INSIDE VOICES

James Wade is the award-winning author of Beasts of the Earth, All Things Left Wild, and River, Sing Out. He is the youngest novelist to win two Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America, and the recipient of the MPIBA’s prestigious Reading the West Award. James’s work has appeared in Southern Literary Magazine, The Bitter Oleander, Writers’ Digest, and numerous additional publications. James lives and writes in the Texas Hill Country with his wife and children. His lates novel, Narrow the Road, was released August 26, 2025 with Blackstone Publishing.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: What first inspired the idea for Narrow the Road? Was there a moment, image, or piece of history that sparked it all?

As for the particulars, it was probably a handful of images and pieces over time. I’d always wanted to write something that incorporated the historic lumber town of Manning, Texas, because my great-grandmother was born there and, in the few memories I have of her, she was telling me stories about growing up there. The Bonus Army protests in D.C. and the federal government using force against its own veterans is a chilling moment in our history, as is the Great Depression in general. And then at some point I saw a photograph of a boxing bear in an old medicine show and wondered how I could work in something like that. But all of those things are just part of the stew. The actual stock we’re cooking with is my own need to try to understand the world. The young people in this novel are trying not just to survive their circumstances but to have a life. Despite all that’s going on around them, they want to do more than be stuck in survival mode forever. I feel like I’ve been in survival mode for the past three years. And while it’s not much fun, and sometimes can be absolutely overwhelming, I’ve also come up with some inner strength here and there that gives me some hope and some sense of myself. And that’s what William’s journey is really about, and what a lot of coming-of-age stories are about— parting with the notion that someone is going to swoop in and save you, or things are going to always magically work out, but rather, realizing that you can rely on yourself more than you thought. That you are capable and worthy in your own right. And that your friends can be just as important as family when it comes to loyalty and standing by your side. 

Inside Voices/Robert: The novel is steeped in the atmosphere of 1930s East Texas. What made that setting so essential to William’s journey? 

The time period is just so ripe for narrative exploration because there were so many big historical things that were happening on a national scale and yet the news that makes it into these rural areas is sometimes late, sometimes altered—and because of the way information is given in the book, William seems to always be a step or two behind his father’s last known whereabouts, and in that way their journeys begin to mirror one another, with William quite literally walking in his father’s footsteps. It’s also a setting that William is familiar with. Even the places he hasn’t been, he's been somewhere similar. I wanted both William and the reader to feel like they weren’t necessarily traveling further away from something but instead going deeper into something.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: Family, loss, and resilience are major themes here. What personal or cultural ideas were you exploring through William’s story?

Yeah, resilience, self-reliance—and that doesn’t mean not asking for help or having to do everything on your own—but more along the lines of trusting yourself to know who to ask, or what to ask, or what your goal should be. Basically everyone is telling William, oh, your situation looks bad, you should find your father. And William, even in the early going, is not entirely convinced that’s what he should be doing, but that’s what everyone else thinks and so he goes along with it. The hardest thing in the world to do is to trust yourself. Especially for halfway intelligent folks. We’re always worried about making the wrong decisions. We overthink things. We play out every single scenario a hundred times before we make a decision, and even then we can’t help but wonder if things would have been better had we chose different. 

Inside Voices/Robert: William and Ollie make such a memorable duo—especially with Ollie’s mortician-in-training background. How did you approach writing their friendship?

William leans more toward the stoic personality, particularly in the early stages of the story, so to me that meant the narrative called for Ollie to be the opposite. To be the one who cracks jokes, the one who seems less solemn about every little thing. He pops off at the mouth, gets drunk, but is incredibly loyal to William, adhering to his own moral code of friendship and what it means. And at first his job as a mortician is just another way to highlight how “different” his personality is, and it provides some funny moments, but as we go on the reader can see that Ollie has an incredible amount of wisdom and that his world view has no doubt been shaped by his time working a funeral home and all that it entails. 

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: Doctor Downtain is a truly chilling character. What went into building such a vivid and menacing antagonist?

