Brian ChilsonWe’re big admirers of Pope County writer Eli Cranor over here at the Arkansas Times. So big, in fact, that we asked him to pen an original short story for our April issue of the magazine to coincide with the imminent total solar eclipse on April 8.
(Our April issue hit newsstands today, and you should race out to get one!)
Cranor, 36, has two novels under his belt so far: 2022’s Edgar Award-winning “Don’t Know Tough” and 2023’s “Ozark Dogs,” both of which are set in fictional Arkansas towns that closely resemble real places. In a profile of Cranor from last year, former Arkansas Times Editor Lindsey Millar called the latter “a white-knuckle thrill ride filled with all sorts of evocative detail.”
Cranor’s next novel, “Broiler,” comes out in July, and takes place in Springdale, where an undocumented employee at a Tyson Foods-esque chicken plant harbors a revenge plan against the plant manager who unjustly fired him. An advance blurb by writer Laura Lippman asserts that it’s “a satisfying hunk of noir that tells us far more about the American South than those endless newspaper think pieces set in diners and gas stations. Want to understand what’s going on in the United States right now? Read Eli Cranor.”
“The Gloam” — Cranor’s engrossing new story about a bound-for-breakup couple hawking bootleg MAGA wares in London, Arkansas, during the town’s eclipse festivities — debuts in our April issue. To tide you over until you can nab a copy, we chatted with Cranor about his writing process, the versatility of crime fiction and how he’s planning to spend the celestial holiday.
You’ve published two novels in two years and have another on the way. How much are you still writing short stories and what motivates you to keep doing so?
Short stories tend to come between the books. I’m really kind of a hamster when it comes to writing. I like to always keep moving and always have something to work on. I get up pretty early and do an hour or two of just writing. I write everything out longhand when I’m doing fiction. We have two kids, so I try to get it all done before they get up. That part of my day is just built into every day, seven days a week, no matter what. I always kind of liken it to meditation, or a workout, or any sort of thing that you do that’s built into your routine. If I don’t do it, I feel weird for the rest of the day.
I keep a little list of ideas and some ideas are smaller or bigger than others. When I finish a book, I’ll look through there and think, “Would any of these smaller ideas fit a short story?” I like to dive right in. And I like to do shorter things to cleanse the palate. Most of the time, those longer projects are never actually done. [laughs] So it’s nice to slip into a smaller world for a little while. And it helps me get fresh eyes for the bigger projects, when the revisions come.
How do you think of short stories as different from novels?
They’re more freeing in a lot of ways. I love short stories. I cut my teeth on short stories. Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Flannery O’Connor, all of those kinds of Southern writers. In recent years, I’ve really gotten into a guy named Elmore Leonard. But, like I said, “freer” is the word that is most apt, because they can be weirder, you don’t have to hit certain beats. I write crime novels, which is a pretty wide label. And my short stories are often crime-related, too, but you can really get into the goofiness of criminals, especially small-scale criminals. And it doesn’t have to resolve. You can focus more on the writing.
Does “The Gloam,” the story you wrote for the Arkansas Times, fall under the crime genre? It feels more like literary fiction to me.
When I started writing, I never set out to write crime fiction. And I really didn’t read a lot of it. The only reason I ever got into crime was because I couldn’t find anybody who’d publish any of my stuff. And so I found a contest for the first book [“Don’t Know Tough”] and it just happened to be for a debut crime novel. And there was a crime, just like in the short story, there’s a crime at the heart of it. And I guess that’s all that’s required.
I think crime, in many ways, defines culture. What we allow people to get away with. In another country, there’s different laws, and crimes are defined differently. And so I think that’s one of the biggest powers of crime fiction. It’s a magnifying glass. It’s a viewing lens into a society, which was what, for me, “The Gloam” was really about. Taking the eclipse and using that to amplify and be a frame to look at this craziness that’s going on in our culture, and specifically Arkansas.
The story is about 4,000 words long and we gave you very little time to write it. It feels like you pulled it out of thin air, and yet it’s so polished. How’d you make it happen so fast?
This was such a serendipitous project. I’m a writer in residence here at the local university [Arkansas Tech University]. I had told my students about this idea I had for a short story. The idea was simply that there’s going to be 4 minutes and 12 seconds of totality and everybody around here is going to be looking up. If you’re a small-town criminal, that’s 4 minutes and 12 seconds that you could get away with something. Not necessarily go rob a bank, but there’s going to be a window of time where you could get away with something.
I put it all out to them. I was like, “Somebody write this story because I don’t have time.” I was knee deep in finishing up a final draft on a book. This is where the serendipity plays in. Because literally the day I sent the book off to my agent, [Arkansas Times Editor] Austin [Gelder] emailed me saying, “Okay, we have nine days. Is there any chance you write an eclipse story?” And I was like, “Yes! Actually, I would love to.” It was all kind of perfect. I wrote the first draft in four days.
What are your plans for the eclipse?
Well, we live right here where the story is set. We live on the banks of Lake Dardanelle in a little town called London right outside of Russellville, where my wife and I are both from. We’re 50 feet back from the water. We’ve got a little pontoon boat and our hope is to watch it from the water and see what that feels like.
One thing that writing the story did [was make me] do research on what totality is really like. There are all these great blogs from people who travel the country and the world in search of the next totality. We know how big and cool this one is because of all the hype, but it really is [special]. [These bloggers] are going for 30-second and 40-second totalities and we’re going to have 4 minutes. All the stuff that’s in the story about [it looking like a] diamond ring and the prominences of solar flares and iridescent clouds — all of that was what I read. They describe it like this otherworldly experience.
