Writer and native queer Kentuckian Garth Greenwell won this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel “Small Rain“. Though winning might be a surprise, for him, this award isn’t really a career-defining moment. “What it means is that the jury was in the mood for my book,” he gratefully and laughingly put it in an exclusive interview with Queer Kentucky.

“I don’t think anybody expected that “Small Rain” would win,” he explained. His debut and widely popular 2016 novel, What Belongs to You, was a finalist for the same prize but didn’t finish. “I had kind of convinced myself that I would never get one of these big prizes.” 

“I really do believe that prizes don’t mean anything objective about the value of the work. You know, I think the greatest living American writer is Frank Bidart, and he didn’t win a major prize until his late 70s. But he was writing groundbreaking work for half a century at that point.”

All three of Greenwell’s lyrical novels focus on the same queer protagonist in different contexts and life stages, from cruising the bathrooms of Bulgaria to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Small Rain” is different, not least of which because it was the first time Greenwell sat down knowing he was writing a novel. 

Of his novels, “Small Rain” is the most constrained in setting but most imaginatively expansive. The plot is spent over 12 days where the main character is confined to a hospital bed and has only his mind to explore—a constraint Greenwell explores thoroughly. 

The pandemic and the dysfunction of America’s healthcare system haunt him while he explores how we make meaning from art, sex, and life. “It was exciting to think about this character cut off from sex, what has been a primary motor of his life. He compares it to flipping off a switch: who would I be without desire?”

The Orange County Review’s critic called Greenwell a “master sensualist” because of his sexy and physical writing, both in subject and style. I couldn’t help but mention this quote to Greenwell, who said he should get that phrase on a t-shirt.

“Writing is an activity that engages the passions, including corporeal passions,” he continued. “Part of this is having been trained as a musician. You know your instrument is your body, you become very aware of how your mouth moves when you’re making language. I think there’s a relationship between the shapes of sentences and even the physical experience of sex.”

Though Greenwell is drawn to constraints like those of “Small Rain,” he says, “my next book will not involve someone in bed for 12 days. But I’m very drawn to art that feels that someone has taken a certain amount of material and they’re just going to squeeze it until they get absolutely everything out of it.” 

Greenwell was far from unrecognized before Small Rain’s big award. “What Belongs to You” was even called “the first great novel of 2016” in Publisher’s Weekly. 

“The resonance of ‘What Belongs to You’ was a big surprise,” Greenwell said. He toured the book for almost 2 years, during which he was sometimes asked to speak about his art as a queer representative and as an activist. 

“I really wasn’t prepared for that. I think the role of an artist and the role of an activist are distinct roles. And I feel a lot of urgency around protecting my art from any sense of that kind of responsibility, of a certain kind of representation. I actually think that’s death for the kind of moral and potentially political work art can do. I think real art is, in fact, sort of allowing oneself to be moved by urges that are beneath intention, urges that can only ever be irresponsible.”

Greenwell now lives in Iowa City and New York, but he was born and grew up in Louisville. “I lived in Kentucky until I was 16, through the AIDS crisis, pre-Internet, and I really felt that, if I stayed, I would die. And I think that I was right. My relationship to Kentucky has kind of defined my whole life, in part because from 16 on, I very much had a sense of my life as being one in flight from Kentucky.”

One of his first escapes, to Bulgaria, was the subject of his first novel. “I was cruising the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture and finding, in this very weird way, in this country where I could barely speak the language when I arrived, I found that the cruising codes were exactly the cruising codes that I knew from Cherokee Park in Kentucky, where I went when I was 13, 14.” 

As he learned the language, he said he had a sense that he was hearing stories he’d heard before. “I was experiencing a world that reminded me in many ways of the world that I had fled.”

In his second novel, he explored what it was like to hear his students in Bulgaria tell him about their own queer experiences. “As these 16, 17 year old kids were telling me their stories, they were, in a sense, telling me my own story.”

At 38, Greenwell came back to Kentucky and, despite thinking he’d known all he could ever possibly want to know about the state, a visit to the University of Louisville’s archives unfolded a history of queer Kentucky life that was inaccessible to him as a teenager. “My whole life up to that point was designed to keep me from accessing that. It was incredibly moving.”

Greenwell’s next planned book is a book of essays, but he hopes to get to Kentucky in his writing soon. “You know, my whole life would have been different if I had had access to the queer history of Kentucky and the sense that queerness is everywhere, including the small town in the middle of the state where my family’s farm was. What I would wish for that queer kid in Kentucky today is an ability or access to this sense that queerness is not something that exists elsewhere.”

“Learn about the place where you are,” he says. “Go wherever life takes you, but don’t feel like I felt, that life is only possible elsewhere. There is a place for you here. Claim it.”

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Purchase “Small Rain,” and follow Greenwell on his Substack.