Fiction often involves movement—in both the literal and figurative sense. The reader, accumulating pages, follows a character’s emotional and physical journey. The writer, accumulating drafts, goes in search of an elusive answer to a difficult question. For us—Rickey Fayne and Carrie R. Moore—fiction pays homage to places left and longed for, especially when it comes to the South.

In the winter of 2021, I met Rickey at the Michener Center for Writers. Like so many of our peers, I felt shaken by the pandemic, taking classes on Zoom and trying to write without the in-person communities MFAs often promise. Then– Rickey’s manuscript appeared in workshop. It reimagined the story of the Devil, who in Rickey’s telling, received a deal from Jesus: free Black folk from legacies of slavery and earn the chance to reenter heaven. Rickey’s pages were soulful, relentlessly honest, full of profound grace. I read as the Devil pursued generations of the Laurent family, offering each descendant a shaky salvation in the hopes of earning freedom for them both. Rickey’s work reminded me of home, of the South as I knew it. He was writing the way I hoped to, which is to say, he was complicating the people and places I loved. For years after that class, we traded work before we ever met in person. Now, his manuscript has become the novel The Devil Three Times, which was released May 13 by Little, Brown.  

 – Carrie R. Moore 

I first encountered Carrie’s writing in a novel writing workshop. She shared a draft of her novel about two teens’ troubled relationship to their home, an all-black town known the world over for their stained glass. I tore through it in half a day in awe of Carrie’s prose. Her descriptions were rich, evocative, and kinetic. But what I was most taken with was the deep sense of place, the way this town felt alive. She’d written a book that catered to my readerly tastes. I feel the same about her debut short story collection Make Your Way Home, out from Tin House July 15^th. Here, Carrie turns her attention to real places all throughout the South, delving into their histories, and peopling them with characters as tangible as anyone you might meet out on the street. I am beyond thrilled that her writing is finally out in the world. 

– Rickey Fayne

Now, in the summer of our debuts, we decided to interview each other about how we arrived at our characters, the complexities of desires, and getting back home.

Carrie R. Moore: The Devil Three Times is so daring with its religious references (to this practicing Christian, in particular!). I’m floored by the amount of complexity it affords the Devil. He’s unsettling, and at the same time, I have a deep empathy for your version of him. Was there anything that pursued you as you wrote the novel? Something you just couldn’t shake until you’d gotten it right on the page?

Rickey Fayne: I was terrified of the Devil when I was kid. One of the things that separates the Black church from mainstream Christianity is the emphasis on immanence over transcendence. It’s as if the figures in the Bible are still living and you might one day encounter them in the world. I thought that one day I was going to turn the corner and he was going to be there waiting with a bargain for my soul too good to refuse. I could feel the shame that would be visited upon me when that happened. Part of my motivation for writing the Devil in this way was to pay homage to this attribute of Black religion and to find a way to forgive myself for not being perfect. I think a lot of people who grew up in the church were made to feel guilt for actions both real and imagined. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, what hope do any of us have? None. But, if there’s hope for the Devil, there’s hope for everyone.

CRM: I definitely feel that sensation in your novel, especially the sense of shame that affects so many of the characters, whether they struggle with addiction, passing, or desire for the wrong person. And of course, there’s the Devil’s shame in his separation from God. It’s hard not to feel shame when being imperfect has such a cost, when you’ve been shunned or kicked out of someplace meaningful, like heaven in the Devil’s case.

RF: Where do your own characters come from? Do you see or hear them first, or do you start with a situation and allow that to give rise to them?

CRM: They come from emotional extremes. Much of Make Your Way Home arose from my own inner turmoil, from moments when I felt like I was struggling with multiple ways of being. In my twenties, I wouldn’t just feel anger or disappointment or acute self-awareness. I would almost watch myself having those emotions and try to suppress them, as if that would afford me safety or control. I remember a specific instance where a former friend of mine said something deeply disappointing and hurtful about Black women’s desirability. Half of me felt a profound, unshakable anger. But the other half was aware of how easily people perceive Black women as angry, and this was the half that wanted to project some more positive emotion, even if my rage was justified and pretending otherwise wore me out.

