Elizabeth Broadbent is a force of nature. Since making her acquaintance, I have found Eliza to be a friendly, passionate, and caring person. Her love for both writing and her fellow writers is palpable, whether you’re interacting with her online or in person at conventions. And she’s not only a cheerleader of her contemporaries, but a serious player in the writing game, putting up truly impressive stats. She is the author of Blood Cypress (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2025), Ink Vine, and Ninety-Eight Sabers (both Undertaker Books, 2024)—that’s three fantastic books in two years for those keeping score at home.

In addition, she is a former journalist with bylines in The Washington Post, Insider, Time, ADDitude Magazine, and TODAY! Parents. She was an eight-year staff writer for Scary Mommy, and her essay, “A Mother’s White Privilege,” is used by anti-racism programs in universities and activist organizations worldwide. She has appeared as a guest on BBC World News, MSNBC, CNN, and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” An exiled South Carolinian, Broadbent lives in the Commonwealth of Virginia with her husband, three sons, two dogs, four cats, and flock of crows.

And even with a house that full, she’s got plenty of words to share about her favorite author, as you will soon see.

Who is your favorite author and why?

My first favorite author was Pat Conroy, but every great author is a thief, and the better the author, the more talented their target. I loved Conroy because, like his main character says, my house had no poetry, no Shakespeare—I had never seen words enjambed into rich, reckless metaphor. Conroy made me want to be a writer, but it took me a long time to learn that he was stealing from two people in particular. He stole from Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel. And he stole from William Faulkner. I love Thomas Wolfe—the introduction to Homeward can make me cry with its sheer beauty. But my favorite author is William Faulkner.

If you’re telling them right, Southern stories are horror tied up in a bow. Faulkner knew that. You’ve got to tie a real pretty knot, because no one could stand to look at them otherwise.

But I can’t talk about Faulkner without a disclaimer. Faulkner is problematic—so problematic that I wrote Blood Cypress because his treatment of women and neurodivergent people infuriated me. Dissertations have been written about his racial caricatures and his tendency to veer into Lost Cause-ism. Faulkner’s art is beautiful. Faulkner’s art is appalling.

As a woman, I admire feminists who can throw out problematic male artists without a backward glance. I snatch at beauty where I find it. But if you do that without calling out injustice, you become complicit in oppression.

Ooh, a lot to chew on here, even at the beginning, I love it. I suspect we’re going to dive deeper into this particular topic as we go here; but, right out of the gate, I wanted to get a little more from you, re: this idea of problematic authors/texts. Because you mention Conroy’s and Faulkner’s issues, and both authors have passed on, so there are no new works forthcoming to judge in light of past controversies. At the same time, these controversies weren’t all posthumous, right? Yet, we still read these authors, we teach these authors, we have them as part of the so-called canon. And they may have even enjoyed success in their lifetimes amid controversy. All of which leads me to ask if you have any type of personal philosophy/code of reader conduct for yourself regarding when/when not to separate art from artist or, say, what red lines may exist for you in terms of author behavior/conduct, etc., and whether those lines extend beyond death or not?

I’d love to throw up my hands and refuse to engage with problematic writers. But as a Southern Gothic author, my artistic heritage remains inherently problematic. In All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren writes, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” Governor Willie Stark (based on Louisiana governor Huey Long) was talking about his opponents there, but he could have been talking about the South in general. Scratch the surface of any white Southerner and you’ll find that something.

At the University of South Carolina, I learned about the life and work of National Book Award winner and former Poet Laureate James Dickey from a trio of his best friends: America’s preeminent John Updike scholar, the foremost expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a wise-talking classics professor. These were men who loved literature. They adored the larger-than-life poet and handed me a hundred stories about the life and times of Dickey, most of which started with, “Jim was drinking.”

Eventually, another professor told me about Dickey’s darker side. Dickey was a misogynist (no shock if you’ve read Deliverance). His casual lechery rose to legend in Columbia—many women at the university refused to ride in elevators with him. There were also allegations of racism too grim to repeat. I was heartbroken. 

But, as Dickey’s son Christopher said about Henry Hart’s controversial biography of his father, this ignores the author’s blinding genius. The cinematic adaptation of Deliverance is a touchstone of American film; the novel itself is a poetic wonder (of conflicted toxic masculinity, but a poetic wonder nonetheless). His poetry remains nothing short of stunning. I could live without Deliverance, genius as it is. I could not live without “The Performance,” “Root-Light, or the Lawyer’s Daughter,” “For the Last Wolverine,” and “Cherrylog Road.”

