Q & A: Ginger Eager on Her Debut Novel “The Nature of Remains”

“My goal was to write a book with a plot line exciting enough for any fan of gritty Southern fiction to enjoy”
— Ginger Eager

This blog posts on Mondays. Fourth Mondays of the month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

Ginger Eager’s The Nature of Remains, which won the prestigious AWP Award for the Novel, and comes recommended to me by Ellen Prentiss Campbell, promises to be an excellent read. Here’s the catalog copy:

“In Flyshoals, Georgia, karma is writ small enough to witness. When Doreen Swilley discovers that her boss and lover of thirty years intends to fire her to placate his dying wife, she devises a plan to steal his business from him. Her plan just might work too, if she is not thwarted by a small town’s enmeshed histories and her family’s own dark secrets. Set during the 2009 recession, The Nature of Remains rests at the intersection of class, gender, education and place. Through extended geological metaphor, readers witness the orogeny, crystallization, and weathering of the human soul. Doreen’s journey reveals the ways even a woman’s most precious connections—her children, her grandchildren, her lover—operate within larger social structures capable of challenging her sovereignty.”

C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to write this novel?

GINGER EAGER: I’d gone with a friend to look at a farmhouse for sale. It seemed perfect in the listing, an older home that was both livable and “a handyman’s dream,” on acreage with mature hardwoods and a pond.

The drive in was gorgeous. It was August, and the hardwoods were thick enough for the road to be mostly in shadow with just a bit of dappled light. We drove through a wide, shallow creek, and I found it terribly romantic to consider living in a place I’d need vehicle clearance to reach.

The trees thinned as we approached the house. The sun beat down and insects screamed from the overgrown fields. There was no shade, just the inarguable fact of August in the Georgia. My friend parked, turned off her truck off. We heard the roar of an interstate. The house was difficult to reach by vehicle, but if you were on foot it was just a few acres from I-20.

We stood looking at the house. It needed quite a bit of work. The owner told us there were tenants in the process of moving out. They should be gone, he’d said, and the door’s unlocked. Ours was the only vehicle. We climbed the porch and knocked.

“Who the f*** is it?” shrieked a woman’s voice from inside.

“We’re here to see the house,” said my friend. “It’s for sale.”

The heat-swollen door was forced open just enough for us to see a slice of the woman’s face. I’m not sure when she’d last eaten a decent meal, and her eyes darted about. “My husband is down at the pond.” She scratched at scabs on her arms. “He’ll shoot you if he sees you here. He don’t welcome visitors.”

We thanked her and left. I don’t know if she had a husband or a gun, but she needed the privacy she asked for. Something mean had her in its grip.

That afternoon, my friend called the owner, and he confessed that the home was occupied by squatters. He was unable to get them out of the house.

The theory that there should be no homeless because there are enough homes for all feels morally right to me. But what does this look like in practice? What does this look like in a deeply rural area where the social safety net may be only what your friends and family are able and willing to provide? A home—only a home—is never enough. I kept thinking of that woman, and wondering how she’d ended up in the situation in which we found her.

The first scene I wrote occurs near the end of the novel. Doreen, the protagonist, goes to help her son who has lost so much he is now squatting in a house much like the one I encountered with my friend. I thought I wrote a short story, but the characters haunted me, and soon I was working backward, writing the story that preceded the event.

C.M. MAYO: As you were writing, did you have in mind an ideal reader?

GINGER EAGER: Myself at eighteen.

I was in an abusive relationship from fourteen to twenty. I didn’t find much help for this in my family culture or in the religion of my childhood. I’d long been a bookish kid, and literature became my teacher and advocate. When I was in high school, writers like Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews helped to unveil for me the place and the culture in which I lived. In college I found books like Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. It took time, but I began to see that what I believed to be true about men and women, about love, about “goodness” and “badness,” simply wasn’t true. Women’s Studies courses helped with this too. Literature and education save lives.

C.M. MAYO: Now that it has been published, can you describe the ideal reader for this novel as you see him or her now?

GINGER EAGER: My goal was to write a book with a plot line exciting enough for any fan of gritty Southern fiction to enjoy. If you like Daniel Woodrell and David Joy, you’ll like The Nature of Remains.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers have been the most important influences for you?

GINGER EAGER: I’ve already listed so many, haven’t I?

I need to add Margaret Atwood to the list. Cat’s Eye is the finest novel about girlhood that I’ve read. I return to it every couple of years, and thus far my opinion remains unchanged. I also return to Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. That these novels were written by the same person stuns me. She’s such a brave and nimble writer.

Poetry is important to me. Jane Hirshfield, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Kay Ryan. I have works from these folks on a low shelf near my desk and will grab one of their collections when my words start to feel thick and wooden.

C.M. MAYO: Which writers are you reading now?

GINGER EAGER: Tap Out, Edgar Kunz’s first poetry collection, is so good. I’ve been returning to it for months.

My family went to Scotland last year, and in a local bookstore I bought The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall. I fell hard for the protagonist, a biologist from humble roots who discovers she’s pregnant just as she’s leaving a job in Idaho to return, alone, to her hometown in northern England. She becomes a single mother and reintroduces wolves to an earl’s estate all at the same time. I’ve since read two more of Hall’s novels, and each one has been fantastic.

C.M. MAYO: How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?

