I have known Jack Riggs for nearly nine years and have watched him grow as a writer, first with his short stories and then as a novelist.  His work has always been both refreshingly easy to read and serious in its literary attempt.  It’s accessible writing with something at work on a deeper level if the reader is interested in pursuing it.  I sat down with Jack shortly after he had returned from New York where he delivered the final manuscript to his first novel When the Finch Rises to his publisher, Ballantine Books.  We talked about his beginnings and his experience of writing the novel and how his view of southern writing has been shaped during the years leading up to this first book.  Here is the interview that was conducted over the first week in June 2003.  —Jayne Cavagnaro

 When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

That’s a good question.  Hmmm, it took awhile to realize that I could be a writer, but I think I’ve always written creatively since I was in high school.  I won second place for a poem my English teacher, unbeknownst to me, turned in during my senior year.  I was given a five or ten dollar award during the Senior Assembly.  That was a surprise.  I’ve always written a lot of songs and was pretty active on the coffeehouse circuit when I was in college.  Played a lot of music, wrote a lot of songs, wanted to do that for a living, but then for whatever reason that seemed to fade away, and I ended up majoring in film at UNC Greensboro and went on to the University of Michigan to get a Masters degree.  I helped write some PBS programming in Ann Arbor, and after that I started writing film scripts and treatments, while I worked my way up the ladder in the local Detroit film community.  I worked on a lot of industrial and television commercials as a production assistant and finally an assistant director, while at the same time I was writing film treatments or scripts of some sort on my days off.  When I finally got my DGA card, I moved to LA so I could be closer to the studios and all the agents who represented screenwriters.  But what I ended up doing was writing longer and longer film narratives until I realized I was really writing fiction. 

And so you made the switch that way?

Yea, in a round about way.  I was scared to death doing that, writing fiction in a movie town.  I mean I had already sacrificed so much to be in LA: I was divorced, living in one room of a shared apartment.  I was just starting to get good production work in LA as a Guild assistant director when I decided that I wanted to write fiction, but it took me probably a year to make the transition.  I was so full of doubt about what I was doing. 

Is that why you said it took time before you thought you could be a writer?

Sure, that was certainly part of it.  Also working against me was my own history, where I grew up and what people expected out of you.  Lexington was a wonderful place to be a kid, but it wasn’t the most nurturing of environments for anything so out of the ordinary as becoming a writer.  It seems that creative endeavors were more for children and high schoolers, and when you grew up and went to college, it was best to either get a business degree, go to law school and become a lawyer, or something like that.  It was odd to know I wanted to do something creative like this and not have anyone around who really understood what I was going through.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of  friends who’ve stood by me and always inquired as to how things were going, but I think they have always recognized me more as a college professor than a writer. 

Being a college professor was considered a real career?

Exactly, a real, more concrete type of career.  You could see the legitimacy of teaching.  You know books are everywhere, but for some reason when you say something like “Think I’ll write a book,” most people don’t believe you will ever do that, because most people don’t.  Books are something someone else writes.  We buy them, but we don’t write them, you see.  So needless to say, it took me a long time to be able to really believe I could do it.  Lots of lonely hours writing.  You know I would come home from work, eat dinner with my wife and then kiss her good night, say good-bye and go to my second job at my desk until all hours of the night.   And when you are writing something that has no audience yet, that has no one expecting it, and perhaps has those distracters out there who are wishing you to fail as much as any well wisher is wishing you to succeed, well you get pretty depressed sometimes and its easy to lose faith in what you are doing. 

So that happened to you?

Which time do you want me to talk about (laugh).  Yes it happened numerous times.  And I think there were many times as well that I tried to stop writing, tried to put obstacles up in my way just so I could have an excuse to put it all away. 

But you didn’t put it all away.

No, and thank God I didn’t.  I think a writer is going to write and now I call myself a writer.  I’ve run that gauntlet and have come out on the other end, whole and renewed and with a contract for my book!  Whew! 

And now you move on.

Yes on to the next project. 

Before we talk about that though, let’s keep chatting about how you got started as a writer, what helped you learn your craft?

Well, when I was living in LA, I was reading a lot, a lot of novels.  I read John Updike, John Irving, Pat Conroy, John Steinbeck, Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren.  While I was still out there, Larry Brown got started with Algonquin and shortly after Big Bad Love came out, a guy from Mississippi with whom I was taking a workshop gave me the book as a present.  He liked my writing and thought I could learn something from Larry’s stories, so I read them and fell in love with his writing.  Think I have read almost everything he’s written. 

Are these the writers who have influenced you most in finding your own voice?

