

You’ve spent more than a third of your life researching and writing about civil rights? Was it time well spent? It absolutely was, and still is, my life’s mission. It’s what goes deepest in me. I wasn’t born or raised to be a writer, let alone a writer about race relations. But I grew up in this period. I was in the first grade when the Brown decision happened, and I was a senior in college when Dr. King was murdered. In all the formative years in between, the civil rights movement was pounding away. Finally, it changed the direction of my life’s interest against my will.

Do you think that where you came from drove your interest? Absolutely. The elders in Atlanta at that period insisted that they had everything under control, when they clearly didn’t and were rattled and unnerved. Nobody—no elected official that I knew of—was calling for the end of segregation. It was a pretty big adjustment emotionally to see that these black kids—my age and younger—were really more in command of the agenda and of the moral high ground than the people who ran the world. It was a pretty unsettling time.

What do you read for pleasure? Mostly history? I’m afraid so. Right now I’m reading a history of the early Indochina war —the French period, from World War II until the American war started, the forties and the fifties. Only when I’m going on vacation do I get to read a novel, and usually it’s a Laura Lippman or an Elmore Leonard.

Besides your own, what are a few American history books that everybody should read? The one that inspired me to write narrative history was Shelby Foote’s The Civil War. For a one-volume book, I think Garry Wills’s book on the Gettysburg Address is a treasure. For a broader history outside the United States, one of my favorites is Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, about the Belgian colony in the Congo. And Hochschild’s To End All Wars, about World War I, is a fascinating work.

In 2009, you published The Clinton Tapes, a very unguarded glimpse into the presidency of your old friend Bill Clinton. What kind of reaction did you get to that book? Not nearly what I had hoped for. I think it’s fair to say that’s a disappointment in my career, because it was intended to make people feel what it’s like to be president—not to be Bill Clinton, but to be president. I guess I naively thought the uniqueness of it—a bird’s-eye view of a president struggling to be candid about things as they were happening—wouldn’t be overwhelmingly politicized. But some people said it was a whitewash of Clinton, and surprisingly, a lot of Clinton supporters said it was a betrayal of him because it showed too many warts. It was an amazing experience for me, and I’m glad I did it. I hope maybe as people gain more perspective on Clinton, that book will hang around.

What are you working on next? I’ve been working for more than a year now to prepare at least one book—maybe two—on James and Dolley Madison. I’ve jumped back a couple of centuries! The civil rights movement puts you in the crucible of the politics and the psychology of democracy, and James and Dolley Madison kind of do that in a different era.

Photograph by J. Brough Schamp.

*EXTENDED VERSION OF THE ARTICLE THAT RAN IN OUR JANUARY 2013 ISSUE

Top 10 Books of 2012

Teresa Weaver — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:59:00 GMT

[TOP FIVE FICTION]

Criminal by Karin Slaughter (Delacorte Press)
Slaughter churns out bestselling crime novels with such frightening frequency, it’s easy to take for granted how talented she is.
ONE GREAT PASSAGE “Lucy’s tongue swelled in her mouth. Her vision blurred. It was useless. There was no air left for her lungs. No oxygen going to her brain. She felt herself start to give, her muscles releasing. The back of her head hit pavement. She stared up. The sky was impossibly black, pinholes of stars barely visible. The man stared down at her, the same concerned look in his eyes. Only this time, he was smiling.”

Elza’s Kitchen by Marc Fitten (Bloomsbury)
Fitten’s second stylish Hungarian folktale captures the dreaded ennui of a forty-eight-year-old divorcée and restaurateur who wakes up missing something she can’t quite identify.
ONE GREAT PASSAGE “She shook her head at her reflection again. Her skin was sallow and her temples, gray. Her eyes looked sunken in. Her breasts sagged like plastic shopping bags. She tried to force a smile. She pulled her hair back and stuck out her chin. She remembered the younger woman she had been. She thought to herself, I know I am in there. Somewhere. I know I am still here!”

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson (Grand Central Publishing)
In a murder mystery that only Jackson could write—smart, funny, a little twisted—three generations of women cope with the fallout of a sloppily buried secret in Gulf Coast, Mississippi.
ONE GREAT PASSAGE “My daughter, Liza, put her heart in a silver box and buried it under the willow tree in our backyard. Or as close to under that tree as she could anyway. The thick web of roots shunted her off to the side, to the place where the willow’s long fingers trailed down. They swept back and forth across the troubled earth, helping Liza smooth away the dig marks.”

The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont (St. Martin’s Press)
In this sparkling debut novel, an associate professor at Agnes Scott College guides her immensely likable teenage protagonist—the Dickensian-named Jason Prosper—through a perfectly rendered world of boarding schools and sailboats.
One Great Passage “What Cal liked best was to spot waves during an upcoming squall. We both understood that it was always best to sail directly into a storm. Never away. When riding into colder water we could feel the surface air cool, the wind slow and back down. Together we’d calibrate the rise, as gale forces cause the edges of crest to break into spindrift.”

A True History of the Captivation, Transport to Strange Lands & Deliverance of Hannah Guttentag by Josh Russell (Dzanc Books)
In this wickedly funny send-up of Puritan-era captivity narratives, scholar Hannah Guttentag lives out her own “captivity”—and redemption—in early-1990s academia.
ONE GREAT PASSAGE “Buttery September sun slanted into the basement cafe. I listened to Joanie and Sam and Nat say smart, snide things about TV shows and books and movies and professors, and it became clear to me it would be at times like this . . . that I would live the life of the mind I’d imagined living when I first got the letter from Cornell.”

