By Christine Rice

Bedrock Faith, Eric May’s debut novel, is a book you fall into fully, totally, and unreservedly.  The plot hooks you; the movement is fluid; the characters are razor-sharp.  You think about them when you’re at work, making dinner, walking the dog — those awful times when you can’t pick up a book.  You wonder how the reformed ex-con, Stew Pot Reeves, will redeem himself and how his delightfully disciplined neighbor Mrs. Motley will react. 

You wonder, too, if the rest of the neighborhood will be as forgiving as Mrs. Motley where Stew Pot is concerned.

You might even doubt Stew Pot’s fervent transformation when he tells Mrs. Motley,

…Oh, I read the Bible every day now.  The Lord came to me in prison.  He found me, saved me, and made me a new man.

You might.  And you’d be right.  Who wouldn’t be wary of Stew Pot Reeves?  After all, he terrorized the neighborhood for years before being carted off to jail.  You’re wary but you’re rooting for him, too.  You’re rooting for him because he’s trying to set himself straight, clear the hurdles of his delinquent past.  He’s an out-there everyman trying to reform his life.

Eric sat down with Hypertext to talk about the importance of setting, one of my all-time favorite female characters (Mrs. Motley), and the importance of narrative patterns.

CR:  Bedrock Faith’s prologue gives a detailed description of a fictional Chicago neighborhood called Parkland.  You’re a native Chicagoan.  Is Parkland based on any particular neighborhood?  Why was it important to define the novel’s setting for your audience?

EM:  When you say Black neighborhood, all too often, even with African-Americans, the first thing that leaps to peoples’ minds is some impoverished area with all the problems that poverty creates. I didn’t want my readers to have any confusion as to the sort of place that the novel is set. I figured a prologue was the most efficient way to get that done.

Like Thomas Hardy’s English county and Faulkner’s Mississippi county, like Toni Morrison’s Ohio towns and Ann Petry’s Connecticut town, Parkland is a fictional locale. I drew strongly from my memories of growing up in Morgan Park, a neighborhood on Chicago’s far South Side. The section of the community where I lived has been an all-African-American enclave since the area was prairie grass. In my early years there were White neighborhoods directly north, east, and west, and open fields directly south. The emotional affect was very island-like, which is not to say that living there was unpleasant, just the opposite in fact. There were neat, tree-lined streets, a big park with an Olympic-size pool, large back yards, lots of churches and, with it being the height of the Baby-Boom, plenty of other kids to play with; but no gangbangers or mean cops to bother with.

In Bedrock Faith the neighborhood is a character in regards to the group perceptions and reactions of the neighborhood-at-large to what Stew Pot Reeves and his immediate neighbors are doing. This group perception serves as a Greek chorus of sorts, commenting not only on the behavior of Stew Pot et al, but also giving the reader a sense of the emotional context of the place.

A longtime resident such as Mrs. Motley would of course know how her neighbors would react to things. This action/reaction between characters and neighborhood is also a great story device and in the novel produces drama on several occasions.

CR:  You put a great deal of care and detail into Mrs. Motley’s character.  She’s fiercely proud.  You give the reader a detailed sense of her routine.  Is Mrs. Motley based on anyone in particular or is she a composite character?

EM:  She’s a composite. I drew heavily on the middle-class African-American women I knew growing up–my mom, my aunts and grandmothers, teachers, the mothers of kids I played with. Very proper, church-going, women who had very strong ideas about right and wrong, proper personal conduct, as well as an unshakable belief that getting a sound education was the only way a “Negro” (as we called ourselves back then) could achieve a successful life in a predominantly White country that was often hostile to their children attaining such a life.

CR:  Mrs. Motley’s a woman of high ideals and morals and an impeccable routine yet she never falls into cliché. 

“From her experience with her grandmother, she knew how uncompromising people could get angry when refused.  And she did not want to run the risk of irritating Stew Pot even a little bit because it was now sunshine clear that Stew Pot was more than a little off.”

I appreciated how you dropped the fact that Mrs. Motley knows Stew Pot is off — if only to remind the audience that she’s savvy and realistic.

EM:  Yeah, she definitely has her ideals, as does just about every other character in the novel. They all have their “bedrock faith” in something. It’s the characters’ surety in their ideals that leads to a lot of the dramatic situations that arise in the story.

I very much wanted to make it clear to readers that Mrs. Motley wasn’t taken in by Stew Pot. I also wanted the scene to remind readers that he might well be nuts.

CR:  At the beginning of the book, I’m on edge every time Stew Pot appears.  I don’t trust him.  I want to trust him.  But I don’t.  Am I wrong to not trust him?  Or would that be giving too much away?

EM:  My thinking was, since I was beginning with a prologue, the story proper had to get right to what sparks the action of the story, which is Stew Pot’s arrival. As far as whether you should trust him or not, I’d say to readers: “Trust your instincts.”

CR:  There’s a lot of history between characters in the Parkland neighborhood.  Models or patterns play an important part in developing characters.  What did you learn about character development during your time writing BF?

EM:  A number of the characters in Bedrock Faith are in their senior years and have lived around each other for decades, in some cases all their lives. Their shared history is part of what affects their actions; which is just the way human nature works; events of the past can be as emotionally charged for people as whatever may be happening to them in the here and now.

CR:  What did you learn about your process during the writing of Bedrock Faith?

EM:  Every scene should have causality; that is, some direct affect on the story. This doesn’t mean you have to know the story-affect a scene will have before you write it. A lot of times we don’t know. A scene comes to us in our imagination and our storyteller’s instinct recognizes it as a good scene and so we go with it. That’s what John Schultz means by going to whatever is most strongly taking your attention for whatever reason. But at some point in the writing process we have to figure out a way to have a scene directly affect what happens in the story; otherwise, we run the risk of having a collection of pretty scenes that don’t connect to anything story-wise, which can have a negative cumulative affect on the reader. A good way I found to figure out causality is this: the scene must cause a character/characters to do something they wouldn’t have done if the scene hadn’t happened, or, cause the character/characters to not do something they would have done if the scene hadn’t happened. In other words, figure out a way that the scene can change character/characters action in some definite way. And finally, as with all writing rules, the one I just gave should always be followed–except of course, for those times when it shouldn’t.

You can order Bedrock Faith from Akashic Books.  Eric will be reading from Bedrock Faith at  Sheffield’s Beer Garden, Chicago IL, March 5, and Powell’s Books, Chicago, IL, March 8.

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Eric Charles May graduated with a BA in Writing/English from Columbia in 1975 and the following year joined what was then Columbia’s Writing/English Department as a part-time instructor. He moved to Washington D.C. in 1985 to attend graduate school at American University and began working at the Washington Post as a newsroom clerk. In 1987, he joined the Post staff where he was a reporter on the Metro section. He returned to Columbia College in 1993. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in such literary anthologies as Criminal Class Review, Briefly Knocked Unconscious By a Low-flying Duck, Fish Stories: Collective I, Sport Literate, Angels in My Oven, and f5 Magazine. May is a Certified Story Workshop Director, and former Associate Faculty member at the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference in Maine and Solstice Writers’ Conference in Massachusetts, and a past Board of Judges member for the Columbia University Scholastic Press Association (CSPA). His debut novel, Bedrock Faith, will be published by Akashic Books in March, 2014.

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