by Abby Lewis

Abby N. Lewis: I’m here today with Michael Amos Cody, who teaches in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University. He grew up in Madison County, North Carolina, and lives with his wife, Leesa, in Jonesboro, Tennessee. He previously wrote about Runion, which is featured in his new short story collection A Twilight Reel, in his first novel, which came out in 2017, titled Gabriel’s Songbook. So, each of the twelve stories in A Twilight Reel—your new short story collection, which comes out on May 25, 2021—every story represents a month in a year, with “The Wine of Astonishment” being the first story set in January 1999 and “Witness Tree” as the final story set in December of 1999. What influenced your decision to order the stories in this way?

Michael Amos Cody: Well, my initial thoughts when writing always tend to be about place and trying to realize a sense of place, how to create it. Be that the rural setting of sort of small town Runion and its environs, or whether it’s an urban setting like Nashville, which was the setting in a lot of Gabriel’s Songbook. I try to get a physical picture of the place in my mind so that readers can kind of enter the world, I hope, and physically sense it. You know, they can they can smell it, they can feel its textures and hear the sounds and such. That’s where it starts.

But part of thinking about the story collection and how it became organized and what develops out of that, striving for a sense of place, especially for me in writing about Appalachia, is that sense of place goes beyond the physical, beyond the day to day. It’s seasonal. There is a quality about each month that you can feel in the air and you can see it on the mountainsides as those changes take place. As I was thinking about the stories, I wanted to recreate that place as thoroughly as I could, and to me, that meant setting these stories in the calendar. I remember early on, someone responding to one of the stories said, “I can really feel the winter in this.” So, I liked that idea, and I wanted to continue it. Considering place that way, and in thinking about famous examples like Faulkner’s “little postage stamp of native soil” and James Joyce’s “dear dirty Dublin,” I wanted to do that kind of thing with the mountains where I grew up, specifically Madison County, NC, where I lived from the time I was five, I think, until I left there. (And I still spend time there now.) But initially, as the first stories began to develop, I realized there was one in the winter, there was one in the summer, there was one that became based on the blizzard of 1993 that hit the western NC mountains. As those seasonal settings began to develop, I saw what I wanted to do in tandem with changes in the topography, the climate—those things have a strong influence on place.

I was also noticing the changes that were taking place in my lifetime in the mountains. People often lived in these very secluded little hollers and little towns, in “branches” like Doe Branch or Anderson Branch—all of these kinds of places in Madison County. I remember to some extent in school being able to tell where in the county a person was from because of the slight shifts in their accents and the way they said things, even in a very localized setting like a county high school. I started seeing those kinds of things going away, seeing satellite dishes start popping up on hillsides and on barn roofs and things like that. And I started thinking that somehow this community that I had grown up in was becoming part of a kind of backwoods version of the global community. Things were starting to change that way.

So, initially, I was thinking about that period in the late ’80s, mid or early 1990s. Then what I decided at some point was that I wanted all of them to be in the same year. So, I started restructuring them to fit. And I chose 1999 mainly because that’s when my life sort of changed when I moved away, for one thing, on a more permanent basis. I got a job at Murray State University in Kentucky, and then came here to ETSU. At the same time my life was on the move, 1999 had all of those end-of-the-century anxieties, the Y2K fears of the world collapse at the moment 1999 became 2000. And so, I thought that would be a good year to bring all these stories together in time and try to capture them over the course of the year: the geography, the climate, the spiritual character of the place, the culture, the thick layers of change being experienced by communities and families and individuals.

ANL: You’re very specific with street names and a lot of the landscape is very intentional. It’s clear you’ve got a road map in your mind of how the town looks. Have you drawn out a physical map of the town or landmarks to help you remember, or is it all in your head?

MAC: No, I have a map. I used to have a basic one stuck up on my wall, a general map that I drew out for the Runion sections of Gabriel’s Songbook. But then as I began to work on this collection, because it is so focused on this area, I drew up a map of Runion that is much more detailed. It shows all the Runion State University buildings and everything that’s on Main Street and Mill Street from “Grist for the Mill” and Lonesome Mountain Drive. It gives this sense of the whole town and the roads that go off into those hollers and various places. So, yeah, I do have a very physical image in my mind of what Runion is like.

