Interview: Cary Holladay

By WES HUTCHESON, for Porchlight

It feels especially meaningful to introduce this conversation with Cary Holladay, whose work first came to me not casually but canonically—assigned during my MFA candidacy at Warren Wilson College. Those stories, encountered in the serious light of study, altered the way I understand prose: its tensile strength, its moral clarity, its quiet reckonings. 

Holladay is the author of seven acclaimed story collections, including The People Down South, The Palace of Wasted Footsteps, and Horse People, as well as the novel Mercury. Her work has been widely anthologized and recognized with honors such as the O. Henry Prize and fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Across decades, Holladay has remained one of the South’s most incisive literary voices, illuminating the region’s histories and interior lives with precision, wit, and abiding compassion. 

 Porchlight: Your fiction often draws on Southern landscapes and historical research, weaving them into evocative narratives. How do you approach the setting’s accuracy with imaginative storytelling, and do you ever find one influencing the other in unexpected ways?

Cary Holladay: Yes, a sense of place is important, the way a landscape smells and feels, its physical and social history, its name, everything about it. My mother used to say, “What color is the sky?” encouraging me to look deeply at the spheres above and beyond us. Rural Virginia provides glorious opportunities to observe wildlife and natural phenomena. A snow bunting visited my yard last week, a little traveler stopping by for mere hours. The coats of deer have turned dark with winter, and winter aconites are blooming under the oak tree in my yard, the earliest flowers, tiny golden cups that smell like honey and attract bees even though there is snow on the ground. Aconites are poisonous, though. Don’t eat them! Every plant, animal, and insect is a marvel and a mystery. Without access to nature, I don’t think I could write. I found hawk feathers on the ground: there must have been a midair battle. What happened, who won, and what was the aftermath? Birds have influenced my language all my life. The sky poets. Their impassioned cries, the rhythm of their songs and calls, their bursts of speech like internal lives urgently breaking through. I never had the chance to meet Eudora Welty, but her work has influenced me, and one time I dreamed about her. “Listen, Cary!” she was saying. “You’ve got to listen better.” 

Now it's March, my favorite month. I love March, the smell of it, the lengthening days and the wide sky you can see through the still-bare trees. There is always a hidden world. 

PL: March is my birthday month, so I’m partial to it as well. I think writers are inquisitive by nature, and that’s apparent in your approach to life as well as in your writing. “What color is the sky?” “What happened?” “Who won?” I’ve been told that asking the right questions leads to specificity in our work, an area many writers can improve. There are moments in your stories where details carry significant weight. I read the following examples from stories in The Palace of Wasted Footsteps multiple times, trying to digest each word.

From “The Belle Glade”: “Clouds made goose shapes over the sea. The pool was emerald--slimy and slick. Algae trailed from the surface down to the terrifying bottom, and the safety rope, with its small orange buoys, disappeared into the dark depths as if a drowning victim clutched the other end. The silver lions’ heads looked small and chipped, their mouths pursed to whistle, with no water coming out.”

And, here in “Doll” as Boyd reflects on his baptism: “The preacher had led a group of people into the James River. It was an overcast summer day, and Boyd kept waiting for God to knock the thunderclouds aside and speak to the penitents as they crept into the brown water, the women holding their dresses above their knees and wiping their eyes with handkerchiefs as they wept for joy, the men plunging in boldly and becoming short and mysterious as they sank up to their shins in riverbottom mud, their arms resting on the water’s surface as if on a table.”

The precision in these passages is remarkable. 

Speaking of Boyd, I’d love to turn to character now. Your stories feature richly drawn characters whose internal lives are central to the narrative. Can you talk about your process for entering a character’s inner world, and how you sustain that intimacy while maintaining narrative momentum?

CH: I try to see the situation through the eyes of the person who has the most to lose. How will they try to make things better? Key word is “try.” They have to struggle. Get your characters talking and disputing and messing things up. I hear lines of dialogue in my mind, remarks the characters are making, or comments said by real people, sometimes many years ago--my personal mixtape. You can also have moments when the characters are just being themselves, either alone or interacting with others, simply showing who they are. You can write about what is in their hearts.

I keep returning to the question, What does the main character want? 

