The World’s Ending Every Day: A Conversation With Evan Gray About Thickets Swamped in Fence-Coated Briars https://ift.tt/EyRe7Jn
Last year, my friend Evan Gray released his debut poetry collection called Thickets Swamped In Fence-Coated Briars. And I want to tell you about it, not just because Evan’s my friend, but because I believe your life will benefit from reading it. It’s gonna tell you something you need to know, specifically about class, rurality, and Appalachia. Specifically, someplace in North Carolina you probably have never heard about. Someplace you might never have known if Evan didn’t feel the need to write about his place and people.
I’m not a literature expert. But I’m also from a tiny forgotten corner of America where my people are really, really hurting. And I’m tired of books today called “literature” where characters are moral avatars, rather than real folks with pasts and futures and damage and light. There’s no feeling of shame or guilt in the writing, the work ain’t life or death.
I’ve known Evan for a decade. Back then, we called him Evan “Ghost” Gray because he didn’t ever come around. All we knew was he was from the mountains and raised Freewill Baptist and came from people who had to work for everything they ever got. You could just look at him and tell. Then one time Evan “Ghost” Gray did come out. And he ended up laying underneath the pool table, laughing and giggling like there won’t no tomorrow, saying we were all gonna die.
That was years ago, back in MFA school. When everybody was fucking around and trying to find out what to do. And there was Evan, writing poems addressed to mudholes – about septic tanks, baptisms, barefoot neighbor boys stuck in the holler – like it was his destiny. He didn’t need to find any visions. He’d already had them. They lived in his head.
You can see them in these chapbooks, like if Frank Stanford studied with Jonathan Williams and read Marx before bed:
Blindspot (The Rest (Garden-Door Press, 2018) Dusk Melody (Shirt Pocket Press, 2019) Body Birth (Above/Ground Press, 2019)
In 2020, Garden-Door Press asked Evan if he had a full-length. He gave them something half-dream/half-reality – blurring memoir and poetry, each page a revelation or continuation of the forgotten stories of his people. Thickets Swamped In Fence-Coated Briars is haunted and rooted and wild. It’s Appalachian because that’s where Evan’s from. He can’t help it.
Evan was raised seven miles southeast of Jefferson, North Carolina, in an unincorporated community called Glendale Springs. It’s where all his kin have been for forever. One time, he took me to see it. It won’t nothing but a road and rolling green hills, a church and a cafe. The chocolate gravy was on special so we ordered it. Evan looked around and said, “I don’t know about you, but when I’m home it’s like I’m in a daze – I’m writing in my head the whole time – it’s like I can’t do nothing but get it all out.”
From Glendale Springs, we rode to Jefferson. A bigger town with a grocery store and tire shops, where Evan’s family moved during the Great Recession. He pointed out the places from Thickets Swamped In Fence-Coated Briars. Here is where a cousin claimed he saw God. Here is where a woman made the best spaghetti you’ve ever had. Here is where the all-conference linebacker blew his head off. Here’s where another boy shot himself in the heart.
This is Ashe County, North Carolina, where the poverty rate is higher than the state and country’s average, where unemployment and death by suicide or overdose has increased every year.
Place-based writing is inherently political. In L’écriture comme un couteau (Writing as a knife), Annie Ernaux says, “I bring something hard, heavy, and even violent into literature, tied to living conditions and the language of a world that was entirely my own until the age of 18; a working-class, rural world,” she says. “There is always something real.” For Evan, it’s life or death. In Thickets Swamped In Fence-Coated Briars he writes, “We tell this funny little joke about life: everyone who dies also goes to work.” Later there’s a “Cumshot in the eye of the bossman.”
I found myself driving to Asheville thinking I never got to see my daddy in the mountains. We’re not Appalachian, we’re rural-working-class from the eastern side of the state. Thinking about Daddy’s grease smell, his farmer’s tan – the roads were wine-dee as hell, woods thick as ever, his medicine was Mountain Dew and Crown, he could fix anything with his hands, left the house before sunrise, came home after sunset, I was there at the door waiting for him, helped him unlace his boots. And his best friend, Mr. Fred – last time I talked to Mama she told me he’d killed himself, shot himself in the truck after telling everybody he was gonna do it for weeks. I lost reception, the road cut through rocks, cliffs down beside me.
I met Evan at Haw Creek Park. Right next to where he lives in Asheville, over two decades from Glendale Springs, and over 300 miles from the house on the dead-end road where I unlaced Daddy’s work boots. I said, “Thickets Swamped In Fence-Coated Briars.” It felt almost impenetrable when it came out my mouth.
