The Ballad of Falling Rock and Author Jordan Dotson

The Ballad of Falling Rock is one of the best novels I've read this year, so I was fortunate to be able to interview its author, Jordan Dotson. Listen in as we talk about his inspiration for the novel (which began with a snow day and no electricity) and the family stories that helped form the historical context for the novel. From the real tuberculosis sanatorium in Roanoke to the churches of the fictional town called Trinity, we'll explore the musical story that begins with Saul Crabtree and extends through the haunted generations who follow.

Get your copy of the novel and learn more about Jordan at Home - Jordan Dotson

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Transcript

Amy Clark: 0:00

This is Amy, and you're listening to the Talkin' Appalachian Podcast. Hello and welcome back to Season 3 of the Talkin' Appalachian Podcast. This is turning out to be such a Exciting season and I'm so thrilled about the guests that I'm bringing on the show and I hope that you are too. And I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I also want to give a shout out to new subscribers over on Patreon. Charlotte, Amy, Kathy, Ross and Sarah, I just want to say thank you to all of you for signing up for a paid subscription. And I'm excited about the content that you're going to have access to. So if you'd like more of the Talking Appalachian podcast, bonus content, early access to episodes. This week's guest is Jordan Dotson. Jordan is an author. He wrote The Ballad of Falling Rock. It's a beautifully written novel. He is originally from Wise County. He lives up north now and is about to relocate down south. He came by during the Gathering in the Gap Music Festival to talk about his book, and I was just so excited to have him here. And it was just the perfect time to do an author reading because the music festival was a good backdrop for what this book is about. Jordan is an award-winning author, musician and literary translator whose work has been featured in numerous publications and anthologies throughout the United States and Asia. Born in Wise County, he moved to China and that's Wise County, Virginia. He moved to China in 2005 to study classical poetry and folk music. Over 14 years in Asia, he worked as a journalist, musician, writing teacher, and college admissions counselor, and he eventually earned his MFA in fiction from City University of Hong Kong. His lone co-written screenplay won the jury award in narrative shorts and more than 30 film festivals worldwide, and though now he resides in Boston, he still still considers Southwest Virginia home and like I said He wrote this novel called The Ballad of Falling Rock. He's got a very cool story about how he was inspired to write the book. He and I share similar interests when it comes to the musical history and the history of the Catawba Sanitarium and Roanoke and the tuberculosis epidemic. I'm really looking forward to sharing this episode with you. So I hope you enjoy. Go to the show notes to see how to order Jordan's book. You can get it from an independent bookseller. You can order it straight from his website in So we're here with Jordan Dotson, author of The Ballad of Falling Rock and Big Stone Gap, the Gathering in the Gap Music Festival, which those of us who asked you to come thought that would be the perfect backdrop for your lyrical novel, The Ballad of Falling Rock.

Jordan Dotson: 3:07

Thank you so much, by the way.

Amy Clark: 3:09

We're sitting in a house that was built in the same time period that your novel begins in the 1930s. And so we're just going to jump right in because my first question that I have for you is, what does it mean to be here in Wise County at a music festival talking about this novel? What does that mean for you?

Jordan Dotson: 3:29

Everything. As I've said to you before, the ultimate litmus test for me whether I succeeded with this book or whether the book itself succeeds, every opinion of people here, specifically in this part of Virginia. The reactions I've had of this book from people back here tend to be very emotional. And people in small towns elsewhere in the country are somewhat similar, maybe toned down a little bit. Urban people don't quite get it. They expect something different. Maybe they want people around here to be something different. But that's why I'm so happy To be here with you guys, it means everything for me to see people enjoying this book, to say that it's real, to say that they find authenticity in it. I spent close to a decade on this book, and that's really all that matters to me. It's not the number of readers, but the feeling of those readers that matter. And people here in Wise County, specifically, are the ones I care about.

Amy Clark: 4:26

Yeah. So when you say they're emotional about it, do you mean that they have an emotional connection to it because it's grounded? in places and song and things that are familiar to them?

