Bone of My Bone:
A Review of Jim Roberts’ Of Fathers & Gods
by Justin Lee
(Of Fathers & Gods out now from Belle Point Press!)
Jim Roberts’ collection, Of Fathers & Gods, covers a lot of ground. There's stories about human trafficking and faith and mass shootings and grief and love. There is a center to all of these stories. A common ground that these stories share despite how different they are. Fathers. Good ones, bad ones, ones we never get to know. Through these stories we get to meet a wide variety of characters. A professor, a victim of human trafficking, a young father. All of them are struggling with fathers in one sense or the other.
This may be a debut, but there are so many echoes of Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver. That's not me being hyperbolic. Jim Roberts is just that kind of writer and this collection will break your heart.
***
Justin Lee: Would you mind giving an introduction to the people who may be unfamiliar with you and your work?
Jim Roberts: Sure. I’m a debut author, with my short story collection Of Fathers & Gods recently released May 14, 2024. I’m also a “late in life” author, with my first publication of anything (a short story in Rappahannock Review) appearing in December 2020. I’ve had a deep and passionate interest in writing fiction since my late teens and began college as an English Lit major. But let’s say life in general derailed my initial plans and I went into a business career and am just now circling back to my first love.
I was born in West Texas but grew up in rural East Texas, but spent most of my adult life in Cincinnati, Ohio. A lot of my fiction draws on southern and blue-collar roots, and reviewers have referred to my stories as “gritty, hardscrabble, sharp-edged, and searing” Themes that fascinate me are dysfunctional family dynamics and the enduring and inextinguishable human drive to love and be loved. In essence, how family (or lack thereof) defines us, from our worst fears to our greatest hopes.
JL: Who are your biggest influences?
JR: There are so many! A rather eclectic group, I’d say. As a teenager, it was J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye), Ray Bradbury (Illustrated Man) and Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) who implanted the embryo of a writing bug in me. In college, I’d add Melville, Ellison (Invisible Man), and Flannery O’Connor. In early-to-mid adulthood I’d say Toni Morrison, Vonnegut, John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany), and Margaret Atwood (A Handmaid’s Tale).
The writing bug lay dormant for a few decades, with all the above serving as loamy soil for its gestation, like a literary cicada. By the time it emerged above ground, I’d discovered Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, Donald Ray Pollock (Knockemstiff), Denis Johnson, and Daniel Woodrell (Winter’s Bone).
Two huge influences feeding the matured bug are Jennifer Egan (A Visit From the Goon Squad) and Cormac McCarthy, although I’m not sure it’s proper to call McCarthy an influence. That seems like too small a term for someone so monumental. A more appropriate label would be awe-striker. I can’t say I aspire to write like him. That would be a clinical level of self-delusion. I aspire only to write something that he might judge as passable. It’s his universe. The rest of us just live in it.
JL: I’ve read in other interviews that you do not have an MFA. I know it’s not that uncommon, but I always feel like writers without that degree take a more workman-like approach to their work. What does your process look like?
JR: I don’t know how my process compares to writers with formal training—in fact, I’m betting there’s little commonality among writers, regardless of their writing journey—but I follow a pattern of “binge and break.” Especially when it comes to short stories. By that, I mean when I’m running hot on an idea, I can’t stay away from my computer for long. And during those “hot” periods, I work best early in the morning. I roll out of bed and grab a drink and don’t let anything get between me and my keyboard and write until I burn out, usually about three hours. Eat lunch, exercise, run errands in town, distract myself until about six p.m. Then read what I wrote that morning (I always edit on paper) and mark it up. Sometimes type revisions before bed, but otherwise make revisions the next morning. Rinse and repeat. I also work on only one story at a time (if the passion of the moment is a short story), although I might jot down a sidenote if something worthy pops into my head related to a different story I have on my to-be-written list. All of that is the binge part.
The “break” part is just that: a break. Although I might have a long “to do” list of story ideas, I don’t typically dive directly into another one right away. I might go a few days to a few weeks before another binge wave hits. But when it hits, it’s usually “all in” until finished.
JL: Let’s talk about themed short story collections for a bit. I feel it’s a bit of a dying art. Which sucks because some of my absolute favorite collections like The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien or Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson really explore a specific thing from so many different viewpoints. Which sounds like a mess, or like an author is just retelling the same story over and over, but I kind of see it as a way of using the theme as a vantage point. To see the angles and to find a way to navigate them. Was it always part of the plan to work around a theme or was it a happy accident?
