After reading Joe Samuel Starnes' novel, Red Dirt (2015), I interviewed him about the book and the sport of tennis. Most of this interview can be read at The Classical, but a couple answers that did not make the final cut have been included below:
Bryan Harvey:
What I found most striking about Jaxie Skinner (the protagonist in Red Dirt) is how he exists between two
worlds. He really does come across as a subversive boundary crosser, which
seems apt considering the tennis athlete’s relationship with line judges. The
tennis elite see Jaxie as somewhat of a redneck, but the rural population of
Georgia does not necessarily claim him as their own. Moreover, even his
romantic interests are forbidden to him: he sleeps with the quintessential high
school jock’s girlfriend, stows away in a Russian star’s hotel room, and steals
time with a cop’s wife. Did you intend Jaxie as a thief or trickster in the
crafting of the novel? Or is his life on the edge an element of Southern noir
and the private detective novel?
Joe Samuel Starnes: I think all exceptional tennis players have at
least a little bit of a thief or trickster in their character—every point you
win is one you’ve stolen from your opponent. It’s an intensely individual game,
and all players are loners when out on the court—how many other sports are
there where a competitor is forbidden from talking with a coach or advisor
during play? It’s isolating. And although it has a reputation as being elitist,
pro tennis has seen great success by outsiders—the Williams sisters, who rose
up from the rough public courts of Compton, California, are a prime example.
And yes, everything I write has some element of the
“rough South” or “grit lit”—as some southern fiction has been called—inspired
as I have been by my literary lodestars: Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Harry
Crews, Barry Hannah, and William Faulkner.
BH:
Aside from being a tennis novel, Jaxie’s story also speaks to the Southern
parable of the family farm’s decline and the abandonment of the Southern
economy to and by the textile industry? One of my favorite sequences in the
novel is Jaxie banging a tennis ball against the ruins of this hard economic
history.
JSS: Until I was fifteen, my family lived out in the
country, six miles from Cedartown, Georgia, and about a mile from the nearest
house. When my dad drove me to elementary school in the seventies, every day we
passed a small family farm where the farmer waved at us without fail. That farm
is now long gone and its fields are the site of a subdivision with newly built homes.
The Goodyear Mill where my grandfather worked the second shift for thirty-five
years closed down in the eighties, and later the vacant building burned in a
spectacular fire. So yes, even though I’ve lived in or near big cities for past
two decades, including the past fifteen near New York or Philadelphia, rural
southern landscapes and economies are part of me and have been the primary
settings for my fiction.
Bryan Harvey can be followed @LawnChairBoys. The above photograph on lease from The New York Times.
