“Windows into lives nothing like our own are important.” – young-adult author T.L. Simpson

 
Posted March 7, 2025

T.L. Simpson is author of two young-adult (YA) novels: Strong Like You and Cope Field (both Flux/North Star Editions, 2024 and 2025 respectively). He is also an award-winning journalist and editor of Russellville, Arkansas’s The Courier.

His gritty writing on rural poverty, sports and boys’ anger and confusion has been called “unflinching, insightful and gut-wrenching,” “perfectly conceived and executed” and “powerful, sparse, poetic prose.” He has been compared with Louise Finch, Lewis Hancox, Anthony McGowan and G. Neri, and his subject matter with Barbara’s Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead.

According to a 2024 Kirkus Reviews article on Simpson, books like his that unpack toxic masculinity in ways that engage boys are “vanishingly rare” and much needed.

His hobbies include drawing, playing guitar, lifting weights, running, reading and playing video games. Married with four children, Simpson can be found at https://tlsimpson.net/, https://www.facebook.com/tlsimpson21, https://bsky.app/profile/tlsimpson.bsky.social and @word_factory21 and @trvsimpson.

Q: You’ve said it’s important that your struggling male teens’ voices are “shared with the world.” Reviewers of your books have emphasized the same. Can you please expand on that?

A: Windows into lives nothing like our own are important. But then again, so are mirrors that show us the best and worst parts of ourselves. The thing is, my mirror is somebody else’s window.

I read a statistic some time ago that said men are something like 80 percent more likely to commit suicide and commit over 90 percent of all reported incidents of domestic violence. Our prisons are full of men. So I think it’s clear that something isn’t working. Through both Strong Like You and Cope Field, I have tried speaking directly to young men.

I want them to know that these systems they are taught and cling to are hurting them. I wanted to deconstruct toxic masculinity without ever saying that phrase so that people who would otherwise bristle at that term might still end up understanding what is meant by it. Better, they might actually be able to untangle it a little in their own lives.

To be perfectly clear, I believe diverse representation in literature is profoundly important. But I have noticed a lack of stories for young men in the YA space. We need stories to show us the wider world. But we also need them to meet us where we are and help us to see things differently.

Q: You’ve introduced two young-adult novels so far. Although their themes and settings are similar, please talk about their differences, including the age differences of the main characters.

A: Walker is a sensitive kid who doesn’t realize he’s sensitive. Crawford is an introspective kid with a lot on his mind who thinks he has nothing worthwhile to say. Generally speaking, I think Crawford is better educated than Walker, although I wouldn’t exactly call him smarter. Crawford probably has an easier time paying attention in class since he’s well fed, rested and his basic needs are typically met. Walker has grown up in extreme poverty. Crawford is a privileged kid with every opportunity money can buy afforded to him. Yet, it’s his privilege that masks his trauma from his community. They all think he has it made, so they ignore or miss the warning signs of abuse that might leak out of the Cope home.

Conversely, everyone knows Walker is troubled. And most folks have written him off because of it.

In both cases, a kid who is hurting is unseen by his community.

The themes of both books run adjacent, but Strong Like You is about finding out what it truly means to be strong. Strength is vulnerability. Cope Field is about speaking your truth, even when it is scary or hurts. It’s about dethroning your heroes and not giving a pass to terrible people simply because they are good at something.

As far as the age difference, I needed Walker to still be young enough to have some naivety about his father but old enough to be threatening when he stands up to his uncle Wyatt outside their trailer.

With Crawford, I thought the upheaval of senior year and college paired with a state championship run was the perfect backdrop for his tumultuous home life finally coming to a head. This kid has enough regular kid problems as a star baseball player with a famous daddy before you add in his anger issues and explosive home life.

Q: How challenging have you found it to combine vulnerability, anger and perception – three such very different personality components – in your young male characters, and what have you drawn from in your own boyhood to do so? (You’ve said your parents were nothing like your characters, but you’ve also said “I asked myself what I would say to the sensitive young boys of the world, the ones who have been crammed into a ‘this is what it means to be a man’ box that in no way, shape or form resembles what it actually means to be a man. In other words, what would I say to boys like me?”)

A: I am always trying to create some juxtaposition in my characters. I think the conflict between who a person thinks they are and who they really are is very interesting. I’m always looking for fun ways to play with that.

Like I said, I was a sensitive kid, so I am well-versed in the ways young boys tend to root out and attack perceived weaknesses in others. And I know there are others who were not lucky to have the parents I had, who equipped me to survive it. For many young boys, once they reach a certain age, the bullying over being “too sensitive” comes from their own parents. So I wanted to tell that kid actually, it’s them who are wrong.

Q: In both Strong Like You and Cope Field, you offer strong, unusual voice, and a lingo unique to (I presume) regions of the South plagued by rural poverty. Tell us why and how you shaped that jargon/dialect – and whether the process was fun, difficult or caused you any concern about reader criticism.

A: I think I’ve always had a good ear for voice. And I wanted to capture the way people here in Arkansas talk. We are often depicted as having an Appalachian accent, and there are notes of that hidden in there. But Arkansas, especially the Ozarks, is slightly different than that. There are people here with no discernable accent at all, folks who sound like they are from the Midwest and folks who sound like they’ve never left the mountain. Smash all that together. For Strong Like You, Walker was about as gritty as you can get – very intrinsically (and accidentally) poetic, which I think a lot of Southerners are. Crawford is a little more wry and more intentionally clever with his word choice. He’s not really from Arkansas, but he picked up some of the accent from his daddy.

Q: How has being married and raising four children influenced your writing?

A: It’s definitely a challenge to balance everything. I don’t think it inspired writing middle grade or young adult, though. I am an eclectic reader and therefore also an eclectic writer. I’ve tried my hand at adult horror, YA, middle-grade, crime thrillers, science-fiction, fantasy… you name it. YA is what has resonated enough to see print (so far!).

Q: Please tell us what’s next!

A: I can’t say too much yet as it’s still in the very early planning stages, but I am working on another YA novel about a young nerdy kid who, after their marginalized friend is targeted by alt-right neo-Nazis, decides to take the fight to the oppressors and burn down their houses. It’s about learning a hard truth: Violence always begets more violence. I’ve been jokingly calling it Hillbilly Kick-Ass. It’s all my love for obscure and weird 90s anime mashed up with my love for little rural communities and people on the brink.

– Pam Withers