Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.

Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. is an advocate, educator, author, and Kentucky Teacher of the Year. My work is focused on advocating for LGBTQ+ rights and creating inclusive spaces for students, especially within the context of Appalachia. He is the author of Tore All to Pieces, a fragmented novel about a small town in Appalachia and the interconnectedness of our identities, as well as Gay Poems for Red States, a bestselling collection of narrative poetry about my childhood growing up queer in Appalachia.

My Q&A with Carver:

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

Tore All to Pieces was the first title I gave this novel. Then I worried it wasn’t à la mode, and for a brief moment I renamed it Held by Fire and Flood. That title felt more fashionable. But the original kept resurfacing symbolically in the text as the characters showed me who they were. Tore All to Pieces is a key. It tells the reader, over and over again, in recursive patterns, across many lives, in many time periods, what it means to be whole.

What's in a name?

Last names matter a great deal in eastern Kentucky. I populated Mosely with many of the last names I heard growing up: Carroll. Slone. Spurlock. I imagined the same early settlers who came to my Martin, Kentucky also made it as far as the imaginary Mosely, Kentucky. While many of the place names are invented—Battersburg, Fox Creek—some of them are the same waters flowing through my own Appalachia: Cow Creek. Beaver Creek. When I am imagining Mosely, sometimes I feel that if I can have a character drive over just one more hill, or across one more curvy mountain road, then maybe they will find their way home.

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

He’d faint on the spot. In many ways, this world was outside his imagination. Gay and trans folks at the Dairy Queen? Never. As Fenton Johnson’s gay Raphael Hardin says to his Kentucky mother in Scissors, Paper, Rock about his childhood silence around his queerness: “What words could I have used?” But just as some of this world would feel impossible, much of it would feel intimate, as permanent as the hills themselves. I’d like to think he’d be comforted and excited. I’d like to think he’d feel hope.

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

Endings are easier for me because I recognize when they’re happening. An ending declares itself: we feel the growing spiral find its end. But beginnings are more complicated for me because the backstory, the context, the life of a character or a place will begin to unfold in my mind. To do it justice, I often have to return to where I started.

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

It depends on the character. Some of them I admire so deeply because they remind me of people I admire, people I study. As a general rule, the meaner a character, the more they remind me of me. I only write characters I love. Even the awnry ones. The lazy ones. The violent ones. Loving myself—as a fat gay sissy from up a holler—was a hard-won fight. But, by God, I won. So sometimes I start with myself and imagine different choices, different opportunities, different problems. I’ll end up with a deeply flawed character who, in many ways, is me.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I don’t know if we’re allowed a one-word answer, but if I could, I’d just write “women.” My whole life has been held up by women who keep finding ways to make life better for others—who have taught me love, endurance, strength, and courage. Who show up. Who aren’t afraid to feel, even when experience has shown them the cost.

Visit Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.'s website.

--Marshal Zeringue