Or, perhaps, I simply refuse to. How do you defend the indefensible? You can’t, and you don’t try. You buck the traditional love of the lost cause. With apologies to my wondrous teachers—and these men gave me stunning kindness at a time when I very much needed it—Hart’s biography holds more truth than I would like to bear. But those same men passed me James Dickey as an inheritance, a kind of artistic blood-right entailed from academic father to child. The Southerner might hate the face of his father, but he never forgets it.

If I tossed out problematic writers, I would be left only with Black Southern authors. While that’s still a rich heritage, it would tell me nothing about how white Southern writers before me coped (badly) with their legacy of racism and colonialism. Once again, I’m forced to figure my own literary inheritance like an adult groping through detritus of a ruined childhood. To discard those forebears is to refuse what makes me myself. For better or worse, theirs is the artistic legacy that makes me.

This is the key difference between the problematic nature of William Faulkner and other Southern Gothic writers as opposed to, say, Neil Gaiman or She Who Must Not Be Named. I hate to live without Sandman, but I do so without regret. Gaiman didn’t create me—or, at least, his kinship is a more distant kind. I can toss current, living writers for their atrocious behavior. They don’t form the bedrock of my artistic life; moreover, despite our current winter of discontent, they ought to know better.

I could disavow Faulkner, Dickey, O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Warren, but my work would still bear their smeared fingerprints. Better to face the guilt than to waste ink with denials—you’ll look ridiculous, and no one will believe you anyway. So I call out racism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, and classism (did I hit everything? I’m sure there’s more). But I can’t leave them behind: The past is never dead. That’s our key and our touchstone and the root of our evil in five small words.

I know what happens to Southerners who deny their past. That bastard just floats up meaner and angrier.

When were you first made aware of this author and how did you come to their work?

I don’t think you can properly love Faulkner when you’re very young, the way you can’t love The Great Gatsby when you’re a sophomore in high school. You have to return to it. So, when I read Faulkner in college, I liked him, but I didn’t love him. His themes are complex; his prose is beautiful but wending and sometimes hard to parse. Faulkner’s hard. Hand the uninitiated The Sound and the Fury and they’ll chuck it against the wall. I certainly did.

I came back to Faulkner after my MFA, after I quit fiction and tried journalism, after internet journalism broke and I took up fiction again. With a graduate minor in Southern lit, I had already read a lot of his work. But my undergraduate mentor always raved about Absalom, Absalom!, and since I’d managed to miss studying the novel, I picked it up.

The book’s first three pages are some of the most spectacular prose in the English language. I kept it together until the second page, when I read, Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap then down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be Sutpen’s Hundred, like the olden time, Be Light.

That’s when I fell in love, right there. My two best friends and my husband have all been informed that if I’m actively dying, they had best make the beginning of Absalom, Absalom! the last thing I hear (and the second-last best be Dickey’s “For the Last Wolverine.”).

Faulkner also has a fine-tuned sense of setting and how it affects narrative (notice how the  sentence above is about place-creation), so much so that he created a whole county in which to set his work. I love the small-town-ness of his stories. There’s a heft and a richness to the fabric of Yoknapatawpha that makes other fictional towns feel flimsy as flour sacks.

I want to emphasize my agreement on that last point in particular. It really does feel as though there’s as much to learn from Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha as there is from Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Both seem to recognize that places are informed by the people within them, the cultures, the history, etc. And the way people talk, obviously! Are there any other specific takeaways on setting that you’ve gleaned from Faulkner?

Southern Gothic stories start and end with setting; the web of human experience exists as a function of Spanish moss and sullen humidity. Absalom, Absalom! begins with a description of the “long hot dead weary September afternoon,” twice-bloomed wisteria, and gusts of sparrows; the crux of its beginning comes in the creation of Sutpen’s Hundred I described above: that stark act of man-made creation torn violently from rank wilderness. “A Rose for Emily” commences with the town’s women eager to see inside a house. And on and on.

Comb through classic Southern Gothic and you’ll find that in the first two paragraphs—often the first sentence—people react to and are influenced by setting (or perhaps the other way around). Deliverance sees four men hunched over a map; As I Lay Dying describes a field. Argue about Kansas’ inclusion in the South all you want, but In Cold Blood starts with a description of the town of Holcomb. The first paragraph of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil describes Mercer House. And that covers the top five Southern Gothic novels on Goodreads (other than To Kill A Mockingbird, which begins instead with history). 

