AUTHORS INTERVIEWING AUTHORS - Toby LeBlanc and Amos Jasper Wright

Toby LeBlanc and Amos Jasper Wright

Wright: Eccentricity seems to be the ocean that creatives swim in. Do you have any quirks or rituals? They do not necessarily have to be associated with your writing.

Leblanc: My wife could probably answer this better than I can. As far as writing quirks, I don’t believe I have that many. Maybe the fact that I do not have a codified writing practice is a quirk. But I have several non-writing eccentricities. I have a very sensitive sense of smell so there are certain fragrances banished from my presence. I park in the exact same spot at places I frequent so I never have to think about where I parked my car. I have “tiers” of T-shirts which move from work/public-worthy to pajama class, to lawn duty, to car wash/winter pipe wrap.

Wright: What are the themes you are focusing on in your current work?

Leblanc: I’m revising a novella that I started up this past spring. It focuses on a post-climate change world (similar to my upcoming story collection Soaked), but considers parenting, relationships with grief and nostalgia, as well as colonization. This one has been hard, I think because it's about fears I'm struggling to face. I'm also contemplating a follow-up to my previous novel, Dark Roux. Themes I'd like to address in this one would be the commodification of a culture and the negotiation of cultural change across generations.

Wright: How do you handle unpublished work?

Leblanc: This question assumes that I would have some method or approach I’ve codified over time. That could not be further from the truth. In one instance I tried to get a novel out there and it had no traction. This was for the best because there was so much that just wasn’t there. However, I ended up distilling it down to a single short story which became published almost ten years later. That publication launched my writing career. Often my unpublished work is fragments for which I haven’t found a home. Eventually I find a way to work a scene that’s been sitting dormant for years into a new piece. But maybe my favorite thing that has happened with unpublished work is with my most recent novel (currently on submission). I wrote a version of it almost twenty years ago, right after Hurricane Katrina. I stopped writing right as the family in the novel was waiting for the buses to pick them up at the Convention Center in New Orleans. In my mind they’d been waiting there ever since I stopped writing and had grown angry with me for it. When I was given permission to write this novel again (long story, I’ll have to tell you another time), the family had morphed, and the story was about something much deeper. I understand now I wasn’t ready to write that novel back then. That could be the real reason the family in my head was angry with me.

Wright: How do you approach editing? Do you consider yourself a “slow writer” or a “fast writer?”

Leblanc: Slow writer seems to describe me better. Although, that depends on some factors. Sometimes I know exactly what I need to happen in a scene. And I’ll know exactly what that means for my character. In those instances, I will be able to bang out content in no time. But most of the time I am learning about the character, or the impact of the setting, or even about myself, in real, slow time. I take time to process what is happening and often get confused. I will walk away and come back hours, or even days, later. This slows things down substantially. In editing, too, it’s a similar process. If my plot isn't fully fleshed out, I have to dig deep to find what the story is really about. Without a fully fleshed concept, I am working in editing to find the meaning of the work so that I can then make it cohesive. Then it is a matter of reading for character consistency, pacing, language cohesion…you know…all the traditional edity stuff.

Wright: Writing is a solitary endeavor with few immediate rewards and an uncertain outcome. Why do it? How do you balance W-2 work that pays the bills, family life, and other obligations with a writing schedule?

Leblanc: The best advice I’d ever read on becoming a writer is that I should first try to do everything else. If I keep coming back to writing, I know it’s meant to be. If I look back, I was a writer before I was anything else. I’ll likely be a writer after everything as well. I write because it’s where I teach myself. It’s where I sort out my thoughts and feelings. My hopes and dreams get to live there. Why do it? Because it’s always where I come back to and where the real work happens.

Although, keeping a writing schedule is something completely different. Despite writing feeling like a calling or vocation, bills need to be paid, children need to be raised, and retirement plans need to be tended. There are times when I have a little more space in my life and I can regiment some time to devote to the craft. But most writing happens as thievery. I steal a moment here and there, and begin to cobble something together, in hopes that I will have more space in the future to make it into something cohesive. On my best days I can string together two thousand words. But in truth, my writing happens in a series of moments.

Wright: How do you define or practice the relation between reading and writing?

