Q&A with Robert Gwaltney

  

Photo by Robert Kim

 

 

Robert Gwaltney is the author of the new novel Sing Down the Moon. He also has written the novel The Cicada Tree. He lives in Atlanta. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Sing Down the Moon, and how did you create your character Leontyne Skye?

 

A: I’ve always believed the South remembers. After my debut novel, The Cicada Tree, I was haunted still by the idea that the land, that place keeps our secrets.

 

The story grew out of questions about inheritance—how we inherit not just property, but grief, trauma, and silence. What does it cost to break from a legacy that’s claimed generations before you?

 

Leontyne came to me already marked—missing a hand and missing pieces of memory during an event known as Tribulation Day. She’s an innocent—tender and bound to the island that’s both her home and prison. Her struggle—whether to save herself or sacrifice for what’s always been—is the heart of the novel.

 

Q: The writer Ron Rash described the book as “intensely Southern yet also reminiscent of the magical realism of writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez...” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: To have Ron Rash say anything kind about my work is an honor beyond words. I’ve long admired the moral clarity and sense of place in his fiction, the way his landscapes feel both beautiful and unforgiving.

 

For him to call the novel “intensely Southern” means a great deal to me, because that rootedness in place is where my stories begin.

 

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: I knew the last sentence very early on. It came to me before I understood how Leontyne would earn it, and it served as a kind of North Star while I wrote.

 

I had clear guideposts—the beginning, the middle, and the end—but not a detailed map. The journey shifted as the characters deepened and the story revealed itself. The destination never changed. The real work was discovering how Leontyne could truthfully find her way there.

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: Titles arrive for me the way music does—first as a feeling, then as a phrase I can’t shake. Sing Down the Moon came early, and I knew it held the tone of the novel long before I could fully explain it.

 

Without giving too much away, the title is tied to a violin named Salome, a prized possession of Rebecca Longwood. That instrument carries history, longing, and a kind of reckoning within it.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m already at work on the next novel, tentatively titled All the Kingdoms of the World. It’s Southern Gothic with a more overtly dystopian edge, braided with magical realism.

 

For the first time, my protagonist is a young boy, which has shifted the texture of the storytelling. At its heart, it’s a coming-of-age story set in a world coming apart—still grappling with inheritance, responsibility, and the cost of survival.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: That I don’t write these stories to escape the South—I write to better understand it.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb