Lori Stephens’ new novel Blue Running is out this week from Moonflower Books. Set a dozen years after Texas has seceded from the Union, it follows Blue, a young girl who has to go on the run. Shortly before publication, Paul Simpson chatted with Stephens about the future that the book portrays…

 

I originally wrote Blue Running as a dark satire. I was thinking originally that I wanted it to be a corrective Huck Finn tale about a girl’s journey to discovering who she is and what her values are, stopping along the way at these crazy places and seeing how the logic of the communities plays out. There was humour in the scenes but my humour comes out in the most intense areas of the scene as a way to relax the reader and get out some of the tension, but some of it was cut because it was too much humour.

Was there a particular image that sparked this? Was there a particular news story? Or just the way everything has gone in the last four or five years?

There’s always been a threat to women’s rights in Texas and we were always trying to fight our way through these restrictions that we’re now experiencing.

The first scene that came to fruition in this novel that launched me into the book was the Republic of Texas: what would happen if the most conservative people were able to see what their country would look like, right? There have been threats in the past from Texans who want to secede, they’re the loud vocal minority so I was thinking what would happen if this did occur and children grew up in this environment?

I was thinking of the setting first as a character and Blue (who was originally named Bon for Bluebonnet, same name) was twelve. I really wanted to capture that moment when the child separates from the parents’ viewpoints.

She was like me. When I was growing up I had all of the viewpoints of my parents and my community and I did not understand why anyone would want to have an abortion. I thought it was murder. I just wanted to portray that strange innocence of a child whose worldview is completely shaped by her parents – and this is true of everyone – and then meeting someone from a different place in life and how that one interaction can change the trajectory of your values, your beliefs and worldview.

The other event that inspired the storytelling: my little sister’s boyfriend shot himself in the stomach while cleaning his hunting rifle. He was 14 at the time, and his death sent everyone who knew him into shock waves. My little sister’s life went off the rails for a few years. I had a newborn son at the time, so I internalized the horror and filed it away. It was only when I started writing the death scene with Maggie, the best friend, that I realized how much it had stayed with me.

Obviously a lot altered along the way. Was that during the writing or did you sit down and work out how the world would change and how it would appear a dozen years after secession?

Dallas underpass homeless encampment (Dallas News photo)

It just sort of unravelled or developed as I wrote. I didn’t make a lot of changes at all in the editing process of the sequence of events; it was just all there. I had a big map, a huge piece of butcher paper and I literally drew a line from the beginning to the end. I knew it would end at the border and I had little pictures of different kinds of transportation so I drew a motorcycle and a bus!

I had all of the transportation and all of the stops along the way and I knew that I wanted her to stop and experience certain things, but I didn’t know what would happen until I got there. So I just moved through the story and it just organically developed.

Were these places that you know, or did you go out and research? Did you have to do the journey?

Austin Amtrak Station.
Google Earth Pro & Greg Ellis

I really wanted to do the whole journey, I’m very familiar with the journey from Dallas to Houston and Dallas to Austin so taking the bus ride, I’m very familiar with that terrain. I’ve also been to El Paso and I’ve been to San Antonio but I haven’t taken the train on the route from Dallas to San Antonio and then up to El Paso. It is such a strange route because it’s so long but I really wanted to because I wasn’t sure exactly about the terrain.

It was at the beginning of the pandemic when I wrote that part so there was no way I could take a train so I just Google Earth’d it. I went all the way down through Google Earth and looked at the whole trip, which took a couple of days, just to make sure I was on track but I really wanted to take a train ride and in fact I might do that as soon as it’s safe.

Or maybe I shouldn’t because I’ll think ‘Damn, I missed this, this is completely different’!

Equally you’re a certain amount in the future in this, so things change. Think how much has changed in the last two years, terrain and places have changed.

And I think if Texas were to secede they would experience a complete collapse of infrastructure, because in spite of our oil, we get a lot of federal funding and without that federal funding schools break down, universities cease to exist – there would only be one or two that would be able to be funded. That was the original conception that I had of Texas: a crumbling republic where people in isolated pockets were like little mini states dealing in their own ways with the struggle.

Was there anything that you wrote that and you thought ‘Actually no that’s too far, there’s no way that we would actually get to that point?’

I was really pushing it with mandatory gun ownership being that young but in fact I’m not sure that that would never happen because people own guns anyway even now. In Texas we recently passed bills so that you don’t have to have a licence to openly carry a gun…! It’s pretty shocking, right? You don’t even have to have training to carry a gun and of course what’s on the books, what’s in law and what happens in everyday life doesn’t often or always align. So the people who are or could openly carry a gun are only white. If you’re a minority and you openly carry a gun because you’re legally able to do that, you’re going to be stopped by the authorities and harassed, so really it’s intended to favour one group of people.

This book’s coming out over here in the UK where Texas, I suspect to a lot of people, is still best known as a big place and for J.R. and Ewing Oil. For people who aren’t au fait with Texan politics, what’s the trajectory been in Texas that forms the backstory to this?

So the trajectory is essentially Trump’s election. I started writing it during the fervour of Trump’s candidacy. Then when he was elected everybody was in shock; here it was, I think, similar to what the BBC was showing about the shock of Brexit, people saying, ‘Oh we voted but we didn’t think it was going to happen.’ And that’s exactly what happened with Trump: the Trumpsters believed it would happen but all the big cities in Texas are Democrat. The Republicans are largely elected by the rural areas and there’s a lot of rural areas in Texas.

