Author Taylor Brown continues to put his heart out for everyone to see with 'Wingwalkers'

Even after more than a decade of writing, Georgia’s 2021 Literary Fiction Author of the Year, Taylor Brown, still lives the high-risk, low-security lifestyle of many creatives. With no steady job or any entailing benefits, Brown pours his heart into novels with no guaranteed outcome.

This dynamic, which prompted him to move to Savannah for greater support in 2019, is precisely the energy that fuels his latest novel, “Wingwalkers.”

“You're literally putting your heart out there on a wing for everyone to see. You're taking something that means a hell of a lot to you, that you are usually dredging out of your soul … and then putting it out there for everyone to have an opinion about,” Brown said. “I felt like there was this parallel of kind of being out on the wing.”

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Brown’s fifth novel, released in April, tells an intertwined narrative of an airplane daredevil couple traversing America during the Great Depression against the life of novelist William Faulkner. Brown based the story on a real-life experience Faulker had with a similar couple during New Orleans’s 1934 Mardi Gras celebration.

Along the novel’s seven-year formation, Brown, now 39, organically discovered an affinity in how daredevils and authors both “live on a wing and a prayer.”

"All of everything I've built is from me with a laptop in a coffee shop somewhere,” he said, later adding, "It is nerve-wracking and exhilarating at the same time.”

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Brown, who punctuates his sentences with frequent hand gestures, grew up on the Georgia Coast as an incessant storyteller. In the summer of 2005, following his graduation from the University of Georgia, Brown committed himself to writing full-time and moved to Buenos Aires in pursuit of an environment reminiscent of 1920s Paris.

Homesickness and financial strain pushed him home eight months later, and his first two manuscripts will never see the light of day.

Brown is currently writing his seventh manuscript and just submitted his sixth in mid-July to St. Martin’s Press in New York City, which has published all of his books.

Brown described the writing process as equal parts perseverance and faith in his voice and stories as an author. That faith, he said, is akin to nighttime highway driving.

“You can only see 500 feet ahead, but you can get the whole way there,” Brown said, attributing the metaphor to E.L. Doctorow. “We can have these great plans of where everything's going to go … and usually it doesn't work out that way. Not knowing how things are going to work out is, to me, both in life and in writing, one of the great rewards because it is [a] mystery. It is a path of discovery.”

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Across his body of work, reviews have highlighted Brown’s gorgeous descriptions of Southern terrain, economical prose, and complex character plots. Kirkus Reviews said Brown’s debut novel “Fallen Land” — a Civil War tragedy — embodied “American literature at its best.”

Brown supports himself by writing in other capacities, saying it keeps writing novels enjoyable. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of BikeBound, an online motorcycle news and culture publication. Across Instagram and Facebook, Bikebound is nearing 950,000 followers.

Brown also writes the occasional essay for various online publications. At the end of June, he published an article in The Bitter Southerner on the natural history of Georgia’s blackwater rivers, calling for better environmental protections. A lover of nature, Brown carries a tattoo of a swallow-tailed kite on his left shoulder, his favorite bird.

However, fiction remains Brown’s primary focus, which he described as a lonely endeavor. Over the coming years, he is hopeful his growing readership will bring more stability.

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“The publishing industry is hard. We as writers still get rejected … even though we’ve been published before. That doesn’t get talked about a lot; it absolutely still happens,” Brown said. “You, in some ways, are living on a little bit of a knife edge it sometimes feels like because … there’s not a lot of margin for error in the industry.”

Brown advised newer authors to not wait around for inspiration to strike, but to sit down in their writing chairs and keep faith in themselves.

“I think that a lot of times, both in life and in writing, there are a ton of parallels. We sit around and think too much instead of getting in the chair and doing,” Brown said. “You'd learn a hell of a lot just by doing it. And things tend to work out just by doing it.”

Find "Wingwalkers" at both The Book Lady Bookstore and E. Shaver Booksellers.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah GA author Taylor Brown on new book, Wingwalkers