Luke Rolfes: We’re here today with Laura Leigh Morris to talk about her new novel with University Press of Kentucky called The Stone Catchers—an unflinching, multi-person narrative that discusses the aftermath of a mass shooting event at a community college. Thanks so much for spending some time with us, Laura!
I’m curious about where the idea for this book came from. It’s certainly an intense and painful topic that has been simmering in our national consciousness for the past 20+ years. Tell us a little about the process of generating and writing this book.
Laura Leigh Morris: I teach at Furman University in Greenville, SC, and in 2016, my department took part in active shooter training with campus police. It was a weird experience—an officer started by showing us what not to do. Apparently, early advice had been to turn the lights off and hide in your classroom. So, he had us do exactly that. Then, another officer came in the room and shot us with an airsoft gun. Even though we knew it was fiction, it was still terrifying to see how easy it was to snuff out our lives. Which, I guess, was the point.
After we were all dead, the officer turned on the lights and explained that they now offered different advice. First, if possible, escape the classroom. If you can’t, you should barricade the door. Then, if the shooter breaches your barricade, you should throw things at him (him, because he’s almost always a man). I remember the officer saying, “You can’t aim a gun when someone’s throwing a stapler at your head.” His last bit of advice is what stuck the most: you need five volunteers to restrain the shooter. Two for the legs, two for the arms, and the last one for the head. That person should use their thumbs to gouge out the shooter’s eyes.
What hit me was the violence needed to end violence. That night, I woke up with a scene in my head: four people attack a shooter who’s breached their barricade, except they don’t stop once they’ve disarmed him. They get lost in the frenzy of violence, and they kill the killer. I ran to my kitchen and wrote that scene on a piece of notebook paper, and that was the birth of The Stone Catchers.
LR: What sort of research did you have to do to write a novel on this topic? And how difficult was that research?
LLM: When I write about something that isn’t in my immediate experience, and I’m so thankful I’ve never been directly involved in a mass shooting, research is a necessity. But I never want research to come first. I’m more interested in the people I’m writing about and their stories. So, for the first couple drafts of the book, I only did the most rudimentary research: what type of gun is used in most school shootings? Which school shooting has the most victims? That sort of thing.
Once I knew my characters and where they were headed, I did a lot of reading about mass shootings. I read Rhiannon Navin’s Only Child. I read Dave Cullen’s Columbine and Parkland. I read NPR articles. I read first-person accounts of shootings. Then, I incorporated telling details into the world of my characters. For example, I’d never thought about what happens to the trinkets (letters, stuffed animals, etc.) people leave at shooting sites until I read an NPR article about it. Once I did, I had to include it in my story.
The research was gut-wrenching at times, but so was the story I had to tell. Luckily, I came to the task with some coping mechanisms. For the past dozen years, I’ve taught (off and on) in prison. One interesting thing about working in a prison is that you must hold two truths in mind simultaneously: While in prison, you can never forget you’re in prison. But, while teaching incarcerated people, you must forget you’re in prison. The reason for the first is safety, while the reason for the second is humanity. After spending so many years following this dictum, I’ve learned how to let myself feel fully but then also step away from those emotions as necessary. It’s a helpful skill, and I think it really helped me write this book.
LR: In the first chapter, you throw us right into the action. The mass shooting occurs within the first ten to fifteen pages. Can you discuss this choice? Why did you want to start with the event rather than pushing it off into later chapters?
LLM: My goal in writing this book isn’t to discuss what causes mass shootings. Instead, I want to explore what happens to the people who are involved in them after the cameras leave town. I want to examine how people move through trauma. So, beginning with the seed of trauma seemed most natural—it’s the inciting incident. Now, I could have set up the characters’ “before lives” and pushed the shooting to a later chapter, but I wanted the faster pace that comes with putting the problem in the beginning. Now, we are immediately thrown into the aftermath and only learn about their lives before the shooting as they relate to their lives after the shooting. The book is relentless in a lot of ways, and I think beginning with such a major event sets readers up for that expectation from the first chapter. I like the saying, “The book teaches you how to read the book,” and I hope that’s true here.
