Interview with the author of Georgia Buddha, V.N. Ebert

This week, I have something a little different. It’s a written interview with one of my favorite new fiction authors, V.N. Ebert. Ebert’s debut short story collection was recently published by Passage Press (which you can buy now by clicking on the link).

The back jacket of the book describes the stories thusly:

In this debut collection of short stories, author V.N. Ebert cuts deep into the heart of the American South. Haunted by ghosts of ancestral battles and violent histories, these stories explore the lives of flawed but heroic characters, each fighting an existential war for reclamation. Some win, some lose, and some have already lost, their struggles playing out amidst the decaying, jasmine-scented ruins of a world outside of time.

This book first came across the transom when I started the original Passage Prize in late 2021, a contest I’d hoped would draw out some of the hidden artistic and literary talent that had been left to languish during the era of radical censorship and cultural decay that had taken root in the previous decades.

Ebert’s titular story ended up winning First Prize for the fiction category. Among the many entrants, his writing above all was a vindication of my thesis for the contest, that indeed highly talented people were out there who, for petty political reasons, had been denied the opportunity to have their work taken seriously by the legacy gatekeepers. While green in certain respects—as virtually all unpublished writers are—Ebert’s command of language, his unique style, his understanding of the elements of story, and the inexplicable magic of this combination of native talents, all compelled me to demand of him a book-length manuscript to publish.

Two years later, Georgia Buddha finally came to fruition. This is a remarkable collection that achieves moments of incredible poignancy. It is also very funny, darkly so, and unlike so much contemporary literature tells compelling stories full of action and excitement.

I am as proud of this collection as any editor or publisher has a right to be of someone else’s work. V.N. Ebert is a remarkable talent who I firmly believe will help revitalize the world of American letters. Over the last several weeks, Ebert and I had the following exchange in which we speak about his collection, his thoughts on writing, his thoughts on the current political and cultural environment, and what comes next for him.

Enjoy.

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Lomez: It seems to me that the main character of Georgia Buddha is its setting. In these very different stories of very different kinds of people, the throughline is the place where they all live. Southern writers seem to be especially aware of the physical environment of their stories and its spiritual qualities. I am thinking of Faulkner of course, but some of my other favorite southern writers like Barry Hannah, Harry Crews, and Padget Powell who all treat the south as a living thing which, like their human characters, has motivations and interests all its own. So what’s going on here? What is it about the south–the geography, its history, its people, its spirits–that gives rise to this perception?

V.N. Ebert: Southern whites are unique among white Americans in having lost a total war on their own soil. That’s the starting point, I think, for Southern writers, white Southern writers and the white Southern experience. The second point is that Southern whites think of ourselves as native to the South, as not having immigrated here, but of this being our native soil.

To explain that, the South had a failed national awakening. It is unique in having that experience, the Confederacy which in practice was a collective suicide attempt. And the South spends over a century, maybe now a century-and-a-half, as a defeated nation trying to retrench itself and decide it fits into the larger American culture. What’s left, because of the destruction of the Old World, slave-holding, plantation dominated culture of the antebellum South, which itself required an act of redefinition, of deciding what the South was in its defeat. The South produced a posthumous national epic, or a sub-national epic, in Gone with the Wind, which is not good history but remarkable national mythmaking. And, because the South is part of the national culture, that becomes the biggest movie Hollywood ever made, and so it’s that process of the South defining itself and its own place in the national culture.

So, the South has a spirit, a tragic spirit. The South is the tragic part of America. The South is also, paradoxically and relatedly, the most American part of the country and the part of America most alienated from the rest of the country. How sons and grandsons of Confederate generals saw action in World War II, or guys today who fly large twinned American and Confederate flags from their lawns.

This all gives the South a particular sense of place, and a sense of history and of a people traveling through history that has acted on them in a very powerful and irrevocable way. And there’s other elements, of course, including being a self-consciously aristocratic and racially stratified society that throws a wrench in the egalitarian self-image of the larger nation.

