Sweet Tea, Country Music, and Some Southern-Fried Woolf: an Interview with Author Drēma Drudge

Here's an interview with the co-host of MFA Payday, Drēma Drudge. 
Her bio: 
"Welcome! I’m Drēma Drudge, author. From reading cereal boxes on the breakfast table when I was a wee thing to reading my first chapter book in a mimosa tree which birthed my love for novels and twinned it with my affection for trees, the written word and I have been fast friends forever. I’ve also been writing in one capacity or another since I was about nine, starting with terrible poems and graduating to melodramatic stories in junior high. (No one explained to me then that my beloved books came from the destruction of my (almost) equally beloved trees!)

Mercifully, I eventually discovered that there are books, classes, and programs on writing and I learned how to write! Now I have an MFA in Creative Writing.

Read more about my books.

I’m married to the incomparable Barry Drudge, musician (and writer) extraordinaire. We have two grown children, and we live in a charming small town filled with plenteous, splendid, trees and wide Victorian homes.

Barry and I have been privileged to travel to some really cool places. My first novel ended up being written in six countries! As a result of our travels, I’ve ended up writing in some fascinating, gorgeous places, such as sitting in a pew in the Pantheon in Rome and writing in Recoleta Cemetery in Argentina. I’ve visited the homes, birthplaces, and graves of many of my writing and art heroes and have often had the opportunity to write in or about those very places, something my younger self never imagined possible."

Southern-Fried Woolf
Briscoe Chambers is not only the manager of her country music star husband, but a graduate student trying to complete her Virginia Woolf thesis by fall – the same time her cheating husband, Michael, has an album due to avoid being in breach of contract. No problem, right?

Except his co-writer will be Velvet Wickens, his idol who has been opening shows for him. And who happens to be the one he’s cheating with. Now Briscoe has been asked by their record label to ensure the album gets finished on time. To accomplish this, they must all live together for the duration of the writing of the album.

And by the way, Briscoe knows, and it’s triggering coping mechanisms she had thought were long gone.

Fans of the writing of both Taylor Jenkins Reid and Virginia Woolf will enjoy this novel that has plenty of sweet tea, country music, Virginia Woolf, and heartache. In addition, the reader gets to watch over Briscoe’s shoulder as she crafts her essay and attempts to untangle her troubled marriage.

Sign up for a free story over at  www.dremadrudge.com. 

Transcript

0:30

Welcome to MFA Payday, where we help you evaluate your writing with intention. We're your host, Dreamer Drudge. Before we get started today, we have a fun new freebie for you. Do MFA grads need a literary agent? Well, do they? Hmm. Well, we've heard a lot of our friends talking about this lately, Barry. So we thought we'd just create a guide to help you consider pursuing an agent is right for you. Go to our website, mfapayday. com and sign up for our newsletter. And you'll get access to our guide that will help you figure out what's in your writing's best interest. Just do it. That's right. MFAPayday. com. Well, I, I'm excited today because I get to interview someone that, uh, is a large part of my life and is doing a wonderful job at everything that she does. She turns all no's to yes. Uh, my wife, Dreama. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. Well, of course, and we've, we've been meaning to do this for a while because this book has been out since January, but you know, life and other people and such. So let me read a little bit of your biography here. Okay. My wife Dreama is the award winning author of the novels Victorian, which came out in March of 2020, and Southern Fried Wolf, which came out in January of 2023. Oh, that's this year! A graduate of the Naslund Mann Graduate School of Writing, she and I, musician and writer Barry, have two grown children, a grand dog, and live in a picturesque town in Indiana. We also host this podcast M F A Payday. You can learn more about Dreama and get a free short story at www dot dreama drudge. D r E M A D R U D g e.com. Oh, I'll tell you, Dreama, you've garnered so many accolades or your work has, I guess you are connected to your work, so therefore, you share those accolades, since its publication in January. So let's talk about those to date. Southern Fried Wolf has garnered its share of accolades since its publication this past January. Thank you. To date, it is a finalist in self publishing review, semi finalist as of now, in literary fiction, the best of indie, 12th Annual Kindle Book Awards. I think it's going to go to the top. Take it to the top from your lips. That's right. It's been awarded the Silver Literary Titan Book Award, runner up in the 2022 Page 100 competition, shortlisted for the 2023 Somerset CIBAs. I assume that's how you say it. It's C I B A S. literary and contemporary fiction. A red ribbon winner for the Wishing Shelf Book Awards. And her novel also received a 9. 