GINGER EAGER: The Digital Revolution is a blessing and a curse, isn’t it?

Information—knowledge!—is so much more easily available. There are several podcasts that are like church to me: Buddhist Geeks, Medicine Stories, On Being, DharmaPunx NYC. What did I do before I could listen to things like this while running errands?

I also love the availability of music. My family has a Spotify subscription, and we share songs and albums and new artists with one another. I remember having to choose between books and cds. I almost never chose cds. I’m catching up now on all sorts of music I missed in my twenties. The flip side of this availability is that musicians now have to tour to make a living. That’s so hard on the body and mind. I think of the Gillian Welch song, “Everything is Free.”

As much as possible, I make my office a quiet space. I don’t bring my cellphone into my office. On my laptop, I don’t have notifications turned on for emails or text messages or social media, and my cell doesn’t ring through to my laptop. I’ve only ever allowed myself to check social media on my phone, so my brain doesn’t reach for the escape hatch of Instagram when I’m working at the computer.

Email is the hardest for me. I’ve lost so many good working hours to emails. Someone smart, maybe Glennon Doyle, described email as a to-do list that anyone can add to, and I definitely have this relationship with it. I go through phases where I do a lot of flagging and categorizing, and then I forget to tend to things because they feel complete once they’re flagged and categorized. So then I’ll go through a phase where I try to just answer everything once a day. This doesn’t work either. It’s either noon before I’m settling down to work, or I’m dealing with emails at night, when I’d rather be reading. I need help with email!

C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you or problematic?

GINGER EAGER: I keep several journals in composition style notebooks. I have one related to my reading life, one related to my daily tasks and accomplishments, one related to my tracking of the seasons, one for ideas for future novels, one for my moody outbursts—the list goes on. Some fill quickly and others fill over a period of years. I mine these journals for all sorts of information that finds its way into my fiction and nonfiction.

For any sort of work that isn’t a type of journaling, I work on a laptop. This includes drafting, revision, and editing. I don’t like to draft, revise, or edit in longhand. My process for that type of writing is different—I go fast, and I delete a lot. When I do this on paper, I end up with whole pages of scratch outs, and I sometimes can’t read my own words. It makes me nutty. I’ve never written work I intend for the public on paper. When I began doing more than journaling, I wrote on a word processor.

C.M. MAYO: For those looking to publish, what would be your most hard-earned piece of advice?

GINGER EAGER: When I was in grad school, the director quoted the movie, Glengarry Glen Ross: “Always be closing.” The idea is that one should be ever on the lookout for new opportunities. One should be making connections, and finishing pieces, and submitting to journals. Network, network, network! I was told that publication is a numbers game, and that she who submits the most publishes the most. Finding an agent is said to be a numbers game too—a friend advised I query three hundred people. All of this is excellent advice in regards to publishing and building a career as a writer. It’s vital if you want to land (or keep) a full-time job in academia.

I’m only now able to do many of those things I was advised to do in grad school. The reasons for this are many, but the strongest is personality. “Always be closing” suits best the writers who are fast and bold. I’m neither of these things. In fact, I’m the opposite, slow and anxious. But I’ve kept at it, and doors have opened, and with each door opening I’m able to do a little better the things I know I must. Maybe the only trait you absolutely must possess if you want to publish is stubbornness. I joke that my spirit animal is the pack mule. Pack mules are never the fastest or prettiest ones to reach camp, but they always show up, and they arrive bearing dinner, whiskey, and the tents.

C.M. MAYO: If you could travel back in time ten years, what is the most important piece of writerly advice that you give yourself?

GINGER EAGER: There is this Buddhist story about a farmer whose son breaks his leg just before rice harvest. “Bad luck, bad luck,” say all of the villagers. But then, during the harvest, the army whooshes through town on the way to war and conscripts all of the young men. The boy with the broken leg is left behind. “Good luck, good luck,” say the villagers. The story goes on like this, good luck and bad luck unfurling from the same event.

I’ve just released my debut novel during the global Covid-19 pandemic. It was a virtual event. A virtual release wasn’t the original plan, and there are other events canceled that cannot be replicated. This might seem like bad luck.

But I had so many people rally behind my book and invite me to be a part of their events—I was able to launch my book as part of the Decatur Book Festival’s online programming. I was able to be part of the Joshilyn Jackson Reads track. Local libraries and the Georgia Center for the Book all promoted the event. A smart and scrappy indie bookstore, Acapella Books, sold books for the event. This not the sort of community and press that a literary debut novelist with a very small press typically encounters.

And my good luck didn’t end there—during the event itself, so many people I know and love showed up virtually, far more than would have come to an in-person launch. There were almost 250 people in attendance, and I recognized most of the names. It’s permanently mind-altering to feel that supported. It’s permanently mind-altering to experience as much gratitude as I have.

Who knows what event will unfold next? It might be very bad luck indeed. The point is that nothing is predictable. My advice to myself would be to enjoy the process. We should enjoy writing. We should enjoy our lives. We could be conscripted for war tomorrow.

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you?

GINGER EAGER: I’m working on a new novel. I don’t want to say too much about it because I feel that could jinx it. I will say that it’s set on the Altamaha River in coastal Georgia. If anyone is heading that way, reach out to me through my website for the name of an excellent tour guide.

>>Learn more and read the first chapter at www.gingereager.com