A Short Interview w/ Luke Wortley

"Bonus material" for Wortley's short story, “Inheritance,” published on Tuesday, 11/11.

Short Story, Long features long short stories, each paired with original art, published every other week. In between stories, we feature some kind of “bonus material” for each — an interview with the author, outtakes or trivia about the story, etc. The stories are always going to be available for all, for free, with the “bonus material” saved for subscribers only. Paid subscriptions help pay writers and artists.

Read “Inheritance” now if you haven’t already!

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Aaron Burch: I'm kinda always curious where stories came from and what the seeds of idea were. Can you tell me a little about the genesis for this story?

Luke Wortley: Funnily enough, this is the part of the question I dreaded the most, as this story flew out of me in a bit of a gush of autobiography, fascination with Kentucky folklore, trying to repurpose old stories and poems that didn't work, and real-time grief, sorrow, and rage. I was trying to make definitive sense of how drastically life had changed when my dad left our family suddenly in 2014 when I was in graduate school, having just started dating my partner who had a child and having just lost all financial viability through my graduate assistantships. Not to say I've been writing this story for a decade, but I was trying to wrap as much of this kind of shimmery haze of how far away he was, like how utterly and profoundly he'd changed even in just the preceding year. The genesis for this representation, actually, is a local legend known as The Pope Lick Monster, a goatman who haunts an old train trestle that towers over Pope Lick Creek out toward the county line on the far outskirts of Louisville, KY, right before you get to a stretch of horse farms and rural areas on your way east to Lexington. Super creepy place. My life in Kentucky is predominated by hauntings of this nature, some more fantastical than others. For whatever reason, my dad became this, and that's how it began.

It's interesting that you note "this is the part of the question I dreaded the most, as this story flew out of me in a bit of a gush of autobiography." It does read like that... in a way that I think is a real strength. I rarely care in fiction what is or isn't "real," what did or didn't actually happen, etc., but I love a piece of fiction that feels real, that feels lived in. Essays are different, but I'm teaching these "personal pop culture"/"lensing" essays in my Art of the Essay class right now and I've been thinking, and we've been talking, a lot about how a pop culture object in this kind of essay can often act as a kind of "protective shell" like in a hermit crab essay. And so I couldn't help reading this through the lens of thinking that the speculative element of these horns kinda acts like that? I wonder if that rings true? If you can talk about that idea at all?