25 out of 10, which I think is pretty darn good, in Publisher Weekly's self publishing division. Booklife Prize. The semi finalists are yet to be announced. Wow. All I can say is wow. That's, you know, thank you. Tell me a little bit about your book. Well, first of all, thank you, Barry, for taking the time to talk with me. Well, yeah, I take all the time in the world. This is going to be the longest one. No, I'm kidding. Well, should I reveal that we have had a couple of technical difficulties? Oh, sure. So technically this is the Third time we have attempted to talk about my book and the first two times we were using a program to just did not record. Yeah, we would think especially we double triple checked as it was recording to say it was recording until we looked about halfway through three quarters of the way through and it had stopped. Yeah. So my throat's a little raw, so. If I sound a little like this, forgive me. I don't know who she is. It's Svetlana. So I should know what I'm talking about by now. Briscoe Chambers is not only the manager of her country music star husband, but a graduate student trying to complete her Virginia Woolf thesis by fall. The same time her cheating husband, Michael, has an album due to avoid being in breach of contract. No problem, right? Except... His co writer will be Velvet Wiccans, his idol who has been opening shows for him. And who happens to be the one he's cheating with. Now Briscoe has been asked by her record label to ensure the album gets finished on time. To accomplish this, they must all live together for the duration of the writing of the album. Oh my... And by the way, Briscoe knows and it's triggering coping mechanisms in her that she had thought were long gone. This is for fans of the writing of both Taylor, Jenkins, Reed, and Virginia. Quite intriguing. That's, that's a broad, a broad base to have to cover there. Why thank you, Barry. That's purposeful. I really must say. Well, let me talk a little bit more about the kind of a thumbnail of the journey from. Inception to publication. Can do, can do. So this book started off as something between flash fiction and poetry. 2007, 2008 ish, somewhere around there. Um. Well how big was it, how big was it when it was a flash fiction piece? a couple paragraphs to a page. And how big is it now? Two hundred and... Yeah, well, like that's an interesting story in and of itself. This edition is, I believe, 273 pages long. So that would be, you know, Bigger. Yeah. I'm not even gonna do math. I don't do math. Go ahead. Exactly. So, so it started out, as I say, as a piece of flash fiction, almost poetry. It was some sort of riding the line there. Um, Became a short story. Became a novella. And, uh, sitted around a little bit as a novella to a few competitions. Didn't really get, um, much traction there. It was my graduate thesis for grad school. And from there I decided I wasn't done with it I wanted to continue working on it. So it became a novel. Well now that's part of it because that's the part with what became Briscoe. Michael's name existed from the beginning, but the original character The, her, the, the spouse was, morphed into a spunky little lady named Briscoe. True. But at the same time, this final version of it is more than just a normal novel dinging, ding dinging I thank you for noticing that. I noticed you did notice I did. Technically, this could be called a novel essay. I call it a novel and feel pretty comfortable doing so because the essay portion is not that large, but it's there for multiple purposes. I kind of took the mommy track, went back to school later in life. And went back as a senior. So, I was taking senior seminar where we were, doing deep dives into books and we also had to write our senior thesis. And I already knew Virginia Woolf, most people do, you know, from earlier in my undergrad career, obviously I'd read her essays, Three Guineas, A Room of One's Own, and Orlando, that beautiful, strange book, that I just adored. It is fabulous, but I had never encountered To the Lighthouse. Don't know why I never went further with Wolf. I thought she was lovely, dark, and deep, to quote Frost, but I don't even know if I knew the novel existed, if I'm being honest, but this was one of the novels in senior seminar and, we read it. I was, the first time around now, I want to say, I was very familiar with Stream of Consciousness, had even practiced some of it myself in some short stories, and a novel better burned than ever to see the light of day. Anyway, But instead of just doing what I call a typical stream of consciousness, Wolf went off in these directions and, flitted from person to person, and is this then the house talking, or is this what exactly is talking at this point? It was just, it was fascinating, but it was also a little baffling. And I think in the back of my mind was, Dear God, I have to write a thesis about something. So, I read Lighthouse. I read it again. I read it again. I read it six times before I really felt like I was grasping enough of it to write about it. And it became for me, pardon me, not trying to be sacrilegious, but it became for me, some people will go through the Bible and they'll find scriptures that are just things to inspire, scriptures that are just beautiful to hear, wonderful prose, beautiful images to pick out or share or go to for advice or what have you. To the Lighthouse is like that for me. Every time I pick it up, I flip through, I see something that speaks to the human condition that pierces, what we think of as the world and gets to the heart of it. It's just that kind of book for me. What I decided to do was to marry this, ha ha ha, problematic novel of mine with the essay. Oh, I didn't finish. So I took that essay. Yes, I was able to get my undergraduate degree finally. Yay! Yay! I was having so much fun. I thought, well, let's just keep this ball rolling. I went on to grad school, and I rolled in thinking, oh, I've got this essay and I've just worked on, last year it's fresh. I'm going to be able to use this. And in grad school, we had to write what was called an extended critical essay, the ECE. I remember mine, unfortunately, right? I thought, oh, I'm only going to have to add maybe 10 pages, a dozen pages onto it. That won't be hard. I've done most of the work already, and I can just jump back into the creative writing and not have to worry about this other stuff. Not that I didn't enjoy Wolf, but I don't like people telling me what to write about Wolf. So, joke was on me. The professor's like, oh, that's a great idea. This is this