Clifford Garstang's Blog, page 33

Virtual Book Launch!

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Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person book launch events are not happening just now, and to be honest, that’s okay with me. My last mini-book tour in North Carolina was fun, but it consumed several days of my time, not to mention cash and gas. Instead, Press 53 is hosting a virtual book launch for my new book, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, along with Shuly Cawood’s new story collection, A Small Thing to Want.

The event is on Sunday, May 3, at 2:00 pm ET and can be accessed on Zoom with pre-registration. Register for the event here. Alternatively, you can watch on Facebook Live on the Press 53 page. Shuly and I will read a little from our books, talk a little, and answer questions.

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Taking my turn as Guest Editor

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During the last semester of my MFA program at Queens
University of Charlotte, I wrote short stories because I’d finished my
thesis manuscript, a novel. (Said novel remains unpublished, but I’m thinking
about reviving it when I finish my current work-in-progress.) With my degree in
hand, I wanted to be published, so I started submitting my stories to literary
magazines. It didn’t take long to pick up a couple of acceptances, and so I
kept writing in the short form.

But I didn’t feel like I really understood magazines and how
they made their decisions, so I volunteered as a reader for a magazine that I
thought was high quality and that was also based reasonably close to me so that
I could be of some use. This was before electronic submissions were wide-spread,
and this particular magazine only took hard copy submissions. Every couple of
weeks I’d pick up the latest batch of stories and essays and would comb through
them, looking for the ones I thought were worthy of consideration by the
editor. He ultimately made the selections, but I did come to understand how the
process worked.

I did that for a couple of years, enjoyed it, and when my stint ended I was keen to get involved with another magazine. By that time, my first short story collection had been published by Press 53, and on a publicity tour, I suggested to the publisher that the press should launch a magazine. He said he’d been thinking about that very thing, and during the drive from one city to the next we fleshed out our idea and even came up with a name: Prime Number Magazine (because 53 is a prime number, prime describes something of high quality, a prime is distinctive, and a number is another word for an issue of a periodical).

We recruited genre editors, put out calls for submissions, designed the webpage for the online journal, and by mid-summer of 2010 we launched. Over the next five years, I served as Editor-in-Chief and we published a lot of good work: short stories and flash fiction, poetry, non-fiction, book reviews and interviews, and the occasional short play or graphic story. But it was a lot of work and in 2015 I decided to step down as editor. The publisher changed the model to one that focused only on short stories and poetry and recruited guest editors for each issue from among the writers whose books the press was publishing. It’s been functioning that way ever since and has achieved even more success, including winning its first recognition from the Pushcart Prize.

Which bring us to the most recent issue of the magazine, for
which I served as guest fiction editor (because the press is publishing another
story collection of mine this spring). I read lots of terrific stories over
the course of a three-month submission window and finally selected three
outstanding pieces for Issue 173 of the magazine: “Andrew” by Alyssa Asquith; “Felt
and Left Have the Same Letters” by Lisa Cupolo; and “Mission to Mars” by
Richard Farrell.

Read these stories and also some fine poetry here: Issue 173 of Prime Number
Magazine

2020 Reading–March

This was a big month for reading, which should come as no surprise as I, like a lot of people, have been spending a lot of time at home. Here’s the month’s lineup of books finished:

[image error]I’m From Nowhere by Lindsay Lerman

I’m From Nowhere by Lindsay Lerman is a short novel about grief that takes place against a backdrop of intense global warming. Food production has been severely impacted by the heat crisis and fresh produce is now a luxury. Otherwise, people survive on canned food only. In the new environment, what does the future hold? Does it make sense to even raise children now? And what is climate change doing to our own prospects? At the beginning of the book, Claire has just learned that her husband, John, has died and the funeral is now happening. They were a young couple, and they had been arguing about whether to have a baby. She wanted one—because her life without a job was feeling empty—and he wasn’t sure they should. Two old friends of John’s, Luke and Andrew, have come to the funeral, and Claire has a complicated relationship with both of them. The book, lyrical and slow-paced, shows her dealing with her grief and also deciding whether and how she might continue.

