“The People Are Everything”: An Interview with Mitch James https://ift.tt/0gSk18i
In Mitch James’s first novel, Seldom Seen: A Miner’s Tale (Catamount Press/Sunbury Press), the enigmatic Brander returns home to Illinois after two years in Alaska. He finds his mother dead, the family home set for auction, and a ghostly stranger who encourages him to venture to Pennsylvania’s Seldom Seen coal mine. Brander arrives into the lives of Seldom Seen’s workers, such as his friend Lucky, as his grief, guilt, and loss take him deep into the mine and its meanings. Mitch James and I corresponded about the novel, regional identity, and the stories that emerge from places that may be overlooked or ignored.
James is a professor of Composition and Literature at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio, and Managing Editor of the Great Lakes Review. His short fiction has recently appeared in Made of Rust and Glass: Midwest Literary Fiction Vol. 2, Red Branch Review, and Bull, his poetry at Watershed Journal, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, and Southern Florida Poetry Journal, and his scholarship at Journal of Creative Writing Studies.
Seldom Seen is richly detailed — about everything from mining to home surgery. How much research happened in a more academic sense? How much happened through firsthand experience?
The “traditional” kind of research went into depicting those moments when characters were engaged in activities I wasn’t familiar with firsthand. For example, any time I’ve worked on a car, it’s been fuel-injected, so I had to read up on how to tune a carburetor when Beef gave Brander the old Scottsdale. Contrary to popular belief, I’ve never done meth, so I had to read up on how it’s made during what I call the barn scene. For months, I was waiting for a drug task force to kick in my door in the middle of the night. And though the book has a lot to do with mining, I’ve never done that either, so, as you can imagine, lots of research went into those moments. Part of that research was working closely with the spouse of a colleague who, at the time, was a mine engineer.
But the other parts of the book, like the characters’ behaviors or the world itself, that’s all informed by lived experience.
Seldom Seen moves among gritty realism, action-packed drama, and the supernatural (or eerily psychological). It’s by turns tender, subtle, and violent. How did you think about genre while writing this book?
Boy, it doesn’t sound like the book is written in much of a genre at all, does it!? It could be why it took ten years and an independent publisher with an imprint interested in only Northern Appalachian writing to get it into the light. To be honest, I think your description really mirrors my thinking about genre regarding this project, in that I wasn’t thinking much about it at all. I was thinking more about what I wanted readers to feel, smell, and fear. When I closed my eyes and saw the world swell and the characters move, I wanted readers to know exactly what that was like for me. I wanted a fictional world that was palpable, that required all the senses. And I always want my novel-length fiction to be accessible and rewarding to read for both casual readers and those who admire the literary line, basically, a quick read worthy of attention to the line if preferred but not at all necessary.
That mixing of genre, to me, feels closer to life. A day can start out in fantasy and end as a mystery. Perhaps, genre is tidy only in art — or in the imagination of publishers. Lucky is such a memorable character. He’s also a locus of family and debt and labor and fate and the desire for more. How did this character develop? I’m thinking about him in relation to Brander and in terms of masculinity more generally. He’s a patriarch who is both very capable and, in many ways, completely shaped by circumstances.
I always tell my fiction writing students when writing those early drafts to let their subconscious breathe. Relax the frontal lobe and just write, see what you’ve been hiding from yourself. And Lucky is the reason I say this. He was never intended to be in the novel. I was writing the scene where Brander and Major are going into the mine together for the first time, and I needed to fill the space with miners while they waited on the lift, people that helped introduce readers to that world. And there was Lucky, a dude I thought was filler, but he wasn’t having it. He became an absolute force within the narrative for all the reasons you note. Psychologically, though, it’s not a stretch to say that Lucky was born of every patriarch that’s ever mentored me, whether intentionally through their words or unintentionally through their actions. I felt like I knew him best. The debt, the labor, the desire for more, and the masculinity, both toxic and absolutely necessary at times — I could replace each of those nouns and adjectives with names of men in my life, both alive and dead.
You write about places in which everyone is in everyone’s business. I’m thinking about when Brander “borrows” Lucky’s truck and people are immediately on him about it. But characters can also be incredibly isolated. They care for each other, they avoid each other, they destroy each other — sometimes all at once.
“They care for each other, they avoid each other, they destroy each other — sometimes all at once.” You absolutely get it, the most important part of the book. The people are everything. There is no story without their myriad complexities. I was talking to a friend today from the west coast, and he was telling me about a time he was traveling east and stopped in Effingham, Illinois, a town near where I grew up, and he said that when he and his friend walked into a bar there, he realized he was in the Midwest, the “real” Midwest, not because the optics were different from what he was used to or anything like that, but due to something he couldn’t quite put his finger on — mannerisms, postures, the way discourse did or did not unfold. For readers from rural areas, especially Appalachia, I want them to see the familiar. For those not familiar with those regions, I want them to see the unfamiliar, to make new acquaintances that foster a respect for region as both a physical and ideological force that shapes its inhabitants as they shape it. Place is a symbiotic relationship.
