Do you have any book related resolutions for 2025? Why not start with delving into the work of an author you've never read before? I might have just the author for you! We're launching a blog tour for American Still Life by Jim Naremore. Fans of Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn and Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis will find an intriguing read in this journey of loss and redemption. Join us as we celebrate the launch of his book with a giveaway and an interview with the author.
We are all drowning, and we are all saviors.
Wresting with addiction, guilt, and self-loathing, gifted photojournalist Skade Felsdottir finds herself trapped in a web of her own creation when she is forced by circumstances to return to her hometown—the place that holds her crippling secrets. After screwing up her “big break,” a photo essay book about descansos—roadside memorials to people who have died tragically, Skade tries to salvage the project against a tight deadline. While simultaneously working and keeping her darkest demons at bay, Skade reconnects with an old boyfriend and befriends a unique but broken young woman named Kit. Their burgeoning friendship begins a process of healing for them both, until a devastating sequence of events plunges Skade into darkness, leaving her to decide between redemption and running away; between life and death. Set against a backdrop of the back roads of a forgotten America, American Still Life explores the crossroads of grief and artistic expression, of loneliness and atonement. A journey familiar.
With roots in the American deep south and the Midwest grounding his sense of place, Jim Naremore has published an array of short fiction and the award-winning novel The Arts of Legerdemain as Taught by Ghosts (Belle Lutte, 2016). He holds an MFA from the Solstice program at Lasell University in Boston and currently lives with his partner and cat in New York’s Hudson River Valley.
WOW: Yes, we love discovering indie books that might not have the promotional push of books with the Big Five. So tell us how you first learned about Descansos, and what made you want to include them in a book?
Jim: Just as Skade says in her book notes in American Still Life (ASL), I think I’ve been aware of
descansos as objects for as long as I’ve been riding in cars. I remember being fascinated by them when I saw them as a kid. They are one of the last real deeply-felt examples of pure folk art that most of us get to experience either as observers or as creators. That fascination was what led to the writing of ASL, and it kind of shows off my creative process.
I’m always finding little ideas: lines of dialog, metaphors, images, plot ideas, character ideas, settings, etc. I jot all these down in notebooks. When I get ready to start a new book, essentially, I put a bunch of these little concepts in a bag, shake them up, and see what comes out. ASL started with the idea of someone doing a photo-essay on descansos. I guess I always thought that would be an interesting thing to do. Descansos are so uniquely visual, and they vary so much (I’ve seen some spectacular ones in the desert in southern California) that I think they lend themselves perfectly to that idea.
Some of the other ideas that went into that bag included a plot idea about a group (not just one) of puppeteers and how they related to their puppets, the concepts of memorial tattoos, a character who was a very tall and awkward and traumatized young woman looking for a friend (“Kit is short for Kitten, my dad was an asshole” was probably the first line I actually wrote for the book), and Skade, who was in a short story I could never get quite right (I think I wanted it to be a short story and it wanted to be a novel… we’re still discussing it). Eventually, ASL grew out of all that.
The novel I began to write was quite a bit different than the one that emerged, but that’s the writing process for a novel, I think. I think another answer to that question is that I am very, very interested in folklore and fairytales. I probably should have majored in folklore studies in college, but I didn’t think of it. As I said, descansos are unique performative pieces of folklore. Folklore and fairytales are parts of all my writing.
"Finishing a book is really hard. As such, we create ways to keep us from
having to actually finish. And that research thing is one of those
strategies… You just need to know enough to sound like you know what you’re talking
about. No, that’s not lying or cheating. You’ve done enough research
when you can effectively answer all the questions the book gives you."
WOW: Do you do research, or work with things you already know? When do you know when you’ve done enough research?
Jim: I do a fair amount of research. To me, it’s a big part of the fun of writing books, and the research can REALLY help in creating and advancing the plot! Of course, I usually start with things I’m already interested in and so I do know a little bit about the things I write about before I go in. For my first book, The Arts of Legerdemain as Taught by Ghosts (TAoLaTbG), I did a lot of research on stage magic and spiritualism, even though I already had a decent working knowledge of both, I suppose.
For ASL, I dove into descansos, puppets and puppetry, and tattoos and tattooing. I learned a good amount and found some great books and resources. I also spent time in and around real descansos when I got the chance. They can be quite powerful to sit with.
That question about when you’ve done enough research is a killer. In a vacuum, the answer is never, and that can be absolutely paralyzing. I’ve taught workshops on writing novels, and something we talk about are roadblocks. Finishing a book is really hard. As such, we create ways to keep us from having to actually finish (write “The End.” I won’t go into why that is now, it’s an essay in itself). And that research thing is one of those strategies… “I don’t know enough yet, I need to do more reading! It’s not perfect!”
The best example of this is writing mysteries (I’m working on a mystery now, actually). If you’re doing a mystery, chances are (unless you have rare personal experience) you have no idea beyond what you’ve seen on TV or what you’ve read in books about how the police actually work or how a detective actually solves crimes. The desire to not look like an idiot by writing something that a reader could poke a hole in is really strong, so it’s really easy to get lost in never-ending research into police procedure and the wonkiness of being a private detective. But here’s the thing: the vast majority of your readers don’t really know much more than you do. Yes, the more you know, the better you can create, but you are not (should not) go into crazy amounts of procedural detail in your writing. You just need to know enough to sound like you know what you’re talking about. No, that’s not lying or cheating. You’ve done enough research when you can effectively answer all the questions the book gives you. There will ALWAYS be more to know, but you don’t have to know it for the purposes of story.
WOW: What appeals to you about the themes of what people leave behind and reinventing yourself?
