“GIRL FLEES CIRCUS” AND ENTERS A WHOLE NEW WORLD: NEW MEXICO

English professor and writer extraordinaire C.W. Smith has decades of experience in the world of writing, whether that be fiction or nonfiction, teaching or learning. Many writers will say that their love of literature came at an early age, but for Smith, a rural Hobbs-set childhood meant that literary inspiration waited to strike until adulthood, when he discovered the great American writers of the Depression era and the Beat Generation. These influences are apparent in Smith’s tenth novel, “Girl Flees Circus,” which centers on Katie, a pilot who crash lands in the fictional town of No Name, New Mexico. Mystery, connection, and an exploration of 1920’s rural America abound in Smith’s latest project.

ATM: What do you find to be so rewarding about writing fiction?

C.W. SMITH: People always talk about “escapist” fiction, meaning the reader uses it to escape, but it’s true for me too as a writer. The imaginary worlds that I create take me away from my immediate surroundings and plop me down somewhere else.

ATM: “Girl Flees Circus” addresses a bevy of social issues that seem everrelevant. Why was it important for you to include that?

CWS: I’m not sure that those things were exactly a conscious choice. I think each character is struggling to identify themselves, to discover their truest nature or best path forward, and in so many instances the obstacles standing in their way are the same that people today face - racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

ATM: How greatly does the NM setting impact the story?

CWS: Hugely, I think. The way Mabel as a transplanted Mid-westerner has to learn new social customs and traditions and a new natural environment creates conflict and change in her, and Wally and Otis have come to NM originally to become members of an allBlack township after suffering discrimination in Texas.

GIRL FLEES CIRCUS: A NOVEL

By C.W. Smith UNM Press

216 Pages

$19.95

ATM: Do you find inspiration in the Southwest?

CWS: One of my favorite passages in “Girl Flees Circus” to write and think about is the one where Mabel is considering how she would describe the sky in the West to people back in Cincinnati. As a child of the Southwest, lots of sky and sun are deep in my somatic memory cells, and that feeling of comfort and familiarity and connection I feel with high-desert places keeps me centered.

ATM: The book is set in 1928– have you thought about where main character Katie might end up after Black Monday and during the trials of the Great Depression?

CWS: I have to say truthfully, I didn’t. I can imagine her eventually becoming a bonafide, certified pilot, but like all pilots both male and female, they would struggle to make ends meet.

ATM: Did your upbringing in Hobbs influence your writing?

CWS: When I was growing up there, Hobbs was a hard-scrabble oil town barely a decade and half out of its boom. Working class. Bars attracted thousands from dry counties in Texas.

I worked in the oil fields summers as a kid, and it wasn’t until I got to college and read John Steinbeck that I realized that a kind of literature could be made from the people and the milieu I knew and had grown up in. That was a revelation to me.

ATM: What kind of story did you want to tell when you first set out researching and drafting “Girl Flees Circus”?

CWS: I had no plan for the genre it would fall into, really, though I knew it wouldn’t likely be very dark (not a noir thriller, for sure), and it might likely contain some humor and size-of-life characters.

ATM: As an English professor, is there a specific lesson or piece of advice you impart on your students that carries over into your writing?

CWS: A couple of things -- the most important rule is don’t be boring. Write every day if you can. Don’t wait for “inspiration” before you start working: inspiration comes through work, not before it. —ET