Caroline Cole had a nickname for the days when she ditched school to sneak into the public library and snatch a book or two: Stay Gone Days. Little did she know the nickname would soon reflect her relationship with her sister, too. Haunted by secrets and by the death of their father, Stay Gone Days (Ig Publishing, 2022) follows the lives of Ella and Caroline Cole who, each in her own way, flee the past and the difficult love they share for each other. In settings ranging from the Mississippi Delta to Boston, and to Poland, Steve Yarbrough slowly unravels the Cole Girls’ secrets — and mistakes — over the span of decades. Yarborough’s eighth novel proves to be one of his boldest yet.
Publishers Weekly writes:
Setting up a smooth structure and writing in relaxed prose, Yarbrough manages to convey the rhythms of everyday life along with the characters’ trauma. Readers will enjoy getting caught up in these two women’s faltering lives.
Maitlyn Harrison discussed with Yarborough the evolution of his writing, what it continues to mean to be a writer with roots in the South, and the inspirations and themes that come to such vivid life in Stay Gone Days.
+
Maitlyn Harrison: You’ve published a number of books through various publishing companies, university presses, major New York houses, and independent presses. What has your experience been working with independent publishers?
Steve Yarbrough: My experiences with independent publishers have been great. My first novel, for instance, was published by Greg Michalson and Fred Ramey at McMurray & Beck. The novel had racked up forty-one rejections over three and a half years. After Greg and Fred published it, USA Today gave me half a page, an absolutely glowing review, the other half page going to a young British author named J.K. Rowling. Time Magazine compared me favorably to Faulkner. After the book did well, the paperback rights sold at auction to Scribner, which had been among the first publishers to turn the book down more than four years earlier. I learned a lot from that experience. The same book that no one wanted became a lot more attractive after somebody else took the risk of publishing it and worked hard on its behalf. That’s what the independents do every day. They don’t have much money. What the good ones do have plenty of is taste and the courage of their convictions.
MH: You wrote your first novel in 1999, and Stay Gone Days was published this year, 2022. You’ve been asked before about differences between earlier and later novels, but I want to ask what similarities you think are present between, say, The Oxygen Man and Stay Gone Days? Do you find that you have preoccupations that regularly show up in your writing?
SY: One big similarity is that both novels make extensive use of the landscape and culture of the Mississippi Delta, the region I come from. Both of them explore racial descrimination and sexual exploitation and violence. Those have remained preoccupations of mine—partly because of what I witnessed growing up there but also because to a large extent those typically Southern preoccupations have now become national preoccupations. Or so it seems to me. I last lived in the Delta when I was twenty-one years old, but it is no exaggeration to say that mentally, I spend part of each and every day there. I have a love/hate relationship with that place. On the one hand, it exacted a brutal toll on Black people. On the other hand, those same people gave us the blues, from which it is not hyperbole to say that all American vernacular music springs. I’m about to make a generalization: In the Mississippi of my youth, many, though not all, of the region’s musical achievements came from Black people; many, though not all, of the literary achievements came from white people. Writing books depended on access to education, and for much of its history the Delta relentlessly excluded Blacks from that, right down to canceling classes in Black schools during “picking season,” so that Black kids could go to the fields and pick cotton. But if you could get your hands on a cheap mail order guitar, you might turn into Charlie Patton or Muddy Waters or B. B. King.
MH: Oftentimes when a Southern writer writes about the South, this label stays with them throughout their lifetime, despite anything else that they may write about. How do you embrace the label of a “Southern writer,” and do you think you’re challenging the notions of what it means to be a writer from the South?
SY: Well, I’m a writer from the South who often writes about it. But I’m also a writer who lives in Boston and Krakow and spent twenty-one years in California and writes about them too. I don’t think I’m doing anything all that unusual. One of my favorite writers from the South, Elizabeth Spencer, wrote beautifully about Italy. Richard Ford has written some fabulous stories set in the South, but he’s just as much at home writing about Montana, New Jersey or anywhere else his imagination can take him. In other words, the South has a rich literary history, and I’m honored to be part of it. But I don’t feel like it defines me or my work.
MH: I know that in your recent novels you’ve done a lot of writing set in Central Europe, especially Poland. How do you think the way you write about Poland has evolved over the last few years?
SY: Poland has gone through a lot of changes during the time I’ve been writing about it. And basically, I’ve been writing about it off and on for thirty-five years, though I never attempted to use it as a setting for a novel until The Unmade World, which appeared in 2018 but was actually completed in Krakow in the winter and spring of 2016. I first wrote about the country in a short story called “The Formula,” which Virginia Quarterly Review published in 1987—at which point Poland was still part of the Eastern Bloc and being ruled by the Polish Communist Party. In several stories and essays over the next twenty or so years, I dealt with a newly emerging free-market Poland, in which characters were sometimes intoxicated by the speed with which their world was changing. In The Umade World, those changes have started to go sour for some, like my character Bogdan, who was doing quite well under the old system but poorly equipped to deal with capitalism. In Stay Gone Days, we see life in Poland mostly from the perspective of those who are thriving. My fiction, for better or worse, is always set against the socio-economic background of the time and place in which it occurs, which I think is a refection of my being a diehard realist. Like Popeye the Sailor, I am what I am.