Jordan Dotson: 4:38

Yeah, it's not so much a place that's not on a fictional county. If one were to say that it's a fictional version of Wise County, I wouldn't say they're wrong. Maybe that's not exactly what I had in my head, but the places should be recognizable to people around here, even if they're not named. They don't have the same names. But more than that is the way that the characters who live in these places interact with each other and the world, the way they talk to one another. I'll give you an example. When we were editing the book, my publisher, the editor, had a big problem with something I do that the book does continuously. People are referred to as a Collins or a Sturgill or a Wilson. And they kept, they wanted to edit that out. And I said, no, you can't edit that out. That's correct. They say it should be the Sturgill. Collins or this Collins. You don't understand. If you're in southwest Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and someone says, who is that person? He's a Collins. That means their whole family. They're good people or maybe not good people. But just saying a family name that way, it seems to be a linguistic feature. Stuff like that is important. I can't even explain how many hundreds of hours I spent trying to get this stuff right in an authentic way. For example, Suzanne from the Historical Society reached out and said how much she and Had a lot of good things to say about those little elements. That's what I mean. Like the authenticity of speech and language and the way that people love, hey, interact with one another around here. It's different.

Amy Clark: 6:07

Yeah. It's

Jordan Dotson: 6:08

different. And it's just a matter of getting that right.

Amy Clark: 6:10

That doesn't surprise me because I've talked to so many writers who have similar experiences with editors or with directors when they're recording an audio book and they don't like the way they're saying a word or something like that. And it's just not understanding the vernacular language.

Jordan Dotson: 6:27

And that's a tough, that's really a tough artistic issue because you have to understand that readers come from everywhere and you need them to understand. It's not about me as a writer. It's not even necessarily about the characters in the book. It's about the audience. It's about the reader. They have to understand. And if you don't make them understand, you failed as a writer, in my opinion. And that's really tough. How do you manage that language in text? It's music, poetry. It's tough. I hope we got it right.

Amy Clark: 6:57

Yeah, I think you did. Absolutely. Would you like it if somebody said this is a literary novel?

Jordan Dotson: 7:02

I would smile.

Amy Clark: 7:04

Because you pay attention to language. And the language is, I know everybody keeps saying that. It's so poetic. And you studied classical poetry, right?

Jordan Dotson: 7:14

I did. I studied poetry writing, creative writing in college. And I had intended to be a poet when I was younger. But it's like music. You discover really quickly whether or not you have it.

Amy Clark: 7:23

You can tell that in the way that you write prose that gets in there. And it's, for me as a reader, and it makes me think of Ron Rash. Do you read Ron Rash? Yeah. And he's a poet.

Jordan Dotson: 7:35

He is.

Amy Clark: 7:37

When I read his stuff, I want to be somewhere where I am not going to be interrupted. There's nothing around me that's going to get my attention because I want to savor the language. And that, to me, is a literary novel.

Jordan Dotson: 7:49

Poetry has to be spoken out loud. It's performative. It is music. Like song. It is. It absolutely is. Staffo was a wedding singer. We read these clips of these old Greek poems from 2,500 years ago. Those were wedding songs. She was a singer-songwriter. Yeah. The thing that did it for me was when I was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, there was a poet by the name of Charles Wright. You may not know

Amy Clark: 8:13

him. Yes, I know who

Jordan Dotson: 8:15

he is. I feel like a lot of people around here don't know him as well as they should. He was a poet laureate in the United States. He's from Kingford. I never had him in class. I wasn't that lucky, but I would stop by his office hours. One day, I stopped in and asked him for an opinion on a poem. He took a look at it and said, this isn't a poem. He said, it's a country song. He had already complimented my cowboy boots, which was so, I was already, he was greasing me up a little bit. But at first I was heartbroken. But then he said, that's not an insult. He said, it's musical. And he said, he gave me a piece of advice. He said, if you want to write poetry, I suggest you spend the next three years only writing in poetic meter. Only writing in pentameter, hectameter, stuff like that. And I did. I listened to him and listened. It was at the end of those three years that I realized I'm never going to be a poet. It's hard work. But it gave me a kind of ear for music and sound and language that I've never lost. And in some ways it's a curse because you can really get in the weeds. And when you're dealing with a poem musically, if you're going to be reading it out loud, it might be five minutes. But a novel, to try to sustain that through a novel is really difficult. And also you risk Like I was saying earlier, you risk putting the reader off. If they have to be as immersed in the language as you said, that's hard work. That's a cognitive load. Ron Rash is a great example of someone who balances it perfectly. It has that depth, that almost sensuousness to the language when he wants it, when he wants you to be. But then he can segue out a little bit, make it a bit easier on you at times and keep the story, the narrative moving along with the major.

