"Don't Shoot for the Easy Target": A Conversation with Zak Jones
I first met Zak Jones not in a creative context, but an academic one. A Ph.D. candidate with the University of Toronto, he had presented a paper called “Echoes of White Power Nationalism in the American Narrative.” It was immediately striking. Academia can, at times, feel removed from the day-to-day realities of our lives. But Jones’ presentation refused such easy division. Instead, he intertwined scholarship and activism, highlighting what we can, and must, do in the face of our uncertain future.
His debut novel, Fancy Gap, does much the same. Refusing to pull back from myriad seemingly contradictory complexities, the novel explores the simultaneous beauty and violence, grace and retribution found in rural Appalachia. The book resists a simplistic narrative, following a strong cast of characters: the complicated homecoming of Dalton; his brother Messiah’s warping moral code; his mother Jane’s relationship with illness and addiction; his grandmother Grace’s twisted hold over apocalyptic American Christianity. During our conversation, we spoke not only about the searing beauty his book captures through this cast of characters, but about the blurred lines between genre, the challenge of revision, and interrogating not only where we are, but how we got here.
Kira Compton: I wanted to start with how much place is really a part of this novel—the sensory details and cultural elements woven into the story. This couldn’t be set anywhere but this very specific part of Appalachia. I wanted to hear you talk a bit about place as a character in this novel, and if writing this away from southern Appalachia affected how you wrote about it.
Zak Jones: I grew up in this interstitial space between the mountains and the flatter, rolling farmland. Both have distinct cultures, and being in the middle means it’s jarring to witness. There’s a difference in how they organize their communities, their lives, their economies. Fancy Gap struck me as a pretty good title because it’s not a real town. It’s not a real place. It’s a census area that’s a gateway to the Blueridge Mountains. It’s an intersection between all these other areas in the region.
Geographically speaking—or even psychogeographically speaking—this novel is about region, and quite a broad region at that. Appalachia is mountains and lowlands and the spaces in between. The characters move through these spaces, go out into the lowlands and then retreat into the mountains, out into real-deal wilderness where you can get lost very easily. I was trying to recreate that exact feeling of Where am I? How do I get my bearings?
And certainly, distance has something to do with writing it. The bulk of the novel was written in Toronto, but it began as a long poem. I started trying to turn it into a novel around the time my mom was sick with breast cancer, and I was driving to Virginia any opportunity I got. It’s a place you can really let your imagination wander, and I would think about this long tradition in American literature where weird stuff happens in the forest. Even in The Scarlet Letter, right?
This text started as a long narrative poem called “Tobaccoville Fires,” which was kind of polyglossic with different speakers recounting parts of their community being set on fire by unknown arsonists.
There’s just so much unknown about this part of America that doesn’t get reported on or looped into our cultural commentary. I was really trying to include this slightly mystified but very real description of the place.
Kira Compton: What inspired you to transition this from a long poem to a novel?
Zak Jones: The cynical answer is that I started my MA in creative writing and needed a supervisor. I was writing mostly poetry at the time and was having a difficult time landing someone to shepherd my work. Part of it was that I was starting from such a complicated, formal place. This text started as a long narrative poem called “Tobaccoville Fires,” which was kind of polyglossic with different speakers recounting parts of their community being set on fire by unknown arsonists.
And I thought, “Okay, let’s try a different tack. Why don’t I tell this story from the arsonist’s point of view? What is driving these fires?”
As I started writing it in prose, a long narrative emerged and through that, I secured my supervisor and sort of officially made the transition. I kept elements—a lot of what Grace says is directly pulled from the poem—but it just worked out better when I started telling it like a story.
KC: I’m always interested in how novels with multiple points of view come to be. I’d love to hear if some came more easily to you, if some were more difficult, and the ways that these multiple voices interacted with one another while you were writing.
ZJ: Oh, it was a nightmare. I’m much more confident in my ability to do it now, but I probably won’t ever do it again. My second novel, which I’ve already written, is a straight shooter and runs as chronologically down the line as humanly possible, because this was just so hard.
I found it relatively easy to keep up with my characters’ attributes, and the way they speak, but it’s hard as an author to change up your frame of mind to match the character’s.
Not to get too woo-woo about it, but there is just a shifting of gears that needs to happen in both the writing and the editing phase. I had to re-break the text into each focalizer’s chronology to just stay with a character as long as possible while editing. Dalton, or Grace, or Messiah. I couldn’t be five people at once.
