Brian Lee Knopp spent more than a decade as a private investigator in western North Carolina, working for private clients as well as attorneys. He wrote the bestselling book Mayhem in Mayberry: Misadventures of a P.I. in Southern Appalachia, where he tells what the profession is really like on a day-to-day basis.
This year he finished the serial collaborative novel, Naked Came the Leaf Peeper with 11 other authors based in or near Western North Carolina built upon a story arc brilliantly imagined in the first chapter by Knopp.
Rapid River Magazine:When did you first start writing stories? When did you know you wanted to spend your life writing?
Brian Lee Knopp: What? You don’t know? Hell, I was the unofficial poet laureate of my elementary school; they actually made a song of my 2nd grade classic “The Bison” and made all the other grades sing it:
“The Bison is toughAnd very very rough/He lives on the prairie/And is hardly a fairy/One time he told me to Scram/And How I ran.”
Ridiculous. The ‘60’s. You could get away something like that then. But I was always getting into trouble as a kid, anyway, and writing seemed the most creative, nonviolent way to do so and I just stuck with it.
RRM:What writers influenced you the most when you were young and who helped shape your voice? Has Elmore Leonard in anyway influenced you?
BLK: I was influenced by everybody and everything I read. And I read everything, from Dr. Suess to Nikos Kazantzakis. I think back and wonder: who would let an impressionable 12 -year old read Zorba the Greekand eat Froot Loops at the same time? DSS should have intervened.
Really, though, I think my voice was shaped mostly by listening, not by reading. I listened to people and animals and things and tried mimic them. And to the best of my recollection, I’ve never read a single Elmore Leonard work except for his chapter in Naked Came the Manatee.
RRM:When you write do you have the story outlined completely in your head or does it unfold as you write?
BLK:Both. I outline in my head, I outline on paper—and yet damned if the story still doesn’t go where it wants to, anyway, heedless of my design. That’s probably why I prefer to write nonfiction, because the two processes play together better there. I get lost writing fiction; I’m the proverbial blind dog in a butcher shop; I just run amok, you know?
RRM: You are often referred to as a southern writer. What does being a southern writer mean to you? And what does it mean now in 2012?
BLK: I am proud to be considered a Southern writer. It is a badge of honor, and I don’t wear it lightly. I wasn’t born in the South but my consciousness was, and I’ve lived in the South since I was twelve. The South is my Muse, my Demon Lover and my Salvation — and the focus of all my favorite writings.
Speaking strictly for myself, I think being a Southern writer means you identify strongly with the land and have empathy for all its creatures, human and nonhuman; it means you will take a stand on something, in defiance of all odds or consequences; it means you take your storytelling seriously, your writing even more seriously, and yourself not too seriously at all. I feel the stern corrective gaze of all great Southern writers bearing down upon me, living and dead, even as I try to answer this question. Feels like Poe’s Raven is gawking me.
As for portends or possibilities of Southern writers in 2012, who could say? There are so many brilliant writers just in the WNC area alone! It’s exciting to be a part of it, and humbling, too, though when you consider your readers’ expectations are pegged to folks like Charles Frazier and Ron Rash.
RRM: What’s next in terms of your writing? Are you working on a novel now?
BLK: Yes, I am working on a novel. At this point all I’ll say is that Garnell Lee Ray, the little assassin/heroine of Naked Came the Leaf Peeper, will get into some more trouble. Not sure about the potato gun, though.
RRM: Tell us a little about your working habits; when do you write and for how long each day?
BLK: Uh-oh. I dread this question. I’m pretty high-functioning ADHD, which means I write when I can, if I can, and when something doesn’t distract me. “Something” being anything—a fight between hawks and crows outside, the mystery of why goats have rectangular pupils, the smell of something baking a block away that I can’t figure out, a song from a cartoon that I heard when I was five and can’t recall all the lyrics, my dog’s interest in getting muddy somewhere. You get the idea.
I’ve tried writing regimens like some folks try gym workouts. They never last. I write at this time and at this place for a month or two and I think “Look at me, I’m cookin’ with gas!” Then something comes up and then the time and place don’t work out anymore and I get demoralized because I don’t have that constancy and discipline of the better writers. So I don’t have any recognizable “habit” or “schedule” of writing. Thank God I’m a fast writer or I wouldn’t get anything done.
RRM: How did Naked Came the Leaf Peeper: A Serial Collaborative Novel come about, and what came first, the idea to do a serial collaborative novel, or the story itself?
BLK: In the spring of 2011, the owners of Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café approached me about creating a writing project that would help celebrate the store’s upcoming 30th anniversary as well as showcase the talent of WNC writers and artists.
A collaborative tourist guidebook of Asheville was mentioned, but quickly never mentioned again. Everyone realized the kind of trouble a former P.I. would get into while supposedly crafting a “tourist guide.” The idea of an anthology was tossed around and eventually dropped.
And then I remembered the collaborative serial novel Naked Came the Manatee that came out in the mid-‘90’s. I read it and thought hey, that’s the way to go. A collaborative, serial project was just an insane literary relay race. You know, the perfect vehicle for a certain ADHD writer who wanted to have fun writing a parody novel RIGHT NOW but didn’t want to wait four years or whatever to complete it by himself.
So I enlisted the best writers I could find who were up to the challenge of writing in the same distracted jack-rabbit mode in which I normally write. Then for Chapter One I dreamed up some characters, threw in a raven and a beagle, killed a dude with a potato gun—and away it went, on down the line of eleven other writers. It was the most fun I’ve ever had with a writing project.