In Henry’s Chapel, narrator and author become intertwined with the characters and director of a film described by the book’s narrator in this uniquely presented tale of a Texas family. Where did the idea for this novel come from?

There were a number of main sources for Henry’s Chapel. First, I am originally from southeast Texas, and my dad’s family is from South Carolina and Georgia, so I got full exposure to the South growing up, and I guess I got the sense, or suspected, that there were some seriously depraved shenanigans – a particularly southern sort of depraved shenanigans – going on just beyond the surface scene. Second, I read Faulkner (may favorite is As I Lay Dying), which corroborated my suspicion about those depraved southern shenanigans. Third, I saw Billy Bob Thornton’s film Slingblade, which brought those depraved southern shenanigans to visual and cinematic life. Fourth, I read Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, whose simple, reportage-like narratological approach inspired me to write “Grass,” a short southern gothic tale about an autistic boy and his love affair with his lawnmower. I tried unsuccessfully to turn “Grass” into a movie script, and then I dropped it until…Fifth, I read David Foster Wallace (I read all of Wallace, but I really liked Infinite Jest (novel) and Oblivion (a collection of stories – his last before his suicide)). The Wallaceian narrator really resonated with me, and it occurred to me that I might try to mix a Wallaceian narratorial style – which is very casual-conversational and philosophical at the same time – with the Faulknerian southern gothic vision, or content, of “Grass.”

These five sources came before I started writing Henry’s Chapel, but there is a sixth source, which came as I actually wrote the book: that this book could be a serious hybrid of a lot of things: philosophy, creative non-fiction, fiction, film, tragedy, comedy…And narratologically speaking, a really big formal idea I had was to try to include everybody in it: fictional characters (he, her, they), a non-fictional narrator (I, me), and a reader-audience, who watches the film with me (we) and to whom I can turn and ask questions (you). Having the Wallaceian narrator watch, report, and comment on the Faulknerian film is what made this hyper-inclusion, this radical heterogeneity, possible.

Did you plan the tone and direction of the novel before writing, or did it come out organically as you were writing?

The tone or mood of the film of the novel, Lawnmower of a Jealous God, was set by Faulkner before I started writing; and the Wallaceian casual-philosophical narratorial tone was also set before I got to writing in earnest. But the direction was very organic. I did not know from day to day where the novel was going. Each scene set up the next, and that’s all I knew. Occasionally, this scene-by-scene organic approach would run me into trouble because I would realize that a scene that followed naturally from its immediate predecessor contradicted a scene or story element or plot element much earlier in the novel. The advantage, I think, of the organic approach is its spontaneity; the disadvantage is this occasional house-of-cards problem, where you have to go back and revise previous scenes to be consistent with new, organic scenes that you really want to keep. So, with the organic approach, there’s a lot of painstaking going back-and-forth between writing ahead in the novel and tweaking in earlier parts of the novel that otherwise would be inconsistent.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Generally speaking, I think I wanted to explore boundaries in Henry’s Chapel – and to show where they break down, e.g., between philosophy and fiction, fiction and non-fiction, fiction and film, religion and fiction, brother and sister, the taboo and the acceptable, parents and children, sisters and brothers, hope and despair, comedy and tragedy, director and directed, real and unreal, false and true authority, male and female, humans and non-human animals, humans and inanimate objects, love and hate, legal and illegal…This list goes on.

Independence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency were really important to me as well. It may not seem like it at first blush, but I think Henry’s Chapel is ultimately an optimistic novel: Henry burns down the old, obsolete paradigm and walks free into the unknown. Although, he is sure of his love for his sister, whether she is alive or dead. So, love is a central theme as well – true love, which may be something more like friendship, in the Aristotelian sense.

I find a problem in well-written stories, in that I always want there to be another book to keep the story going. Is there a second book planned?

After setting fire to his old home, it was very natural for me to want Henry to keep on walking, over the bridge, and back to the other side; it was natural for me to want to keep on dreaming his and Emily’s lives. But as he walked down toward the bridge, and I heard the chorus of cicadas singing (for him), and I saw them catch fire, like a million little candles (in tribute or in vigil), I knew that was it, that it was over, that there was no way for Henry to come back or keep on going. I have considered, however, a related novel entirely dedicated to Emily, but in so many ways, she is the most powerful force in Henry’s Chapel because she exists somewhere between life and death, and if I were to write further about her, I might destroy that precarious balance.

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