Blog Archives
Stories are Told by the Storyteller
Reel Around the Fountain follows a boy from a working-class family navigating his growing awareness about his own sexuality as he searches for answers about his family’s past. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The core of the book’s genesis wasn’t so much about family history as it was about examining how queer kids are often targeted by predators. Queer kids tend to be good at keeping secrets — at blending into the background, into the walls — and I wanted to explore and expose that. The intersection of queerness and working-class, paycheck-to-paycheck life creates conditions predators can take advantage of. That intersection wasn’t something I saw represented growing up, and it’s still not something I find often, but I wanted to portray it with fairness and affection. It’s a world I know well, and I wanted to honor it.
But I was equally interested in family dynamics, and how those dynamics create room for people like priests to exploit queer kids. As I structured and wrote the book, though, the family itself started to take over. I felt it was important to show that kids from poor backgrounds aren’t exploited because of some lack of love or parenting — it’s that society creates the conditions that marginalize working-class families in the first place, and predators find the cracks in those conditions.
The story captures working-class life with remarkable specificity. How important was it to portray that community with both honesty and affection?
This was extremely important to me. I didn’t want to pander, stereotype, or romanticize working-class life and people. It was key to me to examine how we pull the levers we have access to in this life — and sometimes that may not be many levers at all. In addition to this, I wanted to explore gender roles, and how working-class life is often misunderstood to be rigidly gendered when, in fact, that isn’t always the case. With the grandparents in particular, I wanted to examine masculinity and femininity as a spectrum, not a binary norm. The grandfather and grandmother expose how circumstance often dictates what gender expression in family caregiving actually looks like.
Working-class life also often starts earlier than other facets of life do. White-collar, wealthier kids get a different kind of upbringing — more protected, more cushioned. Working-class kids shoulder different burdens, and shoulder them sooner. Through JP and his family, I wanted to explore that. I also wanted to highlight how the institutions that are supposed to protect people — police, social services, hospitals — often aren’t trustworthy, or aren’t there for people like JP’s family when it counts.
JP slowly learns that every family member remembers the past differently. What does the novel suggest about the relationship between memory and truth?
In any love circle — the one you’re born into or the one you build — stories are told by the storyteller, not recorded by some neutral archivist. As a storyteller myself, I can’t count how many times I’ve sat across from someone I love and found we remember the same event completely differently. I like that. And I know my version isn’t absolute truth. Instead, it’s a form of characterization. So while JP is trying to piece together the story of his birth, that search is also a way for him — and for the reader — to understand each family member through how they tell it. Every version of the story reveals as much about the teller as it does about the event.
I also think it’s important that truth, for the individual, is shaped by survival, not accuracy. What we remember is what we can handle remembering — what lets us survive the day, and the times, we’re living through. JP’s quest for the truth of his birth shows that we can never fully know it. Memory is fluid and fleeting. That’s part of the human condition. I hope that by the end, the reader is still left without the full truth of his birth story — but with the understanding that each storyteller’s memory reveals something about them, not about the events themselves.
What do you hope readers take away about family, forgiveness, and the stories we inherit?
We inherit stories, but since stories are fluid with memory, and truth is subjective, how we choose to shoulder and carry the burden of those stories matters. The truth of a story changes and evolves as we change and evolve as human beings. That’s key to this novel. We inherit family burdens, and those burdens are carried differently as we move through — and change within — this world. I want to be deliberate here with the word change instead of grow. Shouldering the burden of stories isn’t a progressive climb toward growth; it’s up and down, like every other facet of life. Where we are — reacting to outside circumstances — shapes our truth and our memory in that moment.
Forgiveness is a big part of this story, but for me as a writer, what mattered most was that JP needs to forgive himself — for the blame he’s chosen to inherit, both for the weight of his family’s beginning and for the abuse by the priest. If we can’t first forgive ourselves for things — even things that were never our fault, but that we assume blame for anyway — we can’t truly forgive the people closest to us.
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Reel Around the Fountain
Roy Edward Jackson’s Reel Around the Fountain is a coming-of-age novel about JP, a gay boy growing up in a working-class Michigan town amid illness, alcoholism, Catholic guilt, and a family that expresses love through caretaking, teasing, sacrifice, and the occasional hustle. The novel begins with JP learning that his birth coincided with several family upheavals, including the accident after which his father, already living with multiple sclerosis, never walked again. From there, JP tries to assemble the truth from relatives whose stories are shaped by grief, guilt, exaggeration, and self-protection. His questions about the past run alongside his growing awareness of his sexuality and his understanding that, in his world, becoming an adult often means knowing what must remain hidden.
The book’s most striking choice is its second-person narration. Calling JP “you” gives the story the intimacy of someone revisiting a younger self, sometimes compassionately and sometimes with exasperation. It also suits a novel preoccupied with memory. Scenes don’t unfold as a clean historical record but as stories retold, revised, and connected through songs, objects, hospital rooms, bars, Catholic rituals, and family sayings. Records are especially important. Music gives JP and his father a shared language, while scratched vinyl, skipping songs, cassette tapes, and 45 adapters become ways of thinking about damaged memories and lives that keep circling back to the same moments.
Jackson handles painful material with an earthy, observant sense of humor. JP’s attention can land on a dirty carpet, a strange phrase, a record label, or the social rules of a funeral home even when something devastating is happening nearby. That voice keeps the novel grounded in the physical details of working life and poverty. It’s also where the book finds much of its emotional force. JP’s family members are vivid because their care is practical and imperfect. GG manipulates systems, Paw Paw gives up trucking to become a caregiver, Anna turns pain into blunt jokes, and JP learns to work, write obituaries, take photographs, and tell stories. Even after abuse leaves him tangled in shame, the narrative stays attentive to the difference between what was done to him and what he’s been taught to blame himself for.
