In Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press 2023), Christopher Lowe unleashes the dark side of “Friday Night Lights,” alongside its cutthroat recruitment tactics, the commercialization of players, and the dynamics of football family legacies. Set in the Deep South where high school football is the heartbeat of small Southern towns and the SEC reigns supreme; Lowe does a deep dive into football culture shifting effortlessly between multiple perspectives and pushing the boundaries of his anti-heroes.
His characters are high school football players going hard on the field, players on the cusp of signing with the major football factories, and coach’s daughter with as much love for the game as any boy. They are has-beens with used-up bodies and used-up dreams, over-concussed, ex-NFL players scribbling plays that’ll never see the light of day, and they are ruthless recruiters with handshakes and paper bags full of cash payoffs. Lowe tramples over cliches and exposes the game’s ugly truths leaving no stone unturned. Yet, amongst the ugly aspects there remains an enduring love and respect for the game that resonates in these stories—the simple thrill of playing or watching, hometown camaraderie and local and state rivalries.
Southern Gothic readers will find not thin replicas, no caricatures of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit or William Gay’s Granville Sutter but real flesh and blood villains who hold their own with the most malignant in the genre. In this collection of fifteen, hard-hitting short stories, trauma follows Lowe’s characters off the field into their roughhewn lives and leaves readers unsteady, wondering, “what just happened here?” At only 116 pages long, how can so much passion be packed into something so small? I’m not sure if this book slaughtered me or I slaughtered it. My copy is dog-eared, covered in sticky notes, scribbled upon, and pages are falling out. I put it through the ringer.
Country music songwriter and performer, Jamie Johnson, wrote a song called “Somewhere Between Jennings and Jones.” The tune kept circling my headspace while reading Lowe’s stories. Maybe, it’s because of Lowe’s title, which alludes to a country song, but whatever the reason it occurred to me that Lowe has an old-school style you don’t see much nowadays. Sometimes, it is referred to as Grit Lit or Redneck noir; really it’s just real people living real lives in real towns. But following in Johnson’s thread, I’d say Lowe is reminiscent of two old school authors I really admire. I guess I’d place Lowe somewhere between Crews and Rash.
Discussion
Dawn Major
Dawn Major: What is your personal experience with football? Played? Coached? What attracted you to using football as your background for Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay?
Cristopher Lowe: I actually never played (in any organized way) or coached football, but I am a huge fan of the sport. I love college football in particular, as do many folks from the South. I watch every Ole Miss game each fall Saturday, and one of my happiest memories is of dancing with my wife and (then) four-year-old daughter in our living room when Ole Miss finally beat Alabama for the first time in a decade. Butting up against that love of the sport is real inner conflict with the reality of power imbalances between players, coaches, boosters, administrators, and TV executives. It’s a sport that has (through its governing bodies, including the NCAA, conferences like the SEC, and universities) insisted that it’s amateur in nature, but the billions of dollars flowing into it are in direct contrast to that. There’s been a fundamental shift in college football in the last few years with the ability for players to be compensated for use of their name, image, and likeness. That, along with court-mandated loosening of transfer restrictions, have made some headway in smoothing out the imbalances that have existed, but they’re still there under the surface of the sport. The stories in this collection were all written prior to the current NIL and transfer landscape, and they reflect the way that those in positions of power often abuse those who are reliant on them. As a writer, I’m always interested in how humans treat one another, how the way that they present themselves publicly might be at odds with how they treat those in their sphere of influence. Writing fiction about all of this helps me to feel less complicit in the parts of the game that I dislike.
DM: The title story, “Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay,” your father/son villains, Deep South imagery, and no-bones-about-it prose sets the tone to enter your no-man’s land. When I first saw the title, I was reminded of William Gay’s titles who was fond of using country music or blues music titles for his short story collections titles. Of course, I Googled your inspiration after reading the story umpteen times. To be honest, I’ve read this collection three times now! I promise to try and not give too much away, but the title comes from a song lyric from Townes Van Zandt. This story represents everything I love about the Southern Gothic genre and its grotesque characters. It’ll remain a classic for me and going forward will be one of those stories I will reread at least annually.
I loved the brief but telling details about Gray Ellison Jr.’s father also sound like a song lyric: He [Daddy] collects money, pays out earnings rarely, and threatens people when necessary.
