Mark Brooks’ Southern Murder Tragedy Explores Impact Of Relationships

By LYDIA BERGLAR
News Editor

“What starts relationships, what builds them, what keeps people together or breaks them apart?” wonders author Mark L. Brooks. “With friendships, marriages, parent and child, mentor and protégé, how do people influence your life?”

His debut novel, “Laying Autumn’s Dust,” explores the theme of relationships. In his words, “Throughout the novel, you can see how having the right people in your life can influence you and how not having those people or having them removed can put you on a different path.”

McBride’s Bookstore is hosting a book signing with Brooks this Saturday, August 10, from 1-4 p.m., and the Dade County Public Library is hosting a meet the author, signing, and book reading event with Brooks on August 20 at 5:30 p.m.

“Laying Autumn’s Dust” spent roughly 15 years as a short story before Brooks began expanding the tale into a novel. He spent the last five or so years working on it, and this June, Co-Pilot Publishing released the book.

Brooks grew up in the Puddin Ridge area of Sand Mountain, and his book’s setting was influenced by the area. Although he attended Ider schools, he also made many friends just across the state line in Trenton.

He fondly remembers his mother reading to the family when he was young and his wonderful high school English teacher. He developed a love of stories at a young age and remembers “The Prince of Tides” by Pat Conroy leaving a strong impression on him in high school. He also loved “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald and used a quote from the classic as the epigraph in “Laying Autumn’s Dust.”

Brooks spent two years at Northeast Alabama Community College before completing his undergraduate in English at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. A graduate assistantship at UTC allowed him to earn his master’s in English with a focus on literary studies.

One bit of feedback from a professor has helped Brooks improve his writing over the last several decades. “He told me to prune, prune, prune. As a young writer, it’s hard to get rid of anything you write because you think everything should be there. As a more mature writer, I get excited when I can cut fluff and make sure I’m not using hollow words.”

He taught as an adjunct at UTC for two years before moving to Fort Collins, Colorado where he lived for 17 years. He spent several years teaching British literature as a remote instructor for Snead State Community College in Boaz, Ala. and also found an enjoyable career in the call center industry.

An avid trail runner, Brooks delighted in the culture, climate, and outdoor adventures of Colorado, but he moved back to our corner of Georgia and Alabama at the end of 2016 when his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Working part time as an adjunct at Northeast Alabama Community College gave him the flexibility to care for his parents as well as focus on writing.

Completing a novel had long been a goal for Brooks, but until “Laying Autumn’s Dust,” he had only completed short stories and dabbled in poetry. “Between work and trail running, I had not prioritized writing.”

Out of all of his short stories, he saw the most potential in one told from the first-person perspective of a young man named Jesse. Brooks added two more first-person narrators to the book: Abigail (Jesse’s mother) and Donny (Jesse’s father).

These narrators sometimes recount the same scenes but from their unique perspectives. Brooks reflected, “I think this brings an appreciation for the fact that we all have our own experiences and bring different things to the table. When you’re young, you feel like everyone grew up the way you grew up and probably thinks the way you do, but writing scenes from different perspectives makes you more tolerant of the ways people think.”

The original story established the main characters and their relationships. Through these fictional lives, Brooks explores the influence of relationships. While the original short story changed drastically on its journey to becoming a novel, he explained, “I do not regret all the time I spent on the original short story because without that foundation, I wouldn’t have written the novel at all. I became a better writer throughout those years.”

Two tricks Brooks used to help improve his work were searching for words (thanks to modern technology) and backwards reading. To eliminate redundant usage, he searched for a total of 750 words and rephrased sections where they were used too often.

Also, he read his work backwards, sometimes sentence by sentence, other times paragraph by paragraph. “When you read forwards, your mind knows the way it’s going to be delivered. Sometimes, you’re not paying full attention because you already know what’s there. Reading backwards, you break that rhythm.”

The book is a murder mystery with a coming-of-age element, but Brooks originally didn’t plan for the mystery. He knew all along who the murderer was, but a friend read an early draft and theorized about which character was the murderer. Brooks then added suspects throughout the novel and threw red herrings into the reader’s path.

In keeping with the northeast Alabama setting, Brooks crafted each narrators’ dialects. He said, “It’s the intentional misuse of grammar to where people get it but it’s not a distraction.”

He aimed to make the setting timeless. Explaining that the story has the feel of being before the era of cellphones, Brooks added that some corners of rural Alabama/Georgia are like a portal to the past, so the story could take place in almost any year from the last seven or so decades.

Brooks also wanted re-readers to uncover more layers with further trips through the book because he enjoys books that have layers to piece together with multiple reads.

One challenge in writing is how to keep readers interested. The answer, Brooks says, is pacing and pruning. “If you read your own work enough—and read it honestly—you realize what you need to cut for pacing. One of my goals was to make every chapter my favorite chapter, with no filler chapters and no real lulls. I feel like I succeeded in this.”

As for the title, Shakespeare’s “King Lear” uses the line “laying autumns dust,” and it struck Brooks as an intriguing title. It evokes a hot, dry summer and the dust kicked up from country roads, and he included dust imagery throughout the book.

Writing the book was a blast for Brooks, but finding a literary agent was far less delightful. He sent out about 80 queries to literary agents, only two of whom read the manuscript. When Brooks was on the verge of choosing the self-publishing route, a friend connected him with Co-Pilot Publishing (copilotbooks.org), a small, family-run company.

With the right publisher, editor, and graphic designer now behind him, Brooks enjoyed the final push to publication. He is thankful for support from Trenton, Ider, Fort Payne, and beyond. Friends of friends and friends of relatives have read his book, and Brooks reflected, “There are so many ways you can spend your free time and millions of books to choose from. For anyone to read a book by someone they don’t know means a lot.”

In the future, Brooks would love to write more books, saying, “I can’t think of a better lifestyle than that of a writer.” He has several other short stories he could expand, and while the thought of starting the long writing journey again seems daunting, he reminds himself that “Laying Autumn’s Dust” came from a short story which all started with one sentence. He wrote that very first line several decades ago, and it’s now a line in his first published novel.

“Laying Autumn’s Dust” is available on Amazon and at McBride’s Bookstore.