THE WRITER’S EYE with Susan Beckham Zurenda and guest author, Julia Franks

I didn’t meet author Julia Franks until we were author participants at Booksmarks’ Movable Feast in Winston Salem in early 2024, but I read her compelling books long before. She is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Say So and Over the Plain Houses, a debut that was included in many “best of” lists, including NPR’s Notable Books of 2016. Her work has received seven literary prizes (The Townsend Prize, The Thomas Wolfe Award, The Southern Book Prize, Georgia Author of the Year, The IPPY Gold, An Earbuds Award from Library Journal’s Audiofiles Magazine, and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Honorable Mention). She has also published in The New York Times, Threepenny Review, Ms. Magazine, Salon, Lit Hub, and The Bitter Southerner.  Here, Julia writes about her novel in the works, tentatively titled The Acid War and how a postcard captured her attention and provided an eventual “aha” connection for her story: 

The postcard shows an early 20th century immigrant sitting on an industrial wooden crate. The man doesn’t pose or straighten or even try to orient his body toward the camera. He only turns his face to us with an incurious expression. He’s wearing the dungarees and shade hat of a laborer, but also the clean white blouse, waistcoat, and watch chain of a supervisor or engineer. One hand is bandaged and missing two fingers, and he wears only one shoe. The caption on the card reads, “CHRIST DERCIGNICE FELL 110 Feet FROM THE PARKSVILLE DAM, May 15, 1913.”

In the early 1900s many foreign laborers lived in encampments on the sites of huge construction projects. In the South, such camps tended to be called “dago camps”, though they seemed to have included Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Hungarians, Italians, and many others besides. Whatever these men’s origins, their premature graves were likely to be marked Dago 1, Dago 2, etc. Such was the case with those who died building the first dam across the Ocoee River, the Parksville Dam.

But this particular man had the dignity of a photograph. And yet. Whoever scrawled his name across the front of the image didn’t get it correct. The surname Dercignice does not exist anywhere I can find it, and the first name, well, suffice it to say it’s not every day you meet people named “Christ.” 

Which was maybe short for Christian? Not clear. An hour of googling leads to crumbs: in rare cases the nickname might be a shortened form of “Christos”, “Christophe,” or “Christiaan” in Greece, Haiti, Philippines, Holland, or Belgium. The internet also tells me two versions of the Christ Dercignice “legend,” one, that he died immediately, and the other that he walked away without a scratch. Both versions seem belied by the photograph.

I’d gotten to this dead end while researching for a novel about Copperhill, Tennessee. By that point in my investigations, I was already overwhelmed with eye-blinkingly strange material about the Copper Basin: the fact that early 20th century Tennessee copper companies were manufacturing the majority of the world’s sulfuric acid, that some of our nation’s most educated and inventive scientists were living in this corner of Appalachia, that castle-like refineries produced vast quantities of acid and stored it in vats the size of grain silos, that the landscape was barren and surreal, a valley where creeks ran purple, where the air dissolved fabric and no blade of grass grew, where rich executives employed barefoot locals to do everything from hauling ore to fetching their errant tennis balls, a place where local farmers suffered the consequences of industry’s acid rain, and resentments simmered as long and hot as the copper in the Bessemer smelters, a place where two back-to-back fires burned down the entire town of Copperhill in just 48 hours, and an arson investigation was launched.

All of which seemed like plenty of material—too much material— for my next book. I meant for my story to be about the tensions between capitalism and the environment, between Gilded age executives and rural farmers, between sulfuric acid and arson. The challenge would be making the surreal feel real, and it definitely wouldn’t help to include a mysterious guy who’d fallen from a dam and may or may not have died and may or may not have been named Christ. 

I mean, seriously. 

But over the following weeks, Christ kept insinuating himself into my thinking. 

Robert Olen Butler has written about the genesis of a novel being two things, two ostensibly separate stories working at cross purposes to one another to create a kind of friction. And when I stop to consider, this kind of cross-grain action has been my experience as well. 

I think you know where this account is going. It took longer than I want to admit, but I came around to the obvious conclusion: What if Christ the immigrant became a kind of lever to open up the rest of this unique and forgotten place? What if, instead of trying to normalize a very strange place, I instead leaned straight into all its weirdness? 

You start where you start. You start with a sentence. To begin with, Christ fell one hundred and ten feet from the top of Parksville Dam down the spillway and into the Ocoee River, where the combination of cold water and sulfuric acid slapped him clean back to life.