ANL: That would be cool if you had a little replica of the town that you could reference.

MAC: Yeah, my colleague Dr. Scott Honeycutt does his wonderful maps of rambles. I have thought that at some point I might ask him to take my sort of badly drawn map and maybe create something that’s more interesting to look at. That’s something that Dr. Honeycutt would be able to pull off.

ANL: Yeah, that would make a nice design on the inner jacket of a book or something. So, you’ve been working on several of the stories in your book for many years. How early on did you realize that the individual stories you were working on were part of something larger?

MAC: Three of the stories were part of the creative thesis that I wrote for my master’s at Western Carolina University, which I finished in 1995. So, “The Wine of Astonishment,” “Overwinter,” and “Grist for the Mill” were all part of that initial thesis. I’ve had it on my shelf here at the office, but I haven’t really paid any attention to it in a long time. To look at it again when getting ready to talk with you and see that I titled the thesis “A Twilight Reel”—it was really kind of a surprising to me. I didn’t realize that I had been thinking about it in that context for that long. At the time I was writing those first stories, of course, 1999 hadn’t even shown up yet, so I certainly didn’t have that year in mind at all.

But it’s apparent from looking at the thesis written nearly 30 years ago that I was thinking of the current structure. The three stories I had back then are arranged in chronological order—January, March, and August. I remember—fairly early on, not as early as ’95, but in the midst of the first decade of the 2000s—I remember having a table of contents. I had decided on the single year. I didn’t know what the single year was at that time, but I had a table of contents with titles. Several were titles with no stories to go with them, like the May story, “Decoration Day.” I had already picked that out. And the December story, “Witness Tree,” I’d already picked that out as well, but those stories were among the last to be written. So, it was something that took shape in my mind a long time ago and then the stories were kind of set in a way to fulfill that idea.

I’m very pleased with the way it’s turned out. Some of the authors who have read it and provided blurbs made comments that I find very gratifying. They have enjoyed the particular stories, which is great. But then two or three of these reviewers pointed out that, as a whole, the stories create this entire atmosphere, which is really what I wanted to do. I’m glad that some people have picked up on it, which suggests that I made some strides in that direction at least.

ANL: That’s something that is difficult to tell as the author, when you’re so immersed in the individual stories, how people are reading it as a whole.

MAC: People didn’t read a lot of it. Some of them I had published. I think by 2014, probably six of the stories had been published and only seven of them were written. So, then, at least five of the stories were written just over the last two or three years.

ANL: Which one is the first story that you wrote?

MAC: The first story actually didn’t even make it into the collection. When I left Nashville, where I wrote songs for a number of years in my 20s, I had begun to write some songs that were tending toward a kind of homecoming. In fact, one of them is called “Homecoming.” My mind was turning in that direction of moving out of Nashville and coming back to the mountains, getting married and going back to school because I hadn’t finished my bachelor’s degree. One of the songs that was written late in the Nashville period was called “Jamboree.” It’s a little song about this young woman going to a music festival and falling in love with one of the performers on the stage. As a song, even though the lyric doesn’t specify, in my mind it was taking place around where I grew up. Some little local music festival. So, when I moved back to NC and started back to school at UNC-Asheville to finish my bachelor’s, I took my first creative writing course. I wanted to force myself to write something besides songs. Because the songs I wrote tended to be so narrative-oriented, fiction seemed like the natural move instead of poetry. A lot of people from the old days have thought that I went into poetry because of the connection with songs, but the narrative element of the songs pushed me into fiction. In the first fiction writing workshop I had, I was casting around to figure out what I was going to write about. I picked up my song “Jamboree” and thought, “Well, okay, here’s a three-minute song of three verses and a chorus.” I knew that there was much more of the story that wasn’t in the song. So, I just expanded that lyric into a short story, and it turned out well. It was part of the thesis that I was talking about. It was the fourth story that was in there. And for a long time, it was part of the collection, but then as the other stories began to develop, they just moved slightly away from the character of “Jamboree.” So, it didn’t quite fit what I was hoping to do with the collection as a whole. In the last three years or so, it got bumped out and I wrote a story called “Conversion” to fit in there. “Jamboree” was the June story and the earliest one, I think. Now, in the finished collection, “Conversion” is the June story. Of the early thesis stories that survived to be in the collection, I’m fairly certain that “The Wine of Astonishment” was the first one written. And it’s the first one in the collection, the January story. About the same time I was deciding that it probably was written first, I remembered that “Witness Tree” was the last one that I wrote, which is the December story. They weren’t all written in order like that, of course, but I think it’s interesting that the first story is the first story written in the collection and the last story was the last one written.

