Willie Davis’ I Can Outdance Jesus (2024) is a rip-roaring collection of excellent rural short fiction–one that is almost certain to leave a lasting impression on readers. In Davis’ stories, songwriters taunt Episcopalians leaving church, a young girl preaches to chickens, and miracles appear (well—maybe not).
It was my pleasure to be able to talk with Willie about humor, rascally characters, and rural fiction.
Bradley Sides: Thank you for taking the time to chat with me, Willie. I want to jump right in and talk about I Can Outdance Jesus. From the opening story, “Battle Hymn,” until the book’s end, I was impressed by the balance of humor and tragedy. Do you feel like one of these sides is easier to write? Or do they present themselves equally?
Willie Davis: Thanks so much. I don’t know that one of them is definitively harder, any more than you can definitively say that building suspense is harder than being profound. That said, my first reaction to the question is that obviously, being funny is harder. Almost everything you’ve ever laughed at has surprised you at least a little. It’s rare you can see where the joke is going and still laughed uncontrollably at the punchline. The reason that comedy ages so poorly isn’t because of fashion or what you can or can’t say—it’s because comedians impersonate each other, and the old jokes seem predictable. The number of revisions the average story has to go through—not to mention the length of time between an idea forming and publication—means that it’s hard to remember why it’s funny in the first place. For a joke to survive that much time and repetition means it has to really work. Plus, when you’re being funny, you run the risk of being unfunny, and what ruins a story quicker than that? I’d much rather read an unmoving death scene than an unfunny joke.
The counterpoint to that is that when people face real tragedy, they act like they’re on a bad TV show. They really do scream, “Noooooo!” and crumple on the ground in tears. In some ways, we’ve learned how to deal with tragedy from bad TV shows. So, if you want to write a realistic tragedy, you’re going to risk sounding like a TV character. Plus, there are infinite ways of being funny, and only a couple ways to be sad. To make those interesting takes a lot of imagination.
Willie Davis
Either of those answers could work, but I guess the truth is that I don’t believe comedy and tragedy are two different things. The myth of Gallows Humor is that we tell jokes to obscure pain. Maybe that’s true inasmuch as we do literally everything to obscure pain, but I don’t buy it. We joke in the face of tragedy because that is how we experience tragedy. We cry at weddings because that’s how we experience joy. It’s not a way of obscuring our joy.
I have funny friends, and I try to surround myself with funny people in general. Funny people are having a full emotional reaction to everything around them. The jokes that you told on 9/11 didn’t invalidate your tears.
BS: As the title of the collection hints, many of the stories here have to do with religion in some facet. What draws you to this theme?
WD: Like my characters, I’m casually blasphemous, and a lot of people confuse that for atheism or hostility to religion. But I just think heresy can be funny. I’m a bit of a religious mongrel myself. My mom is a Jew from Pittsburgh, and my father is a Christian in deep Appalachia. Growing up, I considered myself a “Heeb-billy” which was fun because I was the only one, but it also never made me examine what I believe. Neither parent presented their religions as the definitive truth. My wife is Episcopalian, and so are my kids, and I have tremendous respect for the people who run our church. But I respect them because they are good people who work incredibly hard to improve the community, not because they are members of the church. Which is to say, while I have no hostility toward religion, I try not to respect institutions just because they’re institutions.
I respect stories and storytellers. Religious stories are among the most fascinating I know. I feel like we’re always asking the wrong questions about religious stories. Did the story of Adam and Eve happen? Literally, I suspect not because serpents don’t talk. But metaphorically, it not only happened, but it happened to me, to you, to everyone. It’s the story of growing up, of exchanging innocence for knowledge. At one point in your childhood, you thought your father was God—all powerful, all knowing. You thought your mother was the earth—so loving and providing you literally received your sustenance from her. But we eat from the Tree of Life. We exchange Eden for life. We learn our parents can be tired or drunk or angry or disinterested. We learned to be ashamed of our bodies, our nakedness. I know the story of the Garden of Eden is true because it happened to me, and I’m watching it happen to my children. But it’s not the only truth, nor is it the only way to the truth.
My characters tend to think of God like the weather. He’s omnipresent, but not something that demands your attention. My most irreligious characters have a palpable but basically indifferent belief in God. The narrator of “Battle Hymn” says he can get away with blasphemy because “I’m Chrsitlier than most people.” The two fake Mormons in “The Peddlers” are a practicing Jew and an embittered Mormon. Their highest belief is antagonism. If they lived in the world of Academia or Stand-Up Comedy or wherever God was a punchline, they’d slaughter those people’s sacred cows as well. Antagonism is their religion, and that is not a sin. How can you tell a story without an antagonist?
Bradley Sides
BS: I currently have a three-way tie when choosing my favorite story. It’s between “Battle Hymn,” “Last Words,” and “A Subdivision of Heaven.” The characters in each are very complicated–and rascally. What is it about such flawed characters that makes them good protagonists?
