interview by Joan Brasher
photo by John Russell

Tony Earley, the Samuel Milton Fleming Chair in English, is author of the acclaimed novel Jim the Boy, published in 2000. The book follows the life of 10-year-old Jim Glass, who lives in rural North Carolina with his widowed mother and bachelor uncles during the Great Depression. Earley’s highly anticipated sequel, The Blue Star, picks up Jim’s story seven years later. It will be in bookstores March 10. A member of Vanderbilt’s English faculty since 1997, Earley was named one of the 20 best young fiction writers in America by The New Yorker. His other works include a collection of short stories, Here We Are in Paradise, and a collection of personal essays, Somehow Form a Family: Stories that are Mostly True.

VV: Was it difficult to take the established (and beloved) character of Jim Glass and “age him up” for this sequel?

TE: I guess the hardest part was convincing myself that I would not mess up Jim the Boy if I attempted to do that. Jim the Boy was received so well that writing about Jim again sort of seemed like a trap, and it was a while before I could convince myself it was OK to risk it.

VV: How long did it take to write The Blue Star in comparison to Jim the Boy?

TE: Both took a while. They happened the same way. I had the idea, wrote the first section, lost the scent, put it aside, and then spent a couple of years figuring out how to solve the mechanical problems that presented themselves. Once I figured those out, I finished the books fairly quickly.

VV: Was it more difficult to write The Blue Star?

TE: In some ways it was easier because I think I know more as a writer than when I was writing Jim the Boy, which was my first novel. So it would have been easier, except for worrying about ruining this character for people. I always figure out a way to make things harder than they need to be.

VV: What is life like for Jim as a teen?

TE: He’s still in the same town, but life is different because he is in love with a girl he can’t have. World War II is sort of looming in the background. In the first book he had just begun to sense that there is a greater world out there, and now that greater world is confronting him in ways he’s not ready for.

VV: Tell me about your writing process.

TE: It’s not a particularly pretty story. I drag myself to the office I have behind my house, filled with self-loathing. I write for a while and then drag myself back to the house, more often than not convinced that I’ve made whatever it is I’m working on worse. Occasionally there will be a day where it comes very easily – five or six or seven pages – but usually it is much, much slower than that.

VV: So writing is a difficult process for you?

TE: It is, but I also don’t want to be too whiny about it. It’s not like I’m working third shift in a factory. So maybe I should say that writing is not so much grueling as it is challenging. And the fact that it’s challenging is what I like about it. I like writing because it’s hard to do well. And since doing it well is the only thing I allow myself to settle for, it’s always going to be a bit like swimming upstream – but that’s fine. The individual steps of the process may not always be fun, but finally completing the process is a great deal of fun.

VV: I have heard you say that you share pages with your wife as you are writing. Do you still do this?

TE: Yeah, poor girl. I come in from my office with new pages and sort of follow her around the house. She has great suggestions, but I don’t want suggestions – I just want her to praise me. It is not in her nature to hand out empty praise, and rough drafts rarely deserve it, so I think my writing is probably as miserable for her as it is for me.

VV: Do you prefer fiction writing to nonfiction?

TE: Most of the nonfiction I have done has been personal, and I’ve lost interest in myself as a subject. As far as the actual process, writing fiction or nonfiction don’t feel that different to me. Both are about setting artistic goals and finding a way to check those off and tell a story. It’s all storytelling.

VV: How difficult has it been to balance your teaching life with your writing life?

TE: It is not always easy, but in general it’s not much of a problem. I wrote most of Jim the Boy while I was teaching. The best thing about teaching is that the enthusiasm of my students often inspires me. To see that kid in class who is sort of wild-eyed about writing and wants to be a writer more than anything reminds me of what I like about writing in the first place. That kid always makes me want to go home and write something.

VV: Do you ever have students who take your class because they want to become famous writers? What do you tell them about that?

TE: Often, the really ambitious kids want to know how to get an agent or how to find a publisher or how to get into good magazines. I tell them that publishing is easy. Learning how to write is hard. Once they learn how to write, the other stuff will fall into place. But if they don’t learn how, all of that stuff is unobtainable.

VV: Will there be more books about Jim?

TE: I think so. I’m sort of toying right now with the idea of starting another one.

VV: Is it your secret dream to be chosen for Oprah’s Book Club?

TE: Any fiction writer who tells you that he or she does not occasionally secretly think about Oprah is not telling the truth. I’m just glad she started the book club. Now every time the phone rings, I think, “It could be her.” It’s not going to be, of course, but it could be. You never know.

VV: What other projects are on your horizon?

TE: I need three or four more short stories and I’ll have another collection finished. These are a little darker than the Jim Glass stuff. At times, they take a turn that might or might not be supernatural, so they are a little stranger than the other fiction I have worked on.

VV: Do you prefer the short fiction genre to novels?

TE: If one could earn the same money writing short stories that one can earn writing novels, I would be a short story writer. When I write a short story, the process might last a month. When I write a novel, it could take me seven or eight years. I really, really love the form.

VV: What are you reading these days?

TE: When I’m teaching, I don’t read much else. But when I do read for fun, I tend to read nonfiction. I’ll read anything that has the word “storm” in the title. Storms, epidemics, plagues, hurricanes – I just find those fascinating. 

Tony Earley will appear at a book signing at Davis Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on March 19.

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An Excerpt from The Blue Star
by Tony Earley

They carried the coffin to the far end of the platform and carefully put it down, first Jim’s side, then the other.

Everyone got their fingers out from underneath it intact. They stepped back and looked down at it. Nobody spoke. The man returned to the boxcar and retrieved his lantern and from the platform waved it in a bright arc at his side toward the engine. Jim stared at his right hand and considered wiping it on his pants, but he thought better of it.

Up ahead a bell began to ring lazily in the darkness. Jim heard a determined chuff of steam and then another, and the wheels of the engine began a slow, almost animate screech against the rails.

As each car began to move, it pulled with a heavy clank against the coupling of the stationary car behind it, dragging its brother, groaning, into reluctant motion. The sound of the individual couplings clanking together galloped in succession away from the engine, car to car to car to car, growing louder as it approached Jim’s position on the platform and softer as it ran away; in a second or two it leapt into the darkness beyond the far end of the train. And then the boxcars were moving smoothly, gaining speed, bracketed by thin slashes of darkness.

The brightly lit caboose, when it passed, left them alone on the end of the platform in an exposed, unexpected quiet; as it drew abreast of the man with the lantern, he nodded toward them and touched the brim of his cap with his index finger and stepped by nimbly onto the rear step of the car. He opened the door, walked inside, and closed it behind him.

Jim watched the lighted window of the doorway until it passed out of sight around the bend. And then the train was gone. Jim stood with the uncles and Pete in the starlight on the platform.

When the engine whistled at the crossing east of town, it already sounded far away.

Uncle Coran tapped the coffin twice with his toe.

“Now what do we do?” Uncle Al asked. 

Excerpt courtesy of Little, Brown & Co.

Posted 03/01/08

Other works by Tony Earley: