Interview with novelist Jordan Dotson

Novelist Jordan Dotson chats with me about his new magical realism novel, The Ballad of Falling Rock.

Bio:
Jordan Dotson was born and raised in Appalachian Virginia. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Jordan moved to China in 2005 to study classical poetry and folk music, and over fourteen years in Asia he worked as a journalist, musician, and educator, eventually earning his MFA in Fiction from City University of Hong Kong.

The Ballad of Falling Rock is Jordan’s debut novel. His short fiction has been featured in publications throughout the US and Asia, including anthologies at multiple Hong Kong universities. In 2019 he received the Scoundrel Time Editor’s Prize, and the same year his screenplay for Incognito won the Jury Award in Narrative Shorts at more than thirty film festivals worldwide. Though Jordan now resides in Savannah, Georgia, he still calls Southwest Virginia home.

Welcome, Jordan. Please tell us about your current release.
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it died of a broken heart. 

Yet, more than anything else folks ponder in the town of Trinity, one question lingers: why did this angel-toned preacher’s son, just as his fame seemed ready to light the Appalachian nightsky forever, disappear completely?

In 1938, the decisions Saul makes will alter his family’s story for generations. He and his eerily talented descendants ignite religious fear throughout Red Pine County. They navigate chapels, decaying sanatoriums, high school hallways, and a lingering myth from their Cherokee heritage that follows them wherever they go. 

In the end, however, it’s Saul’s precocious grandson, Eli, who must find answers to these heartbreaking questions, who must enter this world rich in music and voices, where people die to hear the unspoken, and salvation is only found in the not-yet sung.

What inspired you to write this book?
In 2011, I spent seven days of Christmas without electricity in a bleak Appalachian snowstorm, huddled around a gas stove with my family in our hereditary haunted house, shivering and telling stories about eerie neighbors, the ghost of our aunt who lived upstairs, and our grandfather, a mysterious radio singer, who died long before my brothers and I were born.

One year later, I returned home again to visit my family for Christmas, and in the middle of the first night, I woke up from a dream in which an adolescent boy in a dusty attic discovered a book of songs written by the grandfather he’d never known. That same night, I began to write. It took me ten years to turn that dream into The Ballad of Falling Rock.

In many ways, this story was inspired by the miraculous lives of my grandparents, who met as patients in tuberculosis sanatorium in the 1940s. At the same time, it was greatly informed by the tragic lives of musicians like Hank Williams and Jeff Buckley, both of whom have had a great influence on my own conception of musical, lyrical, and artistic transcendence (while forcing me to confront the chilling reality of how often death and deification go hand-in-hand). Thus, even as the novel is inspired by my family’s history, I suppose we could say that in the end The Ballad of Falling Rock represents an effort to answer the question: What happens if a musician achieves transcendence, but is unable to share that gift with the world? Just asking that question is heartbreaking, isn’t it?

Excerpt from The Ballad of Falling Rock:
On the day in 1938 when The Tale Without an End reached an end, Solomon Crabtree, or Saul as we knew him, made the most curious discovery. With the addition of only a lonely twang and a husky, minor-key exhalation, he found he could transform the old church hymns into dark and aching stories. Just like that, “Farther Along,” a song he’d sung every Sunday for years, cast a foreshadow of revenge. Suddenly, within its childish notes, “This Little Light of Mine” told a tale of violence in a bloody bed. Moving his hands up and down the neck of a crack-faced Gretsch acoustic guitar, Saul felt certain that no one had ever played a song this way before. The epiphany all but choked him. He bent the notes and let them curve off into a blue Virginia sky, and sitting beneath an old pitch pine, for a moment, he felt like a prophet. He named it the “Pentecostal” scale.

“Ain’t nothing Pentecostal about that scale,” the old man Rocky told him later that morning.

Saul sighed, watching the busker play his new scale forward and backward. The old man’s hair fell long and silver, but his fingers were young and alive, and when he let loose those two new notes, he leaked out an oops as though it were an accident.

“Ain’t even a scale. Not precisely. Why I even taught it to a boy just like you, preacher’s son, too, maybe thirty years ago. Tutwiler, Mississippi. Young Willie C. He picked it right up, then played it on a tin horn. Tender enough to make a glass eye cry.” The old man spat tobacco juice into the dirt. “But I suppose finders are keepers, young man. Finders are indeed the keepers.”

Saul rolled his eyes.

“I hate you, Rock. Lord have mercy.”

The old man winked and spat.

Together they sat on upturned baskets in the porch shade of Burdine’s General Store. Neither spoke much. They mostly just noodled on their separate guitars, occasionally stopping to point and guess at the coal camp homesteaders pulling in from all across the county. Turkey Beach? Saul squinted. Dante? The town’s name sounded like “ain’t.” Maybe Secondhand Hollow? Rocky couldn’t help but laugh. More often than not, the women and children from these faraway hollows came riding in Tom Dooley’s Model T Ford, each time backward, each time a run-and-go, slinging mud chunks up Courthouse Hill because, as Tom announced thirty-eight times that day: “Who wants one of those fancy fuel pumps when all you need is some gravity?” On arriving Tom would honk his Klaxon horn, and before anyone could leap out of the way, the old man Rocky would tear off a riff, the young man Saul would sing out a name, and together they’d chuckle at what they’d playfully dubbed the “Coal County Blues.”

