#radarlit

What is the difference between Memphis hot and Jackson hot? Is there a difference? Is D.C. hotter than both?

This is a good question. Memphis is the hottest place I've ever lived. It seems at times during the summer almost Biblically hot, like we’re undergoing a plague. It also gets quite cold in the winter, and I speculate that it has something to do with the city being on the river on top of a big hill but still being itself entirely flat. Also, I don't think there's anything higher than a knee-cap between Little Rock and Memphis so when the wind starts blowing it feels prairie-level intense. 

Jackson gets hot for sure, that kind of stuck-in-world's-largest-jock-strap heat, but Jackson just seems more verdant and prettier than Memphis. The heat seems to work in its favor somehow. Perhaps I'm just idealizing where I grew up. 

However, the hottest place I've ever visited was Charleston, S.C., where I attended a summer wedding. That place was dank, amphibious. It was lovely but you could feel all the buildings and streets rotting from that intense moisture. 

Left to my own devices I will of course talk non-stop about the weather. It's both banal and constantly occupying. Don't get me started on cold though. I complain about the heat but I'm actually afraid of cold the way some people are afraid of heights or snakes.

How did Portable Son get started? There's a strong thread between the stories, was it always a story collection?

The impulse behind the collection—writing individual stories but repeating characters—began in college. I’ve always loved books that do this, how you see characters in waves over time. I sometimes feel like stories that are linked like this are actually truer to how we experience life than more linear or chronologically tidy novels. (I realize I’m generalizing recklessly here.) It seems that we understand our lives through discrete stories, little formed moments of meaning, but that these stories accumulate and contradict and modulate one other as life progresses—life as a roving tumbleweed of constantly revised stories.