Amy Clark: 9:59

So this is a novel about... a musical family, lots of father-son relationships. But music is a central theme, and it starts with Sawcraftry, and it moves its way down the generations. What does music mean to you, and why did that become the central focus of this story?

Jordan Dotson: 10:21

That's hard to explain. I didn't play music as a kid. I always wanted to. But for some reason or another, I never fully took to it until I was a teenager. But I did grow up singing in church. And my dad was always singing in church two or three days a week. And that itself is its own language that you grow up in. It shapes the way we interact with the world in ways that we don't understand. One of the big things for me when I started approaching this novel, I was working on all these old hymns that appear in the book. And I never once in my life have been fully aware of how I knew the lyrics to every single one of these hymns front to back. And I didn't quite know how because I spent most of my childhood going to a Pentecostal church that sang more modern stuff. But then my cousins and my uncle's churches were more traditional Southern Baptist, Free World Baptist, stuff like that. And I spent a lot of time there having my family preacher. It's like you don't understand how you have all this music within you and then Three decades later, it can just come out crystal clear. And that, I think, was maybe where the impulse came from to unpack that, figure out where that music comes from and how it becomes a part of your life, how certain songs and memories can be milestones for certain times in your life, emotions that you felt. That's really the big theme of it all. And then, of course, later in life, I came to music and performed for a long time. And when I gave up poetry, I attempted to be a songwriter for a while. And that was an education in itself. For example, you come from a musical family. Your son and your brother, I think you

Amy Clark: 12:00

said they're incredible

Jordan Dotson: 12:00

musicians. They're incredible musicians, lifelong musicians. I've never been a lifelong musician. And yet music is, it's like blood. It's like our emotional currency. Why is that? It's not just me, it's for everybody.

Amy Clark: 12:15

I think my opinion is in Appalachia especially. We had music before we had anything else. When people came here from the old country, they didn't have anything but they had their instrument and they had their song. And those songs could be passed down like heirlooms. And before people could read, they could sing and they could teach through singing and they could teach. So I really think it is in our blood. I think that's when so much of what... Country music, for example, so much of what that is today started here, started in Bristol. And you talk about, that was going to be one of my questions too, is about your research. You talk about Ralph Peer, who first recorded the Carter family. And I actually pulled out of my Victrola some Carter family records. These are all the Carter family records that I had in a talking machine that I inherited from And

Jordan Dotson: 13:10

those

Amy Clark: 13:10

are, yes, these are the shellac 75 in the original sleeves. I just thought you'd think that was

Jordan Dotson: 13:16

neat,

Amy Clark: 13:17

but yeah, I thought you might get a kick out of seeing some of that.

Jordan Dotson: 13:21

Wildwood flower right there on top.

Amy Clark: 13:22

Wildwood flower. That's the

Jordan Dotson: 13:24

song that did it all. Yeah. That's the song that if you, I think you want to trace. Country music is the most popular musical genre in America today. You want to trace it all back to this song, Mother Mabel Carter, the way she played guitar, essentially inventing a new style of guitar. That is the language. Everyone who's recording this kind of pop country stuff today, they don't even understand that it's born out of Morocco.

