A Reader's Interview with Stacey Swann

Hello!

On a semi-regular basis, I talk to authors about my two favorite topics: reading and writing. You can find previous examples here and here. This week, with the election right around the corner (gulp), I’m excited to be talking to Stacey Swann.

Like me, Stacey is a native Texan who has spent most of her life in this state. She got her MFA from Texas State in San Marcos and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (like Larry McMurtry). Her debut novel, Olympus, Texas was a 2021 Good Morning America Book Club pick, an Indie Next Pick, and was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Stacey not only writes beautifully about small-town Texas, she cares enough about this state to run for office. This fall, Stacy is the Democratic candidate for the Texas House of Representatives in Lampasas, Texas. (VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!)

I asked Stacey about Greek mythology, Texas, and her new novel-in-progress.

Olympus, Texas is about what happens when March Briscoe returns to his hometown in East Texas two years after an affair with his brother’s wife, Vera. You use characters and plots from Greek mythology as a sort of foundational structure to tell the story of infidelity and sibling rivalry in the Briscoe family. I’d love to ask you about how you decided to use Greek mythology in this way. Did the theme come before the story, or did you first have the idea to tell a story about a family of strong-willed Texans and later discover that the patriarch could be a modern-day Zeus, the matriarch could be Hera, etc?

There’s really nothing that lights up my writing brain more than finding scaffolding to build a story around. I love extended metaphors and allegories and retellings. The first glimmer of the story came from me thinking about the way Texas is obsessed with its own mythology and with larger-than-life characters. It occurred to me that blending Greek and Roman mythology with a Texas story would be a natural fit. The work of creating mortal, modern Texan counterparts of the Greek gods was huge fun. It was only much later that I realized I had also created a dysfunctional family story.