7.22.2018   Austin’s May Cobb on her debut novel Big Woods, sisterly telepathy, and the whispering pines of East Texas

May Cobb is a novelist and freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Big Woods won the 2015 Writer’s League of Texas manuscript contest and the 2016 NaNoWriMo Pitchapalooza. Her essays and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Edible Austin,Austin Monthly.

Big Woods has been described as a collision between Stephen King’s Stand by Me and Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, with a 1980s Stranger Things vibe. What could be more of-the-moment? The author talked with us via email for today’s Lone Star Listens. Visit her online at www.maycobb.com.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: May, you write on your website that your proudest achievement remains winning first place in the UIL personal writing competition in the fourth grade. Did you always know you wanted to write?

MAY COBB: I think so. I’ve always had that tendency to scribble in journals and diaries, and I’ve always loved books. But I certainly never thought of myself as a writer or thought that I could choose writing as a career path until much, much later in life.

You reside in Austin with your family now. Would you give us a little background, please? Where did you grow up, go to school, first jobs?

I’m originally from Longview, Texas, which is in the piney woods of North East Texas where Big Woods is set. I left to go to the University of Texas in Austin in 1992 and have lived in Austin, on and off, for the past twenty-six years, except for a three-year stint in California for grad school.

I’ve worked as a delivery person, a courier, a personal assistant, an office administrator, and a ghostwriter, among other miscellaneous gigs.

Tell us about Big Woods. What was the inspiration and the process? Why a mystery?

Big Woods is an actual place on the outskirts of Longview and it was always creepy and eerie — sort of a mythic place that was rumored to house devil worshippers. In high school, we used to go out there on weekend nights to see how scared we could make ourselves. This provided the backdrop for the novel, but the inspiration came from a true story my mom once told me.

While I was growing up, my mom worked as a nurse, and for about two years she worked the graveyard shift in the psychiatric unit of our small town’s hospital. One night, a frantic young woman in torn clothing appeared and begged to be taken into hiding. “They’ll find me, and they’ll kill me,” she kept saying over and over. And I don’t want to tell the rest of the story because it might spoil the plot.

A little about the process: in the fall of 2014, my husband, my young son, and I moved back to Longview for almost two years to be near family. Right before the move, I had just finished up a year-long novel/memoir-writing class with acclaimed novelist Amanda Eyre Ward in Austin. I took the class in the hopes of finishing up my decades-long nonfiction project, a book about the late jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk (which I’m currently finishing now).

Between moving back and getting settled into a new life with our toddler, I found it hard to focus on the research-heavy nonfiction project and decided to take a quick break from working on it. The Writers’ League of Texas had a manuscript contest coming up in early 2015, and a friend urged me to write a few chapters on a new novel and enter it. So, I did, and went back to working on the music book. But a few months later, much to my surprise, I found out I’d won the contest and decided, with the urging of my mom and husband, to hammer out a draft of the novel. And living in Longview almost beckoned me to write it. It was very much like writing on location, and my father pulled me aside one day and told me he felt like I should try my hand at a mystery. So Big Woods was born.

I recognize a subgenre of mystery and suspense I call East Texas Gothic. There’s usually a witch involved. What led you to choose East Texas as the setting for your mystery? What about the story made it necessary to set it in the 1980s?

Ooooh, I love that, and I’ve actually never heard the term but it makes complete sense to me. East Texas, to me, is so very achingly beautiful, mysterious, and also unnervingly eerie. It’s truly as if the pines are whispering long-held secrets. And since I grew up in the ’80s (and also, that’s when the Satanic Panic was sweeping across the nation), it made sense for me to write it in that era.

Why did you want to write about the bond between sisters? Do you have siblings?

Yes! I’m the middle child of three sisters—and we’re insanely close. Almost telepathically so, as sisters can be. I cannot imagine my life without them. And my younger sister, Susie, very much provided the inspiration for the high-spirited character of Lucy in the novel. I actually used a picture of her for the missing children’s poster I used in the book trailer. Very creepy, I know. And I couldn’t have written Big Woods without my older sister, Beth, who read the novel as I was writing it and cheered me on every step of the way, along with my best friend, Amy (who is like a fourth sister to us). Beth and one of her friends actually drove me out to Big Woods very early on in the writing and this trip proved to be a crucial turning point for me in the process.

