Q+A: KY author Silas House on his new poetry collection and murder mystery novel
Silas House is one of Kentucky’s favorite sons because he is so many things to so many people: Kentucky poet laureate, novelist, playwright, professor, environmental advocate, music expert, LGBTQ advocate, dog lover, mentor. In other words, he’s a busy guy. And he doesn’t let up. He’s following up the huge acclaim of his last novel, “Lark Ascending,” by publishing TWO new books this fall. The first, “All These Ghosts,” is his first collection of poetry, and the second, his first mystery “Dead Man Blues.”
House sat down with me to talk about a big autumn ahead. This has been edited for clarity and space.
Linda Blackford: Okay, I think the first question I would like to ask: You have two books coming out –when is it that you sleep?
Silas House: Well, I think sleep is the main thing a writer has to sacrifice. You know, because most writers have to work other jobs. Most of us can’t be full-time writers, but the first thing I teach my writing students is that you can only be a good writer if you are a great observer. And so you’re sort of writing all the time, you know. And so when you actually sit down to put your fingers to the keys, you know you’re ready to go. It doesn’t take as much time at the keyboard, because you spent your whole day writing in your head.
LB: I feel like you’re known as a poet and a novelist. So, it is a surprise to hear this is your first poetry collection. Are these poems from over a long time span?
SH: I would say about 80% of them are in the last couple of years. I’ve always written poetry, but I spent most of my time learning the craft of prose, even though I love to write poetry, and so I never felt qualified to really call myself a poet, until I started really spending hours and hours studying the craft, working with poets, taking classes, just studying poems. And so I became much more serious about it in the last few years. And so the oldest poem in here is probably about 20 years old, and the most recent poem was written about a week before I had to turn in the book.
LB: When you talk to your students about poetry versus prose, what do you say? What do you find are the biggest differences between the two crafts?
SH: Well, you know, I mean, I guess if it comes right down to it, the main thing with poetry is just economy and efficiency. I do think that you have to find the perfect word, the perfect words, no matter if it’s prose or poetry, you should always be really concerned about the language. But of course, in a poem, you just have to be so much more efficient. You have to be succinct. You have to find the one image. You have to find the music in the line.
LB: That’s an interesting perspective on this book. In particular, the poems about your mother and your aunt are so lovely and so nostalgic and so wonderful. Can you talk about that?
SH: Well, the main theme of the collection is “timesickness,” mostly meaning a sort of feeling of homesickness, but it’s more for a time period and more for a place that no longer exists. And so to really get to the heart of timesickness, the book begins with my childhood, and even before my childhood with family stories. I’m looking back at that time and that place and those people who are not there anymore. So I really need to establish, you know, central characters, and two of the main ones are my mother and my aunt. I just grew up in such a matriarchal culture — the women were the ones telling the stories. And so often, when I’m thinking of telling a story, I’m thinking of them, and they were also just so foundational in me becoming a writer, in the way that they encouraged me and let me be this weird little writer child. And so I was really lucky to have that.
LB: For those of our readers who don’t know the story, could you quickly tell the story of when your first manuscript was accepted? You were working as a postman. Is that right?
SH: Well, I started my first novel when I was in college. I went to EKU. And as soon as I graduated, I just knew if I went into becoming an English teacher, which is what I was most qualified for with my degree, that I would never finish that novel. I have to do whatever it takes to get this one book out of me, and so I took a job as a rural mail carrier because I knew it was a job that I could leave at the office. And it’s the best decision I ever made for myself as a writer, because every day on the mail route, I was just composing scenes in my head as I delivered mail, and by the time I got home, I was able to put it on the page, and before long, I had a novel.
So, I worked as a mail carrier for seven years, and besides giving me that writing time in my head, it also just taught me so much about human nature, and also the natural world. A thunderstorm comes, and our normal inclination is to get out of the rain. You can’t do that as a mail carrier. So, you get to know it in a different way. You get to know all parts of natural world and human nature in a really different way. So it was a great education for me as a writer.
LB: And now your day job, as it were, you’re still a professor at Berea. Is that correct?
SH: I am a professor at Berea and also teach at the Naslund Mann Graduate School of Writing in Louisville (a low-residency program at Spalding University).
LB: And then you decide, well, I’m not busy enough. I’m going to write a mystery novel.
SH: I have always loved mysteries. I grew up on Agatha Christie and other mystery writers, and also grew up on two lakes. I grew up near Laurel Lake in Corbin, but in my family, the only place we ever vacationed was Dale Hollow Lake, which is on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. And I have never really written about the lakes, even though so much of my life has been spent on them. So, I decided I would write a murder mystery set on a lake, and the man who solves the murders lives on a houseboat. And it just allows me to take you all over the lake and create this whole world, because it’s a fictionalized version of those two lakes.
Writing a mystery is sort of like writing a poem, in that there’s so much more form about it than there is in a literary novel. Because in a mystery, you do have to go by formula to some degree. I love to challenge myself that way, and I always want to do something different in my writing. I want every book to be fresh and new.
LB: What I loved about “Dead Man Blues” also is that the lake (”Cedar Lake”) is a character, and that you get into the somewhat tragic history of Kentucky’s lakes, of all the TVA lakes (which were made by flooding land where people lived). And that is such an integral part of this book, which is interesting.