The cadence, the lyricism, the tension has the effect of listening to a song. It builds gradually, not too rushed, until the scene at Hazard’s and Gray Ellison, Sr. says, “Count it,” to the bartender and then you can almost hear the rhythm go offbeat or a discordant note. There’s a shift that occurs right there, a narrative pause that’s comparable to a musical rest. The shit is about to hit the fan, and I’m not saying it doesn’t, but Ellison is just so cool, so calm. He reminded me somewhat of McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh…perhaps not as psychopathic if it’s possible to be just a little psychopathic. There is no need to threaten or quarrel. Men bend to his will, and he knows it.
Not a simple question. But I would love to know the origins of this story. From an inkling in your mind to its birth, how did it come to be? How many rewrites? Or did you just get damn lucky the first time around? Was it mainly the song that inspired the story or were there other songs? And how important was music composition, if at all, to creating this piece?
CL: Thanks so much for the kind words about the story. There’s really two threads to the start of “Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay.” The first is the Townes Van Zandt song that you mention, “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold.” I love music that has a narrative slant, as this song does, and I find myself consistently inspired (though often not quite so directly as in this instance) by musicians like Van Zandt, Jason Isbell, Lyle Lovett, and Lucinda Williams. I first heard Steve Earle’s cover of “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” a duet sung with his now departed son, Justin Townes Earle, on his album of TVZ covers, Townes. I love that album, and when it first came out, I probably listened to it a dozen times, start-to-finish. The line that the story’s title is pulled from was one of a handful that kept knocking around my head, and I knew it was too good of a bit of language to not use somewhere, especially since it so tonally fit a lot of the writing I was doing at the time.
Christopher Lowe
The story itself began a few years after that, with an act of avoidance. I was deep in the drafting process for a long-gestating novel about high school and college football, and I eventually hit a brick wall. Out of frustration, I decided to take a break from the novel and just work on a story instead. I didn’t have a particular idea or impetus for a story. I just knew I wanted to get away from the world of the novel for a bit. I was sitting in the Calcasieu Parish Public Library, and I opened up a blank document, and I started typing the first thing that came to mind, which ended up being the first two lines of the story, “Gray Ellison is my daddy’s name. It’s my name, too, but I try not to think of it as such.” Those two sentences came out of nowhere, but I knew there was tension there and that I had a character I wanted to dig into. I started following Gray, Jr. and his dad through their evening, and at some point, as I was moving through writing the story, the line from Van Zandt popped into my head, and I knew I had not just my title for the piece but an integral part of character-building for Gray, Sr. This kind of connection happens a lot in my writing, where a line, an image, an idea will be floating around with me, disconnected from narrative, waiting to find its home in a story as I draft it.
From there, the story took shape pretty quickly. I did a couple of rounds of revision on my own, tightening it up, and then I started sending it out to journals. The good folks at Greensboro Review ended up accepting it, and working with their fiction editors at the time, Anna Blake Keeley and Benjamin Newgard, was a wonderful editorial collaboration, one of the best that I’ve had. They both came to me with strong suggestions that made the work the story was already doing sing. I give a lot of credit to the two of them as editors for this one.
DM: I enjoyed the varying perspectives in your story, “A Guest of the Program,” and how you switched between second person and third person point of view. The conversational “how to bag a recruit” actually felt, at times, like the narrator was talking to himself, sort of like a pep talk. And then at other times I thought he was giving advice to another unknown character. The vagueness here made for a more a pseudo-unreliable narrator, adding even more tension to your story.
Technically, there are two complete stories in “A Guest of the Program” that could stand on their own, but together, are more powerful. Plus, the third-person perspective makes Tommy sympathetic. So, why was it important to you to use these varying perspectives with the same narrator? Did you start with one point of view and then experiment back and forth, or did you always know you wanted to tell the story with two narrators who are the same?