Amy Clark: 13:47

I remember my granddad playing the Victor talking machine. He would wind it up and he'd put the record on it and he'd On snow days, that's what we did for fun, especially if we didn't have electricity. He'd say, let's play. You don't realize when you're younger, you just don't know what that means. You don't realize it until you're older. It's like traveling with my dad. He was in a gospel quartet and I've been in so many churches. And I grew up in a Free World Baptist church. And so I know all the hymns, all the old hymns. And again, didn't know what that would mean until so much later and how much that affected me. until I started writing about Appalachia. It's

Jordan Dotson: 14:26

funny you mention a snow day. It reminds me to talk about that later. I don't know if I ever sent that to you, but that's how this whole book got started.

Amy Clark: 14:33

Let's talk about how the book got started. It got started on a snow day.

Jordan Dotson: 14:37

I lived in China for a very long time. After college, I moved to Asia and had all kinds of swashbuckling adventures. I came home every year for Christmas, maybe two or three times a year sometimes. I've always found it impossible to stay away from why it's called that. And actually, my very first year, I didn't come home for Christmas. And it was the most depressing day of my life. Waking up in an industrial park in southern China on Christmas morning. It was a learning experience. I had to be a better, stronger person. But after that, I said, I'm going home every year. And I'm going to spend two weeks with my parents. And you may remember, it was, I think, 2011. There was a snowstorm that shut off power to pretty much the whole county. And that happened right at the beginning of my trip home. And we, of course, we had no power in my parents' home. a little bit smaller, similar to this one, old, 1920 at some point, my great-grandfather's home. And we sat there around a gas stove for seven days with no power, snow piling up outside the windows, and we're all shivering. And what do you do when you're with your family in the middle of a dark Appalachian blizzard?

Amy Clark: 15:38

Tell stories.

Jordan Dotson: 15:39

Tell stories. And the first day was miserable. The second was okay. We're dealing with it. The third day, stories started coming out of my parents. that we'd never heard before. They, it was some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. Stuff that you don't even know about your parents. Things that clarify things from youth. Wild stories, crazy stories. Some of the stories that appear in this book are versions of these things that I learned. And it was incredible. And probably one of the most important weeks of my life. One year later, I came home again for Christmas. And I was back in my childhood house. And that very first night, I woke up in the middle of the night and basically had this story fully formed in my head. I dreamed it. Woke up and rolled over and started writing, putting the notes down. And that's how the whole, it took me 10 years to write that book. But it was, it's like God gives you the story. And then through a very staticky speaker, you've got to figure it out. I had no idea at that point that my grandfather, my mom's, father who died when she was a teenager he'd been a singer he'd done a really good singer he sang on the radio country gospel stuff and so there are some things about your family that don't get talked about when you're young things that are and it took that silence of three days in a snowstorm to let some of those things work out the grandson in this book he's trying to figure out who his granddad was and maybe i'm certain that's what i was doing trying to figure out who

Amy Clark: 17:07

Is that who you identify with the most? Or do you identify with any of the characters that you created? I know that's a dangerous question because people are like, how much of this is real and how much of this is fiction?

Jordan Dotson: 17:19

There are certainly elements of me in all of them. And elements of everyone in your life. Mind, reality, for that stuff. I think perhaps I could say that any emotions that the characters feel are emotions that I've felt. It's... You're trying to make those clear and right and honest and true of the task, and you have to pull that from inside. Yeah. I don't think I was ever as charismatic as Saul was supposed to be, maybe more sensitive like Eli, the grandson. I did that quieter, more introverted. I went out with more like that. Fairly

Amy Clark: 18:00

early in the novel, speaking of search and history and story, Saul... And I don't want to give too much away, but this is early in the book. Saul has tuberculosis, which they call consumption. And he is sent to the Catawba Sanitarium in Roanoke, which was a real place.

Jordan Dotson: 18:20

Real place.

Amy Clark: 18:20

So talk to me about why you chose to include that element of the story.