While my Blood Cypress doesn’t examine setting on the first page, it does so for a specific reason: the novella’s first section takes place at Princeton. As soon as we arrive in the South, Lila Carson discusses life as a function of Lower Congaree’s isolation. Ink Vine features a ride through town on its first pages, as well as using the heat to damn rich people in the second paragraph; Ninety-Eight Sabers discusses the heat and the scent of sickness. Exactly none of this happened intentionally or consciously.

Not only does Faulkner understand people as a web of relationships influenced by setting, but his recurring characters also allow him to examine how that web expands and changes over time. We know the history of Yoknapatawpha from the expulsion of the Native Americans up to Faulkner's present day. Because Faulkner knows his setting and characters so well, he’s able to discuss that microcosm of the South in dialogue with history. I used this model to write my story “Babylon Burning,” which examines a Civil War incident mentioned in Ninety-Eight Sabers. Because I understood how that web of relationships functions, I was able to go backward in time: I know those stories that made the characters who they are. I’ve spent so much time in Legare County that I can trace its roads in my dreams. 

Deploying setting like this allows time to bend and the past to resurface, an absolute crux of Southern Gothic literature. You can’t understand the present until you know the past, and you can’t talk about either one without discussing landscape. Haunted houses have cobwebs; the South has Spanish moss. Both are warnings if you know what to look for.

Is there one particular piece of work from this author that you are especially fond of or that’s had a significant creative impact on you? What is that piece and what makes it so appealing or affecting for you?

For so many reasons, I think Absalom, Absalom! is the quintessential Southern Gothic novel. It might not be the first Southern Gothic novel; it’s not even the first Southern Gothic Faulkner wrote, or the greatest—The Sound and the Fury is regarded as his masterpiece. Probably true, but as a woman, I can’t read it without wondering about Caddy’s erasure. It’s certainly sadder than Absalom, Absalom!. But The Sound and the Fury lacks that truly wicked pulpiness we Southerners crave like sweet tea. I love Absalom, Absalom! for the same reason South Carolinians like me followed the trial of Alex Murdaugh: rank, absurd bloodiness.

Like Murdaugh, Thomas Sutpen is absolutely feral. We wanthubris to destroy him, and his payback comes with the holy righteousness of a cleansing fire. Both men are the South, and the South is always Saturn, a god who devours his own children. Absalom, Absalom! tells the story of a demon’s downfall; it’s also a tale about our original sin of racial oppression. The narrative is wrapped in gorgeous prose, and like any good Southern story, it spirals through structure, through multiple narrators—that’s modernism, obviously, but we knew truth was slant before postmodernists broke the world.

I’ve also had to sit in the cold and the dark with the question Shreve asks Quentin at the end of the novel. Why do I hate the South?“I dont hate it, he thought …  I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont!”

That’s the last line, and Quentin never answers Shreve. Absalom, Absalom! becomes Faulkner’s answer. So far, Blood Cypress, Ink Vine, and Ninety-Eight Sabers are mine. Northerners have the luxury of forgetting our nation’s original sin. But when you stroll through those moss-draped squares in downtown Savannah, you remember that enslaved people laid their bricks. You remember those squares only exist because Sherman didn’t burn them. You’re blind to it, you shut your eyes to it, or you live haunted.

Yes, to return to the Faulkner/Tolkien comparison (now, there’s one for the fanboys!): Faulkner’s not necessarily inventing the history of his characters and their world from scratch. These works exist in the context of Southern history’s good, bad, and very, very ugly. And now you’re mentioning recent Southern events like the Murdaugh trial. What do you think accounts for this interweaving of history and literature that seems so integral with the character of the South?

Lord, that’s a question. Why do our history and literature twine together like snakes? Short answer: the South loves storytelling. The best stories are about ourselves, and our past is a  chronicle of horrors.

We have a long tradition of oral culture. The region is full of griots and scops; Southern literature comes from the bardic tradition via Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas. These are yoked to a love of public oratory and a religion that emphasizes charismatic preaching. No shock that to this day, Southerners are suckers for a good story.

And to explain how those stories twine into history, I’ll tell you one.

South Carolina is a backwater banana republic, and even today, Hampton County remains a backwater of that backwater, a land of malarial swamps and pervasive poverty. In June of 2021, in the Hampton County depths of what locals call bumf*ck nowhere, prominent lawyer Alex Murdaugh gunned down his wife Maggie and his twenty-two-year-old son Paul. While not initially suspected of murder, Alex’s comically fake suicide attempt exposed his long-term Oxycodone addiction, as well as the embezzlement he’d committed to fund it. After he was expelled from the law practice his grandfather founded, Alex was arrested and tried for double homicide. When the jury heard that his hound dog Bubba failed to bark at the murderer, they found him guilty. 

