Q&A with Willie Davis

 

 

 

Willie Davis is the author of the new story collection I Can Outdance Jesus. He also has written the novel Nightwolf, and his work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Guardian.

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the stories in I Can Outdance Jesus?

 

A: About 20 years ago, I had an idea for a book of interconnected short stories that take place over the course of a summer in Hazard, Kentucky. “Hazard, Kentucky” sounds metaphorical, but it’s a real city in the Appalachian Mountains, and it’s where my family comes from.

 

Short stories are the best medium to tell the story of a place. Most of us live our lives in short stories. Even the lucky few who live their lives in novels tend to recount their experiences in short stories.

 

We flesh out the city by hearing different voices telling different lies, nothing ever quite finished. I wanted to paint an Appalachia full of fascinating bullshitters, where it all connects and tells one large story out of a dozen or so smaller ones.

 

Specifically, I wrote about two characters—one a young man who moved away and came back for the summer and an older, half-crazed man who becomes his mentor.

 

Some of those stories are still in the spine of I Can Outdance Jesus. The stories no longer explicitly connect with each other, nor do they all take place in a single town. But they’re still Appalachian at their core, and my hope is that all these mismatched pieces of cloth form a crazy quilt that holds together as a singular piece of art.

 

Because I’ve kept some of these characters with me for 20 years, the biggest change has been with me. I thought of my young characters as handsomer versions of me.

 

Now they feel like old friends who I haven’t seen in years. We’re still friendly, but we’re suspicious of each other because I know all their secrets, and they know mine. I’m also now older than most of my older characters.

 

Back when I conceived them, they were a projection—I didn’t know what respectable people did with their days, so I had to guess. That was back when I thought youthful vanity and anxieties were things people outgrew.

 

It’s a long way of saying that my attempt to tell a story of a town through two generations took a generation to tell. I’ve written and rewritten these characters for so long, fiddled with their voice so much, that at times I don’t know where their voice ends and mine begins.

 

In that way, this collection feels like an autobiography of my last two decades, even though I’ve done none of the things my characters have done.

 

I’ve never, for instance, knocked on strangers’ doors pretending to be Mormon as a joke. I’ve never written prospective suicide notes for my friends. I’ve never broken into an abandoned beach house. I’ve written and sang many offensive songs, but I never believed they were going to start a riot.

 

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

 

A: I was in a coffee shop with a friend, and we were brainstorming on what would be the world’s most confusing bumper sticker. We had ideas like “I’m Pro-Choice, But I Don’t Vote” or “I’m Indifferent About the Buffalo Bills” or a picture of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing in a toilet.

 

One of us came up with the phrase “I Can Outdance Jesus.” We joked that it sounded like a demented country song. From there, we wrote a song where we made it literal. The singer is at a bar, and he gets in a dance-off with Jesus Christ. The chorus goes, “I Can Outdance Jesus, so won’t you dance with me/You can’t shimmy and you can’t shake, with your feet nailed to a tree.”

 

From there, I would write other offensive country songs, trying to be more and more incendiary. I wrote a love song to Lynndie England (“My head’s in a hood and my heart’s in a knot/For the sweetheart of Abu Ghraib”), a musical history of America (“America, America, with forty acres and a mule/Our women have fake plastic boobs—take that, Istanbul!”), and a song designed to help children whose parents were divorcing (“The new mommy’s a lot prettier, and she don’t make you clean your room/She didn’t keep you locked away for nine months in her womb”).

I would sing them at parties for friends, and they were a pretty reliable hit, so long as the friends were sufficiently sarcastic and drunk. I didn’t think much of it until one person—likely not a fan—said “What are trying to accomplish by making people mad?”

 

It seemed such a strange question. What’s anybody accomplish by singing a song? A song is its own reward. Maybe you can entertain someone or become slightly more sexually attractive, but beyond that, I’m suspicious of any artist with a motive. But he asked me why I was making people mad. I’d just thought of that as a fun bonus.