In a literary way, I think the history seeps into the landscape and the people. Writers and the intellectuals of the South have a way of investing history and a tragic sensibility into both of those. I certainly do, it informs and probably helped inculcate my interest in transience, in inevitable defeat and survival after defeat, and in the transcendence that can arise from spiritual crisis.

I’m a writer of crisis. I’m more interested in defeat than victory, and I think that’s common to Southern writers. We’re intellectuals living after the defeat, and so our victories are necessarily limited and temporary, and circumscribed, as are the victories and successes of our characters. That condition is spiritually and aesthetically interesting, and it’s the Southern condition. I suppose it’s also the Human Condition, but it’s very apparent in the Southland.

Along these lines, the book also seems to be interested in acts of stupid and chaotic violence. Reading through many of these stories, I was reminded of a Coen brothers movie. These characters are not always redeeming, but are very often agents of unforgiveable and unthinkable villainy to the point it becomes morbidly funny. Is the connection between violence and humor something you are conscious of while writing your fiction?

I am—I have a dry, dark humor, and an absurdist streak. I thought the book was funny, not laugh-a-minute-funny, but, how you put it, morbidly funny.

I wear my influence from Flannery O’Connor on my sleeve, her interest in violent and grotesque, comic characters who wrestle with God. And, to pull in the previous question, the South has that violent and comic element, both in its history and in its stereotypes, back-slapping old boys with shotguns.

Especially starting with the title story, Georgia Buddha, I was interested in how extreme a character could be and still be sympathetic. My process, my experience of writing is that I’m spending time with the people involved in my head, and maybe aspects of that are wanting to capture the fullness of the person. Say, Medea Gothic, which is I think the most pitch-black story in the collection, was also one where I thought, these people are funny. It’s the Coen Brothers, or the literary antecedents of the Coen Brothers like, among others, Jim Thompson and Elmore Leonard, crime writers who wrote about criminals who were bumbling idiots and demanded to be taken seriously.

There’s also a position that someone else articulated, I can’t remember who at the moment, that comedy at its best was the greater spiritual vehicle than tragedy. That tragedy is recognizing the tragedy inherent in being alive, and crying, while comedy is recognizing that tragedy and laughing. And violence is tied into that, in people who are absolutely in over-their heads, and responding poorly and chaotically.

Maybe this treatment of violence and humor and the human animal as such brings us finally to the spiritual center of this book. The title, Georgia Buddha, points our compass east, but also stories like “Floating World,” “Death Poem,” “Mother Kali” and others have unmistakably eastern spiritual undertones (and even overtones). This collision of the Far East and the South is not something I think I’ve encountered before. It creates such a complex metaphysical texture to the writing. There’s a great moment at the end of “Floating World” where a southern officer is visiting Japan after World War II and has a tender moment with a geisha, telling her, “I got beat by the Yankees, too.” Such a funny and poignant scene.

I don’t really have a question here. Tell me more about this collision–or fusion–of worlds, Far East and American South. Is this unique to you as an author, or is there something more fundamental about this relationship?

Maybe both? Or, there’s a commonality which I haven’t seen explored by other writers, and I was positioned to write on it. Or had flat enough associational gradients to recognize it. A branch of my family has been over-educated for four generations, and has an eccentric streak, or a strain which produces idiosyncratic seeker personalities.

My grandmother would have done well born to professors in the Bay Area and instead she was born very poor in East Texas and migrated within the South, but she was a product of the post-World War II expansion of the university system and completed a PhD and became a college professor which, given her background, would be impressive even today and for the time and place she did it in, the early 1960’s in Texas and the Deep South, was remarkable. But, she was New Agey, she changed religions a few times in her life, and later in life she was deeply committed to Psychoanalysis, so she would talk about Jung in a strong Southern accent to her ten year old grandchildren, and not even the like personality inventory Jung but the, we are all ascendent spiritual beings and eventually we will become omniscient Jung, which maybe gets to some of why I am how I am.