Big Woods won the Writers’ League of Texas manuscript contest in 2015 and NaNoWriMo Pitchapalooza in 2016. Now you’ve spent this week on book tour and you head panels at WLT’s Agents and Editors conference. What has that transformation been like? What are the challenges you didn’t anticipate? What does it feel like to have your first novel likened to Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, and Stranger Things?

It’s been incredibly gratifying. I’ve been writing for over twenty years, and to have these strokes of good luck happen feels amazing. And it also speaks to the wonderfully supportive literary community of Austin. For the launch of Big Woods, I was so lucky to be joined in conversation by New York Times bestselling writer Suzy Spencer, who is both a mentor and friend. I’ve long been a huge fan of Spencer’s riveting true crime work as well as her genre-bending memoir, Secret Sex Lives, so to be joined by her at BookPeople was literally a dream come true.

And I’ve been a longtime member of the Writer’s League of Texas and could speak for days about how vital and nurturing the organization has been to my writing.

Some challenges I didn’t anticipate: Well, let’s just say I was a bit of a basket case while my novel was out on submission. What a nail-biting period in any writer’s life. But my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was finding such a warm home for Big Woods in my fabulous publisher, Midnight Ink, and I can’t say enough about how great it’s been working with my editor, Terri Bischoff.

And my head is still spinning over those comps to King and Flynn, as well as Stranger Things.

[Blurber] Amanda Eyre Ward has long been one of my absolute favorite novelists (as well as my teacher and friend), and to have had her respond so positively to my novel was such an incredible feeling. I was so nervous when I first sent her the manuscript! I mean, I’ve studied and worshiped her work for years now, so let’s just say the stakes were very high for me personally as to how she would respond.

And A.J. Finn is hands-down my favorite thriller writer. I was gobsmacked by The Woman in the Window. Such a propulsive thriller, and his prose is so gorgeous it makes me want to bury my typewriter in the backyard. (I don’t have a typewriter or a backyard, but it sounds more dramatic, doesn’t it?) So, to have Finn give Big Woods such glowing praise stunned me, and still does.

Which mystery and suspense writers do you enjoy, and why?

The aforementioned Finn, obviously, and I cannot wait until his next book. I also love Tana French for her atmospheric writing and believable female leads; Ruth Ware for the same reasons; and Paula Hawkins. I just read a fantastic thriller by Araminta Hall called Our Kind of Cruelty and loved it because it is so different and fresh (the narrator is a male who is telling the story from his jail cell). I’m also a huge fan of Riley Sager, whose Final Girls absolutely blew me away, just incredible writing/voice, and I can’t wait to read his latest, The Last Time I Lied, which was just released and has already hit the New York Times bestseller list.

You are also a freelance writer. Your pieces for The Rumpus are about musicians, and I read that your next project is a book about the late American jazz instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk. You discovered Kirk in a jazz history class and wrote that it was “like listening to the inside of someone’s heart.” Can you tell us about that project? What intrigues you about musicians and music? Do you play, sing, or compose?

Rahsaan Roland Kirk is one of the main reasons I’m a writer. His story, which called out to me on a very personal, spiritual level, set me on the artist’s path. I consider him to be one of the most innovative musicians who ever lived, and I’m amazed that more people don’t know about him, but he’s having such a strong resurgence and it’s wonderful to witness. I’m finishing up the book now and have an interested publisher, so that’s very exciting after working on it for more than two decades.

I sing in the car by myself and sometimes with my family, much to their chagrin, but no, I’m not a musician.

Your pieces for Edible Austin are about farmers and related to the land and touch on spiritual and philosophical themes. Is being out in outdoors a spiritual or healing experience for you?

Those were assignments, and I was lucky they were such fun ones! And yes, being outdoors is the best. My son, who is five, is autistic, and we find there’s nothing that soothes him more than being out in nature.

What books are on your nightstand?

Fiction, all thrillers: The Visitors by Catherine Burns, Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier, and Lying in Wait by Liz Nugent.

Nonfiction: Secret Sex Lives by Suzy Spencer (re-reading this phenomenal memoir because it’s helping me with my own nonfiction project) and Big Magic by Liz Gilbert.

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