And that only hits the case’s highlights. But you cannot understand Alex without understanding that two years beforehand, his son Paul killed another Hampton County teen in an underage, drunken boating accident. Paul avoided immediate prosecution through the influence of both Alex and his grandfather, Hampton County solicitor Randolph Murdaugh III. Nevertheless, the Beach family filed a large civil suit. Alex’s Oxy addiction had already driven him hundreds of thousands of dollars in the red. If the suit went forward, his financial records would have been subject to unwanted scrutiny.

And you cannot understand either Paul’s drunken boating accident or the Murdaugh obsession with money without first understanding that Randolph III had served as the 14th District solicitor since 1986 (solicitors are the state’s equivalent of district attorneys). Randolph III took over the post from his father, Randolph Murdaugh, Jr., who was sworn in as solicitor in 1940; Randolph Jr. inherited that post as a birthright from his own father, Randolph Murdaugh, who was elected in 1920.

And you also cannot understand Randolph Murdaugh without knowing that he not only rode into office on the coattails of Ku Klux Klan rallies, but he also masterminded an expansive bootlegging business. Randolph had so much political power that when a state senator once asked him for help, he shut his door and said, “Is it legal or illegal? Well, it doesn’t matter.” Alex Murdaugh’s crimes are inseparable from his family’s history of treating Hampton County like their personal fiefdom, from his unbroken legacy of ill-gotten wealth and white privilege.

The Southern present cannot be understood without the Southern past.

Of course, neither can the American present. But more than any other region of the country, Southerners tend toward both honesty and self-loathing (blame that on religious guilt). New England history begins with the Pilgrims. Mythologized as thrifty and honest, they’re rescued by benevolent Native Americans. White America likes to forget that those Pilgrims eventually slaughtered the Wampanoag.

The South’s history begins with Jamestown. First Families of Virginia exist because their ancestors cannibalized one another; Disney might have swallowed Pocahontas, but we know about the conflicts early Virginians fomented with the Powhatans, among others (I write from the edge of Monacan territory). A dozen years after Jamestown’s founding, colonists brought over America’s first enslaved Africans. This generational sin persists into the present day. Unless you’re a member of the Mayflower Society, the Pilgrims’ crimes probably feel dim and distant. But Southerners can draw a straight line from current racial tensions to our earliest beginnings.

Our literature is obsessed with monstrous history, and that obsession persists because we’ve never answered or atoned for it. If you think with any depth about the South, you see that we’re mired in historical trauma. Our minority populations still suffer the effects of that oppression.

Our frontier culture glorified rebellion; a literate aristocracy viewed The Three Musketeers and Waverly as life advice instead of satirical pulp. Confederates propagandized those traditions to paint their soldiers as martyrs and heroes. They were mythologized as men who died to save the South, and the horrors of Reconstruction only cemented that image. It remains inscribed on the landscape, in our place names and statues.

One population clings to that image as a last vestige of lost grandeur. Another still suffers from the trauma that this image created and creates. Imagine places that proudly display portraits of Confederate generals, but employ an all-Black staff—those establishments still exist here. Hitler’s Final Solution came from his correspondent Joseph DeJarnette, a eugenicist who ran Western State Lunatic Asylum in Staunton, Virginia (depicted best in David Sims’ Fear the Reaper). Nazis are Confederates with snappier uniforms.

How often do you revisit that particular piece or the author’s work in general? What lessons have you learned at various times from the work?

Absalom, Absalom! sits next to my bed, and I pick it up whenever I’m broken or dispirited or uninspired. For obvious reasons, that’s fairly often lately. Like most reviewers, I read three or four books at once, and one of them is always Faulkner—right now, I’m in the middle of The Unvanquished. I love Bayard Sartoris as a boy, and I was so sad to encounter him as a bitter old man in other books. Drusilla Hawk may also be my favorite female character in Faulkner’s work, though he admittedly doesn’t do women well.

Faulkner left a huge body of work behind, and I’m slowly working my way through it. I’ll be sad when I’m finished.

Are there any pieces in the author’s oeuvre that have not worked as well for you? If yes, which ones and why do you think that connection was not as strong?