So, there’s an atypical New Agey strain in my Southern family. I half-jokingly say that I’m a Calvinist Buddhist. Maybe that’s the starting point. Because there’s a long tradition of Americans finding something in Japan, or what they imagine Japan is, or East Asia more generally. Alan Watts, the Beats, Joseph Campbell, other people who I imagine were difficult to deal with. Most of whom were also not likely to interpret what they saw through a Southern lens. Bay Area or prototypical Bay Area, California tends to show up in my work as a metaphor for escape, the West Coast where people reach the sea and can’t go any farther, and it’s also the farthest place, spiritually, from the South. So, they were people who tended to see the Zen, but ignored or downplayed that, say, D.T. Suzuki was also a booster for the Empire of Japan before discovering pacifism in defeat. Or that Hinduism also has caste and sati and a devouring Shiva, among other aspects which don’t fit well with the kind-of Americans most likely to become interested in India.

Because there are commonalities. Japan and the South particularly were both aristocratic, militaristic, racialized societies that came into conflict with and were crushed by the greatest power in human history, the productive capacity of the American military-industrial complex, and were partially remade in the image of the victorious power. Hence, “I got beat by Yankees too,” which I liked, too. They are both nations that live their defeat, and are trying to find their place after a civilizational crisis.

So, there’s that, a commonality almost of mood, and of a shared impulse to self-annihilation by violence. And, relatedly, there’s a part of the East Asian, religious and philosophical tradition that I think becomes deracinated and woo-woo-ish when it’s being handled by Yankee pacifists. Because it’s a tradition with a great capacity for violence, and thoughts on violence, and morally complicated elements that deserve to be taken seriously instead of being written off. Much of which could also be said of the American South.

And so, I was interested in driving that commonality as far as I could. In seeing if Sri Ramakrishna could be situated, not just in India or in California, but in the Southland. In sparse ink-wash paintings of the Deep South. So, I think I’ve worked my way to more definitively saying, it’s both. There’s a fusion of the two cultures that is suggested from a certain perspective, and that perspective might be idiosyncratic enough that I was an appropriate writer to see it. To the extent that they gesture to a universal philosophy, Ramakrishna and the Buddha have to be in the South as much as they are in India.

Your above answer talks some about your biography, but you’re writing this under a pseudonym, and outside of some generic details I don’t know anything about you—and I’m your publisher! The audience knows even less.

This is par for the course for this online space we’re in and where I discovered your writing (the titular story won 1st place for fiction in our first ever Passage Prize), but is less common for mainstream publishing. Despite the so-called “death of the author” made famous in the 60’s by Roland Barthes, identity in authorship is perhaps more important now than ever. Whether the author is a woman, gay, black, disabled, [insert favored identity category here] seems to be all that matters in fact.

So how do you think about anonymity in your case? Why is it necessary? Or is it necessary? Or anyway what is the function of anonymity as a writer/artist in the Current Year?

In my few interactions outside of Passage, there’s been some ambiguity as to whether it was a pseudonym. As well as to what V.N. actually stands for. I think I’ve given you my name, at least it’s on some of the forms somewhere, although actually I signed the contract as V.N., now that I think about it.

On some level, I like being V.N. Ebert. I think writers, or writers who aren’t writing autobiography or thinly-veiled autobiography, have an impulse to become other people. It’s freeing, you escape the judgment of others, and free yourself from being yourself. And, I’m a private person - there’s a particular variation of attention-seeking introvert that probably describes authors. It’s a field where even if you do well, no one actually knows what you look like.

There’s also, semi-seriously, it helps with my actual life. It wouldn’t, it’s not as though I’d lose my job, or be driven underground, but it would be at best an awkward conversation I’d have to have and, from then on, like it’d be something I’d have to say about myself. As though I’d have to introduce myself as, here’s me, and oh, I also write and have some things published, don’t worry, you’ve not read them and I don’t want you to. Most of my family doesn’t know I do this, and very few of my friends. It makes it easy to compartmentalize my life.