JR: Okay, we’re instant friends if you love The Things They Carried. Fiction doesn’t get any better than that. I haven’t read Collapse of Horses, but as of now I’m putting it on my TBR list. I once took an online course conducted by a successful short story writer who said, “I don’t know the themes of my stories until someone tells me what they are.”
The answer to your question about my collection Of Fathers & Gods is that the theme—at least in the beginning—was neither entirely intentional nor accidental. I’d been working on a novel for a long time and when I finished it, I said, now what? Get it published, of course. But, when I turned to the question of publication, there were obvious barriers.
Everything I read said “you must have an agent” to get a novel published and “it’s almost impossible to get an agent.” How could I query agents when I had no writing credentials of any kind? No MFA, nothing ever published anywhere or even submitted anywhere? Writing short stories started out as a pathway to building some writing credentials I could leverage in query letters to agents for the novel.
I wrote some stories from my gut, and after about the third story, my wife said, “you do realize all these stories are about fathers, right?” (Insert video of light bulb snapping on here). I pondered what she said for quite a while, and took a long trip back through my life, revisited my own experiences with my father, and with my sons (who are now fathers) and also drew from a lifetime of hearing other people’s stories of growing up with both great and terrible fathers. The relationships between fathers and their children: the good, the bad, and the awful. The subject fascinated me, and I kept it close at heart as I continued to write new stories that eventually came together in the collection.
JL: It’s probably in poor taste to do this, but I have to say it. “Tender, Like My Heart” is my absolute favorite story from your collection. I loved them all, and the thematic thread throughout the collection (fathers and their children) hits close to home for me. But there is something about that story that just sings. Can you tell us a bit about how it came to be?
JR: Thank you for the kind words! “Tender, Like My Heart” started as an experiment to see if I could write in the third-person point of view. Before this story, I had written only in first person. And while I consider “Tender” to be literary fiction, it has a sprinkle of crime genre throughout, probably sparked by my love of both the Breaking Bad and Justified television series.
Emotionally, it was a difficult story to write because the father in the story shares many similarities with my own father (the only father in the entire collection to do so). In the story, Digger Shay—the father of the protagonist Tedi—dies from lung cancer, just like my dad. Tedi’s grief and anguish are drawn from my own personal experience, so yeah, that was hard to write. The degree to which that story “sings” is likely due to my digging deep and writing with anger. Anger at how the universe could treat such a good man so shabbily. I doubt I’ll ever read certain scenes from that story at a public reading, because I can’t get through them without tears.
It's one of my favorites as well, and ironically, my most often rejected story by literary journals. Also, I stubbornly kept the title after a roomful of people in a writing conference I once attended agreed that it had “one of the worst titles ever.” The title comes from a catchphrase my dad said from time to time. For example, after serving him chicken-fried steak, my mother would ask, “Roy Dee, how’s the steak?” And without missing a beat, he’d deadpan, “tender, like my heart.”
I continue to run into readers like you who love the story, so I’m glad I toughed it out and ignored certain feedback and all the rejections.
JL: So now that you’ve had your debut, what can we expect to see from you next?
JR: That novel I mentioned earlier (working title: The Power of Circles) is now complete and ready for query and submissions. Here’s a brief synopsis:
Billy Wayne Bastrop has killed three men, but he’s not a murderer. At age four, Billy loses his right arm, his mother, and his baby sister. Abandoned by his father, he is rescued by his Aunt Sunshine who chain-smokes Camels and spews profanity while praising Jesus. She tries her best to take Billy to The Lord, but Billy has other plans, abandoning salvation in search of his own personal truth. Billy’s quest to remake his life takes him from the Piney Woods of East Texas to the Little Appalachia slum of Cincinnati, and finally to the dark backstreets of Matamoros, Mexico. By journey’s end, Billy discovers the difficulty of escaping one’s own blood, and how deeply family defines us, from our worst fears to our greatest hopes.
Jim Roberts is the author of the short story collection Of Fathers & Gods (Belle Point Press, 2024). His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice named to the finalist list for the Screencraft Cinematic Short Story Award. His work can be found in Prime Number Magazine, Reckon Review, Rappahannock Review, Snake Nation Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and ArLiJo-The Arlington Literary Journal.
Roberts was born in Amarillo, Texas but grew up in rural East Texas. After college, he lived and worked briefly in Houston before moving to Cincinnati, Ohio to pursue a business career. Now a full-time writer, he splits his time between Ohio and Texas, depending on whim, changes in the weather, or the beckoning of distant haints.
Find him on Facebook and Instagram and learn more about his writing, events and appearances, and works-in-progress at www.jimrobertsfiction.com.
