Wild in a Good Way

Cameron Engwall interviews Rob Franklin about “Great Black Hope,” his debut novel.

By Cameron EngwallJune 13, 2025

• Fiction

WITH A CORTADO ordered and the fire rumbling, I wait on a gold brocade couch in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel for one of my lifelong friends. He always lets me pick the spot (he’s famously anti–fine dining, though from his book you’d never know), and this one took very little thought; it was obvious.

In Rob Franklin’s new novel Great Black Hope, the main character Smith drifts from space to space, always feeling like a stranger, an in-betweener. And that’s what hotel lobbies are for: comings and goings. Anticipating a cab. Preparing for a reservation. As the waiter places my drink on the coffee table, he asks for my room number. “I’m waiting on a friend,” I say, insinuating that said friend is staying here. Not quite a lie, also not the full truth—I live in Brooklyn; I, too, am a visitor.

Rob enters, towering, trench-coated. He orders tea and honey. We catch up on our personal lives, though this quickly shifts to his work, his flowering future. I hope that everyone gets to watch their best friend seize their biggest dream. I hold his book in my hands: it’s real and marked up, dog-eared from stuffing it into my pocket between subway transfers.

He has written a novel that spans class, race, and sexuality, set in a steamy New York, a chilly Easthampton, and a static Atlanta. We talk about trading our juvenile poetry back and forth online, about the books that made us want to write. He shares the writers—and individuals—who have shaped this book: the family he holds dear, his own history.

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CAMERON ENGWALL: When I first picked up Great Black Hope, I tore through it in two long subway commutes. It’s breakneck and intense but also layered with so many tonal shifts. How early did you know you wanted to structure the novel that way?

ROB FRANKLIN: Some of that was intentional from the beginning, and some came together through revisions. I always knew I wanted the middle section to shift pace and tone, especially after the kind of mania of the first section. Part one has this breathless quality to it—Smith is on the run, emotionally and literally—and I knew that couldn’t be sustained for an entire novel. So I thought: What does it look like when he stops running? And that led to the more expansive, quieter tone of part two. Then part three is this sort of synthesis—it’s the return to the city, but with everything that’s been learned or faced along the way still humming underneath.

That first section really is a sprint—cinematic even. The language is dense, poetic, fast.

I started as a poet, and I think you can really see that in part one. I love maximalism when it’s done right—when it creates that effect of being inside someone’s head without filter. I still like writing that’s willing to go for a packed, breathless sentence, especially if it’s carrying emotional weight. But I was definitely more of a maximalist writer when I started. Some of those sentences are wild, in a good way.

Over time, I’ve learned how to be more economical without losing the lyricism. The third section was written after years of working on the book, and it reflects that shift. It’s more fluid, more grounded.

Talk me through the second section. What all changed?

So much changed. Originally, that section was almost entirely Smith reading—literally reading books by Lawrence Otis Graham, Margo Jefferson, Frantz Fanon—and then kind of going off on these academic digressions. Like, the novel stopped being a novel. It was just this character absorbing and reflecting. There were long quotes, footnotes. I wanted it to be smart. But it killed the pacing, and it didn’t feel like fiction anymore. Eventually, I realized I needed to embed that thinking into scenes, into interactions. So the essays became part of the texture, not the whole fabric.

I’m glad you brought up the reading. There’s this really moving thread in part two about Smith going home, picking up his father’s books, and noticing his annotations. Were you consciously mirroring your own experience there?

It became personal. When I was home in Atlanta during early COVID—first year of grad school, 2020—I was writing at a café in Grant Park and pulling books from my dad’s office. Notebooks filled with his annotations. At first, I was just reading them for research. But then I started writing these essays, and eventually it became about more than the ideas. I started thinking about how reading these physical texts—books loved by someone I love—could help me understand him better. My dad and I aren’t super emotionally direct. Reading those annotations was a way of decoding him.

Did you two ever talk directly about the books?

Some. There’s a book called Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham—it’s basically a gossipy, sociological look at the Black bourgeoisie. My dad gave me context for how it was received, how controversial it was. Graham tried to do for Black America what others had done for old-money white families. He even wanted to make a social register of the top 800 families. It’s an odd project, but fascinating. That book mentions neighborhoods I grew up in, people my family knows. It stops just short of naming us. But most of the other books we didn’t talk about directly. It was easier to just read and get a sense of him that way. Intellectual connection more than emotional.

It’s such a clear departure from the New York world of part one, where status is built on proximity to coolness. Did writing the South feel different, or closer to home?

Yeah, I mean—literally, it is home. But I think writing Atlanta gave me a chance to slow down and reflect. Smith is grappling with where he comes from, and being surrounded by family forces a reckoning. I wanted that section to feel warmer, but not without tension. There’s love there, but it’s not always comfortable love. And a lot of that mirrors my own experience of going home—feeling both rooted and alien.

You’re really balancing so many shifts—geographic, tonal, formal. Was that always the plan? That part three braids together the two halves?

I think so. I wanted the novel to feel like a triptych—each part distinct but connected. And to reflect the evolution of the character. The first is about escape. The second is about confrontation. The third is about reckoning. Formally, the language tracks that too. There’s a poetic refrain that emerges in part three—“red slip, river, ruin”—that wouldn’t have made sense in part one. But it does once we’ve been through the journey. That was always my North Star: matching style to growth.

So there’s a poetic thread in everything. How far does that date back for you?

Honestly, I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid. My mom tried everything. The only books I wanted were Nickelodeon-branded—literally Kenan & Kel scripts. Later on in high school, I found The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and that really cracked something open for me. And then—huge moment—I read Richard Siken’s Crush.

Oh yeah. I remember that. That book broke both of our hearts open.

Exactly. I mean, it was the first time I saw language that felt like how I thought. I started writing poems basically in direct imitation. I literally took the form of “Scheherazade” and wrote my own version. I think a lot of early poetry starts that way—you’re trying to catch the feeling someone else gave you.

And from there, you were hooked?

Totally. I studied poetry at Stanford, did the whole workshop circuit. And I had great teachers who really encouraged me. Then I got a job in consulting—because, you know, capitalism—and spent a lot of time writing on the side, often during long stretches when I wasn’t busy. I wrote big chunks of my first novel that way. I think having a day job where your brain isn’t fully taxed can be surprisingly generative.

At what point did you feel like you could really call yourself a novelist?

Only recently. I think I needed the book to be real in the world before I let myself use that word. But now, yeah. I think I’m in it for the long haul.

Well, you’ve written another full novel before this one. What’s your relationship to that project now?

Oh wow, yeah. That book’s still in the drawer. It’s about a white Yale grad who drops out of corporate life and moves to Berlin, falls in with a group of trust fund kids, eventually does sex work not for money but for meaning. It’s kind of about privilege, performance, the search for authenticity. I haven’t looked at it in a while, but I cannibalized parts of it for Great Black Hope—lines, themes, even character dynamics. It’s very much a novel of my twenties.

Would you go back to it? Try to publish it?

Maybe. It’s a time capsule. There are parts that I think don’t work anymore because I’ve written them better now, but I still have a soft spot for it. At the very least, I think I’ll keep borrowing from it. It has good bones.

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Born and raised in Atlanta, Rob Franklin is a writer of fiction and poetry, and a co-founder of Art for Black Lives. A Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer Award, he has published work in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus, among others. Franklin lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts. Great Black Hope (2025) is his first novel.

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Featured image: Photo of Rob Franklin by Emma Trim.