The morning broke cool and crisp that Monday in December when David Joy turned 40, and he naturally was feeling reflective.
It had been 10 years since he signed the contract for his first novel, “Where All Light Tends to Go.”
That flame-throwing debut — about meth and gothic murder in the mountains — was a finalist for the Edgar Allen Poe Award, and it attracted a simpatico auteur. Billy Bob Thornton starred in it for the screen as “Devil’s Peak,” filmed in Georgia and released in 2023.
Joy now has seven titles to his name, establishing him as the high-lonesome voice of Appalachia, and he has become something of a rugged folk hero in France, of all places, where he is a darling of literary festivals. It’s a long way from where he lives in Tuckasegee, North Carolina, at an altitude reachable only with four-wheel drive. “Not bad for 40,” he thought to himself. A country boy can surmise.
But the weather was cool and crisp, and his trigger-finger was itchy, so Joy celebrated his birthday “as I would have at age 12.″ He shot a heaping croker sack full of squirrels with high hopes for “fluffy dumplings and thick gravy.”
Then he settled in to do what else he does with just as much lethal force resulting in a high body count: Write.
Looking tough as a pine knot, Joy has a bushy beard the russet color of a fox and a noticeably calm, composed manner — but spring-loaded, the kind of body language you hone by stalking animals and fish. In photos, he seldom smiles, looking much like an old-timey daguerreotype from an earlier era; condescend to that stern countenance at your peril. Still waters run deep.
His novels’ camo-clad characters struggle in gladiatorial fury with each other in work the New York Times has described as “bleakly beautiful” about “a region blessed by nature but reduced to desolation and despair.” Raw and painful to read at times — they’ve been described as “the novel as blunt-force trauma” — his books scrub life down to the quick.
“I write about fathers and sons. I write about friendship. I write about poverty and hopelessness, addiction and violence,” he says. Faulkner had his fictional Yoknapatawpha County; Joy wrings minor-chord music from his very real Jackson County with its misty ridge-lines.
Credit: Penguin Random House
Credit: Penguin Random House
Each book has been more ambitious in scope than the last, with his most recent, “Those We Thought We Knew,” hailed as a breakthrough “social novel” and named one of the best Southern books of 2023 by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
After a young Black artist returns to her ancestral home, she undertakes a provocative project to right a historical wrong, attracting the Ku Klux Klan and setting off a horrific chain of events that splits her small community apart. The tropes may sound familiar, but Joy paws them with the subtly of a lynx, never devolving into caricature. He dedicated the book to his friend, Marie Cochran, founder of the Affrilachian Artist Project.
“What David wrote about in fiction could have actually happened in real life,” says Cochran. “The fact that he is willing to explore these issues has enabled me to confront certain truths in the present day in my own work and life.”
It is — defiantly — not material for the tourism-minded regional promoters, who might as well wear a target on their backs when Joy is at the keyboard. Has he received any local pushback?
“I could care less what any chamber of commerce thinks,” Joy says. “The place I’m always listening for criticism is from across the gaps. I think all art, all art is a matter of appropriation, of taking something that is not yours and using it for your own purpose. When a photographer frames a photograph it’s just as important what they’ve chosen to leave out of the frame as what they’ve placed in it. The subject has no choice in the moment the shutter closes. The photographer, the artist has to be conscious of this. They have to understand and acknowledge that they are inherently operating from a place of power.
“For me as a writer, and especially as a white male writer, there is no gap that I can cross where the power dynamic isn’t floored to one side in my favor. So any time I cross a gap — whether that be class or gender or race or place — I have to be conscious of that power and conscious of the very real damage I could cause by getting it wrong.”
Not to worry. Charles Frazier, of “Cold Mountain” fame says, “One of the things I admire most in David’s writing is that he gets the details of our corner of the Southern Appalachians right — the language, the natural world, the people.”
