On finding spaces to think and work creatively

Callie, tell me about your day job.

I have a day job in tech. I work at a FinTech company, writing four words at a time and then spending two or three weeks on the phone with lawyers about why those four words don’t work. One of the things I really like about my day job is it gives me a space to think about words where I’m not in them. It provides me a different angle to think about language. I can get really precious about my fiction, which is part of the deal, but it’s really compelling to write something that means truly nothing to me and know that 60 million people are going to see it, and then work on my novel and be like, “Hey, if 100 people read this, I’m going to be thrilled.”

It’s good for my relationship to language. It does get in the way of pursuing a literary career, but it also funds my life. Work like this is an option that’s not given openly enough to writers. When you care about language, you don’t have many paths to get health insurance. Of course, you need to respect the place you’re working for and not feel like you’re contributing to the downfall of humanity. But I’ve seen a lot of writers struggle after MFA programs or after working for a long time in the literary space without ever getting benefits, or a good gig, or stability in a role that’s not at the whims of nonprofits and ever-changing grant structures. There’s some safety in forgoing a part of your identity for a day job.

I happen to know that you founded one of the best independent presses out there, A Strange Object—which I loved long, long, long before it acquired my book. You no longer run A Strange Object, but please tell me about that experience.

When Jill [Meyers, who still edits at A Strange Object] and I started the press, we were like, “We think we have taste. All the rest, we’ll learn.” We just dove dove right in and learned on our feet—learned some things well, I think, and never learned certain things. We always understood that it was never going to be a financially successful enterprise. Knowing that, we just decided, “We’re just going to find work that excites us, that’s new, that feels like it could be overlooked at major houses because it’s voicey or more experimental or because they don’t want to take risks on a story collection”—we both came from a story-loving background.

We built the whole press up before we had our first book, which was Kelly Luce’s Three Scenarios in which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail. It felt like a really good starting point for us. We wanted to do two or three books a year, and we did for a while do that. It was just the two of us. We were very hands-on. Our office was just a room with a tiny little window, and I went in one night and painted the big slash from the logo on the wall in bright red. We had this little spinner on the wall. One side was “normal” and one side was “strange,” and when we couldn’t make a decision about whether we were going to do something in the traditional way or in a completely ridiculous way, we would just spin the spinner and see what it landed on, and it would help us.

A Strange Object was so fun, and it was hard for me to walk away from it, but I did. I really wanted to pursue my own work. Still, I’m so excited when Jill puts a new book out. She’s got a book coming out by a writer named Ethan Rutherford, who we’ve loved for a really long time. It’s coming out right when my book comes out, which feels like kismet to me. I’m so happy that A Strange Object has managed to continue doing its thing. We didn’t know if it was going to be two books or 50 over the course of many years, and it’s looking like the latter, which is just delightful.

How does it feel to have your debut coming out with Doubleday, which is an imprint at a Big Five press—very different from A Strange Object?

I was nervous. I used to write very experimental stuff, super weird shit, and it never occurred to me that I would put my first book out with a major house. Never crossed my mind.

But Doubleday has been so much closer to the small press experience than I expected it to be, and that’s because of my editor, Lee Boudreaux. I don’t have the words to to describe how deeply she worked on Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine. She bought the book on partial, so she bought the first 100 pages. And I think over the course of the last three or four years, I’ve written maybe five or six different versions of this book, and she just got on board. She just was so patient and so invested, and it was a wildly different and better experience than I expected it to be going in.

Was it you who knew when you’d found the right version of the book, or was it Lee, or both of you? How did you stop yourself from writing more versions?

I’m still writing more versions in my head. I have never felt like something’s truly done, even though the book’s now in a physical form. Lee was hugely helpful, and so was my agent, PJ Mark. It was collaborative—way more collaborative than I thought it was going to be.

But yeah, there were versions of this book that I felt like were right and were there. And from those versions, the pieces that felt most right to me, the pieces that I felt like I’d nailed, are still in there. You know, it’s a short book, but it feels to me like there are just so many paths that could have been taken, so many potholes that I left or chose to clean up, or reroute it around that I could have made a totally different decision about.

