CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: A Conversation between Bradley Bazzle and James Chapin

November 11, 2022

Bradley Bazzle interviewed James Chapin, author of Ride South Until the Sawgrass (Lanternfish Press, 2021). Read below for an insightful conversation detailing Chapin’s book and its alertness to the natural world.

Bradley Bazzle:

You live in Florida, so to locate your first book there makes sense, but why the middle of the nineteenth century? What attracted you to the period?

James Chapin:

I do live in Florida, guilty as charged. But you can come from a place and love it deeply without truly understanding it. You sort of skim along the surface and fall into the seams, without ever getting the full picture. That’s too bad—because in Florida’s case, the full picture is so compelling. For a long time people called Florida the “Southern Frontier”: it was a home for runaways of all races and motivations. Ex-slaves escaped here and formed independent communities; sometimes they joined forces with the Seminole Indians, who were themselves called cimarrones or runaways by the Spanish colonists. And of course, there were white outlaws and scalawags of every description. It was just a very hospitable place for people who did not want to be found by the State.

I did a talk with the author Tauno Biltsted, who has a lot of involvement with anarchist politics. In our conversation it became clear that a lot of what he was getting at in his work is also reflected in the Florida I was writing about. A period in the mid-1800s, when structures of control were quite fluid and there were a lot of possibilities for what direction things might take. I wanted to look at that type of moment, animate it.

Bazzle:

Because of the cattle-drive and conflict between white settlers and the Seminoles, I think of this novel as a literary western. To what degree were you informed by the western genre? Did you set out to write a western, or was your starting point the place and period in time?

Chapin:

It began with the time and place. That came first. Then the Western mode emerged as one way to talk about it. That frontier period was largely shaped by white cattle ranchers and Seminole Indians (who also raised cattle); they coexisted at points, but the peace always frayed. All I did was look at that history and say: Hold on, that’s a Western. Those are the constituent elements of a pulp Western, but set in the subtropics. Part of my mandate was to write that Western, allowing it to be as humid and outlandish as it would necessarily become. And to populate it with real, three-dimensional women and men, not cardboard cutouts. And to tell a real story, unvarnished.

But let’s be honest. Who wants to write a damned Western right now? Who wants to take on the freight of all that genre’s various distortions and misdemeanors? Not that other genres haven’t been complicit in unpalatable stuff—science-fiction had a musty midcentury libertarian streak a mile wide, for example. (And it gave us L. Ron Hubbard.) Still, the Western has deserved the particular criticism it has received: it has been racist, it has been chauvinist. And (maybe worst of all) it has just been kind of dumb. The fiction-cowboy is the useful idiot in the larger project of American expansionism.

So part of my work here was to distinguish between the fiction-cowboy and his real-life counterpart (in Florida more properly called a cattleman or cowman or cow-hunter). This individual is a bit wilier than his fictional cousin out West, less willing to be co-opted into anyone’s nation-building project. I know several of them, they’re around today. They call themselves Crackers, men and women, after the sound of the cow-whip. They are nobody’s fools.  

Bazzle:

Reading this book, I thought of literary westerns like John Williams’s novel Butcher’s Crossing. And I know you’re a fan of Cormac McCarthy. Did they inform your work? Are there other books that did?

Chapin:

My process with this book primarily involved going back to a number of O.G. westerns, the real dime-store stuff: Max Brand, Zane Grey, this type of thing. A writer named H.A. DeRosso, a tormented man who wrote these clunky but somehow really moving stories. His novel .44 is a favorite. That’s the title, .44. Just a bullet caliber in big letters across the cover. This was the kind of thing I reached for. And I came to love them; they move so fast, they are genuinely exciting. And maybe I started to wear some of this stuff on my sleeve. The exclamation points in some of the section titles (e.g., The Barren Herd!), that’s totally a call-out to the old “action stories.”

This is the reason for the larger form of the book, actually: it’s structured as four novella-length sections pressed together into one narrative. The novella-length story is a real hallmark of pulp Western writing, except they called them “short novels.” I guess novella sounded (to them) suspiciously… foreign? feminine? Anyhow, a lot of work is in that odd eighty- to one-hundred-page range. It gives them a really distinctive rhythm and tempo—very fast, sort of thin, jumping into the story and jumping back out again immediately after the story is “resolved.” That was the form I was playing with and trying to unlock. At one point I wanted each of the four sections to have its own separate cover inside of the book, with a pulp look, like they had come in a separate serialized book. That proved infeasible.

As far as McCarthy, I mean, what can you say? Good old Cormac. But for me he speaks most movingly about Appalachia, the early East Tennessee novels. I still can’t get past those. He was not my doorway into the Western form. (That being said, I think “Tangerine Meridian” could have been a sort of mood-board goal for this novel. “Blood Orange Meridian”? A citric-acid western, anyway.)

While we’re on the subject of grumpy old men with deep voices, I also want to give a shoutout to the singer Bill Callahan. For me the album Apocalypse is one of the great Westerns ever written. This book had the working title Drovers at one point, after the lead track. A real writer.

Bazzle:

Forest management plays an important role in the settlers’ lives, and specifically in the “Part IV: The Devil’s Wedding!!” when Nat and Jude Quinto do their widow neighbor the favor of “running a little fire through” her property, so she can plant crops on it (240). Did your own work doing conservation lands management in Florida contribute here?

Chapin:

I think so. Prescribed fire was more or less my job description for a couple of years before I moved to Georgia. Lands management work, in this part of the country, is centered on restoring fire to the landscape. It’s indispensable. I was part of a conservation team that focused on fire almost exclusively, and the process really worked its way into my mind. There are a couple of scenes in this book that are basically just old-timey renditions of the same process we use now—cut a fire break through the forest understory, light a fire, let it “back” into the wind to the other side of the section, put out spot-fires.