It should be jarring to go from one interiority to another, because hopefully, there are five fully formed egos and ids and super egos. Readers will notice if you mail that in.
I did borrow stylistically from different authors that I admire for each character. The short Clyde sections are total Cormac McCarthy worship—he unzipped the shaving kit, he shaved his face, he wiped his face with a towel—which is totally different from Messiah’s sections where I’m borrowing more from Benjy in Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury. Maybe I was making it more complicated than it needed to be, but these were my tricks to differentiate the characters. I think the worst thing that you could do when you attempt something like that is to come out on the other end of the writing with a homogeneous tone and affect throughout. Each character deserves to be their own person, to have their own voice.
KC: Was the challenge worth it?
ZJ: It was worth it to me because not only am I proud of it, an astute reader will pick up on the shift—not only prose, but mood and tenor. You know, the lamentable and beautiful sadness of Jane’s character versus the manic thoughtlessness of Dalton’s. It should be jarring to go from one interiority to another, because hopefully, there are five fully formed egos and ids and super egos. Readers will notice if you mail that in.
KC: In a lot of ways, this story is about addiction. Of course, the obvious ones like alcoholism and opiates, but I actually think it’s primarily about the more insidious ones. The ways that faith can be addictive, especially when bad actors are involved. Or how a sense of belonging can be addictive, especially when tied to masculinity and identity.
ZJ: What I was really hoping people would take away is that these things don’t happen in isolation. Socially, we try to isolate the problem. If you’re an alcoholic, go to AA. If you’re addicted to narcotics, go to NA. If you’re in some sort of cult situation, you just need psychotherapy to fix it, and so on.
My theory is that there is a confluence of problems in everybody, and they’re not so easy to separate in such neat and tidy ways. In Fancy Gap, Jane likes to drink wine and is maybe too free-wheeling with her pain medication, but that is a secondary problem to her feelings of abandonment and desperation for inclusion. She attempts to fill that void with drugs and alcohol, but I think the text shows that those crutches don’t always work, and often make things worse. People need a purpose, and they latch onto what’s available to them to help them live, to try to persevere through hardship.
KC: It’s interesting that this started as a poem, because I was going to ask about your work as a multi-modal artist. Poetry, obviously, but also music and film. I was curious if this informs your fiction at all. How are you approaching all these different forms as an artist?
ZB: The influence my mom had on my life is the big thing connecting all my work. She was an artist as well; a poet and a playwright and filmmaker. She had this documentary project that she worked on with her mother and her grandmother, who was a homesteader, about the Appalachian Mountains. My mom filmed it all on 16mm and now there is this gorgeous archive of images and interviews of women singing and praying. She asked me to finish her documentary just before she died. And, in a way, I am finishing her grand art project, one that captures this traumatic and strange history of our family, the highs and lows of rural living and all its consequent struggles. She was always trying to find these things in her art and to do so her way. It’s an impulse in my art, too, to paint portraits of hard-to-find lives. Though, I see little rebellions to our tradition in my own work.
For example, she hated Fancy Gap. She saw herself in the Jane character, which is fair, since as a mother figure, the character borrows from my relationship with my own real-life mother. But I tried to explain to my mom that this character isn’t her, this novel is an exorcism of all the nightmares, all the worst-case scenarios we experienced living down there. It can be pretty, in some ways, but it’s not pretty in a celebratory way. She didn’t like that. That’s where we diverge, but in terms of the focus of much of my art, it comes from her.
KC: What advice do you have for younger writers, especially these days?
ZJ: My advice is taste-based, so there will be people who disagree with it. But don’t shoot for the easy target. Don’t pick up the low-hanging fruit and definitely don’t pick fruit up off the ground.
The ideas that break through and last are not the pieces of art that seek to address in pedantic or didactic ways the immediate situation, but instead those that interrogate the more esoteric questions. We need to investigate the systems of our condition rather than the symptoms.
Everybody knows that our current political climate has a target on the back of small independent presses, or artistic projects with mission statements that seek to support marginalized groups. That’s absolutely true. But great art has been made during and throughout times of great oppression or suppression of ideas. The ideas that break through and last are not the pieces of art that seek to address in pedantic or didactic ways the immediate situation, but instead those that interrogate the more esoteric questions. We need to investigate the systems of our condition rather than the symptoms.
Anyone who’s interested already knows that this world can be bad and harsh. My advice is to ask “Why is this tree growing?” rather than “Why is the fruit rotting?”