[image error]Bully Love by Patricia Colleen Murphy

Bully Love by
Patricia Colleen Murphy is a poetry collection from Press 53. The poet,
originally from Ohio, now lives in the Southwest and her poetry often addresses
that transition—marveling at the desert landscape in which she now lives while
also remembering her home fondly. The collection also includes many poems about
the poet’s mother who apparently suffered from mental illness. These are
touching poems that also suggest a certain amount of anger. The poems overall
are filled with beautiful images and brave emotions.

[image error]Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh

Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh is about a rare book dealer and folklorist who splits his time between Brooklyn and Calcutta, India. On a visit to India, he learns of a shrine in the Sundarbans, islands off the coast of West Bengal. The shrine, he is told, is connected to a folktale with which he is familiar, about a figure called the Gun Merchant and the Hindu goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi. A young man who accompanies the book dealer to the shrine is bitten by a king cobra, which seems to trigger psychic abilities. Later, through an Italian acquaintance, the dealer makes a connection between Venice and the shrine, so he travels to Venice to investigate further. All of this is told against a background of bizarre weather patterns brought on by global climate change and also the linked issue of migration, as the book dealer becomes involved in a crisis concerning immigrants in Italy, including Bengalis. The book was extremely engaging, but I noted that there are large passages of “information dumps,” basically spots where one character tells another character a story that is intended to provide information to the reader, as well as the main character. It’s essentially how he learns about the issues that are at the heart of the book. In addition, a great deal of the plot depends on coincidences, occurrences that the rational mind would say are unlikely, although the narrator seems to understand this and begins to believe that there are no such things as coincidences—it’s all about fate. Okay, maybe. In any case, I enjoyed the book and will look for more work by this acclaimed writer.

[image error]Last of Her Name by Mimi Lok

Last of
her Name By Mimi Lok is a collection of stories and a novella about the
Chinese diaspora, but mostly about Chinese in Hong Kong and London. Because of
the London connection, it reminded me slightly of my reading of Crazy Rich Asians, which begins in
London but is set primarily in Singapore and, to a lesser extent, Hong Kong.
But Lok’s stories aren’t about the sensationally rich and unreal characters of
Kevin Kwan’s novel. These people feel far more real, living real and gritty
lives. The collection’s novella, “The Woman in the Closet,” is fantastic and
very moving. Granny Ng feels unwanted in her son’s cramped apartment, so she
moves to a tent village of homeless people. Eventually, though, she breaks into
a comfortable home and secretly lives in the owner’s large storage closet.

[image error]The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata

The Lost
Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata is an interesting puzzle of a novel.
Along with Mimi Lok (see Last of Her Name,
above), Zapata and I were scheduled to be on a panel at the Virginia Festival
of the Book called “Stories of Displacement: Fiction, Far from Home.” The
panel, along with the rest of the festival, was canceled, but I wanted to read
my co-panelists’ books anyway. Several strands of narrative come together in
the book as a young man named Saul, who works at a hotel in Chicago, attempts
to fulfil the request of his late grandfather (who raised him after the death
in a terrorist attack in Israel killed Saul’s parents) by sending a package to
someone named Maxwell Moreau in Santiago, Chile. In a separate strand, Maxwell,
born in 1920 to a pirate and a refugee, is searching for his father and carries
with him a book written by his mother, a science fiction story about parallel
worlds. Arriving in Chicago to search, Maxwell is befriended by young Saul
(grandfather to the other Saul), who later becomes a historian and writer.
Saul’s family also has a refugee story, having fled Lithuania during the
Bolshevik revolution. The modern Saul also has a friend, Javier, a foreign
correspondent, who resurfaces after years abroad and together they try to find
Maxwell to deliver the package. It’s quite an engaging tale, although so much
of the information in the story is one character telling a long story to
another character. This feels like it might be the point, although the result
is a lot of “telling” that is sometimes distracting (although always
interesting).

