Lethal Minds Journal Special Edition

Fear, family, and F-words: An interview with novelist David Joy

Lethal Minds Journal is by servicemembers for servicemembers, but part of that is introducing you to artists you may enjoy and the ideas they’re working with. David Joy is a 6’5”, 240-pound, bearded, camouflage-wearing hunter and angler who rarely comes off the North Carolina mountain on which he lives. That description likely conjures an idea for you of who he is.

That idea is likely wrong.

David and I became friends about five years ago when I read his first book. Since then, we’ve wandered the woods and fished for flathead catfish, sat on a few porches, and shared some laughs. A book I helped write had part of its genesis in his living room. But his books are the focus here and I hope you will read them.

David lives in and writes about Jackson County, NC. He deals with tough topics: poverty, murder, drug abuse, and racial divides just to start. But he does it all with the intent to make you think, and likely from a perspective you don’t expect from a white man with a thick Southern accent.

With a new novel out, Those We Thought We Knew, it seemed like a good time to sit down for a long chat about some third rail topics as well as writing, reading, hunting, fishing, and plans for body disposal. Some of it might have you nodding your head. Some might make you comfortable. Some of it might make you mad.

Good.

Art is that way. Life is that way. And we’d all be better off if we acknowledged it and then found a way to look for ways we can agree rather than ripping each other apart over what we don’t. That’s just a recipe for bread and circuses.

I hope you read and enjoy.

Fire for Effect,

Russell Worth Parker

Editor in Chief – Lethal Minds Journal

Submissions are open at lethalmindsjournal@gmail.com.

Russell Worth Parker:  At Lethal Minds Journal, one of the goals is to offer exposure for artwork by active service members and veterans and give them a platform to write, think, and share their visual art. That's taking a big step. Just getting folks to open their mouths is difficult sometimes. Why are you a writer now?

David Joy: Well, I think I didn't ever want to be anything else. I grew up surrounded by storytellers, in an oral storytelling tradition, and then realized pretty early on that I wasn't capable of telling a story orally, but that maybe I could write. I started writing stories before I could spell. I would tell my mom the story, she would tell me how to spell the words. It was just always a compulsion. But, as far as, like, as a career choice, or as something that you do in adulthood… It was funny, I was with a buddy in Ashe County last week. His father was a sculptor and his mother was a potter, and my mother was a potter. We realized we were very likely, as children, at some of the same art shows because my mother was at an art show every week. I said, “I think one of the things that allowed for us is that, wherein most people are told, ‘Well, you're not going to make any money as an artist, what are you going to do for a living?’, for us, it was like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ We're surrounded by glass blowers, and fucking potters, and painters, and photographers, and sculptors, and metal smiths, and leather smiths every weekend.” And so, looking back, I think that was incredibly formative, in that, as a child, I recognized that art could be something that you pursued as an occupation.

RWP: And was there ever any fear or reticence associated with that?

DJ: No, not at all. Part of it, too, is that my lifestyle requires very little.  I'm in some ways very privileged in that I'm not even married, but I don't have children. I don't have anybody who's dependent on my income other than me, and I don't require very much. And so, it's like, if all you've ever had is not very much, then the idea of having a little bit less isn’t very terrifying. There are years where I've only made $15,000 and I'll make it work. And so, just knowing that I can scrape by, I think, is kind of an empowering thing.

RWP: Do you ever want a specific thing? Like, I want a Benelli Super Black Eagle in 12 gauge.

DJ: No. I've got some really nice guns, and I'm able to save up for things that I want just the same as anybody else. But, as time has gone on, I would rather just save my money and go do something.

RWP: So, talking about not having much, the first time I became aware of you was when I saw the cover of your first book. Why did you write Where All Light Tends to Go?

DJ: Compulsion. I woke up and Jacob was talking. So, it was very much of a matter of keeping up at that point. I had been trying to write that novel, I don't know, maybe a year or so before that, and kept working on it and kept getting it wrong. And then, like I said, one day, I woke up and I could literally hear it.

RWP: What was the turning point on that?

DJ: I don't know. I don't know. When people talk about the writing process, there are times when, yes, it is very much like work. And you sit down and you're trying to do something, and then, there have been times for me where I did quite literally nothing. And with Where All Light Tends to Go, it was like that stream of consciousness. There was a voice telling me a story, and I wrote that novel in a month and a half. And that's never happened again until recently, which is the book that I'm currently working on. I woke up and there was somebody talking.

RWP: Was it ever frightening to you in the five titles between ‘Where All Light Tends to Go,’ and what you're working on now, were you ever scared of the fact that you weren't hearing that voice?

DJ: Oh, no. That's just because I have complete faith in my process. I think, if I really look at my maturation as a writer, the biggest turning point was just getting completely comfortable within my own process. And there's never a moment where I'm fearful of having a story to write. or I need to be doing something. I know that it's going to come back because it always does. I think, early on, yeah. I remember one time, real early, like before I ever wrote a novel, having a conversation with Ron Rash and talking to him about writer's block. I was in a place where it just didn't seem like I could get anything done. And he said that he was in a similar place. But, looking back, he works so much differently from me. And that was part of the problem, I didn't have any examples to look at of writers whose process was similar to mine. You always get people saying, “Oh, write every day,” I’d blow my fucking brains out if I had to write every day.