Joy is that rare thing — an artist conscious of “privilege” who knows the taste of Skoal; a backwoods mountain man who is very much a citizen of the world. He has mentored the young Cherokee novelist Annette Clapsaddle.
“David examines the power structures and value systems that drive our world,” she says, “and he is my go-to when I am exploring the natural world. Whether I am trying to identify an animal print on a muddy trail or curious why a deer made a specific noise, David is always more than happy to not only answer these questions but also join me in a conversation about how we represent the world around us to those who do not have these experiences firsthand. David is just as likely to gift we me with a turkey fan from a recent hunting trip as he is to ignite philosophical conversations regarding global approaches to literature over a pint of craft beer. He is a private but generous man.”
So much of Joy’s sensibility comes down to the axiom of real estate — location, location, location.
“As for how I wound up the way I did, I’d say, one, is just the rootedness to place,” he says. “I grew up in a place with all of my family within walking distance, in a place where most of the houses had been built by my ancestors, and to a people deeply rooted to a landscape and a river.”
He is a 12th-generation North Carolinian. His father was an accountant, and his mother was a potter.
“The second factor is that I grew up the son of an artist,” he says. “I spent my childhood running around craft shows with painters and sculptors and glassmakers and metalworkers and potters and everything under the moon. And the reason that was such a foundational thing was because when I decided I wanted to write, and most folks’ response was, ‘OK, but how are you going to make money,’ that was something that never computed. I’d grown up surrounded by people making ends meet by pursuing art.”
Art. And fish.
“Fishing was all my family did and all they talked about, which is to say I got the affliction in earnest,” says Joy, who wrote a memoir titled “Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey.”
“I drew them all over my bedroom walls. I had species charts hung on the walls. I’d lay in bed at night and study the “Audubon Field Guide to North American Fishes.” It was all I thought about. There was a farm by the house and there was a cattle pond at the back of one of the pastures. I fished that pond most every day. I used to keep journals of fish caught and conditions, and there were literally years when I did not miss a day.”
Although he spent more time pond-side than in a library, he started writing early and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature from Western Carolina University.
“I’d probably written a thousand pages before college,” he says. “None of it was any good. I probably wrote another thousand in college. None of it was any good. I wasn’t a quick study by any means, but the compulsion to write never waned and eventually there came a shift where I started to do some things well. There was a moment when I began to see that I was doing things on a page that not a lot of people can do.”
He wrote “Where All Light Tends to Go” in a month and a half. “Of course, there was a lot more that went into it,” he says, “into editing and revising and rewriting and polishing, but it was just this fever dream.”
Joy’s mentor Ron Rash says, “One of David’s most impressive attributes is his commitment to excellence. Whether it’s trout fishing, turkey hunting or writing novels and essays, he never does anything half-assed. If it’s worth doing, it is worth doing with total dedication and focus.”
One reason Joy writes about his place and his people with such visceral vehemence is that he sees them disappearing. He views his work as a prescriptive preservative.
“Outside wealth is coming into rural places and buying up land at an unfathomable pace, and the people in these places are being priced out,” he says. “What may be unique to this part of Appalachia is the way in which tourism was peddled as some economic savior without once recognizing it as an extractive economy, as something, that while not as ugly, is equally extractive as timber or coal. The working class cannot afford to live here. And the thing that keeps me up at night is the cultural erasure that occurs as a result of that displacement.”
In his 2020 novel “When These Mountains Burn,” he writes, “Now everyone was sitting around watching the last of it flicker like a sunset with eyes blind and minds dumb to the fact that when the night finally came there would come no light again.”
Why does Joy love nature so much? Why would he skin his knuckles fighting for it — or develop carpal tunnel syndrome writing about it? “It’s honest,” he says. “There’s no mask. There’s no lie. The terms are clear. There’s none of this nonsense about fairness, but there’s nothing underhanded or manipulative about it either. Things happen and you adapt, or you don’t. I can live with that.”
And the dumplings are good.
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