[TOP FIVE NONFICTION]

Must Win: A Season of Survival for a Town and Its Team by Drew Jubera (St. Martin’s Press)
Veteran journalist Jubera mines storytelling gold in this beautifully crafted book about what high school football can mean to a town. His magnificent portraits of the people of Valdosta are more compelling than anything that happens on the gridiron.
ONE GREAT PASSAGE “Beyond a chain-link fence on the other side of the field, a murmuring chorus of parents, retirees, and ex-players idly fingering their championship rings looked on from low wooden bleachers—all of them bunching up and drifting off and then resettling again, like mockingbirds trying to get cozy on a telephone wire.”

My Cross to Bear by Gregg Allman (William Morrow)
The surviving Allman brother relives the glory days and the backstage realities of an enduring rock ’n’ roll band in this frank and unfussy autobiography. Allman is at his best when he’s writing about his one true
love: music.
ONE GREAT PASSAGE “When you get down to it, I was, and probably still am, the least accomplished musician in the band. By accomplished, I mean as far as theory goes, and scoring and reading music—I do none of those. The other guys in the band know more than I do about that stuff, but most of them don’t know shit about singing.”

The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by Janisse Ray (Chelsea Green Publishing)
The author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood returns to her farming roots with a sweet-hearted vengeance in this exuberant, impassioned call to save our heritage through saving seeds. This book is part memoir, part political manifesto, part botany textbook, and pure Ray.
ONE GREAT PASSAGE “On that same farm, the one I roamed as a child eating crabapples and muscadines, pomegranates and sand pears, now the story is Roundup-resistant pigweed growing among rows of genetically modified (GM) soybeans in fields leased to chemical cultivators . . . The sassafras tree my grandfather so carefully skirted with his harrows is dead
and gone.”

Strom Thurmond’s America by Joseph Crespino (Hill and Wang)
Emory University historian Crespino has accomplished something remarkable with this fascinating biography of a despicable political leader (1902–2003). Rather than dismissing Thurmond as a relic, Crespino argues that the late senator was a seminal figure in the rise of modern conservatives.
ONE GREAT PASSAGE “[Thurmond] remains today one of the great American hypocrites, yet there is more than just hypocrisy to his story. And the hypocrisies that exist were not just his or the white South’s alone; they were also America’s. Staring these facts in the face is uncomfortable, yet it is what makes our looking all the more essential.”

The World of the Salt Marsh: Appreciating and Protecting the Tidal Marshes of the Southeastern Atlantic Coast by Charles Seabrook (University of Georgia Press)
In a mesmerizing blend of reporting and memoir, longtime environmental journalist Seabrook captures the poetry and the science behind the marshes that he has loved since his childhood on Johns Island, South Carolina.
ONE GREAT PASSAGE “These teeming multitudes can make swimming in a tidal creek slightly unpleasant. Scores of shrimp constantly run into you, their sharp tails and spines pricking your skin like so many little stickpins. If you swim at night, their little red eyes surround you, thousands of tiny points of light darting about like tiny little spooks.”

This article originally appeared in our December 2012 issue.

Josh Russell

Teresa Weaver — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:55:00 GMT

In his third novel, A True History of the Captivation, Transport to Strange Lands & Deliverance of Hannah Guttentag (Dzanc Books), Josh Russell puts a wry twist on a genre known as “captivity narrative”—typically a story of someone captured by rather uncivilized enemies. His protagonist Hannah Guttentag’s whip-smart and sexy tale, set in early 1990s academia, is instead about being captivated by such savages as librarians, grad students, and professors. Guttentag visits the strange lands of Nashville, Ithaca, and New Orleans—and her studies include Puritan-era women’s narratives. Russell, forty-three, is a remarkably gifted and unpredictable novelist. He grew up in Normal, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Maryland before getting an MFA at Louisiana State University. He worked as a 7-Eleven clerk, a skateboard salesman, an oyster shucker, and an editorial assistant to NPR commentator and poet Andrei Codrescu before landing at Georgia State University, where he is an associate professor of English and codirector of the respected Creative Writing Program.

“Teaching has allowed me to focus on writing for more than a decade, and that’s been a blessing,” says Russell. “My students are always excited and exciting, and I’m fortunate to spend my time with exciting and excited young artists. Honestly, I can’t think of a better job for a writer.”

Russell on Writing
When and where I write when I can find time and where I can find a quiet spot. Right now the dining room table is my favorite. When I write, I write three pages. If that takes an hour, so be it. If it takes ten minutes, I can go swimming. You’d be surprised how fast those three-page pieces add up.

Fiction vs. nonfiction I knew I wanted to concentrate on being a writer of fiction when I took my first creative writing class at Maryland. Before that, I thought I wanted to be a journalist, but quickly I realized I liked making things up too much to be a journalist. This was back before Fox News.

Literary heroes I’m uneasy with calling people whose books I like “heroes.” Martin Luther King Jr. is a hero. I am a serious fan of the work of Leonard Michaels, Borges, and Nabokov.

Recent literary loves Anne Carson’s Nox, Sarah Goldstein’s Fables, Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, and Michael Griffith’s Trophy: A Novel.

Metro Atlanta as a literary hot spot The community is supportive and active to a degree I haven’t seen elsewhere, even in New Orleans, which has a reputation as a literary town. Decatur is wonderful. Last year my kid sat next to Thomas Mullen’s kid in kindergarten. I like to imagine them talking about their dads: “Novelist.” “Mine, too.” “I wish he was a fireman or a lawyer—something more interesting than a boring old novelist.”

The best writing advice he ever got Write the fiction you want to read.

The worst advice Write the fiction you imagine the largest number of people wants to read.

Photograph by Kathryn Russell

Drew Jubera

Teresa Weaver — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 18:50:00 GMT

In South Georgia, high school football lies “somewhere between iconic and mythic,” writes journalist Drew Jubera in his first book, Must Win: A Season of Survival for a Town and Its Team (St. Martin’s Press). Jubera immersed himself in the 2010 football season of Valdosta High School, once the dominant team in the nation. In 2009 the New York Times dispatched Jubera to write about the fallout from a loss to county rival Lowndes High that seemed to mark the official end of the school’s glory days. Jubera realized right away that the story wasn’t just about football, so he spent a year commuting from his home in Atlanta and eventually took up temporary residence in Valdosta.

Must Win is propelled by characters that are way too colorful not to be true. From the troubled senior prodigies to the one-armed superfan named Nub, everybody in town clearly confided in Jubera. The result is a testament not only to storytelling, but to old-fashioned (and time-consuming) reporting, to listening well and writing like crazy. Occasionally the metaphors come as fast and furious as a swarm of South Georgia gnats. But the depth of detail and craftsmanship of a gifted writer at his peak make up for any stumbles.

You don’t have to know a tight end from a Hail Mary to appreciate this book. Consider this irresistible sketch of the irrepressible Nub: “He was all bright squinty eyes and toothy, hidden-agenda grins—a grown-up version of the kid your mother told you over and over not to play with anymore.” On virtually every page, there is a reason to stop, to reread, and to marvel. This is a book worth cheering about.

Photograph by Ellis Vener

Q&A with Emily Giffin

Teresa Weaver — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 14:42:00 GMT

In 2001 Emily Giffin ditched a fledgling law career in Manhattan and set out for London to write fiction. Five bestselling novels and a few million dollars later, that decision looks pretty good. At forty, Giffin and her husband, Buddy Blaha, are doting parents to twin eight-year-old sons Edward and George and daughter Harriet, who turned five in May. The family recently moved into a $5 million Buckhead manse, and Blaha left a top job at Newell Rubbermaid “to smell the roses before gearing up again,” Giffin says. “We recently went to St. Barts for our ten-year anniversary, and he wrote ‘coach’ as his occupation on his immigration document. I’ve never seen him so happy. It really makes me realize how lucky I am to love what I do.”

That search for bliss works its way into many of Giffin’s novels, including her new one, Where We Belong (St. Martin’s Press). Thirty-six-year-old TV producer Marian Caldwell’s life is flipped upside down when an eighteen-year-old girl appears at her doorstep, saying, “I think you’re my mother.”

An interview with the author

The last time we talked was right before the film version of Something Borrowed came out. What did you think of the finished product? It surpassed my expectations, and I thought Kate Hudson and John Krasinski had amazing chemistry. Of course there were things I would have changed, but that will happen in any collaborative process. Overall I think it really captured my characters and the feel and tone of the book. I loved it.

Are there other film projects in the works? Yes, the script for Heart of the Matter, written by Naomi Foner—Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s mother—is nearly finished. I met with her recently and was so impressed with her vision for the film. Hilary Swank and Molly Smith are producing. (They produced Something Borrowed and have also optioned Something Blue). The script has also been written for Love the One You’re With. Bruna Papandrea, the producer of Milk, is producing and really wants the film to have a subtle, artsy feel, which I think is perfect for the story.

You’ve done a couple of cameos on a soap opera and in Something Borrowed. Do you enjoy that? Do you have any real acting aspirations? Yes, I really enjoy the glimpse into that world. It’s so fun to be a part of the process, and I think it’s neat for my family, friends, and readers to see me on screen. (Although my kids are still too young to watch a PG-13 movie!) But I have absolutely no acting aspirations—which is fortunate, because I also have zero talent. The director of SOBO, Luke Greenfield, mercilessly mocked me for looking directly into the camera after every take.

You’ve achieved a level of financial success that most novelists can only dream about. Does that increase the pressure when you sit down to write the next book? Or decrease it? The financial aspects of the job are completely divorced from the stress I feel when I sit down to write. It has everything to do with wanting readers to like the new book at least as much as the one before it. I feel a great connection with my readers and would never want to disappoint them. On a much lesser level, I can’t help caring what reviewers think of my work. I have increasingly steeled myself to criticism, but it still can sting, especially when you feel that it is unfair—or that they are judging my book by its cover or by preconceived notions.

When you write, do you have a particular reader in mind? Yes. My mother. We have the same taste in books and movies, and generally the same feeling about people—whether characters or celebrities, friends, and acquaintances. She’s very honest, so if she likes what I’ve written, I feel a little more confident putting it out there to the world.

You have a knack for creating characters that readers really care about. Is that where fiction starts for you? Or do you have a basic plot line in mind? My stories always begin with a very general premise, such as, “What happens if you have a second chance with the one who got away?” or, “Are there any deal breakers when it comes to true love?” The characters come next. And as they interact with one another, the nitty-gritty of the plot and story unfolds.

Do you know the ending when you start a novel? I might think I know it, but I’m almost always wrong.

>> AUDIOBOOK:
Listen to an excerpt from Giffin's latest novel

What’s the strangest feedback you’ve ever gotten from a reader? Darcy, the heroine of Something Blue, is quite shallow and opinionated. At one point, she commented that she dislikes “gingers,” i.e., men with red hair. I received several emails from fiery redheads who said they were offended by “my” comments. I had to remind them that it is fiction. If I write about a murderer, it doesn’t mean I have a dead body in my trunk. It was also fortunate that I was able to write back and tell them that I once dated a guy with red hair! I’m no Darcy.

In writing fiction, how important are happy endings? I like happy endings and prefer them in books, whether I’ve written them or not. That said, I try to be true to my characters. They really dictate my endings—most of which have been melancholic but hopeful and certainly not tied up neatly with a bow.

Do you believe in happy endings in real life? That’s hard to say. I don’t think that’s something you really believe in. I do hope for them, though. I worry about everything, but I’m an optimist.

You’ve been a journal-keeper for much of your life. Do you keep one nowadays? I don’t—and it’s something that bothers me all the time. But instead, I take photographs. I have over forty albums since my boys were born eight years ago. Everything is documented, just in a different way.

