[ad_1]
At times, trying to pick up basketball in my thirties feels like a fool’s errand. My body is past its days of fast learning, so it takes time for things to stick, and with no coaching my fundamentals are trash. But it has its perks too. For example, one day playing a game with some other writers, I found myself guarding novelist Glenn Taylor, and in our sprints back and forth across the court we became fast friends.
Taylor’s Juniper Prize-winning fourth novel, The Songs of Betty Baach, is a collection of “songs,” brief chapters that move with vibrant musicality, humor, and images from a near speculative future (2038). Narrated by the titular character, who claims to be 321 years old, the novel is filled with pop-culture touchstones and folkloric joy that span centuries of West Virginia history.This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Aram Mrjoian
Place seems particularly important to this project. What considerations do you make when writing about Appalachia? And, in your mind, what often gets missed in creative work about Appalachia?
Glenn Taylor
I had the advantage of tuning my ear early and often to a wide array of good talkers who would have been good talkers wherever they were from, but these were from southern West Virginia, and so they said things like “Morey, you know that man ate a half a dozen eggs every mornin’ of his life.”
“Morey” is my dad, and he is from Matewan, in Mingo County, and we went there all the time when I was little and my grandparents were still living. My Grandma Lena was a Chambers. Her Uncle Reece shot and killed two Baldwin Felts agents from a roof that May day in 1920 (in what came to be known as the Matewan Massacre). A year later, my Grandma Lena’s cousin Ed Chambers was shot and killed in daylight along with Sid Hatfield on the county courthouse steps in Welch. In other words, in terms of place, the struggle for labor rights here has not been a quiet one, whether the mine wars of the early 20th century or the teachers’ strike here in WV in 2018. And whether I’m reading old books or walking on a real-life picket line, I try to just listen to how people talk and what they say. I just keep tuning my ear and trying to tell it right.
What gets missed by some who try to capture Appalachia in creative work usually involves a lack of time spent, or a lack of looking around, listening to people for a long period of time. Some work tends to excavate what it wants from the surface of a place (poverty, poor health, drug addiction), but fails to answer the old question “How did Appalachia get thataway?” In turn, this region is seen by some in other areas of the country as somehow deserving of its ill fate, as if the people living here orchestrated the massive, 60-year job hemorrhaging and lack of public facilities and health care, not to mention the influx of oxys. But it wasn’t the people. It was big coal. It was big pharma. Maybe this is starting to be more widely accepted with such books/films as Dopesick. But even so, beyond all this, what also sometimes gets missed is the historical importance of the place, and the fact that it wasn’t always the way it is. At least in terms of WV’s small urban areas, it is important for folks from other regions to look at the boom/bust/sacrifice zone reality and how such an economic reality drives young people away in droves, and black and brown people, and immigrants as well, all of whom were such a vital part of the forming of communities in the early 20th century.
Aram Mrjoian
The chapters in the book are all short and propulsive, not quite vignettes but also (from my reading) intentionally nebulous around the borders. They are all titled in the theme of “Song of X.” Were you thinking of this book as a sort of album or mix-tape? Is there a level of musicality you wanted to include?
Glenn Taylor
Yes. The level of musicality I wanted to include is almost overwhelming. It’s multi-leveled. In other words, Betty’s voice is like a score and I had to find its pitch and rhythms and cadences and movement by trying to hear her and then get her on the page. As you point out with the end result of nebulous borders, I just followed my instincts of sound to know when each chapter had exhausted its own tune, structuring each one similarly so that they all end with a different note, but also the same note.
Betty believed all stories were songs, just as some might believe all poems are songs and all novels are nothing but long poems. If I could find a way to make my novels into music, I would do it.
I have to say that I have reached a point in my time on this earth where I basically orchestrate my life at all times. Whether through headphones or a good speaker, I have playlists that are created for all activities: writing, cooking, walking, hooping, showering, entertaining, sunny days, rainy days, late nights, afterparties, etc. Covid enhanced this propensity toward orchestration of all endeavors. This habit infected my writer’s regimen to the point that I find myself unconsciously writing in what is essentially verse, sometimes rhymed. So in the end, I suppose the book is less an album or mixtape and instead more of a score, a soundtrack of a life lived, and I hope that the reader might find their own interior soundscapes while reading.
Aram Mrjoian
The Songs of Betty Baach is loosely set in 2038, but since the title character claims to be 321 years old, you cover a huge amount of time from past to future. The manipulation of time is one of my favorite literary conversations, so I’m curious how you were thinking about it when writing this and if there were any hurdles in trying to cover multiple centuries.
Glenn Taylor
I may have both a dumb and smart answer for this one. In other words, there’s no denying that I teach in an MFA program, and so somewhere in my mind are things like Joan Silber’s chapters “Switchback Time” and “Fabulous Time” in the book The Art of Time in Fiction. But here’s the thing: the former term literally aligned in my mind with my own instinctual time manipulation in making the book, and Switchback is truly the name of a town in McDowell County, where the characters reside. Such coincidences belie the fact that storytellers perhaps already possess ways to naturally manipulate time, and then smart folks name those ways and write books and we read and teach them so that we can get back closer to how stories are truly made. Dumb answer is I’m lazy and I don’t like in-betweens or explanatories [sic] or transitions, so I just skip when and what I feel like. I did that in my first novel, and it was freeing to do it again, in even more grand amplitude fashion.
