What do you get when you marry traditional storytelling with contemporary, queer themes? One answer is Denne Michele Norris’s gripping novel When the Harvest Comes (Random House, 2025). It’s a story about marriage, grief, masculinity, music, and becoming.
In her novel, Norris explores the ways grief can test physical intimacy in a marriage as well as how the weight of losing a parent can distance one from their partner and the world. Finding one’s way back is a long journey for Davis, the novel’s protagonist, but a revelatory one that feels in many ways inevitable.
Norris and I exchanged emails and several messages about father figures, femininity, and finding the perfect title for her novel.
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The Rumpus: At what point in the drafting of this novel did you realize you wanted to write from multiple perspectives?
Denne Michele Norris: I love this question because a little-known fact about me is that point of view is one of my favorite big-picture craft elements. Part of the heart of writing fiction, for me, lies in the very human truth that at the end of the day, no matter how compassionate or empathetic one might be, there are very real limitations to how well we can know another person. We can’t see the world through another person’s eyes or taste a meal through another person’s taste buds. This might sound basic, but our capacity for imagination is boundless—and that’s where there’s some porousness between how different people move through the world. For me, this is perhaps the greatest benefit of reading—seeing, for a time, through someone else’s eyes.
As a writer, I’m always curious about the ways in which people are misaligned in how they might’ve experienced the same moment. So there was never a moment or a time when I thought this novel would be written from only one point of view. For several of the early years, I was just handing out point of views to nearly every character. It was giving Oprah: “You get a point of view, and you get a point of view!” It was chaos, but at one point, there were nine or ten of them.
Rumpus: Chapter six is so well structured. The running formation reveals so much about fatherhood and the Caldwell family. Can you share how that chapter idea came to you?
Norris: When I was in college, I played viola in a string quartet. At the end of the semester, two of us traveled home with a third member of our quartet for a few nights. That first morning, the two of us who were visitors were sitting quietly in the kitchen drinking coffee. Over the course of a half hour, every single person in that family came down to the kitchen as they left for a morning run. All five members of this family very enthusiastically invited us to join them. This was hilarious to me, and in my head, became shorthand for a certain sort of affluent, very liberal, East Coast white family. I shamelessly stole it when I was trying to get to know Everett’s family. I very purposefully masculinized it and ritualized it. It was the key to understanding Everett’s father and to understanding how masculinity worked in that family—and how Everett, in his own way, both manifests that sort of masculinity, or runs toward it, and how he simultaneously runs in the opposite direction. It was great fun to write, and it unlocked so much about the book for me.
Rumpus: Your writing style harkens back to traditional storytelling, yet it deals with defining, contemporary issues. It’s an interesting marriage. Is that an assessment you’d agree with?
Norris: Yes, absolutely. So many of my greatest influences, especially in the earlier years of my writing, were so traditional in their approach and from a time when tradition was prized in the craft of writing. Probably the most influential writers for me from that era are James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, James Salter, and Joan Didion. I’ve always been very interested in more traditional techniques, storytelling structures, and ways to innovate while working within them, especially when writing more contemporary stories. I have a lot of love for the traditional. That said, I’m thinking a bit more expansively as I look ahead, and I’m less interested in using techniques and structures that are based in storytelling traditions that don’t center nonwhite, non-straight, gender nonconforming identities and stories. There’s a time and a place to work within the tradition, but there’s also a time and a place to build a new tradition. And for what it’s worth, I’m not sure you can have one without the other.
Rumpus: Legacy and masculinity are major themes, and the nuances you present on the page are so delicious. Was it satisfying to dissect these constructs, or at times overwhelmingly heavy?
Norris: Thank you! It was definitely all of the above. I find it a bit ironic that I’ve written a novel that deals so intimately with masculinity, simply because if you’d told me twenty years ago that I’d be a novelist, I would’ve assumed I’d write something that centered on women. At that time in my life, I didn’t find masculinity terribly interesting, quite frankly. In some ways, I still don’t. But I do find its challenges, its limitations, and the way America is clinging to it [to be] very interesting. I’m fascinated by the duality of a person feeling safer, feeling protected by masculinity, while recognizing the ways masculinity is used to wield destruction across the globe. Or a certain brand of power, which we, perhaps prematurely, ascribe to masculinity, when there’s not necessarily an inherent link between the two. Here’s what I’ll say: it was satisfying when I felt myself getting it right. Otherwise, it was enormously heavy. But that’s what writing is, for me. It’s enormously heavy work. It’s also my greatest joy.