mentor of mine. He says, But I have some ideas. Of course he did. And he made me dig deeper and he's like, I need you to add another book. Yada, yada, do this and that. And I'm like, okay, okay. I really enjoyed it. And again, I earned my credit and I have my degree. Yay. Yeah. but I never gave up on Wolf. Like I just couldn't, even now, even though I'm finished with the book, I'll never be finished She is my thinking. One of If not the best writer, one of the best writers for me, probably the best writer. She's not the easiest. She's one of the most difficult writers to understand. If you ask me if you wanted Easy Beach read, maybe not. She's not it. Maybe not. She's not it. Now. For those of you who might be wondering and wanna know more about that from Dream, huh? Go ahead and write at info at. Mfapayday. com. Yes, we'll talk. That's right. We'll start a conversation. We're all about it. So now you've got this percolated ECE. You've got this whole, I mean, did you think, I mean, I know you spoke at a conference, you want an award for it, that you Were unexpected because you just went because a friend had asked it wasn't even a That's well thought out per se. So now you've got that and then you've got this short story How did they collide into one another? That's an interesting question. I really wish I remember the moment. It's one of these things You wonder, why can't I remember exactly? Along the way, I learned that Virginia Woolf had attempted to write a novel essay, and I'm like, what the hell is that? What's a novel essay? And it's just what it sounds like. She tried to take this idea she had about women's rights and such into this essay and put it into a novel. And she tried it for quite some time, and at some point, there are two ways of looking at it. Either she gave up on it because she felt she couldn't do it, or she felt it wasn't doing her idea justice. And probably, it's more the latter, I would assume. But I thought, I want to do that. Of course you do. If you've lived with DREAMer as long as I have, there's never a say no in anything, and it's definitely I could do that. Why can't I do that? How hard can it be? that's something that I think should be on her tombstone in memoriam should be, how hard can it be until she gets into it? But, at that point it's like, you know, torpedoes, you know, full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes type of thing, you know. He's saying this in particular because we have taken it upon ourselves to do lots of home renovations lately. And when I say home renovations, we are not the kind to do extensive carpentry and such, but little projects. And I'm just like, how hard could it be? Come on, we can do this. And so we get in the middle of it. I'm like, Oh, I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard. But you know, when you're in the middle of something, you have to finish it. And so we do. Oh, absolutely. I don't think that I've ever quite seen her say that about the actual work of art of writing and work of writing because she's, she's always up to the challenge. So yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you. Bit you got through the mail or email that reviewed your book Said some really lush and exciting things and I think you know, I'm the husband so therefore Everybody's gonna just say oh you love her And you'll say all kinds of positive things just because of your love. Well, I mean sure I mean if it were just adequate, you know, work a day work. Yeah, that'd be fine. I love my wife and whatever. But this this if if you did a blind read and I didn't know she was working on this, I would be looking at it going, Whoa, this is staggeringly intellectual and heartfelt all at once. I don't know how you You marry all that stuff and psychological and you know, dig digging deep and down into the dirty. So, okay. We've gotta also mention that not only were you writing this, but you took pauses and you wrote another, your first novel in the middle of all of this. Indeed I did, yes. As part of grad school, I. I had the opportunity to be in a novel, workshop. And, have my whole novel examined by a group and, and to do likewise. And, so I hurried up and finished it. in a matter of whatever. And now, of course, then revisions come at a much slower pace and you want to make sure to get it right. But in the hot fever, I dashed off a novel six months. She's not telling you, but it's six months. But then I did do some extensive revision work. I don't want anyone to think that I was sloppy and it was just easy because it wasn't like that. Yeah. So anyway, so yeah, that was in between. So the other was sort of on the back burner. And I was sort of working on it. In between slash afterwards as I was waiting my book was out on submission and I was like what should I do with this story? Do I continue? Do I send it out? Do I revise it? And I realized it just wasn't done with the couple and then I started thinking well, what if? Why don't I play with this and like I still really enjoyed my essay That I had written on Wolf and I thought, Oh, I would love to just continue working on that. And so I started putting them together and, here you go. Hey, well, would you do us a favor and read us a bit of it? I think we're in a great spot now to introduce us to the world of Briscoe Chambers and her motley cast of characters. Yes, yes, indeed. That, that would be true. Oh, it, uh. It is amazing. So without any further ado, let's introduce you to Dreama Drudge and her book Southern Fried Wolf. Thank you. This is chapter one. So the very top of the book I pushed my whining phone across the bed with my toes until it dangles over the edge like an imperiled on screen Marvel superhero Not that it stops ringing. I admire my freshly polished toenails Sunset Chrome, very cool. But force my fingers to return to the home keys, while my thoughts hunt for a similar perch. I sweep