Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.
Today: M. C. Benner Dixon lives, writes, and grows things in Pittsburgh, PA. She is quick to make a pun and slow to cut her grass. Her debut novel, The Height of Land, is the 2022 Orison Fiction Prize winner and will be released by Orison Books. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Reckoning, Literary Hub, Funicular, Fusion Fragment, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere. Millions of Suns, a collection of craft essays co-authored with Sharon Fagan McDermott, is out now from the University of Michigan Press. Find her at bennerdixon.com.
Thanks so much, M. C., for joining me!
J. Scott Coatsworth: How would you describe your writing style/genre?
M. C. Benner Dixon: I’m still in the process of discovering that. It’s been fun to observe myself as I try new things—what stays the same and what changes. My writing consistently has a melancholy, lyrical, reflective voice, no matter what genre I’m attempting. My characters are sometimes thrown into the middle of big, flashy plot events (bombs, betrayals, storms, escapes), but the writing remains staunchly internal. I am definitely a speculative fiction writer, but it’s hard to get more specific than that. I’ve tried everything from space opera to cyberpunk. The Height of Land is post-post-apocalyptic with little hints of the supernatural. Each genre offers me a different set of tools to work with, and I love the challenge.
JSC: Do you use a pseudonym? If so, why? If not, why not?
MCBD: I have a weird relationship to my name, like it’s this malleable thing, and I am always editing it to suit my needs. You can probably blame my parents for that—they gave me a perfectly fine first name and then immediately began calling me by my middle name. When I got married, I added my husband’s name to mine primarily because I wanted an x in my name. I’ve never used a true-blue pseudonym, but I have published under various versions of my actual name over the years. The current manifestation is M. C. Benner Dixon. I like that it’s gender neutral and represents both my family of origin and my chosen family. But who knows? Maybe I’ll get tired of that one and try out a new one at some point.
JSC: Are there underrepresented groups or ideas featured in The Height of Land? If so, discuss them.
MCBD: I think a lot about who gets included or left out when I imagine worlds. Because my worldview was shaped by white American culture, certain assumptions (whiteness, straightness, thinness, physical ability, youth, etc.) sometimes crop up in my writing unwittingly. It’s bizarre that, even though my experience is more varied than that, even though I myself have been marginalized by this culture, even though I want a world that empowers people in all their diversity, I still fall into the assumption traps. At the same time, I recognize some stories aren’t mine to tell.
I know that I haven’t mastered graceful representation yet, but I learn by trying. The Height of Land has nonbinary characters, fat characters, disabled characters, neurodivergent characters, racially and ethnically diverse characters, and so on. My main character, Red, is a man in a sexual relationship with another man. The holy texts featured in the book are not all Christian. The poetry is not all by white men. However, I should note that book is set within a culture that is several generations and one major catastrophe away from ours, so the context for all these things is radically different. Their society’s stumbling blocks are not ours. The most important work of representation, I think, engages with the here and now. But leaving whole groups of people out of an imagined future is a kind of erasure that I don’t want to perpetuate either.
JSC: How did you choose the topic for this book?
MCBD: The idea for this book came while reading Reza Aslan’s God: A Human History. I grew up in a very religious community, and I am fascinated by the impulse of human beings to create stories of the divine—whether those stories are meant to control, comfort, or explain. As I read Aslan’s book, I began wondering what the religious impulse would look like if people had the scientific and mechanical knowledge of modern humans but none of the institutional religious frameworks. My original plan was to write a novella that set up a kind of post-post-apocalyptic Garden of Eden with two people in isolation working out a new sense of God—but by the time I had finished the story, it was a full novel, and Red only got to his Garden of Eden in the last chapter. In editing, that chapter got cut. But so it goes. Maybe that deleted chapter can be bonus material or something.
JSC: What secondary character would you like to explore more? Tell me about them.
MCBD: I’m really interested in Carlynn Boscage, the mother of my main character Red. She’s basically straight out of a Willa Cather novel—one of those hard-faced prairie women who loves her children by teaching them to tame their own frivolous whims and get to work. But we learn in the novel that she herself had an impractical passion once. She was obsessed with the nuances and poetry of language, and she left her family’s farm in Chert River to pursue her studies. Becoming a mother—and then a young widow—eventually forced her to give up her dreams for good, and she took the children back to Chert River. The novel doesn’t go into that transformation in detail because this book isn’t about her, but I’m curious about it. Carlynn has clearly made a decision to become the person she’s supposed to be not the person she was born to be. I want to know more about those compromises. Did her husband realize all that she was giving up to build a family with him? Her story is compelling to me.
JSC: What was the weirdest thing you had to Google for your story?
MCBD: Because The Height of Land is set in a post-post-apocalyptic society, the characters do a lot of things by hand. I found myself watching long YouTube videos on how to make cedar shingles using hand tools or how to make glue out of pine pitch. It was actually a lot of fun. My book launch party is going to be post-apocalyptic-themed, with folks doing demonstrations of their low-tech skills for partygoers.
JSC: What qualities do you and your characters share? How much are you like them, or how different are they from you?
MCBD: I tend to have a lot in common with my characters—even the bad ones. In the case of Red, the main character of The Height of Land, there is a lot of my story in his, especially when it comes to finding prophetic, holy voices in poetry. But the character also has a lot in common with my brother Jason (but then, so do I). Jason read an early draft of the book and okayed my intention to translate parts of his personality into this dreamy, sensitive young farmer/carpenter. I’m even hosting a launch party for the book at his family’s farm in Virginia.
But there are always differences, of course. Once I start writing, my characters take on a life of their own, so to speak. They might be extroverts where I am an introvert. They might be motivated by competition where I find it stifling. Each character takes on what I think of as a little tune all their own, and my goal is to keep writing in harmony with their song.
JSC: If you could create a new holiday, what would it be?
MCBD: My husband and I actually did that! We celebrate Epic Chef Day exactly six months after Thanksgiving so that the big feast days aren’t too close together. We both love cooking adventures, so the focus of ECD is entirely on food. We create a menu that is way fancier than anything we would normally make, but we do it all from scratch. I did a mushroom tart one year. Pot-stickers where we make our own wrappers. Last year we did a pan-seared red snapper and some red chilis. We invite friends over to share it with us—in the age of Covid, that now happens outside, but it’s always a good time. And very delicious!
JSC: How does the world end?
MCBD: The world is always ending.
JSC: What are you working on now, and what’s coming out next? Tell us about it!
MCBD: The Height of Land is out April 1 from Orison Books! But I always have something in the works. Right now, I have several novel-length projects underway that I hope to see out into the world before too long. I’m also coordinating the Parsec Short Story Contest, open to non-professional writers—including a youth category! This year’s theme is Roots, and submissions are due March 31. https://parsec-sff.org/short-story-contest/
And now for M. C.’s new book: The Height of Land:
The Height of Land follows the quest of a young man torn between spiritual longing and commitment to his community’s survival in a harsh landscape. Red sacrifices everything to study the long-lost words of the gods. He does not know that he is reading the poetry of Lucille Clifton, Ḥáfiẓ, and Walt Whitman, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, and the Tao Te Ching. In a world reborn from catastrophe, these ancient texts take on new meanings.
To seek such things is to court peril. Belief in the gods is forbidden. But Red is desperate to know the gods. And he is not searching alone. Forsaking all that is familiar, Red pledges himself to a clandestine church in the city and falls in love with the charismatic priest. But Red may lose both love and faith in defying the church for the sake of a friend.
Have the gods truly abandoned the earth, or just Red? What kind of answer can he receive when he has lost the words to ask?
Publisher | Amazon
Excerpt
And so the afternoon passed slowly. At last, the bucket was empty of shakes. Given the sinking angle of the sun, Red decided to pack his tools down with him and come back to the roof tomorrow. No, not tomorrow. His spirit brightened again. They would leave for Exchange well before sunrise. It was a long journey, and Dusk liked to get there before the market stalls had been picked over.
Setting his buckets on the ground, Red lowered the ladder with its thick rope and tipped it down to lean against the barn. He carried the roofing tools to the shed and ambled back out into the yard, crouching beside the bean patch in the kitchen garden, his hands draped between his thighs. His eyes moved through the plants with careful attention. The plants looked healthy enough, but there were faint white spots on the leaves closest to him.
Putting the garden here had been Dusk’s idea. He had turned over the soil for this new bed in a single afternoon, bashing clumps of sod on the edge of his shovel and hurriedly picking out the ubiquitous chunks of cement, brick, and plastic from the upturned soil, piling them beside the bed. Having a kitchen garden would save them the walk to the lower fields, Dusk had explained, and decrease their dependence on the dry stores, which they could save for the spring markets. But Dusk hadn’t bothered to gauge the sun and shade before he dug the new bed, and this corner of it sat in shade almost until midday, even in the summer.
“Have you said your prayers, little beans?” Red asked. He liked to play his old game of the gods when no one else was around. Red reached out and lined the edge of one bean leaf with his finger. “Do you ask the god of beans to heal you when you get moldy? What do you offer in return?” Red listened, but the beans said nothing. A part of him always hoped they would.