Where’d this title come from?
There’s this poem called “In Cold Hell, In Thicket,” by Charles Olson, and reading it is like wading through a thicket: there’s darker spots of mystery and then there’s clearer spots with a lot of sun. Even when you’re walking through a thicket, there’ll be clearings where you can see for a good bit, and then there’ll be places where you have to crawl to get through.
I can remember going deer hunting whenever I was with my dad when I was little, or even with buddies, and we would just walk across ridge lines. And you could get to a part where you could see for miles, and then you would crawl under logs and shit and not even be able to see where you’re going. With the title, it seemed like kind of a perfect image for the way I felt when I wrote it. Just being trapped sometimes, just completely lost. And then other times, I felt like I was on my feet and able to make sense of this world.
I was thinking about how the book moves between two modes. There’s poetry that’s fucking with the form all over the page and then you layer in these moments of denser more traditional paragraphs, more memoir-ish.
I wanted to make sure that if I was gonna call the book Thickets Swamped In Fence-Coated Briars, the form was gonna mirror exactly what I was talking about.
[Pointing around the park] Some of it is manmade, right? But some of the stuff is completely natural. In the book, some of the shit’s manmade and impenetrable – things we feel like we don’t have any control over. Work or money feels like that to me, or even death, you know. I’m scared of that. Death is natural sometimes, but so much of the death in the book is manmade, not necessarily someone’s fault. Circumstances are certainly outside of our control sometimes for sure.
But yeah, the form. I rewrote this book, probably 10 times.
I get a sense of feeling trapped while reading this book. Trapped by money, trapped by disease, trapped by fucking capitalism. And, especially, in the second half, there was a lot of anger.
Yeah, there is a shift in the book. The first half for me feels observable and reflective. Then the second half feels maybe angry, somewhat trapped in struggle, trapped in definitions from outside places, and really wanting to break it all down. Which is funny though, because the form gets maybe even more cohesive as we move through the book. It shrinks into lines and prose blocks towards the end. That wasn’t really something I was thinking about.
I spent a lot of my time, whenever I first started writing this book in grad school, just trying to figure out my place inside of this weird space, where I immediately felt like an outsider… for aesthetic reasons, but also obvious material reasons, like money and shit.
Academia?
I’m still trying to find my place inside of that. How that works. I feel conflicted about grad school and academia. In grad school, it was clear I had an aesthetic difference with teachers and other students, but it did give me a chance to do things. Before that, college was really helpful, too. It was kind of my only way forward.
I didn’t know I was from Appalachia till I went to college. I had no idea. Like, it was always just the mountains, it was always just home. And I didn’t think about the meals we ate, or what we did on Sundays, or who we hung out with as being emblematic of a larger culture. It was just like what we did. The way we talked, the way we said things, I didn’t think it was strange.
And then, I went to college and wrote a personal essay, and everybody said, “Oh, you’re an Appalachian writer! You know you’re from Appalachia?” Some people embrace it, fully, maybe to a problematic level, and become Appalachian exceptionalists. They think this place has to exist the way it does in their consciousness. Obviously, I have a bias for this place. I think it’s important, and I care about the people. But people in Appalachia don’t live that differently than people in most places in the world, especially rural places.
I’m not an Appalachian literature scholar. But I know enough to know there’s some certain tropes. And I knew that you weren’t going to fuck with any of that in this book.
Yeah, there’s no banjo in it. But more than anything, in this collection, I want to gesture that money is a greater force of control over people than the place or the culture. I don’t care if you think I’m a real Appalachian or not. But there’s some folks who tie their identity to Appalachia in ways that I find uncomfortable, writers who double down on those stereotypical narratives.
If their dad wasn’t a coal miner, then they still have to prove to their reader they know what turtle soup is and they have to wear overalls. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But you’re gonna be put into this one box. I mean – I love this region, I think I’d probably die if I lived outside of it for too long. But Appalachian culture has become increasingly commodified – maybe it always has – but now it’s become less about the region and more about extraction. It’s a self-serving extraction with, ya know, the images, themes, or…
Meth labs
… like you see on the TV. Yeah for sure, that’s here, and if that’s your life, you should write about it. We knew people whose meth labs blew up and shit, but we were less concerned about that. We were just trying to make a life for our family inside a place we’ve been in for so long.
What about your parents? Did they go to college?
My mom took some community college classes. And my dad, he almost went in the Air Force. He tells a story where he’s like, “I was loading up to go, I was going to enlist. But my Uncle Jerry, who was in Vietnam, came by the house and said, ‘If you do this, this will be the worst thing that you ever do in your life.’ And so I didn’t, but I still wonder what it would be like.”