RWP: I've heard you say that before, and it has been somewhat liberating for me because I have all those things, those obligations you specified not having. Wife, two dogs, cat, kid, mortgage. And I feel like, if I am not working, I'm not producing, and I'm not earning.

DJ: I just don't think about it. I don't know, it is a compulsion. It is like I feel absolutely driven to do it. I feel like I'm going to die if I don't do it. When it's happening, I can't imagine a time where that just completely goes away. Maybe it will, I don't know. And, at this point, shit, I'm happy with the body of work. If I pull out of this parking lot and get T-boned at a fucking red light, I'm proud of the body of work as it stands. I don't need to write anything else.

RWP: That's a hell of a way to be able to live. What is it about the body of work that gives you that…I'm going to call it ‘peace’?

DJ: I think this last novel, for sure. I know the work that went into that book, and I'm proud of the work. I'm proud of what that book is doing. And the trajectory from where I’d like things to go for that novel is steep. I covered a whole lot of ground in a fairly short amount of time. And, for the most part, I've done the things that I wanted to do. You know, the book I'm working on now, in some ways, is kind of a reversion back to the beginning, in that I just wanted to write a book that moved again. Just see how fast I could make a story go.

RWP: Well, that is, to me, your hallmark. I don't know if there's anybody that paces a book better than you do.

DJ: Yeah. That was always a goal, but when I think about the people who I was most influenced by, especially early on, it was Daniel Woodrell. I can remember the first time I ever read Tomato Red, and reaching the end of that first chapter and realizing that I pretty much had not taken a breath, and just thinking, “How the fuck did he do it?” And, for the next month, I did nothing but read that single chapter over and over and over. I was reading it five or six times a day trying to figure out what he was doing and how he did it.

RWP: So, I've tried to do that with authors before, what were you looking for?

DJ: Just studying everything that he was doing, from sentence structure to punctuation, to where there was dialogue, to just the movement back and forth from length of the sentence. I was with John Vercher recently. He wrote a novel called Three Fifths. And then, he wrote a novel called After the Lights Go Out, both really good novels. But we were talking about that I don't think that enough people study writers. And, for me, I think it goes back to a literature background where what I was trained to do was to dissect language and literature. And so, as a reader, when I'm working through a story, or a novel, or anything else, that's how I'm looking at it. John said that one of the biggest benefits for him as a teacher working in an MFA program, is that, “I'm constantly ripping apart other people's work and trying to figure out what's working, what's not working, why it's working.” And I told him, I said, “That sounds horrible to me.” And he was like, “But it's selfish for me.” And he said, “Because, when I do that,” he said, “Then when I go to my work,” he said, “I have to think about my work in those same terms.” And so, in his mind, he's like, “If I'm going to call this person out for doing this, then I better damn short call myself out for doing it.” But he's studying the work. And, to be honest, I don't think enough writers are reading that way.

RWP: Then let me be honest and say you have known me basically the entire lifespan of my trying to become a writer, now to a point where I feel like if it's measured in publication or cash, I'm doing fine, I feel comfortable saying, “Yes, I'm a writer.” But I don't know how to do what you're talking about. I have been paid to teach writing classes, and the first thing out of my mouth every time is, “I am completely unqualified to do this. I can just write.” Does that make sense?

DJ: Yeah. Yeah. I think, again, for me, it's going back and looking at… It's like learning to explicate a poem, for instance. You're looking at every single decision that was made, from syllable choice, to punctuation, to where the lines cut, where the line continues. And when you do that long enough, you just see it differently. This past weekend, we were replacing a bunch of stairs at my house, and my buddy who's a master carpenter was over there and once the stairs are off, we can see the stringers underneath them. And he's talking about a detail where they went in and they cut a 45 on the edge of the stringers. And there was a term he used for that. And he was like, “What a detail, that means nothing to you unless you're a carpenter.” And he's right. If me and you had taken those steps off and just seen it, we probably wouldn't have even noticed. I spent years taking apart poems, taking apart stories, and looking at novels through that same lens. And so, I can't say that, “Well, this is what you do.” But I think if you were to go start looking into how to explicate a poem, that’s a perfect place to start. I can't just read a poem. I can't. I can't even really just read a novel, or a story without asking questions about form and choice.

RWP: I realized as you lay all that out, I call that the music. I hear the cadence and rhythm. But I don't know how to do that with poetry. We publish a lot of poetry, And I know one of our contributor’s poems are awesome because they make me feel like, ‘oh, my God, that's amazing.’ When I read them. But I don't know why they're amazing. I can't tell you why. I can't entertain a conversation of it. But the long story short is you put in a whole lot of work to get where you are now. And after Where All Light Tends to Go that meant The Weight Of This World. I believe I know some of the genesis, but would you please explain the background there and why you wrote that book?