CL: One of the challenges of writing about college football recruiting is that it’s a very specific system that many readers are fundamentally unaware of, which can be tricky when the dynamics built into that system are what power narrative conflict. I’ve tried different techniques for revealing that system within my stories, but here, it felt fitting that there might be a kind of second person “How to” element at play. In my mind, that second person voice is Tommy, in a different context, trying to explain a rational, organized approach to recruiting. There’s real tension between the Tommy in those second person sections and the Tommy who’s revealed in the forward-moving third person sections. I like the idea of those little modules interacting with one another, the voice of one bumping up against the reality of the other. When I started writing this story, it was heavily focused on the third person sections, but somewhere in the drafting process, a second person module emerged, giving me a brief break from the forward momentum of the story. Once that module happened, it felt natural to cycle back and amp that element up throughout, to make it a design element of the story rather than a one-time shift.
Dawn Major
DM:. I really connected to “Lake Charles,” and I don’t know if everyone has experienced a summer like the one your characters Tawner and Trish had in your story, but I’ve had a few. You have a dark sense of humor and the matter-of-fact way you present your character’s lives in their everyday settings adds to that sense of comedy:
Monday was Big Ass Beer Night at Pappy’s, and over my thirty-two-ounce mug of Coors, I asked if she was working the next day, and she said she was not, and I asked if I could pick her up around ten, and she said that I could. And our life of crime began.
It’s summer in Lake Charles, LA and Tawner, the DA’s son, rich kid now college drop-out does what any bored male at his age would do. He hits the local bars where he meets up with high school crush, Trish, who is equally bored. Their dating life consists of breaking into cars and pawning off what they steal. It’s not about the money, though. They don’t need it, but they’re not exactly the dinner and a movie type either. The monotony of life and the thrill of getting caught drives them to a “life of crime,” which is in actual fact grossly overstated by the narrator who even now looking back on his younger self still hasn’t gotten past rich kid syndrome.
It’s a nihilistic text—one might say the entire collection is nihilistic—the characters are simply passing time and doing whatever they can to feel alive, although I think a lot of Tawner’s actions are about him rebelling against his father. But eventually, everyone gets caught. Right? And as readers we want something to happen; we just don’t know how big that something is.
Enters Chekov’s proverbial gun held by a Vietnam Vet: The man held a shotgun. Big, pump-action. A hunting gun. He had it leveled at us.
This ought to be Tawner’s moment but his older, wiser self insists nothing changed as a result of this event: You might think that this story is the kind where I suddenly realize that I was enamored with childish things and that my relationship with Trish was one of those childish things. Trish was too. This night was no Rubicon, though. Tawner doesn’t believe in cause and effect, or so he says so, and yet here he is telling this story.
I won’t say exactly what occurs between Tawner and this man, other than that the man shares a war story where he, like Tawner, believed he was facing crossroads in life, granted his was literally at the crossroads of life and death:
I told you that story to tell you this: sometimes a thing happens and in the moment, in the damned moment, you think it’s going to set something off, trigger something to happen, change something, and even when you think back on it later, you don’t know how it didn’t cause anything like that. Sometimes that’s what happens.
The soldier character is a foil for Tawner’s character as the Vietnamese war scene setting is a foil for the wealthy neighborhoods in the Garden District that Tawner pilfers. They shouldn’t compare, but they do. This piece should be taught in college literature courses as a perfect example of irony, by the way. It was one of my favorite stories, so I have a multiple questions.
The third story in the collection and already two guns have been introduced (more later on, too) Theoretically, I think this is the third gun because Ellison weaponizes his tattoo gun, but that’s just my opinion. Maybe you would like to elaborate on this some. But my question is about anti-heroes because let’s face it, your book is full of them, and Tawner is no hero. What do you think your reader takes away from him?
Christopher Lowe
CL: I’m fascinated by the idea of character change, when it happens and why it happens. Often in fiction, we see that change as intensely causal, with the events of the narrative we’re reading leading directly to some specific change for the character at or just following a climactic moment. Sometimes this comes in the form of an epiphany. That narrative structure works really nicely much of the time, but as Charles Baxter points out in his great essay, “Against Epiphanies,” that’s not necessarily the right fit for every character and every story and shoehorning an epiphanic moment into a narrative can strike a false note, if it doesn’t actually rise to a certain level.