 

It got me thinking of a character whose sole motive is anger, to make people as mad as he was. I thought of him as a neglected child because nobody can rage quite like a child.

 

I decided to train his anger at the pillars of modern Country Music. So his goal is to write the most offensive songs possible in order to make people so angry that they burn down the Grand Ole Opry.

 

Because of course, what’s really behind our rage isn’t that people find our words offensive—it’s that people ignore them. Our words can’t really start fires. But he had to believe they could. His first song was “I Can Outdance Jesus.”

 

I tried shopping this collection with different, more traditional titles. But in a way, this collection is my confusing bumper sticker description of Appalachia. So I titled it with the most confusing bumper sticker slogan I could imagine.  

 

Q: The writer Maud Casey said of the book, “Davis is writing in [Eudora] Welty's lineage though there's as much Percival Everett and Frank Stafford here as Welty, and Davis's magnificent song is very much his own.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: It’s pretty flattering for those chumps she compares me to.

 

In all honesty, Maud Casey is incredibly generous, and that comment gives me both tremendous pride and a not inconsiderable amount of imposter syndrome.

 

I first read her blurb in a bar in New Orleans, and I immediately told myself “Don’t read it again.” I was afraid if I read it again, I’d believe it, and I knew nothing so flattering could be good for me.

 

Welty writes with immense elegance and speed. Everett and Stafford write with power and humor, and they’re so much fun to read. They all have a specific sense of place in their fiction.

 

So I guess I’d say, I hope it’s true. I don’t know that it’s true, but Maud Casey is brilliant, so I’d believe her if I were you. And you can trust me, because I’m in the lineage of Welty, Stafford, and Everett, and my magnificent song is very much my own.

 

Q: How did you decide on the order in which the stories would appear in the collection?

 

A: I really wish I could tell you a fascinating lie here and pretend that this was thematic reason, but it was all instinctive. I thought of it like putting songs on an album. You start with your single. You go to something softer, more rhythmic. I tried to vary the funny stories from the more serious ones.

 

I wanted to start with the “I Can Outdance Jesus” story because that felt loud one that will draw people in. I knew I wanted to end with the story “Roar and Retreat” which is the longest short story I’ve ever written, and the only story that explicitly set outside of Kentucky.

 

It takes place at the ocean, and I wanted the book to end at the ocean. It seemed right to end with the longest story, looking at the largest thing at the world. I like albums that end with something long, strange, contemplative songs (like “Desolation Row” or “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”).

 

But again, this is only a feeling. It was the most enjoyable part of the book, thinking of it like an album, and I have no idea if I made the right choices.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on a mystery set in the world of country music. I love old country music. I love the songs, but the stories are what keep me up at night. The casual way they’d drink themselves to death and end petty disagreements with gunfire. All the while they’re creating these works of genius that won’t help them at all.

 

There’s something about the obvious fakeness of country music mixed with how real the emotions get that breaks my heart. The singers are wearing rhinestones and thousand-dollar boots that never touch mud, and speaking for the working man. It’s like the drag version of blue collar.

 

They’re obviously fake but all they can talk about is how real they are—the tension in that makes for high drama. I thought setting a mystery in there would heighten their senses. Give these emotionally sloppy creative geniuses a problem, high stakes, and a ticking clock and see how they handle it.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Satan is the ruler of this world.

 

That’s not something I believe, but I read an interview with Bob Dylan, and at the end they asked if there was anything else we should know and he said, “Satan is the ruler of this world.”

 

I’ve thought about that for decades, and it’s been my go-to reaction whenever anyone asks if there’s anything else they should know. It’s funniest aside anyone could offer. “Just before you go, you should know that everything you see and sense is the product of the literal embodiment of evil.” Presumably, he found everything else he said before that more important.

 

It’s odd to hear that philosophy from someone who’s had so much earthly success. Then again, Bob Dylan is right about pretty much everything, and I tend to trust him more than I trust myself. So maybe he is right, in which case, it truly would be a good thing to know. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb