There’s real magic in Bradley Sides’s new collection of stories, “Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause The Flood” (Montag Press). And, as you’ll read in the interview with the author to follow, the reverse is also true.

Once labeled — or mis-labeled, depending on how you read his stories — as horror, Sides earned his first reviews from magazines built on terror and speculative fiction. Lately, though, he’s been categorized within the realm of magic realism — a special blend of storytelling that he’s come to “embrace,” and one that he helps us define.

But whatever the classification, Sides’s fiction offers a unique voice and ability to distill heart-wrenching moments into a paucity of pages — stories that smack of a mature minimalism, echoing the best short works of Raymond Craver, Kurt Vonnegut and others.

We recently took the opportunity to talk about such things with Sides, but also about how a country boy who graduated from Limestone High School, attended Calhoun Community College, graduated from Athens State University and went on to earn a MFA from Queens University of Charlotte decided to come home to both place — and story.

Today, Sides works a day job teaching creative writing at Calhoun Community College, but more and more he’s earning accolades for his stories about real places and real people — including people you’ll really know. More, the author is building an impressive fan base, and one that includes the seminal storyteller Levar Burton. A story from Sides’s first book, “Those Fantastic Lives,” was plucked by Burton for the award-winning podcast, “Levar Burton Reads.”

You can hear Burton read that story here (https://tinyurl.com/4xktkw42), but first listen to how that reading came about. … Sort of. It’s not like Sides can tell us exactly how his chain-smoking, soon-to-retire psychic came to be voiced by one of the most recognizable voices in storytelling, but it’s also not something he’s too concerned with. After all, the author tell us, he’s the creator, not the reader —and of the two, the reader is the one who matters.

Today, you’ll find Sides on most days professing at Calhoun Community College. We caught up with the writer in mid-March, a day after a book launch for “Crocodile Tears” at the college, for a chat in our offices at The News Courier in Athens, Ala. The following interview has been edited for both clarity and length.

1. Let me start with this, your new book, “Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood” (Montag Press), is an impressive collection of short stories. They remind me in a way of the early short fiction of Kurt Vonnegut or Raymond Craver, both great writers who are now deceased. The commonality is that you people your stories with hardworking men and women, simple folks who live and work and pray but most of all … endure. Is that a fair assessment?

BS: Yeah, it is and it’s interesting you say that because yesterday (during the book launch at Calhoun Community College) somebody else talked about the good heartedness of people on display in the stories. Again, that’s interesting because I don’t know that I picked up on that when I was writing, but I think it’s influenced probably by the kind of people I grew up around — like, it’s the people I know are shaped that way.

2. Tell me about that. How did you grow up, and who are your people?

BS: So, Goodsprings, Ala., is a very small community. There are no traffic lights, no businesses, there’s nothing. We grew up on a cattle farm, my brother and I and our parents. Just had a lot of time out in the world with cows and ducks and cats and dogs, and lots of animals and the sky. And hay fields. Lots and lots of hay fields. …

You’re not farming now?

BS: No, and I miss it. I really do. My wife and I are in Madison (Ala.) now, and it’s a very different kind of life. It’s much busier. Whenever you drive through, well, we’ve all seen the congested traffic and the businesses popping up like crazy all the time. It’s just very different from what I know and where I spent so much time.

3. It sounds like you had a rather simple and magical upbringing. Which is my rather obvious segue to ask you about the type of stories you write. I mentioned Carver in relation to the characters and situations in your stories, but the resemblance sort of ends there. Vonnegut is closer, at least in his early stories and books such as “Slaughterhouse Five,” but we generally put those in the science fiction category. I think the label that’s been most closely attached to your first two books is magical realism. Does that resonate with you?

BS: Maybe. You know, when the first book of stories came out (“Those Fantastic Lives”), the first review I got was in a horror magazine, of all places, and I never ever thought of my work as horror. But then it was covered by Horror Obsessive (https://horrorobsessive.com/2021/09/14/bradley-sides-those-fantastic-lives-is-beautifully-terrifying/), and then it was picked up by Strange Horizons (http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/those-fantastic-lives-by-bradley-sides/), which, you know, focuses on weird kinds of Southern or non-Southern speculative lit and those kinds of things. And it kept getting in these places and it being talked about as horror, but then it shifted to where the common phrasing was magical realism. I’m more comfortable with that and I kind of embrace it.

A question for the professor, define magical realism for me?

BS: The definition I give people is that there’s magical situations in ordinary worlds and circumstances. And you know, is that real? I don’t know, but that’s kind of just a general magical realism definition. So, I’ve run with that one a little bit more. But, if people want to say its horror, I guess it is. You know, I’m not the reader of it. I’m the creator of it.

4. So, magical realism would sort of be like the “ordinary circumstances” of a family of vampires living in a small community and hiding in plain sight by working as organic garlic farmers? Of course, I’m referring to your story, “Dying at Allium Farms” in “Crocodile Tears.” Wonderful double entendre title on that story, by the way.

BS: I really don’t know where that one came from. …

I would suggest, and with respect, that your brain works a bit differently than from most people.

