WELL READ Magazine April 2023

INSIDE VOICES with Robert Gwaltney

Robert Gwaltney and Jeffrey Dale Lofton interview Zak Salih, author of Let’s Get Back to the Party

Zak Salih earned his BA in English and Journalism from James Madison University, and his MA in English from the University of Virginia. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Foglifter, Epiphany, Crazyhorse, The Florida Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Millions, Apogee Journal, Kenyon Review Online, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. Let's Get Back to the Party is his debut novel. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Jeffrey Dale Lofton, award winning author of Red Clay Suzie, and I had the opportunity to sit down with Zak Salih to discuss his debut novel, Let’s Get Back to the Party.

ROBERT: The novel explores what happens when a marginalized portion of society is layered into the mainstream or what some might define as the typical. Where did the idea of Let’s Get Back to the Party come from?

ZAK: The idea for the novel came in pieces. A favorite painting of mine in the National Gallery of Art. A YouTube interview between gay men of different generations. The image of two men at a wedding, both of whom loathe being there for entirely different reasons. All that came together under an overarching curiosity of mine over what it feels like to belong to a hinge-generation of gay men (see below), and how one tries—and sometimes fails—to reckon with the past.

JEFFREY: This is a two-part question. Your book has a foundation that is symmetrical, balanced. For example, the two main characters share the primary relationship and then each of those characters embarks on a significant journey with two secondary characters, one older man and one younger. How did you craft this story in such balance, and what did you want to say with those older and younger gay men?

ZAK: Form is very important to me as a writer. I need some sense of a vessel in which I’m going to pour all these haphazard thoughts and sentences and characters. My favorite kinds of novels are ones in which the architecture of the story is clearly visible. Building this novel around two competing voices allowed me to show some of the ways in which these thirty-somethings, and even the men from the generations bracketing them, were different from one another, and also similar in many ways. Oscar and Sebastian each possess their own distinct voice, but my intention in structuring the novel this way was so that, eventually, a third voice would emerge: the voice of the book.

ROBERT: Within the novel, you focus upon sexual identity more than racial identity. Talk a little bit about that choice.

ZAK: There was something empowering to me about having Sebastian be mixed race but not letting that part of him define his story. While I understand and respect the need for readers and writers to explore the racial traumas of non-white characters, that’s not a pressing concern in my work. Perhaps that’s because growing up mixed-race in a diverse region like northern Virginia grants one—as it granted me—a less traumatic childhood than growing up mixed-race in, say, the deep South. Still, I didn’t see the need to whitewash the character just because race wasn’t the driving engine of the novel.

JEFFREY: Sense of place in your book is strong, both the geographic setting, but also place within the gay community—about where we do, or don’t, fit in. How has your place in the gay community changed since you had the idea for this book, the catalyst for it being a major milestone in LGBTQ history?

ZAK: I think of this novel not as a coming out but a coming into story. How do we carve out an authentic life for ourselves in a community? How do we struggle with our own little slices of a vast spectrum of experience? Community, to me, is one of the major responsibilities of a modern queer person: to understand that you belong to a community with a past and a future—a past and future full of trauma, sure, but also of much beauty and joy. No matter how much society progresses, there will always be people who will actively work to harm queer people (or people of any minority community). The work—the pride—is in living life through this, in spite of this sobering truth.

ROBERT: I read in a previous interview, something that fascinated me. This concept of painting with words. Talk about that with us.

ZAK: Sebastian teaches AP Art History at his high school, so painting and art are essential to how he thinks about and interprets the world. I don’t think his experience in the novel is all that different from anyone who encounters a particular work of art they admire. There’s the art before you—and the personal thoughts and memories that art conjures. For Sebastian, paintings and sculptures are a box of Proustian madeleines. I love ekphraistic writing, where someone writes at a slant of sorts about a piece of art, and those passages in Sebastian’s sections were there from the first draft.

JEFFREY: Tell us about what you call the Hinge generation and the blessing and the heartache of being born at the time you were?

ZAK: With the understanding I’m no anthropologist, what I mean by a hinge generation of gay men is the generation of which I’m a part: born too early to see the AIDS plague as anything other than history but too late to take advantage of the boost in visibility much of today’s gay and queer youth enjoy. There’s a palpable anxiety of being in this particular niche—the death and loss avoided, as well as the opportunities missed out on. How would our lives be different if they’d been lived at other moments? How do we respect different experiences without envying them, without letting them keep us from living the one life, at the one moment in history, we do have?

Robert Gwaltney, award winning author of southern fiction, is a of Florida State University. He resides in Atlanta Georgia with his partner, where he is an active member of the Atlanta literary community. Robert’s work has appeared in such publications as The Signal Mountain Review and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. His debut novel, The Cicada Tree, won the Somerset Award for literary fiction.

Jeffrey Dale Lofton, award winning author of Red Clay Suzie

Catch the full interview on WELL READ Magazine's BETWEEN THE PAGES youtube.com/@wellreadmagazine