SH: I guess, because I grew up in a place where a lake had been built, I heard a lot of stories growing up about people who had been forced off their home place, and people would talk about how beautiful that area was. It was the most, you know, preserved mountainous part of that section of southeast Kentucky, and now it’s underwater, you know, and so there’s a lot lost.
LB: What else are you working on?
SH: Well, I’ve just finished a play that I’ve worked on for a long time about Mary Todd Lincoln and her sister, Emily Helm. I’ve just been commissioned to write another play that I have to have done by the end of the year, so that’ll be my main project for the next few months, and then we’re going to write a TV show with a friend of mine that may never see the light of day, but we’re doing it.
LB: And it seems like you left the door open for a continuation of this character, Dave Hendricks, in “Dead Man Blues.”
SH: I have already been asked for a sequel to this. And I know the entire book. I have it all in my head, but I haven’t put one word on paper yet. You know, every day I go for long walks with my beagle, and on that walk, I’m constantly putting voice notes in my phone, and so right now I’m just in the process of compiling those voice notes, you know, putting them into a written file so I can draw on them to write the next novel. And one thing is, I’ve had to go back through the first mystery, you know, to make sure that I know everything that’s going to be important in the second one. So it’s like working a puzzle or making a quilt.
LB: There are lots of interesting characters in the book.
SH: There are a couple of characters in this book that I went into it thinking they were minor characters, and I ended up really loving them. For instance, the sheriff’s secretary, I really love her. Her name’s Sheila Shepherd, and she could run the whole Sheriff’s Department. So, in my mind, you know, eventually in this series, Sheila will become sheriff at this little town. I love Rex. He’s a former monk who just decided one day he wasn’t gonna be a monk anymore, and started walking, ended up at this lake. And he’s British, and just, you know, a theologian, and just an interesting character.
LB: And the main character is on his own arc of redemption?
SH: Your main character needs to be in as much trouble as possible, you know. So he’s a disgraced former mayor. His best friend has betrayed him, having an affair with his wife. And he’s just sort of lost everything, you know. But he’s found some freedom in losing everything. He sort of doesn’t have anything but his houseboat and his dog and his records, and he finds that he’s pretty happy with that.
LB: I’m sure a lot of people come to you and say, we are living through some very difficult times, and you’re a public figure and a public intellectual, and they must ask you for advice on how to get through it. What do you say?
SH: It depends on the day. I think the main thing I keep going back to is that I’m really lucky to work with young people, and I encourage everyone to, when you feel really hopeless, spend some time with the young person, because they can make you feel much more hopeful. As poet laureate, I got to visit a lot of high schools, and, you know, I just would always leave with that thing in my mind, mantra in mind, you know, the kids are all right, and I’m depending on them.
The other thing that gives me a lot of hope is grassroots efforts. I think when you live in a place where a lot of people feel as if their elected representatives aren’t representing them properly, you just do things on your own. You know, you clean up after the flood or the tornado, you raise the food to solve the problem of living in a food desert, etc. There’s so much grassroots work in Appalachia, in Kentucky, and that makes me hopeful.
LB: You also write a lot about social justice issues.
SH: I think usually when I’m writing something that has some kind of social justice issue at its heart, it’s just because I am trying to find a way to work my way through that. I’m trying to articulate my own emotions about it.
LB: Do you think that Kentucky is a more special place for writers. Or do you think every every state is?
SH: We have a special thing in Kentucky, and I think there are a few places that have that. I mean, the ones that come to mind for me are Mississippi, North Carolina and Kentucky. But I’ll focus especially on Kentucky, mainly because our writing community is really we support each other, we encourage each other, we’re proud of each other. It’s not a backstabbing sort of community at all — a victory for one of us is a victory for all of us, and I think that’s really special. And also we get together a lot, and, you know, a lot of people who live in other places will tell me that that’s just not the case.
LB: And do you think it’s because this is a state that’s had maybe more hardships than other places or and that brings out this artistry?
SH: I think the main thing is that most of the world thinks we’re illiterate, and so we really celebrate the written word together, and we want to sort of spread the gospel of how rich our literature is.
LB: And then last question, I think a recent story came out that 40% of Americans didn’t read a novel for fun in the past year. As an artist, as a writer, where do you go with that?
SH: Well, I mean, I hear a lot of people say, I read all the time on my phone, but the thing is, that kind of reading is different. It’s different to disappear into a book, and especially fiction or poetry, I think it kind of elicits a different kind of empathy. It allows you to put yourself in people’s shoes in a different way. And so I think that we’re losing empathy when we lose readers, and that’s scary.
If we as a country lose our empathy, we’re certainly doomed. And I think that we can already see reflections of that in the way people think about the environment and immigrants and, you know, all kinds of things. It’s disheartening, but it also makes me want to make better art, and it also reminds me that art has been a balm for me my whole life.
Silas House will be discussing and signing “All These Ghosts” on Sept. 9 at 7 p.m. at Joseph Beth Booksellers. He will return to Joseph Beth on Sept. 30 for “Dead Man Blues.”
This story was originally published September 4, 2025 at 7:51 AM.