Yes, those and others.  I love Updike and Irving and Conroy for their sense of geography.  I actually tried to write my first novel after reading Conroy’s Prince of Tides.  And John Irving’s work, its uniqueness of place and character was always on my mind while I was writing When the Finch Rises, and Steinbeck too, my goodness, Grapes of Wrath.  That first chapter where we watch the land die and then the sharecroppers being forced to leave their generational homes is so powerful, even today.  I taste the dust of that dried up land and the sweat of those itinerate farmers every time I read it.  I love Flannery O’Connor and Joyce Carol Oates their use of improbable story made believable by their ability to craft the unbelievable into something real.  I read everything that Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle put out.  They are writers who work with the contemporary south and all its symbols.  Jill is of my generation and so to read her stories is to read about my youth, growing up with the Temptations and peroxide summer hair at Myrtle Beach.  Lee reminds me of folks I knew from a distance, more like foothills folk, or just good old country folk, mysterious and wonderful in their uniqueness.  Saving Grace is a very important book to me for the way she crafts character.  Both of those gals are great storytellers who I have sought out to read my own writing.  And I remember Gail Godwin’s book A Southern Family was one of those that hit it just right, the story, and her language, the way one leaves the south and when forced to return must learn to accept things as they’ve always been.  That’s one thing certain about the south, when you come here, you better be ready to change because the south ain’t budging.  It was a book that made me want to be a writer early on and tell my own stories.  And of course Reynolds Price and Fred Chappell, poets who write fiction, have meant a lot to me as a writer.  Now everyone knows these fellows write great poetry as well as stories, but what I mean is that their language is so wonderful, its rhythms, the way the narrative flows onto the paper, it is poetry in story form, I think.  Both men are so tender with their characters, so respectable and true to them.  I try to read a little of Chappell and Price before I start writing something just to remind myself of how it really should be done all the time.  But probably one of the most influential writers that I can think of for me is Lewis Nordan.  He writes with a kind of magical realism in his stories that I think is so important.  He can spin a yarn and make it so unique.  I mean just read Wolf Whistle and you will know what I’m talking about.  And I keep a copy of Music of the Swamp near my desk so if I get stuck or feel my own creative sensibilities waning, then I just stop and read some of Buddy’s stories and I feel like I am being baptized all over again.  I know I have gone on here, but I have been influenced by a lot of writers because I have stopped and taken the time to read before I ever started writing anything. 

Your love for reading is obvious and not just southern literature but others too.

Sure, you’ve got to read everything that you can get your hands on.  Reading is very important. 

You said that you participated in creative writing workshops, tell about that.

Well that is the place it seems to always start, a workshop of some sort.  Whether it’s in a creative writing class in school or outside of a classroom, people seem to always go to a group to learn about their writing. 

Do you think that is good or bad?

I think it’s a great way to start, as long as you understand how to take what is given to you.  You have to remember that a workshop is usually filled with people who want to be told they are writers, good writers, and so when real criticism comes, good criticism that can really help a writer understand the problems of a story or novel, sometimes it goes

unheard because the writer assumes failure right there.  Writing is all about failing in order to eventually succeed.  I tell my students that they will fail far more than they will succeed with their writing, so they need to be prepared for something not to work and for there to be a need to go back into the story and rewrite it.  Sometimes in a workshop the writer just can’t accept such criticism and so assumes everyone there is a dunce for saying what they say.  It’s always a room filled with self-doubters anyway, and still we seem to go there to get some sort of validation.  When we don’t hear what we want to hear, we tend to disregard the good criticism that inevitably comes out of a workshop.  There is a lot of coming of age when you take a workshop.  You have to have thick skin, learn whose voices are legitimate and whose might just be trying to get back at you for something you said about a story he or she had up before you.  It can be a vicious circus, but then it can be wonderful.  In the beginning, I found them very helpful, but I always gravitated to either the instructor for notes or to one or two classmates who I thought understood what I was trying to do.  I think workshops helped me for the first couple of years and then I just needed a couple of voices to listen to my words in order to make my work stronger.  I think one steadfast rule should always apply to workshops and that is to always bring in something that is unfinished.  I don’t mean bring in five pages of a ten-page story.  I mean bring in a completed story that has legitimate problems that a group of fledgling writers might be able to help you fix.  Don’t bring in something that you think is polished because you will inevitably be shot down.  You know there is this urban legend out there about a disgruntled writer in a graduate writing class who allegedly brings in an Updike story as their own work, having retyped it and everything just to see what the class would do to it.  Now I don’t know if the story is legend or truth, but of course no one knew the story and everyone trashed it and in some way validated the student’s contention that workshops are ineffective.  I think the only ones who tell stories like that are those who suffer too much in workshops looking too hard for validation.  The workshop is a good place to start and then find those few sets of eyes that see your stories as you feel they should be seen and then stick to them as voices of reasoning. 

That sounds like good advice.  Now you spoke a few moments ago about geography.  Has being southern, living in the south influenced your writing?

