Ask the Author: J.C. White
Answered Questions (4)
J.C. White
Yes, I can. Be on the lookout for my next book. I promise you will find several inside.
J.C. White
I’d definitely go to Absalom, Absalom! Not because it’s pleasant or has palm trees, mind you, but because it’s unfinished business.
I’d walk the red roads of Yoknapatawpha at dusk, sit on a sagging porch with a glass sweating in my hand, peeled lead-based paint dropping into my glass, and listen. I wouldn’t try to fix anything. That’s where folks like me tend to go wrong. I’d listen long enough to hear what people are choosing not to say, the pauses, the stories made crooked on purpose. I’d like to see whether the ghosts know they’re ghosts, or if they still think they’re just horribly misunderstood.
I’d walk the red roads of Yoknapatawpha at dusk, sit on a sagging porch with a glass sweating in my hand, peeled lead-based paint dropping into my glass, and listen. I wouldn’t try to fix anything. That’s where folks like me tend to go wrong. I’d listen long enough to hear what people are choosing not to say, the pauses, the stories made crooked on purpose. I’d like to see whether the ghosts know they’re ghosts, or if they still think they’re just horribly misunderstood.
J.C. White
I have a TBR list a country mile long. I read voraciously, sometimes three at a time, so I always have 50 or 100 titles unread on my shelves. Which also means I am always on the prowl for new titles. I have great intentions about what I will be reading next, but oftentimes I see a title at a bookstore I can't live without and start it immediately, skipping the title I had planned to read for a week. Lately, I am mixing a classic title with other, more modern ones to maintain my equilibrium. I am also inclined to put classic Russian and Japanese fiction in my rotations. As a writer, I love cultural shifts that inspire the use of surprising words or phrases. Normal for a particular culture, not so much for me. And those surprises shake loose other ideas in my brain in terms of expression that I can layer into my own southern vernacular. I cut my teeth in technical writing, boring stuff, but necessary. Expressiveness, texture, and tapestry are like crack to a writer with my background. My stubborn affection for bad instincts requires rigid editing; I'm like the poor kid who's discovered velvet and needs a suit made entirely of it. That is, until the big brother chimes in and uses shockingly abusive language to help me avoid expensive therapy in the future.
J.C. White
There’s the mystery of why it took losing my mother—the one person who spent her life telling me I should write fiction—to finally make me listen. There’s probably a book in that somewhere. A son who waits until the voice urging him forward is the ghost of his mother, before he finally steps out of the shadows and writes a fictionalized version of his own mother's family secret—southern logic at its finest.
And there’s the enduring riddle of how a man can live a respectable life, hold down serious jobs, raise a family, and still carry around a private catalog of mischief, near misses, bad decisions, and narrowly avoided catastrophes that could qualify as either memoir or evidence, depending on who’s reading.
Some folks inherit land. Some inherit money.
I seem to have inherited stories, unfinished, half-told stories.
I’m still untangling them.
And there’s the enduring riddle of how a man can live a respectable life, hold down serious jobs, raise a family, and still carry around a private catalog of mischief, near misses, bad decisions, and narrowly avoided catastrophes that could qualify as either memoir or evidence, depending on who’s reading.
Some folks inherit land. Some inherit money.
I seem to have inherited stories, unfinished, half-told stories.
I’m still untangling them.
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