Photo by Rayon Richards
Did you see Opal & Nev perform in their heyday? In truth, no one did; the 1970s rock stars are the invention of 2022 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award winner Dawnie Walton. But if you’ve read “The Final Revival of Opal & Nev,” you might swear they’re real. The novel follows fictional journalist S. Sunny Shelton as she uncovers new details about the concert-turned-catastrophe where her father, the drummer on Opal & Nev’s debut album, was killed. As interviews progress, Shelton confronts issues that remain relevant today, from the erasure of Black women from rock history to the inscrutability of celebrity. Walton is scheduled to speak in Richmond on Nov. 10 — a full-circle moment of sorts. She grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, but she spent the summer of 1996 interning at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. We spoke to Walton about her journey before and after the “The Final Arrival.”
Richmond magazine: What has struck you about the process of promoting a novel?
Dawnie Walton: You have your talking points down, and you practice with your PR team, who you work with through the publisher. Then if you find yourself so blessed, so fortunate, to have an audience of people who have read the book, the conversation changes. The invitations become more, “We would like for you to talk — not a reading, not a moderated conversation — but we want you to talk in-depth about something about your book.” … That has been an interesting learning experience for me — something new, to always be looking at the story with fresh eyes all the time and really thinking deeply [about] my process and the research that went into the book.
RM: What were some of the deep dives that were crucial to your research?
Walton: I started from a place of being highly interested in the women who were in “20 Feet From Stardom,” the documentary, and their stories and imagining that there are so many other women like that who have toiled away for years and years in the music industry [but] never got a shot. … I started finding out about artists like Betty Davis, who I did not really know before I started writing this book, and then who grew and grew in my mind and my imagination and my appreciation into a character that was hugely influential on Opal. … The artists who I was thinking about all came to me that way.
RM: When aiming for authenticity, did you hit any roadblocks?
Walton: One of the things that I really questioned, honestly — especially having watched “20 Feet From Stardom” and having heard of so many failures to launch in the industry — was thinking, “I don’t know if people are going to believe that Opal could have attained this level of fame at this time.” That question ended up driving what happens in the story, because I didn’t really believe that it would have been possible back then just on talent alone, and just on force of personality alone, because if that were the case, there might have been more Opals at that time in the world.
RM: What do you hope to impart at speaking engagements like the one coming up?
Walton: The No. 1 thing that I always tell students is [that] writing is a bit of a selfish act in the sense that you should really be leaning into what brings you joy. … Writing books, writing novels, is such a marathon. This one took me five years just to do a first draft and another two years of revisions. It’s going to be your interest and your obsession and your joy that brings you back to the story again and again to make it what you dream it to be.
Dawnie Walton will speak at VCU’s James Branch Cabell Library on Thursday, Nov. 10, at 7 p.m. The event will also be livestreamed, and registration is required.
