An Interview with Kevin Young

Abstract

YOUNG: I definitely think it comes out of the Southern tradition, both literary and folk based. And I definitely want the title to evoke that. As you probably know, both my parents are from Louisiana. And that's where a lot of the impetus of the book comes. I really felt like when I was writing it that I was transcribing ghost stories or telling ghost stories or trying to get down the ways in which people talked. But also the ways in which family history held silence, things that are unsaid. In reading the book, especially the first section, you learn what happens only elliptically-whether a father dies or how the family loses their land or whatever. It's not narrative in the straightforward linear sense. For me that indirection was very Southern. I guess the title too is elliptical; you know, it's clipped. And that to me is symbolic of the language of the book and of the language of those stories.