INSIDE VOICES - Christopher Swann

INSIDE VOICES - Robert Gwaltney and Jeffrey Dale Lofton interview Christopher Swann, author of the Faulkner Family series

Christopher Swann is a novelist and high school English teacher. A graduate of Woodberry Forest School in Virginia, he earned his Ph.D. in creative writing from Georgia State University. He has been a Townsend Prize finalist, longlisted for the Southern Book Prize, and twice been a finalist for a Georgia Author of the Year award. And this year won the coveted award. He lives with his wife and two sons in Atlanta, where he is the English department chair at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School. He is the author of five novels: Shadow of the Lions, Never Turn Back, A Fire in the Night, Never Go Home, and Never Back Down.

Jeffrey: Protagonists have an origin story, so what about you? What’s author Christopher Swann’s backstory?

Christopher: My eighth-grade social studies teacher, Mrs. Corpening, assigned a project at the end of our Revolutionary War unit, and one of the options was to write a fictitious diary or journal from the point of view of a fictitious person who had witnessed or participated in an actual historical event from that era. While my friends all chose to write a book report on Johnny Tremain or make a poster project about how a musket works, I chose the journal option. I had a lot of fun making up the narrator, whose name I don’t remember, but he was a third-rate Daniel Boone frontiersman who picked up his musket to fight against the British. Mrs. Corpening liked it, and I liked writing it, and my friends said, “That’s pretty good,” which is high praise from thirteen-year-old boys. That’s the moment I decided I wanted to write books. It took me a little bit longer to get published, but now I’ve got five novels, and I’m still sort of stunned that I nurtured a dream for almost thirty-five years and then it came true.

Robert: I feel that the settings in your novels live and breathe as characters. Share a little bit about your approach to setting.

Christopher: Thank you! Setting can be very valuable for a story. It can set a tone. It can foreshadow. It can provide a contrast with the action, sometimes ironically. And it can draw the reader into the story, so you are no longer sitting in your living room or on a beach reading a book—instead you are on a train rushing through the Ural Mountains, or walking down an alley in Chicago, or on a boat sailing up the Nile. I don’t want to overload the reader with too much detail, which I do sometimes in early drafts, because it slows down the narrative, so I always try to find a handful of details that will bring a scene to life in the reader’s mind.

Jeffrey: Your work blends genres: literary and thriller. How would you describe your work?

Christopher: “Literary thriller” is what I aim for most of the time. I’m a product of creative writing programs, which in my experience prioritized characterization and the quality of your prose—some of the elements of literary fiction. So I value complicated characters in fiction with beautiful writing. But I also love authors like Martin Cruz Smith or James Lee Burke or Donna Tartt, whose writing is literary and whose plots are thrilling or suspenseful. Shakespeare is a master of both the written word and the building of suspense. I like to write the best prose that I can and create characters that a reader will find interesting and worth following. If you can create a character that readers become invested in and curious about, then you can write any kind of story you want.

Robert: As a novelist, from where does your inspiration come? Do the characters speak to you first, or is it plot?

Christopher: Each book is a bit different. With my first novel, Shadow of the Lions, I decided to write a story set in a boarding school, and it quickly became a combination of a mystery and a coming-of-age tale. Once I wrote the prologue, I knew I had my story. Never Turn Back was, in its origins, much more about the characters of Ethan Faulkner and his sister Susannah, and how they each react to becoming orphaned. Suzie Faulkner is a character who has taken up a lot of space in my head, so the other Faulkner Family books are written from her point of view, in her voice. And A Fire in the Night was born from a simple scene: a middle-aged man, alone in a mountain cabin, is disturbed by a teenage girl who stumbles onto his porch in search of help.

Jeffrey: Speaking of plot, your books are full of secrets. How do you know when to tease out those crucial details, or to withhold them?

Christopher: I’ve read a lot of mysteries and suspense novels, from Sherlock Holmes to Karin Slaughter, and I enjoy novels that make me want to know what’s going on but keep that information tantalizingly out of reach. It’s a game you play with a reader, and it’s easy to screw up—you can reveal the secret too soon, which erases the tension, or you can withhold the secret for too long and annoy the reader. Have you ever read a mystery that didn’t work? It’s usually for two reasons, which I call “butler or aliens.” Either the butler did it, which you saw coming from page 50 but gamely read on, hoping to be surprised, or aliens did it, which came out of nowhere and seems like the writer just came up with a convenient, and unsatisfactory, answer. I try to avoid both of those problems. Films like The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense both rest on twisty secrets that, when revealed, shock and surprise you while, in retrospect, also make perfect sense. Readers don’t mind being fooled as long as the answer or the twist makes sense in retrospect, if they were given enough clues to have figured out the answer but without being blatantly told “It’s Colonel Mustard! In the conservatory! With the wrench!”