Jordan Dotson: 18:27

Because that's how my grandparents met. My grandfather, my father's parents met. My granddad is Dotson from Southwestern Eastern, Kentucky. They've been here for hundreds of years. He got tuberculosis at work in Wise and was sent off to Apollo Sanatorium. My grandmother was a daughter of Italian immigrants in Philadelphia. She grew up in Philadelphia. And she ran away from home at 15. She had an aunt in Newport News. And she ran off, lived with her for a while, got a job in a department store. Got tuberculosis and was sent, because she's now a virgin, she was sent to Catawba. And one day she was looking out the porch there and she saw a young man with red hair and she fell in love at first sight. My grandfather actually got a settlement because it was at work that they did a lawsuit or something like that. And he used the money, the small amount of money he got to buy a ring for my grandmother. She came home with him, never went back to Philadelphia and lived here. to the day she died in 2020, 80 years. She's buried three mile that way. It's my family's life. And it was something that I guess I had to work out in fiction to truly understand it. But I think the really, the most important thing was that idea of tuberculosis. My grandfather had his, this was before penicillin. Penicillin was like

Amy Clark: 19:55

in the 40s.

Jordan Dotson: 19:55

And this was in the early, mid 40s that they were there. And they had all kinds of crazy treatments. One of them was my grandfather had a lung removed. So they cut out two ribs, took them out, and cut out one of his whole lungs. And in my research, I discovered, I can't remember who it was at the time, but there's a great, a classic country singer. I can't remember who it was. Same thing happened. Had a lung removed during tuberculosis treatment and had to relearn how to sing.

Amy Clark: 20:25

Really?

Jordan Dotson: 20:26

Yeah. I wish I'd looked it up. I can't remember who it was now. I've got so much of this stuff in my head. And that was the big thing. The characters in this novel are singers who've lost their voices and have to recover them. And that's just a powerful idea. Yeah. So the kind of visceral aspect of falling in love. through the disease and yet losing your ability to express love in art and having to learn how to do that again. That was the dynamic that spoke to me.

Amy Clark: 20:52

He meets his love there and they come back together and the blood is so dramatic. When I was reading some of the scenes, and again I don't want to give away the plot for people that haven't read it yet, but I just thought, oh my, I could see that. I could frame that out in my mind. But you're writing in a way, the blood becomes poetic, coughing up blood. And it's as horrible as it is, it still becomes part of the scene in a way that, I don't know. I would have to work out how I want to say that, but it's very visual.

Jordan Dotson: 21:25

Yeah. I'll take that. That's a great metaphor for singing right there, coughing up blood.

Amy Clark: 21:29

Yeah. Yeah. All

Jordan Dotson: 21:30

right. Yeah. The kind that matters, at least. The kind of singing that makes people cry.

Amy Clark: 21:35

I found letters from, I had a relative at Catawba. I

Jordan Dotson: 21:39

remember.

Amy Clark: 21:39

And I wanted to show you the letters that I found in a sewing machine.

Jordan Dotson: 21:43

You read these?

Amy Clark: 21:44

I read them and I've transcribed them. Yeah. But she was just so incredibly lonely. She'd never been away from home. And that was in the 50s. That was at the end of TB. But it's so interesting to me.

Jordan Dotson: 21:56

I remember listening to this when you were out there doing it. I remember... I was being surprised because that wasn't the Vic youth. That was after penicillin during tuberculosis by then, but apparently it hadn't made it down to Catawba yet. Yeah.

Amy Clark: 22:09

Did you go any... Catawba doesn't exist anymore. I think there are pieces of things left from the original space, but did you just rely on family stories or did you have to go anywhere to find out more about Catawba?

Jordan Dotson: 22:22

I was living in Asia at

Amy Clark: 22:24

the time. Oh, so you couldn't. This

Jordan Dotson: 22:25

was one of the great difficulties. I did have, I spent a lot of time talking to my grandmother about it. And there wasn't a ton of information about it back. I remember when I first started doing all this research, I started, I did see Google searches again recently. And there's so much about Catawba on the internet now. There's photos, there's all kinds of stuff. It wasn't there 10 years ago. Yeah. And it was hard. You could find like letters just like this. There was a few scraps and things and you piece it together as best you can. And use those interviews, really, to win the authenticity, to find the things that really matter. There are details that my grandmother would tell me that were like, I think she might have had more fun there than most people there. But there's a lot of little details like that. And you just need one detail. You need the right detail at just the right place. There was one moment in the story where one of the characters talks about something called pig pot.

