Laura Terry interviews Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr., author of “Tore All to Pieces”

Author Biography:

Willie Carver Jr. is an LGBTQ+ youth advocate and KY Teacher of the Year. His Gay Poems for Red States is a Stonewall honor, Whippoorwill, American Library Association, Read Appalachia, and Book Riot Award recipient. In 2026, he published Tore All to Pieces (University Press of Kentucky) and The Red Ahead (North Meridian Press).

Willie’s writing has been published in Appalachian Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Writers Chronicle, Another Chicago, Harbor Review, Good River Review, Salvation South, Gay & Lesbian Review, among others. 

 Willie writes from Appalachia and believes everyone’s story matters.

Interview:

Laura Terry: Thank you for visiting with me today over Zoom to discuss Tore All to Pieces. You begin the book with a description of the characters in the book and a hand-drawn map. Would you talk about why you felt the map was important to the beginning of this book?

Willie Carver: I think it is so important for people relationally, in identifying themselves. My Appalachia is always about relations.  It’s your relation to the environment, to other people. There really is a character in this place, but also because this is such a real place for me, and I wanted to capture it. Mosley is based on Martin, KY, which doesn’t exist anymore, at least in the form that it used to, so writing this place is a way to bring it back.

I think about advice I got early on in my writing career, which was when you are writing about place, you should ‘think about what’s in that place and then make sure make sure those elements are centralized in the story.’ But in order for me to write about Appalachia like this, I’d have to leave it. Even in my head, I’d have to stand outside of it and look at it and then pick apart those things central to it from wherever I am when I’m outside of it. And on top of this, Appalachia has so much weight she’s forced to carry. Weight due to a century and a half of capitalists being afraid of a collectivist tendency here and calling us ‘backward hillbilly’ in any way that they can, so that we can’t be taken seriously. So, we have a legibility issue.

LT: The book is unconventional in terms of its structure: poems, short stories linked by characters though not always chronologically. It seems geographical place is as consequential to the narrative as the characters. Is that true?

Willie Carver

WC: Yes, the place is what is holding this entire book together. If there is a central character, it is the town itself. It’s a little cliché depending upon how you look at it, but the town is the binding agent for every single character. They are also each other’s place. I wanted to introduce people to the Appalachian way of relating to people, which is geographic and human. The book started with the titular story about Keesha, and after it was written, suddenly all these other characters in the story wanted a backstory. What I found was, now I have this collection of stories, and I can’t remove anybody, because pulling anyone out of this makes everything fall apart.

And that is really what I wanted to drive at, in a time period where we’re increasingly believing that certain people don’t have a place, that we can define Appalachia or the South along very rigid terms. Well, we really can’t, because there’s no Appalachia without the drug dealing gay uncle who’s not an uncle.

LT: Would you describe “hollers” as a physical aspect of the place? Describe how the physical landscape impacts the people and the story.

WC: The holler might be the basic unit of geographic space where I am from. There is town, usually on whatever flat land we could find or make, and then there are hollers—long roads that begin at the mouth, which opens onto larger roads or into town, and otherwise follows a creek towards a mountain end, called the head. There’s only space for one house at a time usually, then roads and curves, then another. Someone nearer to the head may be an hour from town, even if they’re five minutes as the crow flies.
 

There is a linguist, Paul Reed, at the University of Alabama, who talks about the way language is used in Appalachia, how it is tied to our sense of place. You can say it’s “out,” “over,” “around,”…you can stack prepositions because what people are really doing is imagining the movement and curve of the hillside. So you might say someone lives “back down over and around the church” and the listener images the road as it moves with the hills and creek.

Also I wanted that map because Mosely is such a real place to me. Some of the creeks that travel through Mosley also travel through Martin. It was an act of preservation.

LT: If the people of Appalachia are “forgotten,” or ignored by outsiders, do you think the landscape is also forgotten?

WC: I think specifically about the compound up in the hills pointing back to Mosely, or about when Jamie and Nathan “sort of wreck,” and you’ve got the creek separating them from people on the other side of the creek. Folks within a stone’s throw of them are totally inaccessible.  So, I think there are complex parts to living in Appalachia in terms of geography that don’t map easily onto other American stories.

Proximity doesn’t always mean accessibility.

That feels true in a larger sense, too.