[image error]Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann is this month’s selection for my book club. When oil was discovered in Oklahoma, it made a lot of the members of the Osage Indian tribe very wealthy. And at some point in the early 1920s, a number of these wealthy Osage turned up dead. The book is about how the local authorities couldn’t or wouldn’t solve the crimes, so the newly reorganized Federal Bureau of Investigation under Herbert Hoover stepped in, appointed a new regional director, and insisted on results. The narrative is fascinating on several counts, including the investigation itself as well as the background of both the victims and the killers. In the last section of the book, after describing how the case was solved by the FBI, the writer emerges and describes more of his meetings with the relatives of other victims and discovered that there was more to the case than the FBI saw.

[image error]Be With Me Always by Randon Billings Noble

Be with me
Always by Randon Billings Noble is a collection of essays that I picked
up after the author and I were on a panel together at the Fall for the Book
Festival at George Mason University in 2019. We were on this panel because of
some vague supernatural events in our books (as well as the third book) and by
the theme of “hauntings,” which one could probably say of any book that deals
with memory, and it seems that most books do in one way or another. Anyway, I
enjoyed these very disparate essays, some very personal and others that were
more externally focused, some that were straightforward and traditional and
others more experimental and fragmented.

[image error]Disparates by Patrick Madden

Disparates by Patrick Madden is another essay collection and these essays are so disparate they provide the title for the book. (Madden is mentioned in the acknowledgments for Noble’s book, and I can see some similarities in their work, but I don’t know what the connection is.) One thing I note about the book is the frequency of musical references, to rock bands I don’t know much about. Some of them I’ve heard of, some I haven’t. And there are references to South American performers, too, as Madden has ties there (his wife is from Uruguay and I gather that Madden did his Mormon mission there). Which is fine, as it gave me exposure to new things (but the book should maybe come with a soundtrack). Besides the musical references, though, there are plenty of other allusions to the greater world, especially to literature, that I appreciated more, including to writers at the opposite ends of the art of the essay: Michel de Montaigne and Michael Martone. (I’m only surprised that Madden didn’t make something out of those MM initials.)

[image error]Cargill Falls by William Lychack

Cargill Falls by William Lychack is a short, intense novel about boys growing up together in a small Connecticut town, told in the form of a reflection on a single day. On their way home from school that day, the boys find a gun, a service revolver, and from then on the reader is filled with dread because something is going to happen involving that gun. It just has to. It’s a quiet book, but its beauty is in the language—filled with careful, evocative imagery.

[image error]Murder in the Marais by Cara Black

Murder in
the Marais by Cara Black is the first book in Black’s Aimee Leduc
Investigations series. I almost never read mysteries, but I had been scheduled
to meet the author at a reception at this year’s Virginia Festival of the Book,
so I thought I should read one of her novels. The Festival didn’t happen and
neither did the reception, but I wanted a light read (some of the other books
I’m reading right now are pretty intense), and the idea of a book set in Paris
appealed to me. One reason I don’t read many mysteries is that they tend to be
filled with clichés and the writing is often mundane, if not downright bad. I
wouldn’t say the writing here is bad, but it’s definitely not special. Leduc is
an investigator who specializes in corporate crimes (having fled the rougher
side of the business when her father was murdered), but takes on a murder
investigation when she discovers a body that appears to have been killed by
Neo-Nazi skinheads. The deceased is an old woman who grew up without her
family, victims of the Nazi occupation of France, and the investigation dredges
up some ugly history, not to mention the darker side of modern right-wing
politicians.

“The Learned Lama”–an excerpt from House of the Ancients and Other Stories

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House of the Ancients and Other Stories, my forthcoming story collection (now available for pre-order from the publisher, Press 53), comprises 23 short stories set in a variety of locations, from Scandinavia to Vietnam, Hawaii to Virginia, and points in between. One of those stories, which originally appeared in Six Little Things, is “The Learned Lama,” which is set in Mongolia.

