We recently spoke with author Samuel Ligon about his new Slant book, Miller Cane. This is part one of the two-part interview.
Miller Cane originated as a serial in Spokane’s weekly newspaper, the Inlander. How did writing the novel as a serial change your process? How did the experience differ from that of writing your other books?
Jacob Fries, the Inlander’s editor at that time, had the idea to run a serial and asked me to write it, which seemed impossible. Why would I publish the first draft of a novel—as I was writing it? All my wrong turns, blind alleys, plot holes, character inconsistencies, and other mistakes would be glaringly obvious. In my experience with other novels, I wouldn’t even know what the book was about or might become until I wrote that first draft.
Many of the self-imposed rules I followed with previous books had to be abandoned for Miller Cane. In the past, I wouldn’t talk much about a story or novel or essay I was working on, until I had a complete first draft. And I certainly didn’t want early critical response from readers. I thought that would limit the potential of the work and limit my own discoveries on the page as I was writing. Not only did I not share or talk about my own work early in the composition—I advised students to follow the same rule. As if we’re all the same writer. As if my rule ever even proved valuable to me.
With Miller Cane, I worked with three trusted writers from the very beginning—Kate Lebo, Jess Walter, Robert Lopez—and a trusted editor, Jacob Fries. We talked about plot, characters, tone, American history. Rob, Jess, Jacob, and Kate helped me think about the book before I started writing and then as I was writing the entire first draft. When the serial started running, I had sixteen installments done. By weeks forty through fifty, I was sending pages to my readers three days before they were published and giving edits to Jacob one day after that. Writing that draft and having it read by readers, days after pages were composed and “polished,” was the weirdest, most invigorating, and exciting project I’ve ever been involved with, like playing music, collaborating with other musicians to find and shape the song.
How did you come up with the idea for this book?
In 2016, I became obsessed with American history and American fraud tied to commerce and religion. It seemed to me that the earliest significant English points of entry in what would become the U.S.—Jamestown and the Massachusetts Bay Colony (both taking on significant weight in American mythology; both granted legitimacy by royal charter and the establishment of corporations, the Virginia Company of London and the Massachusetts Bay Company )—these places, it seemed, could be understood as shaping various elements of our national character: religious fundamentalism and separatism in the case of New England and commerce in the case of Jamestown. And I wondered if American fraud and violence arose partly from the impulse to generate wealth, a puritanical belief in predestination, and conflicting beliefs in theocracy and a separation of church and state.
In the meanwhile, like everyone, I was struck by our national impotence in the face of mass shootings, from Columbine to Sandy Hook to Parkland to Las Vegas, and all the massacres in between and after.
Early on, I had no idea where I was going. But I read P.T. Barnum’s books, and books about P.T. Barnum. I read everything Narcissa Whitman wrote, and books about Narcissa and her husband Marcus Whitman. I was interested in Narcissa’s desire to save “the benighted heathen” in the American West, before that land became American. How quickly her compassion and empathy dried up. I was interested in her and her husband’s murders, the Whitman Massacre of 1847 in Walla Walla, where my grandfather was born half a century later, a hundred and fifty miles south of my current home in Spokane.
As I read, I knew I would be dealing with American history and fraud, a kind of hucksterism, patent medicine and traveling shows, the type of scams that Twain and Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor made so funny in their fiction.
Then there was a school shooting near Spokane and a picture in the paper showing a man walking down the side of the road with a pig in his arms, going to provide animal therapy to the survivors. My wife Kate Lebo showed it to me and said, “What if this is what Miller does?”
It seemed exactly right. I hadn’t realized there was an entire apparatus surrounding mass shootings to con people, until I saw that picture. And then I thought, Of course there is. This is America. Twain would have recognized it immediately. And it became a way to bring levity to the horror of the shootings, to bring some kind of humor to all that pain. But also to capture something that felt particularly American in the fraud and violence and commerce.
At a time when American violence is seemingly at an all-time high, why did you want to address this issue in fictional form? What can you say in a novel about this problem that you can’t say elsewhere?
In 2024, 15,364 people were murdered with guns in the United States. This number does not include people who killed themselves with guns, which was an additional 27,593.
In 2024, 712 people were killed and 2,389 people were wounded in 587 mass shootings.
We’ve grown numb to these numbers, though most shootings, even mass shootings, aren’t even reported anymore—or if they are, there have to be lots of bodies to merit coverage. And I don’t know if more reporting will do anything good.
Guns don’t kill people. A lack of political will kills people.
That and our murderous hearts.
I’m not sure what can change anything.
But I knew I wanted to address mass shootings as a part of who we are, a significant aspect of our culture, and it seemed like a novel was the only way I could do that.