A Review of Jim Roberts’ Of Fathers & Gods
by Justin Lee
(Of Fathers & Gods out now from Belle Point Press!)
Jim Roberts’ collection, Of Fathers & Gods, covers a lot of ground. There's stories about human trafficking and faith and mass shootings and grief and love. There is a center to all of these stories. A common ground that these stories share despite how different they are. Fathers. Good ones, bad ones, ones we never get to know. Through these stories we get to meet a wide variety of characters. A professor, a victim of human trafficking, a young father. All of them are struggling with fathers in one sense or the other.
This may be a debut, but there are so many echoes of Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver. That's not me being hyperbolic. Jim Roberts is just that kind of writer and this collection will break your heart.
***
Justin Lee: Would you mind giving an introduction to the people who may be unfamiliar with you and your work?
Jim Roberts: Sure. I’m a debut author, with my short story collection Of Fathers & Gods recently released May 14, 2024. I’m also a “late in life” author, with my first publication of anything (a short story in Rappahannock Review) appearing in December 2020. I’ve had a deep and passionate interest in writing fiction since my late teens and began college as an English Lit major. But let’s say life in general derailed my initial plans and I went into a business career and am just now circling back to my first love.
I was born in West Texas but grew up in rural East Texas, but spent most of my adult life in Cincinnati, Ohio. A lot of my fiction draws on southern and blue-collar roots, and reviewers have referred to my stories as “gritty, hardscrabble, sharp-edged, and searing” Themes that fascinate me are dysfunctional family dynamics and the enduring and inextinguishable human drive to love and be loved. In essence, how family (or lack thereof) defines us, from our worst fears to our greatest hopes.
JL: Who are your biggest influences?
JR: There are so many! A rather eclectic group, I’d say. As a teenager, it was J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye), Ray Bradbury (Illustrated Man) and Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) who implanted the embryo of a writing bug in me. In college, I’d add Melville, Ellison (Invisible Man), and Flannery O’Connor. In early-to-mid adulthood I’d say Toni Morrison, Vonnegut, John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany), and Margaret Atwood (A Handmaid’s Tale).
The writing bug lay dormant for a few decades, with all the above serving as loamy soil for its gestation, like a literary cicada. By the time it emerged above ground, I’d discovered Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, Donald Ray Pollock (Knockemstiff), Denis Johnson, and Daniel Woodrell (Winter’s Bone).
Two huge influences feeding the matured bug are Jennifer Egan (A Visit From the Goon Squad) and Cormac McCarthy, although I’m not sure it’s proper to call McCarthy an influence. That seems like too small a term for someone so monumental. A more appropriate label would be awe-striker. I can’t say I aspire to write like him. That would be a clinical level of self-delusion. I aspire only to write something that he might judge as passable. It’s his universe. The rest of us just live in it.
JL: I’ve read in other interviews that you do not have an MFA. I know it’s not that uncommon, but I always feel like writers without that degree take a more workman-like approach to their work. What does your process look like?
JR: I don’t know how my process compares to writers with formal training—in fact, I’m betting there’s little commonality among writers, regardless of their writing journey—but I follow a pattern of “binge and break.” Especially when it comes to short stories. By that, I mean when I’m running hot on an idea, I can’t stay away from my computer for long. And during those “hot” periods, I work best early in the morning. I roll out of bed and grab a drink and don’t let anything get between me and my keyboard and write until I burn out, usually about three hours. Eat lunch, exercise, run errands in town, distract myself until about six p.m. Then read what I wrote that morning (I always edit on paper) and mark it up. Sometimes type revisions before bed, but otherwise make revisions the next morning. Rinse and repeat. I also work on only one story at a time (if the passion of the moment is a short story), although I might jot down a sidenote if something worthy pops into my head related to a different story I have on my to-be-written list. All of that is the binge part.
The “break” part is just that: a break. Although I might have a long “to do” list of story ideas, I don’t typically dive directly into another one right away. I might go a few days to a few weeks before another binge wave hits. But when it hits, it’s usually “all in” until finished.
JL: Let’s talk about themed short story collections for a bit. I feel it’s a bit of a dying art. Which sucks because some of my absolute favorite collections like The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien or Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson really explore a specific thing from so many different viewpoints. Which sounds like a mess, or like an author is just retelling the same story over and over, but I kind of see it as a way of using the theme as a vantage point. To see the angles and to find a way to navigate them. Was it always part of the plan to work around a theme or was it a happy accident?
