Behind Seven Hills

Why I Wrote This Book

As a boy, I played baseball in fields not far from where my father grew up in northeastern Oklahoma. That landscape was part of my family story long before I understood its history.

My great-grandfather once swung a pickaxe in the coal mines near Bluejacket, Oklahoma. My father, Terrel Taylor, played basketball for Bluejacket High School—or, as he liked to describe it, “tailback.”

“Taylor, get your tail back on that bench,” the coach would tell him.

Then, during an overtime game, several players fouled out and the coach had no choice but to put him in. Dad sank the winning free throws and became the unlikely hero. Bluejacket had lost twenty-six consecutive games before that night.

Stories like that—funny, humble, and passed down through generations—shaped the way I came to understand Oklahoma. My family has deep roots in both the Dust Bowl Panhandle and the Tri-State mining region, where Oklahoma meets Kansas and Missouri.

Seven Hills grew from that landscape.

The novel is inspired by the region that became the Tar Creek Superfund Site, where a century of mining left behind poisoned streams, abandoned tunnels, towering chat piles, and towns slowly surrendered to the earth. The contamination eventually spread across nearly forty square miles of northeastern Oklahoma and became one of the largest environmental cleanup efforts in American history.

But to the people who lived there, it was never merely a Superfund site. It was home. It was where they attended school, played baseball, worshiped, raised families, buried loved ones, and built lives beneath the shadow of the mines.

Although Seven Hills explores environmental injustice and the decline of an American mining town, it is ultimately a novel about inheritance—not only the inheritance of land, but of memory, faith, sacrifice, silence, and love.

At its heart, the book asks a question that has stayed with me throughout the writing:

Does telling the truth about a place we love destroy it—or finally allow it to be remembered whole?