Chip Cheek

Chip Cheek's new novel is Cape May.

From his Q&A with David Adams:

How did you get the idea for Cape May?

I’ll give you a little bit of backstory. I come from a family of people who’ve worked on the railroad in Georgia going back to the beginning of the 20th century, and I was always interested in that. After my MFA, I began working on a novel steeped in the Jim Crow era in Georgia and drawing on stories from my family’s history. I was dealing with murder and race, all this compelling stuff, but I kept getting sidetracked by the love stories. For reasons that are lost in time now, I decided to marry two of my characters to each other and send them on a honeymoon. I was immediately transported; I wanted to stay in that world forever. But I was supposed to be writing this other novel about the railroad and Jim Crow. So I shelved it.

A couple years later, on probably my third novel attempt, the same exact thing happened again–I married two of my characters, sent them on a honeymoon. This was in the summer of 2014, after I got married. This time, I decided that the “important” novel I’d been working on was not the novel–it was this novel, the one set in Cape May. When I let go of...[read on]

Visit Chip Cheek's website.

--Marshal Zeringue