I gave those internal conflicts to my characters. Cherie in “Naturale” has my anger. Claire in “How Does Your Garden Grow?” has my fear of trusting others. Damonia in “Gather Here Again” has my simultaneous hope and apathy for a better future in this country. Every character is born from one emotion or another that I’ve wrestled with late into the night. It’s not that I see or hear my characters, but I feel them, if that makes sense. Hopefully, that doesn’t sound crazy.

RF: It most certainly doesn’t. I know exactly what you mean. I think this is what Du Bois was trying to get at with his talk of double-consciousness, the “seeing one’s self through the eyes of another” of it all. But, more often than not, we spend so much time worrying about the “double” that we forget consciousness. Which is why I love your stories so much. You’re mapping out the inner life of Black feeling over the Southern landscape and working toward a deeper understanding of what unites us as Black Southerners outside the experience of race and it’s a joy to behold.

CRM: I deeply appreciate that. How do your characters come to you?

RF: It’s similar for me. I think of many of the characters in The Devil Three Times as versions of myself that might have existed if time and circumstance had had something else to say. All of them have something of my own feeling and experience. Reverend Walter’s eulogy for Lucille, his mother, is something akin to what I might have said if I’d had it in me to stand up at my own father’s funeral. Lucy’s having to choose between her art and her familial obligations mirrors how I felt when I looked up and realized that I’d spent the last few years of my grandparents lives on a dissertation only a handful of people would ever read. I don’t know that I was aware of these connections as I was writing but, once they were down, and I was able to look back over them they were disconcertingly obvious.

CRM: I can feel that realness in your characters. My favorite writers put their distress and unanswerable questions in their work.

RF: Speaking of unanswerable questions, I’m curious about what first compelled you to write about the South. In each of your stories, even before I’m told where I am, I can feel the South in the logic of thought, the rendering of image, the rhythm of speech. Then, once I’m pulled into the story, I see it in the presentness of the past and the problems your characters face. Why do you turn to the South over and over again?

CRM: I’m deeply interested in uncomfortable intimacies, in moments where you get so close that you can’t ignore a truth that makes you flinch. I was born and raised in the Atlanta area, which means the South has many warm memories for me. It’s where I ate tomatoes from my aunt’s garden and grew up alongside my cousins and first realized how easy it was to drive and suddenly end up in the mountains or at the beach. I have a deep love for the places and people that made me. And at the same time, I can’t ignore the way the South has been romanticized: moonlight and magnolias, the plantation wedding, the glamorization of the Confederacy. While conducting research for this collection, there were many times when I would encounter some law or historical event that absolutely horrified me, that was worse than anything I could’ve imagined. At their core, the stories in the collection are love stories—but they have to be honest. I write about the Black South again and again because I want to get that balance right. I’m always trying to make sense of the relationship between past and present.

Did you feel something similar while writing The Devil Three Times? My approach was to include as many stories as I could within the collection, but I can’t help but notice what the scope of your novel allows you to do in terms of time and its impact on the Laurent family.

RF: I did. What the past means for the present is always at the forefront of my mind when I write. At the same time, one of the most important revelations for me as a reader was that people throughout human history have largely worried about and wanted the same sorts of things. I wanted to show how historical forces inflect the worries and wants of one family over the course of hundreds of years. So although the external pressures bearing down on the characters toward the end of the book look very different from what their ancestors faced during slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights era, internally they are all going through the same sorts of things. We used to sit around eating whole tomatoes fresh from the garden too, sprinkling salt onto them as we went, and I like to imagine our ancestors, no matter how bad things were, found time to do the same.

CRM: So true. With the first of my stories in the collection, “When We Go, We Go Downstream,” that feeling was the only way I could even begin to write characters who were enslaved, since there’s so much potential for a failure of research and imagination. What I wanted most was to capture my characters’ central human experiences. Even if liberation was the goal, I kept wondering about the small ways they’d try to take care of themselves, their inclinations toward family, the loves they would have craved. I kept seeking their interior lives. For many of the characters in the collection, actually, that became different forms of love and connecting with another person.

RF: It’s so interesting that you cite love as the unifying factor of your collection. I hadn’t thought about it in that way before but I definitely see it. I’m curious about this idea of uncomfortable intimacy, when I hear the term, I can’t help but think of the interpersonal dynamics in your stories, particularly “All Skin is Clothing,” where the younger brother sees his older sister as an extension of himself, or “Cottonmouths,” where the mother and daughter share pregnancies—that last scene where the daughter pours her mother tea gave me chills. Can you say more about what drew you to explore that kind of relationship? Is it still love when it goes that far? Or does it become something else?