Amy Clark: 23:15

I remember that. I wrote that word down because I meant to look more into it. A pig pot.

Jordan Dotson: 23:21

I don't even think it's a real word. I think they just had this hot water bottle at the feet of the patients that my grandmother said was shaped like a pig. So they called it

Amy Clark: 23:28

a

Jordan Dotson: 23:29

pig pot with their own slang word for it.

Amy Clark: 23:31

Oh,

Jordan Dotson: 23:32

neat. Stuff like that.

Amy Clark: 23:33

Yeah. So I'm going to pause here and ask if there is a section of your novel that you'd like to read on the podcast.

Jordan Dotson: 23:41

It doesn't give away too much of the plot. Only two paragraphs.

Amy Clark: 23:44

Okay. Okay.

Jordan Dotson: 23:45

Should I explain what's happening here?

Amy Clark: 23:47

Sir.

Jordan Dotson: 23:48

Okay. This scene takes place after Saul has come home. He's relearned how to sing. He's on the verge of musical fame and success. His voice is resonating with people now, but difficulties arise within his family. In the month after his father's passing, Saul sang like a man possessed. He accepted every invitation. In Kingsport, Keokie, everywhere about, Honky Tonks in Johnson City, the Pentecostal hollows of Kentucky, and wherever he traveled, he sang as though he'd abandoned his very soul. His voice baptized the crowds that came, and there was no healing for his trembling lyrics. For the smoky notes of an excised lung that fell in insoluble tears Even to Trinity, they came in droves. Dozens of fresh young housewives appeared, their angry husbands, dozens of women claiming to be widows, and occasionally their husbands too. The Trinity Inn filled to the brim when there were Ratliffs and Thackers, Van Dykes and Medes, teenagers crumpling flowers in their hands, chanting Catholics from railway towns, hot little gospeling children who carried their hats and spoke like wizened bards. No matter who, wall-eyed soldiers conscripted in Bristol, coal miners blessed on Benzedrine, Saul sang to them all, individually, as though fulfilling a mission from God. He sang in a way that spooked children. He sang to make brick masons cry. He sang in a way that made it seem like the world no longer existed, that there was only life in the heart of the song. And nothing on the other side.

Amy Clark: 25:47

How do you come up with all of the different ways of describing things? Just the sensory detail? It's just image after image. And I'm thinking, does he have a list where it evolves from? Or does it come to you? Or do you have to go take a walk and be inspired? Or all of the different...

Jordan Dotson: 26:08

It makes me wonder if there's too much.

Amy Clark: 26:10

No. Literary novels do that. They take time to show you and to help you see, smell, taste, touch things. Not too much, but enough that I think, wow, there's something that's inspiring that amount of detail.

Jordan Dotson: 26:29

I think I've always had a kind of synesthesia about that with language. Maybe a wire crossed in my brain somewhere. But yeah, you know, a lot of it is walking around and just paying attention. A writer's real job is to see, to see the things that we don't pay attention to because we see them so often. And every writer steals. Every writer minds their inspirations. And one thing, to go back to poetry, that was something that was deeply important for me. I have notebooks, like sketchbooks, full of poets, and even novelists that I've read in the past where when something they've written jumps out at me, I don't know why. Usually it's because I know they're seeing the world in a way that I've never seen the world. I've got notebooks full where I've handwritten those things down, stacks up and grown back in years and years and years. And eventually you absorb those things. So it's an autodidactic education in the way that other people use language and the way that they see. That has happened to me as a reader. Throughout my life, I remember the biggest one was about a Colombian author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was 100 Years of Solitude. It's one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and set in South America. But to me, it was Appalachia. It was people and families around here. But I remember reading it and just realizing there's a depth to what that writer sees in the world. And just like music, you don't practice it. You got to get in there. And the sign out, that's what you're going to do as a writer. Show things to people that they might not. Or even as a poet, I think their job is to articulate the things that are hidden behind our vision. Something like

Amy Clark: 28:09

that. Yeah. Yeah, it does. It does. So one of the things I love about the book, because I love reading it, is there's a... Would you call it magical realism, what you're doing in there with the ghosts and the haunting? It seems to be that the family is a little bit cursed. And there's some darkness around this family. And there's that element of otherworldliness happening. And I think in Appalachia, I suspected that your background coming from here may have inspired that because... I've got a bottle tree right here. Bottle tree. The superstition is it captures spirits, but I think it's pretty. But I love that it's got that element of superstition around it. So talk to me about that thread, what she was through the breath.

