The South meets the weird in Bradley Sides’ latest collection, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. The oftentimes experimental stories contained within his new book include apocalypses, monsters, ghosts, and fantastical disappearances, but the heart of each story remains grounded in the very real human explorations of grief, loss, and faith.
Bradley Sides is the author of two short story collections, Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. His fiction has been nominated for Year’s Best Weird Fiction and featured on LeVar Burton Reads. Currently, he lives in Huntsville, Alabama, with his wife. On most days, he can be found teaching writing at Calhoun Community College.
The Last Bird of Paradise, Clifford Garstang’s new novel, is a blend of historical and contemporary narratives set in Singapore, where a lawyer from New York, seeking to escape the city’s despair after 9/11, discovers evocative paintings of an English artist who experienced her own trauma and loss during World War I.
Clifford Garstang is the author of two previous novels, Oliver’s Travels and The Shaman of Turtle Valley, as well as the forthcoming The Last Bird of Paradise. He is also the author of three story collections, In an Uncharted Country, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, and What the Zhang Boys Know, which won the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction. A former international lawyer, he lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
Clifford Garstang: Hi, Bradley! I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. Before we get into any of the nitty gritty, I wanted to say how much I enjoyed Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. The stories are amazing, weird in a way that seems perfectly natural, and thought-provoking. But maybe we should start with one of our commonalities. We both graduated from the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program. What was the program like for you, and what has it meant for your career?
Bradley Sides: Thank you, Cliff. I’ve been looking forward to chatting with you, too. The Last Bird of Paradise is a wonderfully rich novel, full of beautiful language and emotional depth. I loved it. Much to discuss! I’m glad we are starting off by talking about Queens because it’s the place that helped give me the confidence to really put my work out there. And it’s the place where I wrote most of Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. A shorter version was actually my thesis.
I was in the program during the COVID years (from 2020-2022), so my entire experience was virtual. We met online for workshops during our residencies, and I desperately looked forward to those days. Because of Queens, I learned how to take criticism. I learned how to revise. I learned that writing mentorship is powerful. Working with Elissa Schappell and Fred Leebron was career-changing — maybe life-changing. What about you? Same kind of impact?
CG: Absolutely. I was in the program’s very first class (2001-03), and it was always such a thrill to go to Queens for the residencies. Working with the amazing faculty – Elizabeth Strout was one of my mentors – and talented peers really made me think deeply about the work, which I had not been doing before. I like your comment about taking criticism, because that’s so important. But I also learned a lot from giving critiques, which helped me identify weaknesses in my own writing.
BS: That’s a good point about learning to identify weaknesses in our own work. 100%.
Let’s dive into our books. On the outside, they probably appear totally different. Mine is a weird short story collection with vampires, monsters, ghosts, and surreal floods. Yours is a literary novel that balances history, colonialism, marriage, and politics. But I kept thinking about all of the ways our books connect, which I think is so cool.
One of the biggest connectors is the expansiveness of the worlds our stories exist within. Will you talk a bit about your decision to create this global novel? I know you are a traveler. How did your own travels inspire the setting decisions?
CG: I lived in Singapore for many years, and although the city appears briefly in my last novel, Oliver’s Travels, I hadn’t yet written about it in a deep way. The first impetus behind the story was a trio of World War I-era paintings I bought there. When I discovered what was going on in the country at that time, I connected it with my own experience and understanding of the causes of and reactions to global terrorism. It’s a city I know well, so it was a pleasure to write about it.
What about you? The stories in your fantastic collection are, well, fantastic, in both senses of the word. While my novel moves to the other side of the globe and back, yours goes way beyond that to the world of imagination and fantasy. Where do those wild ideas come from?
BS: I think, like you in ways, I lived them. I (sadly?) wasn’t raised by vampires, like the protagonist in “Dying at Allium Farm,” but my family’s garden did have garlic. We didn’t have a pond monster as a bestie, like in “The Guide to King George,” but we did have a heck of a pond out back full of some gigantic bullfrogs. These pieces of the world I’ve always known kept showing up in my stories – and then expanding into the fantastical. Growing up in the rural South gave me a place to dream and imagine. There was space for that among the land and stars and openness. So many of my stories originated from those blurry memories and images of being back home.
CG: One element of the stories that struck me was that danger sometimes drops from the sky: killer snowstorms, a mysterious child, robot parts, winged creatures, etc. While I don’t want to read too much into that, it does seem as though we’re being warned that you can’t always see catastrophe coming. Is that a fair assessment?
BS: Haha! This is such a great observation, Cliff. It’s definitely fair. I’m always waiting for something to go wrong. I wish I wasn’t that kind of person, but I am. Fear. Anxiety. Stress. On the outside, I’m this super chill kind of person. Soft spoken. Quiet. Kind of shy. But on the inside, it’s just not so easy breezy. I also think the period so many of these stories were written comes into play. COVID. I was on edge. The world was. It was just that kind of time.
