Robert Maynor on Everyday Stories, Owls, and “The Big Game Is Every Night” https://ift.tt/wv04tN8
Robert Maynor is from the Lowcountry of South Carolina. He lives and writes in a patched-up fish camp on the bank of the Edisto River, the longest free-flowing blackwater river in North America. His fiction explores the spectrum of complexities and contradictions in the contemporary American South. His short stories have appeared in Blood Orange Review, BULL, the Carolina Quarterly, and CRAFT, among other outlets. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and he is the past recipient of the Larry Brown Short Story Award and the Coker Fellowship in Fiction from the South Carolina Academy of Authors. The Big Game Is Every Night, winner of Hub City’s 2022 South Carolina Novel Series, is his first novel.
We meet at the BP off I-95’s Canadys exit because the GPS receiver can’t read the space signals to his house. There’s a certified scales center around back and a sign that warns: NO FIREWORKS DISCHARGE WITHIN 300 FEET.
He drives up in a silver Ford Ranger. We wave.
He leads me through a gate, down a long snake of gravel flanked by cornstalks that miraculously spits us out on the banks of the Edisto River.
Birds flicker at the feeders. A bottle tree staves off spirits.
“Lots of birds today,” he says. Robert Maynor is big. In a savior kind of way.
His home is modest and neat. On the porch there’s a fan. A table and two chairs. A hummingbird feeder, and pots of giant heirlooms his mother started from seed.
Cars drone on the highway. A wisdom of owls chime the wind.
We’d been experiencing the worst heat of summer, but the porch is shady and cool. He offers me a drink from the cooler.
We crack a couple of Budweiser and sit down.
How’d you become a writer?
It was always something I just did. I was interested in storytelling generally. I grew up in the country. There wasn’t much to do. I didn’t know any other kids. I’d hang out with my dad and my grandpa. They were always telling stories. I liked reading. I liked language and words. So, it was just something that interested me.
Your novel is extremely restrained. I’m curious if that’s something you honed or does that come out of you wild and free?
I think somewhere in between. I write a lot in the first person. It’s really typically someone’s voice I’m hearing or trying to replicate.
Why do you write in first person?
That’s how I hear stories. And how I tell stories. Orally. It’s so much about the people that I know and have met and see on a daily basis, even those that are tangential to your everyday life. You run into someone at the gas station and they’re telling you what just happened to them and it’s in the first person.
That was the voice of that character. Everybody has a different process. Some are character focused. Sometimes you have an image or an idea. Or you’re crafting a plot. But to me, it’s about the character speaking. Whether that’s a narrator or a character. It’s the words they would use that dictate the rest of it.
For me, it’s language first. If you’ve got their voice and how they talk and what they’re thinking, then you can imagine the rest of that person.
I’ve read some of your short stories. They’re very experimental in terms of the form. But your novel is very straight forward, which shows off your range. Where did your novel’s story come from? What was your approach to writing it?
I write more stories than longer form. My first passion was the short story and is still my favorite thing to read. Because of the constraints you can manage it. You can be more strategic. It almost feels like guard rails. It’s weird. The guard rails allow you to be more experimental it seems. With the novel, I had no idea what I was doing.
Is this your first novel?
Yes.
You don’t have one lurking in a drawer?
I’ve made many attempts but haven’t gotten really far.
How did you know you had a novel and not a short story?
I’ve heard people say, I was writing this story and it got out from under me. And it turns into a novel. My experience was not at all like that. It was, here’s this character. Here’s this trajectory. And then how do I set about writing it. I thought of each chapter as a story. And I told myself I’m going to keep it as simple as possible. I’m gonna write it in first person because it’s my sweet spot. And I don’t care if it turns out shitty. I’m gonna write it all the way through and I’m not going to stop. Because if I’m gonna write one of these, I’m gonna write it if it’s good or awful. Let’s just get it out of the way.
Did you feel any pressure to make it more dramatic or plot driven?
I think of writing as work. You have ideas and it’s creative, but it’s work. You have to sit down and type at your computer or write on your paper, whatever you do. So, it’s like I’m setting out this job for myself and I’m gonna do it. This is what it’s gonna look like. The simple straightforwardness was part of the job. This is how I saw it when I created it. If I felt that pressure to liven it up a little bit . . . I mean, who’s gonna read forty pages about a kid playing football? I tried as much as possible to resist that temptation. Maybe it was more like an expectation that I thought I needed to fulfill but I was resisting that. It got to a point that, and it’s really cool that you asked that, but every time I felt like it was working toward meeting this expectation, I thought okay, how do we subvert that expectation? How do we do something, a climactic moment, how would it happen in real life and how would it truly be genuine and authentic. To be truly surprising it needed to be authentic. Not that it’s suspenseful, but to get underneath it was to make it feel genuine.
