The word is out: Eric Charles May’s Bedrock Faith is the 2021 One Book, One Chicago selection. The well-loved Chicago Public Library program that brings Chicagoans together through the experience of reading is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and there’s no better choice for this milestone than May’s debut: a gripping, laugh-out-loud funny, and unabashedly Chicagoan novel.
I’ll admit that I audibly cheered when I first read the news, because whenever I’m asked about my favorite books about Chicago, Bedrock Faith is always one of the first I mention. The novel follows the residents of Parkland—a fictional, predominantly Black, middle-class, and tight-knit community located in the city’s South Side—as they struggle to respond to the return of a troubled resident known as Gerald “Stew Pot” Reeves. After a 14-year stint in prison, Stew Pot reemerges as a hardcore religious zealot and declares himself the moral judge of Parkland, entering into increasingly absurd and dangerous conflicts with his neighbors.
May has made clear that Parkland is not a stand-in for his childhood neighborhood of Morgan Park, but Bedrock Faith perfectly captures something essential to the Chicago experience. Although this community is a part of the city, it’s easy to become lost in the all-encompassing nature of Parkland. Between all the local gossip, the neighbors who can trace generations of their family history back to the same block, and every oddity and intimacy that one neighborhood can hold, May shows how living in a city of nearly 3 million people can still often feel like a small town.
I spoke with Eric Charles May about his One Book, One Chicago news, his experience returning to the press cycle seven years later, and how we build a narrative of Chicago through our unique neighborhood experiences.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Michael Welch
First, on behalf of myself and the entire CHIRB team, congratulations on the announcement that your debut novel Bedrock Faith will be the 2021 One Book, One Chicago selection. What was your first reaction to the news that your book was going to be engaged with in such a coordinated way across Chicago?
Eric Charles May
Oh my gosh, I’m just over the moon about it. They let me know in April, but then they said “you can’t tell anybody.” So, I had to sit on it all through the spring and summer. I was giddy and walking on air, but I just couldn’t tell anybody why! I found out long ago the best way to keep a secret is to just not tell anybody, and it’s amazing how easy you can keep things under wraps doing that.
Michael Welch
Bedrock Faith was originally published in 2014. Since I know that book promotion can be pretty all-encompassing for authors, how has it been returning to that press cycle seven years later?
Eric Charles May
As I’ve been telling folks, it’s like getting a second bite of the apple that most authors don’t get. There have been other selections in the past where the publication date is just about right. In a way it’s had a chance to build this kind of fan base if you will of people who really like the book, and now that it’s the One Book, One Chicago they can get excited about it all over again. And hopefully through the book clubs and things it will reach an even wider audience. I’m absolutely excited and humbled, because this is the 20th anniversary of One Book, One Chicago, and I’m joining some esteemed company. That’s just great!
Michael Welch
The novel is set in Parkland, a predominately Black, middle-class, and tight-knit community in Chicago’s South Side. You’ve also noted in past interviews that this setting bears a lot of resemblance to Morgan Park, which is where you grew up. Can you talk about your process for creating this neighborhood on the page, particularly about what inspiration you took from your home and your decision to give the fictional version a new name?
Eric Charles May
There’s a long history of authors cooking up a fictionalized version of a place they know very well. You think of Jefferson in Faulkner’s work or Wessex in Hardy’s work. And what it does is it allows you to draw all of the strong imagery, history, cultural stuff from the real place, but you’re not pinned down to what in fiction could often be limits of a particular neighborhood or small town. Also, there’s a long incubation period from conception of novel to when it finally winds up in a bookstore—I mean, it took me 10 years to write Bedrock Faith and another 3 years before I placed it—and if you lock yourself into a particular place, one of the dangers is that the terrain may radically change in the interim. And then all of a sudden you have a supermarket where there isn’t one anymore or you’ve got a school that’s closed down. It also means you’re locked into the reality of the architecture and terrain, you know what’s there. When you make up a fictional place, you can become a city planner and arrange the location of the story to fit the needs of the story instead of trying to fit it around a real place.
Michael Welch
You mentioned this was a 10 year process. Could you talk about how the book evolved over that period of time?
