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You once admitted that you thought of the title Jim the Boy before you ever wrote the book. And we seem to remember your saying a while back that the title of the sequel would be Jim in Love. How did the name for your latest novel end up being The Blue Star?

I guess the short answer is that Jim in Love seems to me now a really stupid title. The Blue Star, of course, refers to the service banner families of soldiers hung in their windows, and still fits the Jim the Boy title template: three words, one of them "the." I think Little, Brown, though, would have preferred Jim in Love. It probably would have made the book easier to sell.

Jim’s literary origins lie in your early first-person point-of-view stories, but in your novels, you’ve chosen to employ the third person. Why the shift? How different would these books be if you’d told their stories from Jim’s point of view?

I was interested in using, or seeing if I could use, the tools of classic children’s literature to tell an adult story, and in the technical challenges of using a proscribed third person limited point-of-view to tell a complicated story. Basically I wanted to write Charlotte’s Web. Another concern was that first person from the point-of-view of a child is almost always bad. I’m pretty good with point-of-view, but didn’t think I was that good.

The Blue Star deals with patriotism and a world enmeshed in war—but was written during a much different war than the one you treat in the book. What sort of parallels do you see between these two worlds at war, and did you set out to evoke one in order to talk about the other?

My writing of The Blue Star was intimately informed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the surge in patriotism, in ways both good and bad, immediately following 9/11. What exactly, for instance, is a good war? And how does a war, even a just one, affect a nation’s morality and ethics and sense of itself? Uncle Zeno’s questions regarding WWI, whether or not we "had a dog in that fight" pretty much mirror the questions I had, and still have, regarding the war in Iraq. Uncle Zeno, I’m absolutely sure, would never think torture was a good idea.

As someone who grew up in a rural community, you’ve said you feel disconnected from the history and language of your family members. You’ve said too that you compensate for this in your fiction writing. How does geography define you as an author? Are you envious of those writers who go further beyond the boundaries of their life experiences to tell a story?

The only writers I ever envy—and then only in the occasional moment of weakness and/or ill temper—are the rich ones, particularly the ones who got rich writing bad books. I’m not proud of it, but there you go. I write about the world I know best, and think that part of the world is as valid as any other as a subject for fiction. I don’t think the concerns of people in any other place are any more human, or interesting or compelling or complex, than they are in rural North Carolina. As Buckaroo Bonzai said, "Wherever you go, there you are."

Can you envision taking Jim out of his rural landscape—letting him act on a different stage, as it were?

He eventually moves out of Aliceville, and even lives in a number of southern cities, but he’s still Jim—no more or less than he would have been if he had never left.

The character of Dennis Deane provides Jim and the rest of us with a few laughs. Did you ever have a Dennis Deane-like friend when you were growing up? If so, what’s he doing these days?

I had a friend peripherally like Dennis Deane after I grew up. I don’t know what he’s doing now, and, to be honest, don’t really care. He turned out to not be much of a friend.

Part of the originality of Jim The Boy’s story stems from its plot, which revolves around a child being raised by a bunch of bachelor uncles down south during the Depression. The Blue Star, meanwhile, is a love story set against the backdrop of an impending war. Given that The Blue Star’s “kind” of story has been told before, did you feel pressure to present Jim and Chrissie’s relationship in a non-stereotypical, non-sentimental manner? And did you find this challenging?

Again, in both books I was aware of the cultural tropes in play, and hopefully I found some new ways to deploy them. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of soldiers went off to war in 1942, and left behind the women and girls they loved, and it’s true that that story has been told many times—but not about this particular boy and girl. I think almost any familiar story can bear retelling if it’s made fresh at the cellular level. Even if you have a mob of people doing exactly the same thing, each individual composing that mob is doing it for idiosyncratic reasons.

You’ve spoken in previous interviews about experiencing chronic, recurring depression. Jim Glass, on the other hand, lives with such a sense of clarity that he comes across as the quintessential anti-depressive, if there’s such a thing. Have you intentionally portrayed him as avoiding the darkness that’s marked your own life? And if so, why?

It seems to me that Jim was pretty miserable for most of the last book. I don’t think he ever loses his romantic, optimistic world view, but he does feel pretty bad. Mama, on the other hand, is chronically and clinically depressed. If Jim doesn’t seem to be a particularly dark person, I imagine that’s partly a reaction, as you’ve speculated, to my own problems. If I’m living it in my real life, I don’t really want to live it in my fictive life as well. Besides, it’s hard to get a depressed character involved in a plot. They just want to sit around.

In your essays, you’ve suggested that God has comforted you and your family during difficult times. You’ve also said that while you teach students how writing works, only God can make a writer. And your writing certainly has a strong ethical foundation. Do your religious beliefs influence your fiction in other ways, which may not be readily apparent to your readers, but are clear to you?

My religious views probably come most into play in the ways that I regard character. I believe it’s the job of the writer to love the characters he despises—the bad guys, if you will—as much as the characters with whom he identifies and about whom he cares most. Bad people are capable of great good, and good people are capable of great evil. I think good fiction lives in the place where those two impulses collide, the gray areas where human beings make decisions. You may find people in my books who do bad things, but I don’t think you’ll ever find a villain. To Kill a Mockingbird bothers me because of the one-dimensional way Bob Ewell is portrayed. The poor guy never had a chance. The book identifies him as a mad dog, and points out that sometimes mad dogs just need to be shot. I would be very uncomfortable attempting to occupy that kind of moral high ground, tossing off those kinds of judgements. All human beings are worthy of compassion, even Bob Ewell. When I started writing The Blue Star I didn’t care for either Norma or Bucky. The book didn’t work until I figured out how to redeem them.

When you set out to write, how much about your story do you generally know? And what gets you started after a bout of not writing—is it generally plot, character, atmosphere, an image?

I liken starting a story to standing on the beach and staring at the horizon, which is what, three miles out? I start when I know enough to get to that first horizon. I assume that when I get there there’ll be another horizon. As far as what gets me going, nothing works so well as a critical mass of self-loathing.

A popular publishing trend over the past decade has been to market more and more novels as Young Adult books. In one recent review of The Blue Star, one critic compliments the work by stating that “this would be a pretty good book for teenagers.” As a writer who prides himself on writing “a children’s book for adults,” have you ever had a publisher try to label or market your novels as YA lit? If they did, how would this strike you?

Little, Brown, to their credit, never tried to make Jim the Boy or The Blue Star a YA novel. YA books, fairly or unfairly, tend to not get the kind of critical attention we wanted the book to have. JTB seems to be finding its way into a lot of schools now, usually around the eighth to ninth grade level, but it’s not because of any marketing strategy. I wanted to write a book that could swing both ways, and luckily it seems to be doing that.

You are on record as saying that readers will see Jim again, next time another seven years removed from the latest installment of his story. (In Jim Comes Home? we wonder...) You seem to have yourself set up for a Greatest Generation meets Updike’s Rabbit series! When and where will Jim’s story end?

One more book, Jim just home from the war, getting married, etc. would be good. Three’s nice number, and three books would look good in a boxed set, or an omnibus edition. Then maybe someday, years from now when I’m old, I’ll write Jim’s end of days story. I think I’ll call that one, And Then They All Died.

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