Every Which Way:
An Interview with Nick White
by Karin Cecile Davidson
In his short story collection “Sweet and Low” (Blue Rider/Penguin, 2019), Nick White writes of love, trouble, family ties, and queerness, all wrapped in the heartbreak and lyricism of country songs and storytelling. Set mostly in the small towns and farmlands of Mississippi’s hill country and wide-open delta, these tales are layered with the language of the South and its complicated structures of masculinity. Eudora Welty and William Faulkner come to mind inside a modern version of Southern Gothic, the softness of the stories here turning crystalline and then hard and brittle, as the characters contend with each other, their endings and outcomes always unexpected.
A native of Mississippi, White is also the author of “How to Survive a Summer” (Blue Rider/Penguin, 2017), which focuses on the story of a young man coming to terms with past traumas at a Mississippi conversion therapy camp for adolescent boys. White is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and his writing has been published in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere.
Skies were bigger in the Delta than in the hilly country he was used to. He knew that—everyone did—and yet its bigness surprised him. The sky pushed on and on. Great swaths of blue every which way.
—Nick White, “Lady Tigers”
KARIN CECILE DAVIDSON: Throughout “Sweet and Low,” especially in the second half of the book, it becomes desperately clear where we are, in the South with a capital S. There is “Forney’s Delta: flat, wide, mosquito heavy,” and his Texan mother’s version of Mississippi as “the Absolute Center of Nowhere.” There are gorgeously wicked descriptions of wide-open skies and never-ending delta lands: “Here, you say you live in ‘God’s Country’ because the endless fields of soybeans and rice and cotton that separate your cluster of a town from other towns gives you this feeling of importance, of significance, that you might matter, that surely God can’t miss you if you are one of only a few looking up …”
Eudora Welty’s writing comes to mind in terms of the heavily laden sense of place and how every aspect of the story is saturated in setting. The epigraph to the first part of “Sweet and Low” is a passage from Welty’s story “No Place for You, My Love”—“A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told—returned to the world it came out of”—which reveals much about where your stories might head.
Nick, tell us about your relationship as a writer with place, with Mississippi, with the South.
NICK WHITE: My two starting points for any piece of fiction are place and character. Where I come from is inextricably bound up with who I am, and because of this, there is often inherent tension: I am a gay man, and I am from Mississippi. And I love the South, particularly the small community where I grew up, but I hope this love doesn’t ever blind me to the inequities that still persist there—the racism, the homophobia, the general suspicion from close-knit white communities for anything “different.” I find the raw material there, in Mississippi, for what I need in making fiction. Interestingly, however, I think my writing improved when I left Mississippi for Ohio—once away from home, I was able to “see” it better. The distance not only gave me perspective but also left me quite homesick: while in the Midwest, I hungered for the pine trees, the rivers, the flooded fields, and the secluded, hidden beauty of my parents’ place out in the woods, deep in the country. I missed the animals—the stray dogs, the armadillos, the bobcats. I missed the heat. I missed the mosquitos and the crumbly bridges and rusted train track and the cemetery that holds most of my family. I missed the Truck Stop that sold fried chicken livers and pickled eggs and buckets of LuVel ice cream. I missed the silence and the peace of being in the middle of what most people would call nowhere—but nowhere has always been everything to me.
That was the summer Benjamin was so thin he barely cast a shadow.
—Nick White, “These Heavenly Bodies”
DAVIDSON: Let’s talk about trouble. You give your characters serious trouble, double- and triple-loads of trouble. “These Heavenly Bodies” spells out trouble in the slow-building, unsettled stunner of a first line, nearly one hundred words long and packed with sorrow and surprise. From the missing mother gone to meet her maker, the grieving father, the aunt “from Biloxi [who] stayed on after the funeral until ‘things settled down,’” and the infamous Cade twins, the story is bound with complication, sense of place, and the hot breath of summertime. And in the telling of this luxuriously slow-spun story, the main character Benjamin realizes an unexpected and startling first love.
What ignited this idea of a first love so tangled in trouble, so wild, so freakish, so fraught with romanticism?
WHITE: Any love worth writing about is tangled up in trouble, and wild, and fraught. As to freakish, that never crossed my mind. I wondered about obsession in this story, though. Here was Benjamin, who was brimming over with anger—at his father for emotionally shutting down, at God for letting his mama die. When he meets the Cade girls, he is fascinated by them—first, because they are conjoined twins, yes, but then it is their attitude, their forwardness, that draws him in. They become his literal objets d’art. But it comes at a price. In the process of drawing them, he becomes—in my mind, at least—victim to his own ego. He objectifies everyone in the story, and those that don’t interest him, he discards—which, by the close of the story, is the cause of his undoing.
