Magical Connection to the Land: A Conversation with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
Interviews
By Jimmy Cajoleas
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is from the small town of Woodland, North Carolina. Her debut story collection Sleepovers is out today from Hub City Press. Let me tell you right now, Sleepovers is a marvel. Often violent, always surprising, it’s a book to explore, with each story yielding its own small wonders. It’s the kind of book you never want to stop reading.
Jimmy Cajoleas: Your book is so lovely and violent and strange, I’m not quite sure what to compare it to. Do you feel like you’re a part of a particular lineage of writers? Do you see yourself following in anyone else’s footsteps?
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips: I feel like if someone were to read my book, they would say, “Well, this is this and that is that.” But I didn’t grow up reading. I remember when I turned in my graduate thesis, one of the people on my committee said my work was deeply influenced by Black Tickets. And I had never read Black Tickets before in my life and I went home and learned about Jayne Anne Phillips. The first story I workshopped in grad school was “The Bass” and people compared it to Flannery O’Connor. I had only ever read one of her stories! And I know why people said that. They said it because people like to categorize things because it makes them easier to talk about. All I can say about following anybody’s footsteps is I never really knew how a short story worked until I read Raymond Carver. And I didn’t know you could write about farmers until I read Breece D.J. Pancake. I just kind of went from there.
Then after grad school when I moved back home to Woodland and was so alone in my cold, cold house—I call it my “nun period”—I really loved reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I really connected with that. So when Rebecca Lee said I was the literary lovechild of Carson McCullers and John the Baptist, I really loved that. I said to myself, “I’m going to keep this forever.”
Even though I wasn’t really reading growing up, I was in church, and in church there’s preaching. Messages are delivered with authority and urgency. Even the little narrators in Sleepovers, like in my story “The Truth About Miss Katie”—they all have something to tell you, and they are going to tell it to you quickly, and they’re going to get to the point, and you’re going to remember what they said after they said it. So they’re like little John the Baptist people to me.
JC: How do you feel about the whole “Southern writer” thing?
ABP: People always want to make that North/South distinction. But I’ve learned it’s really a rural/urban issue, and furthermore a rich/poor distinction. I have more in common with poorer people in Baltimore where I live now than I do with wealthy people up here. And speaking of the South, it’s only the South to me if it’s the rural, rural South that I know. Older folks telling you stories until the cows come home and praying over you, all that—that’s what makes the South the South to me. You might not even experience that in a city as big as even Durham, North Carolina. I know there’s a big tradition of Southern literature, but all I can say is I was born and raised in a rural Southern place, one of the poorest regions of North Carolina. My daddy was a diesel mechanic, my mama grew up suckering tobacco. I write stories about my place and I want people from all over to access them.
JC: One of the most interesting parts of the book is how grounded these stories are in real lives and in real people, but also how they are free to explore the way people actually live, which is two-thirds in their heads, dreaming. They aren’t bound by linear time—they’ll jump ten years in a line, and then jump right back. The stories will leap into an animal’s head, or a woman’s imaginary friend who happens to be a horse will begin speaking. There’s so much freedom here, but they aren’t exactly experimental. They feel natural.
ABP: Oh my gosh, this sounds so wonderful! Thank you for saying all this! When I write, I just try to be as truthful to the situation as possible and I let that lead me. I try not to stop and think about what I’m doing. The last story “The Chopping Block” has a lot of dreamy moments. It was originally titled “In Dreams” because I wrote it while listening to that song over and over and over. And I was uncertain about turning that one in for workshop because it’s so much based in dreams, but the narrator there is extremely overwhelmed and sad. And when I’m extremely overwhelmed or sad, my mind is constantly racing. Sometimes life gets chaotic and you don’t know what you’re seeing right in front of you because the past feels so present and everything starts to blur, and it can feel like a dream, like you’re in another place altogether. I wanted to honor that on the page.
JC: I wanted to ask you about a line from “The Chopping Block”: “And I take another hit, pull in deeper now. And I feel all my family out here under me and remember it ain’t my life I’m living, it’s theirs.”
ABP: It’s true! You were only brought here because of the people who came before you. And all the hurts they’ve experienced, and all the joys they’ve experienced, they’re in the same blood that’s running in your veins and going through your heart. And in my case, not only was it that—which is plenty powerful enough—but I was sitting on the same church pew that my grandparents were raised on, singing the same hymns they sang, eating corn grown from the same field they tended. It’s one thing to hear somebody tell the history and it’s a whole other level to be in the landscape where the history happened. It makes it even more haunting. And all of that doubles over on itself until you are like, “It’s not my life. It’s not mine. It’s those people’s lives who came before me.”