As my job, I teach. My focus is early American literature, and I actually picked up the title of “The Wine of Astonishment” story from Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative from the 17^th century. It’s one of the verses that she quotes when she’s a captive of the Wampanoag tribe during King Philip’s war. And, of course, I traced the verse back to the Psalms 60. That phrase just leaped out at me, especially since Reverend Thorn sort of does like Mary Rowlandson in that he brings scripture into the context of whatever he’s dealing with, as she does in her captivity narrative.

ANL: Yeah, that’s a really interesting tidbit, and the bookends of the first and the last story is interesting, too. This question ties into the second part of the first question I asked. Are all of your stories evolved from songs that you’ve written, or do you write stories first half the time?

MAC: Actually, Abby, I think only the first two stories in that first writing workshop came from songs. I was required to write two stories, and I wrote “Jamboree,” which has a very pastoral kind of feel to it. I’m just remembering now that I dedicate this collection to Jeff Rackham, who was my first fiction professor over at UNCA, and he was really, really good in a lot of ways. But I remember when I wrote “Jamboree”—and, again, it’s this very slow-moving pastoral piece—the other students in the workshop just blasted it. And so, you can imagine—my very first story and it gets trashed by the class. But Dr. Rackham took me aside after the class and said, “Don’t dismiss anything that they said, but this story is at a—.” I can’t remember how he put it exactly, but he was saying this is a well-developed story that is at a different level from what the rest of the class is writing. Of course, that was very gratifying and also encouraging to hear. But, in order to get the class on my side as well, my second story was taken from a song called “To the Moon, Alice,” which if anybody is familiar with the old situation comedy from the 1950s and ’60s, The Jackie Gleason Show or The Honeymooners, that was always the threat that Jackie Gleason’s character Ralph would give to his wife. He would shake his fist at her and say, “To the moon, Alice.” So, I had this song called “To the Moon, Alice,” and it was about an abusive relationship. So, I built the second story that I wrote for the class on that. Of course, it was a much more exciting and somewhat violent narrative that the class really ate up, so I was happy to get them on my side there. But other than those first two, I don’t think anything else has really developed out of the songwriting. Of course, I brought a lot of things that I learned as a songwriter into the fiction writing, but as far as direct translation from song to fiction, those are the only two that are really direct.

ANL: I remember reading both of those. Either they were published in something and I tracked them down, or you had sent them to me when I emailed you, I think, as an undergrad asking to hear about your writing. One of those two.

MAC: Yeah. “To the Moon, Alice” is not a Runion story at all. It’s a Nashville story. And, actually, I put it—you may be remembering it from Gabriel’s Songbook because it became a chapter in the book. The abusive relationship that Gabriel’s bass player, Yvonne Moon, develops with this guy that Gabriel tries to rescue her from. That’s basically “To the Moon, Alice” rewritten into Gabriel’s story. So, yes, “To the Moon, Alice” didn’t fit the collection, and it was never even considered for A Twilight Reel. It was also the first one that really gave me some public kudos. It was the first one that was published out in the world, not in the student journal or magazine. It was published by this group in Kansas. Potpourri was the name of the little magazine, and they held the Nancy Pickard Fiction Award. “To the Moon, Alice” won the contest and was published in the magazine. And then when they did a Potpourri 10-year anniversary issue, the story got included in that as well. So, it was a nice public validation of my writing. “To the Moon, Alice” served me in a lot of good ways as far as story and confidence builder.

