Mississippi Expat: Robert Busby
"Being raised in rural Mississippi can come with its traumas, but it also gave me a unique specificity and sensory experience that informs so much of how I see and interact with the world."
What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Though he now lives in Memphis, Tennessee, fiction writer Robert Busby still feels deeply connected to the hill country of North Mississippi where he grew up. Mississippi is, in fact, the inspiration for the setting of Bodock, Robert’s forthcoming collection of stories, which takes place in the fictitious town of Bodock in Claygardner County, Mississippi. Robert writes: “Growing up in a place like Mississippi—and Pontotoc especially—will give you all kinds of stories and strange, curious material to work with.” Today Robert shares the ways how Mississippi has contributed to his identity as a writer.
Where are you from?
I was born in Tupelo but grew up in Pontotoc. At eighteen, I moved to Oxford to attend the University of Mississippi. Except for brief stints in Colorado and Chicago, I resided in Oxford until I was twenty-four, at which point I moved to Miami, Florida.
When did you move to Memphis? Why did you move there?
In May of 2011, Jorden (my wife) and I moved to Memphis from Miami, where we’d lived for about three years while I completed my MFA at Florida International University.
We actually left Miami expeditiously, not because of any legal trouble we’d gotten into down in South Florida but rather to make it back home in time for my grandmama’s funeral in Baldwyn, Mississippi. And because we couldn’t afford to fly home and then back to Miami later to retrieve our belongings, we had to make a single trip. Our last night in Miami, we threw a going-away party at our apartment to say goodbye to close friends and serve up all the booze in our fridge and cabinet (to lighten the load and get better gas mileage on the way home, I reckon). I vaguely remember one fellow writer (who will remain anonymous) pulling up in a red Ferrari that I presume they’d stolen—who would rent a $200,000 sports car to a poet?—in order to stop at various, random places around Miami throughout the day to read verse out of a megaphone as part of the first O, Miami. Anyway, Jorden and I slept all of about three to four hours, woke up hungover, spent all day haphazardly packing a U-Haul in the South Florida humidity, and then drove twenty hours straight to Memphis. We actually went through Birmingham, Alabama, a day or two after the tornadoes devastated that side of the state.
All that said, we intended the move to Memphis to be transient. Jorden grew up there, and the state of Tennessee still considered her a resident, so she could get in-state tuition for nursing school. After she graduated, I’d planned on getting my PhD (with a creative writing emphasis), which no school in Memphis offered. But we had one kiddo (Rock) by then and another on the way (Win, eventually). Jorden’s folks lived in Memphis. Mine were still in Pontotoc, just shy of two hours away. We had a network of friends here. So we’ve stuck around.
At one time, Pontotoc was home. I had a safe childhood in a stable, supportive household. But as a sensitive, creative kid who leaned liberal but wanted desperately to fit in, I didn’t know whether I’d ever feel wholly comfortable there as I got older.
What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?
Whoa—this is a difficult question, and I’ve tried any number of ways to back my way into it. Here’s about my best attempt:
For me, home is many things and many places. Home is where and when I don’t feel lost. It’s a feeling, a sense of security and stability and peace, a temporal chapter within a geographic space where I’ve created memories that root and tether me and keep me grounded as I continue moving through the time and space of my brief existence. Home is basically wherever I’ve been able to find and cultivate family and community.
At one time, Pontotoc was home. I had a safe childhood in a stable, supportive household. But as a sensitive, creative kid who leaned liberal but wanted desperately to fit in, I didn’t know whether I’d ever feel wholly comfortable there as I got older. So probably when I think of home in Mississippi now, I think of my time in Oxford, which is where I felt like I was able to start coming into my own. But I’d also grown up just down the highway. For the most part, the first twenty-four years of my life were lived within a thirty-mile radius. So when it came time for grad school, I decided I wanted to get out of Mississippi for a while and landed in Miami—not South Beach but on the mainland, just on the southern edge of Little Haiti—and was welcomed into about the most inclusive community of writing pals I’d ever known or have since. So Miami will always be a kind of home as well.
Right now, home is writing and drinking coffee at 4:30 in the morning as the robins, cardinals, mockingbirds, chickadees, and mourning doves make a racket in our backyard and this neck of the world shakes itself awake. It’s sitting out on the back patio in the middle of the day to calm the anxiety of an oxymoronically stressful work-from-home job. It’s Sunday evening messing around on our Weber charcoal grill, fixing burgers or steaks or pork tenderloin or lamb arayes while Jorden (the true culinary genius of the family) stirs cocktails and preps sides and our kids tear ass around our small backyard.