So, I suppose it’s not absolutely necessary, but it helps. I have some idea that V.N. arose to write a series of works, gothic fiction set in the postwar South, about God and violence and the passing away of things, and then he’ll pass on himself. Embody the theme. Or I get doxxed and just use some version of my actual name in the reprinting, which is less romantic and more practical.

Maybe, to try to answer the larger question, anonymity creates a blank slate. I like the work being read as the work, rather than being refracted through my biography. It lets me be read on my terms, which is in the tradition of Southern writers, and as an American writer, which I suppose is not totally a blank slate, but then again it’s probably what someone would expect from reading the book. In the premodern world, Camille Paglia I think discusses this somewhere, actors were almost unique in taking new names, stage names going back far into history. And pen names also have a long history, I think there’s a long impulse in trying to shape how the work is received, and how a writer or creative can operate, by taking on a pseudonym.

In the Current Year, I suppose it’s the only way to have the work be read as the work, instead of being forced into a box. I wouldn’t like to be stuck as an identity-politics writer. And, like I put it already, it does help compartmentalize. That’s maybe the enduring value, it lets a person be who that person is, and who that person is as a writer or artist, and for people who for various reasons personal and psychological need distance between those things, anonymity lets them be writers or artists. There’s an element of self-transformation in creative work, I think it helps with that.

One of the bets I’ve made with Passage is there’s a bunch of untapped literary and creative talent out there that for a variety of complicated reasons have been gatekept out of traditional literary circles over the last several decades. By positioning Passage outside of that network—politically, culturally, aesthetically, etc.—the idea was that we could draw that talent out and maybe find some escape from the broad cultural malaise we are in. You are one such example of that talent.

Do you have any thoughts about where the culture is going broadly speaking and how your writing and/or this project fits into that assessment? As a writer, what did the existence of Passage mean for you, and/or do you have any sense of whether we might be able to solve the problem identified by the New York Times recently as the “disappearance of literary men?”

Put more plainly: do you accept the premise that literary culture in America is in a deep depression at the moment, and if so what can be done to fix it?

I’ll start with saying, thank you and everybody else at Passage for making me part of that bet. It’s been a great experience, and I had never thought that I’d be able to come this far as an author.

Passage was a unique opportunity for me to be a traditional author, with a book that exists in the physical world and the legitimacy and opportunity that brings with it. It opened a door, and I’ll discuss this a little more later, for me to pursue writing with the possibility that what I’m writing will actually find an audience. It's a symbiotic relationship, because searching for talent encourages that talent. And it has been really incredibly creatively stimulating, I had a certain amount of material ready for this book when you first reached out to me but the period after that has been very fruitful. It’s difficult, not impossible but difficult, to be entirely internally or intrinsically driven. Writing purely for yourself, I do that, I have done that, and plenty of writers do, but it is incredibly rewarding to write for an audience. A book, someone said this once and I liked this description, is a conversation held by an author with unknown readers. Passage, in my way of thinking, provides authors who, for whatever reason, are outside of the traditional literary network, with an interested and receptive readership. In my own, personal, small way, the times people on Twitter reach out or mention this book, those have always made my day.

I tend to think that literary culture in America is maybe very narrow? I guess that’s a kind of depression. American literary culture, from my outside perspective, seems like it’s very good at nurturing a particular kind of talent and putting out a certain kind of book which appeals to a certain kind of reader. Whatever is on the front table at a Barnes & Noble, or a local bookstore, the kind-of book which has a tendency to be described as brave or urgent or important. The machine has an assembly-line quality to it, with this year’s model book. Maybe that's depression, a kind-of creative stasis. It’s simultaneously, and perhaps relatedly, very faddish, and I suppose I have doubts that the best-reviewed American novels of the last few decades have much staying power.

