Scott Mitchel May On Books And Writing

For my latest books and writing interview, I’m joined by Scott Mitchel May. He resides in Madison, Wisconsin.

This interview has been edited lightly.

Would you tell me a little bit about your latest book?

Sure. “Awful People” is like if the movie “The Big Chill” was rewritten by John Barth and Stephen King. That’s the tagline I came up with anyway, and it’s apt enough.

I guess the thing I wanted to do with this novel was to take these experiences we have bumping into others as we sort of navigate life and play out the ripples. The idea that stuck in my head with this book was that we are all carrying ghosts around with us. We are all dragging around the corpses of old versions of ourselves that no longer serve us; definitions of us that got baked in the cake early and continue to impact everything we do. The thing with the people of this novel is that they are making terrible decisions, doing hurtful things, but there is a kind of sense most of these decisions make in the context of the lives of the people.

It’s funny, but the reaction I’ve seen to the novel is a sense that the people in the book are overwhelmingly awful, somehow beyond the scope of normal, everyday, shittiness. But one of the things I wanted for this novel was for it to be an accurate depiction of the things that happen in the lives of people in their mid-twenties.

There is this pull in us to somehow act like we are the same people we were when we were nine, or twenty-two, or thirty-one, but we are not. We aren’t the loser, or the popular kid, or the one who is above it all, we’re all just trying to live and not be sad. And the things that have happened to us, or the things we have done to others, had a context in which they occurred, and that context provides understanding, and that understanding can provide a path forward, an acceptance.

It’s almost like there is a pull in fiction these days to either explicitly exalt an idealized version of human interaction and behavior, or explicitly make clear that human behavior that is found to be unacceptable by general consensus is, in fact, bad.

When the truth is that most of us are trying, and failing, to not hurt anyone and not be hurt by anyone. The awful things that happen in the book are not particularly noteworthy in the world. They’re normal and that’s the point. I find I don’t want my fiction to tell me something is bad, or show me how good a person can be, I want my fiction to hold a mirror up and ask me if I am okay with what I see.

Oh, and I also wanted it to be funny.

How long did it take to write? Do you have a writing routine?

This book was weird because I didn’t want to write it when I did, I wanted to write something else, but this book was stuck in my head, so to write the book I wanted to write at the time I had to write this one first. I was working from home and my son was one year old. We’d also moved to Vermont but before we could move into our place there we had to stay a month at a rental in Ashuelot, New Hampshire which is a depressing and haunted place. All my routines were disrupted.

So, I started the novel in July 2020 in New Glarus, Wisconsin and finished it in October 2020 in Ashuelot. I wrote it while my son took his daily two-hour nap. A little while later I did a read-through, and besides moving a few sections around, not much changed.

How did you go about getting the book published?

Well, I got an agent in October of 2020 who took me on based on a more traditional novel I wrote called “Bridgeport Nowhere,” and so I spent a lot of time after writing “Awful People” doing edits with my agent on “Bridgeport Nowhere” and “Awful People” just kind of sat.

I was with that agent for almost two years when the head of the agency unexpectedly died and the whole thing kinda fell apart. “Bridgeport” was out on submission with the major publishing houses and then it wasn’t, not really. I made the decision to leave the agency because my agent was the only one left standing after the other agents left and it just became clear that there were too many writers and not enough representation.

So, then I started submitting “Bridgeport” myself to smaller independent presses and it ended up getting shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award but going no further than that.

But, at the same time, Stuart Buck was starting to make a name for Bear Creek Press and I had a friendly relationship with Stu after he’d published some of my short stories. So, while I was submitting “Bridgeport” around, I sent Stu “Awful People” because it was exactly the kind of thing Bear Creek would put out, and Stuart liked my writing. I didn’t hear from him for a long time, but then he sent me an email saying he loved the book and agreed to publish it with Bear Creek, which I was super stoked about as Bear Creek was publishing books by writers I really dug. Maybe five months later, Stuart Buck abruptly announced the closing of Bear Creek in a tweet and that was that.

When I saw the tweet I was on my first family vacation in years, like I just got off the plane and the notifications all popped as I turned my phone off airplane mode. I remember I was just like “Well, that makes sense.” But then other publishers started reaching out to me and I sent the book to like three or four of them, and decided the fate of the book wasn’t really up to me.

Alan Good from Malarkey Books emailed me after reading the first twenty or so pages and said he wanted to do the book with me and said he had an editor who wanted to work with me and asked if he could send it to them. And that’s how I ended up on the Malarkey imprint, Death of Print, and how Axel Kolcow edited my book into something truly special to me. Axel is the shit and everyone should give them money to edit their books.

What sort of feedback have you gotten thus far?

My favorite thing said about the book thus far is “‘Awful People’ is impossible to describe and I find it hard to articulate why I liked it so much, but I did, so fuck you. You should check it out. I think it’ll surprise you too.”

Any new projects in the works?

Nope, not really. I am taking a bit of a break from writing and am spending my time hanging out with my family, skateboarding, playing video games, and reading comics. I spent the last ten years doing nothing in my spare time but writing and reading literature and I fear I’ve mined all there is to mine from my first forty years and need to figure out what I want to say about the next however many years, then the only problem is I have to live them first.

Though, I do have a new collection of short stories coming out on Anxiety Press in early 2025.