Jordan Dotson: 29:00

A hundred percent. You know, if other people were to call it magical realism, I'm like, yeah, sure, fine. That's great. That's what academics do.

Amy Clark: 29:06

Yeah, that's a technical term.

Jordan Dotson: 29:08

Right. They look at art and put labels on it so they can understand it and categorize it. For me, just the way people talk. Just the way people talk here. Like we live in a place where We're growing up in a place where it's deeply religious. People are deeply religious, but everyone also believes in ghosts. These things are not mutually exclusive. It coexists within the culture and the language that we use. So when the moon turned blue or something in this book, to me, I don't need to explain The reader doesn't need to worry about being explained why that's happened, as they might in a realist book or fantasy or sci-fi or something. You want to know those things. They have their own rules. Here, we don't need those rules. You just need to understand that this is people talking to each other, and this is the way we talk. Really, it's the ghosts. Appalachia has great ghosts.

Amy Clark: 29:55

Oh, yeah. We do. The best. We do.

Jordan Dotson: 29:58

And everybody has their own personal ghost stories. Like

Amy Clark: 30:01

every

Jordan Dotson: 30:01

teenager around here knows all the haunted orphanages and stuff like that. And it's just part of life. It's part of the fabric of your youth. And the house I grew up in is haunted, deeply haunted. Still today, my nieces and nephews don't sleep upstairs. Wow.

Amy Clark: 30:15

What happens? What do they hear? Footsteps or voices knocking?

Jordan Dotson: 30:19

Doors opening and closing and stuff like that. And you don't need to explain that. It's really boring, not fun to try to explain that. It's better to grow up in a family that doesn't go stories. Yeah. So in fiction, we can do that. You can let ghost stories be real. And they are real for us.

Amy Clark: 30:35

So that was part of creating the place. That was part of play street and putting that in the fabric of the background and everything. the Native American story. Let's talk about that because Falling Rock is the name of someone in this story that is carefully woven throughout the book and maybe echoes what's happening in Saul's family too. I had never heard of Falling Rock. Now I've heard of Chief Benji and all of that. Talk to me about how that made its way into the work.

Jordan Dotson: 31:05

That's tricky business actually because I'm not Cherokee. And you can do a ton of research. But that's not really what I was going for in this. What I was going for, that Falling Rock story is one. If you get on the internet and look it up, you'll find that it appears all around the region in little different ways. It's a story that a lot of people's parents tell them growing up. But over the course of the novel, the story gets told and retold in different ways by different people and different times. And that is what was interesting to me, how stories can travel through time. how they reflect the people telling them as much as the story itself. Now, like a lot of people around here, you grow up being told that you have Cherokee ancestry. And a lot of people do. And very few people understand it. Very few people understand the history. But it doesn't change the fact that it is part of the story of your life growing up. And so once again, it was a reflection of just the way that families talk to one another around here. The stories they tell to make sense of who they are and where they come came from. And this is a remarkably non-homogenous place. People came from all over. And it makes sense that people are grasping for history and trying to figure out where they came from, trying to find honor in their history because they might not know. I've noticed there were so many immigrants. It's complex. To me, it's not so much about The very specific Cherokee history, as much as the way people in this region talk about it and integrate that into their own histories.

Amy Clark: 32:37

It's interesting that now people want that to be part of their heritage, but not so long ago. No. That was not something that people would have.

