Interview with Timothy Fox

every house needs a ghost

A hearty welcome to this newsletter for Timothy Fox, a writer raised in the US South who flew away to the UK. He’s an award-winning playwright, fictioneer, and poet. His upcoming chapbook every house needs a ghost (available soon on February 20th) is a gothic deep dive into the Southern landscape of his youth, a place filled with longing and beauty and lack.

Read on to learn about the colorful ghosts haunting his work!

every house needs a ghost is your chapbook of poetry and prose that explores some run-down, lonesome corners of the US South. Can you talk a little about your experience of living in the South and then moving to the UK?

I was very lucky to grow up with a host of characters. Boxers, bar owners, truckers, dock workers, hunters; all who could tell stories and had plenty to tell. I had grandparents that lived off in the woods, an aunt who lived on the edge of a canyon. Cousins named Bubba and Chicken Neck. From the outside, it may have looked like your typical Southern upbringing, but there was a real Gothic underpinning to it all. And that ultimately attracted me to a certain kind of literature (Edgar Allan Poe mostly). And like most young people, I wanted to get away from where I was.

When I moved to the UK, it was first to Scotland, where it was dark and cold most of the year. I didn’t mind that, as I always hated the hot summers in Texas and had always suffered from heat stroke. But somehow the constant wind and rain in Glasgow fueled my imagination and I started reading weirder and stranger books. I was introduced to alternative art, music and literary scenes that I would never have had the opportunity to find back home. A lot of that has to do with, at the time, most of the creatives I knew in Scotland were receiving government funding. People were taking chances and trying interesting things. It was a very informative, educational time in my life and I’ll always be grateful for it.

Did you find it easier to reflect on the South once you were away from it?

It took time. I was so desperate to get away from the South, to distance myself physically and mentally from it. It wasn’t until I started writing seriously, and found that I couldn’t write about, for example, rich people living in mansions, because I had never lived that life. Everything that was in me, that I could honestly communicate, was back in places like Gospel, Texas. Harry Crews talks about having the same kind of realization. He called it a moment of grace. And I agree with him.

Now, having accepted that I am from the South, having reckoned with what that carries, I can look on those run-down, lonesome corners and find the humanity, the beauty and the mystery in them.

More importantly, I realized that the storytellers I grew up around were just as lyrical, and their art just as valid, as any of the great poets.

I love how you combine poetry and prose in this chapbook, slipping easily between modes of communication. What inspired you to take this approach? Do you see yourself equally as a writer of prose and poetry?

Yes, I do.

I just thought it would be neat to combine the two modes of writing. I knew it was going to be a weird little book, so why not mix it up a bit.

And sometimes things felt like they needed to be written in verse, in order to capture a certain rhythm of speech that would be otherwise lost in prose.

The cadence of your work reminds me of bluesy folk/country music. Which musicians inspired you? While we’re at it, which writers?

This is going to be a long list, but it must start with the recording of Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground’. I don’t think it is possible for any Southern writer to hear that piece of music and to not be forever changed and haunted by it.

I wasn’t really into music as a teenager until I heard Johnson, and then a door was opened into a way of telling stories where the ethereal and the numinous were the end goal.

And through Johnson I was introduced to other blues singers, like Robert Johnson (who carried his own mythology), Lightnin’ Hopkins, Lead Belly and the list goes on.

Of course, I have to mention the influence that Tom Waits has had on me. The albums he’s done with his wife, Kathleen, are all touchstones.

My favorites now are Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Lord Huron, (the absolutely amazing) Ian Noe, Sturgill Simpson (of course), (thank God for) Tyler Childers and Zach Bryon.

But I also listen to a lot of ambient music. Pretty much any of the artists published by the UK label Ghost Box are on repeat.

As for writers, I spend a lot of time reading ghost stories and weird fiction. Looking at my bookshelf, I see Robert Aickman, Joel Lane (!!!), Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti.

Dylan Thomas wrote several weird short stories that I think everyone should read. ‘The Enemies’ and ‘The Burning Baby’ being my favorite.

Katherine Dunn’s ‘Geek Love’ is my favorite novel and the book that made me want to take writing seriously. And as amazing as that book is, I think her essays on boxing are seriously underrated.

As for Southern writers, Ms O’Connor sits right at the top. There’s no way to escape her claws. Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, and the poet Frank Stanford are also up there.

Could you share one poem in the collection with us, and give us a little taste of what you were thinking when you wrote it?

she runs the diner but

she also dresses the dead

on tables covered in red and white checkered cloth

where you ate your lunch

she fixes their hair and paints their faces

it’s not much

just enough to make it look like they are sleeping

everyone gets buried in their backyard anyway

why not have the diner lady make you look good

i wouldn’t mind

she’s got nice hands

calls me sugar every time i go in

This is based on a true story. And I doubt it’s an isolated case. People in small communities often take on more than one role. And there’s a great comfort in knowing that the lady who serves you the best apple pie you’ve ever tasted is the same one that’ll comb your hair when you die.

Are you working on or planning towards any new writing projects? What’s your method for accomplishing a project?

I’ve spent most of my life in the theatre, and I am currently writing a new play to premier at next year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It is a ghost story.

My method for writing has always been to wind myself up into an excruciating ball of anxiety and word vomit. At the beginning, all writing is bad writing. I have to make my pile and then start chopping away.

I often look for deadlines for different publications that I’m interested in, and work towards that date in order to finish whatever it is that I’m working on.

It’s not the most practical, but it works.

What question would you like to be asked?

It’s more of a recommendation by way of a question.

The question a lot of people ask me when they find out I’m from the South is, ‘Do you like barbeque?’ And the answer to that is, yes.

I’ve fallen in love with a YouTube channel called Ant’s BBQ Cookout. He travels around and films half hour documentaries about the people who have committed themselves to making the best possible barbeque. It requires complete dedication. And every one of those people have an interesting, emotional story to tell. I always end up crying.

Thank you for the stories and the recommendations, Timothy!