my hair off my shoulder with determination. My graduate thesis I have nicknamed Beastus is due too soon to allow interruptions of any kind. I sternly warn myself. I thwart the creeping dusk with the twist of a lamp switch to extend the day, and I once again position my fingers. This time, I actually moved them. In what has been seen by some as her most autobiographical work, Virginia Woolf weaves into her novel, To the Lighthouse, a femininely knitted and masculinely knotted marriage of covert and subtle madness. Though not one without warmth and love. She challenges the reader with a paradox. She makes sacred the domestic arena while revealing madness by the domestic activities themselves, thus showing us the twisted and twisting finger of one of the main characters, Mrs. Ramsey. And of herself, I type. While frowning at my insistent phone, while wondering how much shit I'll get for using the word madness, and especially in relation to Wolf. I highlight it to carefully, I highlight it to consider it carefully, in light of previous and present scholarship, to decide if it even makes sense. To use it. Thank you. That's a great kick off. What a picture. That is a great opening, Dreamo. Thank you. It, uh, sets up the scene to where she discovers Some stuff is, shenanigans are going on in her life, and she's initially, and maybe that's psychological, she's initially blocking them out, ignoring it, while she's trying to get this work at hand done. Do you think that later on when, as I read in the description, that they're all in that pressure cooker of writing and things, she's also trying to block out The affair and all of that, even though it's right in her face to get the work done to fulfill the contract. Well, very good, Mr. Drudge. And I feel like I need to say a few things, maybe fill in a few gaps for people. just because we've read To the Lighthouse doesn't mean everyone has. in Wolf's To the Lighthouse, One of the main characters, if there could be said to be a main character, I was gonna say, what? is Lily Briscoe, who is a young painter. And she is just mesmerized and fascinated by Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey's relationship. She seems almost obsessed with Mrs. Ramsey, just trying to figure out, sight is a huge thing in that book. Trying to see things, trying to figure it all out. They're in a pressure cooker themselves in that they're at this vacation home, so it's not a place they're at regularly, this family, but they've invited the highways and byways and compelled them, right? They have all these, students and sort of people they sort of know and they invite them in. They actually rent out extra hotel rooms in town so that these people can hang out with them, for the summer. Mrs. Ramsey is always telling Lily, Oh, you really have to marry, you should get married, and as a matter of fact, picks someone out that, the outsider's excuse me, what? What do these people have in common? Besides, maybe they're nice people, but anyway. Lily is not so sure she ever wants to marry. She just wants to create good art, and in the book you've got dang Charles Tansley always going, women can't paint, women can't write, and of course Lily's frozen by this, but I'm getting off on a tangent. That's really neither here nor there, but they're in this pressure cooker in this place. That's they're not alone as a family and Mr. Ramsey sort of behaves badly at times, but Lily's trying to figure this all out. Also, I owe a debt to Bel Canto. I was fascinated with By Ann Patchett's use of this they're all, um, pressure cooker of their own. Yes, exactly. They're all caught here. They cannot escape obviously in a different way. I wanted that sort of, isolated feeling where. Briscoe has to be with all these people that she just does not want to be with right now and she has the deadline of her own Thesis which is really overdue, but they are saying absolutely she has got to get this turned in By the beginning of fall, and also you've got Michael's, record label saying that this album between Michael and now V, which is Velvet, the one he had the affair with, this must be turned into ASAP, they've got to get this written so they can get it recorded so they can put it out because they want to capitalize on the fact that at the beginning of the novel, Michael has fallen off stage publicly after V has disappeared. So V was the opening act for his show. And he gets drunk and falls off stage when she disappears. And there's like, what happened to her? So the public is beginning to wonder what's going on. And, so the record label is like, Well, let's just let's just capitalize on this did they didn't they you know what I mean and which seems kind of strange but anyway, so Briscoe is not willing to give up all of the time and energy She has spent a decade of her life not only in this marriage, but in helping Michael create his persona his career it's not only, her emotions that are at stake, it's money, it's reputation, it's her life's work to this point, helping this man become who he is, and she, and yet, they all are in this house to create this album. Michael thinks he needs his band, eventually he was going to need them, but he wants them earlier than he probably needs them. And then Velvet comes to stay. So Briscoe's having to deal with all of this at once. And her mother is a Wolf Scholar. so she, Briscoe, is trying to herself, get this degree to have something of her own, but in a way she's trying to connect and please her mother. her father was a studio musician. And, he did not have a great head for business, unfortunately. But she went to school. for the business of music, try to help him. And then he ended up dying of cancer just a few years after she graduated. So she is well positioned to help Michael. She is a songwriter. She plays guitar, but she considers herself supporting staff, backup, if you will, in a