Do you still write mostly in the mornings? Is that your most creative time? Or is the schedule born of necessity? I like to write in the mornings and late at night, when there are fewer distractions. But so much of my work involves the business side of writing. At least half of my hours logged are about marketing, publicity, preparing for a book launch, strategizing, working on social media, etc. I’m grateful to be where I am, but sometimes I miss the days when all I had to worry about was writing my book.

What’s the best book you’ve read lately? The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. I love stories about sports. When I was little, I wanted to be a sportswriter, and recently I’ve been given the most exciting (and intimidating) assignment to write the essay for my friend Ralph Sampson for his induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame this fall.

What’s the first book you remember really loving? If we’re talking children’s books, I first fell in love with the Betsy, Tacy, and Tib books by Maud Hart Lovelace. I so hope that they aren’t too old-fashioned for my daughter when it comes time for her to read on her own. As for adult books, the first one I can really remember obsessing over is The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. That book touched me in ways I still can recall.

Did you learn anything in law school that helps you in your writing? No. Ha-ha. But seriously—no.

Photograph by Michael A. Schwarz

*EXTENDED VERSION OF THE ARTICLE THAT RAN IN OUR AUGUST 2012 ISSUE

Vouched Books

Candice Dyer — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:00:00 GMT

In today’s digitized, attention-deficit world, guerilla booksellers must bring intrepid commitment to their work, infiltrating events where bespectacled conspirators are likely to congregate.

“People ask who is paying me to do this, and I have to say, ‘Nobody—I just really love these particular books,’” says Laura Straub, the “vicereine” of Vouched Atlanta, a grassroots initiative that promotes and distributes the literature of small, independent presses.

Straub, a twenty-five-year-old writer who moved here from Muncie, Indiana, in 2008, essentially acts as a curator, sorting through hundreds of books in a variety of genres to cull favorites. Then she sets up her folding table at festivals, galleries, and other artsy crossroads around Atlanta—Artlantis, the Goat Farm, the Solar Anus reading series—with around twenty-five selections she can discuss in an on-the-spot book club. She usually buys four or five copies of each title directly from the publisher at cost and sells them for a $1 or $2 markup, which she uses to buy more titles.

“I’ve read them, hence the name,” Straub says of Vouched, which started in Indianapolis “to remind people that literature can shake its ass,” according to its website, where readers can find more ardent commentary and reviews as well as the location of the next ambush sale. “Indie lit can be hard to find, so I thought this was a novel concept to deal with that need,” Straub says, giggling and apologizing for the pun.

Illustration by Bomboland

Summer Reading List

Teresa Weaver — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:00:00 GMT

This summer’s nonfiction ranges from the memoirs of a ramblin’ Rock and Roll Hall of Famer to the musings of a civil rights icon to the travelogue of an accidental bird-watcher. New novels set in suburban Atlanta, rural Georgia, Manhattan, small-town Alabama, North Carolina, and a midsize Hungarian city are testaments to the depth and variety of literature happening right here.

ACROSS THAT BRIDGE by John Lewis (Hyperion)
Atlanta’s longtime congressman renews his call for nonviolent activism and basic civility, revisiting lessons learned more than half a century ago. Having survived more than forty arrests, physical attacks, and serious injuries, when Lewis frets about today’s partisan discourse, he deserves a receptive audience.
First look: Even I, who have looked down the barrel of a gun with only my faith to defend me, would say there is a unique hostility in these times that almost seems worse to me than we experienced in the 1960s.

THE ARMCHAIR BIRDER GOES COASTAL by John Yow (University of North Carolina Press)
In this delightful follow-up to 2009’s The Armchair Birder, Yow travels beyond his backyard in Acworth. Organized by seasons, Yow’s avian adventures stretch from North Carolina’s Outer Banks, down the coast, and westward along the Gulf of Mexico, blending anecdotes with field notes from top naturalists.
First look: Seeing us coming, two hundred white pelicans had already removed themselves from the beach and resettled on the water a hundred yards out. As we picked our way carefully along the shoreline, the air was filled with the low murmur of birds yet unseen in the vegetation rising on our left side. Then, sudden as summer thunder, the white ibises arose . . . wheeling low overhead in a churning cloud of white.

MY CROSS TO BEAR by Gregg Allman with Alan Light (William Morrow)
Allman’s solo album Low Country Blues was nominated for Best Blues Album at 2011’s Grammy Awards, where his band was honored with a lifetime achievement award. In his memoir, Allman opens up about his years in Macon (or at least what he can remember of them), his brother’s death, his most famous wife, and all his personal demons. The only constant was a pure, palpable love of making music.
First look: Basically you state the problem in the first verse, you embellish on the problem in the second verse—like “let me tell what a bitch she really is”—and then you usually have some good music to let you think about them words for a while and also get lifted up by that music.

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE REDNECK RIVIERA by Harvey H. Jackson III (University of Georgia Press)
A historian at Jacksonville State University focuses on the stretch of coast from Mobile Bay, Alabama, to Panama City, Florida, that grew from a string of small, sparsely populated fishing villages into a vacation mecca for Southern working-class families and spring break bacchanals. The book captures the constantly shifting relationship between the coast and its people.
First look: Children were not the only harbingers of change. Even though the motels close to the amusements had maintained their reputation as safe places for families to stay, the beach was beginning to attract people who wanted to do more than swim, play Goofy Golf, fish a little, eat seafood fried or raw, and go home with a carved coconut head.

THE WORLD OF THE SALT MARSH by Charles Seabrook (University of Georgia Press)
For more than three decades, Seabrook has traveled the world writing about science and the environment for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In this book, he takes a very personal—but still beautifully reported—journey as he explores the Southeastern U.S. coast, from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to Cape Canaveral, Florida. A native of Johns Island, South Carolina, Seabrook delves into natural history and ecological threats without letting the poetry of the marsh get lost in the science.
First look: I spent half my childhood trying to get off an island. I have spent half my adulthood trying to get back.