LR: Another large picture thing: You rotate this narrative through several different perspective—each with a different experience of the shooting. It’s similar to a Rashomon effect. What were the payoffs and pitfalls in writing a rotating protagonist?
LLM: You know, I really wanted to tell the story of how multiple people react to one traumatic event, and the shift in perspectives let me do that. I wanted the story to show how trauma effects people differently, and I don’t think I could have done that without the roving perspectives. And, of course, there’s the question of what actually happened during the shooting and how so many people remember it so differently, which I thought added an interesting layer to the trauma, as reality is always up for discussion.
On the other hand, by telling the story in four perspectives, we don’t get that same deep dive into one person’s reaction that you’d get in a single-perspective narrative. Rather than 200 pages in one person’s head, we get about 50 pages in each of their heads. I did my best to make every detail and event speak deeply to who each of the characters is, but I hope readers feel that they know these people fully.
Still, it’s a risk telling a story this way. It’s always a risk that what we gain in the larger story world won’t be lost in the individual tales.
LR: One of the things I admire about this book is that it doesn’t give readers an opportunity to look away from the trauma and PTSD that these people are experiencing. After the shooting, the four characters behave in drastically different ways. Donetta runs away from her family. Priscilla is pushed into the limelight. Miller lashes out violently. Charlie becomes obsessive and codependent. I’m curious: Did one of these responses seem more natural for you to write than the others?
LLM: While I’m not sure it felt more natural, I found Miller’s violence to be the easiest to write. I know so many men who have been told they’re not allowed to feel their feelings for so long that all emotions turn into anger. And that’s who Miller is, a man who feels deeply but has never learned to embody those feelings. I imagine people telling him as a little boy that he shouldn’t cry, that only babies cry. I imagine someone teaching him that fighting is the best way to get through disagreement. And in that moment when he really needs to authentically feel his feelings—when the trauma is so deep that he needs to live it—he doesn’t have the tools that allow him to do that. Instead, he strikes out.
LR: And a follow up: Was one of these characters’ experience the most difficult to write?
LLM: Priscilla’s story was so difficult to write, and it took me so many drafts to find her trajectory. I knew from the first that I wanted her to find validation in front of the cameras, but I didn’t understand why she would want to live her trauma so publicly. I wrote and rewrote her story, trying out different angles. It took a long time—maybe four or five drafts—before I realized she was looking for her mom’s approval. Once I figured that out, her story was much easier, but I needed to find the key to her choices first.
For me, the why is always at the heart of the story, and once I understand why someone makes certain decisions, it’s easier to let the character lead the way.
LR: After ending the lives of many, Wayne (the shooter) is killed by his classmates and professor when he comes into the classroom. As the novel progresses, Priscilla, Miller, Donetta, and Charlie fixate on which one of them was most responsible for killing the shooter (and whether or not that was wrong); however, the outside world doesn’t seem interested. In short: The four care immensely. The outside world does not. Can you talk about this aspect of the book, and what it shows us?
LLM: Everyone involved in a mass shooting is traumatized, but these four are doubly traumatized because they became killers in an attempt to stop the shooter’s rampage. We often see the idea of the good guy with a gun touted by some media post-shooting—the man who wouldn’t have let it happen, who would have killed the killer—but we never think about the trauma people go through when they’re forced to take someone’s life. In this book, I wanted to really consider what it would mean to kill someone. A few years ago, a young man in Indiana killed a mass shooter, and the media lifted him up as a hero. One article I read said he hadn’t responded to questions, as he was still “processing” the events. All I could think was, of course he is! He took someone’s life. Just because he was saving others’ lives doesn’t make his actions less traumatic. I wanted to explore what that processing might look like, as I don’t think it’s ever easy. And it’s not something we hold up as important to think about when we discuss the good guy with a gun.
LR: The relationships of this novel are fascinating to me. Charlie, a childhood friend of the shooter, seeks out the shooter’s mother after the event. Can you tell us about this relationship and what inspired you to take Charlie in this direction?