CRM: My characters are looking for love in its best sense—what they want is for someone to know them for the entirety of who they are, to make space for their joys and hurts and vulnerabilities. Complete safety, in other words. And still that’s one-sided. They haven’t yet learned love as an act of service or, more specifically, how to give and receive care at the same time. The younger brother character in “All Skin is Clothing” is so emotionally wounded by experiencing gunfire that he sees his sister as a refuge. He’s right to. He’s a child who’s been through a harrowing experience. The same is true of Twyla in “Cottonmouths.” She only wants to be close to her mother as her pregnancy thrusts her into early womanhood. I’m always interested in how our needs—even when justified—can unsettle other people or become burdensome. I’m writing about how you get so close to another person through a continuous process of sharing and asking—until they get weary and have to take a step back. I’m interested in love as work.

RF: That’s interesting, I was more interested in what desire does to a person. At some point in my education, I was introduced to Lacan’s idea that desire is lack. But this idea is kind of reductive. In grad school, I encountered the work of Deleuze and Guattari and found more to grasp in their idea that desire is a productive force, the only means by which one entity may strive to become other than what it is. Lack presupposes a state of perfection to which one might return, whereas “becoming” is an open-ended process that could, potentially, lead to heretofore unimagined possibilities.

CRM: I love that. Whenever I write something that verges on the romantic, I’m always thinking about what that love—or perhaps desire—will mean to those characters, even outside the particular relationship.

RF: Exactly, we all have a story we tell ourselves about who we are, what we value, and what our limits are. After you develop intense feelings for someone else, your grip on the narrative slackens. Desire allows you to imagine alternative ways of being, to see life with fresh eyes and know that they’re capable of more. This sort of change can be positive or negative. For James—one of the few characters in the book who comes to understand that love is work—these intense feelings help him realize that he can do difficult things. For Porter, James’s brother, the after-effect of desire is the realization that he can leave all his problems behind.

CRM: Your characters’ personal relationships to desire—and its dark side—is one of the most intriguing elements to track throughout the Laurent family’s generations. Without giving too much away, some of the characters—such as Asa and Louis—initially lust after people who aren’t “technically” blood relatives, though this soon changes over the generations. Eventually, the limit stretches, until what counts as “sin” becomes particular to each character. Even then, what matters more is how they think of themselves in the wake of their actions. It’s astonishing.

RF: I’m thinking now about the title of your collection, Make Your Way Home, the epigraph from Jesmyn Ward, and something you said once about leaving the South, seeing it for what it was and is, and then returning. Did you know before you started writing what you wanted to write about all this or did you have to get it all down first to understand it?

CRM: I didn’t know, at first. I only knew I wanted to write about how multi-faceted the South really is, in terms of Black cultures and geographies. Much later, I realized I was writing about creating a home in a hostile environment, whether that hostility involved political and historical forces or interpersonal relationships. If I were to guess, based on how well I got to know you and your work during our time in our MFA, I’d imagine that’s true for you too.  

The last word in my story collection was always “back.” Tell me, how did you arrive at the last word of your novel: “home”?

RF: When I was living at home, all I thought about was how much I wanted to get away. It wasn’t until I left that I realized what that place meant for me. I grew up at the intersection of Fayne Rd and Fayne Ln on land my family has lived on for almost two hundred years. By the time I came along it was filled with people who loved and wanted nothing but the best for me but, by the time I finally realized this, most of what made home home—my grandparents, my aunts, uncles, and cousins,—was gone. That is part of how I identify with the Devil. He didn’t realize Heaven was paradise until he left and by then it was too late to go back. Of course, I didn’t see any of this until I was several drafts in, which is when I wrote that last section. It came to me fully formed, all at once and it wasn’t until after I typed that last word that everything clicked.

CRM: My story is the same as yours. I grew up in Georgia, then began college in California, where I thought my life would begin. I wanted to make movies, then write novels. From there, the South called out to me. It kept showing up in my work.

But I think writing allows for that. If it can’t return you home, it can get you close.