I don’t have any great thoughts on fixing the culture. It would be nice if literary culture were more open to novels which appealed to men, or expected more of the reader, or had a stronger sense of literary history, or the Western Canon generally. I had a creative writing teacher who once gleefully started listing significant novels and saying that none of them would be published now, which struck me then and has stuck with me. I don’t know if that’s a matter of the audience’s taste or the publisher’s, but that seems less than ideal to me.

That said, I do think the internet has also stimulated the classics, meaning broadly the Great Books, at least for a certain variety of the terminally online. I have no idea if that means anything to the wider world, but at least there’s some community that keeps the classics going. A different teacher, who I liked a bit more, said that the thing about the classics is that they never sell a lot in a given year, but they always sell something in a given year, and will forever. Hopefully the forever part remains true, but I’m optimistic that some people will keep reading, even if the stereotype about the kinds of people who are over-literate might shift over the next decade or so. Maybe it’s all about searching for an audience, the literary men, who probably are still out there unless there really was a great die off, and getting them contemporary material that they would actually like to read.

What are V.N. Ebert’s plans? What do you intend to work on now that you’ve completed this book? When I put on my editors’ hat, I see the seeds of a few novels in these stories waiting to sprout. Do you have any ambitions in that direction?

I guess this is a good time to announce that I’ve been working on a novel, provisionally titled Boll Weevil, and am about a month from finishing the manuscript. I would describe the novel as a child of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 with a Zen Buddhist upbringing and wartime combat experience. I’ve been picking it up and putting it down for years, working on a couple variations on the same characters and setting and never quite being happy with it, and shelved it while I tried to get Georgia Buddha finished under deadline.

To back up a bit, I had originally thought that I would write a novel before trying a short story collection, I had written “Georgia Buddha” and “Sky Burial” already but thought I would try something on a grander scale. I wrote part of what would have been a multi-part novel during COVID before abandoning the project. I actually got V.N. Ebert out of that book, incidentally, the pseudonym used by a character that was based on me. In retrospect, it reminds me of what I think Larry Brown said about his first novel, that he needed to get the crap out of him before he could write something good. Or maybe that every writer needs to write a million bad words before he can write a single good one, something to that effect.

And, this involves a little bit of a glimpse behind the curtain on the production of this collection, there was some lag time between the manuscript being substantially completed and the book coming off the press, and during that period I kept working on short stories. I had momentum, and every time I went back to the novel I conked out. I decided that I would try to get to the point where I had enough finished material that I could put out a second collection, and then I would go back to the novel.

I ended up having a very productive period, and I reached that point sooner than I had expected. As an aside, one of the stories from that batch, “Tar Paper,” which is available on my WordPress, would probably serve as the title of that collection if it ever appears. And the novel ended up coming together. That weird way that a switch gets pulled and suddenly it’s working creatively. For a while I had an early version of the first two chapters on my site, I pulled those and ended up changing the structure, I stripped the book down and found that it moved much better.

So, from here, I’m trying to finish up that novel, there’ll be some amount of editing and revision but I think it has good bones. And I do have two that are outlined, one of which would be derived from actually one of the shorter stories in the collection, “Eumenides County,” and probably share that title. It would be a crime story set in the South shortly after World War II, about a corrupt declining family of planters, and a Western agent of an industrial concern seeking to invest in the county, being pulled into a murder of a local girl, and a character like the avenging character in Eumenides County, Hoss, also appearing.

The other might end up, assuming I ever actually write it, I’m bad about changing projects, being closer to a linked short-story collection, but would share a setting and tone with the last story in this collection, “Appomattox Courthouse,” in the Deep South and the dying days of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction.

Generally, I’m working on how to get stuff out there. I’ve been toying around with starting a Substack, but I’ve been running around in my personal life and have been willing to carve out time to write but not to figure out how to market the work. But, I’m much farther along than I ever expected to be, and I’m grateful. I’m really just happy to be able to write something worth reading with the expectation that, sometime, someone will actually see it.