THE LEARNED LAMA

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Snow fills the Ulaan Baatar morning. As arranged, Oliver meets Ganbat outside the hotel. The boy’s ruddy face is soot-streaked, and Oliver knows he has slept underground, relying on steam pipes to survive another bitter night. Like many street kids, Ganbat knows beggar English and has offered, for a thousand tögrög, to guide Oliver. Oliver’s here on business, but wants to do the right thing, to help, so he’ll employ Ganbat for one morning, and hope it is enough.

Oliver
pays and they both enter the Choijin Lama Monastery. He thinks he sees
disapproval on the gatekeeper’s face, but he doesn’t care. Ganbat leads him
through the grounds, tries to explain the significance of the temples, but he
has too few words.

Ganbat
waits outside while Oliver browses in the monastery’s giftshop, a jumble of
handicrafts displayed in a traditional ger. He examines a Mongolian
woodblock—Buddhist scripture, the clerk tells him—and his eyes settle on a row
of tiny bronze statues. He lifts the smallest, no larger than a molar,
surprised by its heft. The clerk holds a magnifying glass and indicates the
features of the diminutive Learned Lama: pointed cap, raised hands, enigmatic
smile. Oliver pays a small fortune for the statue and carries it in his closed
fist, sharp edges biting into his flesh.

The snow is thick now, and wet. Ganbat waits for him at the gate,
shivering. Oliver shows him the Lama. He presses the little statue into
Ganbat’s hand and watches the boy’s eyes grow wide.

Shakespeare on stage, and in your living room: BlkfrsTV

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When I was looking for a place to relocate from Washington DC in 2000-01, I visited Staunton, Virginia, a small town in the Shenandoah Valley. I didn’t know much about the town, but I learned that a remarkable undertaking was nearing completion: construction of the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theater, the Blackfriars Playhouse. I already liked the look of the town and the surrounding countryside, but the theater sealed the deal.

When the doors opened to the theater, I was settled in my new house and hungry for the entertainment on offer by the American Shakespeare Center–world-class productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It turned out to be far more, as the theater also offered music and contemporary plays as well. I became an instant fan.

Fast forward, and I was invited to join the Board of Trustees a couple of years ago. The ASC is such an important part of this community, presenting a year-round schedule of live theater and music, drawing visitors from all over the world, that I have been honored to be part of it, and I am still a regular member of the audience.

Right now is a particularly tough time for arts organizations, especially theaters. Like everyone else, the ASC has had to close its doors because of the risk of spreading the coronavirus. But unlike most theaters, we had a slate of seven shows (four from the current season and three from the upcoming spring season) that we wanted to be able to share, in no small part because ticket sales make up the bulk of our revenues. No performances, no revenues. Unless we can somehow put those shows online and sell tickets.

Which is what the creative team at ASC has done. Introducing BlkfrsTV. Right now, you can buy a ticket to watch filmed versions of plays performed in our beautiful theater. You can see Much Ado About Nothing, Henry IV part 1, and Henry IV part 2. And in a couple of days we’ll be adding Beaumont & Fletcher’s A King and No King (one of the funniest plays I’ve ever seen.) Because of restrictions from Actors Equity, these are available only for the next 3 weeks, so hurry! After that we’ll be putting up filmed versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Imogen (Cymbeline) and a beautiful adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath.

The ASC is a non-profit theater and your ticket purchases will help us survive this difficult time.

Splendid Isolation

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I certainly do not want to make light of the present crisis. So many people are sick and so many others are hurting because their businesses are shuttered. Neither do I want to dwell on it. Other than not getting sick myself and not spreading the virus to others, there isn’t a whole lot I can do about what’s going on in this country and the world right now, and my own mental health depends on turning my attention elsewhere. I’m all about being alone with myself right now and staying sane.

So, how am I doing that?