Robert: Like many writers, you have a day job. You also have a family. How do you balance it all? What is your writing schedule like?

Christopher: I’m a high school teacher, so I tend to write a lot in the summers—I’ll get a good head of steam going so that when the new school year starts and I have to go back to my day job, I’ve got some momentum and a stack of written pages behind me. I tried getting up very early in the morning to write, but I found it frustrating, because just as my coffee was kicking in and the writing was getting good, I’d have to go to work. So I write in the evenings and on the weekends when I can.

Jeffrey: What as the reaction from readers who first meet you and discover you don’t resemble the dark and twisted world and people in your books?

Christopher: What do you mean? (Insert smiley face.) I think most readers know that writers invent things in their heads that may or may not have anything to do with a writer’s real life. Sure, we all draw on our own life experiences. I once read an interview with the actor Christopher Walken in which he said that he will do some research into his characters and so forth, but ultimately every character he plays is him, to some extent—it’s all filtered through him and his life experiences and world view. So while Suzie Faulkner in the Faulkner Family series is a twenty-something, sexually fluid woman with combat skills who rides a motorcycle and searches for missing people, and I’m a middle-aged heterosexual guy who tends to avoid conflict and would never do most of what Suzie does, she’s still a product of my imagination. There are parts of me in her—far less filtered, no doubt, but there nonetheless: I have a strong sense of justice, for one thing, and I can be impulsive, and my thoughts can dart all over the place.

Before I wrote my first novel, Shadow of the Lions, I wrote a book that can best be described as a story that Pat Conroy and Tom Clancy might have tried to write together. It was a story about a working-class family, a fisherman father and his son who clash; the mother has just died of cancer; it was set in coastal Georgia; and the Irish Republican Army is involved. Now, my family was upper-middle-class; my father and I never really fought; my mother never had cancer and is very much alive; I’ve been to coastal Georgia but it almost always has involved a beach; and although I’ve researched the IRA and traveled to Ireland—which I called “research” and my wife Kathy called “vacation”—I’ve never knowingly met or spoken with an IRA member. So I didn’t exactly know what I was writing about. After years of trying to make this novel work, I was frustrated, and Kathy suggested that I try writing something that I knew, like a story set in a boarding school. I resisted that for a little while because I thought it might be boring (and, honestly, because I was a little intimidated by the idea because so many good books have been written in that kind of a setting), but I realized that I can take the parts of my life that would work for a given story and use them as needed, and ignore the rest. Once I realized that, I felt oddly free to write whatever I wanted.

Robert: What books are in your bedside table?

Christopher: When Cormac McCarthy died, I reread All the Pretty Horses and am now rereading The Crossing so I can finally read the third novel in his Border trilogy, Cities of the Plain. But I put that on hold while I’m at the beach this week. I just finished Joshilyn Jackson’s latest, With My Little Eye, which is a great thriller, perfect for a beach vacation. I’ve got three more books lined up for beach week, each from a different crime or thriller series: Joe R. Lansdale’s Savage Season, his first Hap and Leonard book; Craig Johnson’s The Cold Dish, the first of his Longmire novels; and Jane Harper’s Exiles, which may be the last of her Aaron Falk series set in Australia.

Robert: Never Back Down is the last book of your Faulkner Family series. What will you miss most about them? And what is next for you?

Christopher: It’s the last of my Faulkner Family series for now. Could I return to Suzie Faulkner? I’ve got an idea for a Suzie book in the back of my head, but only time, and sales numbers, will tell. I’ve come to love Suzie and her gloriously messy life, and her brother Ethan, and her friends Caesar and Frankie, and her Uncle Gavin. Even Wilson the dog. I’ll miss writing them and watching them interact and snipe at one another and have each other’s backs. They’re a family, and I feel like a part of that family as well.

At the moment I’m co-writing a novel with my wife, a thriller set in a Georgia lake town. We have a complete draft and are working on rewrites before approaching our agents to see what they think. It’s been a lot of fun writing with Kathy—we complement each other’s writing strengths and predilections, and even our occasional differences on plot or characterization or descriptions have been easily resolved. Basically I’m going to keep writing books as long as people are willing to keep reading them.

Robert Gwaltney, award winning author of southern fiction, is a graduate 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, hails from Warm Springs, Ga. His years telling the stories of playwrights and scriptwriters taught him the pull of a powerful story arc. Today, he is a senior advisor at the Library of Congress, surrounded by books and people who love books. Red Clay Suzie is his first work of fiction, written through his personal lens growing up an outsider figuring out life and love in a conservative family and community in the Deep South.