ANL: That’s really cool to hear, all of that backstory. It ties into the second part of my question, which you talked about the evolution of individual stories, but how do you think your early writing, coming from your music, and then going to a creative workshop at 32, back to school, how do you think all of that influenced your writing goals and even your overall writing career?

MAC: Okay, so this is kind of an odd thing to say, but one of the things that developed in my songwriting is probably the thing that killed me as a songwriter. At some point early in my songwriting career, I decided that I would never write anything that I would be embarrassed to read just as a lyric to a group of people, rather than a song with a melody and rhythm, because you can have a great record, and the lyrics are just horrible. They’re nothing. So, at some point, I decided that I was not going to write anything in which the lyric would not be able to stand up, to some extent, on its own without music. I think as far as Nashville goes, that was probably something that prevented me from getting much happening there. I mean, I got some things recorded, and people liked “Jamboree,” for example. There were a number of recording artists in Nashville who were really taken with that song, but just the way that it was written—I kind of just wrote it for me—they couldn’t see themselves singing it, but they really liked it. So, that was the kind of thing that sort of developed in Nashville, but I think that influenced the way that I write fiction. I try to be very particular about the language on the sentence and phrase level, and I’m one of these writers—and I know there are others out there who are like this—who have a difficult time leaving a sentence or a paragraph until it’s like I want it. It makes the drafting process really tedious and long. But you could argue that at the end, there’s not necessarily a whole lot of revision to be done, at least on a basic level. There may be story elements, more atmospheric or abstract things that can make the story better, but as far as just what’s on the page, it’s close to finished when I finish the first draft. I think the songwriting had a lot to do with that kind of thing, because you have to be so concise and so strong with the imagery in the sensory nature of trying to fit a story or an emotion into three verses, a bridge, and a chorus. I think that really influenced my writing a lot. And then, sort of marry that with my interest in creating place, whether it’s recreating Runion or it’s trying to capture the Nashville that I knew and loved back in the 1980s, which is really not there much anymore. It’s influenced me in that way and the way I put things together.

ANL: Yes, I would say that’s true of a lot of poets as well who turn to fiction writing. They do that very slow and deliberate development that doesn’t require a whole lot of revisions at the end.

MAC: I was listening to a podcast called WMFA, and it’s this young woman who is just talking to writers on each podcast. In one episode I was listening to recently, the writer was talking about it and the exact same kind of process in her writing. And I thought, yes, I have permission to do that.

ANL: Yeah, it’s always good to get validation.

MAC: And as far as just looking at it more abstractly, at least over the course of this collection, the ideas that I wanted to capture, regarding place and also in the transition of place, began to enter into the songwriting late in my Nashville days. Then they carried on into a number of the stories, and I think the songwriting career, such as it was, taught me to be really patient with the writing and with myself. I would go periods in Nashville when I didn’t write any songs. A lot of the summers, I didn’t write much at all. I had certain months that seemed—if I go back and look at my files, there are certain months that seemed to be more productive. I always tended to write a lot of songs in October, or I always tended to write a lot in April. So, at some point, I got to where I was able to say, okay, I haven’t written in a while, but I know it’ll be back. And that has been really useful for me in trying to navigate this writing and teaching and scholarship. I know that I want to write fiction, and sometimes I just don’t have time to do it, but I’m always able to be aware that it’s still there. “You’ll get back to it. Just get back to it as quick as you can.”

ANL: I think that’s normal for most authors, too. I like to think of it like a flask that’s full up and it just kind of drains, and then you have to wait for it to refill that creative energy, then you can go back to working and let it drain again.

MAC: Yeah, and there was a friend of mine in Nashville—he didn’t write songs or anything, but he wrote some poetry and tried to write a book of some sort, but he once said something like that to me when I was griping about not being able to sit down and write something. And he said—I think he quoted Mark Twain about letting the well fill back up, so I’ve always kind of held onto that image as a hopeful promise that I can get back to it.

ANL: I think that’s good to know, especially for early writers, because they tell you so often in workshops and things that you’ve got to write something every day, because if you’re not writing, then you’re not a writer. And you just won’t ever write again once you stop.