Spending way less time on social media. I can’t stay away from Facebook and Twitter for too long, but as soon as I see a post about the coronavirus or Trump’s failure to manage the crisis, I click it off. If there’s good news, I’m sure I’ll hear about it. In the meantime, Instagram is safer. Ooh, look at the pretty pictures!

Reading. With a week left to go in March, I think I’ve
already set a record for the number of books finished in a one month period.
That actually makes me happy. I have such a backlog of books that I could be in
isolation for years and not finish them all. I also listen to audiobooks and I
was in the middle of a very long one when I began my social distancing, so
without actually interacting with people, I get out of the house each day and
go for a drive so I can listen. And there’s a favorite coffee shop that has
curbside service, so I can order a cappuccino or whatever on the app, drive
down there while listening to the book, and have an appropriately removed
exchange with the barista when I pick it up.

Studying languages. I love to study languages, even though I
can’t speak anything other than English. (That’s not entirely true. I’m not
fluent in anything other than English, but I can get by in a few others.) My
last trip abroad (as in most recent, not my last trip ever, I hope) was to
Spain in December, so I worked on my rusty Spanish while I was there, and since
I’ve been home I’ve been working on it with Duolingo. I’ve been studying
Chinese off and on for a long time, so I’m using Duolingo and some other
materials to refresh and improve my Chinese. And I bought a subscription to
Babbel’s French lessons last year, so I spend a few minutes a day on that, too.
It’s probably not smart to do French and Spanish at the same time, but the
Chinese doesn’t interfere at all.

Book promotion. Despite the crisis, I’ve got a book coming
out in May. Maybe it will be delayed or maybe it won’t, but I’ve got to start
thinking about how I’ll promote it. Right now I don’t think an in-person launch
party is likely, but that’s still a possibility. I’m going to carve out some
time to update my website and encourage pre-orders.

Cleaning. Sure. That’s on the list. Where do I start?

Walking. My gym is either closed or off-limits, not sure
which, and in either case I’m not going there anytime soon. I love to walk. It’s
cold and rainy today, but I’ve been trying to put in 90 minutes or so of
walking every day. Because I live out in the country, I don’t see other people
when I’m walking, so I’m still keeping my distance. Good for my health, mental and
otherwise.

Writing. Well, I’m a writer, after all, so I’ve been
spending more time on my current work in progress than I was before the virus
hit. Even a few sentences a day feels good after ignoring it most of the year
so far. This week I also had an editing/teaching gig, working on a student
story, so that felt like writing, too. I also have a book review deadline in a
few weeks, so I’ll have to turn to that soon. But this is the real reason for
this post. I’ve often gone on writing retreats, usually at an arts colony,
where the point of being there was to isolate myself from social engagements
and focus on the work. While this isolation is rather involuntary, I feel the
need to take advantage of it.

Stories of Displacement: Fiction, Far from Home

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A couple of days ago, I should have been seated before a large crowd of book lovers at the James Madison Regional Library in Charlottesville, Virginia for a Virginia Festival of the Book panel called “Stories of Displacement: Fiction, Far from Home.” I’d been looking forward to the panel for months, one of my last events promoting my debut novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, which came out in May 2019. Alas, the festival was canceled and the panel along with it, thanks to justifiable fears of spreading the coronavirus. (I was also scheduled to moderate a panel called “Writing the Anthropocene,” which I’ve written about here, along with interviews of the three authors on that panel: Virtual Panel.)

So the “Displacement” panel did not happen, although our
moderator, Meredith Cole, has a podcast and she has recorded a conversation
with two of the three panelists, and you can listen to that conversation here: Meredith Cole in Conversation
with Michael Zapata and Clifford Garstang.

But in addition, I thought I’d share my own reflections on
the subjection of displacement as it relates to all three of the books.

