Six Mile Store started life a long time before I got around to actually writing it – over twenty years before, in fact, in a dusty little store sitting at a crossroads in rural Arkansas.
As a reader, I have always jumped between genres depending on my mood: psychological thrillers, literary fiction, the occasional historical novel, whatever has risen to the top of the pile by my bed. So I did not have a particular genre in mind when I first started thinking about the people I had known while working behind the counter of a gas station in my late teens. What I had was characters. Vivid, specific, strange, and entirely real – or at least, real enough to have stuck with me for over two decades.
The store itself was the starting point. The building I loved in my childhood was ancient and dusty, run by an elderly couple: she was cheerful and chatty, he was taciturn and spoke to nobody. There were coolers full of live bait and enormous sacks of animal feed. When I was older and got a job at the newer store that had replaced it, I met some of the wildest, most peculiar people I have ever encountered. I made a first attempt at writing about them in my early twenties, a loose collection of character sketches built around the store and its crossroads. I showed it to someone I trusted. They told me it was boring and they had no interest in reading on. I put it in a drawer for a very long time.
Those sketches eventually became my book. I kept returning to them over the years, unable to let go of the characters, but equally unable to find the darkness the story needed. Central Arkansas as I knew it was warm and neighbourly, and these people felt like they belonged to something gentle. Although I had been hurt by that earlier feedback, I could see that I did not yet have enough material to write an engaging book.
The missing piece arrived, eventually, courtesy of a manager at my workplace, who insisted I return to work immediately after the death of my grandmother, the woman who raised me. In that moment, my manager unwittingly provided me exactly what I needed for Six Mile Store: a villain.
But I also had, by this point, a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. There are writers who produce work reliably throughout their children’s early years. To them I can only lift a glass and say well done. I wrote when I could, mostly late evenings, and kept adding words, and eventually connected with an editor, Delphine. Delphine helped me make the setting more expansive, the conflict more complicated, and the relationships deeper. My villain became more nuanced: less cartoon bad guy, more warning, more mirror to my protagonist. And my main character, who had always had a name without my realising it, finally became Honey.
In the end, Six Mile Store became something I had never originally planned for – and thank goodness, because what I ended up with is far more intriguing. Flannery O’Connor once wrote that anything coming out of the South would be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it actually was grotesque, in which case it would be called realistic. I have thought about that quote throughout the writing of this book, and I think it applies. Six Mile Store is not a comfortable read. I hope it is a realistic one.
It remains to be seen how exactly I will approach future books, but I feel that Iโve broken through the confidence barrier after many, many – too many – years of experience writing this book. I went to an artist’s retreat in Italy in July 2024, wrote the last few scenes, and came home ready to publish. A planned September 2025 birthday publication has now become, through various delays, a 19 March 2026 launch, followed by a party in Arkansas in April, with some of the real people who have lent parts of themselves to the fiction. I cannot imagine a better outcome. Though I do hope Razor’s Edge, if that is what the next book turns out to be called, appears before 2046.
A. M. Belsey was born in Arkansas but moved to the United Kingdom at age 21. She ainโt never looked back.
