Sheree Renée Thomas

A conversation with the Memphis author, poet, and editor.

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This spring, Sheree Renée Thomas released Nine Bar Blues, a new collection of short stories, via Jack White’s Nashville-based Third Man Books, the literary arm of the Raconteurs and the White Stripes rocker’s Third Man Records label. Just a month or so after the release of Nine Bar Blues came the publication of The Big Book of Modern Fantasy from bigwig sci-fi editors Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. The collection includes a short story by Thomas. She is the author of Shotgun Lullabies: Poems & Stories and the editor of the critically acclaimed collections Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. Thomas was also a recipient of a 2017 Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Me and My Music

Music is central to Nine Bar Blues. It informs the title, the prose in its lyricism, and it acts as a recurring motif that ties the collection together. The pages practically snap, crackle, and pop — like old deep-cuts vinyl on a turntable — with the sounds of the South, from country to blues to gospel to funk. And it’s in the author’s embrace of multiple genres that she stands out as a keen observer of the multihued mosaic that makes up Memphis’ culture.

“I didn’t set out initially to write a book where each story has some exploration of a genre, but I realized that was what I was doing. And for me music is such a big part of my everyday world. I was born into a family that truly, truly loves music,” Thomas says. “I think my first memory is probably hearing if not Led Zeppelin, then hearing Parliament Funk in the house.”

“I like to say that I’m writing on the borders of the New Weird South, which is connected to the bridge to the Old.”

About “Head Static,” one of the Nine Bar Blues’ stories in which the musical motif is most readily apparent, Thomas says, “I was thinking about what it might be like if your very existence depended on the ability to experience new music. … That constant innovation that humans have in expressing themselves through rhythm and tone.” Laughing, she describes finding a world-saving song like some hidden treasure out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, adding, “I also wanted to play on the quest story.”

“Claire had spent decades foraging through black vinyl, seeking black gold, the sound, the taste of freedom,” Thomas writes in “Head Static.” For Claire, the story’s protagonist, music is a sword and a shield, a way to connect and a path to forgetting. She and Animus are immortal alien music lovers on a quest to find The Great Going Song, “the one that captured the true spirit of a world, its story, its many stories.” They work as DJs, searching for songs to sample, and driving through deserts and rain, in search of underwater pyramids and ancient melodies of the future.

Writing on the Borders of the New Weird South

The eclecticism of Nine Bar Blues makes it refreshing, especially when compared with national depictions of the South. (Remember that ridiculous and short-lived Memphis Beat show where Jason Lee played a cop whose side hustle was as an Elvis impersonator? Yeah.) Thomas’ genius is simply in tapping into the already existing strangeness.

“I like to say that I’m writing on the borders of the New Weird South,” she explains, “which is connected to the bridge to the Old.”

“So many wonderful, truly iconic American contributions have come out [of Memphis and the South] that couldn’t have come from anywhere else. It’s just this strange alchemy of our dark and bright wondrous history and the way we have related to the geography here. Just the music in our language that comes from all of the different cultures that tried to carve out a living out of the land here,” Thomas says. “It’s not a static thing, what we do here. It’s always changing and moving.”

Thomas explains that the New Weird South is a body of work that is interstitial, combining speculative fiction with a Southern Gothic feel. It’s a subset of the New South, a literary movement away from the old “moonlight and magnolias and sticky, sultry, summer nights” clichés. Instead, in embracing the full spectrum of the Southern experience, the movement explores a more authentic, wilder, and weirder landscape.

“You hear echoes, some of our greatest hits, of course, Faulkner, Walker,” Thomas says. She notes that stories in the New Weird South mode are not necessarily linear, sometimes approaching their truth in a series of concentric circles. “It takes us in a space that is not rooted in the traditional modes of storytelling. There’s more space for strangeness,” Thomas continues. “It’s almost like a Southern magical realism, or the marvelous real.”

