1. Can you tell us how you became a short story writer? What have you enjoyed most about putting this collection together?
I spent a lot of my younger years writing and publishing poetry. My work in that regard became more narrative over time, and it became clear to me that stories are a powerful means of understanding our lives. So I guess the move to the short story was natural. Short fiction requires much of same control and compression that lyric poetry does, though I had some new things to learn, as well.
Robert Forst once wrote that if a book of poems has twenty-eight poems, the book itself is the twenty-nine poem. I think this applies to a collection of short stories, as well. The thing that excited me the most in putting this new collection together is the way the stories stand on their own but still manage to come together as a whole.
2. Do you have a personal favorite in this collection?
For me, it would be a toss-up between the title story (“The Highway That Leads Beyond the World”) and “Tucker’s Story”. Both stories connect with the landscape and history of the American South in, I hope, complex and rich ways. In both pieces, the supernatural element of the tale, in my opinion, is unpredictable and well handled.
3. Can you tell us something about the cover?
That’s an interesting story. The cover photo shows the Maude Crawford house in Camden, Arkansas. One evening in 1957, Maude Crawford, a prominent lawyer in the state, disappeared from the house without a trace. Her car was in the garage. Her clothes were in the closet, but she was gone. Her dalmatian, who was apparently very protective of her, was sleeping peacefully on the hearth, and there were no signs of violence. She was declared legally dead by the courts in the early 1970s, but the mystery of what happened to her has never been solved.
The house and what happened there (with some poetic license on my part) provide the setting and back story for “Dietrich’s Witness”, one of the stories in the collection.
4. What advice would you give to writers who want to write short stories?
I would recommend, first of all, that they do a close reading of some the writers who were particularly good at short fiction: Chekhov, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, etc. Learn as much as you can from the masters. You need to have a good story to tell, but how you tell it is, if
anything, even more important. I mean the choice and handling of point of view, narrative structure and how/where to enter the story, the handling of dialogue, etc.
I would add that writing short stories is a labor of love. It’s a great way to learn about the craft of fiction writing, but it’s not likely to make you scads of money!
5. Do you have a favorite writer yourself?
I’ve been revisiting a lot of Graham Greene lately. I also particularly like Conrad and Faulkner. As far as genre writers go, I think Algernon Blackwood is tremendous. He deserves to be more widely read than he is. Lovecraft is currently experiencing a renaissance (at least in America), and I think Blackwood deserves the same.
6. What other genre do you write in? What’s next? Do you have another project planned?
As mentioned earlier, I have written poetry in the past, but the short story is taking all my time and attention at the moment. I’m currently working on a new collection, tentatively entitled The Long Passages of Glass. Stories from this evolving collection have already appeared or are upcoming in The Arkansas Review, The Louisville Review, Penumbra, and an anthology published by The Saturday Evening Post.
7. Do you have any book events planned?
I am hoping to set up a reading at Southern Arkansas University. Nine of the eleven stories in Highway are specifically set in Arkansas, so I think there would be some interest in the work and subject matter. Arkansas is full of ghosts, and I think anyone who has ever lived there knows it!
I also want to mention that there is a review upcoming in the Fall issue of The Louisville Review that locates the book in the Southern Gothic tradition. S. T Joshi has also indicated to me that he intends to review the collection. Mr. Joshi is a distinguished critic and scholar of weird fiction who has edited and written introductions for collections by Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, and others for Oxford University Press and Penguin. Obviously, some attention from him would be very welcome.
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