Tag: Michael Farris Smith

Author Q & A with Michael Farris Smith

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 18)

Oxford resident Michael Farris Smith has come out swinging with his latest fictional work, The Fighter (Little, Brown), treating readers to a rough-and-tumble saga of good intentions gone wrong for a main character whose already hard life has suddenly fallen onto even harder times.

Smith’s previous novels, which have appeared on Best of the Year lists with EsquireSouthern LivingBook Riot, and many others, include Desperation RoadRivers, and The Hands of Strangers.

He has been awarded the Mississippi Author Award for Fiction and the Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction, and his essays have appeared in the New York TimesThe Bitter SouthernerWriter’s Bone, and more.

The wide appeal of Smith’s work has seen Desperation Road longlisted for the UK’s Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel, and it is now a finalist for France’s Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle, a French literary prize awarded by readers of Elle magazine.

International promos for Smith’s books have recently taken him to Australia, and, after a whirlwind Mississippi tour March 20-26 for the release of The Fighter (with stops in Oxford, Greenwood, Jackson, Pass Christian, McComb, and Columbus), Smith will head to France in early April.

Michael Farris Smith

Michael Farris Smith

“It’s busy, but very interesting to see my work being so well-received both at home and in other countries,” he said.

The son of a Baptist minister and a graduate of Mississippi State University, Smith began writing while at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. His family relocated to Oxford from Columbus last summer.

The Fighter is your fourth novel, and it touches readers with the same eloquent writing style as your previous works, even as it again introduces us to characters who find themselves in desperate situations, facing heartbreak, brokenness, and regret–wand who are longing for a second chance. In other words, real people facing tough problems, whose hopes have worn thin. When you are developing characters and plots, where do you think these moving stories and characters come from?

I’m not sure. I guess it’s just a culmination of what I see, of what I know is out there. I wish there was no such thing as heartbreak and brokenness, but there is.

I also know I only want to write about characters who are at the end of the rope, fighting to survive emotionally, or physically, or spiritually, and maybe all of the above. I learned that from Barry Hannah and Larry Brown. The stories I write are the stories that challenge me on an emotional level and when I fell those emotions rise in me, I know I’m going in the right direction.

As the main character in The Fighter, Jack Boucher (pronounced Boo-shay) has lived a hard life–he never knew his parents, grew up in foster homes and owed what good times he had to a woman who took him in at age 12 and devoted her life to keeping him on the right track. But when the story begins with his attempts to set things straight as a worn-out fighter, gambler, and drug addict in his early 40s, things quickly unravel and his intentions are suddenly sidetracked–but why is it that we just can’t help but like this man?

fighterYou win the prize for my favorite question about The Fighter so far. Maybe it’s because we are all fighters. We all have made mistakes, we have hurt people who love us, we have done things we regret and knew we were going to regret it as we were doing it, and we all fight to try and fix what we’ve done after we’ve broken it.

Jack was dealt a tough hand, and then as time wore on, he helped to dig the hole deeper and deeper. But I understand Jack. And I think it’s possible I feel more emotionally attached to him than any character I’ve written, and I don’t even know if I can put my finger on it as to why.

Jack’s last foster mother, Maryann-who became his permanent parent and the only person he believed ever loved and understood him, was his anchor, no matter how bad things were in his life. Why was it so important to him that he honor her by saving her family home and property from foreclosure?

Everybody hits rock bottom. Sometimes we recognize it. Sometimes we don’t. I think after all Jack has been through, all he’s suffered, all he’s brought on himself, he maybe finally realizes only one thing truly matters. Which we have a tendency to do when our lives break down.

For all his brokenness, Jack has his share of homegrown wisdom, a set of principles to which he has clung, and even a tenderness when it came right down to it. In the violent world in which he lived, it was fear that motivated him to live, and hope and forgiveness that often guided his dark moods. In what ways did Annette, another main character, come to see this in Jack?

I feel like Annette is a kindred spirit, and I do agree about the tenderness. She’s lost, like him. And searching, like him. But I think what separates Annette is that while Jack knows what he’s after in this moment, Annette really doesn’t. But that doesn’t keep her from looking, and she lives by her “church of coincidence” theology to keep driving her forward. She’s dedicated to it, to the signs that seem to be leading her. To what, she doesn’t know.

But she attaches this tangible thing to her own questions about who she is and what she’s doing, and she has a tremendous amount of faith. Blind faith. Which is truly the only kind. So, she is able to notice another like herself. So many of us look for signs, little hints of recognition to encourage us to keep us going through hard times. And Annette’s eyes are always wide open to such things.

Explain the symbolic message of the appearance of a hawk at different times throughout Jack’s life.

I can’t really explain a symbol, because it means one thing to me, but will mean something different to everyone else. I will say that when the hawk appeared in the sky in the opening, it just appeared and wasn’t planned. But I knew once I was finished with the passage that the hawk would find itself in the story again.

Some Native American cultures believed the hawk was responsible for transporting the soul from one world to the next, and I love that. The natural simplicity of our spirits being gathered by such beautiful creatures and carried away. I don’t know why it showed up, but I was happy to see it when it appeared in the sky above Jack. So was he.

What is next on the horizon in your writing? Have you ever considered writing a sequel to any of your books?

I was hoping to finish a new novel manuscript before the release of The Fighter, and I was able to do that. I love the story and very much enjoyed the quiet of the last few months, going to those characters each day and living in their world. And I think what it has in common with the others is that you can have a very different conversation about it. Something I’m proud of with each of my novels.

As far as sequels, it’s strange because I expected to be asked that about Rivers, but I’ve also been asked that question about Desperation Road more than I anticipated. And some readers make pretty good points about why there should be another part. But I don’t know. The ideas has a way of choosing you, and not the other way around.

