What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?Learn more about The Poison Flood.
Music is a big influence, particularly on this novel. My tastes are vast. Essentially if it’s good, I wanna hear it, but I was thinking of the narrative quality and confessional nature of many country songs. The way a song like “He Stopped Loving Her Today” hides the details of a death until deeper into the track. I wanted similar layers in the novel. To show Hollis in his present state, then evaluate his past in subsequent chapters to inform how he came to be in these situations.
Biographies or interviews with artists fascinate me. I really crave the opportunity to hear any sort of artist talk about their process. There’s a TV show sponsored by Ernie Ball guitar strings where they talk to musicians like Buddy Guy, Mike Ness from Social Distortion and Billy Duffy from The Cult about their songwriting process and how they achieve a certain guitar tone. I’m not a professional musician, I play some bad acoustic guitar, but I love that show. I think it’s really useful to hear about how anyone creates regardless of the artform. Something about just understanding the...[read on]
Q&A with Jordan Farmer.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