A Lifelong Love of Literature

Along with references to P-Funk and magical realism, Thomas mentions a multitude of writers and books in our conversation. “I have always been a reader. My mom taught me to read early,” Thomas says. Her father was in the Air Force, so the family traveled often, before resettling in Memphis when Thomas was 7 years old. Reading was a way to make sure a young Sheree would be caught up wherever they landed next — and to ensure she had easy access to entertainment to keep her occupied.

“The house was full of books,” she remembers. Her grandparents were great storytellers, too. “They were always sharing these amazing stories from their lives, which seemed like foreign lands to me because they were so different,” she says. “I learned about these different things. I learned about tent city when they were trying to vote and got kicked off the land.”

“My parents were big science-fiction fans,” Thomas recalls. “I found my way to Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov.” She particularly liked the Bradbury stories set in small towns, with the mythical hidden everywhere between a thin veneer of the mundane. That and Bradbury’s poetic prose surely influenced the speculative fiction Thomas would go on to one day collect in magazines and write herself.

“I remember the very first time they let me get a library card. It was at the Hollywood branch of the library,” Thomas says. “They would hand me science-fiction stuff because they knew I liked the scary stuff, the strange stuff.” Formative time spent at an Air Force base in White Sands, New Mexico, driving past replicas of rockets and surrounded by snow-white sands, which Thomas describes as looking like an “alien landscape,” surely made the science-fiction genre more appealing — and lent credence to the idea that the marvelous and the mundane were separated by the thinnest of barriers.

In high school and college, Thomas attempted to turn her studies toward more practical career paths — even considering chemistry. “The lab cured me of that,” the author laughs. But an encouraging creative nonfiction professor and a stint working at an independent bookstore helped push her to follow her passions.

“At the time I had like 15 jobs,” she explains. “I was valedictorian in high school, but I was also one of the few young women who was already a mom.” One of those jobs was at Gallery 250, a bookstore and art gallery on South Main, “which was like heaven because I was surrounded by books and art.”

There Thomas met fellow writer Jamey Hatley, a coworker who gave her an issue of Black Enterprise magazine that focused on women publishers. For Thomas, it was eye-opening. So, she says, “I made a plan. I was like, ‘I’m going to New York.’”

While in New York, she worked at Forbidden Planet, a sci-fi bookstore across from The Strand. “I did that and every job you could think of when it comes to writing in a book publishing house.” She wrote jacket copy, drafts of sales copy, reviewed books, and did proofreading and copy-editing. She was totally immersed in a world of words.

After the Blues

Now, though, Thomas is back in the Bluff City. “I’m back home, and I don’t think I would have written quite the same collection if I wasn’t home,” she says, suggesting that her roots in Memphis and her time away — both as a child and working in New York — gave her perspective on her hometown.

As for what’s next after Nine Bar Blues, Thomas has a packed dance card. Along with Memphis music historian extraordinaire Robert Gordon and singer-songwriter Alison Mosshart, she will host a Zoom author event from City Lights Bookstore and Third Man Books at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, October 21st. Thomas contributed a short story to the forthcoming collection Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire, a collection of vampire-themed stories of the African diaspora. If that’s not enough, Thomas is co-hosting the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony with Malka Older, where both authors will be special Guests of Honor. And she was recently honored as a finalist for the 2020 World Fantasy Award in the “Special Award — Professional” category for her contributions to the genre.

Even looking at a partial list of the imaginative author’s accomplishments, it’s clear that she has already left a lasting mark on genre fiction. Dabbling as she does in science-fiction, fantasy, and horror, Thomas’ strength is her versatility. She embraces the idiosyncrasies of Memphis and the Delta, wraps them in the cloak of fantasy, writing with musicality that makes her prose read like myths in the making. In her fiction, other realms merge with our world, and immortal record collectors and dancing dragons hidden in crystal computer caves are as real and immediate as anything in the waking world.

Perhaps, for some other hopeful young writer, Dark Matter will, like rocket replicas jutting out of white desert sands, point the way to the stars. Maybe some other little girl will see herself in Nine Bar Blues and, in doing so, realize she, too, has stories to tell. Stories that need to be heard.

Find out more at shereereneethomas.com.