QUINTESSENTIAL OBSERVER

Brandon Taylor on his Southern roots and the joys of analog

“FILTHY ANIMALS” by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead Books, 288 pages, $16).

Brandon Taylor, the Alabama-born writer whose 2020 debut novel, “Real Life,” was a finalist for the Booker Prize, tries to avoid setting his stories in the South.

“I didn’t feel like I could write about the South because I was too close to it,” he says. “When you’re too close, you can’t really see it.”

The Midwest — particularly Iowa and Wisconsin — has served as the primary milieu for his characters.

His best-selling book of short stories, “Filthy Animals,” won the 2021-22 Story Prize and has just been released in paperback. His forthcoming novel, “The Late Americans,” will be published in 2023. Taylor is an editor-at-large at The Sewanee Review, and he writes critical essays on his Substack, a blogging platform, called “sweater weather.” He lives in New York City.

His conversation with Chapter 16 has been edited for length and clarity.

Q You grew up in Alabama. You’ve lived in the Midwest, and now you’re in New York City. Is there a region you feel has shaped you the most?

A: I didn’t feel like I could write about the South because I was too close to it. When you’re too close, you can’t really see it. Whenever I would try to write about a character in the South, I would feel kind of paralyzed by all the things that I knew. I would feel like I was constantly getting something wrong when I tried to write about the South. So I started

writing about the Midwest. I write about the Midwest a lot because I know a lot about that as a setting, but I think spiritually, and maybe psychically, my characters feel quite Southern to me.

I feel like a lot of my characters, even though they’re in the Midwest, they’re often displaced to the Midwest. I was there as an outsider and a quintessential observer. It’s where I learned to write real stories, in a sense.

Q Your book opens with an epigraph from the Gospel of John. What role has the Bible played in your life?

A: I grew up in a really religious Baptist family. One of my uncles collected Bibles, and during the summer one of his means of keeping me busy was having me copy down passages for him. We had all these different Bibles and religious texts around the house. We went to church every Sunday. I went to Vacation Bible School. I grew up reading the Bible and singing hymns.

My characters are often beset by a childhood faith that haunts them and follows them for the rest of their lives. They can never quite escape that first essential education in the ways and words of God. The Bible has always been there haunting me in ways interesting, good and bad.

Q

You’ve gotten into film photography lately and seem to really embrace analog products. When you shift to analog, does that change the way you think versus being online?

A: I feel like I moved to New York and went full analog. I went even further into film photography, I bought a new record player, and I got into fountain pens.

I got into film photography because I was going through this intense period of writer’s block and had this novel that I just wasn’t able to get going. I was so miserable. I thought, what if I never write again? I need to be OK with that. I would need something else to do with my life. I had always wanted to try film photography, but I never thought that I was a person who would be able to figure it out. It was so nice to be not tethered to instant feedback. I was learning a new skill and had permission to be bad at it for as long as I wanted to. I had no ego attached at all. I was teaching myself everything I could learn about photography. It was just really nice to be able to go out for three hours in Iowa City and take pictures. To escape the dread of never being able to write again.

Q

What can you share about your next book, “The Late Americans”?

A: “The Late Americans” is a part of what I call my Midwestern quartet. My first four books are either set in Madison or Iowa City, and they alternate between the two. It’s a novel about a group of people in a year in Iowa City. It’s kind of like a relay among all these different characters. The book opens with a poet, and very quickly from there we encounter a guy who works in a meatpacking plant, a woman who gives swim lessons, dancers, artists and an amateur pornographer.

Hopefully the book speaks to some of the absurdities of trying to figure out who you are and what you want in this wacky age of ours.

To read an uncut version of this interview — and more local book coverage — visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.