Tell us about your journey to becoming a writer.
I was the editor of the Rebel Review, Franklin High School’s newspaper. My English teacher, Stephen Womack, assigned us books that greatly mattered to me. One was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Many of his writings are set in Tennessee. Reading this high-caliber writer from Tennessee while doing journalism put me on the path of wanting to do literary reporting.
You have written and edited for several publications, including Field & Stream and Time. How did you make the shift from journalism to authoring a book?
My book is book-length journalism. It’s the same muscle – finding a story, getting sources, working the phone. I went from writing short magazine pieces to gradually longer ones, and the book is an expansion from there.
Your first book, Valley So Low, was released last month. Why did you feel this was an important story to tell?
It is a quintessentially American story about TVA and the workers who cleaned up the disastrous coal-ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee in 2008. The stakes were unbelievably high for these workers: the economy was melting down, and they heroically stepped up in the face of a disaster to help their community. But then they got sick because TVA and its contractors gave very few of them dust masks. TVA has done a lot of good for the Southeast, but it has also made some horrible mistakes, and I wanted to show both in my book.
You grew up in Franklin and have lived in other states, but you are now raising a family here. What do you love most about living in Franklin?
It’s home. All my family lives on my street or around the corner. Many people I grew up with have stayed in Franklin, so I can go almost anywhere and see folks I know. Life changes so much, so I appreciate that.