“Lake Charles” is, in many ways, in conversation with T.C. Boyle’s great story “Greasy Lake.” In Boyle’s story, a group of punk teenagers who think of themselves as tough have a violent interaction that reveals who they truly are and what they’re truly capable of. The beauty of that story is that the narrator is reflecting back on this night in his life from a great distance, judging himself both directly and subtly. I’ve always loved the engine of that story, but as I was writing “Lake Charles,” I kept thinking about how I was leading the reader to assume that this night would be pivotal for Tawner in the way the night in “Greasy Lake” is pivotal for its narrator. That didn’t feel natural to Tawner as a character or to the larger situation, though, and so I started letting his voice intrude a little more directly, pointing us to a different way of looking at the story we’re being told.
DM: These two male characters couldn’t be more different than each other, yet they both share a nihilistic philosophy and they both rebel against their fathers. It got me thinking about father/son relationships which you explore in this collection, and I was wondering, and this may come off as rather Greek, but do sons and fathers ever stop competing with each other? Do sons ever stop rebelling against their fathers? Are we merely repeating Geek epics?
CL: Parent/child relationships emerge as the vital relationships in my stories over and over. I’m not sure what that says about me or my writerly inclination, but I can say that I’m deeply fascinated by the ways that parents affect their children and vice versa. I hope that there are a few examples of better parenting scattered through some of the stories (even when the parents fail in various ways, as we’re all wont to do), but I do find that there’s more narrative tension to be had when these relationships contain some kind of higher level conflict. I think you’re exactly right that both Tawner and the vet are rebelling against their fathers, and I think the vet, in particular, knows it. He sees something of himself in Tawner, and the final movement of the story is the two of them acting out what they’ve been doing on an unspoken level together, finding a very strange community with each other. Not necessarily a healthy community, of course, but these aren’t exactly healthy characters we’re talking about!
DM: And finally, the narrator keeps breaking the fourth wall ensuring the reader that there will be no epiphany here. Do you think that the mere fact that the character/narrator insists the story isn’t a story about the crossroads of his life, actually makes it a story about some pivotal moment in his life?
CL: Tawner’s thoughts on causality are complicated, particularly as he reflects on this night from a distance. I’ve never thought of him as nihilistic, though I can see that reading of him completely, and he certainly takes on that tone in his narration. For me, he’s a character who doesn’t understand himself, then or now. He’s smart enough to know how he should feel about these events, to know how they should have affected him, but he isn’t tapped in enough to understand why they didn’t affect him in that way. Dangling between those two poles, the knowing and the not knowing, feels intensely human to me. I think in the end, that night was pivotal for him. He’s telling the story for a reason, but it’s a reason that’s still obscured for him, and because it’s obscured for him, it’s also at least a bit opaque for us. We don’t get the clean knowledge of direct causality. What we get instead is the messiness of human reality, which is to say we don’t get the answers that he and we think we should have.
DM: In “Blood Heat” yet another Lowevian gun (I need to stop calling it Chekhovian now) appears but this time it’s put to use. It’s a circular story beginning and ending at the same creek in the town of Belle Reve, but it shifts from first person to third person and finally to second person at the end. The narrative’s voice also makes some key shifts—from nostalgia for a small Texas town transforming into something unrecognizable by sprawl of commercialization and eventually to an island once the waters consume its borders.
There’s an “if only” sort of element about this story. If only the main character’s father hadn’t pursued his dream of becoming a high school football coach and had remained a meteorologist, if only his father hadn’t promised championships, if only the rural riffraff wasn’t bussed to the high school, and if only his father had allowed the 3-4 run. But the ultimate if only comes in a form of a Mossburg shotgun…if only wasn’t so damn easy to use or if only it had never been invented at all. When the gun manifests the voice becomes fact-based and detached; the reader gets a paragraph about its history, its specifications, and use:
The Mossberg 500 shotgun 12-gauge shotgun is produced in New Haven, Connecticut, by O.F. Mossberg & Sons firearm company…It’s stock and pump are made of wood composite that is stained a dark, rich brown… While it was originally produced as a hunting weapon, it has since become a popular in combat shotgun, and most consumers now report that they purchased their Mossberg 500 pump-action 12 gauge shotgun for home defense.
As a note, I love your use of repetition here with Mossberg when you could have just gone with the word “shotgun.” It turns Mossberg into a character rather than an object, but then again Mossberg is the name of gun manufacturers so there are real characters at play. I also enjoyed how you used these two physical objects to create tension in this story.
