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 Esquire, Southern Living, Book Riot, and many others, include Desperation Road, Rivers, 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 Times, The Bitter Southerner, Writer’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

“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?

You 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.