CARING IS CREEPY by David Zimmerman (Soho Press)
In this relentless psychological thriller, fifteen-year-old Lynn Marie Sugrue escapes her bleak reality by flirting online with a young soldier. When he gets in trouble on base and flees to the girl’s home in rural Georgia, a bad situation turns really disturbing. Lynn keeps him in a storage space accessible only through her closet, even as her mother’s boyfriend sinks deeper into criminal activities that put the entire household at risk. The author grew up in Atlanta and teaches now at Iowa State.
First look: So this is August of 2005 in Metter, Georgia, population half of nothing. A million miles from anywhere good. So this is me and Dani, just turned fifteen and a couple weeks away from our sophomore year at Metter High. So this is me f---ing up my life like you wouldn’t believe.

ELZA’S KITCHEN by Marc Fitten (Bloomsbury)
Fitten returns to the Hungary he depicted so brilliantly in his debut novel, Valeria’s Last Stand (2009), for another fable of midlife passion and rekindled purpose. Forty-eight-year-old divorcee Elza runs a respectable restaurant in the city of Delibab, serving up Hungarian classics and missing something she can’t quite identify. The author lived in Hungary in his twenties, when that country was going through tremendous political and cultural change. His characters capture a time and a place while still being absolutely magical.
First look: Elza arrived at the woeful conclusion that the last time she could remember feeling truly hopeful about life was a staggering twenty years prior—when her skin was a touch more elastic, her hair was uncolored, she was newly freed from a bad marriage, and her future spilled out around her like a tipped-over bag of flour.

I COULDN’T LOVE YOU MORE by Jillian Medoff (Grand Central Publishing/Five Spot)
Eliot, a middle-aged working mom in a precariously blended family, has a chance encounter with her long-lost first love, Finn, that sets off a series of crises (real and existential) that threaten her carefully calibrated life in the Atlanta suburbs. Midway through the novel, a family day at the beach takes a nasty, slightly melodramatic turn that puts everything in perspective for Eliot. Life is all about choices, made and unmade.
First look: At the beginning of my daughter’s princess party, right before Cinderella is scheduled to arrive, my sister Sylvia announces, apropos of nothing, that she is going blind.

SAVING RUTH by Zoe Fishman (William Morrow Paperbacks)
In her second novel, Fishman draws inspiration from her own childhood—growing up Jewish in Alabama—to spin a coming-of-age tale that has a little of everything: racial tension, sibling love-hate, even an eating disorder. Ruth Wasserman and her soccer-star brother come home from their respective colleges for the summer to take up their regular lifeguarding duties. When a little girl nearly sinks on their watch, long-held secrets start their inevitable rise. The author, who now lives in Atlanta, has a deft touch with the details of childhood.
First look: I wondered if my old Barbies were hiding in there, with their botched haircuts and chewed-up feet. My appetite for those minuscule hunks of malleable plastic had been insatiable. By the time I had been done with a Barbie, she was hairless and crippled.

SEVEN WAYS TO DIE by William Diehl with Kenneth John Atchity (AEI/Story Merchant Books)
Before he died in 2006, Diehl (Sharky’s Machine and Primal Fear) had written more than 400 pages of his tenth novel, about a captain in the NYPD on the trail of a serial killer in Manhattan. Using an outline and notes that Diehl left behind, Atchity finished the thriller, staying very true to the fast-paced, screenplay-ready plot that was the author’s trademark. It’s a fitting posthumous tribute to the former journalist—and first managing editor of Atlanta magazine—who left his day job in his fifties to pursue his dream of writing fiction.
First look: As always his psyche was momentarily askew. He performed each autopsy compassionately. They were constant reminders of the finite line between life and death, between the human body and a corpse without a soul.

SPRING FEVER by Mary Kay Andrews (St. Martin’s Press)
The ninth in a shelf full of crowd-pleasing novels from the chick-lit maven of Avondale Estates is set in Passcoe, North Carolina. Annajane Hudgens is so over her ex-husband that she shows up for his wedding to the horribly perfect Celia. Fate intervenes in the unlikely form of a child’s ailing appendix, which halts the wedding and makes Annajane (and her ex) start thinking about second chances.
First look: “Don’t kid yourself that he’s had a change of heart, Annajane dear. One little night apart won’t hurt me. Because he’ll be sharing my bed for years and years to come,” Celia gloated. She stepped aside and held the bathroom door open with a flourish. “And don’t bother to wait on an invitation to the wedding. This time, it’s strictly a private FAMILY affair.”

Teresa Weaver is one of our editorial contributors.
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Amber Dermont

Tue, 01 May 2012 17:39:00 GMT

Amber Dermont's debut novel, "The Starboard Sea," is set in a fictional world of beauty and privilege that she remembers clearly, but with a healthy dose of cynicism. The associate professor at Agnes Scott College grew up in a Victorian coastal village on Cape Cod. “When you grow up by the ocean, you have no idea how lucky you are,” she says. In her novel, teenager Jason Prosper is reeling from the suicide of his prep school sailing partner and first love, Cal, and trying to fit in at a new, lesser East Coast boarding school that is full of similarly rich, fallen kids. “We weren’t bad people,” Jason says, “but having failed that initial test of innocence and honor, we no longer felt burdened to be good.” He finds some comfort with a girl named Aidan and, alternately, with a smug band of annoying, perhaps dangerous classmates. It’s a coming-of-age story about learning to navigate by the right stars—or sometimes in the pitch black. The descriptive passages are lovely, whether Dermont is writing about the open sea or an ancient doorman: “In his navy wool uniform, all epaulets, gold tassels, and brass stars, his kind face glistening with sweat, Max looked like the commander of a sinking ship.” And the author is remarkably adept at writing in the voice of a teenage boy. “Not a challenge,” she says, laughing. “I have the mentality of a fourteen-year-old boy. No, I have a real love for teenagers. I really am fascinated by them, because they’re so much smarter than we are.”

