Flying High: The Improbable True Tale of Debut Novelist John Corey Whaley

Photograph by Marty Umans

It was a surprisingly warm day in Dallas as John Corey Whaley stood at the American Library Association’s (ALA) January midwinter meeting still “in complete shock,” looking like a guy who’d just hit the daily double.

Who could blame him?

Within the last 24 hours, the relatively unknown writer found out that his novel, Where Things Come Back (S & S/Atheneum, 2011), had scooped up ALA’s William C. Morris Award, an honor given to a first-time YA author. Then, as Whaley made a last-second, four-hour drive from his hometown of Springhill, LA, to accept the award in Texas, his cell phone rang: it was Printz Award chair Erin Helmrich calling to say his novel had just nabbed the nation’s top prize for young adult literature. Stunned, Whaley was forced to pull over to the side of the road.

It’s been that kind of crazy-good year for the 28-year-old, who last November was the first YA writer tapped for the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” program, which annually recognizes a handful of up-and-coming young fiction writers. Last spring, Publishers Weekly also selected Whaley as one of its “Flying Start” recipients, a distinction given to promising debut authors and artists.

Not surprisingly, Where Things Come Back isn’t Whaley’s first attempt at writing a novel, but it’s the first one he’s ever finished. And if you’ve read it, it’s easy to understand what all the hoopla is about. Whaley’s flat-out funny existential thriller features droll, 17-year-old Cullen Witter, whose beloved younger brother, Gabriel, mysteriously vanishes—just as their ultra-boring Arkansas town is attracting national attention after the possible sighting of an extinct species of woodpecker. In alternating narratives, we follow Cullen as he tries to make sense of the 15-year-old’s disappearance, and Benton Sage, a young American missionary, who’s struggling to do God’s will in Africa. These seemingly unrelated stories eventually collide as Whaley mashes together Arkansas and Ethiopia, a long-departed bird, strange religious practices, and, perhaps most importantly, mystery and humor in a coming-of-age tale that’s unlike anything I’ve ever read.

Whaley, a former middle and high school teacher, now writes full time and has recently moved to Dallas. He also sports a woodpecker tattoo on his left arm, modeled after the image on his book’s cover. We caught up with Whaley shortly after he’d learned about the awards to talk about how he managed to create such a memorable story.

Teens will love that Cullen uses the word ass-hat to describe the douche bags in his town. Do you use that word yourself?

That’s so funny. I don’t say ass-hat very frequently, mostly because I used it so much in the book that I got tired of using it personally. I wanted a word to be Cullen’s word. I wanted a word to be sort of his Holden Caulfield’s phony if you will, because that’s the book I look up to more than any other book in coming-of-age literature, and that’s the kind of book I want to write. I wanted Cullen to have his own little word, but I also wanted it to be cheeky and fun and funny. I heard it on a TV show, Everwood, years ago.

How’d you come up with the idea for your novel?

I was a senior in college at Louisiana Tech University [in 2005], and I was driving home for the weekend. I was listening to an NPR segment about my favorite singer, Sufjan Stevens. His song lyrics are quoted a couple of times in the book. Some people from NPR had gone to a small town in Arkansas—Brinkley—where the ivory-billed woodpecker was supposedly sighted by this ornithologist from the Pacific Northwest.

They had been very interested in seeing the songwriting process of Sufjan Stevens, so somehow, for whatever reason, someone at NPR had sent Sufjan Stevens, in New York, all of these interview clips of people in Brinkley, AR, and had him write a song based on the interviews and on whatever he knew about the ivory-billed woodpecker.

What a wild scenario.

So I’m listening to this podcast, and they’ve interspersed verses of the song he’s written with interviews of all these townspeople, talking about how [a woodpecker] had revived hope in their impoverished little town. Their businesses had started to change their names to the Ivory-Billed Cafe or the Ivory-Billed Motel. Listening to this story with this amazing song that Sufjan Stevens had written, I just thought, What an amazing story this is. I’ve got to jump on this before a million people write a book about it.

Your characters have such great names, like Cullen; Ada Taylor, the local teen hottie; and Cabot Searcy, a playboy jock. Can you tell us about that?

I love this question. It’s one of those things that happened by sheer accident. When I first got the idea for Where Things Come Back, I passed an exit sign on the interstate for two towns, Ada and Taylor. The exit sign said, “Ada Taylor.” That was the first character’s name! [Laughter]

I’m driving down the road, and I’m thinking, Oh my gosh! This is finally the book that I can probably finish writing. I am already so obsessed with this story. So I’m driving into my hometown of Springhill, LA, and there’s a small town right outside of it that if you blink you might miss, with a huge yellow sign that says, “Cullen.” As soon as I drove into it, I said, “Wow! That would be a really cool first name for my narrator.”