Aram Mrjoian
There are a ton of pop culture references throughout the book. What do those reference points mean to you? Do you see them as potential anchors or landmarks in the text?
Glenn Taylor
I’d say yes, I see them as anchors, handholds, enjoyable reprises, or whatever the reader might wish them to be in terms of repeated moments of impact. For me they hold not only this connective feeling of real lives lived (through music and television and movies and sports), but also a connection to my own real life. In other words, I used to sing “Peace in the Valley” by Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers to my children at bedtime. I overplayed Smino’s “Baguetti” to the extent that I named a fictional weed strain after it and am convinced some green-thumb future fan of the book will propagate such a seed. I read Kickle Snifters and Other Fearsome Creatures so many times to the kids that I almost memorized it. So, the pop culture references, to me, connect with people I know and love, but also to people out there who I would know and love if only I could connect with them.
Aram Mrjoian
Your acknowledgments mention writing from a position of privilege and that one of your hopes for the book is to offer “honor, respect, love, and fortification for all who are oppressed and misrepresented.” How does that enter your writing process and approach to craft?
Glenn Taylor
During the time of Trump’s rising, I’d started a novel I was calling Lay Me Down In Mosestown, and it was narrated by Rimmy Knox, a man about my age and background, but it wasn’t feeling right. I did not want to hear from a man, among other things. I wanted to hear from an old woman. I was reading so much Louise McNeill again, and then so very much Lucille Clifton, and I was thinking of my grandma Lena and my Aunt Linda and ole Dot Jackson, all dead, all voices I could listen to all night. I started asking friends if they thought it was okay [that] I tell the story from Betty’s voice (I asked my sisters, my wife Margaret, my cousin Ann).
Beyond that, I suppose my approach continuously evolves, and as I’ve unlearned some things and learned others, I know that whatever I write moving forward, it will be in service of and honoring misunderstood people and places. I mean I like all kinds of crazy shit when it comes to contemporary fiction and poetry and nonfiction, but if white supremacy and patriarchy aren’t in the artist’s mind right now, as they sit down to write, we aren’t being plagued by the same shit. I live in a state where they are literally writing laws that come after us, but I also live in a district where one of my representatives is Delegate Danielle Walker, and there is someone I could listen to forever. So, that’s West V for you. I feel the hate and the love, strong as Radio Raheem.
Aram Mrjoian
Perhaps a related question, can you talk a little bit about your presentation of the climate crisis in this book and imagining an environmental future?
Glenn Taylor
It seems I was likely writing against my fears and anxieties here! I don’t think we’ll be at quite this advanced of a collapse by 2038, but when more and more of your state is considered a “sacrifice zone” and the fossil fuel industry continues to hold sway over legislature and governor, a whole region could quickly become truly abandoned when resources begin to thin. No electric, no water, no fuel, no planes flying overhead. And I began to realize how many areas all over this country are “sacrifice zones.” If you are from southern West Virginia, you might be outraged at how the government did the people of Flint, Michigan, but you sure as hell won’t be shocked. So, in terms of imagining an environmental future, I just assumed more bad gerrymandering and voter suppression combined with more lazy governmental failure and quick usage of resources, and then conflict and fallout, I suppose, and then I assumed a kind of boring, spread out existence for those who stayed in these hills. West Virginians tend to be adaptive. I tried to think of basic things like body temperature and clean water availability, and the longing for the old, easy life.
Aram Mrjoian
The Songs of Betty Baach won the Juniper Prize for Fiction. For emerging writers, I think the contest process can often feel overwhelming, expensive, and mysterious. Would you mind sharing a little bit about your submission process and bringing this book to publication?
Glenn Taylor
Well, during the Covid times I split with my agent of twelve years, and then Tony Perez, my wonderful editor for Cinder Bottom, left Tin House for other pursuits, and then Tin House passed on the book, so I was just out in the wind. It felt a lot like how it felt back in 2007, when I was on my own trying to get Trenchmouth published. But back then I was young, a debut novelist yet to come. Now I’m a little grayer, but I knew in my bones I needed to get this book out now and not wait, so while I tried getting a new agent to no avail, I also decided to enter the manuscript in a few contests, and low and behold, I won one. I do think contests can be cost restrictive, and I’m not sure how to rectify that beyond offering waivers for those who cannot afford the entry fees, as we do with MFA applicants for instance. At any rate, I still believe in the contest format, and I am grateful to whoever was reading those anonymous entries and passing them up the line, and I think emerging writers should get after all publication avenues all at once should they be up for that kind of thing. Some of us catch breaks and emerge early, then we go back underground and keep digging a while, and then we emerge again, different but the same.
FICTION
The Songs of Betty Baach
Glenn Taylor
University of Massachusetts Press
Published March 31, 2023
[ad_2]
Source link