JR: Okay, we’re instant friends if you love The Things They Carried. Fiction doesn’t get any better than that. I haven’t read Collapse of Horses, but as of now I’m putting it on my TBR list. I once took an online course conducted by a successful short story writer who said, “I don’t know the themes of my stories until someone tells me what they are.”
The answer to your question about my collection Of Fathers & Gods is that the theme—at least in the beginning—was neither entirely intentional nor accidental. I’d been working on a novel for a long time and when I finished it, I said, now what? Get it published, of course. But, when I turned to the question of publication, there were obvious barriers.
Everything I read said “you must have an agent” to get a novel published and “it’s almost impossible to get an agent.” How could I query agents when I had no writing credentials of any kind? No MFA, nothing ever published anywhere or even submitted anywhere? Writing short stories started out as a pathway to building some writing credentials I could leverage in query letters to agents for the novel.
I wrote some stories from my gut, and after about the third story, my wife said, “you do realize all these stories are about fathers, right?” (Insert video of light bulb snapping on here). I pondered what she said for quite a while, and took a long trip back through my life, revisited my own experiences with my father, and with my sons (who are now fathers) and also drew from a lifetime of hearing other people’s stories of growing up with both great and terrible fathers. The relationships between fathers and their children: the good, the bad, and the awful. The subject fascinated me, and I kept it close at heart as I continued to write new stories that eventually came together in the collection.
JL: It’s probably in poor taste to do this, but I have to say it. “Tender, Like My Heart” is my absolute favorite story from your collection. I loved them all, and the thematic thread throughout the collection (fathers and their children) hits close to home for me. But there is something about that story that just sings. Can you tell us a bit about how it came to be?
JR: Thank you for the kind words! “Tender, Like My Heart” started as an experiment to see if I could write in the third-person point of view. Before this story, I had written only in first person. And while I consider “Tender” to be literary fiction, it has a sprinkle of crime genre throughout, probably sparked by my love of both the Breaking Bad and Justified television series.
Emotionally, it was a difficult story to write because the father in the story shares many similarities with my own father (the only father in the entire collection to do so). In the story, Digger Shay—the father of the protagonist Tedi—dies from lung cancer, just like my dad. Tedi’s grief and anguish are drawn from my own personal experience, so yeah, that was hard to write. The degree to which that story “sings” is likely due to my digging deep and writing with anger. Anger at how the universe could treat such a good man so shabbily. I doubt I’ll ever read certain scenes from that story at a public reading, because I can’t get through them without tears.
It's one of my favorites as well, and ironically, my most often rejected story by literary journals. Also, I stubbornly kept the title after a roomful of people in a writing conference I once attended agreed that it had “one of the worst titles ever.” The title comes from a catchphrase my dad said from time to time. For example, after serving him chicken-fried steak, my mother would ask, “Roy Dee, how’s the steak?” And without missing a beat, he’d deadpan, “tender, like my heart.”
I continue to run into readers like you who love the story, so I’m glad I toughed it out and ignored certain feedback and all the rejections.
JL: So now that you’ve had your debut, what can we expect to see from you next?
JR: That novel I mentioned earlier (working title: The Power of Circles) is now complete and ready for query and submissions. Here’s a brief synopsis:
Billy Wayne Bastrop has killed three men, but he’s not a murderer. At age four, Billy loses his right arm, his mother, and his baby sister. Abandoned by his father, he is rescued by his Aunt Sunshine who chain-smokes Camels and spews profanity while praising Jesus. She tries her best to take Billy to The Lord, but Billy has other plans, abandoning salvation in search of his own personal truth. Billy’s quest to remake his life takes him from the Piney Woods of East Texas to the Little Appalachia slum of Cincinnati, and finally to the dark backstreets of Matamoros, Mexico. By journey’s end, Billy discovers the difficulty of escaping one’s own blood, and how deeply family defines us, from our worst fears to our greatest hopes.
Jim Roberts is the author of the short story collection Of Fathers & Gods (Belle Point Press, 2024). His fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice named to the finalist list for the Screencraft Cinematic Short Story Award. His work can be found in Prime Number Magazine, Reckon Review, Rappahannock Review, Snake Nation Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and ArLiJo-The Arlington Literary Journal.
Roberts was born in Amarillo, Texas but grew up in rural East Texas. After college, he lived and worked briefly in Houston before moving to Cincinnati, Ohio to pursue a business career. Now a full-time writer, he splits his time between Ohio and Texas, depending on whim, changes in the weather, or the beckoning of distant haints.
Find him on Facebook and Instagram and learn more about his writing, events and appearances, and works-in-progress at www.jimrobertsfiction.com.