I think having grown up in the south has influenced me, yes.  I don’t think you have to live in the South to write about it though.  Jill McCorkle and Buddy Nordan, just to name two of my heroes, live elsewhere and probably gain a stronger perspective at times than those of us who live in the boiling pot down here.  But certainly having been raised in the South, growing up in a time where I could watch its great transition during the time of civil rights and now with its shifting population, the great influx of people from all over the country has greatly influenced me.  But you know the great paradox of the South still exists, its conservative backbone and the race issues that continue even today are the very issues that sent me away from the South and paradoxically, it is probably what later brought me back.   

Can you talk a bit more about that paradox?

Sure, one paradox can be seen right here in Georgia.  The South is a place that seems to grow more conservative every day.  Down here in Atlanta, there is this division among those who live in Atlanta and those who don’t.  They say that there are two Georgias, 

Atlanta and the rest of the state.  Now those who say that are taking a swipe at the more liberal folk who inhabit the city.  In some ways they are talking about Atlantans in the same way they talked about northern sympathizes who came down to help register blacks to vote.  And then our flag debate is another, the attempt to hold on to vestiges of the old south while the region is trying desperately to move on.  There is this conflict between the South that was and the South that will be and southerners live right in the middle of it.  There are lots of things that are uncomfortable for me about the south, yet in some unexplainable way, they are the very things that I longed for when I was living outside the region.  I think When the Finch Rises is in someway, my attempt to return to a time when I was the same age as Raybert and Palmer and to recall that past and to look at it not so much nostalgically, but to look at it for what grew there, under the thick canopy of trees and behind the veil of heavy humidity.  It is a place of geography, where that geography has an affect on those who live there, and you don’t have to be born and raised in it to feel its effect.  I think you can move to the South and become affected by the geography of the region.  That is a uniqueness I’m not sure is shared among other regions of the country.  Also I think anyone who ever eats southern barbecue, pork barbecue that is, can never be the same after that experience.  A good pork barbecue sandwich and a basket of hushpuppies is like honey in your mouth, it is transcendence pure and simple. 

Is there any advice you would give to aspiring southern writers today?

Well I know this will sound like some kind of pat answer that I learned from graduate school, a cliché if ever there was one, but it is so true.  If you want to be a writer, then write.  I don’t care if you’re southern or not, you have to write.  But I would add to that, to find your place, your own personal geography from which to start.  We all come from somewhere and we are going someplace else, but where we begin is so important to where we go that I have to feel it is a writer’s responsibility to discover that geography and claim it, dig in it and find what Annie Dillard calls her “batch of things.”  All that stuff that will one day help make story.  Fred Chappell has edited a book of poetry that was collected from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.  It is called Locales and I was fortunate enough to hear some of the poets read from it at the Conference of Southern Literature held this past April in Chattanooga.  I bought that book and read it regularly because of the strong sense of place those poems illicit.  I find poetry helps me to be a better writer.  It gives me strong images of people, places and things.  It is a wonderful book for helping one see strong geography.  Finally I would say to read as much as you can.  You can learn so much from reading good books, so that would be my answer.  Write, discover your own geography, maybe read poetry on the side, or better yet, just read good writing.  Read When the Finch Rises. (Smiles) 

You’ve talked about how you made the change from working in the film industry to writing fiction and you said that you had attempted novels early on.  Can you talk about that a bit, your early work?  Has it always been novels?

No, but it did start out that way.  In fact while I was still living in LA, before I even took a workshop there, I tried to write a novel and what I realized with that endeavor was that I had no clue as to how one goes about writing a book.  I got to a point in the work where I just said to myself that I needed help.  I needed to go back to school and learn about the process.  Now I really went back to school.  I enrolled into the creative writing program

at UNC-Greensboro where I had done my undergraduate work about twelve years earlier.  Fred Chappell was there and I wanted to study with him, so I applied and got in and went home to the South.  But before that I had started writing short stories in the UCLA Extension Program because I needed to learn story structure and I needed a portfolio piece for my application to UNC-Greensboro.  The short story is a wonderful form to work with.  It’s very controlled and very concentrated so you learn how to tell story.  It can be very demanding and very constricting.  When I started writing When the Finch Rises it was like lying down on a king sized bed by yourself and being allowed to stretch and twist and turn all you wanted.  There is shape and form to the novel, of course, but it’s not as concentrated.  You have time to let things develop in three hundred and thirty pages that you can’t allow in a twenty or thirty page story.  But the form served me well and I wrote more and more stories and got away from attempting a novel until it was obvious that the time had come to expand and give Palmer and Raybert more room to grow. 

So Palmer and Raybert were in your short stories first?

Yea they were.  The stories that I wrote primarily revolved around Raybert and his mother and father.  Palmer came along in a rather magical way.  He was a very special boy when he showed up one summer afternoon while I was typing away.  Palmer first appears in a story I wrote entitled “GI Joe, fighting man from head to toe. . .” and he does some pretty funny things when Raybert gets his BB gun.  He was special from the beginning and so when I decided to write the novel, he was a major player, so to speak.  Both boys are best friends and for me, to see them get a public viewing here with the publishing of their novel, well it just makes me feel so good.  They deserve having their story told, I think. 

