The Fish That Can’t Escape the Pond: An Interview with Odie Lindsey
Interviews
By Mary Miller
Odie Lindsey’s debut novel, Some Go Home, is an extraordinary project that tells the story of fictional Pitchlynn, Mississippi, from the points of view of its inhabitants. There’s a soldier-turned-beauty-queen (which doesn’t even begin to describe the vibrant and complicated Colleen), her husband and a decades-old murder involving his father, an aging Southern belle who loves nothing more than a good fight, and much else. What’s most remarkable is the level of detail that’s achieved—and honesty and compassion—that would take another writer a thousand pages, if they could pull it off at all. Because Odie is a friend, I avoided reading his book for months, afraid that I wouldn’t love it and would have to lie or avoid him for the rest of our lives. But I’d agreed months before to this interview, so I’d gotten myself into a pickle. When I finally picked it up, I found myself so absorbed that I spent an entire morning reading, and read into the afternoon, thrilled to find it as brilliant and lovely as Odie himself. The prose is gorgeous, particularly the descriptions of the land, which are the parts I’m prone to skip in other books. The characters are fully alive—dare I say it?—“jumping off the page.” The chapters are brief enough to compel me to read one more, and one more, until the story has been told, but Pitchlynn and its people are still with me. My only complaint is that Odie loves the word “buttery,” but I forgive him for it, and the light shining on North Mississippi is often quite buttery, it’s true.
MARY MILLER: Having read your book of short stories, We Come to Our Senses, I know that Colleen is a character you’ve written about before. Did you always intend to write about her again? Did Some Go Home begin, in its inception, as it does in the novel, with her?
ODIE LINDSEY: Colleen was not supposed to be a part of this novel. It started off as a fish-out-of-water story, about a young widower from Chicago who decides to raise his kid in his wife’s Mississippi hometown.
That character, JP, is still a big part of Some Go Home. Yet during that first draft I couldn’t stop thinking about Colleen, the twenty-two-year-old veteran from my short story. Who would she become? Would she be ok? Could she get over the war and settle back in at home, or would she move on, maybe out of Mississippi? (And was coming home to the South any different from coming home somewhere else?)
At some point, I realized that while I love fish-out-of-water tales, in this case I was most interested in the fish that can’t escape the pond. I wanted to pursue the story of Colleen as the ultimate local, as someone who comes to question and grow in conflict with the very place that shaped her.
MM: While I know there’s a long history of setting fictional towns in and among real ones (the most recent example that comes to mind is Lee Durkee’s The Last Taxi Driver, set in the North Mississippi town of Gentry), how did you choose the name and location of Pitchlynn? What kind of freedom did this fictionalized place offer you that a real one could not? I feel like Southerners employ this tactic more often, though maybe I just read more novels that are set in the South.
OL: I needed a collage-of-sorts to make the town fit the story, to ramp up some of the real-world, everyday tension. My first notes were written in Oxford, a place I adore, and which offered some helpful drama: bookish progressives meet Trumpist second-homers, undergrad debauchery meets working folks, etc. In terms of real estate, Holly Springs’ antebellum houses were adjoined to lower-income flats, while over in Water Valley, neighbors were at each other’s throats over a referendum on beer sales. These and other little conflicts were familiar on their own, but the composite was what I wanted for Pitchlynn: a place made dizzy over how, when, and whether to redefine itself.
Pitchlynn the town is named after Peter Pitchlynn, a nineteenth-century, bicultural Choctaw leader whose life was shaped by the twisting of land, identity, culture (tribal, federal, Confederate); by Indian removal, class privilege, and ultimately the defense of Choctaw autonomy. He seemed the perfect namesake for a town caught in its own crossfire!
MM: I have to admit that I often avoid reading novels with so many points of view, as I find myself attached to one (or two) characters and waiting anxiously for them to return. After reading Some Go Home, however, I realize that this avoidance has surely led me to miss a lot of great reads, as what I like best about SGH are these changing perspectives, and how they enable you to capture so much of Pitchlynn and its history and people. Did you worry about employing so many perspectives? Did you find yourself more interested in one character’s story as opposed to another?
OL: I spent years worrying about these POV shifts, and I’m not sure I’ll ever try such a thing again. With Some Go Home, I chose to go in this direction for a couple of reasons. First, I love works that pull off this type of co-telling. As a schoolkid, I was wowed by Spoon River and Winesburg, Ohio, in part because the text made me feel like I was fitting a jigsaw together. Later in life, writers like Morrison and Bolaño, or books like A Visit from the Goon Squad, knocked me out. Just floored me. So when I decided to make place such a central part of things—a town, and the fallout from a Civil Rights–era murder there—it made sense to pull together a range of viewpoints. To try and make a mosaic, or a map out of the story as told by the folks involved.
Most difficult for me was to hold tight to my hero, Colleen. I needed her to lead the story forward, even as it opened up sideways or backwards, care of those other characters and storylines. I cannot tell you how many times I screwed this up. (And I’m not claiming that it’s not screwed up now.)
MM: You capture Mississippi well, down to spot-on details like this in Gabriel’s section: “Mina did nothing for nearly three months: no work, no cooking, helping anyone out. No money made from laundry or stitching, from engaging the egg trade with the Lebanese peddlers who still came around, their delivery trucks like satellites from their brick-and-mortar stores, loaded with sundry, who nurtured any available market, with any available race.” My grandfather and great-grandfather were Lebanese peddlers who went on to establish a wholesale store in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, but they still traveled throughout the region and sold to everyone. It was great to see, even for a moment, the story of the Lebanese in Mississippi. What kind of research did you do in order to capture the history to this degree?