How can you love your racist father? Carefully, I think. Without rose-colored glasses. You credit the good and call out the appalling. There are certain times—for me, parts of Go Down, Moses and The Sound and the Fury in particular, but even sections of The Unvanquished—when you’ll have to set the book down, look at your friends, and realize: He’s talking about people like her. That person I love, that brilliant woman who lights up a room, who I would bury a body for, no question asked—Faulkner means her. And if sometimes that doesn’t outweigh the prose and the setting and beauty, well, look to yourself. Until white people take racism personally, nothing’s going to change.

Now, we’re both authors from the South, South Carolina in your case and a mix of Virginia and Tennessee/touching on Mississippi for me. Like you, I read Faulkner in high school, college, and afterward. I’ve read plenty of other Southern authors as well and I’ve tried my hand at writing Southern characters, characters whose experience of life—particularly life in the South—feels warts-and-all authentic. But when we do this, when we try to walk the line of showing “this is how it is and how it is is segregated and bigoted and sexist and…and..(not entirely but also certainly not negligible),” while being, to put it frankly, quite white indeed, are we already stepping out on the wrong foot? What’s the level of self-reflection like, when you are writing tales of the South? Are there lessons in what Faulkner did or didn’t do that you try to actively incorporate into your own story shaping?

For a decade, I wrote about the intersections of feminism, politics, motherhood, and mental health. I lost my job when BDG bought out Scary Mommy—they banned political topics, and the staff quit en masse. That loss left me with profound grief. In part, I turned to fiction so I could find my voice again. I write what I know. I grew up in relative poverty and now live with class privilege—there’s classism. I’m neurodivergent, so there’s ableism. I’m bi, so there’s a certain measure of homophobia, though as a cis woman in a heterosexual relationship, I have the privilege of passing.

And I’m a woman. In the Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy calls the South “a fragrant prison administered by treacherous relatives.” Class privilege undercuts some of that imprisonment, particularly regarding neurodivergence—aristocracy adores an eccentric. But misogyny entraps us all. The South eats strong women, and those it cannot swallow, it confines. When we want to scream, we smile. When we want to slap you, we smile. We kill you with kindness, and our cruelty comes wrapped in compliments. Rudeness is a mortal sin. We do not argue. And we do not contradict people, especially men.

Violating this code will make a scene, and there is nothing worse than making a scene. Sociologists would call us a “high context culture,” and while that term might lack empirical rigor, it’s a useful one. Southern culture figures individuals as members of an interconnected web of relationships; a shared history and narrative leave communication more dependent on connotation than denotation (what’s implied rather than directly spoken). Junior League meetings have unspoken rules as inviolate and invisible as the strictures of a Japanese tea ceremony. The woman who chooses a Lilly Pulitzer dress and the woman who picks one by Spartina 449 are not the same. We say Bless your heart to share genuine sympathy; the same three words can signal brutal dismissal. Their meaning depends entirely on connotation. An outsider might not know how to parse them, but every Southerner in the room understands.

This high context culture helps enshrine misogyny. In a high context culture, missteps violate a heightened sense of tradition and social order. They rise from faux pas to threats against shared values. A woman who ignores or mistakes connotation becomes more than an eccentric; she’s dangerous. You tow the line or you risk being ostracized (though the weight of other privilege can shift the margin of risk). We smile because we must, and assertiveness becomes bitchiness. Marginalized groups suffer the worst.

But those strictures go far past smiling. When confrontation is figured as rudeness, women have to tolerate harassment. Calling out bad behavior becomes unthinkable. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin is a sweater vest fascist; South Carolina governor Henry McMaster is a fascist with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. If I met either man, I would smile or risk dire embarrassment, both for myself and the rest of my family. So I would smile. Instead of lobbing accusations, I would say something like, Isn’t it nice we can all get along, despite our differences? Things are so ugly right now, and you’re just so polite you won’t ever be president. That’s high context culture at work: Everyone in Virginia knows that Glenn Youngkin hopes his Nazi bootlicking will hand him the executive branch.

Southern culture can silence women. We learn trickster-like ways of pressuring people, particularly men; we practice the arts of craftiness and subtlety. Because of that silencing, I write a lot about the pressure Southern women face, particularly how that pressure explodes into sudden, unpredictable horrors. In Ink Vine, Emmy suffers mightily for her exotic dancing, though that work keeps food on the table. Olivia Trenholm in Ninety-Eight Sabers has been stifled and imprisoned by upper class social strictures. And Blood Cypress examines how small town social mores entrap Lila Carson.

Despite those themes, there are certain family stories I’ve been asked not to mention. You could say love keeps me quiet. Or you could also say that request itself stems from social pressure, and I’m caving to the South once more.