To you they seem almost real.

Sure, they are to me.  Those two boys are as real to me as anyone I know.  Yea, I made them up, but they told the story.  Not me.  It was a wonderful experience and a great time spent with these two fine young fellows. 

So what inspired you to find these guys?  Why did you choose to write several short stories at first about the boys?

Well as a practical matter, I needed a collection of stories and then my thought was that I would write a collection that had a strong thread that ran through it so I could market it as a novel in stories.  But that didn’t work out and it became quite obvious one afternoon while I was chatting with Jill McCorkle about a particular story that it was time to move into a larger form, that the boys needed to be in a novel of their own and so I slammed on the brakes, readjusted myself, which took about a year of trial and error, and then I started writing what eventually became the novel. 

So the boys grew too big for stories?

No, not too big, but just in need of a different form so their stories could really be told properly.  I liked these boys after they found me, and I had some ideas of thematic material I wanted to approach, you know ideas that dealt with the attainment of grace and the seeking of redemption, and their stories seemed to lend material that could work well. 

So as I wrote one story, another story idea would surface and that kept on happening until I wrote something much more complex and was in need of greater room to maneuver.  That was when I knew I needed to do something more.  It is hard to just stop writing with a form that I had been writing in for so long and turn on the novel engine.  It took some time, but once I got going, the stories became bits and pieces that were scattered throughout the novel.  In the end the stories were like ingredients in a good salad, all chopped up and scattered on top, then mixed vigorously.  It was confusing at first, difficult most of the time, but in the end, everything blended so well that I really can’t see the stories in the book anymore. 

You talked about thematic ideas in the novel, can you talk a little more about that?

Sure.  I think the novel is a dark book with moments of light that enlighten us or just make us laugh.  But for me, it is a book of redemption and salvation.  Raybert’s father lives with a dark dangerous secret that Raybert comes to know when Palmer revels a photograph of Ray Sr. in a very compromising situation.  We never come to understand the significance of this photograph, but we do come to realize how in some ways Ray Sr. is paying something back for what he has done.  He is seeking his own type of redemption, and nobody really understands it.  Everyone around Ray Sr. thinks he is just a bad husband and father and that he lays around drunk all the time, but I think he is suffering for what he has done.  I think he is redeeming himself in the only way he knows how, and we might not like that, but I really don’t think what we feel matters.  This is between Ray Sr. and his God.  Ray is being redeemed.  And as far as salvation goes, Palmer helps Raybert to understand his life a bit more.  In a way Palmer provides a moment of grace for Raybert.  It again is a dark moment, a moment of separation and loss, but what Raybert is left with is eventually uplifting in a literal as well as metaphorical sense.  In the end, there is loss, but I think there is grace found too.  It is a costly grace, a Dietrich Bonhoffer type of costly grace.  You pay dearly with suffering, but the end reward is worth the suffering one must endure. 

I find the theological ideas here interesting.  And when I read When the Finch Rises I didn’t necessarily see that coming out, but now that you mention it, the theological implications are certainly there.  Can you talk about the idea of costly grace a bit more and how it influences your writing?

Well to know that you didn’t see this thematic idea in the story at first is good.  I don’t want the reader to be seeing these ideas out in front of the story.  I want the reader to feel them in the story and I think that you do feel them in the sorrow you have for the boys and their families.  We’re not repulsed by the action in the story.  We’re just saddened and want to feel that the boys will be resilient enough to somehow survive.  I think we see the grace in that way.  We know the right thing happens in the end, but we hurt nonetheless.  The ending was my way of saying that redemption is always preceded by a crucifixion.  My motto is to learn to embrace the crucifixion if you want to really find salvation because that is where it is always found. 

So no pain, no gain.

(Laugh) Yea that’s it, no pain, no gain.  Look, we live in a world where the television, newspapers, all media really advertise or advocate easy fixes to everything, always along 

the path of least resistance.  I just don’t think that’s right.  There can’t be an instant fix for everything.  We are fallen, if you are of the Judeo Christian persuasion, the garden is gone.  Flannery O’Connor said that she wrote stories where grace was found in the territory of the devil.  Well I am here to say we all live in that territory and to get out, we must fight the fight and that fight ain’t an easy one.  We all suffer for something, that’s the point, and we need to just get comfortable with that fact.  Now, can I hear an amen for that.

 Amen. 

Thank you. (Laugh) 

You talked about Flannery O’Connor and the territory of the devil.  Do you think this is a theme exclusive to the south or does this type of theme transcend the southern regionalism?