OL: What a tremendous story and history! I spent ten years working on the Mississippi Encyclopedia while writing this book, so I couldn’t help but try and represent—in sentence, or storyline—a hint of the state’s texture and dynamic.
I can’t remember if I was introduced to the Mississippi Lebanese when seeing Ethel Wright Mohamed’s artwork, or talking with Jimmy Thomas in Oxford. (Jimmy recently completed a Lebanese in Mississippi project.) Or maybe it was the grape leaves at Abe’s BBQ in Clarksdale. In any event, the community kept coming up, both to my great education, and as marker of my great ignorance. (I mean, why the hell wouldn’t there be global legacies in Mississippi? The land had been occupied by Indigenous, Spanish, French, British, American, African, Chinese, Italian, Mexican braceros, Vietnamese refugees. And, as generations of your family well attest, Lebanese.) I do know that the “egg trade” mention came from the book Mama Learned Us to Work by Lu Ann Jones, which documents the multi-million-dollar, under-recognized economy that farm women generated out of the twentieth-century South, care of trading eggs.
MM: There’s a lot of talk these days about writing from perspectives that are different from your own, and I just want to say that you capture Colleen and the relationship between her and her friend, Deana, so well. It’s probably my favorite part of the whole book. Can you give me any insight as to how you captured them/their friendship so fully? Are you JUST A GENIUS OR WHAT?
OL: I am definitely a genius. Likely one of the geniusest.
Really, though, I am grateful for your comment—deeply so. I spent so much time with these characters. Years of rewrites, of sitting and thinking, and talking to myself, just trying to inhabit them, trying to live with them and as part of them. Sometimes, this involved embracing my instinct; other times, I forced myself to write against it, and hope for the best, hope the fiction would work out.
I’m still not sure whether or not theirs is my story to tell. At the end of the day, though, I love those two like family.
MM: Your novel deals with timely topics, the primary of which concerns monuments, or the places (and things) that a town deems worthy of saving and memorializing. In Some Go Home, that place is the Wallis House and Bel Arbre, the grand old magnolia. The timing of your book’s publication is remarkable! Just last week, the confederate monument was removed from the center of the University of Mississippi campus (where it will land, and perhaps be further memorialized, is a whole other story), and a few weeks before that, Tate Reeves signed a law that removed Mississippi’s 126-year-old flag. Both were hard-won fights, with Reeves holding out until his hand was forced by the SEC and other big money. Were you thinking about these things when you were writing the book—monuments and flags; what’s worth saving, fighting for? I’m also curious: what’s the inspiration behind the Wallis property? Did you have any specific place in mind?
OL: With ultimate respect for the folks who these symbols were designed to terrorize, I was half a life late to any formal understanding of what they meant, or why they existed. That massive fact noted, those monuments did impact me years before anyone ever taught me to recognize them. When I came back from Desert Storm (in 1991!), instead of talking about war or related trauma in any meaningful way, I was treated to a status I did not deserve, but which had been a part of my surroundings for as long as I could remember. It was a manly thing. A white thing. A hero-light narrative, which I disdained because it felt so false—though, of course, I didn’t do much to counter it.
It wasn’t until I got to Oxford in 2005, to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, that I learned to consider how physical markers, statues or symbols, might have contributed to this culture, this status. At that point, I really began to think about memory and memorial, flag and statue, and how these could benefit some people and serve as weapons against others. Once I started looking, there was no end to the narrative: in Austin, or Nashville, or Atlanta, or Oxford, etc. The subject and process took over some of my fiction—both short stories and the novel.
The Wallis property embodies this type of memorial: benefit to some and site of trauma for others. Like the town of Pitchlynn, it was a collage of various places, of the houses I’d seen around the South (or anywhere, really).
And, yeah, what a month it has been in Mississippi. I am heartened, and guarded, and eager to support this trajectory.
MM: Finally, we’re friends, the type of friends who send each other email updates about what the birds are doing in our yards. Any new bird activity in Nashville? How’re things up there, bird-wise?
OL: All this backyard COVID time has revealed to me a new world of bird violence. The sapsuckers assassinated my beloved crabapple, which fell over. The starlings kicked every other bird out of my elm, and they poop on my wife and me when we have our afternoon deck beer. (As you know, starling poop carries histoplasmosis, which is the fungal infection Bob Dylan contracted in the sac around his heart, back in ’97.) The bluejays shattered more robin eggs—for sport, it seemed—than I could have imagined possible. For a time, the little blue shells were everywhere. It was like a bad shift had gone down at an avian Waffle House. Random flocks have decimated my fruit trees, my blueberry bushes, my all of it.
I can’t believe what has become of my backyard bird love affair. I do, however, have a soft spot for this bald male cardinal. He just hangs around, trying to be relevant. Can you imagine that? A little buddy without his crest, squawking away? I sure can!
Mary Miller is the author of two collections of short stories, Big World and Always Happy Hour, as well as the novels Biloxi and The Last Days of California. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Oxford American, Norton’s Seagull Book of Stories (4th ed.), McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, and other publications. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss.
Odie Lindsey is the author of the novel Some Go Home and the story collection We Come to Our Senses, both from W. W. Norton. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications such as The Best American Short Stories, Guernica, Oxford American, The Iowa Review, and Electric Literature. Lindsey has received an NEA-funded fellowship for military veterans and a Tennessee Arts Commission fellowship, and is a writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society.
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