Racism is a different concern. I can’t escape my whiteness. Like Warren said, all white people are guilty—not because we personally enslaved people, not because we’re secret racists, but because we enjoy the privilege afforded to all white people at the expense of minorities. My first major essay discussed white privilege and motherhood; it landed me on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. Recently, someone who read the piece when it was released told me that her friends worried I’d be shot for it.

So I have a long history of publicly examining my own whiteness. Ninety-Eight Sabers shows an upper-class, Southern family facing their white privilege (spoiler alert: like most white people, they’re bad at it). Though the novel is set on a plantation, its original draft had no Black characters. I struggled with that. In the end, I didn’t feel comfortable writing about how people of color deal with racism.

I understand the misery of prejudice. I know misogyny’s soul-grinding repression; I’ve seen “feminist” men silence women without a second thought. I’ve listened to “allies” complain about behavior related to my neurodivergence. But I will never comprehend the horrors of being Black in the American South. So in a novel about racism, I felt that writing Black characters would be appropriation.

But my sensitivity reader pushed back. Rob Grimoire told me that omitting Black characters from a novel set on a plantation, especially one about white privilege, continued the tradition of suppressing Black voices. I listened, and their inclusion improved the novel. I tried to represent those characters as authentically as I could. However, each of those characters appears in a third person point of view. If I ever write from a Black character’s POV—i.e., in their head—I won’t do it in a novel about racism.

That’s my own red line. Lately, writers have thrown social media tantrums about who has the right to write what, arguing that the old admonishment to “write what you know” robs authors of everything but paltry autobiography. We have an imagination, they say. With adequate research, we can step into anyone’s life.

There’s some truth to that. Empathy keeps the world turning. No matter what the American Christo-facists claim, it always was, and will remain, the basic foundation of human society; without empathy, we die alone in the cold. But these social media warriors fail to recognize the difference between empathy and appropriation. I can certainly imagine the horrors of racism—I’ve seen enough prejudice to extrapolate. But even if I get it spot-on right, that prejudice is not mine to examine.

Marginalized communities have a right to their own stories. Our ancestors stole African people from their homeland. They dragged those people across the ocean in ships so deadly that their courses changed the pattern of shark migration, and that incalculable suffering reverberates through our society today. White people have stolen Black music and Black food; white people have a long history of stealing culture to serve their own artistic and economic ends. Knowing that endless theft, should we really argue for the right to appropriate suffering that we inflict?

I can write Black characters. Men can write women. Neurotypical people can write neurodivergent people, and straight people can write queer characters. But when we start to examine the experience of prejudice, we move from empathy to appropriation. Does that mean men can’t write about misogyny? They can and perhaps should. But they shouldn’t imagine they can write about it authentically from a first-person point of view, and they shouldn’t attempt it thematically.

Tom Wolfe (different from North Carolinian author Thomas Wolfe) fell absolutely flat with I Am Charlotte Simmons, a novel that attempts to deal with class prejudice and misogyny. Wolfe attended a prestigious white flight prep school in Richmond, Virginia. He never lived through the prejudice that he attempted to examine, and the novel flopped. It’s inauthentic and cringy.

That’s what happens when you try to steal stories that don’t belong to you. It’s the same reason that Faulkner’s examinations of the racism Black Southerners suffer never approaches authenticity. He’s looking in from the outside. Does he show us how white people deal with racism? Absolutely, and he does it masterfully (see the comeuppance of Thomas Sutpen). But his Black characters and his depiction of Black suffering remain inauthentic at best and racist echoes of white patriarchy at worst.

Examine your bias, stay in your damn lane, and examine nuance.

But take it further: Something I’ve said here is a wrongheaded idea . Somewhere—and I don’t know where—my white privilege is showing. I’m doing the best I can, but intention is irrelevant; intentional or accidental, racism causes harm. I’m going to screw up. I was born to white privilege, schooled in white privilege, and move through a world of white privilege to this day. I can’t escape it.

So, I have to be willing to shut up and listen; any white person who claims allyship needs to shut up and listen. We need to be able to admit we were wrong; we make mistakes, so we need to apologize. We have to wake up every morning, make a promise, grit our teeth, and try again one more time.

We were born into this system. Dismantling it is the work of a lifetime, and that work belongs to us.

We move through a world riddled with injustice: capitalism, misogyny, racism, ableism, homophobia, classism. We can break it, or we can pass it to our children. American Christofascism rests on a bedrock of capitalism, and capitalism’s exploitation threads back to Plymouth, to Jamestown, to genocide and slavery. America’s sins have passed down unto the seventh generation, and our ancestors’ debt has come due. You’re fixing it, or you’re part of the problem. 

