Q&A: Author David Joy on the Trials and Triumphs of Writing about Rural North Carolina

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders , an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. David Joy is the award-winning author of five novels set in the real-life highways and hollers of his home region of western North Carolina. He’s also written a memoir about fishing. His new book, “ Those We Thought We Knew ,” releases August 1. Enjoy our conversation about being swallowed up by the city, writing about addiction and violence, and hunting between books, below. Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: You’ve said elsewhere that you moved from Charlotte to western North Carolina when you were 18, chasing a girl. Can you say a little bit more about what kept you there? What did you do with yourself when you first moved out of the city? David Joy: I think it’s hard for people to understand the place and the people that I come from in that they are things that no longer exist. It’s that Gertrude Stein idea that, “there is no there there.” I grew up to a rural people who were deeply rooted to place and who’d largely been swallowed by a city. I’m a twelfth generation North Carolinian for all of the good and horrible that entails. For the most part, my paternal ancestors settled in and around the Catawba River Basin by the time of the Revolution. What I’m getting at is that I come from a people who were very deeply tied to the land where I was born. I’d ride down the road with my grandmother and she’d point out fields where she’d worked tobacco and cotton. She’d point to houses her father and brothers had built. My uncle lived two miles down the road and still kept kennels of rabbit dogs. I spent every afternoon tearing through a cattle pasture to fish a farm […]

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