The novel is episodic and deliberately repetitive, shaped more like an album of connected tracks than a tightly plotted drama. Its recurring phrases and memories occasionally slow the pace, but they also create the feeling of a mind worrying at old wounds until their meaning changes. By the end, JP’s writing, music, and move to Chicago offer him a future built from the people he’s lost rather than an escape from them. The record-adapter tattoo he receives becomes a fitting symbol of that inheritance, something small that connects the music to the person carrying it. I’d recommend Reel Around the Fountain most strongly to readers who appreciate queer coming-of-age fiction, complicated family portraits, working-class settings, and novels in which pop music carries as much emotional history as dialogue does.
Pages: 324 | ISBN : 978-1590218013
Salt in the Fifth House: A Queer Novel of Love, Art, and Survival
Salt in the Fifth House is a raw and luminous memoir-novel hybrid that explores the fierce, complicated love between siblings, the brutal ache of addiction, and the lingering weight of generational trauma. Told through the lens of a queer Latinx narrator recounting her life and relationship with her brother Luca, the story interweaves memories of their immigrant upbringing, their mother’s protective strength, and a haunting betrayal involving an ex-boyfriend’s art exhibit that exposes their private wounds. Virzo writes with intimate ferocity, shifting effortlessly between scenes of laughter and devastation, offering a portrait of a family built more on tenderness and tenacity than perfection.
The writing is rich and emotionally relentless. Virzo’s voice doesn’t shy away from the messy stuff: resentment, trauma, jealousy, exhaustion, guilt. And yet, it’s laced with so much love it hurts. I found myself laughing at one paragraph and tearing up the next. There’s something magical about how the author captures the way love and pain dance together in the same space. It doesn’t feel performative. It feels lived in. And honestly? That’s what made it hit so hard.
That said, it’s not a gentle read. It punches you in the gut. But that’s the point. Some of the most vivid writing comes when Virzo confronts the commodification of her brother’s trauma—the way art and storytelling can exploit instead of heal. Her righteous anger is palpable. As someone with a complicated family of my own, I found myself underlining whole pages. I felt seen, but also deeply challenged. The characters are flawed. The parents make mistakes. Love isn’t perfect. And yet, the story holds all of that complexity like a prayer. It reminded me that survival can be sacred, and that family, chosen or not, is stitched together with every stubborn act of showing up.
Salt in the Fifth House is for anyone who’s ever been tasked with loving someone through their darkest hour. For those who’ve been caretakers, truth-tellers, wanderers, or the ones who left and still felt the guilt miles away. If you’re queer, if you’re Latinx, if you’ve grown up carrying more than your share—this book will speak to you. I recommend it to readers who crave emotional honesty, crave stories about broken families trying their best, and who understand that healing isn’t always linear, but it is always worth it.
Pages: 264 | ASIN : B0F9V7MWDB
The Self-Righteousness of Religion
The Gift follows a gay young man who is cast out of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and his mom’s home and life, who embraces the life of a cowboy while learning to accept himself. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
When I started writing, I had no preconceived ideas or outline for what this story would be. I began with a simple premise of a gay male character named Butch and intended to write a gay western/romance novel, but as I wrote and that character took shape, the story just traveled down the path it wanted to go.
I felt this novel’s supporting characters were intriguing and well-developed. Who was your favorite character to write for?
My favorite character is Butch. He and I share many similarities in temperament and history. But I also really enjoyed writing the villain in this narrative. Dick Stinchfield had so many flaws, but I also wanted to depict him as human. That character was enjoyable to create.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
I didn’t know it when I started writing, but after the characters and narrative took shape, it was clear that I was writing three themes into this novel. All three are themes of contrast: black vs white, good vs bad, beauty vs ugliness.
Intolerance, racism, genderism, sexism, and homophobia are all ugly, and I wanted to contrast them against the self-righteousness of religion.
Gay men don’t all match the stereotype. Today, that wouldn’t surprise anyone, but at the time when this story takes place, it was inconceivable that a masculine cowboy could be gay.
There is a tremendous beauty in the landscape and solitude of the rural American West, but at the time when this story takes place, it was often accompanied by a strong rejection of people who were different. My favorite line to write came from a resident who had absolute confidence in his faith and community – “the good people around here won’t put up with any of those in this town. Dick was the only one, as far as we know, and good riddance to him.” At that time, there was a tremendous level of hate coming from a place of so much beauty.
What is the next book that you’re working on and when can your fans expect it out?
The next novel I am working on is a fictional story of a single mother who has traveled across the country in search of her father. It is still several years away from being ready for release.
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Seeking comfort in the isolation of the western landscape, young single mother Pansy Blackwell brings her son Butch to the Siskiyou Mountains. Fully engulfed in the Jehovah’ s Witnesses assurances for a soon-to-arrive end of the world, Pansy raises her son to conform to the constrictive requirements of their religion. But as Butch discovers the wonders of the world around him with an endlessly patient and kindhearted rancher, he embraces the cowboy culture and struggles to live as his authentic self.
In the late 20th Century, rural communities in America were often hostile to the rising-awareness of LGBT people, and Butch is soon cast aside by his church for homosexuality. In The Gift, Scott Terry crafts a memorable and historically-accurate tale of religious extremism and the struggle for acceptance, before the truth of those times are swept under the forgotten rug of history.
