Fate, Family, and Bluegrass: An Interview with Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne
by Jessica A. Kent
July 12, 2021
Bluegrass has its own distinct composition. Bluegrass bands may sound tight and polished, but the music is filled with complication: off beat rhythms, improvisation, intricate harmonies, and variations. The two main characters of the novel Holding on to Nothing (2019, Blair) are doing the same: improvising with what they’ve got, attempting to harmonize, and trying to find the rhythm of lives suddenly thrown a variety of complications.
Holding on to Nothing is the story of Lucy and Jeptha, two East Tennesseans whose lives become bound to one another after a drunken backseat fling results in a pregnancy. Bound for a better life in Knoxville, Lucy now needs to figure out if she'll stay on that path with a kid in tow, or if she'll stay in town and let Jeptha — a Taylor, one of the no-good, do-nothing Taylors — be part of her future. Mandolin-playing, hard-drinking Jeptha, who has been in love with Lucy all of his life, now has a choice: Sober up and shape up to take care of his new family, or give into his destiny of being a member of a family that manages to screw everything up.
It's a novel full of music, well-rounded characters, and a plot that asks if someone can change their fate, or if they are chained to circumstance and family reputation?
I sat down with debut author Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne to ask that question, and to find out how the novel originated, how it changed shape in the revision process, and how — like in most things — Dolly Parton played a role.
Finding the Melody
Every author has different ways of how their characters “appear” to them. For Shelburne, a Boston transplant from East Tennessee, one of her characters drove right up to her while she was home helping her family move a log cabin.
"I was out taking pictures and a guy in this Camaro drives by once, and then he drives by twice, and then on the third drive-by he stops and pulls over,” Shelburne recalls. “He saunters out of the car and over to me and he says, 'That's a fine looking vehicle, and you're a fine looking woman.' He said that he had a barn at his place that I could take some pictures of." After informing the man that her father was the town lawyer, he left quickly — but not before telling her his name was Jeptha.
Something about him stuck with Shelburne, and she wondered what his story might have been when he was younger. "It's easy to meet that guy and be judgmental and dismissive, but I wondered what's the real story of him, you know? I know that guy's story isn't getting told a lot and was intrigued to think about what could it have been like."
Shelburne began the novel in 2006, and wrote early drafts while working as a journalist, spending time in Uganda and South Africa as a global health correspondent. After moving to Boston, Shelburne sought a piece of home at Bluegrass Night at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, and more of the story took shape, focusing on Lucy after the events of the novel had already occurred. "That draft had Lucy as a child, and then Lucy in Cambridge after everything that had happened. There was no Jeptha in it. I think there was very little Tennessee because it was just interspersed snippets of her as a child." Shelburne likens it to "bad autobiographical fiction."
Shelburne worked on the draft in a “Novel in Progress” course, but wanted a course or group that would not only workshop her entire novel, but give her the external accountability she desired. GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator seemed the perfect opportunity.
Shelburne joined the 2013 cohort, and the novel "changed completely in the course of that process." As she workshopped the Lucy-forward draft, the cohort found two big things missing. Jeptha’s story and a Tennessee setting. Shelburne remembers "feeling too scared to write that, because it felt almost a little too close to home, a little too close to the quick. But with their smart advice, I scrapped all the Cambridge sections and set it all" in East Tennessee.
In order to find Jeptha's voice and story, Shelburne pulled out a legal pad and a pen, and started writing. "The first thing I wrote from his perspective was him playing,” she says. “And I really loved it. I just love being in his head. I loved taking this person that, on paper, you should definitely run far away from, and making people fall in love with him."
Shelburne had found the melody of a novel that was then called Little Sparrow, named after a 2001 Dolly Parton song and album.
Adding Harmonies, Themes, and Syncopation
With a draft now set in Tennessee, and featuring both Lucy and Jeptha's intertwined story, the question became how to structure it. Shelburne chose — and deftly navigates — alternating third person limited point of view chapters, starting with Jeptha playing mandolin in his band, watching Lucy waitress at Judy's Bar.
“I was having trouble figuring out how to get both of their perspectives in,” say Shelburne. “I wanted them to be walking side by side, in the same way that we all walk side by side with each other, but see different things and experience things really differently."
It was the alternating chapters and the equal weight given to each character's perspective that made the original title of the novel, Little Sparrow, no longer applicable. The song "Little Sparrow" had always been associated with Lucy — she even listens to it in the music section of Walmart in Chapter 4. But the novel was no longer just Lucy's story, but Jeptha's as well. The publisher, Blair, wanted to stay with a Dolly Parton song, and suggested the song title "Holding on to Nothing." Shelburne didn't know the song before she wrote the novel, but knew it was perfect.