DAVIDSON: Many of your stories are draped in the hairstyles, radio static, and songs of iconic country singers. Kitty Wells is named in both “These Heavenly Bodies” and “Sweet and Low,” while Tammy Wynette, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Charley Pride, and Loretta Lynn provide the “achy-heart standards” that Forney’s mother Felicia sings in their living room, eventually making her way to performing on stage. Upon hearing his mother sing, Forney responds, “recognizes it, this love inside him, and shudders. With this feeling of love comes, also, dread. Dread because when you love someone you put yourself in their hands. Give them the power to destroy you with something as little as a look. Or a song.”
Is Felicia’s a voice like one you’ve heard in your own life? What of country music and love and a song that might just slay the listener?
WHITE: I have a lot of sympathy for Felicia. She wants to be a singer; she wants to be famous; she wants to have big hair and shoulder pads and all that comes with it. Her dream is farfetched, yes, but no more farfetched than my wanting to become a writer and getting a book published, etc. And so once I understood that about her, saw the bond between us, I felt much more surefooted in writing about her. I can’t write about a character, even a supporting one, even an antagonist, unless I understand them. The second part of the book is devoted to Forney’s life, told in episodic chunks, and the first story I wrote for that cycle was “The Exaggerations.” In that story, the mother, Felicia, is barely on the page—she has already left for Nashville, and yet her presence haunts every line of Forney’s narration. I wanted to learn more about her after I finished that story, and so the title story was born.
I adore country music, particularly the women vocalists of the late 1980s and early 1990s: Reba, The Judds, Lorrie Morgan, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Tanya Tucker, Patty Loveless, Trisha Yearwood, K.T. Oslin—I could go on and on. The reason my stories are full of country music is because I am highlighting what I love, infecting the air with it. I want to have fun when I am writing. I want to enjoy it—because if I’m not, then how in the hell can I expect a reader to?
Maybe for a few of us it is different. Maybe the lucky and beautiful experience this love-made-solid thing I’m talking about … In my experience … people always leave the love that cannot hold them; they just slip right on through the abstractedness of it all.
—Nick White, “The Curator”
DAVIDSON: The idea of love in these stories is complex, cut from frayed Southern cloth. While all of the pieces share in twists of longing, the desire for intimacy, as well as admiration, first kisses, awe, and of course, straight-up sex, none is as complex as “The Curator.” First an homage to William Faulkner, known as “the Author,” and then a love story, the pages reveal that Forney (whom we have followed from childhood into young adulthood and beyond in the other pieces of the collection’s second part) is in love with bookshop owner Maggie, who is in love with famous writer-professor Bradley, whose wife Gilly allows her husband to sleep with any girl he chooses and, in the meantime, goes for Forney. The situation calls to mind the proverbial Ouroboros, or the snake eating its own tail, creation out of destruction, but that symbol implodes once Bradley and Gilly leave the scene. “And now the married couple leaves the single misfits to fend for themselves.” Heartbroken, Maggie gives herself to Forney.
Tied up with the love represented in the pages of this collection are moments of desperation, of impossible yearning, of wishes never granted, or of wishes granted and then taken away. What leads you to write of characters that realize love, only to find how false or fleeting or cruel it can be?
WHITE: Oh, probably because in wanting a person, in yearning for them and lusting for them, we ultimately recreate them into ideal versions of themselves. Desire contorts reality: it makes villains of us all. And once we have them, if we ever get them, it is almost always a disappointment, no? No one human person can ever live up to what our imaginations have conjured. Unrequited love was a staple of my adolescent years: I fell in love with men without even realizing it. In high school, it was with the same boys that harassed and heckled me in the hallways; in college, I had a close guy friend, someone I was deeply in love with, and being in the closet, I was never able to articulate this feeling to myself, not fully, until the day he got married. I was a groomsmen, and, lord, how I cried on the drive back home. It felt like the death of something. It was almost the death of me. Whatever that feeling was—I think I was chasing it in “The Curator.”
Uncle Lucas’s exaggerations had a pull to them, drawing me (and perhaps others) closer and closer to something else, something underneath the story, something he was trying to communicate indirectly.
—Nick White, “The Exaggerations”
DAVIDSON: Some might call Uncle Lucas’s way of telling a story in “The Exaggerations,” with “embellishment … the truth [stretched] so thin you could read the newspaper through it,” a tribute to the best of Southern storytellers. From the small-town cast of characters, the echo of Southern Gothic, the voice and sense of place, this story also brings to mind the legacy of writers that are felt in both your collection and your novel: William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and certainly Eudora Welty to name a few.
What can you tell us about the decision to give Uncle Lucas, a beautifully complicated character, the role of storyteller?