LT: Since you mentioned the titular story, “Tore All to Pieces,” would you describe how the physical place of Appalachia (the hills and the hollers) impacts light and how the light is used as a device in Keesha’s story?

WC: A bunch of thoughts were going through my mind when I was thinking about how light works in this book and in that story. A dear friend of mine was known to say about Appalachia, “you can view this place as a suffocating prison of mountains, or you can view it as a dark womb, a place where you are safe.” I never knew how she felt about this place until I heard this from one of her out-of-state colleagues at her funeral. And I think about the song, “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” which is looking at the structural issues systemically, those that create so much problem for Appalachian people. I think of that line “where the sun comes up about ten in the morning and the sun goes down about three in the day.” I felt that so deeply when I first heard that line, because I know that feeling of thinking you’re kind of trapped. So, the light or lack of it is both a prison and a dark womb.

An early reader of Keesha’s story was upset at the lack of hope and urged me to go back and re-write the story and give her hope. I thought about this, and then decided, ‘Who is Keesha performing hope for?’ She is a stand in for so many children, who in the last twenty years have been running around the holler with — statistically speaking — very little chance of having anything remotely close to a successful life. Why should she have hope? It is not Keesha’s job to perform hope. So, I went back into the story and played up the light and darkness more, because I wanted to make it clear whatever is preventing Keesha from having light, it’s not the holler’s fault and it’s not her fault.

It’s violence outside of her control.

Laura Terry

LT: In many ways, Keesha represents an Appalachian stereotype – a young child raised by her drug-addict, single mother who has questionable taste in men. And the book wrestles with other stereotypes of Appalachia: the ignorant “hillbilly,” the evangelical Christian, the gay “uncle” drug dealer, but you do not allow the characters’ development to end with the stereotype. Each character is complex and nuanced, defying the tropes that others may be trapped by. Would you address how you chose to challenge the stereotypes and write more authenticity and contradiction into the characters?

WC: My experience with people who are trying to do good for Appalachia falls into a couple of camps, and one of those camps tries to hide parts of Appalachia that won’t be understood favorably by others. I think they think that if they can get close to that power, that legibility, that it will just spill over onto everybody else. And anybody who knows how power works knows that that never happens. So one of the things that I tried to do is being aware of the stories that are already there. Often times that means we try to hide the stereotype or we “clean up the language.” We want to say that if we have a character who is on drugs they have to get off of them, that they have to fight the system or they have to solve it. Appalachians didn’t create that problem (the opioid epidemic), so the characters are not responsible for fixing it.

As a queer person I’m aware of my queerness at all times because that is how I am perceived, so there is a second lens added to my self-perception where I have to not only just be, but I have to think how does a straight person perceive how I’m being because my safety is going to be contingent upon playing who I am in a way that’s safe to them.  This is equally true for me as an Appalachian. As I was writing, I could sense the voices and there were so many of them. There was the voice of the outsider who I could sense wasn’t going to take this character seriously because of how she spoke, for example. Or harder for me, I could write my entire childhood verbatim, and some academic would say, ‘This is highly problematic and a stereotype.’ And I would say, ‘No shit! But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.’

I’ve had years to think about this, about the problem with the word ‘stereotype.’ So, yeah, my thought about this book and these stories was I love people. I will write the people I love, and I won’t ask myself questions about what stereotypes mean to outsiders before writing their truth.

Surely that isn’t my work, but theirs.

LT: The reverend in “The Worthy” is the most small-minded of all the characters in the book. Your other characters are more complex, but this character is one-dimensional. He loses his church in the fire because of that prejudice. Would you comment more on that? Why is it that the reverend fits the stereotype of Appalachia more than your other characters?

WC: This story was difficult to write because in this story that church stands for one of the types of extraction that happens in Appalachia, and that is nationalism.

Nationalism is what J.D. Vance was selling. This idea is there’s one type of American, and we all have to match it perfectly and not doing so is some sort of failure. When you look at changes in Appalachia in the last fifty years, you have the old stereotype of the hillbilly who didn’t like the law, right? The outlaw. And very quickly that has shifted and convincing people their own culture is the problem, is inherently less. That is definitely a form of extraction, because you tell someone, ‘Use this model for us to judge you as worthy — and we’re automatically always going to be better than you when we do it.’

You create the hierarchy and then sell it to the person to buy into.