Well, I’ll tell you this, I didn’t read about this type of grace for the first time in a southern story.  I found it in John Updike.  I found it in Rabbit Angstrom as he travels his life, a seeker looking for understanding to the bigger questions.  I read it in John Irving, in his wonderful character Owen Meany.  I read it in late 19^th Century readings of Theodore Dreiser, in his story “Typhoon.”  And Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and many others.  It’s there in varying degrees in all regions, in all writing, some more violent than others, but it’s there.  Updike has probably been the most important writer for me.  His studies of Kierkegaard and Karl Barth have had a resounding affect on me over the years, and I am a great believer of signs, given for us to either take or reject.  Good and bad signs are there for us in our state of free will, and we have to choose even if that choice is to choose to not choose, we have to make a choice.  The consequences of our actions or inactions reside in the choices we make.  Again I tell you, we live in a fallen land and there is pain and suffering.  But we need it more, I would say, than we need all that feel good time that we so crave.  Nothing worth anything ever occurred without suffering and hardship.  Barth and Kierkegaard and Bonhoffer for that matter all deal with this.  Faith, suffering and one’s own journey with both, that’s heady stuff for two twelve year olds to be dealing with in the novel.  I don’t tell them it’s about all that stuff though, they’d only get bored and take off on their bikes and cut school or something.  All that stuff is for the grown ups. (Smiles) 

Many of your short stories centered around a young Raybert Williams.  Can you talk about where he came from?

Sure.  When I was in graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, I wrote a story that actually had the title of the novel.  In fact the title of my thesis ended up being When the Finch Rises but the thesis story was about an older Raybert, a tortured man with his own problems and my original idea was to write a collection of stories that began with Raybert as a young man and then followed him into his adulthood.  That was what I was working on when it became obvious that I should be writing a novel instead of stories.

So you decided to use the younger Raybert than the older man?

Yea because at the time I had so many stories about the boy that I thought it would be an easier transition.  I was always looking out for the path of least resistance (grins), you know the story structure that would be easiest to accomplish. 

And because you had already developed Raybert as a young boy, you felt this was the easiest course to take?

Exactly, but as I would quickly find out, there is no path of least resistance when you are writing a novel.  It is extremely difficult even when you have stories sitting in front of you to give you a certain path to follow.  I kept trying to just plug the stories into the novel and write around them, but that was stupid.  When you write a story it really is a world within itself and I was writing these so they could stand alone in literary magazines, yet at the same time I wanted them to be connected as one big story.  That is a very hard thing to do.  It would have been better to just write many stories and then pick out the ones with an overriding theme instead of trying to connect them with some string that would suggest that they all flow together.  Well it didn’t work is the point and so I ended up having to reconsider the stories as part of the novel. 

Are they now a part of the novel?

Yes they are, but it would be difficult to identify the short stories now.  In fact when I read the novel, I don’t see them anymore at all.  I have sprinkled bits and pieces of the stories all throughout the novel, so there are very few large chunks sitting there for identification.  It is all now just material that enlarges and enriches the story in the novel.  But I think in some ways, the novel still carries the spirit of the original idea of the stories, but now it is just so much more detailed and involved.  So what was the question? (Laugh) 

Well the question asked about why you chose to use Raybert as a young man instead of an adult.

Right, well I did sort of go off there, didn’t I?  I decided that Raybert should be young because that was where I was when I shifted modes.  When I decided on a novel instead of stories, I knew it was going to be from the point of view of Raybert as a young boy.  Also Palmer existed as a boy and I think somewhere along the line I always knew that Palmer would not be in Raybert’s life as an adult and Palmer had to be in there because he was such an important character in Raybert’s life.  At the time I didn’t know how special he would be, but I knew he was magical and that he would be very influential in Raybert’s life. 

Tell me about the relationship that he has with Palmer.

Well Palmer is Raybert’s best friend.  They meet on a very dark day in the history of the United States, it is the day President Kennedy is assassinated.  Now that is the back story of the novel, so I don’t think I give anything away telling you this.  But I will tell you that it is at that moment that we understand Palmer is going to be different than other boys.  Palmer is special and Raybert is drawn to him because of that, but also because from an unconscious point of view, Raybert knows that he and Palmer as a lot alike.  They come from very dysfunctional backgrounds, each having dark family problems, and they both

want to get away from their families.  They are compatriots, they are blood brothers, and they love each other in some deep, unexplainable way that on the surface appears a bit deviant, but really is not. 

What do you mean deviant?

Well the boys are seen in some rather uncompromising situations that could be misconstrued and have been by some who’ve read the short stories and bits and pieces of the novel, but there is nothing to it.  The boys are very love hungry.  They crave unconditional love; love that the Greeks called “agape”.  They don’t get it in their families because the families are so dysfunctional, so caught up in their own mental angst that the boys are pretty much left out and must fend for themselves when it comes to love.  The boys love each other and Palmer makes that love much more intense, and I like that.  I like Palmer’s intensity because his love for Raybert is complete.  It is whole, as whole as he can give it as a twelve-year-old boy who is still under the control of a dominant parent.  The boys need each other to survive.  It is as simple as that. 

But Raybert has Aunt Iris.