It’s probably true for all of us working-class folks, but I know it’s true for my family—it wasn’t that far back ago that people started being able to do what they wanted to do. For the longest time, our survival depended on providing and working for the family. You didn’t have a choice to pursue interests. Everything you did, pretty much, was for your family. This is really powerful to me. It was described to me in school by my French teacher as a “magical connection to the land.” He said we wouldn’t understand until we left home, and he was right.
I was away in college taking creative writing classes that I know my Aunt Dorice would have just thrived in. She’s the best storyteller I know and has overcome so many obstacles growing up in poverty with ten brothers and sisters. Or my daddy who grew up back home where no one could treat his undiagnosed Dyslexia. He loved telling stories too. What would have happened if he’d ever felt confident enough to put them on the page? I can’t help but think of this. I feel really lucky but also guilty that I did have the chance to pursue my interests. Because it’s not fair. It’s not fair that the people who came before me didn’t get to explore or do what they wanted to do.
JC: That’s sort of how time doubles back on itself in your stories.
ABP: Yes, it’s like you’re living in the past and the present all at the same time. Maybe not ever the future, you know? But I think that the only people who can live in the future are folks with a lot of money who can plan. When you’ve got a lot of money saved away, you can plan for certain things to happen. I’ve never been good at planning far ahead!
Where I grew up, everybody knew everybody. I never met a stranger until I was twelve years old. I spent my whole life hearing stories about everybody else’s families in the area. Not just with people either. With trees and rivers and fields and houses. You got all this knowledge. For somebody with a vivid imagination, all it takes is coming up in that sort of environment, and you can live in the present and always in the past at the same time. You’re so caught up in these stories, you can almost see them happening as you’re standing right there.
JC: You take it even further than that. In the story “Snowball Jr.,” you have a woman reincarnated as a deer. So even the animals are your family and neighbors remembering things. The landscape claims you and changes you into something else, even after you die.
ABP: Yeah, I wanted to see how far I could push that. I had written from the point of view of the dog in “Return to the Coon Dog Castle,” and that was really fun. And so I thought, “Well, let’s try and be a deer.” I figured I’d seen then my whole life, so I might as well try. It was exciting to hyperfocus on sound—deer are near ’bout blind, but they can hear better than anything.
JC: But your deer are doing things like thinking about Queen Elizabeth translating Latin into English and back again! I did not see that coming!
ABP: I’m over here grinning like a possum. I’ve just always loved Queen Elizabeth since the third grade, so I figured that was a good thing for a deer to think about.
JC: I wanted to talk about the radical empathy of these stories, and a nearly complete refusal to judge these people, even as you portray some very troubling actions clearly and without pulling any punches.
ABP: Part of the thing I never liked about people comparing my stories to Flannery O’Connor is even though she’s brilliant, she definitely uses her characters as pawns, as stand-ins for these greater moral ideas. It’s incredible to watch how she uses them, but that’s the thing—the reader is always watching the characters and judging the characters, assessing them for Flannery’s moral agenda. I don’t like that. People contain multitudes, right? In my stories I just want to show my characters as complicated beings, same as real people actually are. People are fascinating, and to limit them as functions, or stand-ins for moral equations is cutting them short. What I’m after is showing all of the character. Though, some of my characters are a lil judged—like Daniel Adam in “Return to the Coon Dog Castle”—but maybe that’s because he deserves it. I aspire to pull off what Larry Brown does though. You can tell he loves his characters so much, however complicated they may be.
JC: Something that struck me in your stories is the way the town is so small that everyone knows everyone, but there are still some people who remain outsiders. You give those outsiders a lot of voice in your stories. I’m thinking of “Charlie Elliott” right now.
ABP: I struggled a long time with that story. It’s based off of my real-life great uncle, who I never met. He passed away in the ’70s. He had cerebral palsy. Nearly everything in the story is something I grew up hearing about him, something told to me as true. I wrote it in second person because I wanted the reader to feel that they too could have been born in the rural South with a disability no one understood. I didn’t know if the story was supposed to be an essay or what. I tried to write it from the point of view of myself trying to write the story, but that didn’t work at all. I had to take myself right out of it. It’s his story, you know? And I wanted the reader to live it.