Leblanc: Another quote that has stuck with me is that if you read enough, you will eventually become a writer. I wholeheartedly believe this. The division between reading and writing is like the thin horizon separating the ocean and the sky. They may be made of different things, but they mirror each other to the point where it’s hard to tell them apart. I don’t think a writer can truly develop their voice, their ideas, or their characters, without reading someone else’s words. In that shared space while we read, that mind-meld between writer and reader that is fused along sentences, we step out of our version of being and into a bigger one. There’s an old parable about three blind men and the elephant: one touches the tail and says it’s a brush, one touches the trunk and says it’s a snake, and the last touches the leg and says it’s a tree. None see the elephant. Each book I read helps me see more of the elephant that is reality and informs what I am able to write. This is, of course, not to mention the way I learn how to write as I read. Someone’s brilliant analogy or artistic wording will inevitably spark something in me to create.

Wright: Has the widespread use of social media, and the accompanying documented erosion of attention span affected your writing?

Leblanc: I’m afraid so. It impresses me how well social media and cell phone companies have figured us out. I will catch myself looking at my phone or pulling up social media when I don’t even want to. Last I looked, this is the definition of addiction. In fact, I’ve caught myself navigating over to my phone while writing responses to these questions. Writing is often something I do in combat with distraction. However, I will say social media has made it easier to connect with people who might share my ideas or like my writing. In fact, the connection aspect of it is almost as nice as meeting people at fairs and festivals. In that thought, social media is useful to me, and to my writing, when I use it for its most core purpose.

Wright: If not writing, what else might you have done?

Leblanc: I’ve been doing this mental health therapy gig for nearly twenty years now and it has suited me well. However, I think the next thing for me will be to own my bookstore and/or restaurant/bar. My wife and I have pie-in-the-sky dreams about what our place would be like. So far, we have made it to: regional reading and knickknacks, coffee in the morning/wine in the afternoon, coffee/wine pairings with books, and gumbo Thursdays. I don’t honestly know why Thursday. Gumbo on a Thursday feels right. However, if we aren’t talking about the tangible possibilities… I think I might have been a farmer. There is something about digging in the earth, helping things grow, while still connecting to a bigger system that syncs with my old Cajun agrarian genes.

Wright: Writers are regular people with flaws, like everyone else. Do a writer’s shortcomings as a person undermine their artistic accomplishments?

Leblanc: One thing being a therapist has taught me is that a shortcoming is a strength in the wrong context. Sometimes I have to cope with the context. Other times I need to reconfigure the strength so that it can do its job correctly. I can get too didactic as both a therapist and a writer (I think I am man-splaining my man-splaining). But that shortcoming is born out of my excitement for sharing ideas and experiences. If I can reconfigure my writing or feedback to someone in the therapy room that way, it comes across the way it should (hopefully). In the case where I cope with the context (e.g. baring my soul with words which could potentially last after I am gone but only capture my current understanding and feeling), I always try to treat the experience as a learning moment and growth edge. As I mentioned earlier, I often write to teach myself something. Therefore, whoever comes out at the end of me writing a piece hopefully has fewer shortcomings than the person that went in, and that hopefully shows up in the writing. In this way, I like to think that my shortcomings lead to my growth.

Wright: We’re both from a land of religion and sports. How have these cultural phenomena impacted your writing, if at all?

Leblanc: Religion, more than sports, always finds its way into my writing. My Cajun family is very Catholic. In fact, my father was a monk for a time before leaving the Benedictine order. He remains an oblate monk. I was an altar boy and active in the church community throughout my youth. That life and way of living is not easily exorcised. I find trinities, parables, and even dogma buried in almost every story I write. Themes such as forgiveness and redemption, performing sacred rites, or even the appreciation of an external all -powerful force, populate the worlds I create. Although, I’ve recently been thinking more about the latter, especially when it comes to topics like toxic masculinity, racism, and sexism. A movie that had a huge impact on me was Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time. This was one of the most cherished books of my youth, and I had very high hopes for the movie. Her vision of the book did not disappoint. But what stuck with me the most was how the father, in seeking loving transcendence that would ultimately lead him to be imprisoned by what equates to the devil, is not forgiven at the end of the movie. His hubris, his unchecked ego, and his focus on work, resulted in him endangering his family, and the entire universe. He is saved by his daughter, who is singular in her vision to protect those around her, and who does not let him off the hook. He did not earn it, at least not yet. It honestly helped me redefine the concept of forgiveness, all the way down to my religious upbringing, and shifted everything I’ve written since. Even religion has become a fluid thing in my writing.

