#14: Five for Them, One for Me, with Steve Weddle
Weddle's novel THE COUNTY LINE is available for pre-order now
We’re only four days into the new year but I’m calling it now: Steve Weddle’s THE COUNTY LINE might be the most effortlessly entertaining book of 2024. Deft and lyrical in storytelling, delicate and knowing in character, sharp and witty in dialogue, THE COUNTY LINE is both timely and timeless, an expertly wrought piece of Southern fiction that entertains with every turn of phrase and every turn of the page.
And if you don’t mind me sayin’, it’s about damn time, too. Steve’s previous book, 2013’s COUNTRY HARDBALL, remains a totem for many of us writing in rural settings—it’s one that deserves mention alongside the works of Woodrell and Pollock—and the wait for this new one has been worth it.
THE COUNTY LINE officially releases February 1, but it’s available now for free on Kindle to Amazon Prime members.
Steve co-created with John Horner Jacobs the noir magazine Needle, which, through ten issues from 2010 to 2015, published work from notable writers including Tom Piccirilli, Todd Robinson, Hilary Davidson, Holly West, Ray Banks, Rob Hart, Sarah Weinman, and Chris Holm. With Jay Stringer he co-founded the crime collective Do Some Damage. He’s perhaps the only person I know who’ll namecheck Connor Oberst and Immanuel Kant side by side.
He’s also the latest “Five for Them, One for Me.”
Let’s go.
FIVE FOR THEM
1. What was your origin point for THE COUNTY LINE?
I guess you can blame COUNTRY HARDBALL, as this new one is the prequel to that one. I wanted to find out more about the families that populate that 2013 novel-in-stories, so I got to work. I also bumped up against stories about outlaw camps and bootleggers, so I wanted to play around in that world.
2. The writing in THE COUNTY LINE is something special, because it doesn’t feel like a novel written in 2024 and set in 1933, but more like a novel written during that time period. Were there writers of this period who inspired you, or stylistic techniques you found useful in creating that vibe?
If you pick up a cookbook from that time, you might find an introduction that’s absolutely charming in its phrasings. Or stroll through the virtual stacks at the Internet Archive for journals and diaries of people struggling through the Great Depression. You wouldn’t believe—or maybe you would—how many diaries are still available, hidden away in used bookstores. They tell these detailed, involved stories of random people living their random lives in the early part of the last century. I’m just fascinated by this. Some small university press will published a small run of someone’s 1903-1948 diary, and I’ll run across it in a used bookstore while looking for something else. I found all of that useful, not just in writing, but in being human, you know?
3. Cottonmouth Tomlin is a great character, because you question him throughout the book. He survives war in Honduras and yet finds himself in increasingly dire straits as soon as he’s back home. Sometimes it feels as though he’s in over his head, and other times it’s obvious he’s smarter than other characters give him credit for. What were the challenges in building this type of character?
The challenge is always to make you give a damn, isn’t it? I think for me, I sort of start out thinking, well, what would I do in this situation? Then, as the character becomes more developed, I can think, well, what would he or she do? I get to know the character better the more hell I put them through. I appreciate your seeing those ebbs and flows in him, because I don’t think we’re generally consistent in the way we live. There’s a Bob Dylan line I think about often: “People don’t always do what they believe in; they just do what’s most convenient, then repent.” Sometimes when you’re faced with the need to act, you can just barrel through it. Cottonmouth does that. He’s arrogant in some ways and doubts himself in others. He comes back from Honduras thinking he’s seen the world a bit, and so knows better than others in the community who have never left the community. Oh, I see you’re about to ask me about that. OK. Sorry. Go ahead.
4. The importance of community runs throughout in THE COUNTY LINE. Why do you think it became such a dominant theme for the book?
Isn’t community fascinating? You’ve got family. You’ve got your small group of friends. You’ve got a larger, geographic area. Community is this weird, ever-changing construct, it seems to me. Henrietta Rudd is center of this argument, for me. She’s enforcing rules to keep the community safe, or so she thinks. What are our responsibilities to our community? How do we define our own community, our own belonging? Kant had a great deal to say about community and mutual interaction, which I find fascinating. You can feel so unmoored in this world sometimes, and I think Cottonmouth acknowledges that, leans into it. Where does he belong? Henrietta Rudd has an idea of Cottonmouth’s place, of course. And then there’s that line in Conor Oberst’s “Barbary Coast (Later)” song that I dig so much: “Feel like Paul Gauguin painting bread fruit trees in some far-off place where I don’t belong.” Much of the book, I guess, is just my attempt to deal with having Kant and Conor Oberst and Sartre and whoever else all in my head at roughly the same time.
5. For all of its timelessness, one passage from THE COUNTY LINE struck me the most: “The bigger the matter men like that were talking about, the less it mattered. When they started talking about what was going on closer to them, that was when they could do something, when they could impact what was close to them. Until then, their talk didn’t matter.” That feels so applicable for today. In researching the book, did you find many notable parallels to the present?
Yes. Again, we go back to community and belonging. So many people, then and now, tighten their community when they feel threatened. The old Western cliché is circling the wagons. And there was so much of that in the 1920s and 1930s in the south I write about. Some people lost so much, but you read interviews and diaries from that time and you have so many people saying they didn’t really notice the Great Depression, because they never had that much to begin with. But they had each other, and Henrietta Rudd speaks to this in the book.
ONE FOR ME
There’s so damn much pie eaten in this book. What’s your favorite pie, and from where?
Chocolate pie at my grandmother’s house, years ago, when I knew where I belonged.
WRITING GOALS
As I’m writing this, I just got word on a short story acceptance—I’ll talk about that one as publication gets closer—and I realize this is the first time in nearly two years that I don’t have another short story out on submission. Everything written has been either accepted, published, or is unfinished and waiting for me to revisit.
Also, my novel is out on queries to agents. I don’t have another book finished, so it’s probably time to get a new one started. For anyone else starting a creative endeavor, check out CRAFT TALK by Jami Attenberg; it’s an encouraging and enthusiastic look at creativity and productivity. Her new book 1,000 WORDS is out next week, and I’m certain I’ll be adding it to my shelf.
Matt Bell has a great post about the importance of goals, rather than resolutions, for the New Year. I can’t recommend his book REFUSE TO BE DONE enough; it helped me immeasurably as I navigated the messy second draft of my new novel.
Both Jami and Matt talk about writing goals, about dedicating yourself to put down a set number of words a day. This isn’t for everyone, I know, but personally, I’m a big believer in it. I’m the asshole up at 5 a.m. most mornings, coffee in hand, trip-hop playing on the stereo, committing to a thousand words a day when I’m working on a new project.
Very often, those words suck. The next day I’ll go back and look at it and hate every last word and letter, but there they are, on the page, and they’re the forward momentum I need to get to the right words.
Sometimes the writing process is as much about eliminating the wrong ideas as it is about finding the right ones.
FUTURE PLANS
We’ll probably be moving this newsletter to a new home soon. I’ve never turned on subscriptions, and never plan to try to monetize this thing. I’m certain Substack won’t even notice I’m gone, but with their rather lax stance on white supremacists and Nazis, I don’t wanna hang around a place that allows such garbage to also hang out. As someone pointed out, once you let Nazis in the bar, then it becomes a Nazi bar.
I’ll explore other options in the upcoming weeks, maybe see what the cool kids are doing—hey, E.A. Aymar—and go from there.
That’s all we’ve got for now. Thanks for coming. See you next time, and hey, let’s be careful out there.
OK, there's the first "to read" book I'll put on my pile for 2024. Of course 2023 is not taken care of yet.... Thank you, James!