Today, Feathered Quill reviewer Katie Specht is talking with Jeffrey L. Carrier, author of Coal Dust on Purple Asters: A Trilogy of Short Fiction.

FQ: Tell our readers a little about yourself. Your background, your interests, and how this led to writing a book.

CARRIER: It was my deep fascination -- or perhaps obsession -- with classic Hollywood that first inspired me to put pen to paper. In my college days, while working as a summer newspaper intern in 1984, I was eager to interview stars from cinema’s golden era. I finally summoned the nerve to contact Patsy Ruth Miller, a long-retired silent film star. She enjoyed the resulting article so much that she invited me to collaborate on her memoir, an extraordinary break for a twenty-one-year-old! While my early dreams of becoming a full-time biographer never came to fruition, I never stopped writing. Now, I am bringing that lifelong passion for storytelling into the world of fiction.

FQ: Have you always enjoyed writing or is it something you’ve discovered recently?

CARRIER: I first discovered the joy of putting words on paper in the fifth grade, when my teacher read one of my essays aloud to the entire class. I practically swelled with pride right there at my desk. That spark led me to write short stories for my high school newspaper as a teenager. Writing has been a constant in my life ever since, though it took decades of practice, patience, and persistence to hone that talent into something worthy of publication.

FQ: Tell us a little about your book – a brief synopsis and what makes your book unique.

CARRIER: Coal Dust on Purple Asters is a connected trilogy of short stories set deep in the coalfields of Kentucky during the Great Depression. Against a backdrop of mine cave-ins, sudden flash floods, poverty, and even murder, these stories focus on resilient mountain people who overcome immense odds to preserve their dignity, pride, and humanity. What makes the collection unique is its intimate focus: rather than treating the era as mere history, these are deeply human stories about character, grit, and the quiet grace that blooms even in the darkest hollows.

FQ:  What was the impetus for writing your book?

CARRIER: After toiling in the field of non-fiction for most of my adult life --authoring two minor celebrity biographies, a memoir, and even documenting historical Appalachian cemeteries -- I decided it was time to give fiction a try. My imagination immediately returned to the rich, folkloric tales my grandmother told me when I was a child. As a coal miner’s wife, her stories were steeped in hardship and tragedy, yet always shone with the resilience of the human spirit. Once I began translating those lingering mountain memories into fiction, the words poured onto the screen, and I completed the entire trilogy in about three months.

FQ: Please give our readers a little insight into your writing process. Do you set aside a certain time each day to write, only write when the desire to write surfaces, or ...?

CARRIER: I am definitely not a "timeclock" writer who adheres to a rigid schedule. I write when the creative impulse strikes, whether that happens at dawn, in the middle of the afternoon, or late at night. Once I enter that quiet groove, however, I become deeply protective of the space. I thrive on absolute focus with no phone calls or visitors to break the trance, just soft classical music playing in the background to set the mood.

FQ: What was the hardest part of writing your book? That first chapter, the last paragraph, or …?

CARRIER: For me, the hardest part of writing is always that very first sentence. Opening lines carry immense weight. They are the hook that either draws a reader in or prompts them to put the book back on the shelf. Finding that exact combination of words to set the tone, create immediate intrigue, and invite the reader inside is always the most challenging part of my process.

FQ: The genre of your book is historical fiction. Why this genre? Is it your favorite to read? Did you think it would be the most challenging?

CARRIER: Historical fiction was a natural fit for me. I’ve been fascinated by history for as long as I can remember. Even as a child, I gravitated toward older folks, pestering them with endless questions about the world they grew up in. Because my family's roots run so deep in those Kentucky coalfields, I already possessed an intimate understanding of what everyday life in that area looked like a century ago. On top of that, I have a strong affection for the native Appalachian accent. Writing these stories gave me the blissful freedom to sprinkle that authentic mountain dialect liberally across every page, letting the characters speak in their true voice.

FQ: Who are your favorite authors and why?

CARRIER: While I haven't spent as much time with the usual heavyweights like Faulkner, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, there are two authors from that era whom I have read and completely adored: James Still and Stella Gibbons. Both wrote brilliantly about ordinary people in the 1930s who lived in isolated areas. Still’s novel River of Earth captures hardscrabble life in rural Appalachia, while Gibbons gives us a delightfully eccentric family in rural England, turning Cold Comfort Farm into a staple of English literature. I am also quite fond of Harriet Arnow and James Agee, whose commitment to authentic, grounded storytelling inspires me enormously. I need to revisit Hunter’s Horn and A Death in the Family.

FQ: Was the plot worked out completely before you started or did it evolve as you wrote?

CARRIER: When I began Coal Dust on Purple Asters, I had the basic plot outlines for all three stories clearly in mind, but a plot outline is really just a skeleton. The real work was giving those bare bones flesh, sinew, and vitality -- filling in the rich background details, deepening the emotional color, and sculpting characters who possessed real flaws, virtues, and depth. Beyond the people, I also let the Appalachian environment become a living, breathing character in its own right.

FQ: Are any of the characters based on real people you know? If so, how closely does your character mimic the real person?

CARRIER: In each story, several characters are loosely drawn from real people I either knew or heard about through my Kentucky grandmother’s tales, and I also borrowed names directly from my own family tree. However, the character who most strongly resembles a real person is Granny Stidham in the third story of the trilogy, “Red Snow in the Kentucky Woods.” She is based directly on my great-great-grandmother, who did live atop a remote mountain and smoked a corncob pipe. Her tragic backstory is real, too. Her father did die as a prisoner of war in a Union prison camp during the Civil War.

For more information about Coal Dust on Purple Asters, please visit the author's website at: jeffreylcarrier.com/