He tells all kinds of stories like that. About how he should have worked for the telephone company, because it was hiring when he was young. He’ll say, “God, if I would have worked for the telephone company, I’d be retired.” My dad is able to see that we could have had a different life. That’s why my parents pushed college on me so much, because they realized it was a tool of social mobility.
And you went to college on a baseball scholarship?
Yeah, I played baseball for a year. Well, I was pretty bad compared to those other boys, but I did do it. I was a decent pitcher in high school though. My cousin pitched for the Red Sox, he taught me a little bit of that stuff.
Pitch right hand or left hand?
Left hand. That was also a kind of an advantage. A little less familiar for some people. It was also easier to get recruited if you’re left-handed. You didn’t have to throw 90 miles an hour. You just had to be crafty. They say throwing a baseball is one of the most unnatural movements you can do with your body, and I just didn’t want to do it anymore.
How did your parents take you leaving baseball?
Maybe they thought it would be a lost dream for me. But that was also around the same time I got told I was an Appalachian writer in school.
So you’re a first-generation college student who went right on to get an MFA?
[We both laugh.] And the first one to move away from home if you don’t count war!
Did you ever feel compelled to write as a kid?
I would sit in church and draw a lot while I was listening. Sometimes I’d try and get my mom to play hangman with me, and she would, which is a funny game to play in church. But I was just obsessed with words. My hangman words would be so hard to get because they wouldn’t be grammatically correct words, they would be words I heard my dad say or really complicated phrases. They would be words I’d never read anywhere, but I think that was the first way I started writing poems. Plus drawing. I did pictures of baseball players and cartoons because I was really interested in the way things looked.
Do you remember reading a poem and thinking I wanna try to do this?
It was my senior or junior year, and I was taking a class on Yeats. We’d read almost all of the poems that he’d written… Yeats was a great rhymer. At that point, I thought that’s what old poems did, you know. But the way the speaker talked in “When You Are Old,” someone just sitting by the fireplace, getting this book down, and reading one of his poems – I think that’s the premise of it if I remember right. It’s like I’m dead and gone, but you’re sitting by the fireplace, and you miss me, and you’re gonna read this poem so you’re thinking of me. And I was like, damn, that’s sweet. That’s a sweet thing. It was personalized. It actually had a purpose.
I like that. The poem had a purpose. I know, at least in my working-rural class, raised-in-the-church background, everything you do is for a purpose. And if you’re doing something purely for yourself, that’s selfish. Everything you do must be for the purpose of the family or the community.
Yeah. If you spend money on something you’re gonna use just once, it’s probably not the thing you really need, right? You got to get your money’s worth. Being rooted in practicality. I like things that make sense and are practical as much as I like strange shit too.
Everyone wants to craft. Like, Jonathan Williams is in the avant-garde or experimental camp, but a lot of the things he was doing were really simple. He was just observing road signs and writing it down, and it was called experimental or avant-garde – I guess because of the class difference between who was writing the poems and who was reading them. That’s the difference to me. I think about that, too, with Warren Rorher’s paintings, right? You show them to anyone who’s worked a cornfield, and they get it. But then when you put a Warren Rorher painting next to something like a Vermeer, it looks so strange. I think about that all the time. And I don’t think there’s that much of a difference between the two. The only difference is the class of the viewer, the reader.
Since Thickets Swamped In Fence-Coated Briars has come out, Evan’s read in Ithaca, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. He’s read in Matewan and Thomas, West Virginia too. I joined him in Boone, Raleigh, Wilmington, and Huntington. And every night he read something new.
And when Evan read from Thickets Swamped In Fence-Coated Briars, poems spilled into the next, images lost their place and reoriented, time got swept around and covered up.
When I asked Evan what he hoped folks would take away from the collection, he said, “I just want folks to read it. Just look at it and read it. Tim Earley has this great poem about eating a livermush biscuit – he says even if you don’t eat meat, just look at it. So even if this isn’t you, just look at it.”
He said, “Things that exist in this place don’t just exist by accident. They’ve been here for a long time. And this place is changing, sometimes for the worse. And the people here who bear the brunt of it, their world feels like it’s ending every day. And that doesn’t always mean it’s over, religiously or whatever. Actually, I don’t think I know that. I’m too scared to say.”
Evan Gray lives in the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina. He has earned a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His first book, Thickets Swamped in Fence-Coated Briars, is out now from the Ithaca-based Garden-Door Press. Evan currently serves as an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of English at Appalachian State University. His poems, essays, and short stories have been featured in print and online journals across the U.S. and Canada.
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