Eric Charles May
No matter how much time you spend on a novel, your perception is not going to generally stay the same because you’re going to start noticing patterns of scenes, image, and character that emerge. Some of them you may have planned, but invariably there’s going to be some that weren’t on the forefront of your thinking. Then you’ve got to make it look like you had this in your head all along. Your perception of the novel begins to shift and grow because it’s become clearer and clearer what this novel actually is. For me, I didn’t really realize when I started that this was a novel about growing old and looking back and knowing that there are things that saying “I’m sorry” won’t fix. Also just how African Americans can kind of create an area of safety, because the neighborhood is kind of like a Greek chorus, weighing in from time to time in an attempt to create this area of safety in what at times is a hostile environment.
Michael Welch
Your characters make this such a dynamic read. They’re tender, tragic, hilariously nosey, and at times absurd. Can you talk a bit more about creating what you mentioned was kind of a “Greek chorus” of characters?
Eric Charles May
If you look at some of the writing from Toni Morrison, like in her novel Sula, you kind of get this group perception of what the town thinks. At the beginning of Their Eyes Were Watching God a woman returns to town and you’re getting the town’s response to her showing up. With other writers, you can sometimes see the author step back and take the perception of a lot of people, like what psychiatrists say that when you get two different people together they become a third personality—they do things and say things they’d never do separately. Put people together with a bunch of like minds and this other kind of persona begins to emerge.
I knew going in that this was one of the things I wanted to do, that I didn’t just want to stay with one character. This was going to be as much a novel about the neighborhood as it was about any particular person in it.
Michael Welch
That seems like a really complex technique and setup. How did you balance writing characters with their own individual personalities and a collective narrative?
Eric Charles May
One of the things I did was once I realized what I had going on with all the characters is structuring it so it’s very clearly sectioned off about individual people. So that way I can always have a place where the neighborhood can weigh in. Getting the structure down was crucial, because I was getting confused! Wait a minute, where are we now?! So I said if I’m getting confused I know the reader is going to be lost. And I’d had a good hunk of the novel written by then. Oftentimes structure is something that you really can’t get a handle on until you have a draft written, because otherwise you don’t really know what you have. I was just trying to get the story out. The advice I give is don’t worry too much about structuring, because it’s like worrying about putting up a roof of a house when you haven’t even put up the foundation. But eventually you have to create that structure so readers will know “okay this is where we are now.” Once I had that, it was easy to find out where I was going to have the neighborhood weigh in.
Michael Welch
What are some of your favorite books about Chicago?
Eric Charles May
For me, the book that had a particular effect on me was Native Son. It was important for me simply because it was a Black man writing about my city. Also, A Raisin in the Sun, which is not a book but a play, but I remember watching the film version of it when I was maybe ten. I was stunned. It was the first time in my life I had ever seen anything on television that in any way represented a world that I knew, because the matriarch reminded me so much of my grandmother.
Michael Welch
Because the theme of the 20th anniversary selection is “Neighborhoods: Our City’s Bedrock” and because Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, I have to ask: Why this neighborhood? How do you see stories about this individual community building a narrative of the city as a whole?
Eric Charles May
Well, for many years I’ve said that Chicago is basically just a bunch of small towns all mashed together. You talk to people from other cities and you ask what part they’re from, and they’ll talk about some huge area. But most Chicagoans can pretty much nail down the patch of real estate that they came from that’s not particularly large! I’m old enough to remember going to parties in my 20’s and if there was someone there you didn’t know you’d ask “well what high school did you go to?” There were only a few schools that were city-wide, and everybody else went to a neighborhood high school. And if you were Catholic you could just ask what parish they’re from. It’s the strength of the city.
But it’s also the small town-ness that happens in Parkland that can create this world where everybody in the neighborhood thinks they have a right to get in your business. Because in some of these neighborhoods, some of these residents went way back. My mother was raised blocks from where our house was. It was a neighborhood that had a strong grounding, with people that had lived there a long time. My mother and I went to the same grade school, and then my mother taught at that same grade school for most of her teaching career. And that neighborhood has always been an African American neighborhood, since it was prairie.
One of the things I was going for was the specificity of it, because that’s how you get to the universal. You don’t get to the universal by flattening it out; you dive profoundly into the specific so that people can go “oh yeah I know that,” “I have friends like that.” That’s why we can pick up a book like War and Peace and still understand it, because Tolstoy is diving so profoundly into the specific. I realized that’s probably the best way to get the wide variety of people being able to relate to their own Chicago neighborhood experience.
FICTION
Bedrock Faith
By Eric Charles May
Akashic Books
Published March 4, 2014