way. But, the owner of the record label, Drake, She had interned for him in the past. So her, he knows her capabilities, and he knows just how much he can push her and how much she can push Michael. Therefore, Yes. Well, can we, can we back this up okay. So what you have is you have Virginia Woolf through the vehicle of Lily Briscoe in a looking at a marriage, looking at the dynamics of the marriage. You have Virginia Woolf using the vehicle of Lily Briscoe as she psychoanalyzes in her own way by, observing the life of the Ramses, which we never actually get a name for. They're only a Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey, oddly enough. Right. Not so oddly, but go ahead. Yeah. And Summer with a whole bunch of hangers on because Mr. Ramsey's such a genius. But, so what I think... Then, if I'm not mistaken, you've got also then Briscoe Chambers, as all of this is coming apart, using what she's writing to also analyze her relationship. Because, first of all, Briscoe Chambers is not Mrs. Ramsey, nor is Michael Mr. Ramsey, but it gives a sounding board to reflect on relationships in and of themselves and how their dynamics work. In that, something that we didn't talk about so far, if we might, would be that, another dynamic, you mentioned her mother, Jules, but for Briscoe, Jules is, is, I want to say almost a sore subject, but not quite. what would you call their dynamic amongst themselves? Because there's a lot of frustration. Yeah. since her mother has been largely absent from her life since she, Briscoe was 12. Her mother, was a Wolf Scholar, went to live basically on a mountaintop in a horse fire tower scenario. supposed to be there for a year, but got her grant renewed and then found other funding for it. Basically never came back. Wow, that's, that's something to think about. But, Briscoe did go there for the summer every summer so it wasn't as if they didn't have any kind of relationship. But yeah, I think there definitely were a lot of things left unsaid between them. and yet Briscoe is, is. Also very taken by the same literature that her mother is and, is trying to examine her parents marriage. She's trying to examine her own marriage because she hasn't exactly had a great, example to follow and, and you're right, then there's. Wolf, who is examining her family's life, because her family used to rent a place like that, very similar. and so Mrs. Ramsey is her mother. And I have to go back to Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey, or Mrs. and Mr., and they were not given first names. I think that very much shows the symbolic nature of them, and how they very much are meant to represent These pieces, you know, husband, wife. That's, that's excellent. could you then on this note, read maybe a little bit of, some, interaction between, Briscoe and her mother, Jules. Absolutely. Maybe I'm being too familiar because her, her actual name, I mean, it's a hoity toity name, but she comes from honey. That's right. So Briscoe and her, so Briscoe and her mother go to a wolf conference and Briscoe's mother is the plenary speaker although she did not bother to tell her daughter that because why would she? Her mother lives pretty much outside of society and society's expectations so, during it, this is Briscoe's take on these attendees. This is not my take on the attendees. But there happened to be some who just asked some really asinine questions during the Q& A after, Jules's talk., there's a Q& A. My mother opens her eyes and smiles invitingly, but only I know it's a fake response. There are sure to be some stupid questions mixed in with the inevitable pseudo intellectual ones. Does my mother sound like someone who suffers fools gladly? A hand goes up. Yes. Did Virginia Woolf, like, really not want children? My mother's smile disappears. It was more that it was inadvisable due to her mental health as I understand it. Another hand. Does that mean she used some kind of birth control? Do we know a kind? Or did she just not have sex except with Vita? You'd have to ask her. A nervous Twitter flushes through the crowd. Mother's chest heaves. There's not a thing I can do. From the back, without a lifted hand, I read a rumor that she had an abortion. Do you think that's what really killed her? And they threw her body in the river to cover it up and claimed she killed herself? We're done, my mother says, unclipping the mic, not addressing the ignorance of facts, the half formed suppositions, the incorrect knowledge of Wolf's age of death well beyond childbearing years, unless she was the biblical Sarah. Mother's brow says all of these things. Her words boom as she hunches, her adopted southern accent now fully deployed. We're here to talk about a writer who changed everything. She broke and restyled the noveletic form irrevocably. pointed out injustices perpetrated on women by society and bested many, no, most men's writing forever. And all you want to do is speculate about her sex life and her lack of children. When was the last time you were at a lecture about a man without children and someone asked why he didn't have kids? Did anyone ask if he pulled out? Didn't anyone want to know if his lovers had abortions? Women, don't blame men for not respecting your research if your questions today are any indication of the sort of work you're doing. Admittedly, a mic drop isn't the same when it's done with a lavalier mic, but still, she lets it falls and storms offstage. I give her a few minutes before following her to our hotel room, where I find her sprawled on her bed. I do a slow clap from the doorway, but it's lost on her. I'm serious! Hmm, she says, her fingers moving as if she holds a cigarette. She quit a decade ago because she said it was too difficult to climb the tower when she'd been smoking. Her lips tighten and her face grows melancholy. I'm ashamed of having carved my life from someone else's life as you once