When I got done was when I’d gotten to a point where I’d done the character justice. That was all I wanted to do. I just wanted to make sure that Doug was Doug and that he did what Doug would do, and that the bar he plays at existed in a tangible way, eventually. Getting all that delicate coloring right took years and years and years, and I’m really happy with it, but I do think I’ll be rewriting this book for the rest of my life. I’m kind of content with that.

When you say “Doug was Doug,” does that mean, “Doug was my character, Doug,” or “Doug was Doug Sahm, the musician he’s based on”? Or both?

I know you love Doug Sahm, but I get that question so rarely. It’s funny, even around Austin, where he was from and where I’ve lived for most of my adult life, people do not know who Doug Sahm is. There’s a huge mural of him outside one of the bars that I wrote some of this book at, and people do not know who it is, which is just wild to me.

But the answer to your question is number one. I took a lot from Doug Sahm’s life, but once I was really deep in his voice, I stopped doing research and stopped listening to his music. That was a place where I needed fewer constraints, which is also why I changed his name. I didn’t change [fellow musician] Joe Ely’s name, but for Doug, I was so deep in his character that it didn’t feel right to me to continue to hue to what I knew about Doug Sahm’s real life.

I changed the music itself, too. My dad is an enormous Austin music fan. He’s been here for decades and decades. He was at all the bars; he knows all the guys. And I grew up listening to a lot of cosmic country, a lot of ’70s Austin music, but it wasn’t what I was into as a kid. It felt too close to home. Coming back to it as an adult, I wanted to listen to a lot of the music, but I also wanted to imagine a band that was doing some of the stuff Doug Sahm did, like mixing conjunto into country, but that was also a little more open to blues and soul and some of the other stuff that was happening around Doug Sahm in the ’70s. I wanted that opening.

That said, even though character Doug is not Doug Sahm, he does have… There’s a beautiful old cover of Rolling Stone with Doug Sahm holding a Pearl beer out in front of him. I close my eyes and see that image. It’s really hard for me to totally divorce the character from his inspiration.

If you had decided that your Doug was Doug Sahm, how would you have reckoned with his real existence?

I don’t know. I love fiction about real people, but I also have a lot of feelings about the ethical implications of writing stories about real people. I’m always trying to answer the question of what makes a public figure and what makes someone okay to write about. I do still sometimes get a little bit nervous about having Joe Ely just walk around my book, because Joe Ely is alive. I used his ethos and existence, and I gave him his name.

There’s a book by Megan Mayhew Bergman called Almost Famous Women that’s a collection of stories about almost famous women from history. She does a really beautiful job of delicately exploring a life and giving herself room around it to envision what it would feel like to have lived that life. It’s a really hard thing to do, and I like the challenge of it, but in this particular instance, my character felt like he would be a bigger challenge to me if he wasn’t Doug Sahm.

Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine unfolds in a way that feels extremely organic, and that seems to make sense for a book where the characters are frequently drunk or high. Would it have been harder to let the book stumble forward if you were more constrained by biography?

Yeah. I am not a person who thinks very naturally about plot. I really only think about voice. It’s a problem. But Lee is a fantastic editor of plot. She understands how to build stakes in a way that feels true to the project, and doesn’t feel like you’re just injecting action because you need action in order to understand a life. She really helped with the pacing of the book. It felt like it needed to be tight because it’s so short—but they are all drunk and high, so how tight are you really going to get it?

Also, a big piece of the music in the book and of seeing live music for me is about the spaces where it’s stumbling. The stumbling is what’s interesting and moving. I wanted to write a novel like that. I wanted it to feel intimate, and I think an intimate relationship almost never has the contours of the story that you think it’s going to have.

Were you writing in bars in order to get into that kind of intimate space, or were you writing in bars because you like to write in bars?

Both. I love writing in bars, because if you find the right bar, you can both be completely ignored and overhear here many, many people dealing with all of their problems. I think that there’s a really good middle space where you can become invisible and also be participating in the social atmosphere of a bar.

I’m not a solitary person, really. I spend a lot of time with other people, and writing is hard for me for that reason. So if I can be in a space where I feel surrounded by other people and can still focus, that’s the perfect zone for me, and bars have been that.