9 minute read
INSIDE VOICES - Robert Gwaltney interviews Jeffrey Dale Lofton, author of Red Clay Suzie
INSIDE VOICES - Robert Gwaltney interviews Jeffrey Dale Lofton, author of Red Clay Suzie
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with debut novelist, Jeffrey Dale Lofton, author of RED CLAY SUZIE. Jeffrey hails from Warm Springs, Georgia, and currently resides in Washington DC where he works as senior advisor for the Library of Congress. RED CLAY SUZIE launched January 10, 2023 and already has been awarded the Seven Hills Literary Prize for Fiction along with being named a Lambda Literary Most Anticipated Book. Jeffrey is an author on the rise.
Just underneath the title Red Clay Suzie, I see “a novel inspired by true events.” Is this book a thinly disguised memoir of growing up gay in the Deep South?
Yes, to use a literary term, Red Clay Suzie is a fictionalized memoir. A good deal of what happens to my protagonist, Philbet, happened to me, born gay with a significant skeletal deformity of the chest in Warm Springs, Georgia. And like Philbet’s family, mine was simply not equipped to understand, to guide, to shape a little kid like me. I don’t mean to suggest willful neglect; it was more like parenting informed by equal measures of love, ignorance, and fear—well perhaps a bit more fear than the other two.
It was difficult in the best of times, because I knew early on that I was different on both the inside and the outside. I felt alien, on the fringes of life, in my small town in rural Georgia, trying to make sense of a world that did not square with my inner thoughts and feelings.
At the risk of revealing too much, I’ll give you an example of “inspired by true events.” Like Philbet’s daddy, my own father was shot in the head breaking up a domestic dispute across the road from our house at a filling station/convenience store that was our Times Square. Some of the details surrounding that horrific experience are changed, but the core event is true. And that’s why I think of Red Clay Suzie as a novel based on fact, but not bound by fact.
Philbet is obsessed with cars? Is this another similarity with your protagonist?
Yes, I have loved cars for as long as I can remember. And like Philbet, it started with Matchbox cars given to me by my parents on birthdays, Christmas, and any time I could badger them into buying one of those die-cut wonders for me at our local store. To this day I can tell you the year, the make, and the model of a car by catching the briefest glance. My partner, Erich, who has little interest in moving vehicles of any sort, claims I’m a car-savant. And perhaps he’s right, even clinically, if there is such a thing. My idea of a splendid afternoon is to wander an outdoor car lot—new, used, it doesn’t matter. Just being among them is what counts. They speak of me and always have.
I’ve read that you wrote Red Clay Suzie in a surprising way. Share a little bit about that.
I began writing Red Clay Suzie, as it turns out, just after I left home to attend LaGrange College, a small liberal arts institution in LaGrange, Georgia. To my teenage self, thecollege and the town’s greatest assets were that they were away from home, although in truth a mere 35 miles down the road.
I had years of pent-up frustration, humiliation, confusion and, yes, anger inside me that needed an outlet. As a gay, physically misshapen, effeminate, and slight of build child—a young’un as we were called—I had been a walking target of derision and bullying as early as four or five years old. Living at home had the effect of pushing down any real measure of processing the complicated fabric of my boyhood, but once away at college, the dam broke, and I was flooded with vivid, white-hot memories of my perfectly imperfect family and my boyhood and teenage friends, all of whom had played formative roles in the mosaic of my life up to that point.
I took to furiously scribbling my memories, my thoughts, my stream-of-consciousness angst in notebooks. It was an exorcism by exposition. I wrote to expunge. And for a while it was a salve, a steroid cream on open wounds. And then stuff got in the way—principally school work and my preoccupation with disguising my sunken chest under layers of linen shirts and sweaters, no easy task in hot-as-blazes Georgia. I put my journals away with every intention of continuing to write to pour out my heart on their pages after I got my college sea legs. But I didn’t open them again for about 30 years.
And then I read Call Me By Your Name and reread To Kill A Mockingbird in succession, and something inside me broke open. That’s the power of the written or spoken word. I was moved to go in search of those notebooks (found in an attic box) and read them, immersing myself once again in those raw emotions. And by the third journal I started to think there might be a novel in there somewhere. So with that inspiration, I started to write, improbably, on my mobile telephone on the subway commuting to and from my job at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.I didn’t say a word about it to anyone until the draft was complete end-to-end. When I told my partner over breakfast one morning, his head stuck in The Washington Post, that I’d written a novel. At first he said, “Yes, dear, of course you did,” not looking up from his paper. Then when I repeated it rather emphatically, he nearly spat out his coffee. It was a moment I’ll always treasure.
The Author’s Note in the book addresses bullying and body-shaming. How is Red Clay Suzie a message of hope to young adults who feel marginalized?
Red Clay Suzie is intended to be a message of hard-fought self-acceptance achieved over a childhood of body-blow rejection and intentional and unintentional bullying. There were no books like Red Clay Suzie when I was growing up, at least not on the bookmobile that magically appeared at the filling station/convenience store across the road from our cinder block house. But full transparency, for the longest time I didn’t think of it as any kind of message, per se, to anyone—just a story based on my life experiences, a healing catharsis if you will. Looking back, I suppose I was writing Part Three (the novel’s divided into three parts) when it occurred to me that Red Clay Suzie might be a roadmap for kids living on the fringes, my fellow fringies as I think of them.
That thought didn’t change my approach to writing, but it put the experience into a very different context than before that realization.
One of the most best reactions I’ve gotten came from Pete Cross the award-winning voice actor who narrated the Red Clay Suzie audio-book. He reached out to me after he had completed the recording sessions and said, “I wish I’d had Red Clay Suzie or a book like it to read when I was growing up. It would have made all the difference.”
There is no higher praise.
What gave you the courage to write such a deeply personal and revealing novel?
I don’t think it took courage to write Red Clay Suzie; writing Red Clay Suzie has given me courage. Let me explain. The process of reliving those sometimes painful and sometimes moving experiences of my early life in the course of writing my novel has contributed in a positive way to the life-long journey we all take getting comfortable in our own skin—accepting ourselves with all our faults and imperfections, including our physical imperfections. Somewhere along that path we often gain confidence, and with confidence comes courage.
Giving life to Philbet and Grandaddy and Mama and Knox and James—and all the other characters who inhabit Philbet’s world—has helped me fully accept myself. So it’s been like a second coming out. When I told my parents that I was gay over thirty years ago, I cried and felt ashamed. And they were ashamed . . . ashamed of me. Now, In this second coming out, I’m not crying, and I’m not ashamed. In fact, I’m proud. And I have Red Clay Suzie in part to thank for that.
You are donating a portion of your proceeds from Red Clay Suzie to two organizations that help at-risk youth. Would you tell us about that?
I have long been a fan of the important work being done every day by two organizations dedicated to helping at-risk youth: the Born This Way Foundation (https://bornthisway.foundation/), founded by Lady Gaga and her mother Cynthia Germanotta, and The Trevor Project (thetrevorproject.org), the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ+ young people. So, I decided to donate a portion of what I make from the sale of Red Clay Suzie to support their efforts to help at risk kids who struggle as outsiders, like I did, trying to find a way to lead a happy and productive life.
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.
Catch the full interview on WELL READ Magazine's BETWEEN THE PAGES youtube.com/@wellreadmagazine