I struggled to write a blurb for your book, primarily because blurbs tend to be dishonest. I almost wrote Hub City to see if I could forgo the blurb and write you a love letter instead.The way your novel made me think about my sons and what they must be going through emotionally and subconsciously to become men. . . I’d never thought so deeply about what it must be like for them to have to live up to the expectation of what it means to be a man.
I guess that’s been part of my growth. In the South in particular and within working class communities there is a very traditional expectation of men and boys. To be a man you have to fit into those guard rails. I’ve just been trying to figure out what to do and how to be. That traditional mindset also means there are things boys shouldn’t do. Like write. Or read books.
I don’t think we ever finished that question about where this story came from.
Well, I played a little bit of football in high school and that was its own experience. I played baseball and was more of a baseball player but because I’m so big and always have been it was always, “Well that boy needs to be on the football field” and “Well, if you want to play baseball, you need to play football.” That experience led me into the story because playing football wasn’t really a choice. I wanted to play baseball. I love baseball. But I had to play football.
I still watch football. College football. Even with all the flaws I see with it and the cognitive dissonance it takes to watch it. Football just never really fit my personality. This inspired aggression. I started thinking about the words. I was an offensive lineman and it was always, “You gotta be violent off the ball.” That was the term. I just thought a lot about the language of it.
But I’m still a fan. Football is so woven into the fabric of our culture. How do we acknowledge and celebrate and capture the unique culture here in the Lowcountry but also acknowledge there are negative implications with that, too? What do we celebrate and what don’t we? Those were some of the questions I was trying to answer, and the sport of football was a way to talk about that stuff in a way that doesn’t feel didactic.
Our oldest son, TC, plays football.
How old is he?
Eleven. Our town is very sports driven. It’s the community’s glue.
Homecoming and parades.
Yeah, it’s a huge deal. I really struggle with him wanting to play and letting him play. I question if he’s like you, that it doesn’t fit his personality. He’s real fast, but he doesn’t want to get hit. It’s been a major struggle within our family because my husband sees the fear in him, and he wants TC to overcome that fear. It’s brutal.
What was it like winning the Hub City’s South Carolina Novel Series?
It’s been kind of fast. I didn’t have expectations with this book or with publishing. I didn’t have high hopes, I guess.
Why not?
It doesn’t follow expectations.
I was impressed they chose your novel.
You’ve got a hummingbird behind you.
I can feel it. We have four at the house and they are so much fun to watch. Now, what about the owls? Do you have any talons in your drawer?
No. I wish. That would be cool. I’ve got some skulls. I’ve got a little armadillo skull in there. I’ve got a pig skull I found hunting one day. And we collect feathers. I have a jar full of feathers.
But what’s the deal with the owls?
Growing up on the swamp. And spending a lot of time on this river. Owls are like the guardians. They’re in the black water. They’re in the swamps. If there’s an emblematic representation of the swamp and the Lowcountry it’s the owl. Like tonight. You’ll hear them up and down the river. I heard them a lot growing up. And they are wise, and owls carry this significance. And they are just this intimate part of the swamp. And also, the cover of the album by Songs: Ohia has an owl.
Your cover is awesome.
I love it.
How did the title come about?
I listen to a ton of music. That’s a huge part of my life. I love especially Southern music. But I didn’t know about Songs: Ohia, the band, until grad school or after grad school. I got their CD, and I had an old 2002 Ford F150. It’s what I drove from the time I was fifteen until three years ago and it had a CD player and no radio, and you couldn’t hook up your phone. And I started listening to that album while I was writing this book, pretty far along actually, and I loved the album. It’s cohesive, like a collection of short stories, very literary and sort of . . . thematic. And I felt an intimate connection with the narrator. The emotion in those songs was something I was trying to get across, which was sort of like this . . . deep sadness. But not so much in a traditional way but in a sort of buried . . loneliness. I think that’s what it was. Loneliness.
“The Big Game is Every Night” was a bonus track. And it’s this epic nine-minute song about all these characters from American history and they’re playing baseball and they’re playing football and in the end the narrator ties it all back to performing.
What does that song mean to you?
I think it’s the pressure. The pressure to be a man. Similar to what you told me about your son. You want to be in the spotlight. But you also don’t. You want to play football, but you don’t want to get tackled. I want to write a book. But I never want to talk about it.
Well. If you’d let me. . . I’d love to see your desk.
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