Author Snapshot: C.E. Morgan

There is something extraordinarily timely about C. E. Morgan’s debut novel, All the Living (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). She finds beauty and hope in spareness and poverty. Like the answers she offers us up here, Morgan’s writing is spare and thoughtful.

“Lack is everywhere in All the Living,” writes Bookforum. “Lack of rain, lack of cash, lack of other, less tangible things. From the first pages of C. E. Morgan’s gripping, sensual debut novel, the contemporary Kentucky countryside sprawls into view .... Morgan paints a lush portrait of love in a bleak landscape .... there is a sense of conjuring in her language; her prose is both earthbound and hymnlike, with the slight inflection of southern scripture.”


A Snapshot of C. E. Morgan...
Most recent book: All the Living
Born: Ohio
Reside: Kentucky

What’s your favorite city?
Los Angeles.

You only have six hours to spend there. What do you do?
Get drunk with Agnes.

What food do you love?
Pepsi.

What food have you vowed never to touch again?
No Coke since 1984.

What’s on your nightstand?
Some Daniel Mendelssohn criticism, Beatrix Potter, Theatetus, Moby Dick, tattered case for The Big Lebowski. A photo.

What inspires you?
I’ve never understood what this question means.

What are you working on now?
A novel about horse racing and race relations.

Tell us about your process.
Nothing is, or ever has been, the same from day to day.

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?
Green oxalis. Oxblood oxalis. Pepsi.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
At the age of seven, when I learned to read.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?
Working as a singer.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?
Writing.

What’s the most difficult?
Not writing, but thinking about it.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?
Actually, no one ever talks to me about my writing!

What question would like never to be asked again?
That inspiration question, I think.

Please tell us about All the Living.
A young woman, Aloma, goes to live on an isolated tobacco farm with her boyfriend, who has just inherited the land when his family dies in an accident. Orren is quiet, grieving, difficult. Aloma takes a job as a pianist in a local church, where she finds herself drawn to the charismatic and warm preacher, Bell. Over the course of a long, drought summer, she must decide whether she will stay or go.

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.
Oh, like hell...