Thank you, Zackary Vernon, for taking the time to share your professional writing journey with me and my readers.
Where did your characters come from for your debut YA novel Our Bodies Electric?
Our Bodies Electric is set in my hometown of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, during the early to mid 1990s. It’s a southern coming-of-age story about a teenager named Josh who struggles against the pressure to conform to social conventions placed on him by his religious family and community, particularly as he enters his teenage years and tries to understand his body and sexuality. Josh hangs out with a bunch of misfit teenagers who get up to all kinds of hijinks, but they also help each other through this period of rapid change and development.
I am Josh, or at least Josh is some version of me. Many of the details in the book come from my own life and the lives of my friends between the sixth and nineth grades. There is a remarkable fluidity during these years. We go from being kids to being hormonal teenagers who all the sudden possess very adult ideas and desires.
What’s the underlying message of your writing?
Throughout the novel, Josh sets off on an adventure of experimentation and self-discovery, which is of course natural and healthy. But the puritans surrounding him want nothing more than to police his behavior and stamp out any curiosity they believe is abnormal and thus dangerous. His journey is strange and uncomfortable at times, but hopefully he’s a better and more authentic person at the end of it.
The novel has a message about the necessity of accepting difference. I think one could read it as being a harsh critique of Pawleys Island, but it’s not. It’s a critique of the stultifying impulse to conform that is often thrust onto kids and teenagers in conservative, religious communities.
This sounds very contemporary! Who are your literary influences or inspiration?
Walt Whitman was a huge inspiration both for the form and the content of the novel. I’ve been a massive fan of Whitman since I first read him in high school. His ideas have been rattling around in my head for decades. The year that I started earnestly working on Our Bodies Electric was the year I turned 37. And Whitman in “Song of Myself”—or the Whitman-esque persona that narrates the poem—is also 37. The first section contains these lines:
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
So I decided that during my 37th year of life, I would read Whitman every day. And I didn’t miss a single one. For my protagonist Josh, Whitman becomes a sort of life couch and an inspiration. Josh reads Whitman, and his ideas help him understand and accept himself.
In terms of form, I divided the novel into 52 sections, which are in dialogue with the 52 sections of “Song of Myself.” That’s not to say that there is a one-to-one mirroring going one—i.e. Section 1 of “Song of Myself” is in dialogue with Chapter 1 of my novel. It’s not that similar. But I did borrow the 52-section structure, and I tried to add a Whitman easter egg into every chapter. These are mostly subtle. There are only a handful of passages that allude to Whitman directly. But I’d say in a more general sense, Whitman pervades the entire novel.
How do you come up with book titles?
In the case of this book, Our Bodies Electric, the title comes from Whitman. It’s not an exact quote. Rather I’m riffing on Whitman’s famous poem “I Sing the Body Electric.” I wanted to make this plural and collective in my title in order to hint at what I see as a universal experience—or what should be a universal experience—of celebrating ourselves, both our minds and bodies.
How did you work to avoid writing a book or characters that feel “preachy” or self-righteous?
This is a question I thought about a lot. My novel is set in Pawleys Island simply because I happen to be from there; I lived there during those formative years that seem to cement who we are for life. But I want to be clear that I’m not making fun of Pawleys in any way. The novel is not mean-spirited or tragic. It’s humorous and makes a plea to love humanity. Also, the heroes of the novel come from Pawleys. Yes, the protagonist feels tortured by the conservative community there. But it is also locals who show him there are different ways of being in the world. In other words, that place, like all places, contains good and bad. Josh doesn’t have to flee to find himself. He does that there, with the help of many small-town eccentrics he meets along the way.
What genres do you work in?
I came to YA accidentally. I didn’t write Our Bodies Electric as a YA novel. The main characters were adolescents, but I imagined it being akin to books like Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, or Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp. In other words, I thought of the book in the lineage of coming-of-age adult literary fiction. And I hope my novel is that. But I also don’t want it to be merely read by adults.