MH: As a writer reading about a writer, it was fun for me to see the way Caroline in Stay Gone Days wrestled with her creativity. She follows the method of Irish writer, William Trevor, when it comes to creating characters. Do you follow his advice as well? If so or if not, is Caroline’s writing process similar to your own in any way?
SY: Lord, I wish I could follow William Trevor’s method! Hell, I wish I could be William Trevor. But alas, my mind works differently. Trevor’s first art was sculpture. And he was apparently quite good at it. He once remarked that before beginning to write a piece of fiction, he listed as many facts—some trivial, some not—as he could think of about his characters. So you can see how his method of developing characters is similar to sculpture, in which a figure emerges from a much larger block of material. In Stay Gone Days, the morning Caroline manages, finally, to write a complete story, she sits down hoping to go at things the way Trevor does. What happens instead is that the name she has imagined for one of her characters suddenly triggers a memory of someone else she knew long ago, back in Mississippi. And instead of writing the story she intended—which would have been based on the life of her Polish friend and landlady—she ends up writing a story set in the Missisisippi Delta that deals with a character who feels trapped in a town like one Caroline and I grew up in. That’s how my own mind tends to work. As for as Caroline’s daily writing process, in which she meticulously revises as she goes, it is exactly like my own, right down to traveling with a portable printer when I’m writing away from home.
MH: You play a lot with foreshadowing and parallelism in this novel. Clues from earlier sections in the novel become events as the story progresses. One sister is getting married, one has to leave her boyfriend; circumstances then flip, with one working from the ground-up and becoming a successful author, while one loses her husband and feels as if she’s done nothing with her life. What was it like for you to write with these devices, and how did you expect them to tell this story about sisterhood?
SY: I had never used much foreshadowing or structural parallelism (did we just coin a term?) before. Nor had I been a fan of flashforwards, of which there are several in this novel. I didn’t really think a whole lot about why I was doing it, but if I analyze it from the distance of the two years that have passed since I finished the book, I think the techniques suggested themselves to me because I knew there would be a vast amount of time passing in the novel—roughly forty years—and I wanted to clue readers to the scope of the narrative as soon as possible. Those time-bending techniques are also intended to ease the reader through the gaps that exist between one narrative era and another. I always tell young writers that one of the reasons it’s important to read widely—sometimes even sticking with books that they may not like—is to start building a repertoir of narrative techniques. Whether you ever use them or not, they are always there if you need them, and if you don’t have them, you will never know if you need them or not.
MH: Throughout reading the first section of the book, “The Cole Girls,” twentieth century Southern culture is so prevalent, and with that also comes the “Delta doom” wide-spread poverty—doing things such as selling propane and fixing radios just to put food on the table, and working endlessly at the United Dollar General just to send your girls to a private school. What is disappointing is that when the Cole girls revisit, little has changed from 1975—they are running from a past that is still stuck in the past. Do you think there’s some irony in this, and if so, was this an intentional connection?
SY: Yes, I do see some irony there, and the connection was very much intentional. Since my father died in the spring of 2017, I have visited my hometown exactly one time. It was January or maybe February of 2018, and I was on book tour for The Unmade World. For reasons that we won’t delve into, my parents’ house had ended up in the possession of someone outside my family. I had decided to spend the night at a Hampton Inn in my hometown in between signings at Lemuria in Jackson and Square Books in Oxford. I got to the town around ten p.m., drove downtown, which was dead and deserted, stood in the middle of Main Street and snapped a photo. (If you look hard enough, you can find it on my Facebook page.) Late that night, as I sat in my hotel room sipping whiskey and studying the photo, I realized how the evening perfectly encapsulated my situation vis-à-vis my hometown: I was a traveler there, and I was a traveler for whom the town was no longer a living reality. It was part of my past, and I was part of its past, neither of us connected to the other in the present. I got up the next morning, went to the cemetery and visited the graves of my parents and grandparents and drove away, feeling no sense of loss or nostalgia. I haven’t been there since then except in my own imagination as I wrote Stay Gone Days. I may never set foot in that town again, though it will be alive in my imagination until I draw my final breath.
MH: What is next for you in your writing career?
SY: I’m about 85 pages into a novel set in a small community north of Boston between the winter of 2020 and the winter of 2021. I like it, but so far I don’t love it. As Bill Belichick is fond of saying, “We’ll see what happens.”
+++
Steve Yarbrough is the author of twelve books, including the novels The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, Safe from the Neighbors, The End of California, Prisoners of War, Visible Spirits and The Oxygen Man, and the short story collections Veneer, Mississippi History and Family Men. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The Unmade World won the 2019 Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. The son of Mississippi Delta cotton farmers, Steve is currently a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College.
+
Maitlyn Harrison studies creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Her work is forthcoming from Equinox Literary Magazine and Smokelong Quarterly. She is an editorial intern for the independent literary press, Braddock Avenue Books.