Jim: It’s funny, with both TAoLaTbG (That’s a hell of a title. Not going to do a long one like that again, I don’t expect!) and ASL, and the stuff I’m working on now, I feel like I keep writing the same story over and over again. I’m just beginning to explore that. Obviously, there are psychological reasons for it in my life. My books are full of people I “know” or recognize. It’s a lot easier to write people you are familiar with at some level. So, I think these themes are part of the lives of a lot of people I was close to. Beyond that, I think I’m also trying to write about myself to a degree.
While I was shopping Legerdemain to agents, I got some real interest from one agent in particular who ultimately decided not to pick it up, but who did make a key suggestion: that I put more of me on the page. Steve Kozwa from Legerdemain is like me, but he’s not me. Skade Felsdottir is a LOT more me. Skade and her journey are really much more of my own. I was in active addiction for a very long time. I think the best definition of sobriety has very little to do with abstinence (really important, don’t get me wrong!), and more to do with establishing or re-establishing a relationship with your true self.
This notion of reinventing yourself is really closer to the theme of finding your true self. Rather than creating something new, it’s more coming home to yourself. I think that’s the big umbrella theme I keep writing: Figuring out who you are and coming home to it from a thing you are not.
WOW: Have you ever reinvented yourself?
Jim: As above, yes, very much in a general context. I got sober. I started trying to get comfortable with myself and who I was and my own place in things. That’s a massive reinvention, even if its more letting go of a lot of things I was not or things that were not serving my essential self anymore. A very long hard road. Rather than “reinvention” I might say “rediscovery.”
"You don’t need to use much craft or technical skill in the first draft,
you shouldn’t, because it slows you down and gets in the way. But the
rewrites are where you actually get to be a 'writer,' where your skill
and technique come to play."
WOW: Did you learn things from the first book that helped you write the second?
Jim: For sure. A big thing was that I could do it, and not just do it, but do a fairly okay job of it. That’s huge. In terms of practical process, I’m still learning. I have a way of organizing and creating the story that works for me, even though it’s tough to explain and very inefficient, probably.
One thing I did come to understand, there are two very, very different stages in writing long fiction: the first draft and the rewrites. The first draft is all about creativity, it’s just organically getting the ideas and words out onto the page. Its very free and explosive and artistic. There are very few rules associated with it, and it requires a certain mindset or part of yourself to do it.
The rewrites, on the other hand, are where the actual writing begins. You don’t need to use much craft or technical skill in the first draft, you shouldn’t, because it slows you down and gets in the way. But the rewrites are where you actually get to be a “writer,” where your skill and technique come to play. I really enjoy the rewrite part. The creative first draft is hard for me. But both are absolutely vital to the creating of a good novel.
WOW: One piece of advice for a budding novelist?
Jim: I’m going to cheat and give two masquerading as one. Get tied into narrative artforms. Read, read, read. Watch movies and TV shows. Listen to narrative music forms. Go to plays. Try to pay attention not just to the stories, but how they are being told. Look for the patterns in both the “what” and also the “how.” Then do one for yourself… AND FINISH IT. Don’t worry about how good it is. Finish it. Don’t give up. If you give up and stop before you finish you are training yourself to not complete something. If you finish something, even if it’s not any good, you are training yourself to complete something.
A third one: keep a notebook with you at all times. Write down any little thought or idea, no matter how disconnected or odd or unimportant it is, even if it’s just a word you discover that you like (I wrote down the word “skein” in my notebook. I love the way that word sounds, how it feels to say, ad the metaphorical meanings in it).
"Don’t worry about how good it is. Finish it. Don’t give up. If you give up and stop before you finish you are training yourself to not complete something."
WOW: What are you working on now?
Jim: Long answer: I’ve got three things I’m toying with and a fourth idea. I love mysteries and always swore I’d try one, so I’m playing with a mystery novel. I read a lot of Raymond Chandler and other American noir detective fiction growing up, and I think my voice lends well to that form, so I’ve got a start, but I also discovered that the novel I was writing was not working the way I wanted it to, so I sat it aside and thought about it for a while, got some distance from it, and now I think I’ve got a better start for it.
Then I’ve got two novel ideas that are the lit-fc I normally write, one is based on a short story I wrote several years ago that I think would work nicely in a longer form about a broken-down carnival-circuit professional wrestler who finds himself stuck with a cat named Spike after the young woman who owned Spike took off with the wrestler’s money. The other idea is a much more complicated story of interwoven plotlines but its essentially a pair of parallel love stories, romances, laid over themes of family trauma. I recently discovered that those last two ideas were trying to get at the same story, actually—notions of self and self-esteem and why and how we love—so I needed to pick one and set the other aside. I sat the wrestler aside for now and began concentrating on the other story.
My first drafts are almost comically over-done and packed with too many ideas and this one is no different. I’ve got two love stories, both with enormous problems (one is unrequited the other involves a character who is engaged to another person) an autistic character, a character with a terribly disfiguring congenital condition, a character having strange premonitions of the future, a long sad fairytale, a camel, Camille Longday is in this one, too (she is in all my novels. Don’t know why), a lawyer named Porkchop, a haunted grocery store, a character with a terribly dysfunctional relationship to his extended family, a dying grandmother, and department store mannequins. I’m hoping it is both sad and funny. We shall see.
I’m researching historical barn building, American stonewall construction, scarecrows, the history of carnival sideshows, and a few other things. It’s a lot. We will see what actually makes it into the story.
WOW: Thanks for giving us a peek inside a writer's mind. I think we can all identify that "I've got all these ideas but have no idea if they'll all fit together" feeling.
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