Told through alternating perspectives, Vic Sizemore’s God of River Mud chronicles the lives of Berna Minor, her husband, their four children, and Berna’s secret lover. As the decades and stories unfold, traditional evangelical Bible culture and the values of rural Appalachia clash against innate desires, LGBTQ identity, and gender orientation. Sympathies develop—sometimes unexpectedly—as the characters begin to reconcile their faith and their love. Sandra Scofield, author of Beyond Deserving, called the book “Utterly unique, authentic, and engrossing.” In this Q&A below, Sizemore talks with Holly Mitchell of Vesto PR.
This is your first novel, though you’ve published an essay collection (Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus) and a short story collection (I Love You I’m Leaving) before. What drew you to the novel form?
I am happy with the story collection, and the essay collection came out of a need to make sense of what still looks to me like the total moral collapse of an already teetering conservative white evangelicalism in the runup to the 2016 election. However, I’ve always considered myself a novelist first and foremost.
The first full-length book I ever wrote, some twenty-five years ago, was a novel. I had no idea what I was doing and, not surprisingly, it was awful. I managed to salvage a couple of workable short stories from it, maybe ten or fifteen percent of the total wordcount. That’s not the only one. I have a few other novels in various stages of completion tucked away in files and on shelves. I still hope that maybe one or two of them will eventually grow into something worthwhile.
When I submitted God of River Mud to WVU Press I labeled it a novel-in-stories. Every chapter had appeared in a literary journal as a standalone story, but the characters were all related to one another. As we worked through revisions, as the stories grew more dependent on one another and less able to stand alone, the book morphed into a straight-up novel.
When did you start working on God of River Mud?
It all began with a story I wrote about Berna while I was working on my MFA at Seattle Pacific University in 2008 (note: the MFA program at SPU stands firmly against the university’s despicable turn against inclusiveness orchestrated by their reactionary Board of Trustees, and I personally denounce their actions). I don’t even have a copy of this first story anymore, but Berna got into my head. I wrote and published a couple of pieces about her in literary journals, and as I did, members of her family started showing up at my writing desk wanting to tell their sides of the story.
I need to add that none of the characters are based on actual individuals but are all conflations of people I knew in my youth.
How did you approach the intricate structure of the book, which spans decades with chapters from the perspectives of multiple characters?
The structure took shape through a number of total rewrites in which I tore the book apart and reassembled it in different ways, looking for what worked best. It initially opened with Berna and the stories followed without regard to chronology as an exploration of each person’s relationship with her. It is told chronologically now, all of the POV characters have their own arcs, but hers is still the throughline that gives the novel its direction.
Was one of the characters’ perspectives more fun, or challenging, to write from than others?
Jay’s POV wasn’t necessarily fun, but it was the most interesting in the end, and the one that was by far the most challenging. He began as a minor character, one who had a relationship with Berna but did not have his own story. This was in the early stages, and as I worked with Sarah Munroe, she told me I needed to explore Jay’s story and it transformed the novel.
What was your inspiration for including interstitial church programs?
These came about when the novel was not ordered chronologically, and they served several purposes. The first was to be a road sign and situate the story in time, and sometimes place. The contents of the bulletins do give the reader snapshots of the lives of the main characters, and they offer glimpses of how changes in the surrounding culture are affecting the church. They also include characters who appear nowhere else in the novel, but who are the protagonists of their own stories, full of trauma and tragedy. Finally, the bulletins are a constant reminder of the centrality of church in the lives of these people. Bulletins pile up on side tables and car seats, they stuff Bibles with discarded chewing gum squished inside. They never stop coming, church service after church service, Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday prayer meeting, Sunday morning again, world without end.
How did you approach research for the book?
I grew up deep within fundamentalist Christianity, I even graduated from a fundamentalist Baptist seminary where the history of Christianity, and Baptists in particular, were courses of study. Plus, I’d just written a book about leaving evangelical Christianity that had required a lot of research. I did do general historical research, but I knew the culture and history of fundamentalist Baptists quite well.
As Jay’s story was the most challenging, it required many hours of research. Unlike the others, he was someone I only knew of and so getting his story right—inasmuch as I managed to get it right—required many hours of research. The following books and documentaries (I found most of the documentaries on Kanopy) do not compose a complete list, but you’ll get the idea: Stone Butch Blues, Becoming a Visible Man, You Don’t Know Dick, A Boy Named Sue, Real Boy, Boy I Am, Finding Kim, My Transgender Life, For the Bible Tells Me So, Love Free or Die, Born to Be, Proper Pronouns, One Nation Under God, Gendernauts, Last Call at Maud’s, No Secrets Anymore, Love the Sinner, An Act of Love, Born Again: A Personal Struggle with Faith and Sexuality, Fish Out of Water, and “Transgender,” episode 3 of the series You Can’t Ask That.
In addition to the research, we had two sensitivity readers critique the book and offer feedback and recommendations.
Was it difficult to find an ending for this sweeping family novel?
This is one of the elements that moving Jay out of the background and listening to his story made fall into place. At some point during the revision of his final section, it became clear where the story had to go. Though Jay and Berna’s story is one full of trauma and tragedy, it had to end on a hopeful note, and so it ends where it does. It’s not a Pollyanna ending however, but one carved out within a larger context that is still unfriendly and potentially dangerous.
What do you hope readers will take away from God of River Mud?
First, I hope they set the novel down after the last page with that deep glow of having gone on a journey, having had a profound experience. I hope they feel that the payoff was well worth the time they invested in it. That’s what I come to novels looking for and that’s the first thing I want for God of River Mud.
That said, I also hope that it grows a reader’s empathy muscle, that it works on them at all levels and leaves them with a deeper understanding of people fundamentally unlike themselves, whoever that may be in the novel, and a subsequent willingness to view these people in the real world through the lens of kindness, not fear and hatred.
Which writers were your influences or inspirations as you wrote this book?
The writer who probably has had the greatest influence on me is first and foremost Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and in this novel, with the close third person POV, I attempt to achieve the kind of polyphony that Mihail Bakhtin points out as a primary characteristic of his novels. I wanted the characters to have their own voices and be presented on their own terms, not circumscribed by my, or the narrator’s, ideology.
Too many writers to list here have influenced me. Some of them are Flannery O’Conner, Leo Tolstoy, Ursula LeGuin, Marilynne Robinson, Boris Pasternak, Cynthia Ozick, Shūsaku Endō, Milan Kundera, Alice Munro, N.K. Jemisin, and Philip Pullman. They might not have influenced the novel directly, but they rode with me at some point along the way.
While I was in the late stages of revision, I read Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, and Brian Castleberry’s Nine Shiny Objects—no doubt you will see their influence.
What are you reading now?
On the recommendation of a student, I’m falling asleep every night with a few pages of A Canticle for Leibowitz. Beyond that, I’m reading essays and news in several journals and newspapers. I’m also reading student essays that hit me in waves throughout the semester.
Can you say what your next project may be?
I am currently working on a book like nothing I’ve ever done. It’s a novel but it’s speculative. I’ve always written realist fiction, but I’ve loved all manner of speculative writing since I was a child. If forced to plug it into an existing genre I’d call it urban fantasy, but it doesn’t fit neatly. I started it during the pandemic lockdown and I’m picking it up again—it could turn out to be total garbage, I don’t know yet.
I’m also reworking a group of stories published in various journals over the past ten years, trying to dig at common themes to make them all fit together into a book that feels like a complete and unified read.