Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Stephen Hundley is a writer and teacher pursuing a Ph.D in English at Florida State University. His new novel Bomb Island – about a boy named Fish, a tiger named Sugar, and a tourist-trapping unexploded bomb resting at sea – came out earlier this month. Set in a small coastal Georgia town and off its shore, the book is “part coming-of-age romance, part thriller,” and a total delight.
Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: First of all, let’s start with your background. Where are you from? What do you do? How’d you become a writer?
Stephen Hundley: Thanks for asking! I’ve moved around a lot, but I grew up in Richmond Hill, Georgia – a little coastal town off I-95. For most folks, I just say Savannah.
As for what I do, I’ve spent most of my professional life teaching. I taught high school environmental science for two years outside of Charlotte, then spent a year working with younger kids – pre-k to eighth grade – in Seoul, South Korea. I came back to the States for graduate school in 2016, and since then I’ve taught composition, literature, fiction, and poetry to college students across the southeast. In the summer I teach kayaking and writing at an arts camp in New England.
My mom is an elementary school teacher (just retired this year!), so it was easy to picture myself teaching – when you’re a teacher’s kid, you spend a lot of time in the building helping out. I’ve always enjoyed writing, but I started to consider it as a profession in tenth grade when I took a job as a freelance columnist, writing a weekly page for my county newspaper. Meeting people as a writer, chasing stories, writing interviews, and then seeing my words in print every week was exhilarating.
DY: I read online that the book’s setting is based on Cumberland Island, Georgia. How’d you get interested in that place? What’s your relationship to it, and its feral horses?
SH: Cumberland Island is a place I grew up hearing about. Despite being a longtime retreat for the wealthy, it maintains a rugged mystique and a reputation as a hidden gem. Despite growing up an hour away, I visited the island for the first time in 2016, and I’ve returned for backpacking and camping a handful of times since then. The more I visit the island and learn about its history (biologist Carol Ruckdeschel has recently written an amazing natural history), I become more fascinated. It’s a place where questions of land use, animal welfare, and class have been clashing for hundreds of years.
The horses are compelling to me in particular. The original population was shipped to the island from Arizona in the 1920s by the Carnegies, and they’ve been left to make what living they can on the island, where there is not much quality browse to eat, water is limited and unstable, and they suffer from parasites and other, grislier, problems. The end result is that the horses live about half as long as they might in a more suitable environment, while damaging the delicate island biome by depleting erosion-controlling plants, compacting the soil (and ground nesting birds and turtle nests), polluting available freshwater with their feces, and more.
Plans to remove the horses have been brought forward in the past (and now), but they are often met with intense resistance by people who profit off the tourism the horses generate or, otherwise, don’t appreciate how bad the situation is for the horses and the island. Other, similar, populations of horses (like the Chincoteague and Assateague Island horses) are managed and receive veterinary care.
The horses are often viewed and advertised as “wild,” when they are more like stray dogs – a domestic population that was brought to the island by people and that, currently, no one wants to take responsibility for. I am working on a book now that aims to counter this dangerous romanticization. For recent local journalism on the horses, I recommend this article by the Brunswick News.
DY: You’re also the author of a short story collection, The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First, described by its publisher as “an intimate glimpse into the lives of a working class, American South.” Where does your interest in the South come from? Are you simply writing what you know, or are there things that you feel need saying about your region?
SH: In the case of my story collection, I am writing what I know, and I’m writing to explore, challenge, and explode what I know. Many people’s first book is a kind of external process – where you’re writing to understand yourself and where you come from – and that was part of the thrill of this book for me. In many cases, the stories in Aliens were a chance for me to reconnect to the place of my raising, the kinds people I knew there, the stories I was brought up hearing.
This is a book of short stories, and it is my bid to participate in the form of Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Breece D’J Pancake, Lorrie Moore, and other literary heroes. Aliens leverages the Southern literary tradition by grappling with issues of history and heritage, and it explores the formative role that place – in my case, the marshes and woods – plays in making us who we are.
The collection emphasizes speculative elements that sometimes border on surrealism or science fiction, but, at its core, it’s a book about Southern people doing their best to take care of themselves and the people they love. It will always be an intensely personal book for me, but in its depiction of a real, bizarre, sometimes charming South, it is accessible to anyone who is curious about this part of the country and the people who live here.
DY: I was struck by your decision to place the main character, a young teenager named Fish, in a truly strange setting – something like an island polycule off the coast of rural Georgia – without using his unique family structure to propel the story. While details about their arrangement indeed unravel throughout the novel, the plot doesn’t seem meant to explain their nontraditional life choices. Does that description sound right to you? If so, can you talk a little about that choice?
SH: That’s right – we’re meant to accept the group’s life on the island and the fluid, polyamorous relationship of the adults as part of the story-world. This arrangement does generate tension between characters, but I wanted to reflect that, to the people living on the island, this kind of relationship is normal. This is another thing that sets them apart from the mainland community of Royals.
Rather than propelling him, Fish’s chosen family offers readers a glimpse at the constellation of forces guiding him – some towards violence and some towards moderation. The matriarch of the group, Whistle, has enormous sway over Fish and how he perceives the world, but she’s also a force to push against. I wanted to emphasize Fish’s agency; I wanted him to take chances, and I wanted him to make mistakes.
My philosophy with this novel – and most of my projects – is to place the character into the world of the story, then turn up the pressure until something breaks. That is, until action and scene become natural and irresistible.
DY: Did you have any major sources of inspiration when you were writing the novel? What were you reading and listening to?
SH: While I was writing Bomb Island, I was obsessed with Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan and Sophia by Michael Bible. Both books manage to blend a counter-culture underbelly story with romance, surrealism, coming of age, and questions of Southern identity. Bible was one of Barry Hannah’s students at the University of Mississippi’s MFA program, and Hannah’s Ray is another exemplar for me — one I’m still reading and thinking about.
As far as what I was listening to: a lot (a lot) of 070 Shake. Her album, “Modus Vivendi” (2020) illustrates the atmosphere of whist, confusion, and danger that Fish experiences on the mainland and the island. Check out “The Pines” – a new spin on the Lead Belly classic – or “Guilty Conscience.”
DY: Lastly, what are you working on now – writing, teaching, or otherwise?
SH: I’m currently working on two books. Rodney the Destroyer is a piece of climate-fiction (you might also call it an “eco-horror”) that explores a possible, grim future for the Cumberland horses if they persist on the island. A sample of this project was recently published by The Swannanoa Review.
The other project – which I’m totally absorbed by right now – is tentatively titled The Lay of Linda and follows Linda, a disenchanted 20-something who works in a kennel but lives most of her life online. The story takes on the challenges of family, substance abuse, and being a young person in a small town. I’ll keep the details under wraps for now, but what excites me most about this project is the way it handles grief and the possibilities for reconnecting with people we’ve lost. It manages to be pretty funny too! A book that’s notably influenced this project is Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – which is fantastic!
Both projects are seeking representation, so if you’re reading this and you’re a literary agent, hit me up!
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
