Satan’s Fear of Mayors: An Interview with John Brandon
by John Henry Fleming
Daniel Handler wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “With Citrus County John Brandon joins the ranks of writers like Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Mary Robison and Tom Drury, writers whose wild flights feel more likely than a heap of what we’ve come to expect from literature, by calmly reminding us that the world is far more startling than most fiction is.” Brandon, raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida, took a break
from receiving similar accolades to speak with Saw Palm’s advisory editor, John Henry Fleming. In addition to Citrus County, he has written the novel Arkansas. He now lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where he teaches at Ole Miss and writes a weekly blog for GQ.com concerning Southeastern Conference football―at least during the season he does.
This interview was conducted on the otherwise empty bleachers of a New Port Richey high school during after-school football practice.
__________
JHF: This guy number 65 doesn’t even have a receiver’s number and they keep throwing the ball to him. He drops it every time. What do
you think is going on?
JB: He’s the coach’s kid. He’s not big enough to block anybody. It’s like he doesn’t have fingers or something.
JHF: You grew up here in New Port Richey. Is there something unique about Florida that could produce a kid like Toby [from Citrus County]?
JB: It’s not unique, but that part of Florida--the Nature Coast, they call it--has a lack of identity that can leave kids a bit lost. It’s sort of rural,
with all the disadvantages of rural places, but then it’s not wholesome. There’s no wholesome farming culture and lots of the people are transplants. Likes and dislikes are unfocused. There aren’t even tourists to hate. There’s just not much there that might orient a kid’s soul. There’s church, but church isn’t for everyone. The native Southern folks, some of them rednecks, don’t seem refreshing and full of common wisdom as much as seeming like they’ve missed out on something, that they haven’t gotten an important newsletter. In the Kentucky hills, hill people make sense. In flat Florida, they seem like a bad theater production. And the retirees in Hernando and Citrus and even Pasco aren’t
the good ones. The good retirees, the ones from Minneapolis or Kansas City, they all end up south of Tampa. The Jews go to the East Coast. There are a bunch of accents in Northwest Central Florida and none of them are comforting. That said, I guess Toby has more fundamental
problems than where he happens to live.
JHF: In the opening pages, Toby resembles an old-school antihero, the outsider who will tell the truth and take shit from no one. Even his
meanness to the kid outside the taco shop is excused because, as Toby says, the kid will one day “make one heck of a hall monitor.” The kid’s
a stand-in for rule enforcers everywhere. Shelby seems attracted to this antihero image of Toby. Mr. Hibma is also drawn to him. The reader’s
inclined to give Toby the benefit of the doubt until he does the inexcusable. As you wrote Citrus County, were you interested in exploring the
fuzzy territory between sociopath and antihero?
JB: I never had to think about Toby being an antihero. He just always was one. For me, those sorts of character labels fall away once I’m in
the heat of the narrative. What I was conscious of was giving the reader the choice of feeling sorry for Toby or not. I didn’t want to force it on
them. Some people feel for him and some just hate him. I wrote a story a few years ago in which the main character was a version of Toby that used his powers for good. I enjoyed the kid but I wanted to write a bad version of him. The do-gooder Toby probably wouldn’t have been interesting to me for a couple hundred pages. Most of the kids at Citrus Middle give Toby a wide berth, but Shelby is intrigued by him because he seems to be playing a different game than the other students. He seems to have his own troubles and goals. He’s mysterious, I guess. When they meet, Shelby is light and Toby dark, but somewhere along the line they switch, Toby wanting to be normal and Shelby acting out--at some point Shelby is dark and Toby light. They can’t get what they want out of each other.
JHF: You mentioned that you didn’t know Citrus County all that well but used to drive through it on your way to and from Gainesville. That
experience of driving through a place—you’re not even a tourist, just a bored traveler—can open up the imagination, I think. Do you find
it easier to write about such a place—a drive-through place—than the place you live or know well?
