Ravi Howard (Grad ’01)
Age: 32
Residence: Mobile, Ala.
Favorite book: Billy by Albert French
Who is your first reader? My wife, Laura, gives me notes.
Length of time it took to write your book: I worked on the manuscript for about four years, from 2002 through 2006. I wrote a short story on the same subject while at U.Va., and I used a lot of that same material in the novel.
Plot: It’s the story of two teenaged brothers in Mobile, Ala., in the aftermath of a lynching in 1981.
How many times was your manuscript rejected before you found a publisher? I was fortunate enough to have a contract in place before I completed the novel. I sent pages to my editor probably once a year over those four years. The experience of accepting feedback and criticism in workshop was helpful in making that process easier.
Did a particular event or experience inspire your book? The lynching really happened. A 19-year-old named Michael Donald was killed by Klansmen. They hanged his body from a tree just a few blocks from my house.
Best aspect of U.Va.’s MFA program: The size of the program was just right. We had enough writers to give a nice range of styles, but we didn’t have the big numbers that might make a program impersonal.
Best way to deal with rejection: Buy a paper shredder for the rejection letters. I think we all have to be nomadic in our approaches to publishing. If your work doesn’t find a home with a journal, publisher, agent or prize, then it’s time to move on to the next one.
Advice for aspiring writers: Fiction writers can look for additional lessons outside of their genre—plays, poetry, essays, film and photography—anything that has a narrative.
excerpt from Like Trees, Walking
Prologue
July 14, 2003
Those of us already gathered along the beach check the wind. With matches cupped in our hands, we watch the smoke rise into the breeze that comes off the water. The conditions have to be right. The wind has to be blowing east. Rising tide and an overcast sky. Nights like these, when conditions are right along the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, the salt water from the gulf mixes with the fresh water from the rivers. The fish and blue crabs stop swimming then. Why it happens, I’m not exactly certain—something about the oxygen, the water temperature, and the currents no longer running true. The fish and the blue crabs are stunned, traumatized. At the place where the waters meet, they just float on the surface like they’re dead.
When the tide rises in the early-morning hours, the silver sides of the flounder shine as they wash up on the shore. The crabs collect in the soft sand just below the surface of the water. We wait for them here. Some gather them with scoop nets and stakes while others pick them up in their bare hands and carry them home in washtubs and baskets. Nights like these are called Jubilee.
At night, Mobile is brightened by the shipyard beacons and the battleship lights, but on this side of the bay it’s dark just like it should be. It took a few minutes for my eyes to get acclimated, but now I can see details in the darkness, the outlines that separate the water, the tree line, and the moonless sky. The only lights that connect the east and west shores are those scattered along the causeway and the ones on the bridge.
When my brother Paul and I were young, riding in the back of our father’s truck, we lay on our backs and counted them, 240 each way. Once we turned off Highway 98 and left the bright spread of the bridge lights, only a few dim lamp posts lit the waterside woods. There was more to hear than there was to see. The Edgewater Beach road was covered with oyster shells bleached by the salt water and sun, and the only sound I heard above the engine drone was the crush of our tires grinding the road shells into dust.
I make my way to the spot I like to claim, a rocky stretch at the south end where it’s never too crowded. As I walk farther down, it’s difficult to see who’s speaking as folks say hello when they pass. Some I recognize, others just know me through my family. Most people in Mobile either know us or know of us. Strangers would come up to me all the time saying that they remembered a kind word my father or my grandfather offered when burying their loved one. They had seen our family photo on the church fans parishioners waved on hot days, trying to cool down the humidity or the Holy Ghost. Among the black funeral homes in Mobile, ours is one of the oldest and considered among the best. In the picture, my grandfather, my parents, my brother, Paul, and I stand on the front steps of the funeral home. In black script beneath our feet—“Deacon Memorial: Seven Generations of Service.” In some of the old churches we work in, I still see those fans, creased and faded, with the same picture that still hangs on the wall in the mortuary office. It was the last picture we all took together. I was seventeen then.
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