DJ: With those first two novels, I didn't have a purpose. It wasn't like I sat down and thought, “Well, this is what I'm trying to do.” It was like the purpose and what the book was trying to do was something that revealed itself after the work was done. And the more I looked at it, it became very clear that it was, in a lot of ways, like a treatise on violence and trying to look at the way that violence affects lives both in the moment and most assuredly, afterward. And there were a lot of things that found their way into it. The opening scene of that novel is a little boy sitting in the living room of his house. His mother's folding socks, his father walks into the room and basically says, “I love you.” He looks at his son and says, “I love you this much,” and shoots the mother and then kills himself. That scene took place in my parents' neighborhood, and it was in a foster home. And I just kept wondering, for years I just kept wondering about that kid and what kind of life could he even lead after a moment like that. And so, that became a major piece of it.

That book is dedicated to a friend of mine who we always called Paco. But I spent piles and piles of time with Paco and there's a bazillion stories I could tell about the Paco that I knew. But, in the end, he'd joined the Marines and he was part of that initial invasion into Iraq following 9/11. I saw lots and lots of pictures of the time that he spent there. I don't know what he encountered, what he didn't. Images that stick out in my mind is, like, they've got these two prisoners on the ground with fucking black pillowcases over their heads. And Paco is standing behind them with a big smile on his face and a fucking knife to one of their throats. And I just think about all of the things that he probably witnessed while he was there and how that shaped him because what eventually happened is he was back home for, I don't know, years. And I don't know what the inciting incident was, I just know that he walked into his house and he shot his brother, and he shot his father, and he killed himself. And I can remember the way that it was portrayed on the news and in the media, and it was very much just this…faceless, humanless, soulless type of portrayal of a person who I knew very, very differently. I knew, for a fact, that that boy would have done anything in the world for me even if he hadn't seen me in a very long time. What happened, and the person I knew, those two things didn't add.

And so, I think that played its way into the novel in the sense of just another one of those layers of violence and trying to figure out why people do the things that they do. And so, I think that very much influenced the character of that room in that novel, just like that other story about that foster kid influenced the story of Aiden McCall in that novel. But yeah, I think, when I look back at what the book was trying to do, it was trying to examine violence on a whole lot of different levels; to look at it in the moment, look at it in the afterward, and look at it in the things that lead up to it. I wrote that novel, it's been almost 10 fucking years ago that I wrote that novel, so it's hard to even think about... But there's a lot in that novel, and it basically boils down to maybe the issue was that nobody was listening to anybody. Like, everybody was bottling shit up, and there was no place to let it out. And that's what made the world so volatile.

RWP: You know, for me, I think, what I love about that book… Obviously, there's a lot of extreme behavior in that book. And I won't reveal it because I want people to be surprised by it when they go buy it and read it, but something I loved about that book is the relationship between Thad and Aiden was very real to me in that you got one friend, who if you're looking at it objectively from the outside party, you have to go, “Why do you not cut away from this person? This person is dragging you down.” But also, because you're loyal to somebody that you've always been loyal to because you've always been loyal to them. So, do you think that is… Is that a human characteristic, or is that a southern rural characteristic?

DJ: It's both. I think that's something that carries over across everything. The way that the beginning of that novel plays out is you know, after Aiden McCall loses both of his parents in that event. He's kind of taken in by Thad’s family. And him, and Thad, and Aiden, at that point are…they're not blood but they’re brothers and that's a hard damn thing to break for a lot of people.

RWP: But it can be an anchor around your neck.

DJ: Oh yeah, for sure. When I look at, I don't know, even the people that I grew up with, all of our relationships were like that. The other thing is that, in that novel, they're both in that mid-20s kind of age where I think people are even more vulnerable to relationships like that at that time period. You think about it from a military standpoint, you think about young Sebastian Junger’s Tribe. So much of what he's talking about is that he was looking at rates of PTSD in veterans who had never seen combat experience. And what they wound up finding was that so much of it was a loss of… It was an identity completely defined by relationships with others. And it was like when they left and they didn't have those relationships anymore, that was the traumatic event.

RWP: I read Tribe, and so I'm not trying to say I had an innovative thought at all. But, in 2014, I was the number two guy of about 800-person unit. And I looked out across the force that we had there, and I realized because of their age, and the age of the unit and the assignment policies, we had all these guys with high-level valor awards and a ton of combat. And everybody thought that was really neat, it plays out really well on Instagram, but, because of the seat I sat in, I knew also how jacked up a lot of their lives were. I think that's like a swirling drain, it's hard to get out of sometimes. You're looking for the approval of the tribe, and you get the approval a certain way by also denying the reality of the problems you're having. Which goes back to what you were saying about unwillingness to talk about things, or inability.

