photograph by chip chockley
“I’ve always been a really big reader,” Kristy Dallas Alley says, laughing. It’s no wonder, then, that she has written herself an undoubtedly literary life. She has taught English before, and now works as a high school librarian and is married to Bluff City-based author (and former Memphis magazine contributor) Richard J. Alley. Most important, though, she just released her debut novel, The Ballad of Ami Miles, via Swoon Reads, a subsidiary of Macmillan Publishing. For the lifelong fan of fiction, the release of her (exceptional) debut marks a major milestone.
“In middle school, there was a period where I was reading a book a day, kind of to the exclusion of all else,” Alley remembers. “I wouldn’t really do my schoolwork, so I was grounded all the time. Then when I was grounded I couldn’t leave my bedroom, so I would read just constantly.”
The Writing Life
As previously mentioned, Alley works as a high school librarian, which has helped to keep her finger on the pulse of what’s popular in Young Adult fiction (or YA, as it’s called in the publishing industry). It’s both a help and a hindrance, she explains. “YA is a very different kind of publishing space than adult literature. So in some ways it’s helped me to stay immersed in that world, and in some ways it can be intimidating. It can be hard to push past the idea and the pressure of what is selling in the market in YA right now,” she says. It’s about striking a balance between what’s marketable in a genre that turns more quickly than most to chase hot trends, and writing the story she wants to write. The question is, she says, “Is there a way to make those two things meet in the middle?”
Publishing a book demands that a writer balance creativity and storytelling with timing and business savvy. “In YA there’s a lot of things focused around your debut year, and you’re in a debut group. I’m in a debut group with a lot of young writers who are really shooting for the moon. They want to be able to make a career out of it and quit their day job, and you see a lot of sort of crashed dreams by the end of a debut year,” Alley says, admitting that, for her, it is more about seeing the story she’s held in her head fully realized in the real world. “In reality very few writers are going to become that rock-star household name.”
In the end, what it all comes down to is this, Alley sums up: “Am I trying to sell a book or am I trying to tell a story? If I were only trying to sell a book, I would think the pressure would be overwhelming.”
In a career path littered with the rejected manuscripts of would-be writers, Alley says the thing itself has to be its own reward. Of course, it does help to have someone who has done it as your partner, because then they understand the commitment and work it takes to bring an imaginary world into our own. Not only is one’s partner more understanding if they have also traveled the writer’s road, they can help with plotting, editing, and untangling tricky passages. It’s a busy life, balancing four children, two careers, and multiple manuscripts, but being able to bounce ideas off each other helps. Richard and Kristy have discussed their fictional worlds on long car trips, on walks, and at the dinner table.
Alley says that adds another layer to the relationship, one they had to learn to navigate. “I’m such an English teacher and an editor. He learned to tell me, ‘Right now I just want you to tell me if it’s good or bad.’” Alley continues: “At some point I’ll proofread the manuscript. I’m the grammarian. I mean, he’s not terrible at grammar, but I know all the little nitpicky rules you wouldn’t know unless you taught seventh-grade English.
“You gotta get down in there with the red pen sometimes,” Alley adds, laughing too.
The Ballad of Ami Miles
Alley’s debut is a dystopian YA bildungsroman (or coming-of-age tale). Think Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, but far more hopeful.
photograph by chip chockley
In The Ballad of Ami Miles, America has been laid low by the scourge of infertility. The infertility was caused by a virus, and there was some immunity to it, meaning that children are still born, albeit rarely. Ami’s mother (who has been missing for years) and aunts were able to conceive. Of course, that makes Ami an asset — and some, among them even her family, cannot help but see the 16-year-old girl as little more than a baby-making factory, instead of a fully fledged human with her own hopes, dreams, and desires.
Ami lives in the Heavenly Shepherd compound run by her grandfather, Solomon Miles, an evangelical true believer who is all too ready to sacrifice Ami’s freedom on the altar of the greater good. When Solomon invites a man to the compound to impregnate Ami, one of her aunts resolves to help her escape. “[Ami’s aunt] reveals to Ami that she knows where her mother might be, and she and the aunt and uncle conspire to help Ami run away in search of her mother,” Alley explains. At the time she leaves, Ami thinks it will be a simple thing to find her mother. Of course, that would be an awfully short story.
There are twists and turns as Ami escapes the compound and is thrust, for the first time, into the wider world. “When Ami gets around people her own age for the first time, she actually falls for a girl,” Alley says. “She didn’t even know that was a thing that could happen. So she has to face a big decision between does she have an obligation to her family to do what they have trained her and raised her to believe is her destiny, or does she have a right to choose a different kind of life than she ever imagined she could have.” The Ballad of Ami Miles touches on many contemporary social issues in this way and does so in a way that feels instantly relatable. Who hasn’t felt tugged in two different directions, especially as a teenager, when so many of life’s big decisions loom large?
“Until I ran, I was always the smallest person in my world, and what I knew about the outside of myself was no more than could fit in the palm of my hand,” Alley writes in The Ballad of Ami Miles. Though the world of the book is clearly divergent from today’s reality, Alley expertly conjures the feeling of being a teenager — struggling under the weight of others’ expectations, let loose into a world that is at once exhilarating and confusing and not entirely like the descriptions of it passed down by forebears. It’s a welcome addition to the contemporary YA canon, a book with something to say and a story that compels the reader to keep turning pages.
It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
The author says one review called Ami Miles “positive post-apocalyptic fiction,” a summing up that she could approve of.
“I used to like the hopefulness of it,” Alley says of the apocalyptic fiction sub-genre. Then, she says, “It became this big thing after The Hunger Games.” She says she appreciated the aspect of characters living a life that is nothing like what we see as normal but somehow persevering. Now, in the post-Hunger Games world (and a world that seems to look increasingly like the dystopian landscape of that series), novels in that vein tend to focus more on the systems of control than on the characters who inhabit them. Alley, though, wanted to write something inspirational, something in which the setting serves a purpose — to spur the protagonist on to strive to overcome.
The idea for The Ballad of Ami Miles, though, is rooted in character. Driving to Panama City Beach for vacation, the Alleys would pass an abandoned trailer dealership between Birmingham and Jasper, Alabama. The scene looked so desolate, Alley couldn’t help seeing it as some post-apocalyptic landscape — and wondering who might be hardy enough to make a life there. Ami’s strength of character and perseverance serve her well in the world outside Heavenly Shepherd as she is forced to challenge the beliefs she’s been indoctrinated with. Sometimes, she finds, the hardest task is to love oneself, to give permission to grow and try and fail and, in doing so, become the truest version of oneself.
Because of the pandemic, The Ballad of Ami Miles, originally slated to be released this spring, was postponed and published on December 1st. Autographed copies are available from Burke’s Book Store.