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Mimi Lok, author of , wasn’t able to join us for the podcast, which
is a shame because I really enjoyed her collection of short stories and a
novella. I would describe these fictions as gritty, because they deal with
people who seem hyper-real, the Chinese diaspora unlike the unrealistically
super-rich of Crazy Rich Asians. I
especially loved the novella, “The Woman in the Closet,” about an elderly woman
who feels unwanted by her son and daughter-in-law in their cramped apartment,
so she moves into a Hong Kong tent city for the homeless. Moving from one
encampment to another as the authorities clamp down on them, Granny Ng finds a
comfortable squatter arrangement in a large closet of a bachelor’s home,
unbeknownst to him. Somebody should snatch up the movie rights to that one. The
other stories in the collection are equally compelling.

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I was glad that Michael
Zapata was able to join us on the podcast. His book, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, is a
wonderfully complex tale of displacement. It begins as the story of a Dominican
refugee in New Orleans in the 1920s who marries a man who describes himself as
a pirate. She writes and publishes a science fiction novel about parallel
universes and finishes the sequel and destroys it shortly before her death.
Later, when her husband has gone off to find work, their son follows him and is
befriended by a family in Chicago. In the present (the two narratives
alternate), a young man comes into possession of a package that his grandfather
wants delivered, but the man, who himself is something of a refugee, has to go
to great lengths to find the addressee. In the process, he heads to New Orleans
in the aftermath of Katrina, and as a result encounters a whole city of
displaced people.

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Finally, my own book, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, is
about a young man in Virginia who is trying to resettle on the family farm
after serving in the US Army in the Middle East and Korea. He has been
displaced by his service, but even more so his young Korean wife experiences
culture shock and is unable to feel at home in her new environment. She copes
with her extreme culture shock by developing her skills as a Korean shaman,
which puts her into conflict with her husband’s mother, a woman from a long
line of Appalachian healers, themselves part of the wave of Scots-Irish
immigrants who arrived in the Shenandoah Valley two centuries earlier. Also on
the list of the displaced are a couple of cousins who stir up trouble because
they believe they’ve been cheated out of the family wealth.

What all of these books have in common, I think, are the
people who are looking for a place to call home. The characters in Lok’s book
are far from their ancestral homes, but try to settle in London or the US or,
in the case of Granny Ng, in someone’s closet. In Zapata’s novel, the
characters feel a certain inevitable restlessness, and while making a home for
themselves is a goal, it’s hard to achieve. Where is home, anyway? And in my
book, finding home is really what it’s all about. The main character is trying
to make a home for himself and his son, while his wife longs to return to the
village of her birth—that’s her home.

It was an honor to be part of this panel and it’s truly a
disappointment that we weren’t able to meet and discuss our books with an
audience, but I hope readers will discover and enjoy these three books anyway.

Virginia Festival of the Book Virtual Panel: Writing the Anthropocene

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The Virginia Festival of the Book is an annual event that takes place in and around Charlottesville, VA. The 2020 edition was to have begun today, March 18, with dozens of programs over the next five days, but like so many other big events around the country, it has been canceled because of the risk of spreading the coronavirus. I was honored to have been asked to moderate a panel featuring three terrific authors, and before the unfortunate cancelation, I was preparing for the panel by reading their books and developing questions to ask when we gathered. Sadly, we cannot get together to discuss their work or to present it live to an audience, but I did invite all three authors to participate in a virtual panel, responding to my questions in writing, and the results are here.

First, though, I’d like
to note that you can help support these authors by buying their books. It would
be fitting, too, if you could purchase their books through New Dominion Bookshop, which was preparing
to host our panel and had stocked these books. Otherwise, your nearest
independent bookstore should be able to get the books for you.

Now, some introductions
of the panelists.

[image error]Amitav Ghosh

Amitav
Ghosh, author
of Gun Island, is also the
author of the bestselling Ibis trilogy, and the nonfiction book The Great Derangement. His other novels include The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace. He divides his time between India and New York.

[image error]Lindsay Lerman

Lindsay
Lerman,
author of I’m From Nowhere, holds a PhD in
philosophy from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She lives in
Richmond, where she works as a writer, academic translator, and teacher. Her
first translation will be published in 2020. I’m From Nowhere is her first novel.