Wright: The world has changed significantly since the pandemic. Have these macro-level changes influenced you or your writing?

Leblanc: The pandemic impacted me and my writing in both positive and negative ways. I do not mean this as if there are good or bad aspects. It’s more about what was added and what was taken away. The experience of continuity was altered during the pandemic. And I don’t just mean going to the forty-hour slog every week. It was how wisdom seemed to be interrupted. In all other difficulties in the past there would be some thread of experience to look to. But no one knew what to do during the pandemic. Precedents were non-existent. I realized we had slipped out of the known path. That was what was lost. But what was gained, and positive, was my understanding of our capability to adapt. Overnight the planet changed the way it worked, interacted, spent, healed, and felt. We forge a new path out of nearly nothing. Because of that my writing now considers our adaptability in a bigger sense. I’m constantly wondering how we can change, quickly, to meet demands and threats that aren’t backing down from our indifference. In doing so, it means I have had to lose my affinity for nostalgia (more difficult for a Southerner than I would have ever imagined).

Wright: Enough about writing. What about the other arts – do you have music or the visual arts?

Leblanc: Music will always be the best friend I can pick up at any point and it is like no time has passed. Music is wonderful because it finds those non-verbal corners of my soul. Giving sound to a feeling goes farther than the words. I recently read that music helps release opioids in all mammals. It truly soothes the savage beast, including this beastly writer. I don’t think I could be a writer without music. And in case you are wondering what I’m listening to – it’s mostly blues and Americana. I’m partial to Howlin’ Wolf and Nathanial Rateliffe. But some Lake Street Dive never hurt anybody. When it comes to visual arts, the cinema is my happy place. I’m addicted to story, through and through. Pairing that with fantastic acting and visuals is just a plus. When I’ve had a long week, you’ll often find me in a cold, dark theater.

Leblanc: How do you decide where to begin a story? How do you decide where to end it?

Wright: I guess there’s the old adage about in medias res, in the middle of the action. “Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself,” Harlan Ellison said. Except I seldom begin anywhere near the middle. With a few exceptions, such as short stories, in novels I generally preamble until, blowing by the ab initio, I finally arrive in the vicinity of in medias res, much to the exasperation of the reader, I’m sure. An editor would likely tell me to axe the preambling, that all this preliminary palaver is an exercise in discovering what the story is about, not the story itself, but I’m rather fond of preambling. One part temperament, one part strategic, I confess to enjoying a little (but not too much) schadenfreude – I’m only human! Even preamblers! – frustrating our expectations for instantaneous gratification, and other such incorrigible Americanisms that pall the preambler. Cutting the preamble gives the illusion of authorial control, that the author started the story right where he meant to and stopped it when he was finished with it, not when it was finished with him. But the truth is, I don’t always know myself what the story is about, much less where it begins and ends. At some level, this mode of literary editing has probably been influenced by Hollywood movie production. Preambling and the longeur simply don’t work in cinematic form in the same way they do (or can; or did, especially in 18th century prose) in literary narrative, and the economics of film would prohibit it anyway. Nobody would finance a film with thirty minutes of visual preamble, and even if produced independently no one would watch it. I might not even watch it, and I am a chronic preambler.