The economic, social, and artistic systems that made me have deep roots in colonialism and oppression. Faulkner’s part of it all. That’s why I write what I write, and that’s why I refuse to be silent.

What writing lessons have you taken, purposefully or accidentally, from your favorite author?

I made up my own county, so there’s that. Legare County definitely has its roots in Yoknapatawpha. I find myself interested in both the rich and poor about equally, so there’s that, too. And like Faulkner, I’m also obsessed with both linguistic precision and rhythm—editors sometimes fuss at me about commas. “You need a comma here, and you need to delete this comma here,” they’ll tell me. But I had nuns in Catholic school who lived for the sadistic pleasure of committing whatever petty humiliations fell under their power; and, if we didn’t know grammar, they’d swoop down quicker than the Holy Ghost on Pentecost. I can still diagram a sentence. If I omit a comma, I sacrificed it at the altar of rhythm. Every pause serves a purpose, and if it doesn’t sound right, axe it. Prose is sound and sound is the foundation of beautiful language.

Faulkner had limited commercial success with his first two books. Famously, he shut his study door, stopped caring, and wrote The Sound and the Fury. I try to remember that we all do our best work when we stop caring.

Are there any works in your bibliography that you feel are closest to the work of your favorite—whether in terms of style, subject matter, length, etc.? Talk a little about those similarities.

I started Blood Cypress because though I love The Sound and the Fury, itenrages me. The novel tells the story of the Compson family’s decline after, among other things, Caddy Compson gets pregnant out of wedlock. Caddy’s three brothers all talk. Their servant Dilsey has a section, though it’s in the third person. Caddy herself remains a glaring omission. Moreover, the Compsons find Benjy’s neurodivergence so shameful that their mother changes his name, and that appalled me more and more as I got older. So Blood Cypress started there.

I was always struck by Jason Compson’s insistence that Caddy is a whore, while Quentin needs her to be pure so badly that he’s willing to tell his father they committed incest. That’s unhinged, but it says so much about the ways women are perceived down here, about the gender roles and strictures we’re handed. And possibly the only thing worse than getting pregnant out of wedlock is liking other girls. Add a Biblical dose of revenge for abusing your neurodivergent brother, and I think it’s obvious where Blood Cypress comes from.

I have a novel on sub right now that does the multiple POV approach of As I Lay Dying. I rewrote the first 40K, maybe seven times, from different points of view, until I finally decided to use all of them. That sounds like a cop-out, but it isn’t. I’m glad I didn’t think about what I was trying to do while I was in the weeds, because I would have been too intimidated to attempt it.

Faulkner also wrote a lot about race, despite his shortsightedness on the subject, and I’ve only had the guts to do that in Ninety-Eight Sabers. Reckoning with it as a privileged white Southerner is hard enough; writing about it is nothing short of soul-baring. I think I was only able to do it because I started the novel just after my (actual) racist father died, and I was trying to deal with that. I talk a lot about that in the book’s afterword.

I love all these examples. It certainly seems as though a lot of your works are directly in conversation—if not downright combat—with works from Faulkner. Going back to that notion at the beginning of controversial favorites, do you find these challenging aspects of the works as just turn-offs or do you view them as opportunities for your own writing?

I love Faulkner’s prose. I love his structure; I love the way he handles setting and character and history. But I hate the way he deals with misogyny, racism, and ableism.

Draw a straight line from Faulkner to the South as a whole. I pine for South Carolina. When I go home, my soul feels whole again, and I squirrel away the daily details of life, turned precious with loss: palmetto trunks wrapped in Christmas lights, Education Lottery ads, billboards reminding me: highways or dieways—the choice is mine. I could die happy in the Deep South. I miss swamp mud and cypress trees. I miss shouting at my kids not to pick up Spanish moss, which makes a great fake beard, but inevitably crawls with bugs. I miss alligators skulking off my kayak bow, and I miss feral hogs chasing me through the Congaree swamp. I miss knowing every plant by name. I miss the stories. God, I miss the stories most of all.

But home is a mire of Lost Cause ideology, of Christofascism, of Confederate flag bumper stickers touting heritage, not hate. I delivered three children in Columbia, South Carolina, and today those pregnancies might kill me. Say the names: Nancy Mace, Lindsay Graham, Henry McMaster. Dylann Roof bought his ammunition two miles from my house. My best friend had a lunch date set with Reverend Pinckney for the week after he was gunned down. I don’t hate it. I don’t hate it.

