A Reader's Interview with Stacey Swann
The author of Olympus, Texas on Greek mythology as "scaffolding," John Steinbeck's journals, and the importance of a writing community.
On a semi-regular basis, I talk to authors about my two favorite topics: reading and writing. You can find previous examples here and here. This week, with the election right around the corner (gulp), I’m excited to be talking to Stacey Swann.
Like me, Stacey is a native Texan who has spent most of her life in this state. She got her MFA from Texas State in San Marcos and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (like Larry McMurtry). Her debut novel, Olympus, Texas was a 2021 Good Morning America Book Club pick, an Indie Next Pick, and was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Stacey not only writes beautifully about small-town Texas, she cares enough about this state to run for office. This fall, Stacy is the Democratic candidate for the Texas House of Representatives in Lampasas, Texas. (VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!)
I asked Stacey about Greek mythology, Texas, and her new novel-in-progress.
Olympus, Texas is about what happens when March Briscoe returns to his hometown in East Texas two years after an affair with his brother’s wife, Vera. You use characters and plots from Greek mythology as a sort of foundational structure to tell the story of infidelity and sibling rivalry in the Briscoe family. I’d love to ask you about how you decided to use Greek mythology in this way. Did the theme come before the story, or did you first have the idea to tell a story about a family of strong-willed Texans and later discover that the patriarch could be a modern-day Zeus, the matriarch could be Hera, etc?
There’s really nothing that lights up my writing brain more than finding scaffolding to build a story around. I love extended metaphors and allegories and retellings. The first glimmer of the story came from me thinking about the way Texas is obsessed with its own mythology and with larger-than-life characters. It occurred to me that blending Greek and Roman mythology with a Texas story would be a natural fit. The work of creating mortal, modern Texan counterparts of the Greek gods was huge fun. It was only much later that I realized I had also created a dysfunctional family story. (Which should have been obvious to me because I LOVE dysfunctional family stories.)
I should say that I’ve also spent time fighting against my love of scaffolding. After grad school, I read Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, which stresses the importance of letting your subconscious guide your writing. Playing with structures and large-scale metaphors is typically conscious-brain work. And it often was a battle to get my early stories right: my subconscious brain wanting the story to be one thing, but the scaffolding that had gotten me excited about the story wanted it to be another. That created situations where I really had to manhandle the plot, and the seams would show. So, for a while, I tried to let the stories just come out without as much pre-planning. They definitely were easier to write. But the novel let me embrace that love of scaffolding again, and reminded me that I get a real joy from it that isn’t replaceable. Now, I just try to find a balance between those two methods.
Were you inspired by other novelists who use Greek mythology (or another tradition) in their work? Any favorite examples (either a specific book or a writer’s body of work)?
When I was in the early stages of the novel, one of my workshop professors recommended I read John Updike’s The Centaur to get a better grasp of what I was taking on, but I was worried too much about being overly influenced and didn’t make it past the opening. (Funnily, I just looked up the Wikipedia entry on The Centaur to remind myself of the plot and realized that the novel also has a Venus character named Vera. If I knew that before, I had forgotten it!) I suspect Joyce’s Ulysses was rattling around in my brain, as I had read it just a year or two before I started Olympus. My love for retellings started in undergrad when I read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Angela Carter’s fairy tales.
As I’ve shared with you, I was obsessed with Greek mythology when I was a kid. My first, and still favorite, version is Daulaire’s Greek Myths. I read it with both of my children, but I’m not sure they loved the stories as much as I did—in part because they had a heightened sensitivity (as they should) to the violence, rape, and cruelty of the gods. What is your history with Greek mythology? Did you fall in love with the myths as a child, like I did? Do you have a favorite version?
Yes, it was definitely a childhood love for me! My mom had a copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology that I read when I was young. I have a vivid memory of doing a big project on the Labors of Hercules when I was in fifth grade, which included the related constellations on blue posterboard with clear plastic overlays that joined the stars together. Those labors were actually at the heart of my first, failed attempt at the novel. (In the final version of Olympus, Texas, Hercules is only mentioned in passing, Peter’s other out-of-wedlock child, Burke.) I also adored Clash of the Titans!
What I find fascinating about the sexual violence in those myths is that the translations were much more sexist, in many ways, that the original myths like Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Modern versions by female translators show just how much the male translators from prior generations downplayed the violence, using descriptors with romantic connotations, or turned the blame on the women they were writing about, things that Ovid himself didn’t do. (There’s a great article on this here.)