Music is a big part of my life, and one of my favorite lyrics ever is this from Sturgill Simpson’s “All Around You”: “God is inside you / All around you / And up above.” True and beautiful words there. And the same could be said about how I feel about impending catastrophe. Haha!
Were you writing The Last Bird of Paradise during this same period? How did the outside world work its way into your book?
CG: The novel took many years to write – six or seven – so during the pandemic I was deeply into the revision phase. Still, the threat of terrorism, like the pandemic, is something we’ve had to learn to live with, sadly. Although terrorism hasn’t had a direct impact on me, as a global citizen it’s definitely on my mind, and so terrorist acts and what they do to the psyche became a big part of the book. In that way, it’s not unlike the impending doom in some of your stories. The characters expect the worst to happen, they see the threat of danger everywhere, and it drives them a little nuts.
BS: Your mentioning of character makes me think of one of the big focuses of your book: art. As I was reading your novel and taking notes, I began noticing how big of a role art plays in your characters’ lives. In fact, one of my favorite sections in the first half closes with this fantastic line: “Art can make all the difference in how we see the world….” Will you talk a bit about what you see as the role of art – and how art impacts you and, in turn, your own creative work?
CG: It may not be true for all visual artists, but the two primary painters in the novel use their art to tell stories, and a lot of the art that speaks to me personally does that also. It can be a sort of message-in-a-bottle that someone who finds it in the future – whether it’s in a museum, a gallery, or an antique store – and the viewer may be impacted by it in some way. You mentioned that music is a big part of your life, and that’s true for me as well. Part of the process of appreciation of each of these art forms is finding the story within that has meaning for you.
BS: Let’s talk about form. We both are a bit unconventional in our approach in our new books. You have dual storylines that go back and forth as the novel progresses, and it works so well, too. They kept finding ways to connect. Did you write two separate stories and put them together later on? Did you write them as you went? I’m curious about the development.
CG: That’s a great question, because it was a real challenge for me. The historical thread, which is told in the form of diary excerpts, needed to have its own dramatic arc while at the same time informing what was happening in the contemporary narrative, which forms the bulk of the novel. Given that the voice in the diary is distinctive, being from the Edwardian era, I wrote much of that separately in order to keep it consistent. The trick was figuring out how to weave the two threads together in a way that made sense. Ultimately I figured the reader wouldn’t mind going back and forth. I hope that’s true!
Speaking of form, I know how difficult it is to organize a story collection. The stories in Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood do have some common elements, but they’re also wonderfully diverse, with unique characters, including the ones that aren’t human. Without chronology as a guide, how did you decide on the order?
BS: I spend a lot of time with story revisions and ordering my collections. A LOT of time. Sometimes I think it takes just about as much time to revise and order as it does to create. Maybe not actually, but it does seem that way. With this particular collection, the order I suggested is the one the team over at Montag approved. There were discussions about a couple of switches, but it’s the same order.
I basically wanted to do three things in shaping the book. First of all, I wanted it to open and close with a flood. Floods, literally and metaphorically, appear throughout, so I wanted the image to be there heavily as readers ease into the collection – and as they close it. Secondly, I wanted the flash and longer stories to move back and forth, which they do. Finally, I wanted the stories’ endings to be in different places. I didn’t, for example, want my pond-set stories to be back to back because I wanted the visuals of the world to exist on their own as much as possible. Similarly, if a story has a bleak ending, I tried to give the reader some space before bringing in another story with the same kind of closing feeling.
Since I’ve mentioned endings, let’s go there. Our books deal pretty directly with loss and grief. The ends come, and we still have these two things – very much so. But our books also have something else. They end with peace.
CG: I really like your approach to the collection’s structure! Ending the novel was a little tricky for me because the two threads needed to be resolved at more or less the same time, which I think I’ve done. Without giving too much away, I agree that there is an element of peace, along with great upheaval.
It’s been a real pleasure speaking with you, Bradley, and I really enjoyed your book. Any last thoughts?
BS: Likewise. Thank you, Cliff!
Since we are here at the Southern Review of Books, I’ll close us out with a special shout out to all the good literary work being done by and in the literary South. Thank you to all the fellow southern writers for giving us important stories, and thank you to all of our local libraries and independent bookstores who are doing such vital work in our communities. Know that you are appreciated!
FICTION
Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood
By Bradley Sides
Montag Press
Published February 6, 2024
FICTION
The Last Bird of Paradise
By Clifford Garstang
Black Rose Writing
Published February 22, 2024
Southern Review of Books 