A conman, grifter, snake oil salesman who thinks highly of himself, has few morals, and has a proclivity for underage girls. He uses divisive language to whip rural folks into a frenzy so that he can then leverage their fear and anger into a profit for himself. His followers defer to him in an almost cultlike manner. He sells fox piss and calls it a miracle cure. Doesn’t remind me of anyone, so I guess I just did a good job of making it all up.

Inside Voices/Robert: How much research did you do into the period—and what did you discover that most surprised or influenced the story?

I wrote this on the heels of Hollow Out the Dark which was set not just in the same time period, but quite the same year, and only a few counties away. There was so much research left over from the previous book that I knew I could write another and was keen to do it because I felt there were still wonderfully vivid moments and scenes and ideals that I hadn’t been able to address in Hollow Out the Dark. As for surprises, I think when I began I had an image of William’s father, Thomas, in my mind that mirrored other father figures I’ve written. Absentee, addict, just overall not a good guy. But the more I read about trauma from the first world war, and the lengths that veterans went to in order to help one another and to try getting help from the government, I began to really feel for the idea of this man who perhaps wanted to do the “right” thing but was unsure what that was. Perhaps he too was having a loss-of-faith, loss-of-innocence moment not unlike William. And so Thomas became much more complex than originally intended and now I couldn’t imagine it any other way. He is one of my favorite characters to have spent time with.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: Your prose has been praised for its lyrical quality. How do you balance that with the grit and danger of a fast-paced plot? 

I’m not entirely sure there’s a formula to it. And I’m also not entirely sure I always do strike the right balance, whatever that may be. But I do believe a good story ought to be told with some style and some beauty and some passion. I love the way a poem has the ability to stop us in our tracks by taking something we all know or have all seen or thought or whatever, and it plays that thought or that image back to us but somehow makes it new. I love it when that sort of lyricism is in the novels I read, so naturally I try to find a place for it in the novels I write. To me that’s part of a novel’s power, but I think we see it less and less in popular literature. I think the businessmen-and-women who run the publishing industry are obsessed with phrases like “unputdownable” and “page-turner,” and they’ve forgotten (or likely never knew) the power of a quiet moment when you read a passage from Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy or John Steinbeck and his entire chapter about a turtle crossing a road and you just have to close the book for a minute and reflect. Reflect on the beauty of the writing, reflect on its meaning, its metaphor, reflect on yourself and how you come into play with what the author is trying to say. Those are the moments I live for as a reader. 

Inside Voices/Robert: What do you hope readers take away from Narrow the Road once they turn the final page? 

That not every book has to be full blown escapism. That we can challenge ourselves as readers and still get lost in a story even if it isn’t salacious or high-fantasy or overly spicy (to use a current buzz word in the booktok sphere). I love all those books, too, and I’m glad people are reading but the role of the novel for centuries has been to challenge and move and question. I’d hate to see us lose that element of our society. 

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: How does Narrow the Road reflect your evolution as a writer compared to your earlier works? 

It’s a little tighter. The characters, to me, feel a little more lived-in. I guess it’s also a bit simpler when it comes to narrative POV. There are few chapters comprised of journal entries from William’s father, but other than that it’s a straight on, third-person narrative with the “camera” following William. There was always a third or fourth perspective in past novels. I can think of at least eight points of view in River, Sing Out, my second novel. So I’ve simplified things a bit since then. 

Inside Voices/Robert: What is next for you?

I’m in a pre-transition stage. I’ll graduate in May of next year with an MFA and my hope is to teach creative writing at a university but if and where will be dictated by the job market, so there’s not a lot I can control on that end. I’m also in the early stages of a book that I should be closer to the closing stages on, so I’ve got to figure out a way to get some words down and hope they’re the right ones. But in the short term, I’m headed to Spearfish, South Dakota in the morning for the South Dakota Festival of Books, then I’ll be in Nashville next month for the Southern Festival of Books, Texas Book Festival in Austin, Louisiana in Baton Rouge, and a few more places and faces in between.