From Joy's Q & A with Allen Mendenhall for Southern Literary Review:Your novel is Where All Light Tends to Go, a story about the underbelly of North Carolina, where outlawing is, the opening lines tell us, “as much a matter of blood as hair color and height.” Tell us how Jacob McNeely, your narrator, came to be.Writers Read: David Joy.
DJ: I saw Jacob before I heard him. And what I mean is that there was an image before there was a voice. I was at a buddy’s house up in Cashiers and we were standing by his hog pen where he keeps these feral hogs he traps and he was telling me about how, when they’re hunting, they kill some of the hogs with a knife. They bay the hogs with hounds and when the dogs get the pig down the hunter will go in and stab the hog in the heart. So while he was telling me this, an image came into my head, an image of a really young boy doing this. I saw a boy with his father standing behind him telling his son what to do, and this boy watching the light go out of this animal’s eyes and suddenly realizing just how much power a person had over life and death.
That image stuck with me for a long time, and I kept trying to write his story, but I kept getting it wrong. I think I kept trying to force it rather than let him tell me what he wanted to tell me. Then one night I woke out of a dream and Jacob was talking. That’s when I finally got it right is when I...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: Where All Light Tends to Go.
My Book, The Movie: Where All Light Tends to Go.
--Marshal Zeringue