Where does the story end? Let’s distinguish between the story and the printed narrative. The printed narrative ends, it has to for purely practical and commercial reasons, sometimes the ending deferred too much for popular taste, or when the internal mechanics of the storyline have been exhausted. But this is only an approximate ending. A literary narrative contributes to the illusion of finality, bookending a story at the beginning and the ending, but these are mostly arbitrary milestones in the grand scheme, chosen for narrative convenience, practical limits, satisfying word counts, or because a tidy beginning and ending makes us feel good. But the story never ends; it doesn’t even begin. Only human time begins and ends, and we project this temporal structure onto the universe and call it alpha and omega. Maybe this mania for beginnings and endings is a cultural artefact of Christendom. We’ve been here before, with Genesis and the Book of Revelation, which I am still waiting for to come true and give us all a day off work. After the printed narrative ends, events go on, as they always have. After War & Peace, both war and peace continue their dialectical dance; at the end of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth and Darcy marry and go happily off to Pemberley, but presumably there is the rest of their married lives to write about: the honeymoon, the firstborn, the mortgage, the eating of the rich, the midlife crisis, the divorce, the volte-face, the reconciliation, the end. Once the sun runs out of gas, puffing itself up into a ridiculous harlequinesque red giant, and incinerates the earth, and we are finally spared from preambling and Americanisms, the universe will, one assumes, still go about its cosmic business without us and not much troubled by the absence. But this is to get lost in grand cosmic schemes. Literature, if it is to be at all relatable and human, has to jettison grand schemes lest it become systems thinking or stargazing. In other words, it has to begin and end somewhere, however arbitrarily. And yet, at the other end of the narrative, back at the beginning, the story never began, never begins, never will begin, because before omega there was alpha and before alpha there was some other omega.

Leblanc: Eccentricity seems to be the ocean that creatives swim in. Do you have any quirks or rituals? They do not necessarily have to be associated with your writing.

Wright: Human societies run on ritual, which structures time and experience in comprehensive units that are collectively shared. The rise of secularization and the brutal flatness of technology, transforming every interaction into an anesthetizing surface, have largely left our lives devoid of meaningful ritual. In the absence of ritual, we’ve even invented corporatized holidays like Amazon Prime Day. The closest we might have to a mass ritual these days is the seasonal cycle of sports and the collective madness that is our political campaign season. Anyway, you were asking about rituals. I have routines, which I think of as private or individualistic, but few true rituals, which are communal. I guess rituals can be performed on an island, but their original meaning derives from a social context. Flexibility within structure keeps me productive. Rituals are mostly fixed operations, often inherited from past tradition; routines can be flexible. If I am constantly waiting for the perfect conditions of my ritual to be fulfilled, whenever that ritual is interrupted by the profane demands of a ramshackle finitude, as it inevitably will, then writing becomes an oracular activity requiring the perfect alignment of the stars before it can be fulfilled, which in practice means it never will.

Leblanc: You've written about experiences that transcend a monolithic concept of the South. At the risk of oversimplifying this complex region, with its complex identities, what do you think is the future of literature in the South?

Wright: Let’s talk about the future of the South itself, as a place and a region, first. As goes the region, there goes its literature, although not as deterministically as the phrase suggests. Perhaps this reflects my own authorial preoccupations and interests, but I would forecast that climate change will be a dark cloud over Southern fiction. Even for future Southern authors less preoccupied than me with climate change, the changing environment will work its way into their fiction whether they like it or not. Narrative landscape descriptions will evolve to accommodate the changing climate. More flood stories, perhaps, more thunder and lightning. The old fire and brimstone will be realized as an intolerable and infernal heat. Characters will sweat more, and they will go broke paying higher home insurance rates. If the power grid no longer works, maybe the humming of gas-powered generators is heard on the edge of a climate refugee settlement. Characters will start paying attention to the Atlantic hurricane season. Due to these disruptions, net migration patterns may change: those who can will migrate, and those who cannot will be left behind, since we are determined to model American society on a reprise of Lord of the Flies. As you said, it’s hard to predict how a complex region will evolve, but even harder to predict how a complex event like climate change will impact a complex region. If the climate outcome is bad enough, there may not be much left in the way of Southern literature at all.

Leblanc: What are the themes you are focusing on in your current work?

Wright: Insofar as they’re separable, and I am not suggesting otherwise than that any separation is artificial or for the sake of analytical convenience, I have moved away from race, and focused more on class, economics, work/labor, and financial issues. Beyond that, I have left behind my home planet of traditional literary fiction and ventured into science fiction, hard and soft, weird and speculative, on-planet and off-planet, brainstorming some projects about SETI, Mars settlement, the future of the universe (it doesn’t look good, stay short on the cosmos), technology and the neo-Luddite movement.

