An Interview with Derek Davis

“I don’t think about my teacup, I just use it.”

Writing:
Is a way to be somebody, instead of nobody
Helps start the woodstove (when written on paper)
Can drive Derek Davis nuts

Published shortly before his eightieth birthday, Derek Davis’ latest novel, Evolution Unfolding in a Small Town in Western Pennsylvania, is a sprawling, rollicking, phantasmagoric, microcosmic epic concerning how the long-time residents of the rural community of Deffenburg, PA attempt to confront, among other things, a group of black militants, anti-nuke protesters, anti-Hare Krishna cultists, the United States Army, trolls, a newly-transplanted tribe of Mbuti pygmies, wildly and mysteriously fluctuating radiation levels, and the Amish. On the surface, it’s a portrait of a village which has unwittingly come to encompass the entire world, but a world turned on its head. At its heart, though never stated outright save for the title, it really is a book about human and planetary evolution. The novel’s myriad interconnected storylines are deftly held together by Davis’ singular prose, simple but sparkling as it effortlessly glides from folksy rural vernacular and scientific debate, to unexpected internal monologues and slapstick, to the mystical.

Davis’ first published novel, Gifts of a Dead Man (2011), which he describes as “Midwestern magical realism,” is an occasionally Surrealist noir-ish mystery about the efforts to uncover the identity of a stranger who drops dead in the parking lot of a roadside diner in southern Missouri. His second, No Bike (2017), is a violent and nihilistic biker revenge novel, though that leaves it sounding much more genre-specific than it actually is. And in Back Alleys (2018), he gathers together several decades worth of kaleidoscopic short stories which run the spectrum from science fiction and fantasy to farce. But lurking behind them all was Evolution, the novel he’s been working on for some forty years now, and it shows. Like Joyce or Pynchon or Gaddis, beneath the raucous humor he has packed a lifetime’s worth of experience, the endless vagaries of the human condition with all its messy foibles, into the novel’s five-hundred pages.

Davis was born in NYC in 1939, but would spend most of the next sixty years in Philadelphia, most of those on baring St. in the funky West Philly countercultural enclave of Powelton village. From the early Eighties through the mid-Nineties, he was on staff at Philly’s first alternative weekly, The Welcomat, initially as entertainment editor, then as editor-in-chief. Under his guidance, the paper was irreverent, funny, iconoclastic, a little sloppy, and always unpredictable, a bit like the man himself. After leaving The Welcomat (now called Philadelphia Weekly...