JB: I feel like the less I know for sure, the more elbow-room my imagination has. I don’t think just because you happened to grow up some-
where is always a compelling reason to write about that place. For me, the place has to excite my curiosity. I’m not a big fan of writing what you know. Maybe I prefer writing what I want to know. Citrus County isn’t all that far from Pasco County, but it’s quite different. Citrus County, FL and the state of Arkansas had something in common, to me. They were both places that were hard to figure out. When you drive through them you have no idea what’s going on off the main roads. That’s what it is in Citrus County--those straight, shadowy, hard-packed dirt roads that shoot off from 19. There’s a fear that creeps into you, that can make you a not-bored traveler in a hurry, that comes from not knowing what to be afraid of but suspecting there must be something menacing nearby. That type of fear is more intriguing than being afraid of the suburbs because they’re dull or afraid of the ghetto because you might get shot or afraid of the ocean because you might drown. You need a place that interests you enough to get started writing, and then you can do whatever you want to it. Like I tell students, your responsibility is to your book, not to the chamber of commerce.
JHF: Do you avoid researching your settings for this reason? And do you consciously choose lesser-known settings that you can shape to your own ends?
JB: I stay away from research as much as I can, partly because I’m bad at it and lazy, but at times it cannot be avoided. I never find anything
interesting. Everybody else does, I don’t. I’m thinking of writing a book set just after the Civil War, and that sort of thing is pretty much
impossible to do without research. Anything present day, I’d prefer to just have the vibe of the place and a couple searing characteristics. But there’s a higher thing than setting, which for lack of a righter word I’ll call atmosphere, and atmosphere is the domain of well-imagined
places rather than accurately rendered places. Someone who read Arkansas told me, “Sorry, bub, but there aren’t no hills in Pine Bluff.” My reaction to that: In my book there are, because there was a scene in which I needed hills and that scene took place in Pine Bluff. Maybe
that’s the advantage of lesser known places; not that many people are from Pine Bluff so not many people know there aren’t no hills there. Sooner or later I’ll write something set in a big city, just like sooner or later I’ll do mentionable research. There has to be something about
each book that’s new, a new challenge. Libraries. Urban Centers. And anyway, if there’s a bluff achieved, the place can’t be totally flat. Right?
JHF: I like this idea of the well-imagined place. Some writers use research or firsthand knowledge to stake their claim on a place. Others, like you, seem to rely primarily on the imagination. If we can get crafty for a minute, do you use any techniques when you write to help
you inhabit a setting?
JB: I don’t think more detail is always better. You want the details that do work for you and then you want all the details working under
a common program, as far as the tone they set. That’s the ideal. I try to take something familiar and alter it a bit so it seems noteworthy,
or there’s something unfamiliar and I’ll repeat it enough that it seems commonplace. Something I learned from writers like Joy Williams is
to pair the concrete and the poetic. That’s a useful technique for setting -- you state something plainly, a physical fact, unadorned, and then
follow it with something fanciful that casts a shadow back onto it. A menacing shadow or one that brings relief, depending. In all aspects of
fiction, I think it’s good to mix the easily-swallowed with the outlandish, the everyday and the oddball. It’s one way to conjure the feel of
real life. One of many, I’m sure.
JHF: And is there a specific image or set of images you recalled from your drive-throughs that guided you as wrote Citrus County?
JB: What I could never escape were the strip malls and the way the woods around there are marbled wet and dry. None of the woods are
what you want woods to be; they’re either dusty and sandy and buggy, or a buggy swamp. And those town names on the Nature Coast are
also terrific. Red Level. Inglis, which I don’t know how to pronounce. Weeki Wachee. Centipede Bay. Beverly Hills, for crying out loud. Yankeetown, for crying out louder.
JHF: Inglis is the town that banned Satan by mayoral decree, by the way.
JB: That’s convenient, because in the Bible it says that the only mortals Satan fears are small town mayors.
JHF: And Yankeetown is still haunted by Elvis―he filmed Follow That Dream there.
JB: That raises hundreds of questions.
JHF: Look, they’ve given 65 a glove―just one. He looks like an overinflated Michael Jackson doll lining up in the receiver’s slot.
JB: Budget cuts. One pair of gloves for two receivers. I’m hearing "Beat It" in my head, like the offense and defense are going to break into a
dance-off.
JHF: Are there any questions you’d like to ask yourself?
JB: Yes. “What are you working on now?” That way I can get a little early plug in.