An interview with Dermont

For six years, Amber Dermont has taught creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Decatur. "There's such an incredible tradition here," she said. "It's stunning to me how you don't have to 'convert' anyone to the beauty of creative writing." Dermont recently was awarded a $25,000 fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts that will help her find the time and space to finish her second novel, "The Laughing Girl," which is set against the backdrop of a 1962 plane crash near Paris, France, that took the lives of more than 100 passengers and crew, including some of Atlanta's most dedicated art patrons.

At Dancing Goats Coffee Bar, Dermont, the daughter of rare-book dealers, talked about tradition, privilege and her debut novel, "The Starboard Sea," a coming-of-age story written in the voice of Jason Prosper, a teenage boy at a Northeastern prep school who is mourning the loss of his best friend and sailing partner, Cal.

Your descriptions of this world—especially of sailing—are stunning. Do you sail? I do. I grew up in the very beginning of Cape Cod, in a little coastal village called Onset. When you grow up by the ocean, you have no idea how lucky you are. [Laughs] It was really important to me to get the language right, but to not have it get in the way of the story. I always loved Wallace Stevens's poem "The Idea of Order at Key West." . . . There's a lot of privilege that goes along with sailing—there's an obnoxious side to it—but if you actually know how to harness the wind, what to do with it, you do feel powerful. You feel like Prospero.

Tell me about writing in the voice of a teenage boy. Was it difficult? Not a challenge. I have the mentality of a fourteen-year-old boy. [Laughs] I have a real love of teenagers, although I myself did not have the greatest adolescence. I really am fascinated by them, because they're so much smarter than we are. And they don't know it, so they don't really do anything with their own intelligence usually. I find that stage of adolescence fascinating—where you're suddenly challenging authority, you're pressing these boundaries, you're defiant, and you're doing all this in an attempt to find out what matters to you, what sense of morality you might have. And I find teenage boys incredibly funny.

So it wasn't hard to get inside Jason's head? I really wanted to challenge myself as much as possible. What better way than through gender? If you create a character that is very much like you, that character's going to notice in a scene all the things that you would notice. If you write a character that's completely unlike you, they're going to have to notice all the things that you wouldn't usually. So it makes you a better writer.

I heard that you do every writing assignment that you give to your students. True? Yeah, it's true. I just feel like it's a way of keeping me honest. If you stand up in front of a classroom and pretend to tell somebody what to do with writing, you'd better be able to do it yourself. My students may be struggling with some issue of point of view, and I can come in and say, "You know, I had the exact same struggle this weekend, and this is what I did." They know I'm in it with them . . . Sometimes we do in-class writing, and mine is not always the best! I think that's important for them to see. This is a struggle, a process. You don't get it right the first time necessarily. It's not really even about getting it right.

You've studied under some great writers, including one of my favorites, the late Barry Hannah. Barry Hannah is my heart. He read this manuscript in its very early stages, and he called me up right after he read it and said he loved it. He said, "I loved seeing inside the dirty windows." He would say things like that in class. You'd come to class and just sort of wait for the wisdom. Just receive it, just receive it. He was so incredibly generous. What I think he was able to do was lead you to your authentic voice.

What have you read lately that you love? I picked up the new Alan Hollinghurst book, "The Stranger's Child." "The Line of Beauty" is one of my favorite books. It's so beautiful. I'm really interested in Geoff Dyer's essays, "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition." Oh man, they're so smart. And he's such a wordsmith. I read a lot of poetry. I'm lucky to have a lot of friends who are poets. Sabrina Orah Mark—she teaches at UGA—has a collection of poems called "Tsim Tsum" that is amazing. She has another collection called "The Babies," about all the people who weren't born because the Holocaust happened. She's the closest thing we have to Samuel Beckett. She's amazing. She's married to Reginald McKnight, who's one of my favorite short story writers. "The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas" is one of the most beautiful collections. Whenever I have my students read that collection, there's this moment where you feel like everybody is in it together and has learned something about writing, about how to live, about how to be a better human being. It's nice as a teacher to have those stories that are touchstones, that you know are going to bring your student to this moment of revelation.

Do you write any poetry? I do. I think you have to be able to write everything. I very definitely love narrative, and I was initially drawn to the world of stories. I loved Robert Penn Warren when I was a kid. It was Penn Warren and Flannery O'Connor for me.

What's your writing process? Do you write every day? My friend Holiday Reinhorn once called me a vampire. She said, "I'll see you and then there's suddenly a story, and I don't know how it happened!" I work at night. I have terrible insomnia, so I stay up all night and I work. I've never had that experience where you sort of touch the bottom of the pool—that deep, deep sleep. It's like the line in Martin Amis's novel "The Information": "And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night." Whenever I'm almost asleep, I get a line or something.

As far as a process, what you do always stays a little magical to you. You never demystify it entirely for yourself. I don't have a desk. I write in bed. I remember seeing a photograph of Woody Allen writing in bed. That made me feel a little better.

Anyway, the days are sort of useless to me. When I was finishing this manuscript, there were two months when all I did was write, all day long. In order to write a novel, I think you have to be in that world in such a sustained and concrete way, that anything that takes you out of that world is going to harm the process of getting back into it.

So that's a lot different than writing a short story? Short stories are so different, because each one is so different. I have some stories that I've worked on for half a dozen years or more, and I have stories that I wrote in a weekend and got published three months later. And I wouldn't say that one story was better than the other. I think some stories you receive, if you've done the work and you're ready to receive.

I can't help but notice the giant skull ring you're wearing. What's the story behind that? It's my tribute to Alexander McQueen. [Laughs] When you're writing, you always have to think about mortality. I think it's really important to have that there. When you write, you honor the dead. You honor the great writers, and you honor the people in your life who are no longer there. You think about that.

