Joseph Thomas: Congratulations on You Are Loved, which consists of two novellas following the life of Dixon Still. Which novella did you write first? And in what ways did it determine the direction of the other piece
Andrew Malan Milward: Thank you, I appreciate that. I wrote the novellas in chronological order, starting with “My Passion, My Becoming,” followed by “Little Amusements.” I don’t always write in a linear fashion, but in this case it seemed to make sense, and to explain why I need to talk about how the book was conceived. The idea for the book came to me in 2017. At that point I was thirty-seven years old and I was hit by the realization that I’d spent half my life without the internet and half my life with it, and that would never be the same moving forward. Being part of the last generation that knew what it was like to live in a world without the internet struck me as an interesting—and potentially fruitful—position to be in. Stating the obvious, but
what the hell: SO MUCH HAS CHANGED IN 25 YEARS. Of course, all the technological advancements come to mind, but think about the vast shifts of consciousness that have taken place during that time with respect to politics, gender and sexuality, the environment etc. So I set out to write a book that would capture that shift within one person’s lifetime. Rather than writing a straightforward novel, I liked the idea of having two novellas, set thirty years apart in time: one in a pre-9/11 world where the internet exists but it’s new and you don’t have to be part of it to survive, and one in the very near future where everything is political and technology is so tied to our existence. I like the sense of temporal whiplash a reader might have moving from the quaint-seeming world of Dixon’s New Orleans where he doesn’t need a cell phone or internet to the opening scene of the second novella, where he’s in San Francisco and waiting for a self-driving car to pick him up. In any case, to get back to your question, I wrote “My Passion, My Becoming” first in part because it was the most foreign to me at this point in my life. I had to remember my way back into a world that was so different from the one I live in today. In that sense, it was almost easier to imagine the near, hypothetical future of a world I haven’t yet lived in than the one I actually did live in.
what the hell: SO MUCH HAS CHANGED IN 25 YEARS. Of course, all the technological advancements come to mind, but think about the vast shifts of consciousness that have taken place during that time with respect to politics, gender and sexuality, the environment etc. So I set out to write a book that would capture that shift within one person’s lifetime. Rather than writing a straightforward novel, I liked the idea of having two novellas, set thirty years apart in time: one in a pre-9/11 world where the internet exists but it’s new and you don’t have to be part of it to survive, and one in the very near future where everything is political and technology is so tied to our existence. I like the sense of temporal whiplash a reader might have moving from the quaint-seeming world of Dixon’s New Orleans where he doesn’t need a cell phone or internet to the opening scene of the second novella, where he’s in San Francisco and waiting for a self-driving car to pick him up. In any case, to get back to your question, I wrote “My Passion, My Becoming” first in part because it was the most foreign to me at this point in my life. I had to remember my way back into a world that was so different from the one I live in today. In that sense, it was almost easier to imagine the near, hypothetical future of a world I haven’t yet lived in than the one I actually did live in.
JT: Many writers are inspired by other authors or other books. Did you think of yourself as writing within a particular tradition? Where does Dixon come from?
AMM: I don’t think I thought of it as writing in a specific tradition so much as there were specific writers I found myself thinking about and revisiting. For example, the first novella in particular is very reflective because Dixon is farther removed from the events being described than he is in the second novella. So I was thinking a lot about voice, and a writer who is very important to me in this regard is the great German writer WG Sebald. Nothing happens in his books, but they are riveting because of the voice, his combination of eloquence and insight. I definitively was trying for a voice that was in that vein. Don DeLillo is another writer who was important to me because of his clear intelligence on the page, as well as his interest in—particularly in the later period—in writing about art in his fiction. And lastly, James Salter was definitely on my mind, not just for his envy inducing sentence-making, but because of his ability to write about the body, sex, and love in such a beautifully literary way. I wanted to write a book that in addition to all the other stuff I’ve mentioned was also about sex, desire, and the erotic, which feels very out of fashion in our chaste moment in literary history. But so be it. Salter helped me think about how to do that.
JT: There are a lot of parallels drawn with the love between people and the love of art in You Are Loved. What message, if any, do you think your work conveys about the connection between art and love?
AMM: Hmm. That’s a good question….And one that it really hard to answer! It’s tough to interpret my own work—I’d be curious to hear what a reader thinks about this question—but I’ll give it a shot. Maybe what the book is saying is this: On the one hand art and love are nice-but-not-essential to survival—luxuries for the privileged or lucky—but on the other hand, certainly for some people anyway, they are absolutely essential to survival. It’s possible to live in the world without art and love, but I don’t think I’d want to.
JT: Perhaps my favorite line in the whole book comes from “My Passion, My Beginning,” in a description of New Orleans, the novella’s primary setting: “We were nearly out of the Quarter, the streets less crowded with people and automobiles, the air less clouded by the smell of urine and street wash, the detritus of the city’s eternal bacchanal.” In what way do you think New Orleans influences the writing in this novella?
