The Author: Tennessee Hill
The Book: Girls with Long Shadows (Harper, 2025)
The Elevator Pitch: Identical triplet sisters’ yearning for individuality becomes reckless, threatening their senses of self, unity, and safety.
***
The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Tennessee Hill: As a triplet myself, I am always thinking about what it means to be a sibling, and as a woman, I’m always thinking about what it means to be in a body that is constantly scrutinized. With these big ideas at the center, I surrounded the novel in things I wanted to spend time with: a swampy small town, grandparents, and golf.
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Hill: I wrote the first draft in a 6-month frenzy, then revised intensely with my agent for a year.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Hill: This is my first novel after spending many years writing a poetry collection that I have yet to find a home for. Publishing novels and poetry collections are two vastly different endeavors, though both are so subjective that publishing either feels like trying to hit a shapeshifting target.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Hill: The process of querying agents was filled with no’s that, though sad, each felt like a gentle push in the right direction towards my eventual agent Elizabeth Pratt. Once Elizabeth and I teamed up, everything happened rapidly. She did so much legwork before we went on submission that once we did, the book sold at auction quite quickly to my editor.
Rumpus: Which authors / writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Hill I have had incredible mentors in writers like Jill McCorkle, Eduardo C. Corral, Dorianne Laux, John A. McDermott, and Christine Butterworth-McDermott who each made me a more precise, diligent writer. It was also helpful to know I had peers who were chipping away at their own works—an often quiet yet propulsive kind of fellowship.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Hill I had no intentions when I sat down to write the novel beyond being dedicated to finishing it. In that way, the thriller element of the novel was a total shock. Because I was so surprised by this twist, I revised the novel about four times from tip to tail with my agent, making drastic changes in an effort to reconcile the meandering lyricism of early drafts with the thriller I’d stumbled into.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Hill: I have fiction in The Boiler and Bellevue Literary Review, and poems in Southern Humanities Review, POETRY, The Adroit Journal, Arkansas International, and other spots.
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Hill: More writing advice than publishing, but Dorianne Laux said often, “When in doubt, sing your way out,” which I think she got from a poet before her. This translates well enough for me into publishing advice because it reminds me to center joy and language, even in publishing which can often feel very removed from the original impulses of writing.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Hill: I don’t think about this often because when I do, it can lead me to prioritize wanting to be liked above wanting to be honest. When I picture the most zoomed-out, unfocused blur of a reader of my work, it’s just someone watching an egret stand on top of a cow in a pasture. Maybe they’re thinking about their next cup of coffee or the childhood friend they haven’t talked to in ten years. They always have a song stuck in their head; I know that for sure.
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?Hill: Publishing is such a machine that I found the constant and intimate kindness that I have experienced with agents, editors, publicists, and everyone in between to be bewildering. I never expected to have so many people in my corner, invested in my dreams.