Michael Farris Smith will be Lemuria on Thursday, March 22, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Fighter, which is one of Lemuria’s two March 2018 selections for our First Editions Club for Fiction.

‘The Fighter’ is a fascinating new novel from Michael Farris Smith

By Matthew Guinn. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 11)

“Do anything but bore me,” the late novelist Harry Crews once said in an interview.

“Tie me up and beat me with a motorcycle chain if you must, but don’t bore me.”

Mississippi writer Michael Farris Smith apparently shares that sentiment. Crews’ statement could be the mantra of The Fighter.

fighterThe Fighter opens with a harrowing scene of high-speed DUI and pretty much never lets up from there. It’s the tale of a washed-up, alcohol- and pill-addicted cage fighter prepping for what will be his very last fight—either for good or ill. The stakes are life-or-death—no quarter asked or given. It is a brutal subculture of the South we know, but a fascinating one.

Jack, the titular fighter, should have turned out better. Though orphaned as a toddler, he was raised lovingly in Clarksdale by a devoted foster mother, Maryann (one of the most endearing characters in recent Southern fiction). And yet, as though driven by some kind of genetic predisposition, the teenaged Jack learns and loves the art of bare-knuckle boxing. Soon he is crisscrossing the Southeast for one underworld matchup after another. He climbs to the top of the heap.

But Jack’s champion status comes at a steep cost. He numbs the years of blows and undiagnosed concussions with painkillers and booze. The combined effect is a general amnesia that renders him vulnerable to the cunning. Add in his history of fixing or ‘throwing’ fights for gambling profit, and Jack becomes a walking disaster, a veritable tornado over himself. It is difficult to tell which came first—his pill or gambling addiction. Regardless, each feeds the other.

Enter Big Momma Sweet. In the world of The Fighter, predators are as common as the buzzards that dot the Delta sky, and Big Momma is the queen of them all. From her camp outside Clarksdale, she presides over an empire of fighting, gambling, drugs, and prostitution. Jack is her biggest debtor. His only prospect for settling up with her is one last prize fight—one he is woefully unprepared to fight, perhaps not even to survive.

And then there is a carnival that alights on Clarksdale: a touring regional fair full of convicts, gypsies, and a tattooed lady who just might prove to be Jack’s redemption.
If this synopsis sounds chaotic, frenetic, and over-the-top, then it is accurate. By conventional thinking, there is too much going on in The Fighter’s 256 pages for the short novel to bear. It should not work.

But it does. Smith’s narrative manages to stay just ahead of disintegration, and does so with style, lush prose, and storytelling assurance. Though its protagonist is a disaster, The Fighter is a triumph. It confirms Smith’s status as one of our foremost authors in the Rough South, Grit Lit tradition established by Crews, Larry Brown, Tom Franklin, William Gay, and the towering Cormac McCarthy.

The Fighter is Smith’s third novel in just five years, following 2017’s Desperation Road and 2013’s Rivers. That body of work has established Smith’s aesthetic: a naturalistic South of people living tough lives on the margins, where grace comes hard but the sad stories play out beautifully. All of Smith’s people are on one road or another toward an uncertain future. It will be a harrowing thrill to follow him farther down that road, with his characters just a single step—make that a half-step—ahead of destruction.

Novelist Matthew Guinn is the author of The Resurrectionist and The Scribe. He is associate professor of creative writing at Belhaven University.

Michael Farris Smith will be Lemuria on Thursday, March 22, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Fighter, which is one of Lemuria’s two March 2018 selections for our First Editions Club for Fiction.

Melodious McComb Mayhem: ‘Desperation Road’ by Michael Farris Smith

by Andrew Hedglin

I had been looking forward to reading Desperation Road by Michael Farris Smith ever since last July, when he appeared as the “opening act” at fellow Lee Boudreaux books writer John Gregory Brown’s reading for A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (an excellent read in its own right).

There was a party going on.

There was a party going on.

Smith read from the very beginning of Desperation Road that begins with a woman carrying a child, a trash bag full of their worldly possessions, and the full weight of her life decisions down a hot Interstate just across the Louisiana line. I thought of all the weird interactions I had and heard about living in Tallulah, Louisiana, for three years. Nevermind I was at the wrong part of the border (the woman turns out to be trekking to McComb), she just felt so real in my mind.

desperation roadThe story carries forth the story of the woman–Maben–and her daughter, Annalee, from the harshness of the sun to the darkness of the night. As a reader, you feel like you’ve experienced so much by the time the alternate protagonist, Russell Gaines, even enters the novel.

Russell, recently released from Parchman as a result of a vehicular manslaughter conviction, returns to his hometown to find so much the same, yet irrevocably lost to him. He begins to drift nihilistically. Russell doesn’t carry a heavy conscience, but he is stalked literally by the brothers of the boy he accidentally killed long ago. In the middle of his wayward skid, he finds himself suddenly entangled in Maben’s problem in a way he could have never anticipated.

There is a tension and stark beauty that pervades all pages of Smith’s novel. It delivers blunt, realistic dialogue and long, beautiful run-on sentences that never manage to trip over themselves. Smith is unquestionably a craftsman of the highest order. He managed to surprise me several times, only to have that surprise seem inevitable in retrospect.
This is the first ‘grit lit’ novel I’ve picked up and been enchanted by, so I don’t have any ready comparisons to Ron Rash or Tom Franklin for you, although they seem equally impressed by Smith to go by their blurbs on the cover of the book. I will say that this is sharp Southern fiction at its finest, and I encourage you not to miss it.

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