William Wright

Casey Clabough (born 1974) is the author of the novel Confederado, the travel memoir The Warrior's Path: Reflections Along an Ancient Route, and five scholarly books on Southern and Appalachian writers. William Wright interviews the author about his personal history and writing life.

Casey Clabough's first novel, Confederado, centers on Alvis Benjamin Stevens, a Central Virginian who returns home four months after the end of the Civil War to find his only potential solace—the house and family he has longed to return to—destroyed, scattered, or, perhaps worst of all, almost entirely transformed.

"Read whatever you write aloud. The ear is the best editor and critic."

It’s resisting gravity that wears, the hill going down—weighted with rain, her upturned hands pools erosion, a ladle dipping away cream. The body is equal measures milk and stone, a small room divided by string. The sky’s acid what tongues her face to blur.

Bottoms’s facility with sound is immediately evident, even as the raucousness of the chase softens when the threesome open into a “clearing of cut hay, / the moonlight rusting a tractor, and off / into the black woods, that thing I never saw, dragging / those frantic voices.” There is love here, both for the journey into life and with family, but also the “the thing” the poet never sees, the object that ultimately lures him into recognition of his own existence.