12 Questions for a Writer: Taylor Brown

Taylor Brown is the author of seven books with magazine work found nationally. He is a recipient of the Montana Prize in Fiction, a Georgia Author of the Year, and 3 x Southern Book Award Finalist.

1.     Who are you, what have you written, and why? (Introduce yourself and your work, your background and interests, the book, and why you wrote it).

My name is Taylor Brown.  I grew up on the Georgia coast and fiction is my main focus, often with a Southern Gothic and/or historical slant.  I’m the author of six novels and a short story collection.  My latest novel is Rednecks, which tells the story of the events leading up to the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, also known as the Redneck War of 1921—the culminating violence of the Mine Wars.

The seed of this novel was planted nearly ten years ago, when I was leaning in the office door of my friend, mentor, and freelance editor, Jason Frye—a native son of Logan County, West Virginia.  Somehow the term redneck came up.

“You know where that word comes from?” asked Jason.

I touched the back of my neck.  “Sunburn, from working in the fields.”

Jason’s eyes sparked over his great beard.  “Boy, you don’t know the half of it.”

There began my long personal journey into the history of the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed uprising since the Civil War. In 1921, ten thousand coal miners rebelled against the coal companies, which had been using an army of private detectives (“gun thugs”) to keep them from unionizing. A million rounds were fired, bombs were dropped on American soil, and only the arrival of the United States Army stopped the violence. The miners wore red bandannas tied around their necks, and people called them “rednecks.”

At the time, statistically, it was less dangerous to serve overseas in the Great War than to work in a West Virginia coal mine. Though miners were exempt from the draft due to the country’s need for coal, they volunteered in droves. When they returned battle-scarred from “Over There” to find themselves subjected to intimidation, illegal eviction, assault, and assassination, it didn’t take long for the powder keg to blow.

Blair Mountain is located in Jason’s home county of Logan, and he’d spent his childhood hunting for shell casings instead of arrowheads. He knew the history from growing up there, but I was astounded that a battle of such scale and cultural implication was scarcely known outside of southern West Virginia.

My mother’s side of my family, who hail from the neighboring state of Kentucky, hadn’t been taught the history in school. In speaking to readers on book tours, I found very few folks had even heard of Blair Mountain or the Mine Wars. Actually, our mutual friend John Dailey, a native West Virginian*, is one of the few people I spoke to who knew the story.

I felt I’d come upon a rich seam of buried history—a story thundering to be told. That’s really what sent me down the path of this novel, which would be my most deeply researched book to date.

*And member of the Lethal Minds editorial staff-Ed.

2.     What is it that draws you to writing?

I used to think it was just something I was just born to do.  Like asking a bird what draws them to flying.  But over the years, with more perspective, I’ve come to realize that it was probably nurture as much as nature, and I’ve become more comfortable with sharing why. 

I was born with an acute case of bilateral club feet, which resulted in about ten reconstructive surgeries and countless fractures and tendon injuries over the first 20 years of my life.  While buddies were out sowing their oats, I spent a lot of time stuck at home with casts and braces and crutches, but books liberated me from that handicap.

Sometimes I’d read a book a day, and I read everything from the Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum spy novels on my parents’ shelves to military and aviation history and biography (my old man was an Army vet and private pilot) to the classics left over from my older sister’s required school reading—she’s seven years older, so I got an early start on good literature.  I could go on vast journeys, accompany the great expeditions, time travel, and gain access to worlds that non-readers just don’t have.

The book was a vehicle for me, it was muscle and heart and wings, wheels and gears and engine.  It was everything.  From there, it wasn’t too much of a leap to want to be the creator of this strange machine of the human mind and heart.

3.     Tell us about the process you undertook to write/edit “Rednecks”. 

Oh, boy.  This one was a bear.  Like the majority of my novels, it started as a short story. At the time, I was particularly interested in how the word’s meaning had evolved, even been contorted over the years.

Today, Merriam-Webster defines a redneck as “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class,” while other dictionaries add a “bigot” (Dictionary.com), who “has conservative political opinions and little education” (Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries) and “is seen by others as being uneducated and having opinions and attitudes that are offensive” (Brittanica).

In stark contrast, the “redneck” miners of the 1920s were a diverse lot, significantly more so than popular depictions of coal mining would have us believe. By 1900, one in five West Virginia coal miners was Black, and one third were foreign-born. They were pushing for social progress and economic justice, workers’ rights and the freedom to unionize.

My original short story braided the history of Battle of Blair Mountain with the story of a march a century later—a contemporary timeline in which a young man gets involved with a community defense organization that takes its inspiration from the redneck miners of the 1920s (loosely based on the real Redneck Revolt organization).  That story was published in The Bitter Southerner as “Rednecks.”  Then I began to expand that story into a full-length novel.