What do you miss most about Mississippi?
Although most of us have scattered now, I miss my pals from Oxford. I miss Ajax and Square Books and boiled peanut stands just outside of town and fried chicken-on-a-stick at the Chevron just off the Square. I miss Hot Dog Records and Parrish’s, although they were both pretty much gone before I left Oxford. I miss the pace of life and the quiet. The easy access to the woods. Memphis has some fantastic urban parks like Shelby Farms and Overton Park, which is in Midtown, our neighborhood. We also have Shelby Forest in Meeman-Shelby State Park and kayaking on the Wolf River and the Ghost River, a bottomland section of the Wolf that meanders through hardwood forests and swamps. But I sometimes just miss the trees and vines encroaching on nearly every inhabited space and the ability to walk twenty yards out my back door and be in a sanctuary of trees. The sound of crickets and cicadas and song birds not just in the morning and evening but throughout the day. The hum of nature versus the drone of a moderately large river city.
I sometimes just miss the trees and vines encroaching on nearly every inhabited space and the ability to walk twenty yards out my back door and be in a sanctuary of trees. The sound of crickets and cicadas and song birds not just in the morning and evening but throughout the day.
How have you cultivated community in Memphis?
I can be a bit of a misanthrope, so seeking out community isn’t exactly a strong suit. Thankfully, we’ve landed in places with built-in communities. In Miami, I had the MFA program at FIU, and Jorden and I would often host impromptu gatherings of writers and friends at our apartment. A couple of fellow writers and I started The Honest Liars Club, a student reading series that brought the writing community together once or twice a month. And the inclusive folks in the Miami Poetry Collective were kind enough to let me tag along even though I wrote almost exclusively fiction and was barely a mediocre poet.
Being from Memphis, Jorden already had a network before we landed here. I’m grateful to her intelligent, clever, creative, artistic, humorous pals for adopting me without too much trepidation. I wouldn’t say I’ve found a strong writing community in Memphis, but I’m surrounded by better readers than I am, so I’m probably smarter for having been around these folks I’ve come to call pals. And I’ve got an awesome family whom I enjoy watching grow up in Memphis and interact with the world—even if that means I have to present myself as an extroverted introvert to make friends with, or at least be civil around, the parents of their classmates and teammates.
Do you still feel rooted to Mississippi?
Yeah, I think so. For the gist of north Mississippi, Memphis is the nearest true metropolis, so I’m a stone’s throw or fence post toss from my home and family and in even closer proximity in my mind. And so much of growing up there shaped who I am and the way I think today.
I guess what I mean is that, on the one hand, being raised in rural Mississippi can come with its traumas, but it also gave me a unique specificity and sensory experience that informs so much of how I see and interact with the world. I can still taste Mama Gladys’s rolled-thin dumplings or biscuits made from scratch every morning and sorghum molasses from the Amish community. Can still hear the horse apples drop from the bodock tree like the thundering fists of an angry, evangelical god against the tin roofs of homemade bird coops and the metal patio furniture in my granny’s backyard and the fuzzy, low-fi way heavy metal albums recorded from CDs to cassettes sound on stereos my more mechanically inclined friends had wired to their four-wheelers. I remember trying beer for the first time in eighth grade when two friends and I rode serendipitously up on exactly three (unopened) Southpaws that someone had left standing up in a creek so the bottles would stay cool. Getting shot at with rock salt for trespassing on someone else’s property or just rolling a teacher’s yard with toilet paper. Building a cabin in a clearing tucked in the corner of someone else’s property with scrap materials from a nearby industrial park-turned-junkyard.
I don’t think you ever really escape growing up in a place like Mississippi. You haul every bit of that baggage around with you everywhere, for better or worse.
I’ll just say I think I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Growing up in a place like Mississippi—and Pontotoc especially—will give you all kinds of stories and strange, curious material to work with.
What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been there?
In Memphis—and even Mississippi—I’ll sometimes get this incredulous reaction from folks when I tell them I’m from there because my accent isn’t the thick drawl they hear every day. I had a brief fling in high school who broke up with me, probably for any number of reasons, but at least one of them was that I didn’t sound “country” enough. (We all have our deal breakers, right?)
Outside of the Mid-South, though, folks are pretty good about guessing, within one or two states, where I hail from—and that’s when the weird questions and observations can begin, some endearing and others aggravating.