JC: There’s a line in “Mind Craft” I wanted to ask you about: “Maybe everything would have been all right if I’d been from the city. Mama would have been able to love me somewhere like that.” You strike a similar note in “The Truth about Miss Katie.”
ABP: I didn’t realize the two of those stories were in conversation in that way! Dang, you’re a good reader! I’ll say that it’s really complicated, because ever since I left home and first tasted kombucha and went to a Whole Foods and tried all this food from around the world . . . well, I went wild. I wanted to go to as many rock shows and see as many pieces of art and go to as many museums as I could. I was asking my roommates to do things like visit mosques on the weekends. I was so hungry for all of this life that had never existed for me before. And that was really fun. And after I saw all of that and experienced it and enjoyed it, I went home, and I couldn’t talk to any of my family members about any of those things, because they’ve never experienced them or seen them. That hurt. And it put me in a really lonely spot.
It gets to a point where you come home and all you can talk to your family about is the weather and how the crops are doing, or what people you went to high school with are up to now. Which is sad, because before you left your family at home, your whole world was them. You’re in a constant state of mourning, because then when you go back to the city, and you try to tell your new friends who didn’t grow up in small towns, who didn’t grow up in small Southern Baptist churches and have the lunch buffet with all their cousins every Sunday—when you try to tell your new friends what home is like, they’re not going to understand it either. So you’re straddling these two worlds, one foot in each place, not fitting anywhere. You try to oscillate between the two as gracefully as you can, without upsetting anybody.
JC: Did that make you feel more comfortable living in the city?
ABP: Well, the older that I got living in the city-world—I often call it my second world, because my first world is home—when I got old enough, grown enough, and started becoming more aware, I really started to notice how country people have been misrepresented by the greater American culture. Country people are seen as stupid and silly and ignorant, even more so after Trump was elected. I’d be in situations where people were making fun of a rural person on TV or whatever, and I’d be thinking to myself, “Well, that person on the TV is talking just like my cousin.” With “Miss Katie,” I wanted people to hear from the point of view of a character who thinks Golden Corral might be the best place on earth. That’s important to me.
Growing up, I didn’t ever look at myself as being “trapped” in my hometown, but that’s kind of how it was. Healthcare is extremely hard to come by. And so is a good, quality education. When I went to college, and I started learning all of this information about science and history and what the world was really like, I realized how much I’d been taught was behind the times. And I started thinking things like, Why did I have to be born in the middle of nowhere? Why wasn’t I born in a place where people knew about different cultures and different ways of looking at things? Would it have been better had I been born elsewhere?
So how can society expect people who are left behind to catch up real quick and vote for progressive ideas? Especially when those forgotten folks aren’t even given the tools they need to get out and learn what’s happening in the outside world? My home county doesn’t have a hospital, it has one grocery store, and you have to drive two hours to get to a bookstore. Crime and drug rates are on the rise. No new industry is coming in. The death rate is higher than the birth rate, and folks are all taking a whole lot of medicine. Half of my home county has internet access, but that’s a hella lot better than some of the other counties in the rural South.
I don’t see a lot of folks around me talking about this, how whole rural cultures are trapped, left behind and dying. In my own way, I wanted folks to read Sleepovers and get to thinking about these things. Because it’s awful being in that situation.
The only way we’re going to make progress is for people from both worlds to see each other and acknowledge each other without stereotypes. My dream with getting this book out into the world is creating a place where at one end of the table is my raised-in-NYC Jewish, vegetarian thesis advisor and on the other end of the table is my cousin Dan, who runs the hunting lodge and just finished planting soybeans. I wanted to build a place where all the people I know and love can sit down together and be themselves and relate to the same character. Where maybe I could be my whole real self for the first time. I hope I did that.
Jimmy Cajoleas is the author of four novels, including, most recently, Minor Prophets. He was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and now lives in New York.
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is from rural Woodland, North Carolina. She’s a graduate of Meredith College and earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her stories have appeared in Oxford American, Paris Review, and other periodicals. She suggests donations to Emancipate North Carolina, a Durham-based nonprofit focused on dismantling structural racism and mass incarceration across North Carolina through community organization and mobilization. Donations can be made at https://emancipatenc.org/donate/.
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