Today we’d like to introduce you to Taylor Brown.
Taylor, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up on the Georgia coast and was a storyteller from a young age. My mother says I used to follow her around the house, telling her so many stories she would sometimes have to hide from me or lock herself in a room to get any work done.
I was born with club feet, which necessitated numerous reconstructive surgeries and injuries as I growing up, so books and the world of the imagination were real salvation for me.
At the University of Georgia, I majored in English and fell in love with the Modernist writers: Hemingway, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and more. I thought I was going to pursue a career in academia until I started writing fiction in my last year of college.
After school, I sold my car and used the money to move to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I taught English as a second language and kept writing. Later, I moved to San Francisco, where I worked an office job and just kept writing in the margins of life: before work, during lunch, in the evenings.
Some of my short stories began to get published, and in 2009, I won the Montana Prize in Fiction for a short story called “Rider” — based on the old ballad, “I Know You Rider.” That same year, I moved back home to the South — the mountains of Western North Carolina.
In 2014, after a decade of concentrated effort and lots of rejection, my first book was published, a collection of short stories entitled IN THE SEASON OF BLOOD AND GOLD. In 2016, St. Martin’s Press published my first novel, FALLEN LAND, set in the wake of Sherman’s March during the Civil War, and my novels THE RIVER OF KINGS, GODS OF HOWL MOUNTAIN, PRIDE OF EDEN, and WINGWALKERS have followed.
I was fortunate enough for three of those books to be finalists for the Southern Book Prize and to be named the 2021 Georgia Author of the Year. In 2019, my partner, AJ Grey, and I moved to Savannah — a city we absolutely love and only an hour from where I grew up. It felt like moving home.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Absolutely not! It’s been a hard road, for sure.
Writing, like most creative endeavors, is largely an exercise in persistence, learning from and overcoming rejection after rejection after rejection. For the 25-30 stories, I’ve had published, I believe I’ve had something like 500 rejections. I just kept in mind that every rejection was one step closer to publication.
Then there’s the challenge of trying to find an agent and publisher, and the many post-publication challenges, dealing with critics, reviews, sales, and lots of other sometimes soul-sapping struggles. I’ve said it before, but you almost have to like the taste of blood in your mouth. What I mean is, you have to like the fight of it, the constant knocks and kicks you take.
Not everyone has something to fight for, and this life certainly gives you that. On top of that, there’s the financial aspect. Only the most best-selling authors these days do it as their sole occupation. Most supplement their income with an academic position, journalism, or a regular 9-5 job.
Personally, I founded and serve as Editor in Chief of BikeBound.com, which has grown into the USA’s largest custom motorcycle site, with more than a million total followers on social media. Obviously, it can be tough to balance the entrepreneurial needs of a business with the focus and discipline required of a novelist, but somehow I make it work!
In the end, I do what I do because I love it, because I have to, and because it’s just who I am. The writing itself is what I love — the rest is just details.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’m a novelist, primarily. My work is generally classified as Literary Fiction and tends toward the Southern Gothic and Historical. My books include:
IN THE SEASON OF BLOOD AND GOLD (Press 53, 2014).
FALLEN LAND (St. Martin’s Press, 2016).
THE RIVER OF KINGS (St. Martin’s Press, 2017).
GODS OF HOWL MOUNTAIN (St. Martin’s Press, 2018).
PRIDE OF EDEN (St. Martin’s Press, 2020).
WINGWALKERS (St. Martin’s Press, 2022).
Three of my novels were finalists for the Southern Book Prize, and I was named the 2021 Georgia Author of the Year for Literary Fiction for my novel PRIDE OF EDEN. My stories, essays, and journalism have also been published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Garden & Gun, and other publications.
What am I most proud of? Not so much any single accomplishment as never giving up on my dreams. Battling through all of the rejection, heartache, and challenges to create work I’m proud of — to unbury stories from the world and my own heart, and to put them out into the world.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I hope that the book industry sees a turn back to actual books and independent bookstores. I think we’re already seeing this trend.
While I don’t have anything against ebooks, something is lost in the increasingly virtual world in which we find ourselves, and I see a lot of folks turning back to what is analog, tactile, and brick-and-mortar. In the publishing industry, that means real books and real bookstores.
Ordering a book on an e-reader is not the same as visiting a local bookstore, petting the shop dog or cat, and speaking to real booksellers, who are some of the world’s best folks, bar none.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.taylorbrownfiction.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/TaylorBrown82/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Taylor.Brown.Fiction/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/taybrown
- Other: https://www.bikebound.com