Shelburne also weaves music throughout the novel as well: Jeptha plays mandolin in a bluegrass band ("I feel like even a happy song with a mandolin sounds a little bit like a song full of grief," Shelburne says), Jeptha and Lucy go on dates to Carter's Fold, a music venue, Lucy listens to Dolly Parton at work and while decorating for Christmas, Jeptha discovers songwriting as salvation, and the lyrics of "Man of Constant Sorrow" punctuate the novel's ending. Music, Shelburne says, "is definitely a part of growing up in Tennessee. There, people are musical and you hear music a lot. It was only after, when I wasn't there anymore, that I realized how much [music was] always in the background and always in my head."
Shelburne, an admitted character-driven writer and "pantser" (a "fly the by the seat of the pants" writer, as opposed to a "plotter"), loves to see where the plot will take her, and likens uncovering characters to doing the kind of interviews a journalist would do. “In the same way that I walk into town and strike up a conversation with the guy sitting at the bar, I would do that with my characters — imagine I was sitting and having a beer with them. What would they tell me about their life?” she explains.
Crafting the Coda
But despite being a “pantser,” she always had the ending — THAT ending, if you've read the novel — in mind, to the point where she knew that including the surprise ending was a make-or-break deal for getting representation. "I couldn't figure out how to give it another ending and not have it feel twee. I knew that wasn't the book that I wanted to write,” Shelburne says, noting that most people are shocked by the ending, but don’t see it happening any other way. “I didn't want to write the tied-up-in-a-bow version of it. I didn't think that was going to be true to their characters."
In Holding on to Nothing, there is a sense of barreling towards a destiny that these characters don't have any control over, but the hope in the book lays in the efforts these characters make to try to change their fate: Jeptha cleans himself up, gets sober, and provides for his family — but will it last? Lucy gives Jeptha a chance and places her hopes for a family in Jeptha and her baby — but will her hopes shatter? That kind of uncertainty of whether fate will win or lose keeps the tension building.
Was does Shelburne think? "I think Lucy's fate doesn't change, but her path to getting there is different, and what she wants from it is different,” she admits. “I think Jeptha's does change. I think the only thing that was going to change his fate was something as tragic as what happens, being responsible for that. I envision him still sitting on the porch drinking real Coke. Every day is a struggle, and he's thinking about it every day, but he's still there. Still sober. It's not a big life, but it's a good life."
Shelburne says that the idea of the little things that make us who we are is a topic that she loves to explore. "I am always intrigued by those kind of moments, the way that if life goes a slightly different direction, you'd have a whole other story, a completely different story. And that's the thing I love about fiction: you get to write those."
Southern Style
One of the "completely different stories" Shelburne mentions is her life path from Tennessee to Boston. Considering that she felt setting the novel in Tennessee would cut too close to home, and considering the tradition of displaced Southern writers, it begs the question: How does Shelburne think about being a Southern writer in New England?
"I think about it all the time. I feel very conflicted,” she admits. “In fact, the word Appalachia doesn't appear in my book, but my book is often called an Appalachian novel. It is weird to be in this place of feeling like, oh, I've come into my own as a writer, and have written this deeply Southern book, but I don't live there anymore. I think about it all the time."
The other question it begs is whether Shelburne needed to leave Tennessee to write the book about Tennessee? "I think I did. I don't know. Maybe I just needed the distance of time. Is it geographical distance or time distance that you need to write a book?” she asks. “I think there were probably some things that I couldn't have seen without leaving. There are other things that maybe were harder because I wasn't there,” like simply going to a tobacco farm to do research. A current work-in-progress is also set in Tennessee as well, but Shelburne wonders if her focus on Tennessee has an expiration date. “Or maybe your childhood is always more resonant and relevant because it's all new. And so it lasts longer and rings clearer."
Opening Night
As for the Boston literary community, Shelburne calls it supportive and welcoming, where writers can plug in where they want to. "I love being able to go to a reading and know I'm going to see ten people that I know and love. And that circle’s gotten expanded," she says. Holding on to Nothing's book launch was at Harvard Book Store in 2019 ("I think we had 130 people there. I don't know how we fit them all in there!"), and the afterparty's highlight was a cake with a picture of Dolly Parton reading a book, with Holding on to Nothing subbed in (they ate around it, and Shelburne keeps the part with Dolly and her book in the freezer, to be eaten when Dolly reads the book).
Has Dolly read it? Ms. Parton has been sent multiple copies in different ways, but Shelburne has yet to hear whether she’s read one. "We're going to keep our fingers crossed that Dolly's going to read it."
Find out more about Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne at ecshelburne.com, where you can order a copy of Holding on to Nothing.
Jessica A. Kent is the founder and Editor in Chief of the Boston Book Blog.