Rumpus: Davis’s sister Olivia has terrific dialogue and is such a strong, interesting woman in a masculine book. Tell me how she came to be.
Norris: Interestingly enough, in the first draft, Olivia was Oliver. I found myself having written a book that felt very masculine, which felt really incongruous with my interests as a writer, though it was obviously always very queer. But as the novel developed, especially as I began to write further into Davis’s family and better understand what he’d been born into, I felt that he needed a woman in his life, someone to show him sensitivity, tenderness, and love. Davis needed to encounter some softness as a boy in order to survive. I also felt that Olivia might be a welcome relief for readers, in much the same way she was for me, as the writer, and for Davis as a character. But of course, Olivia can’t be too soft—she is the Reverend’s daughter, after all.
Rumpus: I particularly appreciated the role of music in Davis’s life. Talk to me about the viola.
Norris: When it comes to the viola, I didn’t have to research a thing. I grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, home to the Cleveland Orchestra, long considered one of the world’s premiere symphony orchestras. They really value arts in the public schools, or they did in the ’90s, so I started playing the viola in fourth grade. Up until the second semester of my senior year in college, I was preparing to audition for music schools to get a master’s degree in viola performance. I got tired of always sacrificing time with my friends to practice, which made me realize I no longer wanted to play with any seriousness.
Over the course of writing this novel, Davis was always going to be a musician, but I struggled for many years as to whether he would play the violin or the cello and what the trajectory of his musical life would be. There are certain personality tropes associated with both, and the nuances of building a career are different as well. In the earliest draft, he had finished Juilliard but wasn’t a standout player. He was freelancing occasionally but working in retail, and he was entirely dependent on Everett financially. As my life grew over the years spent writing Harvest, I became less interested in that power dynamic. I wanted Davis not to need Everett in that way. Eventually, I realized that Davis had to play the viola. It was the only option. As the arc of the book clarified itself for me, I knew he needed to be a violist because I wanted him to defy the odds and become a soloist with the instrument least likely to support a robust solo career, and also, as the book explains, the viola, as an instrument, faces physical challenges or imperfections that the other stringed instruments don’t. This almost biological incongruence felt like a perfect metaphor for Davis.
Last[ly], classical music is still an overwhelmingly white space, but I was deep in that world for a long time. And almost without fail, anytime there was another Black kid in the orchestra, or a concentration of Black and queer kids at the music camp, they were always violists. There’s a way in which the viola is marginalized in the world of classical music, and I’ve long wondered if that marginalization attracts players from more diverse identities.
Rumpus: Not since reading Make the Season Bright, a sapphic Christmas romance, had I enjoyed such a spicy novel. You really delivered. What made you decide to go all in with the scenes of physical intimacy?
Norris: Wow, I really appreciate that question because spicy scenes can be such a challenge to write. They’re really very delicate. I knew this was going to be a sexy book from day one because the inciting question was about a couple with a great sex life where one partner’s grief suddenly makes him stop being intimate with his partner. From a very young age, I was obsessed with questions of where people go after they die, and what, from this world they or their disembodied spirits, have access to. When my maternal grandmother died, my fear that she suddenly knew I had a massive crush on the football player, who sat next to me in sixth grade English, kept me up at night. So, when my father passed away one month into my MFA program, I was consumed by the idea that he might have sudden access to parts of my life I’d kept somewhat hidden from him. When I started this novel a few months later, which really grew out of a deep desire to write a piece of fiction that mattered to me in a serious way, I knew I had to be brave enough to really go for it with the sex scenes. One of my workshop teachers, Mary Morris, instructed me to come to our next conference having written a sex scene. She advised me to just rip off the Band-Aid and try it. It worked pretty well, and that scene, though revised, is still in the book.
Then, as I was writing, I realized that for a reader to properly mourn this first crack in the facade of Davis and Everett’s seemingly perfect relationship, I needed to make sure the reader understood what was at stake. I needed to make it clear on the page that this is a couple that has really great, phenomenal sex but also that the sex is not the be-all and end-all of this relationship, just as it’s not the be-all and end-all of this novel.
Rumpus: Talk a bit about the title of the novel and its inspiration.
Norris: For several years, When the Harvest Comes went by a different title, something that T Kira Madden pulled from a reading I did at Sarah Lawrence. It was a great working title, but I always suspected there was another title out there, waiting to be found, but I was never pressed or worried about it.