This is what the reverend in the story has done. He’s sold out his own conscience and community values in order to be something else. It’s really hard then; there are moments where we see that he’s sincere in what he believes, but he’s had to sell over that sense of self in order to become who he is. In a book that begins with a relational explanation of who people are, in a book that centers around characters who are part of each other’s story, here you have a character (the reverend) who rejects other people and their story. Without giving anything away, the story concludes with a consequence of rejection which is destructive.

His authentic self is flattened because it has been extracted. For me, that is a form of nationalism, of buying into this idea that there’s a ‘correct’ way for all of us to be. The rest of the book falls apart if any character is different.

LT: Since you have identified place as a defining thread in the book, how does food contribute to the identity of a place? And how do you use food thematically or symbolically in the stories?

WC: There’s been so much that’s lost, I think, in the landscape in terms of growing our own food, being able to secure fresh vegetables, but here food is a form of currency and comfort. And it’s certainly a form of love.  Wanda turning McDonald’s leftovers into a Thanksgiving meal to share with her son shows that there are people with really interesting, complex, and useful skill sets that are bearing over from a previous time, but that haven’t been lost so much as invisibilized.

Folks living before the destructive forces of hyper-capitalism understood imagination, ingenuity, seeing meals in raw ingredients as a form of survival. The culture wasn’t only in how they did that surviving, but in the instinct.

In 2026, it sometimes looks like a Thanksgiving made of fast-food leftovers. But it’s the same instinct; it’s still our culture.

LT: In “Storing Cabbage,” Vicky is forced to make a difficult choice between saving her cabbages in the garden and her canned goods in the basement or escaping rising floodwaters. Is the flood simply a consequence of the landscape and the place of Appalachia or is it more metaphorical?

WC: Flooding is common in Appalachia. Growing up, we probably had a flood a year, and they’ve gotten much, much worse. So yes, the flood is an ‘act of God,’ but we also have these mining industries. We now have the ability to blow up an entire mountain. It wreaks absolute havoc on the landscape, the way streams work. Now we have this new, all-powerful God of industry. But it has the same effect, and we have the same inability to stop it. So in this story, I wanted to blur the two, for what it means to Vicki to try to escape the flood, but she’s also bridging a gap between an Appalachia of the sixties and the Appalachia that exists today. When I was writing the book, I knew there was going to be a flood and there was going to be cabbages.

For Vicky, the cabbages aren’t really about food but about her realizing that her own youth and strength are waning, alongside the stability of the entire environment. The world she is in is changing, and all of it was sort of in those preserves.

Preserves are literally the past stored away.

LT: One of the most hauntingly, beautiful parts of the book is the balance between light and darkness, between dignity and indignity, the unspoken way these characters continue to show up for one another, even if in a tangled and messy way. Why is it important that dignity, above all else, is expressed for these characters? And does that reflect something missing from our understanding of Appalachia as readers?

 WC: Thank you. I think, for me, it’s about who gets afforded the dignity of being seen and who doesn’t. The light is a reminder of this, of being seen.

Tammy works the register at a Dollar Store. Wanda works as a cafeteria worker. Jamie sells drugs. These are the people I know. These are the people I love.

Their lives are complicated by the place they live and its realities. There are those who would tell me that these characters are stereotypes and need to be cleaned up before being put on the page, which is a way of calling them dirty. I refuse.

There are those who would tell me that these characters can be as messy as they are as long as they address the messiness, as long as they overcome something. I refuse.

Because these characters deserve the light. The darkness is in the system itself, the part of our reality that makes us consider some parts of their lives messy. Or stereotypical. Or even problematic.

My people aren’t rough around the edges. They are exactly who they need to be to survive the world they’re in, the circumstances thrust upon them, and the meaning that others give to their interactions with those circumstances. I don’t need to look at them from the eyes generating that meaning. I don’t need to undo the circumstances.

I just need to love them as they are.

To see the beauty in their lives.

That, to me, is how we understand a place.  To assume dignity and worth first. To ask more questions about the conclusions we have already made about people than about how they fit or don’t fit them.

LT: Thank you, Willie, for writing this wonderful collage of stories and place. Tore All to Pieces is an honest, heartfelt and heart-wrenching story of our times.

Laura Terry is an Associate Professor of Architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. She also maintains an active art and writing practice. When not teaching or painting, she can be found exploring the woods of the Ozarks.