So, I think that this particular book is a book I would throw at any and all veterans because it's super engaging. And I think that somebody who wants to read something that's gritty, and tough, and hard, the same way most military people perceive of themselves, they can, while, at the same time, if they just choose to think about it a little bit, they can get something out of it that will help them sort their life out. So anyway, what kind of feedback have you ever gotten on it? Have you heard from Paco’s family?

DJ: No. I never did. And I don't know if anybody knew that that book was dedicated to him or not. Unless you knew me, you wouldn't know that. I was thinking about this today, which is that that was a tremendous gap to write across. I've been just thinking about the gap so much more recently because I think this latest work crosses boundaries that I had not dealt with before. But I think, as a writer, you're always crossing these gaps, and you're crossing gaps of… A lot of people cross gaps of place, or class, or gender, or sexuality, or race. But with a novel like The Weight of This World, it was also crossing that gap, that veteran gap. And the danger is that you slip off and he becomes this stereotype because we all know there's so much fucking fiction that came out of it, and it makes sense why the fiction came to reflect it in that we lived inside of a perpetual 20-year war. And so, of course, eventually, the fiction starts to reflect that, but so much of it is done just poorly.

RWP: It's beyond poor. In a lot of sense, it becomes offensive.

DJ: Yeah. And so, I think there was a very real danger there that that was something that I worked really hard to try and not do. At the same time, if there was a veteran who reached out and pointed to flaws in it, you have to shut your mouth and listen in the same way that I do any… If a black reader reads a characterization in Those We Thought We Knew, and says, “You got this fucking wrong,” I have to shut my mouth and listen, like, it's not a moment to be defensive. I did the work and I tried to do the work to the best of my ability, but anytime you're crossing gaps, you're inevitably going to slip up in places. You're going to misstep; you're going to make mistakes.

RWP: So, let's talk about that inevitability for a minute. I want to go there eventually anyway, but I was going to kind of go chronologically, but I won't. There's the whole Patterson Hood quote about things just play different in a Southern accent. And I have written about race very tentatively because it is fearsome. And I have called African-American friends of mine and said, “Hey, I need to read you this and tell me if it's okay.” I flat out don't buy the notion that a writer can't write whatever the hell a writer wants to write, I also don't buy the notion that you can write it without consequence. If you do a shitty job, expect to hear about it. I'm not mad about somebody's opinion, and I'm not mad about somebody calling me out on doing something objectively poorly. Race is a scary thing, so, like I said, I was going to go chronologically, but let's talk about ‘Those We Thought We Knew.’ Were you scared at all writing that book?

DJ: Yeah, of course. I think you do the work fearlessly, but when you're away from the page, that doesn't mean that you don't second guess yourself when you're in the middle of it. It's not like when I sat down to write it, like, “Oh, I better hold out here,” or something like that, that's not my personality. When I'm doing the work, there is no hesitancy and no restraint. But yeah, I think the fear isn't a fear of response, the fear is failure. It's getting it wrong. The whole time, it was like I knew that that book would catch heat from both sides and I didn't care about the response from anybody except the very real community that I had decided to use to tell that story. So, like, I cared about if somebody at Mount Zion AME read that novel…

RWP: And for people outside the South, AME stands for?

DJ: African Methodist Episcopal Church. That novel starts with a very real church and a very real community that exists in the county that I live in and write about. That Church was founded in 1892 by 11 formerly enslaved people, and that community has been there ever since. And if somebody who was a member of that community read it and felt that I had exploited them, that was the fear. And the response has not been that, the response has been very, very good from black readers. That has been incredibly encouraging. For me, one of the essential questions was, “Can you write a book about race that is primarily if not solely intended for a white audience?” And the answer, I think, is yes. So, for me, that book was primarily written for a white audience. I don't think that there's any new ground being tread there for black readers. I think that conversations and questions being raised are things that have been lived, discussed, and understood ad nauseam by that community. But the response from the readers that have reached out to me have all been really promising. We were talking about writing across gaps earlier, the truth is that the gaps are just…they're more major for me and you and they always will be. And that's not a ‘poor pitiful me’ thing to say, the reason that those gaps are larger is because there is not a gap that we can cross that does not involve power. Any gap I cross involves power. If I cross gender, I have power. If I cross-race, I most assuredly have power. If I cross sexuality, I have power. As a white cis man, the consequences of getting it wrong are just bigger and it's because they're dangerous. So, I hear this all the time, people are like, “Why can't I write black characters, you got black writers writing white characters?” And sure, again, the difference is power. Me as a white man getting a black woman wrong is more consequential than Shawn Cosby, who's a writer I love, as a black man getting a white man wrong because he's not operating from a place of power. It can't carry the same consequence.

RWP: I feel like the failure to understand or, at least, acknowledge that disparity is at the root of a lot of issues because I've heard you make the point before and I bought into it, I think you were interviewed around this book. Something you said that I felt did a great job of centering the argument here well in the south in a way that was both digestible to the people you're trying to make it to and not patronizing is, “Just because I say it was harder for somebody because of X, Y, or Z, does not obviate the fact that it was hard for you.”

