Earlier this month, Michael Kiggins released his debut novel, And the Train Kept Moving (Running Wild Press). Set in Memphis, the book uncovers the story of Bryan Meigs, described as “a gay alcoholic with OCD who struggles with the aftermath of getting date-raped and potentially infected with HIV.” It’s a story about mental illness, addiction, and compulsion, and it’s a story about a doomed quest for revenge.
A former student of the University of Memphis, Kiggins now lives in Nashville but will return to Memphis for a reading and book signing at Burke’s Book Store this Friday at 5:30 p.m. In anticipation of the event, we spoke with the author about his debut novel and his writing journey. Here’s what he had to say. — Abigail Morici
Memphis Flyer: What drove you to write this book?
Michael Kiggins: It started off almost 20 years ago as part of my MFA thesis, but it was a completely different book. It’s gone through several drafts. The narrator and protagonist of the final published draft was originally a secondary character. Just full disclosure, I have OCD, kind of bad, and I just sort of locked into Bryan as the narrator and his mental illness and how that shapes the way that he looks at the world and reacts to the things that happened to him and the things that he does became the spine of the novel. I kind of wanted to explore [OCD] — sort of like, what if a person dealt with what I have sort of have dealt with and mostly gotten over, but that person didn’t [get over it] and what if they went into a really dark place because of it? And I wanted to study that in a time that advances in HIV treatment were there, had been there for about seven years, but it was nine years before the FDA would approve PrEP and 12 years before marriage equality. So much better times than the early ’80s and early ’90s, But his mental illness and just fixations and obsessions can’t really let him see past his own fears of infection. …
There have been times in previous versions where [the novel] was third person and I just felt like it wasn’t clicking, that it was too removed. And I think one of the strengths of the narration in this final version is that you are so locked into Bryan’s sort of headspace, and — I don’t know if I succeeded at this — but I wanted readers to sort of feel trapped as he is in his own thoughts.
Why was it important for your character to have OCD?
OCD in popular culture and then media often gets reduced to very simplistic things often about tidiness and anal retentiveness, and I really would like for people to inhabit a character who is constantly on guard, trying to protect himself, not really fully understanding exactly how that is ruining his life. I wanted [readers] to feel the obsessive nature that often just gets reduced to a punchline. Also, by using the first person narrator, I wanted them to sort of sympathize with Bryan, but at the same time, by the end of the novel and over the course of the novel, to really begin questioning their allegiances, and why maybe they originally identified with him. I mean, he does some horrible stuff. The novel opens and we know he’s murdered somebody. To me the novel is a tragedy, but the narrator of this novel believes this is sort of a comedy in the classic sense. He is deluding himself. He thinks he’s claimed a victory, but we can hopefully recognize just the pure tragedy of it.
Why did you choose to set your novel in Memphis over any other place?
I have been in Nashville since 2002, but I was in Memphis from the fall of 1993 until May 2002. I went to undergrad when it was still Memphis State University at the time. And I worked in the mental health field for a few years.Then I realized I didn’t want to do that with my life. So I Hail-Mary-ed an application for [University of Memphis’] MFA program and got in. I started writing [the story] in Memphis like little scraps of scenes here and there, and I didn’t change it because, I don’t know, I love Memphis to death. To me, Memphis was just such a character in the novel itself. And there’s just something about the city that when I lived there, I knew so many people that had been there forever and would rag on the city but they’d never moved. In certain ways, I wanted Bryan to be sort of emblematic of the kind of person who has stayed in Memphis maybe too long, but doesn’t really know how to move on with his life.
What made you shift from working in the mental health field to pursuing creative writing?
I wasn’t an English major in undergrad. And in fact, I didn’t have enough English credits from undergrad when I got into the MFA program so I had to take some extra classes, but I wrote my first novel in high school. But when I graduated with my B.S. in psych, I worked in the mental health field, and by the end of that, I was so stressed that I had worn deep gouges into my steering wheel, just from the stress. Eventually, I went to work for Friends for Life, and it was one of the most rewarding and fulfilling jobs in my life. But I lost many clients to HIV. I had recently lost one of my favorite clients, and my partner was like, ‘Michael, do you want to do social work for the rest of your professional career?’ And it was such an obvious question, but I hadn’t really ever considered it. At that point, I had been writing a lot, but before the MFA program, I’d never been in a writing workshop. So that sort of opened my eyes to how much I needed to learn. But the program probably saved my life. If I had stayed in the mental health field without any sort of options, I don’t know who I would be today.
Do you feel that you were able to benefit by having another career before pursuing writing professionally and by working on this book for almost two decades?
I’m so grateful for the time I had to really just put this aside to grow as a person, to reconsider what I was attempting to do, and to maybe shed some of my youthful or late 20s, early 30 pretensions. I’m dealing with a lot of heavy topics, and with the very different book that it was way back then [when I first started], I don’t think I had enough insights to accomplish what I was trying to even then. So, yeah, the many extra years really let me sort of interrogate things on a deeper level and just simply refine my writing at the sentence level. But I’m also very grateful and glad that I’m being published before I’m 50.
And the Train Kept Moving is available for purchase on Amazon and Burke’s Book Store. An audiobook is in production.