[image error]Johanna Stoberock

Johanna
Stoberock,
author of Pigs, lives in Walla
Walla, Washington, and teaches at Whitman College.

[image error]Clifford Garstang

Clifford
Garstang,
author of The Shaman of Turtle Valley, won the Library
of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction for his novel in stories, What The Zhang Boys Know, and is also the author of the story collection In an Uncharted Country.

Clifford
Garstang: Let’s start with a question about the reason these
three books were grouped together by the Virginia Festival of the Book on a
panel called “Writing
the Anthropocene.” Your books are set against a backdrop of human impact on
the environment: extreme weather patterns in Gun Island, extreme global
warming in I’m From Nowhere, and the ocean garbage crisis in Pigs.
We can’t afford to ignore these problems, but what prompted you to incorporate
them into your novels? On a related note, do you think writers have an
obligation to address social issues?

Amitav Ghosh: This panel introduced me to a lot of great books, for which I feel very grateful. I think all of us, as writers (including you of course, Cliff) are trying to address the realities of the world we live in. It’s impossible to shut our eyes to the disruptions of that world; we can just carry on writing as though nothing had changed. As for obligations, I think a writer’s principal obligation is to their work.Lindsay Lerman: In my case, I don’t think it was an entirely conscious decision to “include” the warming climate in the book. As the book developed and the desert setting became a character in its own right, I just wanted the book to reflect the reality that the desert’s heat becomes more intense and unbearable each year, and that it’s been this way for quite some time. Put differently, I simply couldn’t imagine telling a story set in the desert that didn’t acknowledge the reality of a changing, warming world. Especially because I’m From Nowhere is a book about death and mourning; how could a book about death and mourning not also engage the mourning we’re all surely doing as we make our world less inhabitable? I don’t know if writers have an obligation to address social issues, but if you write in order to understand the world and yourself, social issues and your relationship to them will show up in the work somehow.Johanna Stoberock: When I started writing Pigs, it didn’t occur to me that what I was writing was an “issues” novel. I just really loved the bizarro world of the island, and loved imagining all the things that the pigs on the island could eat (finally there was a place for all the junk my kids brought home from school!). But during the first summer I was working on the book, the news was filled with stories of children in overwhelmingly vulnerable situations, and somehow the container that I had created–an island that serves as the repository for everything the larger world throws away–began to stretch to contain those children, and then I realized that there was a connection between the children and the way that we treat the earth, and so the two kind of wound together.In terms of your second question, I really believe that writers only have an obligation to write well. But I do think that now is not a time to hold back if what you want to write about are social issues.

CG:
Your books aren’t only about the impact of humans on the environment, however,
as the environmental concerns feed back into impacts on people: the migration
crisis, overheated personal relationships, and wasted human potential. These
are obviously related concerns and I wonder if you could comment on this correlation.

AG:
I think it is obvious today, that it is impossible to separate our personal
lives from everything that is happening around us. Thirty years ago it used to
be said that writers from the Third World wrote about politics and social
issues  while Western writers wrote about
the inner lives of their characters. It’s quite startling how quickly that has
changed over the last few years. LL: This was especially
important to me, as I wrote I’m From
Nowhere and edited it. If I had wanted to write a book “about” climate
crisis, I would have written nonfiction. With a novel, the goal is to capture
the feeling–the texture–of a series of moments, and doing that requires
attention to the feedback loop of life. If we’re writing about the world, we
don’t get to pull human relationships out of the context(s) in which they
occur. The unignorable context right now is ecological catastrophe that leaves
traces everywhere. There’s no part of life on this planet that is untouched by
it.JS: I don’t think we can separate
out the effects of our changing environment from the way we think about our
fellow human beings. It’s hard to imagine a life that is not affected by the
way human beings treat the world, whether it’s about grasping to have more of
an easy life or suffering immensely without access to that which would ease
suffering, even a little bit.