In 2015, I was home visiting my family for Thanksgiving. My sister and I were cleaning up the table for dinner. My father used to work at the dining room table—it’s where he paid bills, took phone calls, wrote sermons, and we rarely used it to eat unless it was a holiday. My dad always wrote first drafts of his sermons by hand, usually with a fountain pen. I was at Sarah Lawrence in my dorm room working on a story, when my sister called to tell me that he had been rushed to the hospital because he’d passed out at the dining room table while writing a sermon for the following Sunday. It turned out that he’d had a stroke that threw him into a coma, and he passed a week later. So, there I was, five years later, and I stumbled upon a few sheets of loose leaf that contained the beginnings of a sermon, one that seemingly had never been found or moved from that table. And though he’d only written a few paragraphs, my father had titled that sermon “When the Harvest Comes.” I have no idea if that’s the sermon he was writing when he had the stroke, or if it was a draft that had sort of been floating around. I know very little about his writing process, and I wish it was something I’d had the presence of mind to ask him about while he was still alive. But either way, it felt like some sort of gift, a sign of his approval, and I knew immediately that When the Harvest Comes was the title of this novel.
Rumpus: It’s curious that though Davis and Everett grew up in different cultures, their fathers often inhabit similar silences despite one being Black and the other white. When you conceived of this book, was this couple always interracial?
Norris: Yes, I always knew that this couple was going to be interracial, and I always knew my main character would be Black and femme, that his husband would be white, and that there would be an age gap of a little more than a decade between them. I had several reasons for this. Part of my thinking was that in considering the inciting conflict—about sex—between Davis and Everett, my feeling was that if Davis was partnered with a Black gay man, or a gay man of any color other than white, that partner would have a more visceral understanding of what Davis was going through. I simply could not imagine a nonwhite man responding to Davis, and his very complicated grief, in the way that Everett was responding to Davis. If I were starting this novel today, I’m not sure I would make the same choice—whether something is believable on its surface is not as strong of a barometer for me now as a more experienced and accomplished writer.
But there was another aspect I was thinking of as well. At that point in my life, as a Black, queer, femme-presenting gay man in white professional and educational spaces, I was very well aware of certain dynamics in the gay community, specifically the idea that being Black, and being femme, made me less desirable—which is a thing I heard from gay men of all colors in my early years of dating. From the beginning of Harvest, I wanted to turn that on its head. I wanted a certain kind of white gay man, and a certain kind of white woman, to be jealous of Davis, to almost feel as though Davis had taken something from them in making Everett fall for him. And I had no interest in making this intentional on Davis’s part, nor did I want this dynamic to play a big role in the novel. I just wanted it to be part of the emotional and psychological landscape. Davis and Everett walk down the street and people look at Davis and think he stole their man. But nothing could be further from the truth, because Everett is, and always was, meant to be Davis’s man. And Everett knows this in the same way he knows that grass is green, and water is wet.
As I wrote into their fathers over the years, those were less intentional characterizations. I was interested in the idea that on paper, these two fathers could be so different, and could react to their son’s relationship so differently, and yet, at their core, be dealing with the same struggle, the same nuances. In some ways, it amounts to bottom-shaming and femme-shaming, and once I was able to name that, I saw it everywhere. There are several episodes of Modern Family, for instance, where Mitch and Cam’s fathers are visiting at the same time, and they can barely stand to be in the same room because the only way they’ve found they can abide their son’s relationship is to feminize the other man’s son. They both have to think their son is the man, the husband, the top, in order to be around them. I started seeing this dynamic everywhere.
Rumpus: You’ve mentioned online that it took you fourteen years to write and publish When the Harvest Comes. For all the aspiring writers reading this interview, what final words would you like to share with them?
Norris: Many years ago, one of my favorite writers, Elizabeth Strout, looked me in the eye and said, “You have to want it.” I clung to that because I wanted it. And I thought I understood it when she said it to me, but I understand it even more so now. You simply have to want it, perhaps more than you want anything else. You also have to balance that want with some grace and some compassion because it’s most likely going to be a long and arduous road from conception to publication. Always give yourself grace. If you miss a writing day, or an important deadline, don’t beat yourself up because you must live to write another day. No matter what, you must keep going, keep writing, if this life is going to be for you.
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Author photograph by Nicholas Nicholas
