A friend who I never met in person, but have known for years, Neil McCrea, is a plethora of book knowledge. I can’t count how many times he appeared on a thread, and said to me, “hey have you heard of this author?” Neil introduced me to the work of Willy Vlautin. I want to say a handful of years ago when he noticed I was reading some noir and crime he introduced me to Jim Thompson, both Willy and Jim went on to being two of my favorite writers. Early in 2024, I was looking for other writers, and of course Neil appeared like I tossed up my literary bat signal, and he said to me, “ever read Jonathan Evison?” Since Neil somehow nails my reading tastes down nine out of ten times, I told him I’d check out Evison.
The next day I went to two nearby used bookstores. One called USED BOOKS, which is completely an amazing name for a store yet also stupid as hell. I walked through their aisles but no luck. I couldn’t find any of Evison’s work. I hoped in my car and drove over to JULIA’S CAFÉ which is both a coffee shop and used bookstore. I struck out again. I wanted, needed, at least one of Evison’s books. I sucked it up and headed to a shitty Barnes and Noble. And it’s not that I necessarily hate Barnes and Noble, they do sell books, but what I don’t like is that back-in-the-day, they put a lot of Mom-and-Pop bookstores out of business. Years ago, I worked for them part time as a second job for the holidays. I thought, at least my book love and knowledge would be appreciated. It wasn’t. They don’t care if their workers like books or not, it’s all about pushing as much product as possible. I went inside and looked, and looked, and I found LAWN BOY by Jonathan Evison. I took the book home and set it on top of my pile of unread books. I opened my laptop, finished a short story, and was going to spend the next day reading a book.
I could’ve picked up any of the ten or so unread books. I often always have ten or so unread books in my room, but Neil suggested Evison, so I went with Evison. I cracked the spine to the orange book with a photo of a giant bush on it, made a pot of coffee, took Vicodin for my sore back, and started to read. If I recall I started to read around nine in the morning, and aside from a few bathroom breaks, a few smokes on the porch, and coffee refills, I didn’t put the book down until I was finished around supper time. I don’t often read books in one sitting. I have things I need to do. I have a day job, my own writing to finish. I like going for walks, but Evison’s rich characters, his ability to hook a reader and drag them with chains through his world, was something I hadn’t encountered in a while. Literary fiction with a blood red beating heart. Packed with humanity, love, humor, and God damn, fun as hell to read.
Evison’s true talent is showing us his worlds, and when he wants to say something important about the world around us, he doesn’t beat us over the head with it. He doesn’t preach from a soapbox. Like a talented artist he weaves those things inside the fabric tight enough, so we get to enjoy the story. There’s a lot to love there, a lot to learn from, if one is willing to use the entire blanket instead of pieces of it.
After I finished LAWN BOY, I felt naked and alone. I had no more Evison to read, but I went online and ordered two other books by him, LEGENDS OF THE NORTH CASCADES and THIS IS YOUR LIFE, HARRIET CHANCE! I read both in short order and loved them. I wanted to read THE REVISED FUNDAMENTALS OF CAREGIVING, but I had recently seen the film on Netflix and decided to wait. While waiting, I added Jonathan on Facebook, and he’s a great guy, always chit chatting here and there about books and the like with most anyone. So, I asked him to be a part of the interview series, and I was delighted he wanted to be a part of it. I snagged his latest book, THE HEART OF WINTER.
I went into the book thinking, oh man, a book about old people and a seventy-year-old marriage. Gosh, I’m not sure if I’m going to like this, damn. I’m happy to report I was wrong, and I knew I would be. I haven’t read all of Jonathan’s books. I read half of them, and THE HEART OF WINTER might be one of his best books. A novel about a man hitting ninety, Abe, and his wife of seventy years, Ruth, who is in her late eighties. Like his other books, I tore through the novel in short order. Dark times are afoot in the USA these last years, and maybe Evison didn’t plan to write a book about love, sticking it out no matter how hard it gets, and nostalgia, during our dark times. He more than likely set out to write a story he needed to write, but as a fan of his work, I’d like to think he wrote a book about love as an act of rebellion during a time when we sure as shit could use it the most.
– Frank Reardon
FR: I’m going to dive straight into your latest book, THE HEART OF WINTER, which I loved. The story was completely unexpected having read a few of your other books. Tell us a bit about Abe and Ruth and how you came to know and write about them.