AMM: I think both New Orleans and San Francisco influenced the writing of the book immensely. They are two incredibly romantic cities, but they are also absolutely singular. There is no other city in the US that is remotely like them. And because of that I think they occupy an outsized space in the American imagination, especially in proportion to their geographical size, which is actually quite small as far as cities go. That’s one thing I like about them: they’re not that big, but they feel like they are because they’re so unique. All of which makes them interesting settings for my characters. Given that my previous three books are all set in Kansas, this was a big departure for me, but it was exciting and intentional to write about other places I’ve lived and loved.
JT: “Little Amusements” has lots of political undertones and subplots with regards to Cam and his odd family dynamic. What encouraged you to do this?
AMM: The first novella has almost no overt politics in it quite intentionally. In fact, in the scene where it does start to come up, Pelin dismisses the notion, saying something to the effect of art/aesthetics being her politics. As I mentioned earlier, I set the first novella in the year leading up to 9/11, in part because it was still possible to be apolitical and embrace an art-for-art’s-sake world view. I think that has become untenable in the years since 9/11, and that’s why politics comes into the second novella in a big way. Most noticeable you see someone like Cam’s father who went to jail for life for his political beliefs, but you also see how Dixon has changed from a “I don’t really give it much thought” perspective as a young man to a much more politically
committed stance in middle age. Surely this process was influenced and perhaps jumpstarted by his relationship with Cam, but I think it would have happened to him anyway largely because I don’t think it’s really possible to stick your head in the sand and say, “The only thing I care about is art” anymore.
committed stance in middle age. Surely this process was influenced and perhaps jumpstarted by his relationship with Cam, but I think it would have happened to him anyway largely because I don’t think it’s really possible to stick your head in the sand and say, “The only thing I care about is art” anymore.
JT: Having a long association with the South, do you now think of yourself as a Southern writer? If so, in what ways do you find that your path as an artist converges with Dixon’s own path? Did you feel the pull of escapism, and if so, what made you return?
AMM: I’ve found myself thinking about that question a bit lately. My first three books, which I think of as a loose trilogy about Kansas, were so intentionally about that state, where I spent my early childhood, that I couldn’t help but think of myself—and be thought of as by others, I suspect—as a Midwestern writer. However, I was born in Kentucky, in the upper limits of the South, and spent the last thirteen years living in Mississippi, Alabama, and now Kentucky again. And I quite intentionally made my life in the South. For all of its problems and complications, there’s no region I love more or find as interesting, so it seems natural that my writing has evolved to write about this place where, at this point, I have lived most of my life. This is a longwinded way of answering your question, but I guess, given my personal experience, I feel both very much of the South and forever just a little outside it, which I think makes for an interesting vantage for a writer to have.
JT: What’s next for Andrew Malan Milward?
AMM: After two story collections and this current book of novellas, I am finally at work on a novel. As much as it might appear so, I don’t think of this trajectory as indicative of me learning how to write progressively longer works. Too often shorter forms are seen as a kind of apprentice work a writer goes through to learn how to write the “real” book (i.e. the novel). I didn’t write stories and novellas because I didn’t know how to write a novel; I wrote them because the narratives I wanted to tell needed those particular canvases. Whereas the book I’m writing now needs a larger canvas, which is an apt analogy, I suppose, because it’s set in the art world. The research I was doing for Dixon’s character in You Are Loved—learning about photography and
museum curation—opened some interesting doors that gave me the germ for this novel. It’s about artistic friendships. But also forgery, the FBI Art Crime Squad, the South, and, well, my love of Burt Reynolds.
museum curation—opened some interesting doors that gave me the germ for this novel. It’s about artistic friendships. But also forgery, the FBI Art Crime Squad, the South, and, well, my love of Burt Reynolds.
More information: https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/you-are-loved/
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Bios:
Andrew Malan Milward was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the author of the story collections The Agriculture Hall of Fame, which was awarded the Juniper Prize for Fiction by the University of Massachusetts, and I Was a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2015), which was awarded the Friends of American Writers Literature Award. His fiction has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and appeared in many places, including Zoetrope, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, VQR, The Southern Review, Guernica, as well as Best New American Voices. His first book of nonfiction, Jayhawker: On History, Home, and Basketball was released in 2019 and his fourth book a collection of novellas called You Are Loved, was awarded the Nilsen Prize in Literature and published in 2024. Milward has served as the McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, and has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Corporation of Yaddo.
Joseph Thomas studies creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His work has appeared in the Equinox Literary Magazine, and he is an editorial intern for the independent literary press Braddock Avenue Books.
Author photo by Carey Neal Gough