"Nothing survives without taking from something else" - Rae DelBianco

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Have you ever wanted to become a writer? What event/idea gave birth to your book?

I can remember loving writing for as long as I’ve loved reading.  At nineteen, I began writing book-length works.  Years of drafts of an apprentice novel, six months of writing school in London, and another manuscript with plenty of drafts of its own yielded Rough Animals, or À Sang Perdu in French.
I raised livestock from the age of eight and founded a beef cattle operation at fourteen in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  My time working with animals and supporting myself off of the land was essential in telling the story I wanted to tell.
However, the central idea for À Sang Perdu came from my experience of growing up in an isolated, conservative farming community and, after a local teenager’s suicide, realizing it was not at all the idyllic heartland I’d thought it was.  I ended up pulling away from that community, but in the novel I wanted to explore the opposite choice and ask what would happen if, when faced with the truth, you acknowledged all its dark corners and chose to love your home anyway.

When writing did you have in mind that you were going against stereotypes (a girl, young moreover, writing a story of violence and survival in a Western setting)?

Raising cattle, I felt greater gender equality than you’d find in many corporate offices today.  Up against a 1,400 pound animal, any strength differences between me and my male peers were negligible.  It took much more of grit, tenacity, and resilience to be successful. 
I hadn’t realized I was working against the genre until an editor questioned my “right” as a young woman to write about these things.  Every day in farm communities across America, young women prove themselves equally capable as their male counterparts in every aspect of land-based life.  Fiction that portrays women as responsible for their own survival often challenges old Hollywood Western stereotypes, but it accurately reflects history and reality.

The two main female characters are very opposite. From which do you feel closer to? Is there something of you in the two of them or is one especially more like you? (Or maybe even in Wyatt)

For me, writing a character feels like method acting.  Wyatt’s voice is closest to my own.  Lucy occupies my teenage horror at the everyday violence of living with nature.  ‘The girl’ was my imagining of a total rejection of societal expectations.  Claire Vaye Watkins once told me that the girl has “the freedom of menace,” the freedom to act either without consequences or with the ability to neutralize those consequences.  It’s a position that has been held by many people throughout history, but rarely by a young woman.

Like most American writers, you’re a great story teller. But like few of them you also are a skilled craftswoman. You have a way to make violence beautiful and to carry brightness through darkness. Was it important to you to always stay in the “twilight zone”, and make events and characters not as simple as all black and all white?

I appreciate your saying that, thank you.  I want my stories to reflect life, and life is nearly always good mixed with bad, bad mixed with good.  There’s rarely good versus evil, it’s often people doing the best they can pitted against others doing the same.  Denis Johnson had an incredible talent for bringing out the beauty and hope in the lowest, most gritty human situations.
Shifting our perception is one of the most important abilities we have as humans, and our world changes when we are able to see that crack of light in the dark and dismal.  To me, that’s what makes stories great, and I’ll always chase it in my own work.

Did you have in mind some books/authors when writing your novel?
 How long did it take from the first draft to the publication?

I read William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! while writing the first draft of À Sang Perdu, and was enraptured by Faulkner’s portrayal of two characters who were each defined by the other. Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian have both been touchstones for me in creating beauty out of the mundane or violent.
It took three years from writing the first lines of À Sang Perdu to see it on shelves, and over fifty rejections from publishers on its way there.  That was an intimidating number to face at first, but now it is something I’m proud of.  The best writing advice I can give is that persistence and belief in one’s work are as much a requirement as talent.

Do you find great outdoors are more appropriate to bring human nature and inner self to light? Is the line between good and evil more blurred in great outdoors than in urban background?

I find that taking a character out of society opens up space for psychological conflict, and physical challenges bring personal battles to the surface.  My own experience in the great outdoors has been full of difficult reckonings.  There is no line between good and evil—it’s superseded by the need for survival.   The outdoors force you to contend with the fact that among all living things, food and habitat are limited resources.
Nothing survives without taking from something else.  In an urban environment, we can hide from the ecological impact that each of us has on the earth.  People denounce industrial farming but blindly continue to eat its products, never having to look the process in its face.  But they consider humane and skillful hunting to be “grotesque.”
I believe in taking on a greater emotional burden in order to be a more responsible human.  Acknowledging difficult truths enables you to make decisions about the impact you want your life to have.  The outdoors reminds us of our place in the irrefutable violence of living, but also of the great gift of being a living, breathing part of nature.

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 Is nature a very central concern in your personal life? What did you want to convey through your story?

My life resembles so many others in that much of my work is done inside sitting indoors at the computer.  We lose the satisfaction of seeing something we’ve built at the end of the day, of going to bed exhausted from putting our bodies to work instead of developing back pain from an office chair, of knowing we had a real part in putting that meal on our plate.
I love D.H. Lawrence’s line, “be a good animal.”*  It’s dangerously easy for us to forget where we came from, and that we’re part of an ecosystem.
I spent this summer at JTHAR near Joshua Tree National Park, and in the mornings I taught myself to track the coyotes.  Every moment I spent with them was a gift of access into their world, along with a sense of capability, confidence, and fulfillment that I think is just plain impossible to find any other way than by getting out there and challenging ourselves to once again be wild too.  That’s what I wanted to convey through my story, a reminder of the natural world we’re all a part of and its importance to the human soul.

*D. H. Lawrence - The White Peacock

According to you what would be the ideal soundtrack while reading your novel? (maybe you were listening to a special song/record when writing it)

A Horse With No Name by America, Vampire Smile by Kyla La Grange, and The Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash.

You are very active and have many followers on Bookstagram. Why do you find Instagram more relevant to speak about books than other social media like Facebook, for example?

In our time, attention spans seem to be continually shrinking.  Discussing literature is incredibly difficult to do in the space of a tweet, or in a Facebook post that’s short enough that people will stop to read.  Online, an image has far more immediacy in conveying information.  I’ve enjoyed the challenge of capturing a novel’s essence in a photo, in order to open up a discussion of it in the comments below. 

Do you find it easy to be on social media and not say too much about yourself? Aren’t your followers too demanding?

On social media, it’s important to compartmentalize what you’re willing to share.  I’m always excited to talk about books I’ve read with bookstagrammers, it’s really a joy to do so, but I don’t open up my works in progress to discussion.

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I’m so glad your novel is going to be published here in France. Did you exchange with your translator, Théophile Sersiron?

I’m thrilled that the novel is now published in France.  Théophile was fantastic to work with; we had several exchanges to make sure that each bit of meaning, line-by-line, was just right.  He shares precisely the vision of the book that I do in its ideas and underlying themes.
My French language skills are limited, but I’ve loved reading the bits of it that I’m still able to pick up.

Have you ever been in France? What does mean France to you? Have you planned to come and make some readings and signatures?

France was a home to my first literary heroes, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway to Henry Miller.  It was a dream of mine to write in France, and I did so in the summer of 2013.  I was still in the very early days of learning the craft, and I believe the French sensibility for seeking out and celebrating beauty in the world is still present in my work.  That sensibility is what makes art more of a daily presence in life in France than anywhere else I’ve ever visited.  In many ways, the French enthusiasm for life is the same as the artist’s.
I’m overjoyed that À Sang Perdu has won the 2019 Prix littéraire Lucien-Barrière, and I will be traveling to France in September to accept the award at the Festival du Cinéma Américain de Deauville.

Are you working on a new novel at the moment?

I am.  The novel is in its beginning stages; it centers on bull riding, the opiate crisis, and the role (and stigmas) of rural life in modern America.