JE: A couple years back, my mom was diagnosed with stage four oral cancer, and I was her right-hand man through the process, from diagnosis, through surgery, to aftercare, rehab, radiation, and then a long convalescence. I sat at her bedside and read to her, slept with her at night to help her to the bathroom (they removed a good portion of her tibia to rebuild her mandible, so getting around was tough), pureed her food, etc, etc. Honored as I was to be there for her (after all, she raised me on her own), I kept thinking through the process how I wish instead of me, she’d had a chosen forever partner at her side. My mom was unlucky in love. My old man ran off when I was seven, shortly after my sister died, and later she married another guy who treated her poorly and also ended up leaving. So, I decided to write my mom the love story she deserved. Not a boy meets girl, up, up, up aspirational love story, but a real grinder of a marriage, where the relationship is tested at every impasse, but the two people grit it out together despite any differences. As the great Percy Sledge observed, true love travels down a gravel road. I wanted to my mom by writing her a story where love and loyalty persevere.
FR: No matter where I live, if I’m out for a drive I see giant billboards with a photo of a Saul Goodman looking lawyer. The man in the photo has an enormous gold watch, fancy suit, silk tie, and underneath it says, “easy divorce, call 1-800…” It’s not often we see two people stay together over a decade. I read in an article years back that seventy-five percent of first marriages end in divorce. How is it that Abe and Ruth remained together for seventy years? What makes them work?
JE: In a word, commitment. Not giving up. Embracing the value of what can often be a struggle for a reward that feels earned at the end of the day—sorta like my artistic life, I guess.
FR: Switching it up a bit, you have a podcast, it’s called A FRESH FACE IN HELL. Tell us a little about it? And how can we listen?
JE: People have been after me for years to start a podcast, and I always balked because my life is dang full with three kids and a mom to take care of, plus the writing, the speaking stuff, I just felt like I couldn’t take anything else on. Then, my old friend, Jason, a seasoned producer said he’d take care of everything, all the infrastructural stuff, the booking, the scheduling, the socials, all I had to do was turn the mic on and have conversations with people I wanted to talk to. Thus, A FRESH FACE IN HELL was born. I wanted it to be sort of an antidote to the grim times we’re living in. I wanted to feed people’s curiosity (and my own), and sort of re-energize them with the life of the mind. So, I just follow my curiosity, and interview people who are smarter than me, who offer hope in a hellish landscape.
FR: I was introduced to your work early in 2024 by an old internet pal, Neil McRea. I went to a bookstore and the only book they had at the time was LAWN BOY. I don’t often read a book in one day, but I did with that one. I started in the morning and finished at supper time. It’s a wonderful novel. Although, and I could be wrong, I read that the book was not only a highlight in your career but a thorn too. Idiots banned the book in some places. I read you received threats. I imagine the entire experience was frightening yet also pushed the book out there. I personally thought it was a wonderful book and found nothing offensive about it. Strange times we are living in. Elaborate?
JE: Neil! Love that guy. We just drank beer in Bellingham a few months back! That dude is a font of knowledge. As for the book banning stuff, it was a hassle with the death threats for a few weeks, but after that the ugliness cooled down and it led to some great free speech advocacy opportunities with folks like the ACLU and the Pen Center. As a guy who grew up in punk bands trying to rattle cages, I got a kick out LAWN BOY causing such a stir over a dang blowjob scene. The book was an indictment of wealth inequity, racial assumptions, and the sham American Dream, I believe these were the subjects that truly made the banners uncomfortable. But they used a blowjob as an excuse, so there you go.
FR: Back to THE HEART OF WINTER. I think as we all grow older, we tend to look back on our lives. I often seek out nostalgia. The years Abe and Ruth lived; the children they had, the things they lived through, heartbreak and love, how did it shape them in the twilight of their years?
JE: Well, at the end of the day, our struggles define us as much as anything else. I think the people who are most content, whose hearts are most full, are the people who have struggled and overcome the most. There’s more value in things that don’t come easy. You accrue all this valuable perspective along the way, and you learn to appreciate those small moments where your universe is in balance. Those moments are not fleeting. They are the bedrock that gratitude is built on.