You've studied with some great writers: Barry Hannah, Marilynne Robinson, Frank Conroy, Andre Dubus III . . . I have no ego about my writing. I always just want to make it better and make it better and make it better. And I think a lot of that came out of the workshop process, where you have to defend your work but not be defensive about it. If you make your whole life your art, you figure out how to bring those stories into every part of your world.

Are there tradeoffs when you make your whole life your art? I'm very fond of my aloneness. Whenever people can't stand their own company, I feel bad for them. I need a lot of solitude. I also don't know anyone who has as many or as good friends as I do. But, yeah, one of the challenges of making art is dying alone.

Photograph by T.W. Meyer

*EXTENDED VERSION OF THE ARTICLE THAT RAN IN OUR MAY 2012 ISSUE

Teresa Weaver is one of our editorial contributors.
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Joshilyn Jackson

Teresa Weaver — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:00 GMT

In her latest Southern Gothic joyride, Joshilyn Jackson creates an unforgettable story of generational dysfunction and sloppily buried secrets. "A Grown-up Kind of Pretty" (Grand Central Publishing) finds the Slocumb women—matriarch Ginny (aka Big), daughter Liza, and granddaughter Mosey—resigned to living under a cosmic curse that returns every fifteen years. "I was turning forty-five, and that meant it was a trouble year," Big hints calmly. Recovering addict Liza, victim of a stroke that left her unable to speak, narrates her chapters in brilliant third person: "She can see the word she wants to say shining in her head, clear and hard and empty and sparkling. She knows exactly how its cool rim would feel against her lip if she lifted it to her mouth and drank, but her mouth can't find the shape of the word that is this thing." When a grave is unearthed in the backyard, fifteen-year-old Mosey wants to solve the mystery, even as her grandmother Big is hell-bent on keeping the past buried—though it may cost her the love of her life. "Here's this woman who has lost her girlhood to her own child," author Jackson, forty-three, explains. "And she's lost her young womanhood to raising her child's child. I wanted this forty-five-year-old to get that fifteen-year-old first-love thing."

Photograph by Elizabeth Osborne

After recording the last few chapters of the audiobook version of her latest novel, Joshilyn Jackson stopped in at Octane on Atlanta’s Westside to talk about life and "A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty."

Your books are such a curious blend of dark and light. Thank you. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. [Laughs]

How did this one start? With a character, a plot idea, what? You know, I think about books for a really long time before I write them. I had sort of an idea for Liza right after I finished "Between,Georgia," but I wasn’t ready to write it yet. But what happened was, I was sitting in an airport and I overheard this conversation—I do that a lot. There was this woman walking past me and she was of a certain age and she was not going gently into that good night. Very resort wear, very put together. Beautiful forehead, you know? I like to sit in airport bars and pretend I’m doing something and listen. It’s one of the best places, because people go past you talking and you can only hear that much. This woman was on the phone with somebody and she’s really mad. So she says, “So, we’re on the phone and she’s promising me she’s not gonna do it anymore, and right there, while she’s on the phone with me, SHE’S DOING IT.” [Laughs] And I thought, “What could she be on the phone doing, swearing that she wasn’t going to do anymore?” The nicest thing I could think of was smoking, but I don’t think it was smoking. So I thought about that, and I decided it was a girl who’s a virgin who has a neurosis that causes her to pee on pregnancy tests. What grew out of that woman was Claire Richardson, but the girl I thought of was Mosey. So I guess it started with Mosey.

For a while now, I’ve been very interested in writing about male-female friendships. Not a romantic relationship, but a male-female friendship. I knew I didn’t want Mosey to have any kind of a romance. I wasn’t interested in writing a teen romance. But it felt like her story would be a springtime story. And it would be a story about burgeoning. But later I realized it would be her grandmother who would have this love story and burgeon. Here’s this woman who has lost her girlhood to her own child. And she’s lost her young womanhood to raising her child’s child. While this fifteen-year-old deals with things you shouldn’t have to deal with until you’re at least forty-five, I wanted this forty-five-year-old to get that fifteen-year-old first love thing. I just wanted to give her that.

Which character do you feel closest to? Liza. I have a good distance from Big and Mosey. The more distant I feel from a character, the easier it is for me to see inside them. The more connected I feel to a character, the harder they are to write. Liza was very hard to write. I gave her a stroke specifically so that she couldn’t talk. The first 80 percent of the book I wrote was just Big and Mosey. And my best friend and writing partner of many years kept saying, “You all but killed Liza to shut her up. You know you’re gonna have to let her talk.” I kept saying, “She can’t talk, she had a stroke, she doesn’t have anything to say. Shut up.” I was about 80 percent done with the book, about three months from turning it in, and I realized she was right. So I had to go through and rip the whole thing open and take parts away from Big and Mosey and let Liza have a voice. The parts that you’re closer to and feel connected to in some more personal way, they’re the hardest to write, but they’re also my favorite. Liza is my favorite now, even though I hated every second of writing her.

Why did you set it on the Mississippi Gulf Coast? I grew up on the Gulf Coast, and I love the Gulf Coast all the way across. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is more verdant than the Florida part, and I wanted that. This is a verdant book. [Laughs] I wanted that green Mississippi-ness to it. I love Mississippi—especially coastal Mississippi.

Do you consider this a mystery? For all my books, I [borrow] structure from genres that I read. And I read murder mysteries. I freakin’ love Laura Lippman, like wrongfully. "Backseat Saints" was built on the bones of a thriller. I structured that by reading Jack Reacher novels. So I would say it’s a Southern Gothic family drama that’s built on the bones of a mystery. I write weird crap. I don’t know what I’m doing. [Laughs]

How important is a great first line to you? To me, the first line has to contain the ending and set voice. The end of the book has to be in the first line in some way. A lot of times, I don’t write the first line last. And a lot of times I won’t even see how it connects. And then I’ll get to the end and see.