MAC: Right. I have an idea about doing that, writing every day, but I almost never do. That’s just the way it turns out. When Gabriel’s Songbook was finished and published near the end of 2017, that’s when I sort of really turned to this collection, sometime in 2018. I looked at it and said, okay, I have seven stories written over the course of 25 years or 20 years, and I need five more, as soon as I can get them. And it took me two or three years to get those. But they came, and I feel like there’s a consistency in the tone and the atmosphere that has managed to manifest over all the years and the different types of availability of work time and that sort of thing.

ANL: So, Gabriel is the main character in your novel, Gabriel’s Songbook, but he and his wife also show up in A Twilight Reel. You’ve kind of answered this a little bit, but that made me wonder, what came first, the short story or the novel? Was it a short story, and you thought, Gabriel needs to have an entire novel in order to tell his story? Or did you write the novel first, and he just features in some of your short stories?

MAC: It’s the latter, Abby. I wrote “Jamboree” and “To the Moon, Alice” in my first junior-level creative writing course at UNCA, and when I took the next level, I started Gabriel’s story. Actually, a much longer version of it is somewhere in the bowels of the UNCA library as my bachelor’s thesis. It was much longer than the way it actually ended up in the 2017 book. But the novel came first. I remember being very engaged with the Runion sections. They really became my favorite parts of the novel. And some of the moments that happen in those—there’s a scene in which Gabriel goes to the moonshine party where he meets Delbert Gunter, this kind of sage fellow that lives in the mountains and plays music. Then that scene goes into a Saturday or July 4^th morning on the Stackhouse Park islands, where there are all kinds of groups of bluegrass and mountain musicians playing around, and Gabriel wants to be part of that scene, but he realizes that he is not. I think those kinds of scenes and then the final bit of the novel, the last couple of chapters when he comes home, are the sections that really made me want to continue thinking about Runion as a place. I have this long timeline, a document that begins back in the 17^th century and tracks the area that Runion is in through two or three centuries there. What it showed me was that, if these stories are going to be in 1999, then by that time Gabriel is back. He moved back in the early ’90s, and he has remarried Eliza—I guess that’s a spoiler for the novel, but, anyway. He’s part of that community in 1999, so I wanted him to be there in A Twilight Reel. It ended up that there’s a story that the title of the whole collection comes from, “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel,” the October story. It’s the one that Gabriel and Eliza play a big part in. So, the novel came first, but so many different sections of it inspired what I was thinking about and learning about Runion and my experiences growing up in Madison County.

ANL: That makes a lot of sense. “Two Floors Above the Dead,” to me at least, seems to be the most vivid story. I think it’s the November story. And I was just wondering if you could talk about the creation of that story and Gunther, who is sort of the main character, and how you developed him and his manner of speaking and acting.

MAC: Okay, let’s see. Gunther has two really old inspirations. When Leesa and I lived in the Asheville area in the early ’90s, we were often traveling from Asheville north to Madison County, because that’s where our families lived. And in the Newbridge Weaverville area that’s north of Asheville, there was a place you could go where you could drive up into this little neighborhood, and up in there was a house trailer, mobile home, that had the most elaborate Christmas light display that you would want to see. I mean, everything, the yard, every line of the mobile home, the trees all around, everything was lit. And that image kind of just stayed with me. So, again, in chapter five of Gabriel’s Songbook, he’s remembering back to a time when he took Eliza on a date and asked her if she’d seen Santa Claus’s trailer, which was just a local phenomenon based on this thing that I used to see in Newbridge. When Eliza asked him about it: “That’s crazy, all those lights. Who lives there?” And then I just started thinking about it. The name Gunther Gosnell just kind of came to me, I think, for the novel. He appears first in Gabriel. And then he, of course, is mentioned in “The Wine of Astonishment” because he’s the brother of Granger, who has come to Reverend Thorn and asked him to go out in the boonies to see their sister Ollie and let her know that he has cancer. So, Gunther just kind of jumps in that story as this brother. He’s mentioned a time or two through the stories. As far as the development of the character and his cognitive issues, I remember when I was in high school, I worked at a place called Glory Ridge. It was a rust Presbyterian youth camp, and I lived there in the summers. There was a guy, and I can’t remember his name now, but he and his wife would pull in a little mobile home, camper sort of thing, and they would live there as caretakers during the summer. I remember him telling me some story about when he was young. He was at a carnival, and he went into one tent and there was this strong man attraction which said, you get this much money if you can stay in the ring with this guy for two minutes, or something. And, somehow, that then became part of Gunther’s story. That’s how he became kind of damaged, because the guy that I remember from Glory Ridge, he talked about getting into the ring with this brute, and the guy eventually picked him up and just threw him over the ropes and into the third or fourth row of the seats around there. So, I just kind of adapted that trauma into Gunther’s story and used it as the incident that left him damaged in some ways. I knew that he was going to be in his own story. I had already set up his character with the way Gabriel describes him and the way Granger describes him in “The Wine of Astonishment.”