As my sixth novel, Rednecks wasn’t my first rodeo, but I’d never undertaken a book that required so much historical and physical research. I wanted to write the definitive novel of the Battle of Blair Mountain as best I could, almost exactly one century after it occurred—an alternative origin story that seemed at once timeless and contemporary.

I went to West Virginia and explored the old Hatfield-McCoy Feud lands where much of the story took place. I touched bullet-shot walls from the Matewan Massacre / Battle of Matewan that opens the novel (the largest “shootout” in American history, I believe) and took my ‘78 Yamaha DT175 enduro high and deep to find the old Blair Mountain battle sites where a car couldn’t go—and where coal companies still restrict access to the land.

Five years later, I turned in a draft of the novel to my editor, who rejected it. He felt the dual timelines were too much for a single book. While I came to see that he was right, it felt like a sledgehammer blow at the time. Five years of work and more than 90,000 words—every single one written and rewritten again and again—possibly gone.

Writing is not for the faint of heart. It’s an emotional and psychological crucible, which tests the depths of your faith, resilience, and resolve on a semifrequent basis. The words of my late father kept coming to me, quoting Churchill: When you’re going through hell...keep going.

So often, if you keep putting one foot in front of the other (marching?), even in darkness, you will find your way. If you’re willing to find a light, you will. The most important thing is that you don’t quit, nor close your eyes to your vision.

With the contemporary storyline stripped away, the reader needed characters they could sympathize with beyond historical figures like Mother Jones and Sid Hatfield. My editor was intrigued by one of the book’s side characters, a Lebanese-American physician...

At the time, he had no idea that I’d based this character on my own great-grandfather, Dr. Domit Simon Sphire—a figure of lore in the family, who’d sailed to America from Lebanon in 1889, just 14 years old and without his parents, and graduated from the University of Kentucky Medical School. He eloped on horseback with my great-grandmother Buddeah Muhanna, became a well-respected physician and medical examiner in rural Kentucky, and even earned a place in a 1920s history of the state.

All my life, I’d had an inside view of my mother and uncle's struggle to hold together the family farm in Kentucky, just three miles from where my great-grandparents lived and where my grandmother grew up. I’d studied Arabic in college to connect with my Lebanese heritage, and I’ve always had a special connection with my great-grandfather. After all, we share the same birthday, though he was born 107 years before I was. I’d wanted to write about him for years—I just hadn’t found the right angle of approach.

In the midst of rejection and disappointment, this was the proverbial “eureka” moment, the lightbulb in the darkness. Over months of rewriting, “Doc Moo” took his place at the heart of the novel.

As a writer, it was a hell of a battle, but maybe that’s just how it should be.

4.     What did you learn in the process, both substantively and personally, and what surprised you?

Though I knew this already, I was reminded again that it ain’t over until you quit.  Often, a rejection or loss that looks like “the end” is actually an opportunity for growth, as long as you’re willing to stay in the fight and look for the light.

What surprised me most was just how salient that old maxim remains:  “Tis the victor who writes the history and counts the dead.”  Here was an empowering story of working people raising up together, and the coal companies effectively buried it.  Stories were censored, famous evangelists paid to preach against the miners, and even the KKK was welcomed into the local mining communities to sow internal strife.  It goes to show you that what’s left out of histories is just as important as what’s written in them.

5.     What is hardest about making a life as a writer?

Rejection is a big one.  You’ve got to learn not just to live with it as a fact of this life, but to digest and metabolize it into fuel to keep you going.  You’ve got to like the taste of blood in your mouth, because you’re going to get knocked down and around...a lot.

But that isn’t the hardest part.  I think the hardest part is just finding a way to live.  Because writing doesn’t pay well enough for any but a select few to sustain themselves on the work alone—and a good portion of folks who write full-time might be writing stuff you or I aren’t interested in writing.  So you’ve got to find a way to engage in this mammoth undertaking of time and guts and soul on a regular basis while also having a day job that pays the bills and being a good person to your family and friends and loved ones.

A lot of writers go into academia, and that’s a solution from a financial standpoint, but I tend to think the world could use more writers from outside the academy.

As for my solution, I founded and serve as Editor in Chief of BikeBound.com, a custom motorcycle blog/publication.  It’s now the second largest such site in the world and I’m fortunate to do something as my day job that I love, but it took more than half a decade of constant work for BikeBound to become a sustaining source of income that got anywhere near to matching the time and work put in, so I was effectively working three jobs for most of 30s.

Today, another challenge has crept up.  I believe, as I writer, you’ve got a responsibility to cultivate your empathy, to challenge your own beliefs and mental/emotional blind spots, and to try to see different sides of situations and issues.  But these days, it seems everyone is hardening into ever sharper, more shielded, more insular opinions and moral judgments, and they only want to hear reinforcements of what they already believe, and it’s just frustrating as hell if you think it’s better to build bridges than burn them. 