My approach to writing was shaped by the brilliant novelist Robert C. S. Downs at Pennsylvania State University, where I earned an M.A. Character is composed of beliefs and values, he emphasized. You have to keep deepening the conflict, and by the end of the story, something has to have changed permanently. 

PL: Your work has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies, and you’ve won awards like the O. Henry Prize. What has been the role of literary magazines and short story competitions in shaping your career, and how do you see their importance for Southern writers today?

CH: I am deeply grateful to the literary magazines and competitions that have published my work, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Epoch, Five Points, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. I’m excited to be publishing for the first time in Porchlight and in Painted Bride Quarterly. The Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies, Oxford American, and Porchlight focus on Southern writing. I subscribe to many journals and read them every day. They bring the finest stories, poems, and essays to my attention and help me get to know the writers. If there’s something I like, I read it over and over. The Malahat Review published a story called “Home and Native Land” by Canadian author Séan Virgo that I read long ago and have loved all my life. 

PL: What do you think defines contemporary Southern writing, and how do you see it evolving over the next decade? 

CH: The gothic trend, the rise in horror fiction, owes a great deal to Southern forebears--Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O’Connor. You could teach an entire creative writing class with William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”

I think Southern writing will always have a connection with nature, even in an urban world, and that history and local events will continue to provide unusual subject matter. Southern lit will continue to showcase strong female voices. Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God are early examples.

Rural places are having to fight harder than ever against predatory development. Seventy years ago, Flannery O’Connor wrote “A View of the Woods” about a little girl who is dismayed by her grandfather’s selling off tracts of land to developers. This theme is likely to gather momentum as energy companies gobble up land and water for data centers. Wildlife, animals, and forests are being exploited and ruined for the sake of human greed.

PL: Many of your sentences unfold with remarkable syntactic control. Do you consciously shape rhythm during drafting, or does that refinement emerge in revision?

CH: Now and then, the very first line I think of for a story will contain the voice, but generally, I learn the voice gradually as the story develops. The voice is tied to the longing and danger in the story. “Fever,” a novella by John Edgar Wideman, has influenced and inspired me for years with its multiplicity of voices, the incantatory language, and the blend of history, imagination, terror, and beauty. 

PL: In your revision process, what do you tend to cut first—exposition, description, or dialogue—and what signals that a passage isn’t earning its place?

CH/; I revise with an eye for repetition and unnecessary words and scenes. I try to establish a clear chronological through-line, with room for flashbacks. 

PL: What advice would you offer emerging Southern writers trying to honor regional voice while still pushing stylistic boundaries?

CH: Write in a way that feels natural to you. Let your characters talk. Many voices from many regions live and echo in your head—those of your family, friends, acquaintances, and overheard remarks. Your characters’ voices may rise from them--the cadences, the quirks, a blurted-out-truth, the sheer fun of speech. 

The British novelist Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy was inspired by her step-grandfather’s reticence about his World War I experiences, said, and I’m paraphrasing, that there are stories in the silences.

PL: Looking back at your own evolution as a writer, what themes or concerns feel most enduring to you, and are there any new directions or challenges you’re eager to explore next?

CH: Looking back is like staying at home: I’m good at it. My grandparents built the house where my husband, John Bensko, and I live. Generations of uncles and aunts and cousins have turned the doorknobs and crossed the thresholds. I can walk to the Rapidan River in five minutes, stand on the bridge and watch herons and kingfishers. I plan to stay home and write and sit on the porch. Visitors are welcome. You can have the swing!

PL: What’s next? Anything exciting coming up that you’d like to share with our readers?

CH: I help to run an Open Mic & Jam series in Rapidan, VA. People bring their guitars, banjos, and fiddles. My co-host is a friend, Ellen Sawaya. The next one will be held on May 30, 2026. It’s free and open to the public, and it’s so much fun.

PL: It was a true pleasure speaking with Cary Holladay for Porchlight. I’m sincerely grateful to her for sharing her time and insight with such generosity. 

Readers can explore several of Cary’s stories on her website, caryholladay.net.

Her books are available on Amazon.com as well as through Burke’s Books in Memphis, Tennessee: burkesbooks.com.

Read Cary’s story, “Mrs. LeFever,” in the most recent edition of Porchlight by becoming a paid subscriber.