JHF: You’re in the process of editing a novel set in New Mexico, still without title. You’re with McSweeney’s again. You can guarantee a
barn will be burned, a coma, and lots of music.
JB: All true.
JHF: Is there a list of anything you’d like to have us publish?
JB: Places I’ve lost glasses:
-- Tangier Island, Virginia
-- Charlottesville, Virginia
-- Nashville, Tennessee
-- Sanibel Island, Florida
-- Palm Island, Florida
-- Ireland
-- New Orleans, Louisiana
This isn’t interesting in any way. It just goes to show that my eyes aren’t all that bad.
JHF: I’ve lost wallets in a couple of these places, but, in New Orleans, at least, that’s expected. Would you like to plug any writers or works
of fiction that you feel don’t get the attention they deserve?
JB: I’ll give a list of books rather than authors. And maybe some of these do get the attention they deserve; they could still use more.
-- The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury
-- The Sharpshooter Blues by Lewis Nordan
-- A Woman Named Drown by Padgett Powell
-- God’s Country by Percival Everett
-- Taking Care by Joy Williams
JHF: Can you tell us a little about the origins of “Further Joy,” which appears in this issue of Saw Palm?
JB: I’ve been interested lately in plural POV, in 3rd person and 1st person plural. ‘They’ is more authoritative than ‘she.’ It’s got the sound
of legend to it. And there’s something creepy about groups of people who all believe the same things. The uniformity, you know, it’s eerie. In "Further Joy," the girls are mostly hopeful and reasonable, and the fathers are hopeless but also reasonable―to me, at least. The girls are happy enough that I didn’t feel like their half ought to have paragraphs, whereas the fathers wanted that bit of consideration, of gravity. I wanted it to be a bunch of light-seeming details that add up to a heavy whole. I guess some of the details are heavy on their own. I wrote this while my wife was pregnant with our first child and we didn’t know if it would be a boy or girl, so...
JHF: And the verdict is…?
JB: Boy. Name of Charlie. I’ve got him pegged for a blocking tight end.
JHF: Congratulations. After watching this practice, how would you assess the team’s chances this season?
JB: Pray for rain, that’s how.
JHF: 65 finally caught one, anyway. Listen, thanks for coming out.
JB: I’m glad he caught one before it was time to go. I feel better about things.
This interview originally appeared in Volume 5.
from receiving similar accolades to speak with Saw Palm’s advisory editor, John Henry Fleming. In addition to Citrus County, he has written the novel Arkansas. He now lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where he teaches at Ole Miss and writes a weekly blog for GQ.com concerning Southeastern Conference football―at least during the season he does.
This interview was conducted on the otherwise empty bleachers of a New Port Richey high school during after-school football practice.
__________
JHF: This guy number 65 doesn’t even have a receiver’s number and they keep throwing the ball to him. He drops it every time. What do
you think is going on?
JB: He’s the coach’s kid. He’s not big enough to block anybody. It’s like he doesn’t have fingers or something.
JHF: You grew up here in New Port Richey. Is there something unique about Florida that could produce a kid like Toby [from Citrus County]?
JB: It’s not unique, but that part of Florida--the Nature Coast, they call it--has a lack of identity that can leave kids a bit lost. It’s sort of rural,
with all the disadvantages of rural places, but then it’s not wholesome. There’s no wholesome farming culture and lots of the people are transplants. Likes and dislikes are unfocused. There aren’t even tourists to hate. There’s just not much there that might orient a kid’s soul. There’s church, but church isn’t for everyone. The native Southern folks, some of them rednecks, don’t seem refreshing and full of common wisdom as much as seeming like they’ve missed out on something, that they haven’t gotten an important newsletter. In the Kentucky hills, hill people make sense. In flat Florida, they seem like a bad theater production. And the retirees in Hernando and Citrus and even Pasco aren’t
the good ones. The good retirees, the ones from Minneapolis or Kansas City, they all end up south of Tampa. The Jews go to the East Coast. There are a bunch of accents in Northwest Central Florida and none of them are comforting. That said, I guess Toby has more fundamental
problems than where he happens to live.
