Claire Hamner Matturro: Robert, first, thank you for sharing some time and your answers with Southern Literary Review. You have a very full schedule of book release events for Sing Down the Moon, plus you are the vice-president in Atlanta of the Easter Seals North Georgia, Inc, and serve as Fiction Editor for the Blue Mountain Review, so I know you are busy. Next, congratulations. This is your second book, following the award-winning The Cicada Tree—which among other accolades won the Georgia Writer of the Year for a First Novel. And, now let me ask this. Can you briefly summarize the plot of Sing Down the Moon? I ask because in my review of Sing Down the Moon, I had trouble explaining the plot in any concise way because with its magical realism, gothic, allegorical, and fantasy elements, the novel is complex, imaginative, multi-layered, and not always lineal.
Robert Gwaltney: Claire, I often joke that I would rather write an entire novel than summarize one. I don’t think I am alone in not wanting to face a synopsis and summary. And then there is the required economy of the elevator pitch. I have gone through all three phases of distillation, and this is how I ultimately would best encapsulate Sing Down the Moon.
Sixteen-year-old Leontyne Skye is bound by blood and legacy to Damascus, an ancient fig tree that grows on the Georgia island of Good Hope, a tree that feeds the dead and devours the living. As her mother disintegrates before her very eyes, Leontyne must confront a birthright that will take everything from her as it has her mother—teeth, hair, and bone. Leontyne has already lost parts of herself—a hand, and her memory, in a happening two years prior known as Tribulation Day. When a mysterious stranger arrives upon Good Hope, Leontyne’s memories slowly resurface, and with those memories, the discovery of a chilling truth. Rejecting her legacy will shatter the fragile balance between the living and the dead, forcing Leontyne to choose: save the island and those she loves, or save herself.
CHM: The language in Sing Down the Moon is just purely gorgeous. It’s so rich that at times I felt like I was reading a long prose poem, and yet, intertwined with the lyrical sentences, you have these wonderful colloquial phrases and idioms. You have a good ear! But the poetry in the language is so wonderful, and you quote poetry, including Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Which leads me to ask if you also write poetry. And, if yes, where might readers enjoy discovering your poems?
Robert Gwaltney
RG: I don’t really think of myself as a poet, at least not in the formal sense. Poetry has always felt like a separate and sacred room to me, one I visit often but don’t quite live in. What I do love—deeply—is lyricism. I love the way language can move the way music does, how a sentence can carry rhythm, breath, and emotion the way a melody carries a song.
I grew up listening to music and reading poetry, and I think both of those influences seep naturally into my prose. When I’m writing fiction, I’m listening as much as I’m looking—listening for cadence, for the rise and fall of a line, for how the words sound and feel in the mouth and the ear. I want the language to sing, even when it’s grounded in the everyday, the colloquial, the spoken voice of the South, the South I knew as a boy.
While I don’t actively publish poetry, poetry and music have shaped the way I approach storytelling. For me, the novel is where those interests come together—narrative, voice, music, and memory—trying to create something that feels lived-in and lyrical at the same time.
CHM: Grady County, Georgia is where you grew up—to quote your website—“alongside three feral, younger brothers in the rash-inducing, subtropical climate of Cairo, Georga.” On a “it’s a small world sign note,” my husband and I lived in Grady County for two decades and we loved it there. Rash and bugs and all. The people there really are wonderful and live up to their slogan of “The Hospitality City.” But there’s quite a difference between moving to a small Southern town in middle-age and growing up in one. Which leads me to ask how did coming of age in a small Southern town impact your writing? Your protagonist in Sing Down the Moon, teenage Leontyne, to quote the novel “yearn[s] to run clear of Good Hope,” and she “plot[s] how I might escape,… biding the time until I am almost to my destination.” Such beautiful, poignant yearning, and that made me wonder how much of her yearning for her “destination” is reflective of your own experiences?
RG: I would not be the person or writer I am today had I not been raised up in Cairo, Georgia. A small Southern town can be both a cradle and a cage—full of generosity, humor, and decency, but also a place where everyone knows who and what they think you’re supposed to be before you’ve had a chance to figure it out for yourself. As a boy, I often felt different, and that difference pushed me to the edges. I was an observer. Quiet and content to watch life from corners and windows rather than plow headlong into it. In a town that small, you feel everything more intensely—the kindness, the scrutiny, the longing.
