Steven Dunn & Katie Jean Shinkle’s marvelously haunting novel Tannery Bay shimmers with love and friendship and family.
“Steven Dunn and Katie Jean Shinkle have created an exceptional exploration of how place shapes a person, which seamlessly hums beneath a world of taunting, endless Julys. Tannery Bay’s fresh prose feels at once immediate and timeless while it unravels the enigmatic town’s secrets.”
We appreciate you stepping your funky ass into the world of Tannery Bay, our collaborative novel that is a queer/black blaxploitation fairytale with a lot of fucking attitude and style and music to match. Music continually shaped the vision of our scenes because we needed to pull from the sonic explorations and I’m-a-bad-motherfucker spirit of the artists before us. Even two of our central characters, Auntie Anita and Uncle Gerald, are inspired by singers Anita Baker and Gerald Levert. So we started a growing and pulsating playlist like we were deejays for our fictional world. This is the music we fight to, love with, and dream with. Consider this playlist a partial soundtrack of our writing lives, and the lives of Tannery Bay.
Intro: Gorillaz, “Plastic Beach”
This haunting and eerie soundscape is about walking along a polluted hellscape of a seascape full of styrofoam and discarded technology. The music feels dirty purple and pink like the chemically saturated world of Tannery Bay. Welcome to endless Julys, y’all!
Ol’ Dirty Bastard, “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”
Speaking of walking, we walk a lot in our writing practices, and so do our characters. In the very first chapter, you will find Otis, another of the central characters, walking to work. When imagining the opening scene, we can hear Shimmy Shimmy Ya clear as day over his head, ringing out beyond the Tannery Bay Bridge as Otis hoofs it to work, another day another dollar at the Tannery Bay Casino. Otis is tryna amp himself up to go to work at that depressing-ass casino, so he needs ODB’s energy.
Anita Baker, “Giving You the Best that I Got”
Anita Baker is unbothered as fuck on this track, the epitome of “I’m minding my black-ass business because I’m only worried about the folks I love.” And that’s exactly what our Auntie Anita is doing, unbothered and giving the best that she got to her family, blood and chosen. She’s creating public art for everyone to enjoy and find themselves reflected in beauty.
Janelle Monae, “Champagne Shit” / “Black Sugar Beach”
Tannery Bay, overall, is a meditation on art: art-making, art consumption, art ownership, and so much of the magic of the novel rests in the role art plays. Auntie Anita is an artist, first and foremost, before all of her other roles in her life (lover, wife, friend, aunt, neighbor), and the major conflict in the plot of TB rests in the various angles of the meditation: who makes the art, who owns the art, and who the art belongs to. These are the songs that play in the scenes where Auntie Anita is in the act of creating her art for the community she loves.
Terror Jr, “Terrified”
Everybody in the book is a little terrified of love in one way or another, being loved, having love, giving love, platonic or romantic, gay or straight. It is this tension of giving and receiving love where a lot of the joy (and pain) happens for our characters. They love each other, they love their community, they love their town, and everyone, in their own way, is hesitant but reaching, filled with desire and yearning, wanting.
Levert, “Casanova”
If you’re at a black cookout, you’ll hear this song, and young and old folks alike will be tryna sing CASANOVA all strong and shit like Gerald Levert. This song is a bridge for generations, the same way Auntie Anita’s murals and sculptures are in Tannery Bay.
Mel Waiters, “Hole in the Wall”
One of the central places in Tannery Bay is Uncle Gerald’s Juke Joint, so this song, “Let’s go baby, to the hole in the wall. I’ve had my best times, y’all, at the hole in the wall.” is a spot where we can go and be with others, have fun, talk shit, and get LOOSE. This song captures the feeling of everything that goes down in Gerald’s Juke Joint.
serpentwithfeet, “Amir”
Otis has been in love with Leviticus for a while, but that fear of love we mentioned earlier has kept him from opening up about it. But our cast of characters are working towards something together, and Otis and Leviticus are close enough to each other physically where they can start develop a deeper relationship, and that turns Otis’ fear into a tender openness to love that’s similar to this song when serpentwithfeet says, “Amir, so glad I metcha here, you’re so kind, you’re so warm, damn I could shed a tear.
Tegan and Sara, “Closer”
We love queer love! It is something we wanted to capture inside the community of Tannery Bay. But one thing about queer love, is that what comes with it is Queer Desire and Queer Yearning. Our queer characters have a lot of desire and yearning for the people they love. A major barrier to getting the love they want is themselves. They can’t get out of their own way! Cristal and Lexus, in particular, have it bad for each other all through the book, and they both want love from each other. Every time you experience Cristal and Lexus, two young queers who are circling around their desire, imagine you hear “Closer” in the air
James Brown, “The Payback” / Quincy Jones, “Money Is”
These songs makes you wanna fuck some shit up, and feel cool while doing it, taking pleasure in your revenge because them low-life suckas had it coming. Our characters got a little swag after successfully completing a pivotal part of their plan for revenge that involves flooding a casino. All we could hear during the execution of the revenge plan–which involves Ocean’s Eleven, The Fast and the Furious, and Mr. Bean level schemes, deception, physical comedy, and getaway–are these song
Charlotte Day Wilson, “Work”
It’s like when you sigh so deeply you think your whole body will sink and keep sinking into the Earth because all that was weighing you down is temporarily relieved. A momentary reprieve. A deep reciprocity. “Work” is the song that represents all the characters who were seeking love finally finding the love they were yearning for.
Outro: Cheryl Lynn, “Encore”
By the end of our writing Tannery Bay, we knew we wanted the community to unite to aid each other through the adversity against The Owners (the conglomerate of old, cis, straight, white men who are trying to ruin everything for everybody). Without giving away spoilers, we envision this song in the final scenes, where we leave the community momentarily celebrating their wins. But is the fight for their town actually over? Is there ever an end point for any of us out here fighting for what’s right? The answer is: no. We never arrive in this way, we are always evolving in the journey towards equality, equity, joy, safety, love, and taking care of each othe
Steven Dunn (a.k.a Pothole, cuz he’s deep in these streets) is a Whiting Award winner who was shortlisted for Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists. He’s the author of three novels: Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky, 2016), water & power (Tarpaulin Sky, 2018), and Tannery Bay (FC2/University of Alabama Press, 2024), which is co-authored with his homie Katie Jean Shinkle.