JHF: In the opening pages, Toby resembles an old-school antihero, the outsider who will tell the truth and take shit from no one. Even his
meanness to the kid outside the taco shop is excused because, as Toby says, the kid will one day “make one heck of a hall monitor.” The kid’s
a stand-in for rule enforcers everywhere. Shelby seems attracted to this antihero image of Toby. Mr. Hibma is also drawn to him. The reader’s
inclined to give Toby the benefit of the doubt until he does the inexcusable. As you wrote Citrus County, were you interested in exploring the
fuzzy territory between sociopath and antihero?
JB: I never had to think about Toby being an antihero. He just always was one. For me, those sorts of character labels fall away once I’m in
the heat of the narrative. What I was conscious of was giving the reader the choice of feeling sorry for Toby or not. I didn’t want to force it on
them. Some people feel for him and some just hate him. I wrote a story a few years ago in which the main character was a version of Toby that used his powers for good. I enjoyed the kid but I wanted to write a bad version of him. The do-gooder Toby probably wouldn’t have been interesting to me for a couple hundred pages. Most of the kids at Citrus Middle give Toby a wide berth, but Shelby is intrigued by him because he seems to be playing a different game than the other students. He seems to have his own troubles and goals. He’s mysterious, I guess. When they meet, Shelby is light and Toby dark, but somewhere along the line they switch, Toby wanting to be normal and Shelby acting out--at some point Shelby is dark and Toby light. They can’t get what they want out of each other.
JHF: You mentioned that you didn’t know Citrus County all that well but used to drive through it on your way to and from Gainesville. That
experience of driving through a place—you’re not even a tourist, just a bored traveler—can open up the imagination, I think. Do you find
it easier to write about such a place—a drive-through place—than the place you live or know well?
JB: I feel like the less I know for sure, the more elbow-room my imagination has. I don’t think just because you happened to grow up some-
where is always a compelling reason to write about that place. For me, the place has to excite my curiosity. I’m not a big fan of writing what you know. Maybe I prefer writing what I want to know. Citrus County isn’t all that far from Pasco County, but it’s quite different. Citrus County, FL and the state of Arkansas had something in common, to me. They were both places that were hard to figure out. When you drive through them you have no idea what’s going on off the main roads. That’s what it is in Citrus County--those straight, shadowy, hard-packed dirt roads that shoot off from 19. There’s a fear that creeps into you, that can make you a not-bored traveler in a hurry, that comes from not knowing what to be afraid of but suspecting there must be something menacing nearby. That type of fear is more intriguing than being afraid of the suburbs because they’re dull or afraid of the ghetto because you might get shot or afraid of the ocean because you might drown. You need a place that interests you enough to get started writing, and then you can do whatever you want to it. Like I tell students, your responsibility is to your book, not to the chamber of commerce.
JHF: Do you avoid researching your settings for this reason? And do you consciously choose lesser-known settings that you can shape to your own ends?
JB: I stay away from research as much as I can, partly because I’m bad at it and lazy, but at times it cannot be avoided. I never find anything
interesting. Everybody else does, I don’t. I’m thinking of writing a book set just after the Civil War, and that sort of thing is pretty much
impossible to do without research. Anything present day, I’d prefer to just have the vibe of the place and a couple searing characteristics. But there’s a higher thing than setting, which for lack of a righter word I’ll call atmosphere, and atmosphere is the domain of well-imagined
places rather than accurately rendered places. Someone who read Arkansas told me, “Sorry, bub, but there aren’t no hills in Pine Bluff.” My reaction to that: In my book there are, because there was a scene in which I needed hills and that scene took place in Pine Bluff. Maybe
that’s the advantage of lesser known places; not that many people are from Pine Bluff so not many people know there aren’t no hills there. Sooner or later I’ll write something set in a big city, just like sooner or later I’ll do mentionable research. There has to be something about
each book that’s new, a new challenge. Libraries. Urban Centers. And anyway, if there’s a bluff achieved, the place can’t be totally flat. Right?
JHF: I like this idea of the well-imagined place. Some writers use research or firsthand knowledge to stake their claim on a place. Others, like you, seem to rely primarily on the imagination. If we can get crafty for a minute, do you use any techniques when you write to help
you inhabit a setting?
