Taylor Brown

Huge thanks to Gina Gambony of WHQR’s Communique for having me on the show. We talk about The River of Kings, the nature of time, and I read a passage from the novel.

http://whqr.org/post/communique-book-launch-river-kings-award-winning-author-taylor-brown

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Recently Sheldon Lee Compton of Bent Country and Revolution John was kind enough to ask me for an interview, which you can read here. If you don’t know SLC, he’s the author of The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012), nominated for the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, and Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014). His novel Brown Bottle comes out in 2015 from Artistically Declined Press. He is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a judge’s selection winner for the Still: JournalFiction Award, a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction, and an associate editor at NightTrain.  He’s also a stand-up guy and great interviewer.

My favorite question of the interview:

SLC: Who would you fight – Hunter S. Thompson or Charles Bukowski?  Give me a breakdown of how that fight would go.

TB: Well, the wise men say to pick the fight you think you can win, and that would probably be Buk since I’m not bulletproof.  But if a metal-detector was involved, I might pick HST just for the hell of it.  I think I could better live with myself after being worked over by a high-powered mutant than beating up on old Buk.  I’d have to get my sometime office-mate, Peter Maguire, author of Thai Stick and black belt in both jeet kune do and jiu-jitsu, to train me up.  HST would definitely have the reach advantage, so I’d have to get inside his hands and bulldog him.  If I could do that he might have to watch out.  My hope is that whoever won, we’d come out of it sufficiently bloodied and evenly-matched to be friends, and then we could get gloriously drunk and he could squint at me through his purpled eye and tell me about the savage heart of the American Dream and it would be probably the best day of my life.

I was lucky enough to be interviewed by the lovely Bethany Chafin of Triad Arts Weekend for 88.5 WFDD.  You can listen to the segment here. My part starts about 17 minutes in, I think, after the piece on A Band Called Death.  Bethany and I discuss the launch of In the Season of Blood and Gold, as well as the influence of music on my writing, my early days of making up stories, why my GI Joes had holes in their heels, and lots of other good stuff.

Taylor Brown’s debut collection of short fiction comes out this Saturday, May 3rd.  In the Season of Blood and Gold, published by Press 53, includes twelve stories of dynamic characters and timeless landscapes.  From stories of alligator wrestlers, and Confederate soldiers, to a tattooed artist exploring the map to her heart and to her mother’s, the collection is varied and impressive.  Writer Charles Dodd has said of the collection, “With ferocious economy and a great big heart, Taylor Brown writes one of the best debuts I’ve ever picked up.  These are stories, verses, meditations, and accusations, everything in short you could hope to get from important fiction.  This work demands your attention.”