BS: I hope so.

5. Speaking of brains: You earned an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, N.C., and in your acknowledgments you thank a mentor for “helping me better understand my vision.” What is that vision, and how does it influence your storytelling?

BS: The vision: I’m really inspired by images, and the images come, I think, from memories. So, a lot of my stories are inspired by moments where I’ve seen things and they kind of linger in my brain.

An example?

BS: I think a lot about when I was a kid and I was out at the pond in our backyard. A big pond. I think about that pond a lot. I don’t know if I just miss it.

It seems that pond factors significantly into one of your stories in the new book, one about a job description for a tour guide for a farm’s resident pond monster.

BS: It sure does, “A Guide to King George.” It’s maybe not the same pond, but it has the same shape. But that pond, I can see it, and like with the vampire story … that’s the same garlic in my family’s garden out back. I remember the purple flowering kind of garlic, just kind of swaying and just kind of being overtaken by that garlic at times when it was time for it to be dug up.

Your stories delve deep into the human experience. Yeah, it’s a vampire story, but it’s really a coming-of-age story, an acceptance-of-adulthood story. One story that really stayed with me was one of the shortest, “Remembrance Day,” in which relatives get a short window, very short window to interact, in a very limited way, with a dead relative. If I remember, the feat is done by projection, but the scene between the parent and dead son is incredibly touching, incredibly real.

BS: I had written that story before all of the others (in “Crocodile Tears”), and I actually considered it for “Those Fantastic Lives,” but it just didn’t fit. I was like, I really love this story, but it didn’t fit with (its theme) of loss and grief (in that book). But, at the (Calhoun) reading the moderator of the session said I should read that story. So I read it, and people were really moved by it. It was really, really nice to hear it mentioned again because I’d kind of forgotten about it. That sounds odd, but I guess it’s one I didn’t think of a lot.

6. I think that story is something like 2 pages long, and a lot of your stories are like that, concise, compact … sort of like hearing a short homily that stays with you all day.

BS: I appreciate that. I think that’s how I speak as a person, too. As a teacher, I’m not somebody who just philosophizes from time to time. You know, we get what we need and move on.

7. I want to move now to another story I really liked, “2 Truths & A Lie About The Monsters Atop Our Hill.” That one really speaks to me about our current culture, and who the real “monsters” are.

BS: It was definitely inspired by the world in which we live. More so by the day, maybe. That was actually the last story that I’d written for the cycle. So, “Remembrance Day” was the first and this was the most recent, and you chose those two. That’s interesting.

8. What’s also interesting, though, is that you write a lot — literally and figuratively — about monsters. Why is that?

BS: Because monsters are all around us, in many different ways. The take many different forms. … I imagine that whatever my definition (of monster) is, it’s going to be different than Person B’s or Person C’s. In society, we have these visual representations of monsters as these big, scary kinds of things. But monsters don’t have to be big or scary. They can be hiding in many different ways, and I’m really interested in the exploration of what that means.

9. You explore that deeply in the wonderfully creative story, “Nancy R. Melson’s State ELA Exam, Section 1: The Dead-Dead Monster.” What a concept, writing a short story as a series of state exam questions and the responser’s answers that aren’t what … we would expect. She totally subverts the test by answering her own subtext of the questions instead of the text — to the point that an examiner is going to definitely think he or she committed a huge faux pas.

BS: As a former high school teacher, I really hated state tests. It’s a huge part of any school teacher’s life, giving so many of those. I’m always interested in a monster story, so I had an idea of, how can a monster be in a state test story? I just started playing with it and I was like, this is cool. I hadn’t really seen that done before. And, it was fun to ride with it, so I just had fun with it.

10. Something else I bet you had fun with is the last thing I want to ask you about. Actually a two-parter: How did you manage to have one of your stories from “Those Fantastic Lives” end up being read by Levar Burton on his phenomenal podcast, “Levar Burton Reads?” And, more, what was your listening experience of that story like?

BS: For the first part: I wish I knew. “Fantastic Lives” came out in October 2021 and I got an email, randomly, from Levar Burton’s team last summer. So, that was a year and half after the book had come out, and they’re like, “Levar Burton read your book and he enjoyed it. He wants to license the stories.” Just totally out of nowhere. You take a step back: Is this a scam email, like, you don’t really believe it.

The story he chose was the title story, a story about a chain-smoking psychic who’s ready to retire but agrees to see one last client. And of course, there’s a child, actually two children involved, one alive and one dead, and again, the whole thing is a touching story about family, loss and belief. What was the audio experience like for you? … By the way, Levar does a fantastic chain-smoking psychic.

BS: I had to stop for a while to just soak it in. I especially wanted to hear what he had to say when he opened (the segment). I was really interested in what the story was about to him and how he would frame it, which was about faith, largely. … And then after he started reading it, I had to just stop it and go back in sections because it was just really overwhelming to me, for someone who does what he does. He’s somebody who loves stories and to share stories. He’s been a huge influence on my life as somebody who loves stories and hopes that they can share them — in a much smaller way, of course. But, it took me awhile to get the whole thing.