By Alexis Schaben
University Relations and Marketing
A novel by a Fort Hays State University instructor is the story of a Chinese character attempting to live an American dream.
Cathy Adams, instructor of English, is an American dreamer now living in Chinese culture.
“A Body’s Just as Dead” depicts the 21st-century frustration of small-town families who feel the American dream is in shreds and who resent having to share its remnants with people who “aren’t like us.”
“America exists for me now through a new lens that wasn’t there before I left the country,” said Adams. “’A Body’s Just as Dead’ is one of my first experiences melding those cultures together in a significant way.”
Adams lives in Shenyang, China, where she teaches English at Shenyang Normal University as part of Fort Hays State’s dual program.
The novel, to be released August 2018 by SFK Press, Atlanta, shows a Chinese character becoming a part of an Alabama family. Their life stories intertwine, resulting in a skewed American dream.
“Now I see the American dream damaged deeply by loss and fear – loss of the promise, whether real or imagined, that life was going to give you certain things like security or success, and then fear when you realize that life is not going to be easy and that control is an illusion,” said Adams.
Set in fictional Drayton, Ala., her novel tells the story of a town where manufacturing jobs are replaced by nail salons, bail bonds and pawn shops. Adams created Drayton to reflect her northeastern Alabama hometown, Gadsden.
“I needed a setting that reflected that general area, so I created Drayton as a kind of conglomeration of several places that had ultimately the same geographical and cultural feel as the area I grew up in,” she said.
The Gadsden Times is specifically mentioned more than once in the story. “It is a bit of a running joke among the characters that various family members get mentioned in that newspaper each time they either kill someone or die,” said Adams.
The words “a body’s just as dead” originally comes from a character who is commenting, after someone is killed in the story, on the variety of ways a person can be killed, concluding that it just doesn’t matter because in the end, “a body’s just as dead.”
“When those words came, they jumped at me,” said Adams. “I knew that was the title.”
Her novel was initially inspired by a news story years ago about a shooting in Walmart.
“When I read it I wondered, how does something like this even happen? What kind of person ends up shooting somebody out of rage at a Walmart when all they set out to do was buy some double-A batteries and toilet paper? What has changed in America from when I was growing up?”
“A Body’s Just as Dead” isn’t her first story motivated by Walmart shootings.
“I wrote a short story about a Walmart shooting called ‘Daryl and Pete-O Go to Walmart,’ and after it was published the characters stuck with me. I kept wondering what was happening to average American people that is driving them to so much violence, so I created an entire family around Pete-O and it became the novel ‘A Body’s Just as Dead.’”
Adams wrote her novel in the pre-Trump era, not knowing where it would lead.
“What I could not possibly know at that time was that the growing cultural divide in that era was leading us to where we are now,” she said. “I think this is why ‘A Body’s Just as Dead’ is so timely because it examines a single dysfunctional family (which, by the way, I think all families are in their own ways) at a time before our Trump culture war threw a spotlight on them.”
Adams has also written “This is What It Smells Like,” a story about a man who is diagnosed with cancer and returns to the family he abandoned 25 years earlier to find forgiveness and die in peace. It was published by New Libri Press, Mercer Island, Wash., in 2012.
“I teach writing, so it’s important to me that my students see me as a working writer,” said Adams. “I want them to see that I immerse myself on a daily basis in what I am teaching them to do, and I’m always working to improve my own writing just the way I push them to do with their writing.”
“I love writing and I love to teach writing,” she said.
Before teaching in China for FHSU, Adams lived in Asheville, N.C., for 10 years, teaching at Montreat College, Asheville-Buncombe Community College and the University of North Carolina. She spent 20 years in America writing stories almost exclusively about the south.
Her novel will be available online at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.