Constance E. Squires

Constance Squires holds a Ph.D. in English from Oklahoma State University and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. Her latest novel is Low April Sun. She is the author of the novels Along the Watchtower, which won the 2012 Oklahoma Book Award for Fiction, Live from Medicine Park, a 2018 Oklahoma Book Award finalist named in Electric Literature as one of the "Seven Candidates for the Great American Rock and Roll Novel," and the short story collection Hit Your Brights. Her short stories have appeared in Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Shenandoah, Identity Theory, Bayou, the Dublin Quarterly, This Land, and a number of other magazines.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I usually change my titles a lot, often calling a book something different for each draft, and it’s often been the case that stories and even books have had their titles changed close to publication by suggestions from editors. But Low April Sun came to me early and didn’t change. The story takes place in April in two timelines, 1995 and 2015, so the title covers both temporal settings and unifies them. The word “Low” is like hitting a somber note, with low evoking depth—a bottom level—and moral depravity or unfairness—lowlife, low blow. Well, what else was the Oklahoma City Bombing if not a low blow? All of those meanings of Low fit the story, April is the setting, and sun is, well, heat and hope, and that’s there, too, in how the characters pursue their lives. So Low April Sun is a three-word progression from darkness to light.

What’s in a name?

One of the book’s main characters is named August P. I hid a lot of meaning in his name, partly to remind myself what I wanted him to do in the story. August is after Light in August, in which Faukner has a character named Joe Christmas who functions in the story like my August P. I can’t say more. That he is referred to by the first initial of his last name focuses his identity as a member of a recovery community where he meets Edie, one of the other main characters. Hi, my name is August P. and I’m a ---. The initial also makes me think of the way Russian novels of the 19 th century used to use initials for the names of towns, somehow driving you mad to know the real name. August’s full last name, Price, is finally said very late in the novel. He’s a character who has and does pay a high price for much more than is his to pay for, so. I usually work hard to avoid allegorical names, but in his case, I went for it.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

She’d be happy to see that she was right and that she really was/is a writer. I wish that were possible, because it might have spared me so much murky self-doubt and inertia. She’d be horrified to hear that the Oklahoma City Bombing was coming, though.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings are so strong and easy, whereas endings take forever to get, even when I can see how I want it to end. But if the number of drafts in a novel were visible like geologic strata, the beginning would be a tall mountain and the ending would be a flat plain at sea level because I rewrite the openings over and over as I draft and learn what the story is about and what notes I need to hit to set things up at the start, whereas the ending flows out one time and usually isn’t changed at all, or not much.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality or are they worlds apart?

There’s not an autobiographical avatar in this novel, but all of the characters come from me, so they can’t be anything that I can’t imagine, just literally. We don’t think of ourselves as characters from the outside, as subjects, or at least I don’t, but my subjectivity, the eyes doing the seeing, it’s the matrix within which it all lives, so the characters’ observations and ways of noticing the world are all originating with the daily impressions of me as a flesh-and-blood person walking around noticing things. But then I turn my mind to what the kind of person I’m writing about would notice and want and how they’d express things, and those things aren’t usually characteristic of my own thoughts or responses.

What non-literary influences have inspired your art?

Music is always a huge influence on me. Film, too, but I think through music, and I often get ideas or solve problems in my writing while listening to music. This story about the Oklahoma City bombing started as a short story for the RS500.com about the Hole album Live Through This. I had been wishing someone would write a novel about the OKC bombing for years, couldn’t imagine it would be me, but the memories that album evoked whisked me into a set of characters and a situation that let me into the bigger historical topic through kind of a back door where I felt enough authentic connection to feel I had something to say.

Visit Constance E. Squires's website.

My Book, The Movie: Low April Sun.

The Page 69 Test: Low April Sun.

--Marshal Zeringue