This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brandon Hobson, whose novel The Devil Is a Southpaw is out today from Ecco. In his preface, the author hints that the book to come is both “a bit of a detective story” and a tall tale of wild proportions. The Devil Is a Southpaw is, ostensibly, not written by Hobson himself but by an eccentric autodidact named Milton Muleborn, who has sent Hobson a manuscript that is by turns maniacal, ingenious, and tragic. Milton’s muse is Matthew Echota, “a cripplingly shy, talented, smart, and handsome” Cherokee teenager who disappears from the Tophet County Juvenile Correctional Facility in 1988. Both Milton and Matthew are budding artists; Milton is so jealous of his friend’s talent that he grows devil horns under his baseball cap. This entanglement of art and friendship with obsession and betrayal is underscored in a hallucinatory episode in which the boys break out of the correctional facility and meet a treacherous, Duran Duran–obsessed Salvador Dalí doppelgänger in the backwoods. Dalí tells them that even in sleep he dreams of painting, his hand trembling “like an addict.” Kirkus Reviews called the book “a rough, deliberately messy tale, revealing the depths of broken childhoods.” Rick Moody wrote, “It’s got a little Cervantes in it, a little Pink Floyd, and a lot of American tragedy.” Brandon Hobson’s previous novels include The Removed (Ecco, 2021) and Where the Dead Sit Talking (Soho Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. Hobson is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University; he also teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation tribe of Oklahoma.
Brandon Hobson, author of The Devil Is a Southpaw. (Credit: Connor Bock)
1. How long did it take you to write The Devil Is a Southpaw?
Around four years, I think.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Doing the artwork from the narrator’s perspective. I wanted Milton’s erratic prose and prolix sentences to show how unhinged and anxious he is. I wrote one chapter as an acrostic spelling out something important to the narrator.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write at home as often as I can. I have kids and do a lot of teaching, so I have to manage my time as best as I can, which means sometimes sitting at the computer early mornings or late nights these days, but I’m always working on something.
4. What are you reading right now?
I’m usually reading several things, most recently my students’ work, Bolano’s stories, Sherwin Bitsui’s poetry, and Deb Unferth’s amazing forthcoming novel, Earth 7 (Graywolf, June 2026).
5. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The usual distractions: phone, TV, noise, people. I feel like I can’t write in public spaces too well from constantly looking around and watching people. I don’t know how other writers can do it. I have to be alone in a room for the most part.
6. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of The Devil Is a Southpaw?
At some point while drawing and painting and thinking about early drafts, I started seeing more doors open, more possibilities to make this novel as sui generis as possible. The more I thought about the importance of art in this novel, the more excited I felt about including artwork as a lens to helping me understand the narrator.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Both were very supportive about discussing the importance of the institutional, racial, and generation trauma in this novel, in addition to the art, and both were of course brilliant at line editing, especially early on.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Devil Is a Southpaw, what would you say?
I’m always thinking about pushing the idea of what a novel can be and was inspired to use art in this novel as N. Scott Momaday (the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize) used in his poetry and work. In addition to the drawings and paintings, I also used a photograph, thinking about Sebald’s work. I wish art was used more in fiction. My hope is that the art in this novel serves as a mode alongside the narrator’s erratic, prolix prose that conveys his anxiety and envy in Part 1 before his much more reliable retelling of events many years later in the Part 3.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of The Devil Is a Southpaw?
The Devil Is a Southpaw was inspired by my experience working with incarcerated youth and thinking about generational, racial, and institutional trauma of particularly Native American youth. I also wanted to include my artwork from the perspective of an unhinged, obsessive white narrator who provides the unreliable account of his incarceration and jealousy of a Cherokee artist he grew up with. Drawing and painting for this novel was especially a big part of thinking about these things.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
N. Scott Momaday said to use fiction to reach a higher truth. How can we reach a higher truth in storytelling and art? At a time when there’s so much threat against funding for the arts in our country, making art right now feels more important than ever.
