The Family Speaks follows a family across 2019 and into the first year of the pandemic as people who’ve spent years living apart discover that distance hasn’t erased what they owe, fear, remember, or feel about one another. Why was 2019 the right moment to begin this part of the family’s story?

Hello. Thank you for inviting me to this interview.

Your question goes back to the first novel, Timewall Speaks, which takes place over the summer and early fall of 2018. I set Timewall in 2018 because that was the year I made my third thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, and the year that I hiked into the town that Bilbo is based upon, which would become the genesis of the entire saga. (For those curious, there is an explanation for the name Bilbo in Ridley Speaks. For those even more curious, I derived Bilbo from an actual town in Texas called Bobo.)

At the time, though, Timewall Speaks was meant to be a stand-alone novel that explored the inequities of the Appalachian rural poor, or as I have described previously, somewhat of a cross between Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. It dealt mostly with Timewall’s struggle to overcome the incarceration industry, an insidious institution that leaves uncountable ex-cons victim to the lassitude of an apathetic bureaucracy, oppressed, almost impossible to reenter civil life.

That novel mostly revolves around Timewall and Blaize, with Timewall fighting the system while Blaize secretly pursues the murderer of her young daughter, Baby Rose. The other siblings had long-since scattered. These siblings are mentioned as background for the story, characters I’d had no intention to explore further. But readers were curious about Blaize, how she had become the hard woman she was. This led to Blaize Speaks, and now a saga was inevitable.

With the crumbs of detail I’d dropped in Timewall, late-2018 became the launching year, the year Timewall defeats the system and walks onto the Appalachian Trail to recuperate, setting everyone else’s ages at that time. The Covid pandemic intruded into this timeline. I didn’t want to write a Covid novel, so used it as a time stamp instead. 2019 became the year in which each character came to grips with their lives, and 2020, amid Covid, became the year they sought reconciliation.

What interested you about exploring the gap between how parents understand their choices and how their children remember them?

Much of this derives from my experiences as a young teenager. Half of my family are from the Appalachian region. I wasn’t introduced to them until I was about fourteen. I’m sure that if I’d wandered into those woods without my grandfather’s bona fides I might have been accosted or worse. I felt as if I were an outsider no matter how warmly they patted me on the back, struggling to decipher an almost unintelligible accent, every hollow containing a cousin with a brood of kids—also cousins—living in dilapidated security and prepared to mobilize in a moment if called upon to do so.

Listening to the old fellows in their porch rockers, chewing tobacco and sharpening their chain saws, I picked up titillating bits of family history, allusions to previous wives and other kids now elsewhere (in this instance aunts and uncles and closer cousins), with seemingly no apparent motivation to have these people in their lives. I couldn’t comprehend that indifference. I also pondered why I felt as if I were a foreigner among people of my own blood. It wasn’t until years later that I realized memes arise in families—and in this branch of the family, the desperation of the Great Depression still lingered—often happenstance occurrences that imprint and are then passed on, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren expressing these memes with no idea that they are memes or even where they came from. In my case, carrying on to this day, it’s “clean your plate, never waste food, rise early and get to work, and don’t put on airs.” The Speaks Saga explores this as well. Blaize, as an abused orphan, has no model, so her life experiences become memes that are passed on to her children.

What did you want to capture about the tension between wanting to leave a place and discovering that it remains part of you?

I have a saying: You are where you’re born. This is not a law of nature, certainly not universal, but I’ve seen it in myself and others often enough to consider it nontrivial. My people are from Tennessee, and have been here for more than two hundred years, one branch nearing three hundred years. I, however, was born in Texas. Although I haven’t lived in Texas for decades, and although I have lived in my family’s ancestral Tennessee home for almost two of those decades, I still feel the pull of my far-south Texas hometown. That hometown no longer holds any resemblance to what it was when I was a boy. Still, when I go there I know the streets I once walked barefoot, the mesquite trees I climbed, the houses we lived in, the hospital I was born in, and my accent doesn’t clash. I can breathe easier because I belong, even though I am now a stranger and have no desire to live there again.

When readers leave the Speaks family, what do you hope stays with them about home, belonging, childhood, and the importance of simply showing up?

All the elements previously discussed come together with this question. I would hope that readers achieve a new appreciation of where they are from, that grounded sense of belonging that even wars can’t erase, and that sometimes a sense of belonging is anchored in family as well. I hope children, especially those from troubled circumstances, can understand that their parents might only have acted out what they knew to do, through no conscious decision, manifesting a long succession of archaic memes. So do show up when needed, because our parents and their parents are also where we’re from.

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