Introducing Robert Gwaltney

Introducing Robert Gwaltney

“This is Southern Gothic with a vengeance—a dark blast of family secrets, strained loyalties, and bitter betrayals. We follow young Analeise Newell with fear and hope, dreading what may happen to her even as we turn the pages. Robert Gwaltney is a writer to watch.” –Christopher Swann, author of Never Turn Back

A graduate of Florida State University, I presently reside in Atlanta Georgia with my partner. By day, I serve as Vice President of Easter Seals North Georgia, Inc., a non-profit organization strengthening children and their families at the most critical times in their development. Through my non-profit work, I am a champion for early childhood literacy. In all the hours between, I write.

Raised alongside three feral, younger brothers in the rash-inducing, subtropical climate of Cairo Georgia, I am a lifelong resident of the South. A circumstance, no doubt, leaving an indelible mark upon my voice as a writer.

Aside from sense of place, my writing is influenced and inspired by the literary work of others. As a boy, it was with great obsession, I turned the well-worn pages of Charlotte Brontë’s, Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights? Yes, another source of adoration. And Truman Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, I admire with equal reverence along with everything ever written by Tennessee Williams.

Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham is one of my all-time favorite characters. Many hours I spent playing her, wrapped in an old lace tablecloth borrowed from my mother’s linen closet—my tattered, makeshift wedding dress. Locked away in my boyhood room, I haunted the place, plotting revenge, shooing rats from the wedding cake. “Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy,” I would whisper into the impressionable ear of my lovely Estella. Break their hearts.

As an adult, my literary palate is diverse, reading everyone from the sublime Michael Cunningham to the gifted Jesmyn Ward to the incomparable Ron Rash. Though my tastes have evolved through the years, one constant remains: the impact of literature and art and music upon my writing. And my unrelenting quest to make and find beauty in this world.

My work has appeared in the following:

The Signal Mountain Review: Robert Gwaltney – Signal Mountain Review – Volume III, Issue II

The Blue Mountain Review (pages 61-67): The Blue Mountain Review Issue 16 by Collective Media

The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature: Robert Gwaltney: Ash : Fiction : December 2019 – The Dead Mule School

Work in Progress, An Anthology: “In That Quiet Earth”

Additionally, I hold the privilege of serving as Fiction Editor for The Blue Mountain Review.

I have made appearances on the following: Dante’s Old South (Chattanooga NPR): Episode 08

Dante’s Old South (Chattanooga NPR):

Episode 27 DESIDERATUM

This Business of Music and Poetry: How To Gain Power & Resilience From Childhood Trauma (Interview with Robert Gwaltney) by This Business Of Music & Poetry Podcast • A podcast on Anchor

Writers in the Round (Chattanooga NPR): (No available link)

Scenic Roots (NPR Chattanooga)

Desideratum

The Storytellers

Press Release for The Cicada Tree (Ann-Marie Nieves Get Red PR)

A jewel of the Southern Gothic literary genre, The Cicada Tree is the story of two young girls whose friendship sparks obsession, manipulation, and a chain of life-altering events during the sultry Georgia summer of 1956.

Infused with superb imagery, the lyrical poetry of Southern speech, and a mysterious sense of foreboding, The Cicada Tree is the captivating debut novel by Robert Gwaltney. The Cicada Tree is the much beloved novel The Secret Life of Bees meets We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

In it, the friendship of two 11-year-old girls ignites obsession, manipulation, and a chain of life-altering events – all set against the lush backdrop of a sultry, mid-century Georgia summer.

A Synopsis of The Cicada Tree:

It’s the summer of 1956, and a brood of cicadas descends upon Providence, Georgia. It’s a natural event with supernatural repercussions, and unhinges the life of Analeise Newell, an eleven year-old piano prodigy. Amidst this emergence, dark obsessions are stirred, uncanny gifts provoked, and secrets unearthed.

During a visit to Mistletoe, a plantation owned by the wealthy Mayfield family, Analeise encounters Cordelia Mayfield and her daughter Marlissa, both of whom possess an otherworldly beauty. A whisper and an act of violence perpetrated during this visit by Mrs. Mayfield all converge to kindle Analeise’s fascination with the Mayfields.

Analeise’s burgeoning obsession with the Mayfield family overshadows her own seemingly ordinary life, culminating in dangerous games and manipulation, and setting off a chain of cataclysmic events with life-altering consequences—all unfolding to the maddening whir of a cicada song.

‘An Unrelenting Quest to Find Beauty In this World’

While some writers’ processes are driven by intellect, Gwaltney says his process is informed by feeling. “I am an emotional writer,” he says. “My writing is also influenced and inspired by the literary work of others. As a boy, it was with great obsession, I turned the well worn pages of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. And Truman Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, I admire with equal reverence along with everything ever written by Tennessee Williams. Though my tastes have evolved through the years, one constant remains: the impact of literature and art and music upon my writing. And my unrelenting quest to make and find beauty in this world.

“Gwaltney’s Southern Gothic, THE CICADA TREE mesmerizes and seduces, the language redolent and deadly, the characters steeped in secrets and madness, and the whole of it an enthralling and perfect read. Easily my favorite book of the year.” —Kim Taylor Blakemore, bestselling author of AFTER ALICE FELL

“Blending gothic elements into Southern fiction paired with musical notes of magical realism, Robert Gwaltney’s The Cicada Tree blindsides with creative intelligence, leaping across genre boundaries in elegant prose to weave a wholly symphonic experience with all the hallmarks of an instant cult classic.” —NY Journal of Books

Replete with lyrical prose, dark beauty and shocking revelations, The Cicada Tree is Southern Gothic at its best. For more information, please contact me at am@getredpr.com/ 914-393-1359.