Who are some writers you consider influences for writing about place in this way?
There are many, and I’m indebted to them all. Appalachian literature is in a real renaissance. People are truly paying attention to it in a way they haven’t before. If you like gritty Appalachian fiction, read David Joy or Wiley Cash or Tawni O’Dell. If you want to read about the complicated life of Appalachian women, especially regarding relationships with their matriarchs and carrying on (or not carrying on) traditions, read the poetry of Kari Gunter Seymour. If you want the most beautiful writing about the land and the relationship between it and those who live there, you can’t go wrong with most of Charles Frazier’s work. One of the best multi-genre Appalachian writers I’ve read is Ron Rash. Finally, the best book set in Appalachia (in a place very near where Seldom Seen unfolds) that I’ve read in recent memory, a novel that I cannot believe is not a major literary award winner, is PJ Piccirillo’s Indigo Scarf, an exhaustively researched historical fiction novel unlike anything else. It’s an absolute triumph! It’s one of the most underrated books set in Appalachia and written by an Appalachian that I’ve ever read.
The novel puts us very close to Brander, but a lot about him remains a mystery. At one point, he describes himself as “the no one.” Later, he says, “I just don’t know what’s interesting enough about me to need to tell it to someone else.” The tradition of the mysterious stranger is as old as myth. What do you think this figure can help illuminate in our contemporary moment?
This is a fascinating question because, to me, Richter is the mysterious stranger, but Brander, he’s a poor, rural Midwesterner.
Now, my experience in the Midwest is mine, and while it’s valid, it’s not all-encompassing. Like Appalachia, the Midwest is a sprawling region, so I don’t want to generalize, but my experiences are my truth and the truth of many I know. My upbringing within the Midwest was one that often taught modesty to the point of self-deprecation and the courtesy of silence to the extent of emotional repression. This is Brander’s psyche.
For me, growing up in the working poor, rural Midwest was a masterclass in self-erasure. You don’t exist because your place doesn’t exist because you and your place don’t matter. The self-erasure mindset is incredibly powerful. It’s a kind of death of the ego that can breed unparalleled resilience and a self-eradication that puts all else before yourself. It can also be crippling, as we see with Brander. But Brander also connects to the rural poor and working class of Appalachia as well. While he has his own place-based identity, which is apparent in the ways you’ve described and which clashes in some important ways with, say, Lucky’s place-based identity, there are similarities between characters because even though there are differences between poor and working-class rural Midwesterners and Appalachians, there are also many similarities.
Having lived in Central Illinois, along a dirt road in Arkansas, a farm in South Dakota, the mountains of Pennsylvania, and now, for the first time, the outer-ring suburbs of Cleveland (there’s a lot of hardscape around here!), I have found far more that connects rural people than separates them. Unfortunately, one of the primary ways they’re connected is that this nation drastically overlooks (Appalachia) or almost entirely ignores (the Midwest) them. The historian Jon K. Lauck chronicles the systematic erasure of the Midwest through the silencing of its people and their work, deeds, and literature. Jane Smiley, in her novel Some Luck, writes about this very thing in a most muted and perfect manner that couldn’t be truer to Midwestern farm culture. This is some of what Brander, and his fate, can teach us.
This is your first novel. You also write stories, poems, essays, scholarship. What lessons about writing will stay with you from this book? What’s next for your writing?
Thank you for asking a question that acknowledges that the writing process is a learning process. And I define the writing process as the whole thing — the thinking, the writing, the not writing, the publishing. But I think the number one takeaway for me was — and this is an old farmwork saying that applies to my experience of everything in life and so proves true in writing as well — cinch by the inch, hard by the yard. A little bit adds up. I wrote the novel at a thousand words a day, somewhere between 1 to 2 hours, 4-5 days a week, and had a draft in under three months. Of course, there was a lot of work to be done still, but much of the book that’s there now was there then. Slow is fine as long as it’s steady, I learned, I suppose.
What’s next? Not sure. I have a couple of articles that are in the revise and resubmit stage, a short story collection currently being held for consideration, a poetry manuscript in the same boat, and other writing projects I’m grinding away at. Maybe a lot of rejection? Or acceptance? Likely a little of both. I’m really looking forward to some great upcoming collaborations that will occur at the Cleveland Inkubator conference and the Lit Youngstown literary festival. I just intend to keep writing and learning and collaborating with the writers and organizations in my orbit. One of the best things we can do for our writing.
You can find more about Mitch James’s work and upcoming events on his website.
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