Although you wouldn’t know it from the published material, I’ve become less interested in writing fiction that is bound by known historical constraints and chronological series. Writing a Katrina story, if it is to be at all believable, which is not necessarily a prerequisite of literature, I have to, or feel compelled to do some basic fact checking. Katrina was a traumatic watershed in the history of the Gulf Coast, and the history of the country; there is a clearly delineated before and after, a pre-Katrina world and post-Katrina world. Especially for those in Louisiana, these are not the same world. When did the levees break? Where did it happen? When did the New Orleans Saints evacuate and where did they play their early Katrina season games? When was evacuation ordered? When did Bush make his infamous Air Force One flyover? When was the National Guard deployed and where? When did Ray Nagin make his Chocolate City speech? When did Lieutenant General Honoré mobilize relief efforts? What exactly can be known about the events at Danziger Bridge? This could go on forever. These are all historical markers, embedded within a larger event called “Katrina,” that are verifiable by living people or readers with an internet connection. For reasons that would require more preambling, I have started to experience these historical constraints as, well, constraining. In science fiction, one is bound more by the limits of science and physical constants, and sometimes not even that, more than the verifiable record of historical events.

Leblanc: How do you handle unpublished work?

Wright: Much of it is juvenilia, the kind of journeyman work that should probably never see the light of the day, or at least not without significant editing and overhauling, if not total rewriting. In many cases, those early writings may have some interesting concepts, themes, or storylines in them, I just don’t have the time to revisit them and resurrect them. In other cases, I focused entirely too much on literary pyrotechnics, wowing myself with cleverness, and probably producing a lot of unreadable bilge. Not going through an MFA program, which I suspect may accelerate some of the literary maturation process, I had a much slower process of working through my own style. More recent unpublished projects are probably publishable in some possible world, I just haven’t found the time to edit them.

Leblanc: How do you approach editing? Do you consider yourself a “slow writer” or a “fast writer?”

Wright: Fast writer, slow editor, I think. Editing is a necessary evil, painful but curative, like amputating a gangrenous limb. After first completing the draft of a new narrative, utterly intoxicated in the gluey glow of the honeymoon phase, I am utterly convinced that I’ve finally done it, I’ve found the philosopher’s stone of literary production, having written something so immaculate it will need little to no editing, in fact editing would only sully its impeccable inspiration, perhaps the lightest touch of proofreading – even Shakespeare must have made a typo here and there, confused a homophone – and nothing more; only to return to it months or years later, sobered up from the intoxication of creation and the honeymoon glow having worn off, and only to find it barely worthy of the few megabytes it takes up on my hard drive.

Leblanc: How do you define or practice the relation between reading and writing?

Wright: I think of it as a continuum, a co-generative process, the reading informing the writing, and the writing leading me back to reading. A musician who didn’t listen to music would be an impoverished musician. A professional architect who had never looked at other designs, the masterpieces of tradition, would barely be capable of drafting designs for distribution warehouses and lifestyle centers and municipal jails and fast food franchises.

A quarterback who never studied game film isn’t going to be on the roster very long.

Leblanc: If not writing, what else might you have done?

Wright: Now we’re in the universe of counterfactuals. This is where it gets fun. Astronaut. Financier. Action painter. Admiral of the Alabama Navy. Professional athlete. Hal 9000. Movie stuntman. Theologian. Robinhood. Bo Jackson. Academic. He-Man. Yeggman. Stockjobber. Che Guevara. Chimneysweep. Voyager 1. Drew Brees. Peter Pan. Van Gogh’s ear. Et al.

Because I had a childhood dream of making myself as unemployable as possible, I started college as a physics major. Thanks to a heavy dose of Carl Sagan and likeminded science writers, I switched majors to English/philosophy when I realized I’d prefer to think about the implications of physics rather than solving physics problems. Admittedly, there was that romantic part of me deeply disappointed that modern physics, having been dragooned by the division of labor and the rat race of chasing scientific funding, no longer consisted of weird homemade experiments like Newton splitting light into a rainbow with a prism, or Galileo dropping weights and things off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I had a scintillating proposal to drop the Leaning Tower of Pisa from the moon to see what would happen, to be followed up by an interplanetary project to send billionaires on a one-way ride to Mars, but never could get funding. Science has been wandering in a second dark age ever since.