I love it because it’s home. I hate it because it’s home, too.

I love Faulkner because he made me, and I hate him for the same damn reason.

Where does your writing diverge from your favorite author’s? Are there any elements from your favorite author’s work that you would like to incorporate in your own? If yes, what are these?

If I wrote like Faulkner, people would laugh me out of the room. In the age of the four-second TikTok, even literature lovers won’t read a sentence that meanders for a whole page. I get it; sometimes, I don’t want to read a sentence that long, either. But there’s a lot of pressure to spoon-feed readers rather than trust them with nuance, and that’s where the questions begin. How much can we hand readers, and how much can we trust them to pick up? Faulkner switches time periods mid-paragraph. My publishers would lose their minds if I didn’t label each chapter with a narrator.

Faulkner does so much experimentation with narration and structure. I’ve played with those in Blood Cypress and in the novels I have on sub, but not as much as someone like Aimee Hardy. In horror, we tend to be very wedded to the three-act structure; it’s odd, considering we have lots of stellar books that throw it out the window (The Fisherman, House of Leaves). Southern Gothic has a particular habit of ignoring traditional form. I need to spend some time thinking about how to do that.

As an author, when it comes to these challenges that you either pose to yourself or that come up naturally as part of your writing evolution, how do you go about addressing them in the work ahead? Is it another organic part of the process, or do you set specific brainstorming time aside to puzzle out these issues?

I never sit down at my computer and ask, What pissed me off today? Writing is a sort of exorcism. I didn’t know Ninety-Eight Sabers was about race until I hit 70,000 words, and I didn’t know that I’d written a novel instead of grieving for my father until a month before its publication. I knew The Sound and the Fury made me angry, but I didn’t understand until I finished a draft of Blood Cypress that I’d written about Southern misogyny and homophobia. I think starting with a thematic issue, at least for me, feels disingenuous. I begin in-story. The rest comes with time.

My craft veers from organic to highly intentional. First drafts tend to form organically. After I realize what I’m doing, then I can say, Theme follows structure, so the structure needs to work like this. But usually that means picking up what’s already in the text and amplifying it. Sometimes I set time aside to plan—my days of handwriting whole novels ended in graduate school, but I still brainstorm with pen and paper. I have shelves and shelves of notebooks in my house.

I edit recursively, meaning that I stop forward motion on novels and edit what’s already there before I’m done. That muddies the idea of a “first” draft. Currently, I have what’s saved as a “fourth draft” of a Southern Gothic novel on my plate. Today, I’m tearing it down to the studs and restructuring. Lots of drawing and index cards ahead. I’ll have to spend part of each day working on poetry or I’ll go batty. I have a pathological need to muck around with words.

If a reader wanted to start reading your favorite author, what piece would you recommend they start with?

Start with “A Rose for Emily.” If you like that, try “Barn Burning,” and if you’re ready for something larger, I like The Unvanquished for its sheer storytelling, but Go Down, Moses is more representative of Faulkner’s work as a whole. Its seven interconnected tales relate the story of the McCaslin family, both Black and white, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1940s (you can hopefully infer a lot of the content and trigger warnings from that, and if not, well, please read your American history again). That book can give you a good introduction to the ways Faulkner’s prose moves, as well as the themes of racism, misogyny, time, and nature he deals with.

What do you have coming out next on the writing and publishing front? What are you working on now?

In February of 2026, Undertaker Books is re-releasing Ink Vine as Ink Vine and Other Swamp Stories. It contains both the novella and a collection of my interconnected Southern Gothic shorts. I’m excited to see all those stories in one place. Like Faulkner, I like to play in the same sandbox, and there are a lot of reasons for that—I have an essay appearing the same month in Nightmare Magazine about why. Place-creation over multiple works is a habit of Southern Gothic authors.

I also have a YA novella coming out with Undertaker later in 2026. Right now, I have a novel sitting with two agents and two publishers, and I can’t sub much more than short stories until I have word from someone. In addition to that complete novel, I have another Southern Gothic in edits, most of a dystopian novel finished, a science fiction novel that needs only minor edits, and a completed science fiction collection. As well as another novella on sub. It’s a lot to wait on, but I’m patient.

Thank you for taking the time to chat with me about your favorite author.

Bet you weren’t prepared for this level of Southern self-loathing. We love a chance to beat our breasts and try to save ourselves.

Where can readers find you online?

Website: https://www.writerelizabethbroadbent.com

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