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Sheree Renée Thomas A conversation with the Memphis author, poet, and editor. BY JESSE DAVIS
first memory is probably hearing if not Led Zeppelin, then hearing Parliament Funk in the house.” About “Head Static,” one of the Nine Bar Blues’ stories in which the musical motif is most readily apparent, Thomas says, “I was thinking about what it might be like if your very existence depended on the ability to experience new music. … That constant innovation that humans have in expressing themselves through rhythm and tone.” Laughing, she describes finding a world-saving song like some hidden treasure out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, adding, “I also wanted to play on the quest story.” “Claire had spent decades foraging through black vinyl, seeking black gold, the sound, the taste of freedom,” Thomas writes in “Head Static.” For Claire, the story’s protagonist, music is a sword and a shield, a way to connect and a path to forgetting. She and Animus are immortal alien music lovers on a quest to find The Great Going Song, “the one that captured the true spirit of a world, its story, its many stories.” They work as DJs, searching for songs to sample, and driving through deserts and rain, in search of underwater pyramids and ancient melodies of the future.
WRITING ON THE BORDERS OF THE NEW WEIRD SOUTH
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his spring, Sheree R enée Thomas released Nine Bar Blues, a new collection of short stories, via Jack White’s Nashville-based Third Man Books, the literary arm of the Raconteurs and the White Stripes rocker’s Third Man Records label. Just a month or so after the release of Nine Bar Blues came the publication of The Big Book of Modern Fantasy from bigwig sci-fi editors Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. The collection includes a short story by Thomas. She is the author of Shotgun Lullabies: Poems & Stories and the editor of the critically acclaimed collections Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. Thomas was also a recipient of a 2017 Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission.
ME AND MY MUSIC
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usic is central to NINE B AR B LUE S . It informs the title, the prose in its lyricism, and it acts as a recurring motif that ties the collection together. The pages practically snap, crackle, and pop — like old deep-cuts vinyl on a turntable — with the sounds of the South, from country to blues to gospel to funk. And it’s in the author’s embrace of multiple genres that she stands out as a keen observer of the multihued mosaic that makes up Memphis’ culture. “I didn’t set out initially to write a book where each story has some exploration of a genre, but I realized that was what I was doing. And for me music is such a big part of my everyday world. I was born into a family that truly, truly loves music,” Thomas says. “I think my
he eclecticism of NINE BAR B LUES makes it refreshing, especially when compared with national depictions of the South. (Remember that ridiculous and short-lived Memphis Beat show where Jason Lee played a cop whose side hustle was as an Elvis impersonator? Yeah.) Thomas’ genius is simply in tapping into the already existing strangeness. “I like to say that I’m writing on the borders of the New Weird South,” she explains, “which is connected to the bridge to the Old.” “So many wonderful, truly iconic American contributions have come out [of Memphis and the South] that couldn’t have come from anywhere else. It’s just this strange alchemy of our dark and bright wondrous history and the way we have related The New Weird to the geography here. Just the music in our language that comes South is a body from all of the different cultures of work that that tried to carve out a living out of the land here,” Thomas is interstitial, says. “It’s not a static thing, what combining we do here. It’s always changspeculative fiction ing and moving.” Thomas explains that the New with a Southern Weird South is a body of work Gothic feel. that is interstitial, combining speculative fiction with a Southern Gothic feel. It’s a subset of the New South, a literary movement away from the old “moonlight and magnolias and sticky, sultry, summer nights” clichés. Instead, in embracing the full spectrum of the Southern experience, the movement explores a more authentic, wilder, and weirder landscape. “You hear echoes, some of our greatest hits, of course, Faulkner, Walker,” Thomas says. She notes that stories in the New Weird South mode are not necessarily linear, sometimes approaching their truth in a series of concentric circles. “It takes us in a space that is not rooted in the traditional modes of storytelling. There’s more space for strangeness,” Thomas continues. “It’s almost like a Southern magical realism, or the marvelous real.”
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY SHEREE RENÉE THOMAS
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