But really, it’s the other way around: the work we do today is just a slightly higher-tech version of what they did in fact do back then. Fire as a tool for human lands-management has been around for so long. Native peoples used it extensively. A lot of the landscape in the Southeast and beyond were shaped by human use of fire—when the Pilgrims first set foot in North America they saw a mosaic of forests and woodlands and meadows which they believed to be wholly natural, but was actually created and maintained by fire. That use continues right up to the present day, certainly in the Southeast.

Anyway, I feel like fire ecology will work its way into every story I write, one way or another. It’s just such an important process to me.

 Bazzle:

The book is full of piquant details that bring the place to life, like the “palmetto-bud hat” that the vigilante Addison wears when we first meet him, or the cattleman Jake Primrose’s “deer-leather boots polished to a sheen, an indigo-blue shirt bought off a Britisher, silver buttons from Argentina via Pensacola, and a hat of black felt with not one but two bird-o’-paradise feathers looming above the brim.” There’s also the iron paneling in the floor of the guestrooms above the local tavern, so the bullets fired at the ceiling by rowdy patrons don’t strike overnight guests. Are some of those your own invention, or did they come from research into the period?

Chapin:

I spent a lot of time in this time and place, down to really dusty stuff like census records and property maps. The point was to get the texture, really imbibe it, and then the material emerges such that it becomes hard to tell what is directly from historical sources and what is made up. It’s a “mixture of realism and complete bullshit,” as you might say. That strains against my training in journalism, but dammit, let me have my fun. I can keep the lines clearer when I do newspaper or magazine work, but this is my duchy here.

As for the examples you give here: the details of the cattleman’s outfit are stated in descriptions of travelers in that era. The detail about metal paneling being installed so that people shooting at the ceiling in the roadhouse won’t hit people in the rooms above is made up, complete bullshit. And then, the “palmetto-bud hat” is a weird one—those hats are present in the historical accounts, but I’m actually more familiar with them from seeing them with my own eyes. Some folks in Florida will make them and sell them, or just wear them. They’re a favorite of “travelers” who sit on sidewalks playing guitar for beer money. Or maybe that’s just Gainesville, I don’t know.

Bazzle:

Along the same lines, the novel is full of memorable coinages like squonked (“from time to time a sow squonked across the road”) that sound to me old-fashioned. Are those words you’ve come across in your reading, or are they your invention?

Chapin:

I’m not big on neologisms. Whatever it is that I’m trying to describe, there’s probably already a word to describe it. If I just take the time to dig it up I can be a part of that circulation. Passing this lexical object along. It’s important, and it’s fun. I think a writer needs to have a very compelling reason to invent the word they’re inventing.

That said, squonked is made up. I’m an awful hypocrite. But also, that is just the only word for the sound a pig makes when running across a road.

Bazzle:

There are some uncomfortable passages, like when a twelve-year-old boy tells his older brother that he too wants to “kill me an Indin before this war is done.” Enslaved people are also treated cruelly. Was it hard to strike the right tone in incorporating such bleak historical material into a novel that has elements of historical romance and many light, funny moments? 

Chapin:

So hard. This history is ugly. I mean, all of history is ugly in different ways, isn’t it? But this history is hard in ways that seem particularly unpalatable. I wanted to be able to confront that, I thought I was able. But it took a while to face up to what that might entail.

It’s almost easier when you’re writing about war and bloodshed. No one’s going to be confused about the moral timbre of the Seminole Wars, for example. It was a war of removal that turned damn-near genocidal at points; the U.S. Army was cowardly, vicious, mendacious. It was a guerilla war of massacres and raids, and it bore many resemblances to Vietnam in terms of its horrific violence. No one is going to look at this part of the story for valor and heroism.

But it’s harder to write with balance and precision about the quieter stuff. The everyday lives of people at some distance from overt war. Things that appear happy, or ordinary. Because we want those moments to be good, pleasant, uncomplicated, and they just weren’t. Never quite are. You have to see the lattice of violence and injustice that exists there too. That’s what was hard. That’s what is always hard, I guess.

But yes, like you say, there are moments of light. Funny parts, maybe. There are moments where I had to pay my respects to the sheer joy of existing in this landscape. I could not shortchange or deprive the people I was writing about of those moments.

So it was hard, but throughout I was guided by the form of this novel. Which, as you say, is romance—along with about 99% of everything we write and 99% of everything we read, watch, or listen to, I’d argue. I just hoped that I could bend its final outcome or emphasis toward something meaningful and true.

Bazzle:

Did the editors at Lanternfish Press help this novel find its final shape? 

Chapin:

Christine Neulieb was my editor at Lanternfish, and she was just stellar. There was a sincere, supportive, no-bullshit spirit to the whole process, which allowed for real trust. If she said she liked a passage, I knew she meant it. If she disliked a passage, I knew she meant that too. No games were played. No quarter was given.

The process of writing this book was an immensely important thing in my life, for obvious reasons—anything that takes like two solid years of time will be. But the revision process turned out to be astoundingly important too, on a personal-growth level. I had to confront things. I had to confront some of the stuff we talked about in regards to your previous question. I credit Christine for being a huge part of that. Because you may think that you have approached the subject in a perfectly objective way, and you may think that you have compensated for your own quirks of perspective, and you may think you are aware of all the deceptions and self-deceptions you are bringing to the table. But often it requires a reader—not even a reader, but a second participant in the creative process, which is an editor’s position in a way. Because writers—in all our sacred vaunted solitude—I don’t know if we can ever see everything we need to see, in order to tell the truth properly. Which begs the question: what are we even doing?