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Q&A: Magical Realism in the Rural South [1]

['Olivia Weeks', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']

Date: 2024-03-01

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

Bradley Sides is an author of magical realism and a writing teacher at Calhoun Community College in Huntsville, Alabama. His new collection of stories, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, is inspired by his childhood in the country outside Huntsville.

Enjoy our conversation about teenage vampires, anxiety, and telling stories, below.

Bradley Sides at Olympic National Park (photo provided by Sides).

Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Tell me a little about the place you grew up. Is it present in any of these stories?

BS: The places of my childhood are present in my stories – at least at the edges and in a hazy kind of way. I grew up in a small community in north Alabama. It was really as rural as rural can be. There were many more cows than people. There weren’t any traffic lights. It was beautifully quiet. My family owned a cattle farm, and we also had a pond in what was essentially our backyard. It’s, along with a few cows wading in it, one of the big images that comes to my mind when I think of being back home. My stories, which take place beside ponds and inside garlic farms, for example, aren’t recreating the places I grew up, but they do find inspiration from that time and place. Small visual memories from my childhood kept popping up as the stories in Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood came together.

DY: And then tell me a little about yourself now. Where are you, and what do you do aside from writing fiction?

BS: I’m actually not very far from my family’s farm – a little over an hour’s drive. Now, the world I am from and the one I am in are very different. I currently live in Huntsville, which has become quite the city, especially in the last few years. We recently got The Orion Amphitheater, which is helping the city grow into a music and arts hub. One of my favorite things about Huntsville is that it offers a lot to do, but the quieter world is still so close. It’s easy to take a breather and recharge – to head back to the pond and just listen to the world.

Teaching keeps me busy. I work at Calhoun Community College, and, along with teaching writing, I’m involved in lots and lots of projects related to the literary arts. It’s a dream kind of job for me in many ways. I started my academic journey at Calhoun as a student back in 2005, so it’s extra special to be back.

DY: A lot of your stories are located in the rural south. Does magical realism unlock something about those landscapes for you that straight up fiction can’t?

BS: Absolutely. For me, there is so much possibility in the rural world. That possibility inspires my imagination. What might be under the garden’s dirt? What’s under the surface of the pond? What’s in the darkness of the pasture? What are the sounds late at night when the world seems largely asleep? Writing as a magical realist allows me to answer these kinds of questions in ways that play on possibility.

DY: And what about your characters? What does a teenage vampire and “aspiring intellectual” inspire in you that a pretentious but mortal high schooler can’t? Has your imagination always been populated by monsters?

BS: The honest answer is that I think vampires are more fun, and I like to have fun when I write. Creating worlds with vampires, ghosts, monsters, and dinosaur siblings excites me as a writer. When writing isn’t fun and I lose that rush of excitement, that’ll be my sign that I’m done.

I think about monsters often. They are everywhere and in many forms, and they terrorize us all. Writing about them makes them become easier to confront – and maybe even easier to understand.

DY: Some of these stories seem very concerned with the future – characters are asking questions like, “Who’s gonna take care of the family farm when I’m gone? Or the backyard amusement park?” – and some take place on the brink of apocalypse. Does writing about those attitudes feel different, or do they come from a similar anxiety about what’s to come?

BS: Anxiety fuels my work. Truthfully, I’m a very anxious and nervous person, and the future is one of those things that gets me especially frustrated and flustered. The world seems to be falling apart. This scares me. I imagine it scares a lot of us. What is going to happen? And, maybe worst of all, how is it going to happen? Turning to the future in several of these stories allowed me to explore these same kinds of anxieties but from different perspectives. In “The Guide to King George,” which is the story you quote from above, Ritchie is a young guy, but he’s deeply worried about what will happen to the thing he loves most when he’s gone. In “Festival of Kites,” communities gather for a death ceremony that’s just on the horizon. Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood released February 6th from Montag Press.

In “To Take, To Leave,” the narrator has to imminently decide the fate of the planet’s future – to save a child or to save the rest of the world. The future holds uncertainties, and those uncertainties haunt.

DY: Where’d you turn for inspiration when you were writing these stories, any particular albums or authors?

BS: I am always inspired by music. I listen to a lot of Tyler Childers. Like a whole lot of Tyler Childers. I was pretty close to being finished with my collection when Tyler’s Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? came out, but that record has to have inspired my stories during the revision stage. What a big, bold record it is. I appreciate the experimental approach of it. Sturgill Simpson, Valerie June, Watchhouse, and Vincent Neil Emerson, who I know you interviewed a few weeks ago, are a few others who inspire my creative energy.

My biggest inspirations, though, are the storytellers I grew up around. It would be me, my cousins, my grandparents, my mother, my brother, and my aunts and uncles on a porch. Night would be approaching, and we’d still be breaking beans, laughing, and sharing hopes and dreams. We’d be telling stories, and that’s what I wanted to do with Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. I just wanted to tell stories.

This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

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