Yea he does.  And that is probably why Palmer’s love is so much more intense.  Raybert has the possibility of agape love through his Aunt Iris and Uncle Clewell.  You can see how much they care for Raybert because of what they sacrifice for him when Evelyn, Raybert’s mother, is sick and Ray Sr. is AWOL from the home.  Aunt Iris is there for Raybert always, so he does have a reference point for love.  Palmer has none at all.  He is in a very desperate place.  It hurts to think about it. 

To you these boys are real, you’ve mentioned that?

As real as they can be.  Yea, they are my boys and it hurts when I see something bad happen, but I have to write it and let it live as their lives, because like I have said, they wrote the story.  I just transcribe what they told me.  There is one incident that happens to Raybert early on in the book.  Palmer shows Raybert a picture of his father in a very compromising and horrible position.  I won’t say what that is because you need to read the book to find out, but it is a bad place for Ray Sr. to be in, no doubt.  I was at the beach when I wrote that scene.  I have some timeshare weeks at a wonderful place in Garden City Beach, South Carolina right outside Murrells Inlet, and I would go down there for two week writing periods to try and knock out a bunch of the story.  Well I got down there and got all my writing paraphernalia set up and started in on the story and then suddenly I wrote the scene where Palmer shows Raybert the photograph of his father.  Well I just stopped dead right there and didn’t know what to do.  Raybert had just told me something about the story that I didn’t even know existed.  It had never come up in the short stories and I had no idea it would come up the way it did.  So I stopped writing and took a walk on the beach.  Then I came back and for the next two weeks, tried to write the scene out, tried to convince the boys that this wouldn’t happen in 1968 and they assured me they knew it wouldn’t happen in 1968 and then Palmer said, “and you can tell by the type of photograph, this happened a long time ago.”  I told him that still I didn’t want the scene in the book and so I kept trying to rewrite the scene.

I know the scene you are referring to and it is still in there.

Yep.  I tried for the entire two weeks to get it out, but it just would not go, so before I left on the last night of my trip, I accepted the fact that the scene would be there and the boys seemed to be happy about that.  They always knew it was going to be there because this was their story, not mine.

 But it is yours?

Yea, I got the advance.  But don’t tell them that.  They would be royally pissed off. (Smiles) 

You just said that Palmer told you the picture he showed to Raybert was older than 1968.  That’s a pretty specific year in the history of this country.  So how important is the historical setting – time and place – to the telling of Raybert’s story?

To me it’s very important.  It’s the era that I grew up in.  I was about the same age that Raybert and Palmer are and I remember those years so vividly, all the things that were going on.  And even though I was really on the periphery of it all, historical moments of that era certainly had their effect to me.  When I first started thinking about this novel, I envisioned something entirely different.  It was to span ten years from the Kennedy assassination to the resignation of Nixon.  Just think about that ten-year span.  What an amazing decade that was.  Kennedy’s assassination, the escalation of Vietnam, civil rights, MLK’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, Chappaquiddick, Woodstock, the hippie revolution and finally Nixon’s resignation.  Though I am sure there are those who would disagree about the importance of some of these issues, for me, they were life shaping and I had wanted to delve into that idea.  You see, I think we as a society are ultimately shaped by whoever is in the white house and it was my desire at first to write a story about that ten-year period and my theory as part of the way the story got shaped.  Well that was the intention. 

Obviously you pared that back some.

Well, only by nine years. (Smiles)  Yea, it became apparent very early on that I was not going to be able to hold all of it together.  I teach and I have a family and I wanted to be a writer and all of it combined made me realize that the only way I was going to get something done and give the boys a voice was to deal with the story I could handle and so I went for one year instead of ten, and instead of following the boys into adulthood, I ended it after a series of life altering events that occur in this particular year. 

And you used historical events to help express all of this?

Well, not at first.  Mostly what the novel consisted of when it was sold were events or iconographic elements that would identify the time period.  Evel Knievel is in the book, there are television commercials and programs and pop culture icons scattered all throughout.  I really liked what I had done and I kept revising it until I felt the story was so tight that an agent or publisher would not be able to pass on it.   

And you were right.

Well, let’s not go that far.  There were enough passes that I was humbled by the process, but yea you are right that eventually I found a great agent and a wonderful editor who loved the work as much as I did.  That was so important to me, that the editor and my agent really have a love for the work.  Now when we got the contract, then I reread the book and felt like there was still something missing.  I was not really happy with the book and when my editor at Ballantine, Maureen O’Neal, reread it, our feelings on its weaknesses were so close it was scary.  She saw the same needs as I did and so she told me to work on the back story of characters and to strengthen up some of the character motivations so the story would be clearly understood.  Well by saying that, Maureen gave me the green light to go back in and add stuff from my original idea.  I was able to reintroduce all the historical information that I think helps to define the book and actually strengthens the motivation of the characters and really fills out the story. 

