Editor’s note: This interview was first published in Path Finders, an e-newsletter of the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders offers a Q&A consultation with a rural thinker, author or actor. Like what you see here? You can subscribe to the mailing list at the back of this article and get more conversations like this in your inbox every week.
Amy Rowland is an Array teacher and is from eastern North Carolina. His current novel, “Inside the Wolf,” was published on July 11.
Enjoy our on the tragic uncontrollability of gun violence, escape the liberal bubble and reinvent fairy tales, below.
Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Your new ebook “Inside the Wolf,” as its name might suggest, comprises many difficult interactions with animals: a rabid raccoon, a fallen coywolf, and a bat in the attic, to name a few. Does interactions with animals still make so much sense, or is the setting of the novel in your local North Carolina?
Amy Rowland: Animals are central to my novels, although that was not my original intention. On an intuitive level, I sought to write about red wolves. The only remaining feral population lives along North Carolina’s Albemarle Peninsula, which includes five counties. Beaufort County, where I come from, is one of them. Red wolves are beautiful, mysterious, endangered, and I couldn’t help but see them as a metaphor for how some rural southerners feel about “the state. ” I heard my father, my brother, and their hunting companions talk about red wolves and government protections and theories about the presence of red wolves in North Carolina in a different way than how red wolves are written and even talked about in news and conservation stories. I sought to explore that with the concept of wolves as imaginary villains. Claude Lévi-Strauss said something like “animals are intelligent to think”. I didn’t write in that spirit, but writing about animals allows me to explore concepts and attitudes, norms, prejudices and ideals in another register.
DY: What is your current relationship? As far as I know, you have taught, written, and edited in some of the largest cities in the United States for most of your adult life. Was this eBook a way to link to your roots, or just a consequence to stay linked?
AR: Writing this novel was a way of thinking about some of the arguments I have with where I grew up. I spent my adult life in New York and Princeton, New Jersey, and now in Berkeley, California. I have a circle of relatives in eastern North Carolina and stop several times a year. I resisted writing about the South for a long time, because I was too busy, too burdened by the burden of history. . On one of my trips to stop in the circle of relatives, I met a boy who had shot his cousin. I couldn’t get his symbol out of my head. At some point, the first sentence of the novel came to me (“Today I buried a wolf”) and I knew I had to stick to that voice. I knew it was the voice of someone haunted by violence and that it would take me to the tragic child.
DY: The main character of the book, Rachel, is an ambivalent folklorist. How were the 3 little pigs and the witch who loses her skin so important?
AR: No, I’m not a folklorist. In one of the earliest drafts of the novel, Rachel, a scholar of George Eliot, read pastoralism, the social holiday of agrarian life. But as I continued to write, I learned that Rachel was more stinky and tormented than my student Eliot, stern and confident. Rachel can’t pass up the South she fled and remains obsessed with the visibility and invisibility of Southern history. , even if he doesn’t realize it. She is hurt and discouraged that she has failed as an academic, but it is clear from the description of her thesis that it is everywhere. It also becomes transparent that his interest in the silences and mythification of the South is more non-public than coldly academic.
The stories of the three little pigs, the witch bride and Virginia Dare, as they appear in the novel, are all distortions and reshuffles of stories I grew up with. For example, the 3 little pigs evoke the fairy tale, but it is also the call of 3 sisters in the farming village where my father grew up. I never knew much about those sisters, but they lived together in a space on the edge of a farm and I wondered what their history was. The Witch Bride and Virginia Dare interest me in how women are punished. ed (witches) or mythologized (Virginia Dare) in rural spaces with inflexible views of women and the “feminine”. I am interested in the symbolic language of folktales and fairy tales and how it works in oral cultures, quietly regarding trust in fate, silences, omissions and warnings.
DY: How similar are the common qualities of the village where the novel is set to the places where you actually spend your time?I enjoyed your interpretation of confusing, occasionally antagonistic but collectivist meetings after the tragedy. At times, however, they felt ambitious. Was drawing this plan part of their goal?
AR: The setting of the novel is very close to the small town where my father was born, where many members of his extended circle of relatives still live, and where we went to church when I was a child. I have a long and troubled history with this place, which is so small that it’s an unincorporated community. My fondest memories of the formative years come from here, not from my home, the city. But I also place it politically and culturally impossible. I locate there the antagonistic and collectivist gatherings.
I’m curious they feel ambitious. Because when I started the novel a complicated transition year in California, I don’t forget to think about how I lived in a comfortable liberal bubble more years than I did in North Carolina. I felt like I was hardening in eastern North Carolina. I wondered what it would be like if someone who wasn’t me but looked like me in some tactics returned to the farming town where my father grew up. What would it mean to live in a position where one’s political and devout perspectives are a minority?What does it mean to live in a position where you are challenged in a way that forces you out of your individualistic shell?Of course, there is an explanation for why the novel ends in 2015. I felt more optimistic.
DY: Besides writing a novel largely about gun violence, are you an activist on this issue?As someone who has seamlessly overcome the intractable nature of this problem, I’m curious to know if you’ve discovered a daily task to save yourself from gun deaths that is meaningful.
AR: I’m not an activist, but I still think that the mind’s eye can play a role in shaping the values of public life. I’m an introverted editor who believes in radical autonomy, so what’s my responsibility?That’s one of the inner arguments I have with myself, about what it means to write fiction now and what it means to write about the South, with its unimpeachable cruelties and vicious past. I have a lot of ideas about it, especially since the 2016 election and then the Covid isolation. realistic to think that we will all become activists, in the current sense of the word. But we have to find tactics to go out and talk and remain undefeated. For me, that means going out and speaking through fiction. I didn’t want to write about the South or guns or what the idea of a “political” novel would be.
The same political department on gun rights and regulation becomes intractable, and I tried to investigate to find the roots of that insoluble. After meeting the boy who shot his cousin by accident, I learned the startling and infuriating statistic that guns are the leading cause of death among young people under the age of 19 in the United States. Most of those 19,000 deaths don’t occur in mass shootings, but in the home. . I wanted to explore a private story of an accidental childhood shooting, which is an overlooked crisis.
I also felt that living in my comfortable liberal bubble kept me away from political problems. I come from the rural south. My circle of relatives has guns. I know that some of the members of my circle of relatives and some of the other people I went to the best school with will read this e-book and disagree with me. I am willing to disagree. I’m tired of the bubble.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly newsletter of the Daily Yonder. Every Monday, Path Finders provides a Q&A consultation with a rural thinker, author, or actor. Join the mailing list today to receive those insightful conversations straight to your inbox.
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