WD: It’s not so much that I love complicated characters as much as I hate uncomplicated characters. Because the first stories we hear are heroes and monsters, black hats and white hats, we have a natural inclination to take stories in those directions. We are uneasy until we know whether we should like or dislike a character. When we meet a new character in a movie, we don’t have to wait for him to act before we get our mind made up—if we hear minor key background music, we know that not only will he be treacherous, but he’ll also be cowardly and never laugh at a joke. The heroes are not only strong and witty and beautiful and lovable and fearless, but they’re always underestimated. Because we assume the people who get in our way are doing so because they resent greatness.
I can’t believe that there are professional writers who still have jobs who write about “Anti-Heroes.” “They do bad things, but they’re charming. You like them because you can tell they love their families and they are trying to do what’s best, but they keep making mistakes.” You mean “people?” Did you just describe everyone on the planet? People are flawed and loving, but we call them “Anti-heroes” because we can’t figure out why we have multiple feelings about people. I want to ask these critics, “Do you think the bad guys in real life look like Darth Vader?” Unfortunately, I’m afraid they do. I worry a decent chunk of people think those who disagree with them on gun control are doing so because they want more school shootings.
One of the great revelations in my life is that there are no bad guys. There are people who do awful things, but that’s not what a bad guy is in fiction. A bad guy is someone who acts like a villain with no motivation except to be evil. The other day, I caught my son in a lie. I said, “You don’t want to become a liar.” He broke down at the thought that he could be a liar. He admitted he lied, and he knew what made a person a liar is that a liar lies, but he couldn’t accept the fact that he could be a liar. And he’s right. The difference is in the verbs. A passive verb means that’s what you are—a liar, who lies because he loves deception.
Think of the worst villains in real life. It’s easy to think of Hitler and Stalin, but it probably boils your blood more to think of your bully, your rapist, the person who abused your best friend. Those people think of themselves as the good guy, the same as you. Just as we were all bullied, we probably bullied someone we didn’t realize we bullied.
Evil doesn’t exist. It’s a philosophy that sounds humanistic but it’s darker than that. It’s not evil that’s made the bad parts of this world. It’s people almost exactly like us, who created them while trying to make the world better. We can’t pawn it off on others.
BS: I want to talk a bit more about “Last Words.” The opening is so wonderfully dark and absurd. For readers who haven’t read the story yet, here’s how it opens: “For a long time, I kept myself awake by writing personalized suicide notes for each of my friends. I’d found a website that compiled every recorded suicide note of the last ten years, and, not to sound conceited, I could do better.” It continues, of course, but what was the genesis of this story?
WD: The characters in “Last Words” were characters from my novel Nightwolf. The first half of the book takes place when they are seventeen, and the second takes place when they are twenty-three. One day, I wanted to check-in with them in the in-between years, to get a little glimpse into what their life was like when I wasn’t peering over their shoulders. It was never going to be in the book, but the writing of it felt natural because I’d spent so much time imagining them that I could get their voice. To me, the best stories are the ones where you can imagine the characters and relationships that existed before page one and continue to exist after its conclusion. I kind of cheated with that story because I knew where they’d been and where they were going.
I’d heard some writers brainstorming about writing a story collection where each story was based off a Drive-By Truckers song. There’d been similar collections for John Prine, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen amongst others. I—quite uninvited—decided to join their ranks and write a story in case the collection ever formed. (To my knowledge, it has not. Then again, I was a hanger-on, and it would not be shocking if they just didn’t tell me about it). I very much like The Drive-By Truckers, but I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of their work.
The next day, I was listening to “The Last Song I Will Write” by Jason Isbell. He used to be a member of The Drive-By Truckers, so I thought, close enough. The song is beautiful, melancholy and deeply reflective. It isn’t—to my limited interpretive powers—about suicide, but it is about the inevitable end of all things. I wanted to write something more playful, but it to be about the end of things—specifically, the end of childhood when you realize the idle afternoons aren’t going to continue forever. At one point in the song, he sings, “And these are the last words I will write.” That’s when I had the idea of someone who writes fake suicide notes for his friends.
There’s an element of self-parody here. By day, I’m an English teacher, and my students write very personal, often very harrowing essays, but all I can think is “Comma splice. Sentence fragment. Oh God, that’s such a clichéd way to talk about your father’s murder.” I don’t like that those are my thoughts, and I very much understand why that makes me an asshole, but nevertheless, that is my initial reaction. So, I wanted to parody that aspect of myself, as someone who gets competitive and highly critical of suicide notes.
BS: What do you see as some of the qualities of good rural fiction?
WD: It’s hard to pin down because “rural” is such a big concept. Technically, a lot of the Victorian novels are rural because they take place in cottages, but it’s certainly not what I think of when I think of rural literature.