So his election and the shock of it and then the succeeding brazenness of ‘the racists’ who just came out in droves was really horrific and scary for a lot of us. There was a whole movement called #NotMyPresident because of that denial.

I think that was the beginning of the heart of the novel although I didn’t make that connection at the time. I just thought, ‘This is a story I’ve been tossing around in my head for a while and so I think I’ll sit down and write it.’ The connection wasn’t clear until more recently.

So through his whole presidency more and more conservative views were being publicised and normalised and so that also I think affected what Blue was saying as she was navigating her way. I didn’t want to portray Texas as this horrible place just populated with only reprobates. I wanted to show that people who voted for Trump, or the kind of person who would vote for secession, can have good intentions, can be kind in other situations, can care about children and often do care about children but the way they’re going about their decisions often hurt other people more than helps them.

Basically there was an emboldening wasn’t there, of a lot of groups that had previously been outside, leading up to the 6th of January. I just caught a look at the BBC news headlines around 4 o’clock in Washington that day, as everything was going absolutely insane and thinking, ‘This is America!’

It was as shocking to you as it was to us.

These are the kinds of people that I thought of as the people who are guarding the border, these sort of vigilantes who just want to serve their own kind of justice without a jury and just shooting people who break the rules. “We’re going to shoot first and not even decide later… just shoot.”

Shoot first and ask questions of the corpse!

Exactly.

There’s a book called Cult of Glory by Doug J. Swanson about the Texas Rangers, published last year. It was a fascinating look at how corrupt the Texas Rangers were. Essentially they were just assembled to annihilate the Native Americans and they did, out of Texas, because they were a threat to the white farmers and ranchers in the area.

In the early 20th century they would go into small towns in Texas and pull out all of the Mexican and Mexican American men and boys over fifteen and just assassinate them and then move onto the next town. And of course there was all of the plunder and rape.

As horrific as that was, I was glad to see that my portrayal of the darker side of the Rangers did align with what I’d heard, that there was a dark past to the Rangers.

Yes, we hear so much about the ethnic cleansing in Europe – ‘Oh we’re going to drag everybody to The Hague’ – for doing exactly the same thing and doing it in a time when we have television and radio whereas if you’re doing it and there’s no communication, so many of these things aren’t known about. It’s like the Tulsa Massacre. If it hadn’t been for the Watchmen series I wonder how much that would have come to the fore in that way that it has?

And here in America, in effect we do erase those unpleasant events from American history because it makes us uncomfortable. Adults are very uncomfortable teaching children all of the truth about our history and so they write it out of the books. They never address it in textbooks so children don’t know about that and adults don’t know about it because it’s been so long that we’ve just ignored it so yes, the documents are super important for our collective knowledge, to re-educate us.

And now there’s a whole backlash, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it but critical race theory?

Oh yes.

That’s exactly what happened with Tulsa. In Texas, the history textbooks, there were some that are designed and approved by the Texas State of Education which referred to slaves as ‘migrants who came over on a ship to work’! For opportunity, right? Really rewriting history so we are not forced to deal with, our children aren’t forced to deal with, the horrific things, because pride in the country is more important than truth.

I think that’s a real problem especially with Texas. In Texas we’re known for our Texas sized pride and there are a lot of things to be proud of, to live in a democracy and to live in a place that is, ironically, a very welcoming to people, very friendly in spite of its complicated history.

There’s quite a bit of swearing in this…

(Laughs) Yes. I went through the manuscript and my editor said ‘I’m not saying that I’m banning or censoring the language but just check and see how many f-bombs you dropped there.’ So I counted and it was like over 100 so I thought ‘Hmm’.

I think I cut it down to half of that but I couldn’t go below that because for me this was very authentic in the way people spoke. I couldn’t sacrifice too much of it. I was hoping that wouldn’t prevent people from reading it.

What sort of audience or age were you looking at with this?

Well, originally I wrote it without a particular audience in mind, just general fiction and hoping that it would appeal to people of all ages. I was thinking of Winter’s Bone, of a young girl who’s just trying to find her way, but the more I wrote, the more I realised, this might be something of interest to younger people. It’s dealing with very serious issues of abortion and that’s the most serious issue, I think, for people here – and I don’t think publishers would know what to do with it here. It hasn’t sold North American rights and I think it’s because publishers don’t know what to do with that. They don’t think that it would be accepted in schools and I think that’s absolutely right.

With Texas banning books that seem to be tinged with critical race theory, and if that fails they just ban authors of colour, and anything to do with LGBTQ being banned, certainly this wouldn’t be allowed in the schools… A least it would be challenged.

There was a video of that school board saying, ‘We don’t just want to ban the books, we want to see them and burn them.’

Yes. My God, here we go.

Science fiction is showing us what the future could be but something like The Handmaid’s Tale is supposed to have a bit of a warning in it…

Exactly, it’s supposed to be a warning. I think that for this book, really if you think about it, the far right Texan dream is that everybody can carry a gun, that nobody’s rights can be impinged upon, some higher power and yet you pray in all the schools. I took a lot of that out of the novel when I was editing. There was a lot more God in schools.

Every secessionist’s dream is in this book. Go after the people who don’t follow your rigid perception of the way the world should operate.

Would you like to come back to these characters and find out what happens to them?

Definitely, yes. In fact, shortly after I finished it I had dreams about them and what happened to them afterwards – just fleeting images of them together. Yes, I would love to do a sequel at some point but for now, they’re just living like legends in my head!

Author headshot by Luis Noble

Click here to order Blue Running from Amazon.co.uk