DJ: Yeah. I think the only time that you hear people saying that you can't, or complaining that, “Well, I can't do this. I can't do that.” Talking about cancel culture, and this, and that, the only people who are complaining about that are people who are unwilling to do the work. And it's people who are pissed off that they're finally being held accountable; that I can no longer do anything I want to do without consequence, which is a testimony to their privilege. It's a testimony to exactly what we're talking about. Poor pitiful you, that you can't do it anymore and not be held accountable for it. You can most assuredly write across any gap you want to, but we're at a point in time where that work cannot be done inconsequentially. I can't think of a single instance where art is not appropriation.

RWP: What do you mean?

DJ: All I'm getting at is that, regardless, all art is a matter of appropriation, it is a matter of you taking ownership of something that is not yours. And when you do that, there is an immense responsibility that comes along with that to do the work. It's like what you just said, recognizing privilege, recognizing power. The recognition of the responsibility is the work because when you operate from that type of ground framework, you're going to do the things that you need to do in order to get it right. That's it. You recognize the responsibility, you recognize the power, and as a result of that, you do the work to get it right. And that's all you owe anybody.

RWP: What negative have you gotten back on this book?

DJ: I haven't really. I don't read reviews. I'm sure that if I went and looked, I could find things that were written bad about it. But with regards to conversations through interviews, and conversations with readers, and that type of thing, there really hasn't been much negative. Now, when I talked about the inevitability of mistakes and the fact that I know I got things wrong, I can point to things that I go back and question. A perfect example would be that Toya’s father is absent from the novel. Early drafts of this novel, he was in the story. And, I think that I was constantly in kind of this conflict of trying to wrangle in narrative that was sprawl and get it contained, and get it kind of cinch down to something tighter. And over the course of that, he was one of the things that got cut. But, by cutting him, it could be argued I'm perpetuating the stereotype of the absent black father. And if somebody brings that up, they're right. I can explain why I made the choices I did, but that doesn't justify it.

RWP: I'm going to pick at you for one second. I think it justifies it, it doesn't necessarily insulate you from the criticism. Is that too fine a distinction? You're the artist, you get to decide how you present the idea.

DJ: I think that I am comfortable in the decision that I made. I can say that. I don't know whether or not I can say that it was justified in the sense that I am incapable of recognizing the power of perpetuating a stereotype like that because that stereotype does not affect me.

RWP: I'm trying to think if that caught with me when I read it. And, of course, I read it before it was released. I feel like that did tickle in my mind.

DJ: Yeah. And there is a mention of it. There's a mention that he exists. There's a mention of the grandmother saying that's where the girl gets her smile from and that's where she gets her laugh from. And I can say that working with an authenticity reader on that book, she was very aware of the absence of black men in that story. And there were multiple black male characters that had been cut through the process of revision. And when I went back after having worked with that authenticity read, that's when the minister took on the role that he did. I went back and wrote chapters for him that had not existed to try and get at some of the things that she was bringing up. And that's what I mean. In the end, that authenticity read, that whole story is a kind of a nightmare in a lot of ways in the sense that I was not given the time that I feel like I needed to work through it. It was given to me on December 15th and I had until January 1st to turn the novel around. And when they sent it to me, she said, “I've asked everybody in the office, and no one has ever seen anything like this.” They said that the average response from an authenticity read was two and a half to three pages, mine was 25 pages, single-spaced, with another 10 pages of footnotes, where everything was very, very much grounded in scholarship and thought. And every question that was raised, and everything brought up were things that had to be fully considered because they were important. And that's not to say that I had to change, there were things that I couldn't change, and there were things that she brought up that I had spent a ton of time thinking about, but it all had to be considered.

RWP: And where do you source an authenticity reader? Explain what that is for the people who won't know.

DJ: Well, so, I think that the term that most people are familiar with is a sensitivity read. We live in a world where we're constantly trying to get the language right. And when I've said that, I've had people roll their eyes at the fact that it was change from a sensitivity read to an authenticity read. And the thing that I would say about that is that it's a much better term in the sense that if a black reader engages with my novel, and they find a problem in my characterizations of black characters, their response is not the result of their sensitivity. Their response is because I got it fucking wrong. And so, the term now is an authenticity read. So, basically, anytime that you're crossing a gap, and especially a gap where there is some very real danger that could be done, a lot of times, a publisher will bring in an authenticity reader to work through it and raise questions. And so, for me, because my novel had multiple black characters, they paid someone to come and read the novel and to point to things that they thought warranted question. And there was something that I was really adamant that I wanted from the beginning because, for me, it's part of the work of just trying to do everything you can to get it right. And so, I wanted it, and I was very fortunate that I had a publisher who was willing to do that because some aren't.