I think the assumptions that infuriate me the most are the asinine posits about Mississippi and its people that I hear from intellectuals in academia, especially outside of the South. In a graduate-level course on Modernism at FIU, we had a visiting professor from Chicago sit in and lead one of our class sessions. At the time, we were studying The Sound and the Fury, which I was pumped about because I’m a fan and had my marked-up Modern Library hardcover copy in tow, the one from an undergraduate Faulkner seminar at the University of Mississippi where Professor Pilkington had shown us how to annotate all the temporal landmarks in Benjy’s section that signified to what time period the narrator had traveled in his mind.
But instead of an insightful lecture or enlightening discussion, etc., the visiting professor began with some remark about Mississippians still marrying their first cousins—assuming or just not giving a shit whether one of the twelve graduate students he was addressing was from the state he was disparaging (which, in his defense, were probably good betting odds in Miami).
How has being from Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?
I probably answered this to some extent in a previous response. So I’ll just say I think I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Growing up in a place like Mississippi—and Pontotoc especially—will give you all kinds of stories and strange, curious material to work with. And it was on the Square Books balcony in Oxford—after I blew through Larry Brown’s Dirty Work in a single afternoon and into the evening, reading the last page within ten minutes of closing—that I, to paraphrase the Southern Baptists I grew up around, gave my life to writing.
I don’t think you ever really escape growing up in a place like Mississippi. You haul every bit of that baggage around with you everywhere, for better or worse.
What’s something that you’ve come to understand about Mississippi by living elsewhere?
I think I probably became acutely aware of the prejudices I grew up around and how those prejudices aren’t at all exclusive to Mississippi. Nearly 63 million Americans in 2016 and over 77 million in 2024 voted for a fascist, would-be dictator who unrepentantly perpetuates and promulgates racist, xenophobic, homophobic ideologies. Mississippi has a population just shy of three million people. In either election, a little over 700,000 votes were Republican and nearly 500,000 went Democrat. Those other 76 million red votes had to come from somewhere.
What baffles me is that, if someone in any town in Mississippi were conducting business similarly to the way our current president has his entire life, every single one of those Republican voters would’ve run him out of their respective county long before the guy could’ve become mayor. I just don’t get it.
On a more positive note, I know the following words didn’t originate in Mississippi, but they get used there a lot, and in all my experience, I have yet to find a more functional or accessible contraction in the English language than ain’t and no more inclusive one than y’all.
Have you ever thought about moving back? What would need to happen in order for you to move back to Mississippi?
I love Mississippi, despite all its faults. I mean, I live in Tennessee now, so it ain’t like I can levy any criticism at my home state that wouldn’t also apply to my current one. I don’t know either of them as humans, but as politicians and so-called leaders, I don’t think I’d describe either Bill Lee or Tate Reeves as humanitarians.
But my family and I don’t actually reside in Tennessee. Or at least that’s the joke: We live in Memphis, which got sent to the corner of the state, one of the only blue beacons in a very large red sea.
So if I were to uproot my family from Tennessee to Mississippi, we’d have to find a place that, at the local level at least, was comparable to what we’ve found in Midtown Memphis. Progressive-leaning schools. Libraries that don’t ban books. A county that at least trends purple. A quirky, inclusive community invested in the arts. Globally represented cuisine. Perhaps a church that doesn’t preach about some fiery hell or that the Bible is inerrant but does believe God—or the Universe, the Cosmos, the Source of All Being, et al.—intends their love for all humans, regardless of race, gender, country of origin, economic status, etc.
I guess if a good college or literary nonprofit in a decent town saw fit to offer me a job, we could make it work in Mississippi.
I love Mississippi, despite all its faults. I mean, I live in Tennessee now, so it ain’t like I can levy any criticism at my home state that wouldn’t also apply to my current one.
Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician you think everyone needs to know about?
I think everyone should associate the name Larry Brown with the Oxford writer (no offense to the basketball coach). An embarrassing fact about me is that I didn’t read Lewis Nordan until John Dufresne at FIU suggested I’d enjoy this surrealist, magic realist, etc., from my home state (thanks to Prof. Dufresne for also introducing me to Donald Harington, who was from Arkansas not Mississippi but deserves a lot of love and a wider readership). Jesmyn Ward has won the National Book Award twice, so obviously folks know her. But I still feel compelled to name Sing, Unburied, Sing as one of my very favorite books.
