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Q&A: An Ice Storm in the Mississippi Delta, As Told Through Fiction [1]

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Date: 2025-06-06

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.

Robert Busby is a writer from Mississippi living in Memphis. His debut collection of short stories, Bodock, which won the 2024 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, released June 3, 2025, from Hub City Press. The stories are about the fictional town of Bodock, Mississippi, and the very non-fictional ice storm that struck the South in February of 1994.

Enjoy our conversation about odd jobs, space-heater hot dogs, and the etymology of the Bodock tree, below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Robert Busby’s debut collection of short stories, Bodock, released early June from Hub City Press. (Photo by Emily Maggio.)



Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Can you tell me who you are and where you’re from?

Robert Busby: Yeah, sure. So my name is Robert Busby, I’m 41 years old. My hometown is a little place called Pontotoc, Mississippi. It’s pretty small, though not necessarily by rural standards. It’s got like 5,000 people in it, so like there are a lot of places in Mississippi where that would be considered a pretty big place. But it felt small growing up. At 18, I moved to Oxford, Mississippi, to go to the University of Mississippi. Lived there for six years with two brief sojourns to Colorado and then Chicago. And then my wife and I moved to Miami in 2008, where we lived for three years while I was getting my MFA at Florida International University down there. In 2011, we moved to her hometown, which is Memphis, Tennessee, and we’ve been there since. So we’re going on 14 years now here in Memphis. I was a teacher for 13 years, if you include the three years in grad school. When I first moved here though from grad school I didn’t have a teaching job so I had random gigs — I think I was an instructor at a driving school at one point, and then I installed satellite television for a little while as an independent contractor. I worked at a call center, tutored, and then taught until a few years ago. And now I work from home in advertising and in copywriting.

DY: What were you teaching?

RB: It was mainly middle school English. I taught in the public schools and at a private school here in Memphis.

DY: What’s your favorite book to teach middle schoolers?

RB: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. I assigned it every single year that I taught. It’s kind of a murder mystery for young adults and it’s also kind of a puzzle and it’s got a huge cast of characters. I feel like it had a really big payoff for the kids. Most of them loved it.

DY: Can you tell me about when you first started writing fiction?

RB: I think like most writers, I grew up with a sort of penchant or capacity for writing and being inventive. So I wrote a lot growing up, in elementary and middle school. I was never a very good comic book illustrator, but I loved drawing comics for my stories. They were usually rip offs of Batman or Wolverine or something like that. I was also in a gifted program in the public schools where I went to school and that allowed for a lot of creative writing opportunities. I continued to do that in high school, and got into horror writing. I remember a story I wrote that had the same title as a Slipknot song, because like a lot of 90s kids I was into nu-metal. Bodock author Robert Busby was nine years old in 1994 when a storm dropped inches of ice across much of the South. (Cover art provided by Hub City Press.)

But I had a lot of friction going into college with that because in my family, you go to college to get an education to get a job. So I tried pre-med my freshman year and I was like, that’s not for me, tried business and I was like, I hate this. And then I remember – and this sounds romantic but this is exactly how it happened – I was really on the fence, but I was about to just declare an English major, and I was at Square Books in Oxford, on the balcony that they have there. And I was drinking coffee, probably smoking. And somebody had suggested Larry Brown to me, and even though I grew up right down the highway from where he lived, I had never read Larry Brown. So I went inside the store and got his book Dirty Work. I think it’s his first novel. That was the middle of the afternoon, and within ten minutes of the store closing, I finished the book and decided, right then and there, to paraphrase the Southern Baptists that I grew up around, to dedicate my life to writing. And so that’s what I’ve done ever since.

DY: That’s a really sweet story.

RB: And then tragically – this was all in 2004 – Larry Brown died of a heart attack, within a month of that happening. So I never got to meet him or anything like that. But I got to meet a lot of writers coming through Oxford. So it was definitely a good place to dedicate your life to writing fiction.

DY: Are are any of the stories from Bodock from that time in Oxford? When did you start writing them? And then also I want you to talk about your decision to structure the collection around the 1994 Mid-South Ice Storm.

RB: This collection took a long time, a long time to write and a long time to publish as well. I think some of the kernels of the story probably went as far back as undergrad, so from 2004 to 2007 or so, I wrote basically shitty first drafts and ended up molding them as I revised them into sharing this ice storm motif. But the first ice storm story I actually wrote was the last story in the collection, “Offerings,” which was much shorter when I first wrote it. And I saw it as a retelling of the biblical flood, where the flood became the ice storm, the ark became this family cabin. In an earlier draft, there was this weird collection of animals that the estranged wife character in the story had carried with her out to the cabin. So there was a lot of that going on, but it was intended just to be a standalone story. I think I knew at that point that I was going to write about a particular place, and I may even have had the name Bodock. But when I moved to Miami, I knew in theory that it was going to be hot in Miami and I was used to heat. I live in the Mid-South and honestly there wasn’t a single day that I lived in Miami that was hotter than any random Tuesday in August where I grew up. But it lasts so long, from February or March all the way to December. And so when I first moved there, it was like, okay, September’s hot. And then October was hot. And then November was hot. And I think I got this sort of reverse seasonal affective disorder. And maybe as a subconscious response to that, I wrote another ice storm story. And then another one, and another one, and they kind of accumulated, and that’s the direction that I took my thesis.

DY: That’s funny about the eternal summer. Do you remember the real ice storm well?

RB: Yeah, I do. It’s funny, my kids are now older than I was when the ice storm occurred. In 1994 I was nine, going on ten. But I still remember a lot of details of the day to day, like not having power and the trees sounding like guns going off outside. I remember finding creative heat sources to cook with, like roasting hot dogs on this wall heater that we had at our house. But then, you know, like obviously there are nuances there that get lost because I was so young when this happened. But in the South there’s always another ice storm around the corner. They haven’t been nearly as destructive as the 1994 ice storm – like five or six inches of ice fell and there were some places in Mississippi, especially super rural communities, that were without power for extended periods of time. And so it hasn’t been that bad since. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to use some of these other minor ice storms to remember and collect tidbits about how things look and sound.

DY: That’s interesting. So what of your hometown is in Bodock? Are there just specific details, or are they one in the same?

RB: Like a lot of writers, I’ve worked on stories that take place in fictional locations, but I’ve returned to writing about places I know a lot about. I tried writing a story about Colorado when I was living there, and some other places, but I always kept returning to this universe that I was familiar with. As opposed to, as in sci-fi or fantasy, creating a place that I didn’t know the laws and physics of, Pontotoc was very familiar to me. And so I would say that Bodock is basically a facsimile of Pontotoc. It is my hometown.

And then, you asked earlier if you pronounced Bodock correctly, and I wanted to say it’s actually a colloquial pronunciation that comes from people in Mississippi adapting a French word. The Bodock tree is the Osage orange tree, which Osage and Chickasaw peoples and eventually French colonizers used as wood for their bows, because it’s decay resistant and extremely durable. Once Bodock wood dries, it’s as hard and heavy as concrete. You can’t do anything with it, you can’t cut it really. So the story I always heard is that the French came up with the name Bois d’Arc, which just means wood of the bow or bow wood. That eventually became Bodarc and, in some places, Bodock, and so that tree has a mythology in my family. My grandparents had one growing behind their house, and Pontotoc even has a Bodock festival every year. So that’s where the title comes from.

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.

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