suggested I had done. I've spent my career immersing myself in the work of another, creating something of my own from it, only to have a room full of social media reared pop culture tarts negate everything I've attempted in a thirst for literary gossip. As if they couldn't. Google answers to their questions. I sit on the edge of the bed, but turn away. I feel for her enough not to challenge the use of the word tart as she would if I used it. You've built a house of original criticism on her foundation. You've helped a generation see and appreciate wolf anew present. Conference accepted. I think that first question just opened the floodgates of speculation. Social media encourages casual scholarship. Owning a mug with an Austin quote on it and brandishing a plume in your profile picture doesn't make you a scholar. She's heard me say that, but I don't mention it. I see you've checked out Instagram. I can see how many of these attendees could appear to be pussiers. Some surely are. However, I will take casual engagement to none at all. She rolls towards me, her brown eyes pink all around, where her hands have been pressing against them, her skeletal tanned face earnest as she gently takes my hand. Briscoe, don't be like me. Have a family. I'm not supposed to say that to you, but I felt my scholarship wouldn't be taken seriously if I were a mother. I follow Wolf's example. What they reminded me of today was that maybe Wolf didn't have a choice. Maybe she would have chosen to have a family if she could have safely, and her killing the angel of the house had more to do with killing her hopes and dreams of a typical life. Justifying why she WOULDN'T have children. I followed mindlessly in her footsteps, like that was what I was SUPPOSED to do. Maybe she DIDN'T have a choice. You have a choice. I pull away. What is this, an after school special for feminist families who suddenly see the light? Don't undo your whole career's work with one misguided pity party. It doesn't slow her. I ran away from you, from your father. I thought I had to be alone, focused on my work. Now it's all I have. They reminded me of that out there. They reminded me that I sacrificed something I might not have had to. I have no one left. You have a daughter, you ridiculous calcified cow! We both laugh. I kneel on the floor beside her and stroke her hair until she pulls away. Though I have to force the words out of my tight throat, I say as I sit up on my haunches. I've never felt bitter. Being without you made me fearless. I may have missed you, felt disconnected, wondered occasionally if I had done something to run you off, but you have been yourself. That's the mother I needed. And I don't for one minute think you have lived the way you have because of Wolf. You love your life, your freedom. If Wolf was your excuse to do what you needed to do, then good for me. The omniscient me can believe this. She's mature and has never woken up at night crying for her mother. What if I never have grandchildren because I was never a real mother to you? Her face wrinkles and sags. Babies are a big ball of need. I'm not sure motherhood's for me. Trust me, I have all the responsibility I can handle right now. She sits up and curls her tan legs beneath her. I shake my head as the surprise seeps in. I would have bet good money that I was the only woman in America who felt confident that her mother wouldn't pressure her to have children. Till now. We laugh. You really don't want children, she asks. Any night life around here? That evening we go dancing. My mother has no rhythm, but enough joy to make up for it. I say nothing about her dry heave dancing. I just orbit her as always, her hula hoop. That curly haired grad student named Marshall whose company I left her in at 2 a. m. is probably still wondering just what happened to him. I, for one, don't want to know. Predictably, my mother and I never speak of it. Can I do the slow clap now? I think one of the things with her mother I noticed, besides that was a hilarious scene that I had to keep from laughing throughout, calcified cow. That, what a, little zinger that was. Is that as the book progresses and they get in contact with one another again, you know, Briscoe doesn't seem to have explained to her the total dynamic of what's going on in the pressure cooker songwriting steam room, if you will, that her mother tries to be a voice of reason in the middle of what appears to be to her madness. And I asked that question to a degree to you as well, you know. Briscoe considers herself in the book to be a fourth wave feminist. Right. And yet, faced with the reality of losing Michael. Why is it, knowing all she knows and understanding in her head, maybe that's part of the answer, that this isn't acceptable to anyone? I mean, that's being treated that way. They shouldn't just... Lay down and take it if you will. Why why didn't she run away screaming in the first place? Hmm, that's a great question. I think there are multi points to that answer First let's look at the fact that her mother left her. Mm hmm when you've been left, you don't want to leave people Okay, first of all, you know how much it hurts and secondly you cling To someone, even when maybe they're not the best because they are that substitute if you will. by the time she loses her father, she really feels like she has no one. When she and her mother go to the conference, that's sort of when they reconnect. But in my thinking, although I don't think that it's. spelled out in the book, they have a sporadic relationship between, between those times. Like they're not close, but the conference was just actually about a year before the events of the book. that's when they reconnect and, a sort of peace, a sort of, um, understanding comes between them. I wanted to kind of say that. Yeah. Yeah. Does that make sense so far? Um, And I don't know, I would say Briscoe has all the