But I also want to promote Pontotoc specifically, whose cultural, musical, artistic, and literary contributions are sometimes overlooked. I’m a big fan of R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough and fortunately got to watch T. Model Ford play once at Proud Larry’s in Oxford. But I think more folks should know about the Pontotoc native and hill country blues musician, Terry “Harmonica” Bean (shoutout to Fat Possum Records for doing the Lord’s work). Cordell Jackson—iconic Memphis guitarist considered to be the first woman to own her own record label on which she had a hand in nearly every aspect of production and promotion—was born in Pontotoc. “Midnight Train to Georgia” songwriter, Jim Weatherly, hailed from Pontotoc. And Gerry Wilson—author of the novel That Pinson Girl and a story collection, Crosscurrents—is also from my hometown. Pontotoc produced the prolific novelist and short story writer Borden Deal. And all eight feet and two inches of the second tallest professional wrestler in history, Max Edmund Palmer—who performed under the ring name Paul Bunyan—was molded in these red clay hills.
If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?
Public education and universal healthcare seem like the easiest, most popular options. And I’m not fixing to deviate from either. I think vast improvements in both areas would solve a lot of systemic problems at the source. If we could more equitably fund our schools, include more comprehensive art curricula, and teach a more inclusive and accurate history of our country and state, things might just turn around. Young folks might more readily question the ideologies they’d otherwise inherit from previous generations—including parents, family, and friends—and maybe even start voting in their own best interests. Imagine the boom not just in music, film, literature, and art, but also entrepreneurialism, innovation, technology, etc., if you took away the stress of having to find affordable healthcare. And, morally, I one-hundred-percent, whole-heartedly believe that both education and healthcare are basic human rights, regardless of nationality, race, gender, citizenship, immigration status, etc. I mean, Jesus Christ—he believed that, too, y’all.
What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on or something you’re involved in.)
This interview has been super pleasant, and since it coincides with the occasion of my first book release, I will absolutely shamelessly plug Bodock: Stories, which will be published on June 3, 2025, by Hub City Press. (And in case you’re reading this and happen to be an agent, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I’ve also completed a novel—which explores the convergence of two stories in the collection—as well as about a third of another.)
I’d also like to make a case for two possible candidates for a future Rooted interview: Casey Dillard and K. Iver, both originally from Mississippi.
Casey Dillard is an actor, writer, and director also born and raised in Pontotoc. I think she’s currently studying/training/working at Second City in Chicago and has written and starred in a slew of short films as well as the feature-length indie films Driven (2019) and Killer Concept (2021). Both films are delightfully creepy, funny, darkly humorous horror comedies worth an hour and a half of your Saturday afternoon.
K. Iver is an award-winning, nonbinary trans poet from Tupelo. I met them through some mutual friends way back in college. They write these really evocative, accessible, heart-wrenching poems, full of wonder and longing and grief and discovery. K. has received all kinds of top fellowships, and their debut poetry collection, Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed.
I also want to shout out Bookends in Pontotoc. Growing up, I never knew the pleasure of having a bookstore in my hometown, so I’m happy as hell for the folks who get to enjoy more proximate access to literature, literary events, and community programming. Shop your local bookstore, folks.
Robert Busby grew up in the hill country of North Mississippi and has worked as a bandsaw operator, bookseller, copywriter, driving school instructor, prep cook, produce clerk, teacher, and satellite television technician. His debut collection, Bodock: Stories, was awarded the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize and will be published by Hub City Press in June 2025. A graduate of the University of Mississippi, he got his MFA in Fiction from Florida International University, and his stories have appeared in Arkansas Review, Cold Mountain Review, Footnote, Mississippi Noir, PANK, Pleiades, Sou’wester, Surreal South, and others. Currently, he writes, roams, and raises two humans with his wife in Memphis, TN.
One year ago:
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This was such a pleasure to read, start to finish. I particularly love your descriptions of the natural world: "Right now, home is writing and drinking coffee at 4:30 in the morning as the robins, cardinals, mockingbirds, chickadees, and mourning doves make a racket in our backyard and this neck of the world shakes itself awake." And "Can still hear the horse apples drop from the bodock tree like the thundering fists of an angry, evangelical god against the tin roofs of homemade bird coops" - yes!
Nice read. As someone who "can be a bit of a misanthrope" myself and lives much of my life like the back of a Prince album cover, it will be interesting to see how much of Busby's misanthropic self or perspective manifests in Bodock.