You have said that “Texas is a state with its own mythology.” One of my favorite aspects of Olympus, Texas is how beautifully you capture the setting and vibe of rural Texas and Texans. Your characters have god-sized egos and flaws, and yet they feel very familiar to me. How did you go about creating them? Was it difficult to combine their Olympian prototypes with modern-day personalities?
In that earliest version, that I referenced above, the story was still set in modern Texas, and the gods were mortal, but they weren’t yet fully three-dimensional. I was even still using their actual Greek names as the character names. At a certain point, I realized that I wanted those characters to feel more realistic and less metafictional. I started by giving them new names and that choice opened the door to them feeling more human to me. Trying to find them appropriate jobs and seed their backstory with allusions to the myths was like solving the most-fun puzzle. The hardest one to crack was March (Ares). He was one of my central characters, and I wanted readers to feel endeared to him. Not an easy feat with the god of war! I wound up doing a lot of research on anger-related conditions, and that was a perfect door for me to find empathy for his really poor choices.
You’re working on a new novel set in Austin. (Which is personally very exciting to me!) I’m curious about what it’s like to start a new project after Olympus, Texas was such a success. Whatever you feel comfortable sharing.
The publishing world is such a strange one! I was very lucky with my debut in terms getting my dream agent and editor and getting an advance that helped me cut back on non-writing work. But I already know, from friends’ stories, that publishers shower much more interest on debuts than a second or third novel. The second novel typically gets a much smaller advance, and that can also mean a much smaller publicity budget. In a way, though, that feels freeing. I might as well do whatever I want, without worrying about what the market will make of it. I had a lot of readers ask if my next book would be a sequel to Olympus, Texas, but the truth is that I worked on that novel for fifteen years before I sold it. I was so ready to be in a different world, with different characters. I had tortured the Briscoes enough!
It's been a strange experience working on the new book. I’m a slow writer, prone to writing resistance, so I only finished the first draft this past spring. I’m now working through draft two. With the first novel, I would swing wildly between thinking the novel was pretty good and thinking the novel was awful, depending on the day. With this book, I have really liked it the whole time. I’m always pleased with it, even as I see the endless ways I still need to make it better. But I am also convinced no one else on the planet will find it interested at all. That too is freeing, letting me revise without worrying about the market. But it also means the moment I finally send it to my agent with be terrifying.
I loved your essay in Lit Hub about how you used John Steinbeck's journals when you were writing Olympus, Texas. I've been dipping into Sylvia Plath's journals lately and there are lots of passages I want to write down and keep with me. But I hadn't thought of doing a side-by-side writing journal with her. Such an interesting idea! Do you still do that? Any other practices that you would want to share?
I actually did buy Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, thinking I would try the same tactic with the new book. However, I haven’t yet cracked it open. I still do morning pages, on the tough days. But for this book, what has helped me most are Zoom writing sessions with other writers. Sometimes they are with an old friend from my MFA days, the writer Christie Grimes, and often they are with a writing group organized by the fabulous author Brenda Peynado. We say hi, talk about our goals, then mute ourselves and turn off the camera for a period of time. Before we log off, we talk for a few minutes about how it went. The accountability of it helps me so much, and it also magically sloughs off my dread. The older I get, the more I value all the different ways we forge writing communities and how essential they are for not giving up on the work. Your Substack is that kind of community too!
Other interesting things
Halloween is over, but it’s not too late to dress up in one of these mundane Japanese costumes. My favorite is either “middle-aged office worker whose much younger boyfriend came to pick her up on his motorbike after work” or “person in white clothing who mistakenly ordered curry udon.” But I don’t know. I also have a lot of feelings about “guy who has to cut pizza into four equal slices for people he barely knows.”
My family is enjoying Agatha All Along on Disney, and I especially like how the show sneaks in bits about actual history (the midwife example). In this Slate article, critic Laura Miller argues that the Salem Witch Trials are at the root of much of American horror genre.
Here’s a quote from the super interesting Washington Post article Stacey shared about a new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis:
How should one render in English acts that are often grotesquely violent in Ovid’s original Latin? For decades, many have simply sidestepped the issue, obscuring violations with romantic euphemisms or even suggesting, through subtle turns of phrase, that the women in Ovid’s tales consented to assault. [ . . .] The idea that overly sensitive students are seeking en masse to censor such material runs counter to my two decades teaching in college classrooms. I have never had a student object to the frank discussion of rape in the text. If anything, contemporary students are much more prepared to discuss this difficult aspect of literature than many from my own generation. What they are not prepared to do is accept it uncritically.
Don’t accept things uncritically. VOTE!
Loved Olympus, Texas! Thanks, Stacey, for sharing your process, and Sarah for your insightful questions.
So much to savor and chew on here. Thanks for the inspiration.