"...ALMOST EIGHTY THOUSAND WORDS TO FIND THAT TRUTH...": AN INTERVIEW WITH BROILER'S ELI CRANOR

Broilers. Eli Cranor's latest rural noir, looks at the lives of two couples, one working in a chicken processing plant, the other a manager in that plant and his wife. When friction between the men leads to a crime, events veer toward tragedy for everyone, Mr. Cranor was kind enough to talk about the book and his process in general.

SCOTT MONTGOMERY: Broiler is your most straight forward plotting. Did that affect the writing in anyway?

ELI CRANOR: I try not to think in terms of plotting much, but instead more in terms of character. This novel has four very distinct characters and it was very important for me to dig as deep as possible into their lives. The plot came as a result of getting to know Luke, Mimi, Edwin, and Gabby.

S.M.: This book convinced me that I could never handle the work Gabby and Edwin do in the chicken plant. What kind of research did you do to capture this?

E.C.: The original idea came from students of mine. I was teaching at an ALE school and had a group of students who were working night shifts at the local chicken plant. Those conversations opened my eyes and made me wonder what it would be like to do that kind of job then come to school in the morning. It was that question that led to me writing the book.

S.M.: What did you want to get across about the lives of the undocumented?

E.C.: My favorite line in the book comes near the end. It goes, "For every American dream there is a corresponding nightmare." It took me almost eighty thousand words to find that truth, to boil it down into nine simple words. But that's it, that's the sum of everything I was trying to say.

S.M.: The two women, Gabby and Mimi, end up becoming the soul of the book. How did you go about constructing them?

E.C.: Henry James once said an author should try to be "One on whom nothing is lost." I think about that line a lot and have done my best to live it. There's no real secret or shortcut to writing across the gender gap, or any gap, really. You just have to write and hope that you've been watching and listening to the people around you, hope that all those details haven't been lost. 

S.M.: How did you decide to make the plant's term for the chickens to be the title?

E.C.: Titles can be tricky. Sometimes I just start writing and the title comes out in the words. Other times, there's a discussion. Titles get tossed around until one sticks. For this novel, Broiler was always the title. It came to me in that early conversation with my students. They just kept saying it, and eventually I thought, Hey, that sounds like a great thriller title. For the longest time, I just had that word—Broiler—and I kept trying to find the story that would live up to such a name.