LLM: I feel like all my answers come back to trauma, but as I considered whose voices we hear and whose we don’t, I wondered what other traumas exist that we as a society don’t always think about. And I realized that while we often talk about the families of shooters, we often ask whether they should have known, not whether they too are traumatized. In The Stone Catchers, I wanted to explore that idea of who’s implicated in the shooting, but I also wanted to expand the idea of who is injured by the shooter. My guess is most families are devastated when someone they love does something horrible.
Still, I didn’t want to bring a fifth perspective into the book, so instead, I decided to introduce her through Charlie. By making her a part of his story, I can do quite a few things: explore her trauma, get to know the shooter more fully, and examine what Charlie owes this woman who was like a second mother to him as a child.
LR: I’m also curious about the relationship of Donetta and Miller, who, at the beginning of the novel, are having an affair. What draws these two characters together?
LLM: Before the shooting, I think their connection is more about looking for connection that they aren’t finding elsewhere—Miller because he’s divorced and Donetta because she’s not getting necessary interaction from her husband. After the shooting, Donetta, Miller, Charlie, and Priscilla become a sort of club. They’re the only ones who have experienced not just being in the room but killing someone. And when Donetta can’t find her way back to her family, Miller becomes a person she clings to when she feels like no one else understands her. He stands in for all that she’s been missing in family and all that is absent in her life post-shooting.
LR: An arc in the story is Donetta’s definition of herself as a teacher. She waffles back and forth on her role. Sometimes she feels ownership of the students. Other times she does not. How important do you think defining this role is for her?
LLM: You know, it was only in the final drafts that I understood how really important her role of teacher is to her and to the story as a whole. She tries to step away from her family and from her students as she searches for meaning in her life after the shooting. But every time she steps away from the people she’s always cared about, she returns to them again and again. She’s a teacher through and through. She cares about others. And no matter how much she tries to erase that side of her, it won’t let her go. I wonder if it’s the waffling itself that saves her.
LR: I’m interested in how you decided to close this novel. Near the end, you write: “The cameras had disappeared. The buses of volunteers had gone to the next shooting. Brickton had buried its dead. Everyone was moving on.” Of course, the town itself and the survivors have not moved on. Many are still stuck in that moment. How did you know that you reached the right stopping point for this book and these characters?
LLM: As I was nearing the end of the novel, I kept waiting for some big blowup, some event that would feel like a huge climactic moment, but I never found it. In a few drafts, I even tried to create one. And then I realized that trauma doesn’t end. You don’t get past it. You just keep moving through it, and afterward, you can look back and see how much you’ve changed in the midst of it. Once I realized there was no big event, I realized that’s where I needed to leave my characters—still picking up the pieces of their lives as the rest of the world moves on.
LR: What’s next for you? Any new projects on the horizon?
LLM: I’m actually in the middle of two book projects, a collection of stories and a new novel.
I published a story called “The Husband” in Vol 56, Issue 1 of The Laurel Review, and it’s part of the story collection, what I’m thinking of as uncanny domestics. I started writing them after giving birth to my son, and they explore all the weirdness of domesticity. I got married, gained a stepdaughter, and gave birth in my early 40s. Those events made me realize how very odd domestic life is, and I’ve been writing this collection of flash and near-flash fiction for the past three years—since my son’s birth. They let me explore all of the weirdness of motherhood without putting that same weirdness onto my kids.
I also love the novel as a form—you spend years working on it quietly, and when it finally comes together it feels so very amazing. You can hold it in your hand and say, “I created this thing. Wow. How the hell did I do that?” It’s an amazing feeling. So as soon as I finished The Stone Catchers, I gave myself a week off and then started drafting this new one. I’m loving returning to the process of novel writing that was so unfamiliar in the opening drafts of The Stone Catchers and feeling like a I know a little bit more now. Not everything. It’s always a learning process, and I learned so much the first time around that I’m excited for all the discoveries I’m making this time around too. And I hope when I’m sending this one out into the world, I’ll again look at it in wonder and marvel at how I managed to create it.
LR: Thanks so much for your time, Laura! Best of luck with this novel.