When it comes to my slice of rural America—Appalachia, often mistaken for the South—there’s a dichotomy. The most popular Appalachian fiction tells the story of the Appalachia that I saw in PBS documentaries when I was in third grade. They’re about apple-butter and chair-caning, and they’re always underscored by a tasteful fiddle. It’s all so tiresome. But that type of fiction is a reaction to decades of stories where the Appalachian accent—or honestly, a lazy, cartoon version of an Appalachian accent—is a shortcut to show how stupid or racist a character is.
I want to escape it all. I don’t want stories that lionize or villainize Appalachia. I just want the characters to be funny and flawed and aware of where they live. It’s not as though rural people have different desires or pain thresholds than people who live in St. Louis.
Rural places are sparser, and oftentimes, the prose is sparser to reflect that. In a rural town, you don’t know everybody, but you may know of everybody. As a result, the dynamic is set by the time the story begins. People may surprise you, but when you meet them, you have already made up your mind a little bit. When a stranger comes to town, it means something. New York and LA have built their economies on strangers coming to town and slowly giving up on their dreams. But none of this is necessarily true. There are many different Appalachias, many more different rural Americas, and an almost infinite amount of rural stories and story styles.
It should be said that I’m a bit of a tourist to rural America. I was born in the heart of it, but my parents divorced when I was fifteen minutes old. My mom moved about 150 miles away to Lexington, Kentucky. Lexington is a bit of an overgrown college town, made up of many rural expatriates, but it is not a rural place. Growing up, I would spend Mondays through Fridays in Lexington and then weekends with my father in a tiny Appalachian town called Whitesburg. I lived that way for eighteen years. That means, depending on your angle, I have either two hometowns or zero. I write about Appalachians because I find them interesting, but I feel like a bit of an outside observer no matter where I write about. I wanted to say that because so often, Appalachian artists get into a strange pissing contest where artists try to polish up their rural bonafides, and it becomes a race to see who can embody the biggest stereotype. I call it “Holler Than Thou.” As I’m not likely to win any such competition, I figure I should admit my own fraudulence.
BS: I want to ask a more craft-focused question. You’ve written a novel. In fact, the story that sparked that novel is in this collection. Now, you have a short story collection out in the world. For you, which was the most difficult to write? Why?
WD: Unfortunately, I find them all difficult to write. A novel is probably the hardest to write because they contain several stories, and you have to maintain your interest for a long time. If you get seven pages into a short story and you think, “I think this person has told me everything they have to say,” and then you can wrap it up and write something else.
Even when I write novels, people tell stories throughout them. In real life, I’m almost always excited to hear someone’s stories. Not because of the story they tell, but because of what they tell reveals about them.
This is an idiotic story, but I think about it a lot. When I was in middle school, I went over to a friend’s house. He had another friend over who I didn’t know. That guy casually told a story about when he took his penis out in Social Studies to impress a girl, and he was caught by the teacher. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that man again from that day to this one, but what I keep thinking about is that him flashing the girl wasn’t the point of the story. That was just the background, an amusing jumping-off point to tell the real story. This would have been the focal point of my entire life, the reason that I could never go back to my hometown, but for him, it’s not the most interesting part of his afternoon. Of course, maybe that story is someone else’s tragedy, maybe that scared the girl he was trying to impress. I don’t know. But it’s hard to imagine a life so full that this crazy event was just the beginning. We’re all living different lives, inhabiting different identities day to day, and we can only uncover those lives through stories.
BS: As we close out, I want to ask about literary influences. Who were some of your biggest inspirations as you were crafting these stories?
WD: Gurney Norman and Ed McClanahan are two names that are known somewhat in Kentucky, but they aren’t as well-known as they should be nationally. They were part of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and their writing really blends the hippy and the hillbilly strains of rural fiction. I love and am forever influenced by the short stories of Mark Richard. I think the best short story writer consistently working today is Laura VanDenBerg. She writes with incredible speed and precision.
Possibly, my favorite novel is James Joyce’s Ulysses. Ireland is Appalachia with a better view of the ocean and a different set of cusswords. The experimental writing is great, but what I’m most moved by is the fullness of the characters, the relationships amongst them all, and the way he can create a love that radiates out from all their disappointments and misdeeds.
BS: Thank you for your time, Willie. And congratulations on the release of I Can Outdance Jesus!
Willie Davis is the author of the novel Nightwolf. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Salon, The Kenyon Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, StorySouth, and At Length, among other places. A native of Whitesburg, Kentucky, Willie earned graduate degrees in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and The University of Maryland. He has taught English and Creative Writing at The University of Maryland, Kentucky State University, Georgetown College, and The Carnegie Center. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky. For more, visit: HOME | williedavis (iamwilliedavis.com)
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