I wanted to share fellow PQ author Claire Fullerton’s beautiful review of Robert’s debut novel as it appears in the New York Journal of Books:

The coming-of-age concerns in Robert Gwaltney’s riveting The Cicada Tree are set against a surreal Southern backdrop so plausibly staged as to seem par for the course throughout the first-person narrative of Analeise Newell, who unfurls a fantastic story in hindsight about the perils of obsession. Analeise ominously begins, “It was the cicadas’ singing I remember best—their courting song. It was frenetic beckoning for the affection of another that stirred the heat to reckless speeds that summer, the summer I turned eleven.”

It is 1956 Providence, Georgia, and young Analeise lives in a humble house with her mother, Grace, who lives apart from Analiese’s hard-drinking, shiftless father. Beneath their roof cohabitates Miss Wessie and her eleven-year-old granddaughter, Etta Mae. The foursome is a harmonious, biracial family, the girls in school as Miss Wessie keeps house, while Grace works multiple jobs, including part-time domestic work for the Mayfields—the wealthiest family in town who live in an opulent mansion and maintain a mystique of legendary status.

The four main characters are each blessed with an extraordinary gift of otherworldly proportion: Etta Mae sings opera in the voice of an angel; Miss Wessie bears clear-sighted wisdom; and Grace, a talented seamstress, divines the future in her stitches and receives prescient hunches each time the scar she received from a snakebite throbs.

Analeise is a prodigy on the piano to the point where she can see and taste music, and explains, “Though Mama was brilliant with a needle and thread, it was her ability to read the future in her own sewing that was the true gift, an ability as deep down a part of her as the music inside me.” Analise describes Etta Mae’s singing by recounting its initial impact, “It seemed I was the only one who saw it. The only one to see Etta Mae’s voice turn into a real, seeable thing—puffs of breath blown in the winter’s cold… and I could taste it. Love and want. More of a texture than a flavor, cotton candy melting on my tongue, dissolving to a sugary grit.”

The high drama of The Cicada Tree centers on Analeise’s experience with the three members of the enigmatic Mayfield family who share a dark history. When Analeise comes into contact with Marlissa Mayfield at school, she, as well as all others in Malissa’s orbit, is beguiled by her charisma to the point of obsession.

At home, Miss Wessie tells Analeise to stay away from the Mayfields. “Them Mayfields ain’t for you,” Miss Wessie says, and when Analeise presses her to clarify rumor concerning Marlissa’s brother, Miss Wessie hesitantly confesses he was, “As blond as the rest of them, his eyes greener, a kind of shine that makes you feel a strange kind of way. That makes you want to be close. . . . All of them—Mr. Kingston, Miss Cordelia, and Marlissa. They all got it. An unnatural kind of charm.” Analeise admits, “I knew what it was like to stand in the shine of a Mayfield. So blinding you have to squint.”

Analeise Newell is a remarkable character, a deepthinking, uniquely voiced, secret keeping Scout Finch with an exuberant edge you’d follow anywhere. Prone to mischief and grappling with complicated adolescent feelings including a dark, covetous envy, she knows she is pretty, yet in light of the strange goings on around her, she is also self-aware and says of herself, “But what did pretty matter if my inside parts did not match? I imagined my innards, discolored and mushy, a halfeaten watermelon left too long in the sun. I was layers of mean thoughts and murderous prayers. What else might I be capable of if a thing needed doing?”

The Cicada Tree has elements of mystery metaphorically set among a phenomenon of Biblical proportions occurring once every 13 years, and Gwaltney takes the reader into the middle of it when the town is overrun by a swarm of cicadas. Gwaltney leaves nothing unattended in the chaos, when the characters run home for cover. Analeise says, “The four of us moved in close, folding in together, weaving a knot. The song of the male cicada rose, the sound of millions of buckling tymbals. Vibrations passed through the walls with the rise of the racket, agitating the floor, worrying our feet. Our heads jerked and strained in all directions, keeping check on the walls, spying all the dark corners. The light from the dwindling candle distorted our faces, having its way until we were no longer ourselves. All of us left there growing mad from the sound.”

From her self-oriented view based on past actions, Analeise fears her and Etta Mae’s involvement: “The natural world had come undone, the delicate underpinnings unhinged and knocked loose by a song. Etta Mae, she had been the one to do it, to raze the place with hail—to unleash this plague of cicadas. But whose fault was it really? Had I not been the one to strike the blow, to set the plan?”

Blending gothic elements into Southern fiction paired with musical notes of magical realism, Robert Gwaltney’s The Cicada Tree blindsides with creative intelligence, leaping across genre boundaries in elegant prose to weave a wholly symphonic experience with all the hallmarks of an instant cult classic.

Please visit Southern Literary Review to read Dawn Major’s wonderful review - and - The Atlanta Journal- Constitution to read Candice Dyer’s fantastic review.

Congratulations Robert!

I know you will love Robert’s wonderful debut novel as much as we do. He is definitely an author you’ll want to follow.

If you’re in Beaufort you can see for yourself on March 24 th why he’s an author you need to meet!

An Evening with Robert Gwaltney in Conversation with Bren McClain

THU MAR 24 2022 AT 04:00 PM TO 05:00 PM UTC-05:00

NeverMore Books | Beaufort