language of the feminist movement, but that's not the driving force behind her. Like, she has the language, she knows what to say and not to say, she worries that maybe she's not always as good a feminist as she should be. She wants to think she can be that, but considering the marriage she's in, considering the town she lives in, if I dare say, um, it's, it's difficult to actually wear that mantle. That's good. That's good. And, uh, Once, once they get to the house you were speaking earlier, I think about, um, kind of, uh, Wolf's usage of stream of consciousness. Yes, absolutely. I think, I think you have a piece in here that you successfully. Now it's not in a Wolfian voice by any means, but you've you've definitely got your own take on it And I think it's beautiful. Could you share that with us? I can share that with you. Thank you After having fallen asleep while writing I startle awake and rub my face Feeling the imprint of the embossed letters from the cover of the waves on my right cheek From somewhere below the salted scent of music finds me just as mr. Ramsey depends upon his wife I know Michael depends on me. How could I forget? His music says as much. My arms flutter, commanded by his notes. He lures me with a promise of bottomless mysteries of the soul, of emotions I've never experienced. His fingers fly and I am up and out the door, seeking him from room to room. He is using nothing between his fingers and the strings. I'd hear it if he were. Here am I. The notes roll. Where is he? Bernita, oh, what is she doing in front of me with her open mouth and sounds that are not his? Fish, did she say? And that is what is wrong with this world, is everyone is worried about the fish, but I will not listen. And he is where? Not in this room. Not in this one either. And yet, he must be close by, and Bernita is, shut up, shut up, shut up. Up. Now, here, I sink down in his feet, my hair spreading across them. I know now how sorry he is, and I can afford to forgive him because he wants to be forgiven. Michael puts his pick in his mouth to finger the notes. He plays the fretboard with enthusiasm. Liquid lightning. I part my lips and open them. Nothing comes out. Just something Velvet and I came up with on the road, Michael says when he finishes. Of course it is. I ignore the pity on Bernita's face and find someplace Anyplace else I have to be. Wow. Do you consider that a, a turning moment? Yes. A realization that, first of all, that she's under the assumption that A, he's fingerpicking all along, which he takes a pick and puts it in his mouth that he'd had, then starts fingerpicking. And two, that this music that appeared to her to be an apology. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Is something that him and his clandestine lover, I guess mm-hmm. uh, worked out on the road. Yes. So then it sort of hits her like a ton of bricks, would you say? Oh, absolutely. And I wanna go Michael hunting when I when I read that be very quiet. We're hunting Michaels. I don't actually hunt, but um, no, uh, you're absolutely right. Uh, and, and now, I mean this is not on the topic, but there are a couple of characters that I don't know if we're going to have time to mention that other than what we just did, I would love to, um, so Bernita is a mother substitute. She's been in their lives. Her and Michael, she is their housekeeper. But I think she also, all fairness is, is comedic relief. Oh yeah. So the deal with Bernita is, um, they advertised for help and what they said was, Um, no English necessary, meaning we don't care who you are. We just want someone to come and clean our house. We don't care whether you speak English or not. It's fine. And Bernita interpreted that she's just a little hillbilly. I mean, forgive me, but I'm from the South. I can say that. Right. Yeah. Bernita does not speak Spanish. however, she interprets this ad to mean that she needs to speak Spanish. In order to get the job. She thinks they only want someone who speaks Spanish. Ah. So she's betting that they don't know Spanish. She can pretend to know Spanish. So she speaks made up Spanish all the time. But, um, so she'll put in some English words as if she's learning English along the way. And there are lots of food words in there, you know. Chalupa. Lolita. just, okay, that's not a food word. But, anyway. but Bernita, she's comic relief, but she's also very faithful, she is like a second mother, she's, she's older than Briscoe, briscoe comes to rely on her very much, they also kind of verbally spar. Oh yeah. But, but they still, they, they care about each other very much. Briscoe tends to spar with a lot of people in a way. She's spirited. Oh, okay. Yeah. That's. Yeah. And another character is Patrick. He is the personal assistant. He is technically the personal assistant to both Michael and Briscoe. But he basically does briscoe's bidding and occasionally he'll do something for Michael if he's not busy with whatever briscoe wants him to do um And again someone that she is very close to she helps him through his woes when you know He has problems with his boyfriend. They they crown one another's shoulders uh, and it's like there's a friendship but also She doesn't hesitate to ask him to do her bidding whenever she needs something to be done. Uh, there, you know, um, I feel like she's amusingly entitled. You know what I mean? Like, it gets frustrating at times, but also sometimes... It's funny how entitled she can be. Well, can I ask a question based on that? Having lived in Nashville and watching people that had some level of success that we worked around, there would be that moment, like, could you go fetch me coffee? Or can you do this or that? Things that normal people wouldn't ask of one another. Yes. Do you think that perhaps Briscoe's level of living through the fame of Michael and whatnot, do you think that that... Affected her her her grasp. we hired you