In a slightly less detached narrative voice yet still following in the same tone or thread as the Mossberg paragraph, the narrator reflects on his father’s antique barometer: It is a shape and size of an ornamental banjo. Wide, round bottom with a clock hand that points to the barometric facts of the moment: Fair, Rainy, Stormy, Very Dry.
And finally, also in that same withdrawn voice, the narrator introduces the fatal 3-4 scheme:
The 3-4 defense was popularized in the NFL in the late 1970s. It fell out of favor, though, replaced by the 4-3 that was used by the great Mike Ditka Bears teams of the mid-80s. It made a return in the early 2000s, though, when its success at the college level began to bleed upward…My father tried to resist such trends. He believed in molding his plans based on more local factors…Could he forecast their plans and react accordingly?
I didn’t quote the entire passage but enjoyed your use of repetition here to hone your point. The word “bleed” is repeated three times in the same paragraph.
At the heart of the story is a son trying to make sense of violence. He wants something to blame, and he is also simultaneously looking for that moment where it may have been stopped. Is the Mossberg to blame, his father’s refusal to relent and allow the 3-4 defense, and could it all have been foreseen or “forecast” and thus prevented if one of these factors hadn’t been present? There’s no explanation for the violence visited upon the protagonist’s father, and the absurdity of that differing opinions which football play to run is as good enough of a reason.
Would you say this is an anti-gun, anti-gun violence story, neither or both? The ambiguity certainly makes the reader think about cause and effect here. Or is this a story exploring the possibility that there’s no one to blame?
CL: I definitely think there’s some commentary in the story about the fetishization of guns in America. There’s a moment later in the story where the narrator talks about the lightness of the trigger, how it likely would have taken Mard little physical effort to shoot the narrator’s father. The ease of killing, the ease of getting a gun and using it against another person, is a deep moral failing for us as a country, and I think Mard is an example of that. For me, he’s fully to blame for this death, and at the root of his motivation is a kind of greed. Mard wants and wants. Whether the team uses the 3-4 or the 4-3 feels to us unnervingly minor, nowhere close to justifying violence. But to Mard, it’s a marker of control, of power, of success, which are all things he wants. This story began as a novel draft more than fifteen years ago, and its genesis was in a kind of weird connection I made in my own head when I heard someone refer to a small-town football coach as the “king” of the town. My mind immediately strayed to Shakespeare, to MacBeth, and I began to think about how if there are “kings” in the world of high school football, then there are also the Macbeths out there, eager to stake their claim to what they feel they deserve or are destined to hold. Mard is greedy for that power and that recognition, to be the one in charge, to be the one who’s held up above all others. When that kind of greed collides with his existing penchant for violence and with the accessibility of the gun, the violence naturally follows. In the years since I started working on “Blood Heat,” a lot of the more overt Macbeth references slipped away, and it moved from a novel draft to a story, but the core human emotions here are the same for Mard as they are in the play.
DM: Why was it important for you to switch from first person to second person at the end of this piece?
CL: I think you’re exactly right when you say the narrator is trying to make sense of what’s happened to his father. He doesn’t understand Mard as a person, and he doesn’t understand how Mard could stoop to this violence, and so he’s looking for answers that can’t be found. The sections about the Mossberg, the 3-4, and the barometer are the narrator trying to piece together facts to make sense of a problem that’s not logical. The second person at the end of the story is what I think a lot of second person is: first person masquerading as second. The narrator’s separating himself from this moment, shifting it from himself to the “you” of the audience because of that lack of understanding. He’s still trying to make sense of this experience, and separating himself from it is another attempt to get to that point. So many of the characters who fascinate me exist in the state that the narrator does here. They’ve experienced something that’s fundamentally changed their lives, but they don’t know how to interpret or understand it. They grasp for meaning, often for events that have none, that are random or capricious. They, like all of us, want to know that what they’ve suffered is for a reason.