It was my editor Jaynie Royal at Regal House Publishing who had the great idea of marketing the novel as YA. I was resistant at first, but Jaynie ultimately convinced me when she asked who I thought needed to read this book: other middle-aged liberals like me or young adults who might be struggling in the same ways that I struggled. I found and still find that idea very compelling.
As people learned about your book, what unexpected things happened along the way?
I’ve been surprised by how much people open up to me after reading the
book. I’ve done a lot of public talks since it was published, and I’ve often discussed how some elements of it are autobiographical. My experiences seemed to resonate with people, particularly the restrictive policing of children and adolescents’ behavior that often occurs in religious families and small conservative towns. Because I had shared my story, audiences were then comfortable sharing their own. Several creative writing workshops I’ve led almost turned into therapy sessions. I hope these inspire people to write novels about their own experiences. I think it can be really productive to be honest about difficult issues in our pasts. Reading about others’ experiences often helps us feel less alone and can even help us heal.
Has your education helped you become a better writer?
I’ve wanted to be a writer since high school. I don’t know why exactly. It’s not like I knew any writers personally. Maybe I’d seen writers romanticized in films, or maybe it was my Whitman obsession. But somehow I viewed writers as being subversive, and that’s what I wanted to be.
There was never any question of what my major would be in college. It had to be English. Then after undergrad I desperately wanted to get an MFA, but instead I got a PhD. I foolishly thought that this was the practical way of going about things. I had no idea at that point how bad the academic job market was.
What ended up happening was that I developed the scholarly side of my brain, and it’s now taken me years to rediscover the creative side. I still think too much about how my novels will be interpreted. That gets in the way of telling the best possible story. And it can make the symbols and themes too forced or too heavy-handed. I have to remind myself often about that old chestnut: Show, don’t tell.
When I got tenure in my academic position at Appalachian State University, I decided to turn to writing fiction again. I dropped many of my scholarly projects and dove into what would become Our Bodies Electric. I tried to make the writing genuine to myself. I was no longer trying to be someone else, as I had as an undergrad. I stopped attempting to write like William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor. Instead, I wrote humorous stories, and most of them were true in some way—things I’d experienced, things I’d heard about during my childhood and adolescence in Pawleys Island.
How much to you is writing a solitary activity and how much a communal one?
The act of writing is largely solitary—just you and the page. But editing should be communal. I can edit myself, of course, but this only takes me so far. It’s difficult to get outside of my own story enough to be objective, to make necessary editorial decisions. I need other people, readers with fresh eyes, to help me see what parts of a story are working, what parts need revision, and what parts should be cut entirely. I’m very fortunate that I have an excellent community of writers in Boone, North Carolina. Many of these writers work at Appalachian State. We have a very productive workshop group, and we’re constantly reading and commenting on one another’s fiction.
What’s next for you?
I recently finished a sequel to Our Bodies Electric. This novel follows Chloe, who is Josh’s friend and love interest in the first book. Josh makes a few appearances, but this sequel is really all about her story. If I am a lot like Josh, I wish I could be more like Chloe. She’s far more self-assured than Josh. As he flounders to understand his body and ultimately his religious and philosophical views, Chloe is resolute in her convictions.
The new novel is set during Chloe’s senior year, which begins in 1999. On top of navigating the usual drama of high school and applying to colleges, she also has to contend with the mass hysteria that results from Y2K and fears over an impending apocalypse. Chloe receives little guidance from her parents or teachers, but she befriends a motley group of fellow outcasts at a mermaid show in Myrtle Beach. With their help, she is able to survive the millennium and figure out how to pursue a fulfilling life and career.
We desperately need to be reminded right now of the better angels of our nature—to be understanding and kind, even when people in power aren’t doing so. I hope that’s what comes across in my new book. Chloe tries like hell to discover who she is. She rebels against the established community, and as a result she learns to live more authentically.
Thanks for having this absorbing conversation with me, Zachary!
You can learn more about Zachary and Our Bodies Electric at https://www.zackaryvernon.com/