The other part of the story is that he lives in the little apartment above the funeral home, which Gabriel and Eliza lived in when they got married. But that was also taken from my memories of my paternal grandparents who lived in an apartment above a funeral home in Marshall when I was six or seven years old. We would go on Sunday afternoons and visit, and it was always such a creepy and cool place to be. There was actually a door across the hallway from their room where the caskets and things were stored. And it was just always a weird experience. So, that became part of Gabriel and Eliza’s story and seemed to be a good place for Gunther as well, so I put him in there. And as far as the voice and the way he sees things, I just really loved the idea of having him. . . . Either in his imagination or in actuality, he sees and talks to the people in the graveyard as he’s digging graves. So, it was a lot of fun and very interesting to put him together. As far as his voice, I think just listening to various people that I’ve encountered over the years went into creating his voice and his perception of the world. One of the things it does that I really like is that from the beginning, as soon as I had written “The Wine of Astonishment” and ended that story with Reverend Thorn sitting there in his car trying to decide whether he’s going to go home after this brutal experience he’s had with Harry, the old preacher, or if he’s going to go ahead with the mission to go to Ollie and tell her about her brother’s cancer—I always had in mind that there needed to be something about Ollie, a further story, and Gunther’s story seemed to be the perfect vehicle for that, because I couldn’t get a sense that there was an Ollie story specifically that was out there, but I could see how she could fit into Gunther’s story. As Granger is dying of cancer, and Ollie comes to take care of him and then promises to take care of Gunther after Granger is gone. The story I really like a lot. I think it serves the collection in a lot of different ways.

ANL: It’s one of my favorites, maybe just because November is my own birth year, and it’s the birthday of so many people that I know. So, I just inherently wanted to like that one more.

MAC: It’s mine too, yeah, and that’s one of the things I was talking about earlier, that I had this table of contents and I had that phrase, that title “Two Floors Above the Dead,” long before the story itself was written. I like the way Gunther fit into that title and really fleshed it out nicely.

ANL: The last big question I have is that you’re a full-time faculty member, as you’ve mentioned, and you’re also a writer, and you talked about how there are some months that you go without writing, but are there any tips and tricks that you have for carving out dedicated writing time during the school year when things are hectic?

MAC: My schedule usually allows this. I do put on my calendar, at least five days a week, a couple of hours of writing time. Now, I may never get to it in a given week, or a given month, but it’s always there, and I always remember it. So, I try to schedule the time and do at least a little something, a paragraph, whatever I can get together. I actually put it on my daily calendar to write, and I look forward to the summers and the various holidays to put things together. But I also, and you know this from your own writing, but in a sense, we’re all writing all the time. I pay attention to what I’m reading and what I’m teaching in the classroom, and I absorb the various things that I teach, the nuts and bolts of it, the ideas and the atmosphere of a given piece. And I try to keep that close to my writing brain, so that when I do take those two hours on a Tuesday morning to sit down and write, that I have been thinking about it. That generally makes the time more productive. I try not to separate, even though I don’t teach creative writing, I try not to separate the things that I teach and the things that I tend to love myself. I don’t teach many things that I don’t like. I try to keep those teaching ideas in close proximity with whatever story is germinating or nearing completion.