FR: I find THE HEART OF WINTER to be a bright spot in an otherwise murky world. Life is dark, and the art and books are getting darker. When it comes to art and books, I can see why things are getting darker. What inspired you to write a love story in the middle of one of the most fucked up times we have ever lived in? And if I’m being honest, it’s a rebellious act. It took a lot of sand to write that. Congrats.
JE: I think Ruth and Abe in many ways are a statement about the times we live in and even manage to offer sort of a roadmap to success. Here, are two ideologically, temperamentally, opposed people who learn to find common ground in spite of all their differences. It has been said over and over that opposites attract. I’m not so sure about that. But opposites do offer us valuable opportunities for growth, empathy, understanding and the like. It ain’t easy, and I suppose that’s the point.
FR: You often set a lot of your work in the state of Washington, which makes sense since you live out that way. How has Washington, Bainbridge Island, shaped your work over the years? Tell us about the island and the people?
JE: So, the two books you’ve mentioned in this interview, LAWN BOY and THE HEART OF WINTER, are my “Bainbridge Island books.” One (LAWN BOY) is an unsentimental indictment of the class consciousness, wealth inequity, and the uneven socioeconomic playing field the place has come to characterize the place in modern times, while the other hearkens back to the more pastoral, idealistic island I grew up on in the early 70s, which wasn’t so much a safe, crime-free, bedroom community to the city (gated by water), as it was an ideal for a quality of life that celebrated the quaint inconveniences of living on a rural island. It’s been gentrified big time, whereas it use to have a real small-town feel. It was also a lot more diverse, imbued with a ton of Japanese, and Filipino, and native culture. While the street names still reflect this, it just feels whiter now. But it’s still beautiful, and the schools are good, and I can get to the city pretty easily. As for the PNW as a region, the grandeur of the landscape has also shaped my work to a large degree in books like West of Here, and Legends of the North Cascades. It’s still wild out here, man.
FR: This is a question I ask everyone in the interview series because readers tend to love them. Authors, who inspired you growing up and who are you reading? Give me a few from your past, and a few you recommend who are writing now?
JE: For me, it started when I was eight years old with Dickens, the guy who saved us from a Victorian novel concerned largely with the landed gentry and the upper classes, and changed the focus to the little people getting worked over by the outside forces of the modern world. Dickens led me to a bunch of other dead white guys: Twain, Norris, Steinbeck, all of whom had that Dickens DNA, the humanist perspective, the indelible characters, writers who wielded the novel not only as reportage on the human condition but as an instrument for social change. Obviously, I’ve branched out far and wide from dead white guys, but that’s where it started for me as a youngster.
FR: You are an important writer, but also easily accessible, a good guy. I’m not sure what they are putting in the water up in that part of the country, but there’s you, Jess Walter comes to mind, Willy down in Oregon, and a host of others in the Pacific Northwest. What’s up next for you? Are you working on anything new? Maybe finished something or in the process of something? Can you give us a little insight?
JE: I just turned in my next novel, which is called MY GOOD SIDE, a tribute to my late brother, about a struggling lounge singer trying to scratch out a living in real estate in 1980s Silicon Valley. At the moment, I’m working on a novel called WEDNESDAY NIGHT LIGHTS about a grief counseling group that meets in the basement of the South Tacoma Community Center.
FR: HEART OF WINTER also reflects community and the importance of human connection. The book is really striking a chord with many people who often feel distanced by our shrinking circles due to social media, cell phones and the like. People hardly go to movies anymore, never mind a rally or for a simple walk. Tell us a little bit about the process of that community and its importance.
JE: Geez, the necessity of human connection is pretty much the theme of all my novels despite how different they each look on the surface. Humans are not apex predators, we rely heavily upon one another. We simply can’t make it alone.
BONUS QUESTION:
FR: I’ve noticed you are good friends with Jim Thomsen. Great guy. You both grew up in Bainbridge. It’s the mid to late 1970s. You two are riding around on your Huffy’s with banana seats. You have T-shirts with those damn glitter decals, which bands are on your T-shirts? What books or comics are you reading if any? What TV shows and movies are you watching? And what are you doing in the mid to late 70s out that way without technology?
JE: We were definitely on our BMX bikes, stealing cigarettes, reading Marvel Comics and Playboy, and playing Atari if we could find someone with enough money to own a console. Being a poor latchkey kid, my childhood kinda looked like crap on paper, but I fucking loved every minute of it. I sorta feel sorry for kids today, the current culture feels so stifling and alienating.