DM: More than a few times you mentioned this story started out as a novel or you needed to get away from writing a novel, and I wanted to acknowledge this. Because I value short stories and short story writers and I don’t think they get nearly the attention they deserve, I decided to put short story collections at the top of my list to review for SLR in 2024. I’m not sure I told my editor, Donna Meredith, but I guess the cat is out of the bag now. I am a short story writer and because of the push to write novels, I wrote a mosaic novel. My mind works that way anyway; it wasn’t forced, but I certainly considered what I was hearing in the industry: “No one wants to read short stories,” or “Publishers can’t sell short story collections.” What gives here? What is the future of short stories and short story authors? And are you working on a novel? What’s next?
CL: I love short stories. For me, the most satisfying reading and writing experiences of my life are rooted in short fiction. I’m rarely as moved by a novel as I am each time I read ZZ Packer’s “Brownies” or Amy Hempel’s “The Harvest” or Ellen Gilchrist’s “I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy.” There’s something magical about holding a full narrative in your mind across twenty or thirty minutes of reading, about being able to experience something vital of humanity through a complete narrative in such a condensed space and time. Novels can’t replicate that. They’re woolier and looser, even the most tightly written ones. I’m not sure why I gravitate to the one over the other (I do love novels, too, I swear!), but I figure whether I ever write a novel I’m happy with or not, I’ll keep writing stories forever.
My first book, Those Like Us, is a collection of interlocking short stories that function almost like a novel. Much like what you describe with your novel, it was born at least partially from that push toward novel-ish narratives by the industry itself, but it also came from a genuine love for the ways that we can tell larger stories through smaller parts. Mosaic novels, novels-in-stories, and interlocking collections have always been an area of interest for me, so it felt natural that those stories I was working on would coalesce into that particular shape. It didn’t hurt that I kept being told that that was how I’d get an agent and get the book published (I did get it published; I did not get an agent).
After I finished that book, I started working on a novel because it felt like a natural next step and because I’d had a couple of agents ask me to reach out to them when I had a novel. I’ve hammered away at various novel drafts since then, but I’ve never reached a point where I’m happy enough with one to really move forward with it. And, of course, it’s probably pretty telling that each time I get frustrated with a novel, the way that I find happiness in my writing again is to return to writing stories. All the pieces in Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay were written in the margins of attempts at longer form work, and I’m pretty certain that some of the stylistic and structural variance and freedom that exists in the stories is because of how freeing it was to delve back into story writing. I’m so appreciative of UL Press for giving the book a home and for all of their editing and support. Many university and small presses still champion the form, and they’re often more accessible to short story writers than the “major” publishers. I’m very grateful for presses like UL, who still carve out space in their lists for stories.
My fiction is currently on hold, as I’m working on a textbook that’s under contract with Bloomsbury Academic about modular and non-linear writing. That manuscript is due in a few short months, though, and my guess is that I’ll be back to stories shortly thereafter. I’ll likely attempt another novel, too, but I have no doubt that whatever comes next for my fiction, stories will be a part of it.
Short stories are vital, human art. They don’t get the recognition or the accolades that they deserve, but that’s okay. We writers can’t control that. We can’t control what publishers want to publish or who agents want to represent. What we can control is the work itself, the art that we’re making. We can control going to the page and continuing that long and lovely tradition of the short story. And as readers, we can keep buying collections, keep subscribing to journals, keep sharing beloved stories with the readers we know. I so appreciate that you’ve taken this on as your review project for the year, because you’re helping further that.
One final thought to put my money where my mouth is: I just got the new issue of Story Magazine. I’m a contributing editor for Story, but I don’t get to read the majority of the issue before it’s published. The whole issue’s great (subscribe to Story, short story lovers!), but “The Apology” by Genevieve Abravanel really blew me away. It’s the best new story I’ve read in a few months. As long as writers like Abravanel are producing that wonderful of work, as long as those of us who love short stories are reading them and writing them, I think the future remains bright.
DM: Thanks so much for your time, your thoughtful responses, and for sticking it out and keeping with short stories and thank you University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press for publishing this fine collection.
About Christopher Lowe: Christopher Lowe was born in Mississippi, spent many years in Louisiana, and now lives in Illinois. He is also the author of Those Like Us: Stories and three prose chapbooks, including A Guest of the Program, winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Competition. His writing has appeared widely in magazines and journals including Brevity, Quarterly West, Third Coast, Booth, and Bellevue Literary Review.
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