None of it is easy, but no one said it would be.

6.     What do you want people to take away from this book?

I’ve never been very good at answering this one.  If nothing else, I hope people don’t look at the word “redneck” the same way again.  I hope they see that this history, if bloodstained, is more colorful and inspiring and unifying that we might have thought.

7.     What advice do you have for aspiring authors/editors?

As Georgia writer Harry Crews said:  “Put your ass on the chair.”  That’s the number one.  It all comes back to that.  Put in the work, and the rest will follow.  I’ve lived my entire life by that one tenet.  Don’t overthink things.  Trust your vision and let it guide you. 

If you’re a reader of Lethal Minds, my guess is you’re more likely than the average Joe or Jane to have an interest in physical/mental discipline.  I think a lot of those principles apply.  Writing is a discipline that requires thousands of hours to “master” (none of us actually feels like a master) and is a journey of constant challenge and growth.

8.     What is your favorite book and why?

Another hard one.  I’ve had different favorites at different times in my life.  Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and The Road are both up there, as well as Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom and Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry.  But I wouldn’t call these books my favorites, exactly.  They’re more formative or seminal for me—books that demonstrate what’s possible.

Books that I simply loved at different times in my life have included Where the Wild Things Are, The Call of the Wild, West with the Night, The Hunters, A Farewell to Arms, The Dog Stars, and the early Pat Conroy books like The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini.

If I had to pick just one, it would probably be Where the Wild Things Are.  I saw myself in Max from a young age, and my life probably grew out of that vision.

9.     You’ve written about family legacies, the Civil War, roadside zoos, aerobats, and now America’s social history. Where do your ideas come from?   

I just keep my antennas up and nets open for stories.  Things usually start small with me: an anecdote, a turn of phrase, a song, or a vision on the side of the road—something I mark down in the little notebook I carry in my backpack.

Both Fallen Land and Gods of Howl Mountain grew out of songs.  Fallen Land began as a short story based on the old ballad “When First Unto This Country,” while Gods was inspired by the old Steve Earle song “Copperhead Road”—probably my favorite song of all time, and one of my late father’s as well.

The River of Kings started with a shack we found in the woods during a paddle on Georgia’s Altamaha River aka the “Amazon of the South”—a very creepy place with skulls dangling from fishing line and alligator gars left gutted on the entry path like warnings.

Pride of Eden started with a story a firefighter friend (and now USAF EOD tech) told me.  His old man, the fire chief, was at the firehouse one day in Douglasville, Georgia, when Red Palmer—inventor of the “Cap-chur” tranquilizer gun—rolled up in his dually, jumped out with a double rifle, and said, “Hey, you ain’t seen a lion have you?”

Wingwalkers started with seeing an old photograph of William Faulkner in his RAF uniform hanging on the wall in Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. 

And I’ve told y’all how Rednecks got its start. 

One of my favorite things about writing is that you have a warrant or mission to be attentive to such things, to be a good listener and observer of the world around you, to talk to people you might otherwise avoid, and to go hunting for stories like some kind of strange detective. 

10.  “Rednecks” is a history, a thriller, a war novel, and literary fiction all at once. One through line in all of your books is a use of language that I consider uniquely creative among modern writers. You are a southern writer so I instinctively believe I hear elements of McCarthy and Faulkner. Would you agree?  Which writers do you consider inspirations?

I do agree.  They’re probably the two biggest for me from the South.  Other “Southern lights” for me include Harry Crews, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison (much of her work feels Southern to me), Walker Percy, Barry Hannah, and Larry Brown.  And James Dickey and Robert Penn Warren for poetry.

I’ve never been interested in books that don’t do something with the language, which all these writers do in their own way.  I recently read Joyce Carol Oates’s On Boxing and her descriptions of the various styles of Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, and other such greats made me think of the parallels with great writers who use the language in unique ways to accomplish their goals.  Not just to make things pretty or sound good, but to make the story move and sweat and work in ways that it wouldn’t otherwise.  To make the world come alive and the punches land harder, closer to the heart.

I also like epic tales that spread across whole generations and/or landscapes, and both Faulkner and McCarthy do that very well.

11.  Why should anyone read “Rednecks”?

If you’re interested in U.S. history, this simply isn’t a story you want to miss.  It’s a big one, and a bit mind-blowing that it isn’t better known.  And there are a lot of parallels to where we find ourselves a century later.  The echoes carry on.  I hope it both challenges and enriches the reader’s understanding of our past and present, and helps us remember that we are a better people together than apart.

12.  What have I not asked that I should have?

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This was a great set of questions, Worth.  I can’t think of much other than to point folks to the exclusive excerpt the Bitter Southerner recently published: https://bittersoutherner.com/2024/rednecks-novel-excerpt-taylor-brown-miner-wars

Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of Lethal Minds Journal.

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You can buy Rednecks here.

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