RWP:  Got it. All right. So, let's move then to kind of a… I think, I don’t know, between ‘The Line That Held Us,’ and ‘When These Mountains Burn,’ which one I think is more theatrical. I don't know if that's the right word, but ‘The Line That Held Us,’ to me, I can see it on the big screen really fast. What was your thought on writing that book and why did you write it?

DJ: I think, sometimes, I become really interested in form and with very specific things. And so, the book I'm wanting to work on now, I'm willing to play with the idea of the happy ending. I'm wanting to just examine that as an idea. And that's what I'm having fun doing. With ‘The Line That Held Us,’ it was that I wanted to write a really, really memorable antagonist in the vein of somebody like McCarthy's Lester Ballard from ‘Child Of God,’ or, Granville Sutter from William Gay's ‘Twilight,’ or, The Misfit from Flannery O'Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ In the end, the character of Dwayne Brewer does some absolutely horrible things and he is operating from this really hard-to-grasp concept of morality and virtue, but he's complicated enough that I have never had a reader tell me they didn't love him.

RWP: Maybe this is not a word that is going to make you happy, but there's a sweetness to that character.

DJ: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Tom Franklin told me a story one time about after Larry Brown wrote ‘Father and Son,’ Tom wanted to ask him about a very specific scene in that novel. There's a scene in that novel where Glen, Glen is just kind of this absolutely despicable character on all fronts. He's out of prison for having killed somebody. We know that he sexually assaulted one woman, if not multiple women, just an all-around bad guy. And there's a moment in that novel where he catches a fish, and it was a fish that everybody had been trying to catch it for years and years. And he had this opportunity to be the town hero, and instead, he let the fish go. And, in the novel, he's asked why he let the fish go, and Glenn says, “Because that fish never did nothing to me.” Tom asked Larry why he wrote that scene and what Larry said was that there had to be a moment of humanity. That, without that, Glenn's one-dimensional. And so, with Dwayne, I think it's that same thing. This is somebody that you do not want to cross, an incredibly violent person, an incredibly vengeful person, but there are moments throughout that novel of tenderness. And, for me, I think that's the work of trying to create fully fleshed-out characters. There's never been a character who has stayed with me the way that Dwayne Brewer has. I've thought about writing a novel called Dwayne that would just be his story.

RWP: I would read the hell out of that book.

DJ: And that novel didn't do very well here. It did like all the others, but it didn't do very well. But that novel, it did really well in France. That was the novel that did really well for me in France, that was a pretty big book there. I think they can understand all of those things we were just talking about in ways that an American audience doesn't. I think that they tend to ask deeper questions about the work that they're reading. I think they tend to think about things on a little bit deeper scale. And I think that a lot of Americans want airplane books, they want something I can pick up in an airplane terminal, hop on, and have read by the time I get off, and throw it in the trash and never think about it again. And I think that French readers still look at literature as something that should challenge them. And so, I think they're just willing to sit with books that are trying to do bigger things in ways that, a lot of times, American readers just aren't willing to do.

RWP: I think you're right. And I think that characteristic lies at the essence of a lot of the problems we have in this country right now.

DJ: Yeah. We don't want to think. For the most part, it's because we don't have to. For people like me and you, if we don't want to do the work, we don't have to, as far as thinking about things in any sort of meaningful way, try to better ourselves, try to better the world. If me and you decide flat out, “Well, they can fucking deal with it,” our lives don't change. And I think that's at the root of a lot of just the complete unwillingness to engage with being made uncomfortable and engage with being challenged, and with change, is that there's no consequence for not doing it, and it's easier not to do it, so let's just not do it.

RWP: So let me ask you this, this is a fraught moment, but we’re at, one; I think the obligation to be uncomfortable, and that's something that, again, is a reason why I so commend ‘Those We Thought We Knew’ to readers, particularly white readers in the south because it will make them uncomfortable. But if I flip that on its head for a minute, if I choose not to do something, or not to engage, or not to be uncomfortable, if I just sit over here and be quiet, I’m still going to have a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Eventually, if you tell me I suck enough times, I'm just going to go “Yeah, okay, I got it, I suck. I'll be over here sucking and enjoying my life.” Is there any risk, or is there any obligation on either side of whatever equation this is we're describing…the power gap, on either side of the power gap, to adapt how you present a message, or is it all on the people on the power side of the gap?

DJ: I think the burden of the conversation lies squarely on our shoulders, especially when we're talking about issues of race. The issues at hand are a white problem, and that weight lies squarely on our shoulders. And so, for me, the burden of the majority of those conversations lies squarely on us. You look at me and you expect me to vote a certain way, you expect me to think a certain way just because of the way I look, because of the way I talk. And people are surprised or taken aback when I start saying the things that I say. But In some ways, it has been incredibly beneficial for me because it's like the fucking Trojan horse. If I start raising questions about things, it is perceived very differently than if Nicole Hannah Jones says it.

RWP: Tell me who Nicola Hannah Jones is.