Sounds like you were on a roll.

I wrote about 12 or 13 pages, and then I started teaching public school. I didn’t have time to write a book. I only had time to dodge flying projectiles from terrible students for a year. I needed more characters and realized that I could actually use small towns in Arkansas to get most of my characters’ names. No one, unless they lived in Arkansas, would ever notice. A really cool thing happens when you use names from a place—they subconsciously bring you into the place without telling you. That’s my hope at least.

After I had already used three town names in Louisiana—Ada, Taylor, and Cullen—I printed out a list of every town in Arkansas. So literally, on this printed-out sheet, I was drawing lines between town names to see which ones would sound good as first and last names. One of the first ones I saw was Cabot, which was always a name I really liked, and then I saw that there’s a town named Searcy, and I thought, Wow! That sounds like a young man from the South, Cabot Searcy. Benton Sage is another one—those are both towns in Arkansas. And then I saw the name Witter, and I thought, Cullen Witter, I think that’s it. I think that’s the narrator.

What about Cullen’s brother’s name?

I chose Gabriel because of the angelic, biblical allusion. I wanted him to be the most innocent character in the story. I wanted him to be someone who the reader falls in love with instantly, and wants to say, “I wish that were my younger brother.” Because when he goes missing, I want the reader to feel like their sibling is missing with Cullen’s.

Did you have any experiences with religious fringe groups while growing up, like Benton Sage did?

No. I grew up in a pretty liberal household. My parents are fairly liberal people. That carried over with me as far as politics and religion go. I grew up going to the Springhill United Methodist Church, where I still go frequently. Faith has always played a pretty important role in my life, but I knew from a young age that my perspective on it was slightly different than most of the people immediately around me. And so it was always just one of those things that I wanted to try to explore in my writing. Since I was 11 or 12 years old, I always wanted to be a writer.

How did your story end up with all of that weird religious stuff?

It happened by accident. The original story centered around Cullen Witter, the narrator, losing his younger brother. It wasn’t until about 10 chapters into writing the first draft that I realized it was missing something. I needed some way to tie in the religious allusions and symbolism and themes that I had already presented in Cullen’s narrative.

What was the turning point?

I was talking to my friend Randi Anderson. She’s very, very smart. She was reading my book, a chapter at a time, and giving me notes on it, just kind of telling me, “I like this. I don’t like this. This works.”

I told her this idea I had to maybe bring in more religion, and the idea of adding a second narrative was brought up. She had recently either read an article or seen a documentary about the Book of Enoch, which is this apocryphal text that’s not in the King James Version of the Bible or in any versions of the Bible that are readily accessible to Western cultures per se—it’s found in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible. Of course, at that point I’d never heard of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, because I’m from a small town in Louisiana. Why would I have ever heard of that? So I started reading the Book of Enoch, and what I found was this amazing, crazy, weird, messed-up story that somehow was overwhelmingly connected to the story in the 10 chapters that I had already written.

How so?

First of all, [the Book of Enoch] centered around the angel Gabriel. I had already named the missing young brother after the angel Gabriel in my novel. The Book of Enoch is about fallen angels who have children with humans and create monstrous beings that start cannibalizing each other and doing these crazy things. Well, I had already written all of these chapters with [Cullen’s] daydreams about zombies eating humans and attacking them. As soon as I read the Book of Enoch, I was like, “Are you kidding me, world? You just gave me this crazy ancient text that ties into my weird story about an extinct bird.”

During your school visits, are kids curious about the story’s ambiguous ending—whether Gabriel lives or dies?

I always get that question. It starts heated debates during my school visits. I always say, “I want your experiences to help you come to the conclusion. I want what you feel about second chances and hope to play a part in your reflections.” Maybe that sounds cheesy and corny, but that’s why I wrote it the way I did.

I heard you were rejected a lot before your novel was finally accepted. Did you ever feel like giving up?

Not to sound cocky, but somehow I just knew that those rejections didn’t matter. I just knew that eventually the book would find the right place, and I just had to keep being patient. Now, I’ll admit that it got frustrating at certain points during that three and a half years, but I really believed in this book, and I knew that someone, somewhere, would eventually read it and connect with it.