WHITE: There is more of me in Uncle Lucas than any other character I wrote about in “Sweet and Low.” His instinct to make the world better than it really was, to shroud the ugliness of people in nostalgia and hokey one-liners, something I fight against in my own writing. The world is often very unkind to people like me, and why not doll it up a bit? Uncle Lucas has heartache and yet he refuses to give in. Forney, however, cannot help but give in to the way things really are—he cannot quite hold up the façade as well as his uncle, and so it was important to have him narrate the story, so he could, in the second half of the story, begin to deconstruct the exaggerations. The last paragraph of “The Exaggerations” was one of the hardest things I have ever written. It felt like someone was punching me in the gut. It reminded me that writing fiction demands more from us than time; it requires everything we have to give and can push us, if we are lucky, to the very limits of our emotional and intellectual capabilities.
There was a familiar tone in their voices; something I hadn’t heard since getting to college: the sound of awe. It went through me like a heavy wave—the whole Gulf of Mexico was in their voices, bathing me.
—Nick White, “Break”
DAVIDSON: What struck me more than anything in “Sweet and Low” were the stunning, startling ways in which each story turned, the scenes assembled and stacked and leading to breathless, breathtaking endings. The way love is a hopeless venture in “The Lovers”; how wishing for death doesn’t come easily in “Cottonmouth, Trapjaw, Water Moccasin”; how lovers gone astray in “Gatlinburg” head straight into “a terrible sort of intimacy”; the endings told vs. the true endings of “The Exaggerations”; and how there’s “no place for gentleness” in “The Last of His Kind.” Questions about infidelity, childhood, masculinity, queerness, and familial cycles thread through, each stitch pulled tighter than the previous one.
In your essay on mastering scenes at Signature Reads, you speak of your love of scenes and allowing them to linger: “I have become an evangelical for scenes. I used to take great pleasure from reading a well-crafted sentence (I still do), but now my tastes have broadened to include the beauty of a well-structured scene.” Deliberate, hold forth, shout out, if you would, on the place from which you pull these themes and scenes and endings.
WHITE: It goes back to character. When I think about character, I try to pinpoint what they want. In a scene, it is no different, only it manifests through dialogue, action, and reaction. My characters want something, and usually another person is the obstacle keeping them from getting it. How these characters will maneuver around each other in a scene is always a mystery to me until I begin writing it. Or, to put it another way, it is almost like a science experiment: I am putting two or more independent elements together in a setting, and I am never sure, but always excited, to find out how they will react off of each other. For example, in the title story, “Sweet and Low,” I had no clue how Forney would respond to his mother’s flirtation with Buck over dinner, and I had equally no clue how Felicia would get past her son and successfully woo Buck. But I had a good time figuring it out. In fact, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything—once I had the characters off and going, they sort of took over, and all I could do was follow.
It starts early one morning before sunrise. Someone hammering away at a rusty typewriter. Or perhaps hail: god-heavy, insistent.
—Nick White, “The Last of His Kind”
DAVIDSON: In the epigraphs to each section of “Sweet and Low,” Eudora Welty and Lewis Nordan—like you, both Mississippi writers—are quoted. What is it about these writers that calls to you? What other writers have been influential in terms of your own writing? And from this inspiration are there other projects you have in mind?
WHITE: I didn’t start reading—I mean really reading—Mississippi writers until I left Mississippi for graduate school. I was homesick for place. Welty’s stories—particularly the ones in “A Curtain of Green”—helped assuage my feelings of displacement. Her use of voice is so precise, so unerringly perfect in her stories that I felt right at home in her work. Her novel “Losing Battles” was invaluable to me—the story revolves around folks sitting on the front porch, talking. That’s it. And yet, and yet—it is so captivating.
Lewis Nordan’s short stories are glorious and weird. The Sugar stories were a huge inspiration and model for my Forney stories in “Sweet and Low.” If anybody wants to get a taste of this writer, and just how wonderfully odd his work is, then they should read “The All-Girl Football Team.” I won’t say more about the story, because I don’t want to ruin it, but prepare to be dazzled.
Other, more contemporary, Mississippi writers that I adore: Jesmyn Ward’s work speaks to me more than any other living writer working right now. As with Welty and Nordan, she has such a handle on place and how place shapes character. I love her novels, but my favorite book of hers is the memoir “Men We Reaped.” I keep going back to that book—I think I have read it, or sections of it, more than a couple times.
Kiese Laymon is another writer I admire. I am ashamed to say that I haven’t read his much-acclaimed memoir “Heavy” yet, but it is on my list! I am a fan of his novel “Long Division,” which blends genres and challenges readerly expectations on every single page.
And finally, Mary Miller is someone I have been reading as of late. Her novel “The End of California” is a harrowing road trip through radical religious faith, etc. I teach her stories in “Always Happy Hour”—she knows how to craft a story—I have learned so much from reading her. She has a novel coming out this summer called “Biloxi,” which I am thrilled to read.
All of these writers have helped me in one way or another to believe in the legitimacy of setting my work in Mississippi. I am currently at work on a novel that is almost exclusively in the woods of Attala and Holmes county, and I have to believe there is an audience for that; or, to put it another way, I have to believe that the audience will come along for the ride.
Karin Cecile Davidson, Interviews Editor