The air was crisper than summer creek water, the noonday sun sharp and restless. When one family arrived in a horseless carriage, Saul took regard of their olive skin, their frost-blue eyes, and the jaw crick that said they weren’t averse to a fight. Immediately, he cried, “Tacoma Mountain!”

Rocky spat.

“That don’t count. Melungeons are easy.”

Saul gave a thoughtful, sideward glance, then turned back toward the street. The family disembarked in front of the portico of Trinity Inn. Saul noticed a willowy girl among them. She was darker than the others, paler in the eyes, and wearing a blue-patterned linsey-woolsey dress. Her movements were skittish, her ears too big. But then she turned, and her freckles were pretty and her hair sunlit and clean. Saul stared. She stared back at him. Her eyes flitted down to Saul’s guitar, then quickly she spun to her family, like a dancer. Saul hated that this week, the Red Pine Festival, only came around once a year.

What exciting project are you working on next?
For the last few years, I’ve been chipping away at a quirky utopian novel—or perhaps we might call it a satirical fable—that revolves around a brash, illiterate boxing champion who, when he’s refused permits to build a casino, declares the island of his birth an independent nation, declares himself president, and institutes a single law: in Punchland, citizens can freely punch each other—but only once per week. The novel describes the nation’s rise and fall, has an enormous cast of characters, and has been an incredibly difficult book to write. I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes me ten years to finish. But finish it, I shall, and I suspect it’ll be a very fun read.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
This is an interesting question of self-awareness! In hindsight, I was always a reader, and I was always scribbling stories as a child, then poetry as a teenager. (Umberto Eco once said, “My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne,” and that’s so true it hurts.) But I don’t think I ever considered myself a writer until my sophomore year of college.

At the time, I’d hoped to study finance and become an investment banker. It seemed like a reasonable and grown-up thing to do, though I had zero clue what an investment banker did or even looked like, and really hated accounting classes. What a grand misery those were.

Then, I took an elective English class where my professor, the magnificent Lisa Russ-Spaar, tasked us with writing a poem. She assured us that poetry was a valid and even admirable vocation, and with that assertion, and that homework assignment, some catastrophic switch flipped in my mind. It was like being told that breathing is a valid and wonderful and celebrated and profoundly romantic way to spend a life, that I could be that, and it could be me, and that honorable institutions might even pay me to do and teach this thing that I did every day anyway. I turned that homework assignment in. The poem was awful. But that was it. I was cooked. It was a moment of perfect recognition and I knew that, no matter what happened in life, I would be a writer. It was inescapable.    

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
Six days a week, my mornings are dedicated fully to writing. I require, at minimum, two hours of absolute, terrifying silence and focus, and when life allows, up to four hours. Never more.

When that work is done—usually in the afternoons—I manage my company: WriteIvy.com. I’ve personally taught essay writing to high school and college students for nearly twenty years now, and over the last five years through WriteIvy, I’ve focused exclusively on teaching graduate-school applicants, mostly in STEM. To date, we’ve helped over one million students worldwide prepare for the writing tasks of grad school, and I’m incredibly proud of it and all of our students. 

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
Sound. Music. I think I have a kind of auditory synesthesia that’s both a gift and a curse. I hear rhythm and meter in every sentence I write, and it’s the governing mechanism that indicates for me when a passage is “correct.” The literal meaning of the words may be correct, but if the rhythm isn’t, then it’s not complete. It’s not done. To me, prose is a river on which the reader is flowing along in their little boat, and that inherent music and rhythm represents the (entirely subconscious) speed of their journey. Sometimes, I need them moving quickly and fearfully. Sometimes, I want them at utter peace. The music of the line makes that possible. The curse, however, is that this makes me an incredibly slow writer. When I read about Jack London writing one thousand pages a day, or some celebrated writer churning out a novel in eighteen months…that’s incomprehensible to me. I don’t know what that is. I’ve spent entire months just sitting and listening to the same paragraph, over and over, until the music is right.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
As a child, I just wanted to be like my elder brothers, who are eight and ten years older than me. This was a very shapeless and intangible desire, but it was inescapable. As a teenager, this gained focus in basketball. Everyone in my family was athletic, and basketball—especially our brutally strict hometown high school team—was like a religious rite of passage. I believed with every cell in my body that if I worked hard enough and long enough, I could make it to the NBA and make my family proud. It was a ludicrous dream. But it’s one I worked at eight hours a day, carrying a basketball everywhere I went and shoveling snow out of the driveway to practice in the dark with frozen fingers. Looking back, I feel strongly that it was that period of daily discipline, of pushing my body far, far beyond pain, that gave me the ability to sit in a chair and chip away at a novel for years and years on end.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
My favorite novel is Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa. It’s a nine-hundred-page samurai epic that really can’t be considered literature—it’s pure episodic, romantic fun. Yet, at the same time, it has a deep philosophical core that may be the most profound thing I’ve ever read, and I’d love, love, Iove to inspire other people to read it. Especially young men, who unfortunately don’t read very much these days. If a young writer came to me and asked me what to read, I’d say Homer, Shakespeare, Sappho, Gabriel García Márquez, Joseph Roth, James Salter, Flannery O’Connor, Mary Shelley, Du Fu, Borges, and Li Bai. But if a normal, happy, non-writerly young person asked me what to read, that’s it: Musashi. And The Count of Monte Cristo. Those are my life-changing books.

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