Poets & Writers – July-August 2019

I

first had the privilege of reading

De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s writ-

ing eight years ago, when he was a

student in my undergraduate cre-

ative writing seminar at Brooklyn

College. “Your dialogue is filled with

vitality, and through it your characters

spring to life,” I wrote to him then. “It

all feels so accurate and true. I also ad-

mire the ambition of this tale, covering

the cyclical story of a large family. You

do an excellent job portraying the ties

that bind us to our families, for better

and for worse.” A lot has changed in

the intervening years: De’Shawn at-

tended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

and became a teacher in his own right.

What I love about his debut novel,

In West Mills, is what I’ve always loved

about De’Shawn’s work: the vibrant

dialogue, the searingly insightful

evocation of relationships over long

periods of time, and the focus on

powerful female characters. During

his childhood, De’Shawn says, “The

women in my life are who I spent all

my time with and learned everything

from.” In West Mills covers the complex

but devoted, forty-plus-year friend-

ship between West Mills outsider and

nonconformist Azalea “Knot” Centre

and West Mills family man Otis Lee

Loving. Despite various betrayals and

secrets, and despite their very different

approaches to life,

they each receive

sustenance from

t h e i r u n l i k e l y

connection.

Knot’s last name is

Centre, and she is

indeed the center

of In West Mills. Did

Knot come eas-

ily to you, or did it

take you a while to

find her?

JULY AUGUST 2019 44

winslow: julie r. keresztes; phillips: david barry

in me to do one more draft. And she,

with a kind of genius understanding

of writer psychology, said, “Okay,

that’s fine. You can just shelve this

one and start a new project.” Shelv-

ing it seemed unacceptable, so I dug

in again. I spent so much time with

the novel, I used to go there in that

dream state before falling asleep, drift

off to Wolf Island.

Was your path to publication a circuitous

one, or did things fall into place pretty

quickly after you finished the novel?

I wouldn’t call it circuitous, but I defi-

nitely wouldn’t say it was smooth. My

agent, Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Union

Literary, sent the novel out a couple

FIRST FICTION 2019

Agent: PJ Mark

Editor: Liese Mayer

Publicist: Lauren Hill

of years ago, and it didn’t sell. I was,

of course, devastated. Several editors

gave helpful, encouraging feedback

though, and we decided to revise and

send it out again. I remember Jenni

telling me that every writer has a dif-

ferent path to publication and that

this could very well be mine. When

it sells, she said, this will make a great

story. I’m lucky to have an agent who

is super hands-on, whose input I trust.

Jenni and I spent two years trying to

address issues with narrative tension

in the novel—it slowed down, sagged,

in the middle. We spent hours on the

phone talking through the plot, and

I rewrote it dozens of times, but I

couldn’t get it right.

Finally, desperate, I sent the

manuscript to my dear friend the

novelist Dan Torday, and he gave me

some of the smartest advice I’ve ever

received. He told me to leave the plot

alone and focus on character. Things

were just happening to her, he said—

she lacked agency. He said to revise so

that things happened to her because of

her decisions and actions. It was a pro-

found realization—maybe obvious to

most writers but bizarrely elusive for

me—that a character’s agency creates

urgency and narrative tension. Once

I revised with that in mind, the book

became more fun to write. And, hope-

fully, to read. After finishing that final

draft, it sold within weeks.

Helen

Phillips

author of five

books of fiction,

most recently

the novel The

Need, which

will be published

by Simon &

Schuster in July.

INTRODUCED BY

De’Shawn

Charles

Winslow whose debut

novel, In West Mills, was published

by Bloomsbury in June.