ANL: I’ve noticed with essays that I’ve written for school, just academic papers that I tend to not necessarily procrastinate, but I do all the research first, read all the articles, and then I just let it sit for a few days. Then I write the paper, and it comes out a lot more easily that way than trying to do it all at the same time.

MAC: And I wrote, and still write, my academic papers in that way. I’m a procrastination writer in that—not from being lazy or anything, but it just seems to me that very often the ideas just simply don’t gel until the last moment. I think that fiction works in a very similar way. I’m constantly absorbing what I’m reading and conversations that I hear in the grocery store or wherever, characters that I see on campus or in town or walking on the side of the road. I’ve decided that I think I have much more mental space for creating things than I do for remembering things. I sometimes frighten myself with how little I think I’m able to remember about my life and that sort of thing. But I can imagine a lot about it.

ANL: I think I do the same. Is there anything that we talked about that you want to revisit, or is there a question that I didn’t ask you that you want to bring up?

MAC: One of the things I was thinking about this morning, just as far as stuff that I tried to do with these short stories that I didn’t do with the novel was . . . we were talking about the voice of Gunther Gosnell. Even though it’s not a first-person narrative, it’s still very much connected to his thought processes and in his mind, and I tried to do a lot of different things without seeming like doing a lot of different things in the collection. I don’t know how successful that was, but, for example, “Two Floors Above the Dead” and “Overwinter” both have these really, really tight third-person narrative voices. They’re very tightly tied into John Riddle in “Overwinter” and Gunther in “Two Floors Above the Dead.” Then, in other stories, I tried to create this floating point of view, to some extent. I think the most obvious one is probably the October story of “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel,” where the point of view just transfers from person to person. Gabriel will call Eliza on the phone, and the call begins in Gabriel’s point of view, and then when Eliza hangs up, we’re in her point of view, and trying to do some things like that, which I had fun trying to embed into the stories without being jarring, I hope. Those sorts of things were a lot of fun to experiment with. The other thing that stayed with me for a long, long time before I wrote about it was the trilogy of stories that feature Jubal Kincaid, the flute professor that comes. There’s “The Flutist,” and then there is “The Invisible World Around Them” and “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel” that are part of a story arc that ends with the death of Mike Fredericks of AIDs. There were a couple of things that were part of that. If you live in a rural county like Madison, you grow up unaware of some of the elements and aspects of other people’s lives. There was a story from where I grew up of a young man who went away to school and sort of disappeared from his family for a number of years and then basically came back to die of AIDs. Thinking about that story in the context of this rural Appalachian community, and the thoughts also that I was talking about a while ago of this sort of influx of the world coming into an isolated area. So, that story arc was with me for a long time, and I’m pleased with the way it turned out across those three stories. There are lots of other details about the three individually, but the way that they play out together, I was really pleased with and able to tell a story that had kind of haunted me for a number of years. That’s another fun thing about writing is you can kind of exorcise these ghosts a little bit, or at least play with them.

ANL: Yeah, those kinds of stories are the most interesting, because you want to write about them so badly, but they also seem to take the longest and be the most difficult to write about. But then afterwards, I think they wind up being some of your favorites.

MAC: Yeah, I think that’s true with those three, because I had thought about them for years, but they were among that last batch of five to get written, and it took me a long time. I knew basically what was going to happen in the stories, but it took a while to sit down and say, “Okay, here’s the story arc and here are the three places where they go: April, July, October. And so, get to work.” And I’m pleased with the way they turned out.

ANL: I think those are all of my questions. Thank you for talking to me today. And just as a reminder, your short story collection, A Twilight Reel, comes out on May 25^th, 2021, and it’s available, I’m assuming, wherever books are sold?

MAC: It’s a small publisher that I work with over in Asheville. It’ll be on Bookshop. It’ll be on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, available from the publisher’s website, and maybe from some of the regional independent bookstores. I think we’re going to try to get it in them as well. Well, thank you, Abby. I enjoyed talking to you.

Be sure to check back tomorrow to watch the interview recording!