JB: I don’t think more detail is always better. You want the details that do work for you and then you want all the details working under
a common program, as far as the tone they set. That’s the ideal. I try to take something familiar and alter it a bit so it seems noteworthy,
or there’s something unfamiliar and I’ll repeat it enough that it seems commonplace. Something I learned from writers like Joy Williams is
to pair the concrete and the poetic. That’s a useful technique for setting -- you state something plainly, a physical fact, unadorned, and then
follow it with something fanciful that casts a shadow back onto it. A menacing shadow or one that brings relief, depending. In all aspects of
fiction, I think it’s good to mix the easily-swallowed with the outlandish, the everyday and the oddball. It’s one way to conjure the feel of
real life. One of many, I’m sure.
JHF: And is there a specific image or set of images you recalled from your drive-throughs that guided you as wrote Citrus County?
JB: What I could never escape were the strip malls and the way the woods around there are marbled wet and dry. None of the woods are
what you want woods to be; they’re either dusty and sandy and buggy, or a buggy swamp. And those town names on the Nature Coast are
also terrific. Red Level. Inglis, which I don’t know how to pronounce. Weeki Wachee. Centipede Bay. Beverly Hills, for crying out loud. Yankeetown, for crying out louder.
JHF: Inglis is the town that banned Satan by mayoral decree, by the way.
JB: That’s convenient, because in the Bible it says that the only mortals Satan fears are small town mayors.
JHF: And Yankeetown is still haunted by Elvis―he filmed Follow That Dream there.
JB: That raises hundreds of questions.
JHF: Look, they’ve given 65 a glove―just one. He looks like an overinflated Michael Jackson doll lining up in the receiver’s slot.
JB: Budget cuts. One pair of gloves for two receivers. I’m hearing "Beat It" in my head, like the offense and defense are going to break into a
dance-off.
JHF: Are there any questions you’d like to ask yourself?
JB: Yes. “What are you working on now?” That way I can get a little early plug in.
JHF: You’re in the process of editing a novel set in New Mexico, still without title. You’re with McSweeney’s again. You can guarantee a
barn will be burned, a coma, and lots of music.
JB: All true.
JHF: Is there a list of anything you’d like to have us publish?
JB: Places I’ve lost glasses:
-- Tangier Island, Virginia
-- Charlottesville, Virginia
-- Nashville, Tennessee
-- Sanibel Island, Florida
-- Palm Island, Florida
-- Ireland
-- New Orleans, Louisiana
This isn’t interesting in any way. It just goes to show that my eyes aren’t all that bad.
JHF: I’ve lost wallets in a couple of these places, but, in New Orleans, at least, that’s expected. Would you like to plug any writers or works
of fiction that you feel don’t get the attention they deserve?
JB: I’ll give a list of books rather than authors. And maybe some of these do get the attention they deserve; they could still use more.
-- The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury
-- The Sharpshooter Blues by Lewis Nordan
-- A Woman Named Drown by Padgett Powell
-- God’s Country by Percival Everett
-- Taking Care by Joy Williams
JHF: Can you tell us a little about the origins of “Further Joy,” which appears in this issue of Saw Palm?
JB: I’ve been interested lately in plural POV, in 3rd person and 1st person plural. ‘They’ is more authoritative than ‘she.’ It’s got the sound
of legend to it. And there’s something creepy about groups of people who all believe the same things. The uniformity, you know, it’s eerie. In "Further Joy," the girls are mostly hopeful and reasonable, and the fathers are hopeless but also reasonable―to me, at least. The girls are happy enough that I didn’t feel like their half ought to have paragraphs, whereas the fathers wanted that bit of consideration, of gravity. I wanted it to be a bunch of light-seeming details that add up to a heavy whole. I guess some of the details are heavy on their own. I wrote this while my wife was pregnant with our first child and we didn’t know if it would be a boy or girl, so...
JHF: And the verdict is…?
JB: Boy. Name of Charlie. I’ve got him pegged for a blocking tight end.
JHF: Congratulations. After watching this practice, how would you assess the team’s chances this season?
JB: Pray for rain, that’s how.
JHF: 65 finally caught one, anyway. Listen, thanks for coming out.
JB: I’m glad he caught one before it was time to go. I feel better about things.
This interview originally appeared in Volume 5.