DJ: Did the 1619 Project. But someone who is consistently… I think she's leading the most interesting and progressive conversations on race in this country right now. And part of the reason that she is perceived so dangerously is, one is that she is rocking the boat, and she's rocking a system of power where people lose power that they've held for generations when you start to recognize the things that she said. But, on the surface, the reason people are so combative to her as a person is rooted strictly in misogyny and racism. It's the way that she looks, it's the way that she presents herself. You've got this super, super intelligent strong black woman who is grounded in what she thinks and believes, and who is able to say it very coherently. And is unshaken by criticism and question, and in a very real danger that is often presented to her. And that is intimidating as fuck to people. And because of that, they won't listen to a word she says. The minute you see a strong black woman with bright red hair saying that white supremacy is the root of this country, and that white supremacy is something that operates within every system of power that is in this country, the minute you have a strong black woman with bright red hair telling you that, the majority of white Americans write it off. And they write it off because of misogyny and racism, it’s because of where the idea is coming from. And so, the benefit for me is that I'm the opposite. I look the way they look, I sound the way that they sound, and it allows me a chance to say things that have been said over, and over, and over again for decades, and decades, and decades, and nobody's listened.

RWP: And have you seen anybody listen as a result of you saying that you wouldn't have expected?

DJ: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And I just think about, one of the responses on this book tour was we were talking… I think that, again, the burden lies squarely on us to be having these conversations, and it's because the truth is that these conversations are not had outside of moments of black death and black drama. It takes Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes until the entire world watched the life leave his eyes for white people to want to engage in a conversation about race. And, even then, we only want to do it until we can get a moment of quiet to usher the monster back into the closet. We just don't want to have those conversations, and we're the ones who have to have those conversations. And so, for me, one of those reasons I was saying that, and a woman said, “But what if it gets you killed?” And, one; I think it's a privilege for you to suddenly be worried about danger when there are people who are living with that danger twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But, at the end, I think I recognized what she was trying to say. And I think we live in a world where if you're a white person and you go take part in a BLM march, or something, I think you can sense that there may be a very real danger because that's the world we live in. But, at the time, I didn't know how to answer her. And then, it took me a couple of minutes, and I answered her, and I said, “If that's not what you want to do, that's not where the majority of the work is. The majority of the work, the conversations that need to be had need to be had at the kitchen table. They need to be had on the front porch. They need to be had around a campfire. It's people that are very close to you, if that's the only work you're doing is having those conversations with friends and family, then you're doing the work.

RWP: All right, the last book that we hadn't talked about is ‘When These Mountains Burn.’ Yeah. And talking about authenticity, especially, I know you live… A lot of this book deals with the opioid crisis, I very proudly tell people, “I'm a heroin dealer,” in that book. You have been very, very kind to me, and very, very encouraging to me in my inadvertent career as a writer, and I thank you for it. One of the things you said to me, and I think this certainly applies to ‘Those We Thought We Knew,’ you said this to me years ago, “If you want to be any kind of artist, you got to be fearless and vulnerable.” And I want to drill into that for just a minute because of the importance of that, to me, especially for veterans in a space that has sensitivity involved in it and vulnerability, to use your word. You can't be fearless without being vulnerable, and you can't be vulnerable without being fearless. You could not have written ‘Those We Thought We Knew,’ frankly, as a white, rural, southern guy, at least, from my perceptions, without some concerns of what's the blowback going to be in some fashion. I don't know how you do it.

DJ: Oh, well, every novel I've written has been very specifically set in Jackson County, North Carolina, and it's because I just don't know anything else. And so, I think there was an old forester. I mentioned a scene in that novel. I think he was talking about the fire tower, but he was commending me for knowing the landscape in a way that I do. So I think all of the novels are doing that to some level. I think one of the ways that that novel does it in a… Well, that novel, and this new one, both, in a more vivid sense, maybe, is that I think that place is the intersection of… Place is not just landscape, place is landscape plus people. It's those two things intertwined in an inseparable way.

RWP: Which is culture.

DJ: Yes. And those two novels deal with culture in ways that the first three did not. And so, if I think about the book that I'm most proud of, in that sense, and does the most work, in that sense, it's ‘When These Mountains Burn.’ That's the central conflict of that novel. It's two primary characters both feeling like they're watching the end of the world. And for Raymond Mathis, is that he feels like he's watching cultural extinction take place. And for Denny Rattler, it's the opposite, it's a cultural reclamation that he cannot be a part of because of his addiction. And I wanted to pair those things back and forth because I thought it was an interesting way to go about it. But yeah, I think that novel deals with culture in ways that none of the other ones do.

RWP: And that's what I love about that book. To me, culture and place… All the talking we've done about the various gaps across all, to me, have root in culture and place. And they're what makes a place both horrific and heavenly, all those things together. Last thing because I'm way over on your time. Briefly, let's talk about ‘Gather at the River,’ and ‘Growing Gills,’ and the importance of the outdoors and hunting and fishing to you.

DJ: Oh, well, early on as a writer, that was what I thought I would do, be an outdoor writer.

DJ: Well, my goal was to write like John Gierach at the time. There were people that were doing things that I found really interesting on the page, and that were living lifestyles that were appealing to me. And I think it was writers like John Gierach. And I could name lots of other ones, but what interested me about his work is like people are like, “Oh, he writes books about fishing.” Well, no, he does not write books about fishing. He writes books about the world, and the human condition, and philosophy through the lens of fly fishing. It's fly fishing as a vehicle to come to much deeper conversations. And that's what interests me about his work and about all of the work that falls into that vein. Think about something like Thomas McGuane’s ‘The Heart of the Game.’ And yes, that's an essay about hunting, but that is an essay about a whole hell of a lot more than hunting. And so, I think that just really interested me. And so, when I wrote ‘Growing Gills,’ that was the first book I ever wrote and was kind of what I envisioned some of my work being. I think deep down I always wanted to write fiction, and then I did, and that's kind of become… I think people recognize me as a novelist. And then ‘Gather at the River,’ though, the way that came about was just fishing with a buddy, and we got to talking about different nonprofits, and we got to talking Cast for Kids. And it was like, “Man, I really like raising money for Cast for Kids, and I don't have any money. What I do have is access to some of the most talented writers in America. And the majority of them would do me a favor.” And so, I reached out to 25 writers that I admired, and all of them agreed to write essays that were about fishing. And we were, as a result, able to raise a lot of money for Cash for Kids. And I think, truthfully, I'm always working on two books. The big book, for me, is… I'll only ever write one more sporting book, probably, but it's always being worked on. It's always in the background. I can think of three very, very big essays that I've been working on for years, trying to get them right, wrestling with ideas. And all three of those will be in that collection if I'm able to finish it before I croak. But yeah, I started big game hunting about a decade ago, but I grew up to small game hunters. I grew up to squirrel hunters, and rabbit hunters, to an uncle who still had kennels full of beagles a mile down the road. And I grew up running through a cow pasture every single day to fish. And when I say every single day, I mean that I used to keep notebooks, and there were years that I did not miss a day; that I fished literally every day of the year. I started fly fishing, I don't know, when I was probably about 10 years old. My mother gave me a fly rod on Easter and a little shitty fly, and I started fly fishing when I was 10 years old. But I always fished. And now, I don't fish nearly as much as I hunt.

RWP: Why?

DJ: It's just the…I was up a fucking tree this morning. And I wasn't hunting anything, I just climbed a tree to watch the fucking woods because that's what I do. That's where I'm most comfortable. Man, I think it boils down to that singular line that they butchered in ‘Gather at the River,’ that thank God I was able to salvage in an essay that, “All that I know of beauty I learned through rod and gun.’ The most powerful moments of my life happened in the woods. The most the most spiritual moments of my life happened in the woods. I learned a whole lot more about God sitting up a tree than I ever did sitting on a church pew.

RWP: Do you believe in God?

DJ: I believe in the earth is God. I believe in the things that I've witnessed. I believe in the transference of energy. It's the reason that, when I die, I want them to lay me out on this body farm that I’m basically sitting at it right now right down the road. But they will, quite literally, lay you out on the ground and let the animals eat you. That's what I want.

RWP: Right on. I’m going to get burned up and put in a specific chunk of water.

DJ: Yeah. I used to claim cremation, and then I listened to fucking Neil deGrasse Tyson one time, and he was describing the literal thing that happens to your energy when you're cremated, that the energy becomes radiant heat that leaves this planet. That all of the things that are burned up and converted, that's the energy that it’s converted into and that it leaves. And it was like, “Nope, not doing that.” It's the idea of leaving that I don't like.

RWP: I guess maybe I don't like the concept of leaving, but I like the idea of taking up as little space as possible.

DJ: Oh, well, I'll be gone. You think about a damn deer carcass. If it didn't all get gone, there’d be them piles of bones laying every-fucking-where. Eventually, the damn squirrels and the mice are going to be…There ain't going to be nothing left.

RWP: Maybe I’d go that route. The thing is I want to go in the water, and they won't just dump a body in the water.

DJ: Well, I don't know. You got friends that would.

RWP: (Laughs)

DJ: Like, I had a friend one time…I don't know if you know this story, but when Edward Abbey died, his friends broke into the goddamn morgue and they stole his body. And they took him and they placed his body in a cave that was incredibly important to him. And that story, what we used to always joke about was, like, are you that type of friend to me? Like, if I told you that you had to break into a morgue and steal my body, are you that kind of friend?

RWP: I call them body-burying friends. Somebody that you call them on Tuesday night and be like, “Dude, I got to bury a body,” and they’re like, “Alright, yeah, I'll be there in a minute.”

DJ:  Yeah. You know a whole lot of people who would be quite capable of getting your body into the ocean.

(Laughter)

You can find any of David Joy’s books at your favorite bookseller but he would prefer you use www.Indiebound.com or call City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, NC at (828) 756-0966 and have them ship you an autographed copy (tell them what it should say and he will stop in and do it for you).