Interview

Lisa Guidarini Interviews Wiley Cash About his Debut Novel A Land More Kind Than Home

In the bio on your website, you wrote: "I became a Southern writer because I wanted to recreate the South that I know, and I learned to write about the South from the writers I loved." Why is southern writing so distinctive? Do you feel you had the choice to become any other sort of writer?

One thing that makes southern writing so distinctive is that it relies heavily on the voices of its characters and narrators. Southerners are pretty proud of their accents, no matter how much the rest of the country makes fun of them; southern writers want those accents reflected accurately in their work. I think it's important to be true to the diction and vocabulary of southern speech, but I think it's also important to remain true to the southern style of storytelling, which means as a writer you have to pay special attention to how southerners tell stories. Rarely are these stories told in a linear fashion; very often the storytelling is circular or digressive. I'm thinking of the narrator of Thomas Wolfe's narrator in The Web of the Earth, an elderly woman based on Wolfe's own mother who starts the story and then immediately ...