So now it is more of what you originally were after?

Well it still covers only one year in the boys’ life.  Actually about seven or eight months, but I was able to get more of the spirit of what I wanted to do originally.  You know it’s my first book.  It was an amazing learning curve and now I will be ready to attack other ideas in the future.  I hope. 

You commented earlier that you were about the same age as the boys.  I think you said twelve.  Are any parts of the novel based on your own experience growing up in a small, southern town at about the same time as these two boys?

Well the easy answer is no.  And the other easy answer is yes.  I think when one does a period piece that involves a time frame from their own life, they are going to be influenced by their experiences when they write it.  It may be only the geography that they use to define the geography of the book.  I might be an incident in one’s own life from which the story is spun.  Others obviously are writing about their own lives, fictionalized of course.  For me, the story itself is totally fiction.  It’s about fictional characters that live in a fictional mill town in North Carolina with a fictional creek that can reek havoc on the unsuspecting.  I never lived in a mill town, though there was one on the other side of the highway from my elementary school.  And I remember it as being a dark and dangerous place, though I doubt it was all that.  I never knew a boy like Palmer, though I knew boys who I used to create the character.  I certainly have a connection to the time period like these boys have, but there was no outwardly significant mental illness in our family.  People have died in my life and I am sure I have used them as points of reference, but that’s about where it stops.  I am not trying to resurrect any family ghosts.  I’ve got ghosts, but these aren’t them.  Certainly my family had our own dysfunctions, but they never manifest themselves like the ones in the story do.  I did, however, reflect on things that happened in my own life and town where I grew up, and they have found their way into this story, albeit very differently and more dramatically from what I remember. 

And the Finch Creek does flood.  It causes destruction and death that is significant to Raybert.  What is the creek’s importance to the story?  After all it is the title of the book.

Yes, it is the title and I think that it becomes a very significant event in the book because of its effect on Raybert and his father.  It’s an event that makes both father and son very vulnerable.  You have to remember the scenes that precede the storm that makes the Finch flash.  It follows a very important time in Raybert’s life when he begins to feel that anything is possible, that his family will be regular and everything will be okay.  For Ray Sr. it follows a time of attempted grace and redemption.  He is after redemption from Evelyn for something he has done, but what the reader should come to recognize is that he is not winning a costly grace but a cheap grace.  He is trying to undo something without realizing the degree of suffering that is required.  Again it is that idea of the cheap fix rather than the more difficult road where the journey will have true significance to one’s life.  So after the flooding when Ray Sr. has to tell Raybert the bad news of the storm, both are placed in a vulnerable position, a true father and son place where each has to confront something that is ultimately tied together.  It is a moment where the two are forced to confront one another, a father who has not been around much and a boy who wants him to be there desperately, but also has proof of his father’s dangerous nature, a picture hidden deep in his sock drawer.  The creek ties the town together and in some ways ties Raybert’s family together.  It’s a nice metaphor I think. 

Do you work these types of metaphors out as you are writing or are they things that just naturally appear?

I have heard this debate before, you know, it’s the chicken and the egg debate.  What came first, the story or the thematic idea?  Well, I’ll tell you this, the thoughts about Finch creek, just came to me as you asked the question and I thought about it for a bit.  It’s there no doubt, but I don’t sit around with a blackboard full of metaphors trying to fit them all in.  But I did start writing with the idea this would be a story about redemption, salvation and grace.  At first I tried to make sure the thematic material was there, but the story was horribly contrived and melodramatic at best.  When I stopped doing that and just let the story flow, then the thematic material evolves, because that material is me and I am writing and there is no doubt that those ideas will evolve from that subconscious level into the work. 

So what came first, the chicken or the egg?

(Laughs) Well for me it was definitely the egg.  The story has to be told first.  Be brave and believe in yourself as a writer, and the rest of it will be embedded in the text for some bright young PhD student to find and do their dissertation on later down the road. 

You keep talking about costly grace in this story and you have touched on it at different time in this interview.  Could you talk a bit more in general about this thematic idea.

Sure.  It should be directly attributed to Dietrich Bonhoffer from his book entitled, The Cost of Discipleship.  Bonhoffer was a Lutheran theologian in Germany at the time of Hitler and was eventually executed in a prison for his role in a conspiracy to kill Hitler.  It was first published in 1937.  Bonhoffer’s life is one of costly grace.  He had come to the United States in the late 30’s but felt if he was to have any real place in the rebuilding of Germany after Hitler was gone, then he needed to go back to Germany and live and fight the good fight.  He was well known for his work and after his death, his theological writings became even more significant.  So for me his ideas of costly grace are important.  We cannot look for the easy out.  Like I said earlier.  I tried to plug my short stories into the novel form as the road of less resistance and it was horrible.  Also I tried to be thematically specific early on and the writing was horrible.  I had to sit there and suffer to find the story and let it ooze out, then refine it and refine it again until I had what I wanted.  I believe this novel is a product of costly grace, as all works are, I believe.  And in the story, there is great costly grace.  Palmer and Ray Sr. probably pay the biggest price, but everybody has suffering in the book and in the end I think it is Raybert who learns the most, accepts what happens, accepts the costly nature of his own grace and then rises above it all, symbolically in the book’s conclusion.  O’Connor talked about grace being preeminent, always there waiting to be discovered, or for O’Connor, waiting to knock the protagonist to their knees, or worse.  For me, I think that same kind of grace is prevalent in When the Finch Rises.  It’s not violent as in O’Connor’s work, but it comes from dangerous places and involves great sacrifice, and I think is only awarded to a few in the book, maybe to Ray Sr. and Raybert, and in the end, maybe just to Raybert.  After all it’s his story.  It’s his journey. 