In terms of employment, the only thing that matters to our time-is-money culture, changing majors from the sciences to the humanities was a wash. The job market has about as much use for a theoretical or experimental physicist – the guy who drops weights, rotten eggs, water balloons, raw hamburger meat, prosthetic limbs, banana phones, and a variety of Americanisms from a tower – or observational astronomer as it does for a twenty-two year old who can correctly identify examples of poetic meter or write a themed essay that would be THE LAST WORD on Joyce’s Ulysses. If not for writing, I would have afflicted society with my preamblings as a visual artist, painting or sculpture. One of the best decisions I ever made was to drop out of art school. Aside from the financial implications, this allowed me the time to focus on writing, which is fancy pants for bloviating, scribbling, ranting, and general navel gazing. Too old to be a professional athlete and too unprofessional to be a financier, the family history haunted with black and white photos of the ancestors who had fought in foreign wars and tales of derring-do, I contemplated joining the military at various intervals. It is hard to say for sure how serious I was about this, probably as serious as I was about being the Admiral of the Alabama Navy, but when I discovered that this too would almost certainly result in a desk job, like any other office gig, and it was nothing like the movie Wargames or a Hitchcockian spy thriller, nor the swashbuckling adventurism I had read about in T.E. Lawrence or Homer – it was not even A Farewell to Arms – having thus totally confused Jasper Johns’ flag paintings with the actual American flag, I became what every Millennial dreams of – a knowledge worker!

Leblanc: We’re both from a land of religion and sports. How have these cultural phenomena impacted your writing, if at all?

Wright: In the South, football is a religion. Since the New Orleans Saints had no use on the roster for preambling or poetic meter, I have decided to one day, when I grow up, write a football novel instead. It will, of course, be THE LAST WORD on football. I can name several baseball novels, but where is the Great American Football novel? This is a great tragic omission that must be remedied at once. The reading public demands it.

Being from the Bible Belt, baptized in the church, and regularly attending services, when we weren’t worshipping the football gods, I was getting churched. Religion, and that special brand of brimstone that runs hot in the Deep South, was the language that structured my formative experiences. The Bible was the first book that I seriously studied, and I do not mean casual reading, but studied. The history of the book’s construction, exegesis of the prophetic books, the early Christian sects. I credit an adolescent exposure to the Left Behind series, practically radioactive with gaudy apocalypse, with an early interest in reading. Unable to smoke enough opium of the masses to successfully walk across water or see how a mustard seed could move a mountain, and fully convinced that Moses must have set that burning bush alight himself, I had to leave behind Left Behind to fraternize with the likes of Joseph Campbell and Nietzsche and other pagans, so I’m not sure the series had the effect Tim LaHaye intended, but it and the Bible taught me close reading through which I internalized the Bible’s rich stock of metaphors and images. The Pauline epistles. Ecclesiastes and Psalms. The Book of Revelation. Even the non-canonical apocryphal texts. From there, it was the Church Fathers, and theologians, Aquinas and St. Augustine. Like many other Southern writers for whom brimstone was mother’s milk, reliance on Biblical metaphor to convey shared meaning was really second nature. Much later, wishing to do a little bush burning of my own, I prescribed myself an antidote to all this gaudy apocalypse and Christ-haunting by reading other religious and mythological traditions, probably with limited success because it will never be second nature.

Leblanc: The world has changed significantly since the pandemic. Have these macrolevel changes influenced you or your writing?

Wright: While I haven’t attempted a true pandemic novel, I was working on a novel, one about our country’s toxic work culture and high finance, during the pandemic. Although unplanned, over time the pandemic infected the plot. The isolation of the pandemic dovetailed nicely with the isolation induced by our culture’s obsession with work. I was recently editing some work that was written and set in 2016 and, while pondering the fates of the characters, I kept thinking, “These poor bastards have no idea what kind of world of hurt is going to hit them in just four years!”

Toby LeBlanc lives in Austin, TX with his wife and two children. Some of his other work can be found in Barrelhouse Magazine, Deep South Magazine, and Coffin Bell Journal. He also reviews for The Southern Review of Books. His novel Dark Roux (2022) was published by Unsolicited Press. His upcoming story collection Soaked is available for pre-order from Cornerstone Press.

Amos Jasper Wright is from Alabama. His first short story collection, Nobody Knows How It Got This Good was published by Livingston Press (University of West Alabama) in 2018. Livingston Press published his first novel titled Petrochemical Nocturne in 2023. Livingston Press will also soon publish his second novel, The Battle of Danziger Bridge, a collection of interrelated short stories set in post-Katrina New Orleans.