So you don’t know the ending when you start? I don’t know crap. [Laughs] I know the characters, to the bone. I think about these people for years and know how they’re related to each other and what their inner workings are and what their history is. In my novels, the backstory is really thick. That I know. Everything that happened before the book starts, I know.

I had a very different idea of who Mosey was when I started the book. That happened. That developed. The plot for me comes last. I love plot, but plot is how I entertain myself enough to do the hideous work of getting the words right. If I knew the plot, I would never write the book, because then it would just be the hideous work of getting the words right. Whereas now it’s the hideous work of trying to get the words right while finding out what happens next.

What are you like when you’re writing a novel? A little crazed? I hope not, because I’m always writing. [Laughs] If so, everyone in my life is screwed, because I’m never not writing.

Your kids are how old now? Nine and fourteen. You know, I married the right man. Those children were born happy. My son is the easiest teenager on the planet. He’d be embarrassed to hear me say that. It’s really fun to have conversations with him now, because he’s turned into this person with ideas about philosophy, and he watches a lot of the movies that I watch. And he likes Jack Reacher books. It’s really kind of cool.

Do either of the kids show any writer tendencies? Sam is very much math and science. But he’s also a huge reader. What he wants to do is be a game designer, which has a lot of plot in it. Maisy Jane is hugely creative, but she’s very performance-based. She takes acting lessons and dance, and she sings. She’s a huge reader, too, and she writes. She’s written several books and they’re brilliant, I’m here to tell you. She’s even illustrated them herself.

Are you doing any teaching nowadays? No. I love to teach, but the same semester I was teaching at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Susan Rebecca White also asked me to take her class at Emory. So I had a book deadline, two children, and I’m teaching graduate students and undergraduates. I can do two full-time jobs. I can be a novelist and do the publicity and raise my children. And I probably could have taught one class and really enjoyed it. But teaching a class and mentoring five graduate students was too much. It was really fulfilling but exhausting.

Do you write every day? No. I write most days. But some days I just don’t. Here’s the thing I do that’s really weird. I go away for a week or two at a time and generate 20,000 words, writing twelve hours a day. It’s awful. And then I’ll spend five or six days a week—maybe four hours, certainly no more than six—fixing. That’s the fun part! And then the rest of my working day I do all the other things you have to do—work on the website, do all the prepub and postpub interview stuff, blog, keep up with email. I probably spend three hours a day on just office crap.

And then I play MMORPG, which is very time-consuming. I like to kill things. It makes me calm. My husband and I do that. Instead of watching television, we kill things together.

You still live in Powder Springs? We’ll be there till we die. Our house is paid for.

You still get lost when you come into Atlanta? Yeah, but to be fair, I get lost in Powder Springs too. I just push OnStar. If it’s not the grocery store or my church, I push OnStar. And I have the service where a real human being will come on and talk to you. For fifteen bucks a month I can push a button and have a man tell me where I am and how to go to the next place. It’s awesome. When my momtastic van died—I drive cars until they fall in chunks on the road—my husband asked what kind of car I wanted and I said, “I want it to be orange and I want it to have OnStar.”

Orange? Because it’s my favorite color and you can find it in the parking lot. Because the other thing I do is always lose my car.

What’s your next book about? It’s called "Someone Else’s Love Story," and it’s set in North Georgia and Atlanta. A lot of it is set in [author] Karen Abbott’s old condo on Piedmont Avenue. It is a book about miracles, but they’re all fake. It’s got two narrators: a twenty-one-year-old woman named Shandi, who has experienced a virgin birth, sort of, and a thirty-something conservationist named William who works with the North Georgia mollusks that are disappearing out of all the streams. He has Asperger’s syndrome. They meet in a holdup at a Circle K up in the North Georgia mountains. He is broken. When he goes into that Circle K, he is at a place where there is no reason for him to take another breath. Shandi is a mess, and she’s very funny. Her chapters are in first person; his chapters are much shorter, and in third person. They tell the story in an alternating way, where their lives intersect. When she goes into the Circle K, she has a four-year-old son, and the first thing that happens is, William moves between the gunman and her child. Partially because he doesn’t care if he lives or dies, but she doesn’t know that. So she just falls in love with him right there. She says, “Someone should have told me that morning that I was walking into bullets and a love story, especially since it isn’t and wasn’t and could never be my love story.” So it’s the love story of William and his wife.

You’ve put a lot of thought into this! I’m so in love with William, it’s gross. I’ve been wanting to write about William for probably ten years now. But he’s so bleak and miserable and wanting to die, he needs Shandi. Shandi’s like this hammer and he’s this gray rock, and she’s gonna smash him open and he’s all diamonds in there. I’m gonna bust his life open and I’m gonna make him see miracles. But they’re all fake—a virgin birth, a resurrection from the dead. They’re not true. There is an explanation for all of them. But she just relentlessly overwhelms his life with miracles. And then when the real miracle happens, it’s the tiniest thing. I think it involves mollusks. It’s tiny and it changes the world.

Does anybody read your novels in progress? Lydia Netzer, Karen Abbott, and Sara Gruen are my writing group. Lydia’s first novel just sold. She and I went to grad school together, and I dedicated "Backseat Saints" to her. Her novel’s called "Shine, Shine, Shine," and it’s the best book I’ve ever read in my f-ing life. She’s been working on it for twelve years.

What else have you read lately that you love? Carolyn Parkhurst’s latest, "The Nobodies Album." I’ve loved her since "The Dogs of Babel." My favorite three books I’ve read so far this year are "The Nobodies Album," "A Good Hard Look," and "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter."

I’ve gotten to the point where I only read things that I love. I mean, I am going to die eventually. And when I die there’s a finite number of things I could have read. And sometimes I think, maybe this book isn’t one of them.

*EXTENDED VERSION OF THE INTERVIEW THAT RAN IN OUR FEBRUARY 2012 ISSUE

Teresa Weaver is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Contact her