Jordan Dotson: 32:48

I remember when people started talking about Melungeons a lot in the 90s. It just came out of nowhere. And there was a lot of back and forth about it. A lot of people didn't want to talk about that.

Amy Clark: 32:57

Oh, no. I remember going and talking to Brent Kennedy.

Jordan Dotson: 33:00

And

Amy Clark: 33:01

he said he got hate mail, dead threat.

Jordan Dotson: 33:03

Yeah, I believe it.

Amy Clark: 33:04

Because he was writing about that.

Jordan Dotson: 33:06

And nowadays, it's such a stereo cop in Appalachian fiction. It's like, you can't have an Appalachian novel if you don't have Malungans.

Amy Clark: 33:11

You don't have Malungans in it. Handling preachers. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Dotson: 33:14

Probably have in this novel.

Amy Clark: 33:15

Yeah. So what's your next literary adventure going to be? Where's writing taking you next?

Jordan Dotson: 33:22

That's a big question. Probably in the next three years planned out, actually. I've already got a complete collection of short stories that's located in China, where I lived for many years, studying and teaching. I'm nearing the end of the completion of a new novel. This one is set in South America, on a small island. In many ways, it resembles the type of isolated community that is all in rock. Then, I have some ideas to return to Red Pine County, the location of this novel I've had. It usually takes me about 10 years to work an idea out. I would like to do a collection of short stories, ghost stories, I think. And then I've got an idea for a big novel about a family of brothers who have inherited a piece of land. I don't want to say too much about it. That will take me a long time to work out. Maybe 20 years before that one's done. But that's the one that's really... Working on my subconscious right now.

Amy Clark: 34:23

That's great that you have all of that planned out. Wonderful. It might not work out.

Jordan Dotson: 34:28

But

Amy Clark: 34:29

you have the ideas. That's half the battle right there is having the ideas. Wonderful. What made you want to go to China? I'm just curious.

Jordan Dotson: 34:37

When I was studying poetry as an undergraduate my senior year, I took a seminar called Poetics of Ecstasy. And for one assignment, I had to read all these different translations from around the world. And I read, the book was edited by a poet named Sam Hamill. And the poem, but I discovered a poem in it that translates to Bamboo Mat by a Tong Dynasty poet named Yuan Zhen. 20 characters, like a very short little poem. And I read it, and I remember sitting in Alderman Library and thinking, being knocked out of my seat because it was a thousand year old poem and it was a country song it was a story about a guy an old man whose wife has died and he's staring at the place where she slept and he's unwilling to put away the mattress that she slept on and there's this silence in it that to me was it was pure hank william i used to always say that The great Chinese poets of the past, Li Baidu, they could walk into a bar, sit down next to Hank Williams, and stumble out three hours later, best friends. I loved it. And to make a long story short, I changed my direction. I thought I would go to grad school and study this stuff. But in order to do that, I would have to learn a Chinese language. So I took a year off to go have a little adventure in China and start learning the language. Quickly, I realized two things. One, I would never learn the language well enough to be able to mine old poetry that way. But I also, it was, that was 2006, 2005, 2006. And Southern China was like the epicenter of the universe. There was, I remember sitting, being in a hotel, looking out the window in the city and seeing, counting 82 cranes on the horizon, putting buildings up. And it was like, man, something is going on here. And I accidentally fell into a career teaching and writing over there. And I stayed. It was fun. And it just became life after a while.

Amy Clark: 36:41

Wow. What a rich experience.

Jordan Dotson: 36:43

It was something.

Amy Clark: 36:43

Yeah.

Jordan Dotson: 36:44

It was something.

Amy Clark: 36:45

Jordan Dotson, thank you for being on the podcast and for writing this beautiful book. And again, for listeners, it's called The Ballad of Falling Rock. Go first to your independent little bookstore and see if they can get it for you.

Jordan Dotson: 37:00

Thank you so much.

Amy Clark: 37:00

Thank you for being on the podcast, and I look forward to seeing what else you write.

Jordan Dotson: 37:05

Thank you so much, Annie. It's my pleasure and my honor to be here.

Amy Clark: 37:12

Thank you.