A. My grandparents had a farm in Arkansas shortly after World War II, and I grew up hearing the family stories about it. It was a primitive place, an unpainted shotgun shack with no electricity, no running water and no telephone. They named it “Mudbound” because whenever it rained, the roads would flood and they’d be stranded for days. Though they’d only lived there for a year, my mother, aunt and grandmother spoke of Mudbound often, laughing and shaking their heads by turns, depending on whether the story in question was funny or horrifying. Often they were both. I loved listening to them, even the ones I’d heard dozens of times before. They were a peephole into a strange and marvelous world; a world full of contradictions, of terrible beauty. The stories revealed things about my family, especially about my grandmother, who was the heroine of most of them for the simple reason that when calamity struck, my grandfather was invariably elsewhere. To my mother and aunt, their year on the farm was a grand adventure; and indeed, that was how all their stories portrayed it. It was not until much later that I realized what an ordeal that year must have been for my grandmother ­ a city-bred woman with two young children ­ and that, in fact, these were stories of survival. I began the novel (without knowing I was doing any such thing) in graduate school. One of my teachers asked us to write a few pages in the voice of a family member, and I decided to write about the farm from my grandmother’s point of view. But what came out was not a merry adventure story, but something darker and more complex. What came out was, “When I think of the farm, I think of mud.”... (Read the full interview.)