Donna Meredith interviews Walker Abel, author of “Heart & Bone”

Heart & Bone Summary:

Deep in the Appalachian winter, a brutal ambush at a remote mountain shelter leaves two young hikers dead. For Emma Fisher and her friend Summer, surviving the attack is only the beginning. Somewhere in the whiteout, a man named Jedediah follows them—a man bound to Emma’s past by something she believed had long ago been buried.

Jake McKellar travels the frozen ridges alone, carrying a compass and the memory of a brother he has spent years searching for. When he discovers the aftermath of the ambush, he finds himself responsible for two strangers whose lives have become entangled with his own. To lead them down the mountain, he must confront a man who has come to finish what he started.

Set against the unforgiving winter wilderness of the Great Smoky Mountains, Heart & Bone is a story of survival, grief, and the unlikely bonds formed when everything else has been stripped away. A novel of violence and tenderness, of the past reaching into the present, and of what remains when survival alone is no longer enough.

Walker Abel is a Mississippi author, and Heart & Bone is his debut novel.

A longtime resident of Oxford, Mississippi, Abel is drawn to stories about ordinary people confronted by extraordinary circumstances—and the choices they make when the past refuses to stay buried.

 Interview:

Donna Meredith: What motivated or inspired you to write about this story?

Walker Abel: Years ago my daughter and I hiked a section of the Appalachian Trail together, and I didn’t sleep at all the first night. Two men walked into the shelter at dusk, and for a while it was just the two of us and two strangers. They were thru-hikers and probably perfectly nice, but you don’t know that when the woods go dark. About an hour later a father and his young son showed up, and I remember thinking, well, if we’re going to die, at least we’ll all die together. That was when I understood that it wasn’t the bears I was afraid of out there. It was the people. Heart & Bone grew out of that.

DM: Did any particular character really speak to you?

Walker Abel

WA: Jake, more than any of them. I have several brothers, and I had a sister who died when she was young. So whatever Jake feels about loss in this book, I’ve felt it too. I didn’t have to invent his grief. I only had to give it to him and get out of the way. Those were the hardest chapters to write and the ones I’m proudest of.

Emma mattered to me in a different way, because I wrote her with my daughter in mind. None of what happens to Emma happened to her, thank God. But whenever I wasn’t sure how Emma would react to something, I asked myself what my daughter would do, and that usually settled it.

The character who surprised me was Jedediah. He’s Amish, an escaped prisoner, and he’s convinced that nobody is innocent, not even a child. He’s wrong about that, and the book knows it. I gave him his own chapters in a voice that is almost scriptural. Writing from inside him was unsettling, and I think that’s why he works.

DM: What research was required for the writing of this story? What resources were available to you?

WA: Less than you’d think, because I’d been there. I’ve spent a lot of time hiking those mountains, and when I sat down to write, I could see the entire chase in about five minutes. I knew where they would go, how long each stretch would take, and what the weather would be doing to them. I could see it all the way to the final confrontation at the waterfall. I knew how they would land, how they would hit the ground, and which bones would break. The ground itself was the easy part. The hard part was everything the characters carried across it.

Donna Meredith

DM: What details were most challenging to get right about the setting?

WA: The mountains came easily. The Amish world did too, which surprised people. There’s an Amish community about thirty miles from my home. One day I was driving past their one-room schoolhouse and saw the children playing in the yard out front. They had a shirt hung on a stick, and they were chanting around it, reaching in to lay their hands on it, then breaking away and running, some kind of game of tag. I’d never seen anything like it. That scene is in the book almost exactly as I saw it.

The challenge was moving it. The community near me sits on flat farmland, nothing like the country I’d pictured. So I had to take something I’d watched with my own eyes and set it down in the mountains so it felt like it had always been there. The schoolhouse is real, the children are real, the game is real. Only the ground under them changed.

DM: Tell us a little about your background and what got you started as a writer.

WA: I’m an engineer by training, and I run a broadband company here in Oxford, so writing isn’t my day job. I’ve always read more literary fiction than anything else: McCarthy, Doerr, Faulkner.

What actually started me was a dream. In April 2022 I woke up around two in the morning from a dream of going over a waterfall with a brother of mine. It was so vivid that I typed it into the notes on my phone before it could fade. I left it alone for two weeks, then came back and wrote it out as a full chapter. That became “White Noise.” Then I wrote a chapter before it and a chapter after it, and that was when I realized the boy in those pages had to grow up. I needed Jake as a man, remembering. Everything else in the book was built around that.

It took about four years. I queried agents for a long time, then decided to publish it myself through my own imprint, Red Earth Press. The engineer in me never really left. I wanted every word to earn its place.

DM: What question do you wish interviewers would ask you?

WA: Where the title comes from. For most of the four years I worked on it, the book was called Ridge Runner. It described the chase, but it didn’t describe the book. I wrote the action in lean, hard prose, close to McCarthy, with nothing extra. In the quieter, emotional moments I let the language open up and breathe more. Bone for the action, heart for everything else. Once I saw that, Heart & Bone was the only title that fit. I went back and worked the phrase into an early chapter, in a scene between Jake and his mother, so the title lives inside the story too.

DM: Thanks for sharing a little about your writing process to create this book with Southern Literary Review.