Does the mother find redemption?  There is a very important segment of the book that deals with her mental illness.  What was the genesis of this and how is Evelyn reconciled?

That is a very good question and in the end, the mental illness is controlled, but it’s done so in a very sad way.  I am not sure about the mother’s redemption or if it has actually come by the end of the book.  Like I said, this is really Raybert’s story, told from his point of view some years later, so most characters are agents that act upon him.  But the mother, I think, finds a place in the end and becomes restful from her disease.  She comes to a strong realization that she is sick and finally gets the help she needs, though it’s not done voluntarily.  In the end it’s sad what finally happens to her, but Raybert gets his mother back in some ways, and I think if you asked him how he feels about his mother and her situation at the end of the book, he would say he feels good about it.  So maybe there is redemption for her in there somewhere.   

When I was growing up, there were times when really bad mental illness would hit the front page of our newspapers in tragic headlines, and then there were many more times when mentally ill folk in town were talked about regularly but their lives never exploded publicly at all.  There was a quiet and somewhat respected public awareness, but the illness and the behaviors that accompanied it were left alone, acknowledged but quietly ignored, if you know what I mean.  I remember the tragic suicide of a woman in front of her children, and a classmate who had psychotic episodes.  These and other events would come out every now and then, hover on the surface for a while and then fade back into the town’s ether, still there but quietly ignored.  I was somehow related to a man, a distant cousin I think.  His name was Joe and he always road a bicycle around town and I think he delivered papers.  I would see him uptown or down by the YMCA when I was a young boy.  I never talked to him, but I do vaguely remember my mother saying hello to him once or twice when we would see him around town.  She told me that he was related to us and that amazed me and put Joe in my mind forever.  I think I once asked if he could come and have dinner with us, maybe take a bath or something like that, but Momma just let that pass and it never happened.  We also used to have an old couple named Pearl and Arthur who pushed a cart around town all the time collecting things.  They lived in an old ramshackled house that contained more junk than you could ever imagine.  Junk piled up everywhere in their yard, on the porch.  It was such a fire hazard and eyesore, but no one ever seemed to complain about them.  They made their way around town while we kids rode our bikes in circles and teased them.  Pearl would cuss us and wave her fists at us when we did it.  Her hands were always wrapped with cloth and rumor was she stuck pins in her skin so she would be disabled and could always get welfare.  So you see, I had lots to choose from when I was thinking about mental illness.  It comes from the mostly southern behavior of keeping such things secret or quietly public in the town.  You know sort of out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of things.  Evelyn’s sickness seems to be public enough.  She is certainly public with it.  It is just part of Raybert’s life that he has to navigate during that treacherous year of 1968. 

Finally, what do you hope When the Finch Rises will accomplish for you?

Fame and fortune beyond my grandest dreams? (Laughs)  No I don’t know.  The process has been so long that I think I have changed a lot in what I hoped this book would do.  In the end, I just want the story to be told.  I want the boys to have their day in the light so others can meet them and come to love them as I have.  I am excited about going public with them and sharing their lives with others.  I look forward to doing a tour and meeting others who share a love of the written word.  I want this to give me an audience that will be looking for my next book.  I want my mother and father to be proud of me.  You know, last year my father fought off lung cancer and it was a scary time for our family, big Tom fighting for his life.  It was also the year of my parent’s 50^th wedding anniversary, so you can imagine the thought process that went on inside of me, the coincidence of the two events and my belief in the reading of signs.  I was also deeply involved in writing the novel and had to go to North Carolina a lot.  I ended up writing some of the story in the original carrel that I had used while I was a graduate student at UNC-G.  So many strings were pulled together during that year, and it was my father’s illness that seemed to be the main string.  I wondered if he would be alive long enough to see any of this come to fruition.  Well he made it and so if I want anything to come of this, I want them to be proud, my parents.  I’ve made them wait far to long to see some fruit of their great labor.  Now maybe they can tell their friends they have a son who is a writer.  That sounds pretty damn good to me.  I like that I can call myself that now. 

You can call yourself a writer now?

Yea, I’m a writer.  That’s what I do.