to do things, it's like mm hmm. Yeah I mean, it's like a pecking order, right? There's Michael Michael who will get absolutely anything and everything he wants isn't that clear and then from there it's briscoe And then the people under that they've hired and she doesn't hesitate to remind them. Yeah. Hey, this is your job You're gonna do your job, And I think part of that is the fact that she has an odd relationship with money She and her father always struggled,, her mother always struggled to stay on her little hill there And so she feels like money talks and and I think maybe especially like with well both Patrick and Bernita That they may take liberties because there is a, uh, it's not like, oh, you're the hired help. Do not talk to us when you come in a room or anything like that. I think she, she especially with, with Patrick relies on some of his feedback also because he's also hired by Michael as well. There have been times that things have happened that was not relayed back to her. Right. Which she feels is, is disloyal. And Patrick has to remind her, um, you know, I work for both of you and, uh, you know, who, who's really in charge here on day to day you, but guess who pays my salary in a way. and also, I don't guess we haven't really mentioned this, the book description mentions a triggering or how, coping mechanisms have been triggered in her, uh, ever since her mother left when. Briscoe was 12. She's battled an eating disorder. Okay, and so Patrick and Bernita tried because they're with her on the day to day. They're seeing, someone who she's the housekeeper Bernita is but she also likes cooks their meals and make sure they're eating whether she's ordering in food or she's actually cooking or whatever And she sees what Briscoe is or is not eating the same with Patrick because she works so closely with them and They, they hear if she sneaks off to maybe do a compensatory behavior, you know, that sort of thing. You mean refunding? Yes, yes. And, um, so for her it's sort of a cycle between bulimia and anorexia. Like it's, um, just depends on how bad the stress really gets. And when you're in this, You know, cauldron, this, this terrible, um, what were we calling it? Pressure cooker. Pressure cooker. Yeah. Where she's trying to help her husband who she, she really does love and admire. I mean, obviously she worships his, um, abilities. She sees where there's room for growth. I mean, she does see that, but she's just in awe of him. And, um, and now she's, she's having to help him. And his lover, and what she has to decide is how much of herself can she sacrifice? How much does she have to give? And she tries to look beyond. She tries to think, Okay, this is really, really, this is the hardest thing I've ever done. However, The fruits of it could be something that outlast us all. The fruits of it could be something that actually heals someone else in the same situation that we all find ourselves right now. So they're, they're creating a timeless piece of work. And as in turn, that's enveloped into a truly timeless piece of work that you've written. Thank you. Is there anything you want to add before we, Um, I just want to thank you so much for taking. Lots and lots of time. Oh, yeah, interview me and not only interview me, but um, you were my music consultant And I was able to ask you all the questions I had does this work and that work and you were one of my first readers and you read multiple drafts For which I cannot thank you enough because I can't imagine some of the drafts. I mean every other day for years He's heard me say I'm this is no good. I'm gonna get rid of it. I'm gonna start over. I hate this No, that or guess what, honey? I've, I've cut out 30, 000 words today. It's like, there's a proud moment, you know, it's like, well, and I guess I would just like to emphasize that, uh, the book has some, you know, obviously it has some dark things. I think it has some, uh, a lot, I tried to try to inject a lot of humor, a lot of, um, generosity of spirits. Um, you know, if you look. It's hard first person present to get other viewpoints, and I tried where I could, but if you just step a little to the left of where Briscoe is, you can see beyond. Like, I am not trying to demonize Velvet. You know, she, which I don't think we've mentioned, she and her family, uh, went through their own trauma. Yeah. Yeah. They were their own country, legends. And, I think in many ways she's to be pitied. So I'm not trying to do this, pitting woman against woman, but when you're in the thick of something, yeah. I think, yeah, it's, uh, you don't always think clearly when emotion takes over. Right, right, right, right. So, um, you know, I, I hope if you do know wolf, I think you'll enjoy it. If you don't know wolf, I think you'll, uh, maybe learn some things about wolf and hopefully enjoy it along the way. Wow. Well, thank you for your time in this, this journey that we've talked about. Um, to recap, it's, uh, Southern fried wolf. It is. It's sassy, it's spunky, it's psychological, it's, uh, looking into the depths of, of relationships left right and up and down and, uh, I think it will change you when you're done reading it. Oh, I do. It's, it's a very, wow. It's a great book. And where, where can we find this book at before we close? Oh, absolutely. Um, you can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, most of. Most booksellers, you can find that if you'd like an autographed copy, you can email me at, uh, dreama at dreamadrudge. com and, uh, we can arrange a way for me to autograph you a book and send it on out. We thank you for your time along this journey today and until next time, keep writing all the things. If you'd like to be a guest on our show and you're an MFA graduate, or someone in the publishing industry, go to our website, mfa payday.com and reach out to us on our contact forum. We Wish You a Merry Christmas