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.

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