That sense of yearning you notice in Leontyne is very true to me, though it isn’t autobiographical in a literal way. It’s emotional truth rather than lived experience. I understood the hunger to move toward some imagined destination, even if you couldn’t yet name it or point to it on a map. At the same time, there’s a deep love braided into that yearning. Isolated places like Good Hope—or Cairo—shape your language, your values, your sense of story. Even when you dream of leaving, you carry the place with you. I carry it still.
For me, writing became a way to honor both sides of that experience: the ache to escape and the tenderness for a place that never turns loose. Those early years taught me how to pay attention, how to listen, how to sit with solitude. In the end, I think that quiet watching—those fringes and corners—gave me the raw material for the stories I tell now.
Claire Matturro
CHM: While the language and descriptive passages can be quite beautiful in Sing Down the Moon, the story is often rather dark, even brutal at times. Jealousy, betrayal, anger, addiction, bullying—all rear their ugly heads. Yet, much of the great literature of the South is dark. Flannery O’Conner, Daniel Woodrell, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Barry Hannah, just to name a few. And, of course, a gothic story like Sing Down the Moon is by definition dark and brooding. Yet, I am curious as to where all this darkness came from in your own novel Sing Down the Moon, and how much the fact you are a devoted reader per your website of such authors as Charlotte Bronte, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams influenced it.
RG: The darkness in Sing Down the Moon is something I couldn’t look away from. The South is a place of extraordinary beauty—lush landscapes and deep-rooted traditions, but it’s also a place shaped by trauma, and a complicated history. Those two things exist side by side, and I don’t believe you can write honestly about one without touching upon the other.
I’ve always been drawn to Southern Gothic because it allows space for that reckoning. Writers like Faulkner, O’Connor, and Morrison understood that the grotesque and the beautiful are often intertwined, that grace be born through violence or loss, and that moral clarity is hardly ever simple. That tension—between good and bad, beauty and ruin—is where I feel most at home as a writer.
My reading life has shaped that sensibility as much as my raising. Charlotte Brontë taught me how interior darkness and longing can be rendered with lyric intensity. Capote showed me how elegance of language can coexist alongside cruelty. Tennessee Williams gave me permission to write fragile, yearning characters who live on the edge of collapse. All of them wrote with deep compassion, even when their worlds were brutal.
CHM: Of all the wild, wonderful, unique, and uniquely fascinating characters in Sing Down the Moon, Willadeene the haint captured me the most, with her evergreen skin and the way flowers and berries grow out of her. You describe her as: “Willadeene is beautiful to every sort of eye. From what Eulalee has told me, there is not another one like her. She is near abouts a human creature. A womanly form with arms, legs, and bosom. Evergreen skin and flowers for hair. And she is the only specter ever to escape a Sarah Fig before it could do her in.” And while the old cliché that there is nothing new under the sun is especially true for novels, Willadeene in my opinion comes very close. So, I need to ask: where in this world did you come up with the idea of Willadeene?
RG: I’m happy to hear that you are partial to my Willadeene. She came out of my love for folklore and for the way stories are passed along in the South—half-remembered, half-believed, and very rooted in place. Growing up, I heard talk of haints and spirits not as abstractions, but as presences. They belonged to the land and the people who worked it, to the trees, the swamps, the backyards and graveyards. In Gullah Geechee and Appalachian traditions especially, a haint isn’t just something you fear; it’s something you live alongside. We all live alongside ghosts. With memories. With the past.
When I began writing Sing Down the Moon, I didn’t want Willadeene to remain a shadow or a whisper. I wanted her to be corporeal—to take up space on the page the way the living characters do. Giving her a body, a texture, a scent, even a kind of beauty felt essential. I wanted readers to feel her the way Leontyne does, as something tangible and immediate, not just symbolic. Her evergreen skin and the flowers and berries growing from her came from thinking about the South itself—how life, decay, beauty, and wildness are all tangled together. I believe at one point in the novel, she says something along the lines of this. It is hard being dead. And more alive than the living.
CHM: Speaking strictly for myself, I see Sing Down the Moon in large part as an allegory about addiction. The drug Redemption drives so much of the negative behaviors, though not all since jealousy certainly wreaks havoc in the story. The South has been ravaged by addictions to oxycodone, meth, and crack, and I wonder if I am misreading this aspect in Sing Down the Moon. What would you say is the most important theme or moral of the story?
RG: Addiction is absolutely a theme. In short, I would say this about the book. It is a Southern Gothic tale of generational trauma, exploring inheritance, addiction, and identity. It’s a story about the legacies we carry, the ghosts we inherit, and the costs of breaking free.
CHM: Thank you again, Robert, for sharing your thoughts and your time with the readers of Southern Literary Review.
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