CG:
It seems to me that these topics are of utmost importance. Can you recommend
other works of fiction that effectively address human impact on the environment?

AG:
I think Richard Powers’ Overstory is
a great book. I also made some other recommendations here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/books-make-sense-wounded-planet-amitav-ghoshJS: I’m reading Deb Olin
Unferth’s Barn 8 right now, about the chicken farming industry
(and so much more), and am captivated by her ability to write both a very human
novel and a novel that considers the environment, politics, and animal
consciousness.

Questions
for Amitav Ghosh:

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CG:
I was already hooked when the narrator of Gun Island visits the shrine
in the Sundarbans early in the novel and we learn about the legend of the Gun
Merchant. I was then blown away when the connection to Venice is revealed (I
hope that’s not too much of a spoiler), especially the references to Shakespeare’s
Venetian plays. Can you comment on the genesis of the idea for the book?

AG:
The book grew out of my long personal relationship with Venice – I’ve been
visiting the city for four decades and have watched its population change while
its outward forms remain the same. The influx of people from Bengal was
particularly striking to me and it played a large part in the genesis of the
book.

CG:
I was also intrigued by the character of Tipu and the emergence of his psychic
abilities. His questions to the narrator about shamanism were of particular
interest to me because of my own recent novel about a Korean shaman. How important
to you are the mystical elements of the story, which help to tie the current
plot to the Gun Merchant legend?

AG:
Like you I find shamanism very interesting especially because shamans were the
people who gave voice to non-human beings – something that writers once did but
now very rarely do.

CG:
I was struck by the nobility of many of the characters in the novel. Young Rafi
stands by his friend in need, Piya is a champion of the marine species she
studies but also of the humans she feels responsible for, and an Italian
admiral does the right thing in the face of official and popular opposition.
There are many other examples, as well. Given the environmental catastrophe,
how important was it to you to portray this heroism?  

AG:
These characters are based on real-life examples. There was in fact an Italian
admiral who said he would rescue people stranded at sea no matter what the
government ordered – simply because it was the law of the sea. Similarly I have
known many very dedicated conservationists.

Questions
for Lindsay Lerman

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CG:
Your novel is primarily a study of grief. Not only has your main character,
Claire, lost her husband, but she’s grieving for the baby she didn’t conceive
while he was alive. How is this exacerbated by the climate crisis going on in
the background?

LL: I think the climate
crisis in the background heightens or exacerbates Claire’s grief, yes, but it
also simultaneously shrinks it. She struggles with this throughout, asking
herself if she has any right to grieve the death of one man when she is
surrounded by death every day, when she knows that she’s luckier than most
because she has a roof over her head and access to food, for instance. All I
can really say is that I share this struggle and these questions with Claire–I
am not comfortable with the fact that some deaths are considered more worthy of
grief and grieving than others, and it is hard to know how much space we should
give ourselves to grieve individual human lives as many species approach
extinction everyday. Claire’s desire for a baby is another difficult aspect of
the book, I think. The tensions that the baby represents cannot be easily
resolved. On the one hand, Claire suspects she would never be content as a
mother and housewife, she knows that having a baby during a never-ending crisis
is not wise, and she wonders if she wants a baby for the “wrong” reasons (a
desperate search for purpose and belonging, remaining comfortably within and
doubling down on established gender roles, etc.). But on the other hand, she
foolishly–but maybe also beautifully–suspects that she has more love to give,
that there might be something glorious in the uselessness of human life and its
continuation, and that she and John might have learned something crucial
together as parents. John’s death prevents her from finding any of this out,
and she feels some bitterness and anger about it–bitterness and anger that are
selfish but not entirely so. The foreclosed possibilities in her life are not
disconnected from the foreclosed possibilities in all our lives, as the climate
and the issues related to it (famine, disease, war) shape each of us.

CG:
In her grief, Claire turns to two male friends with whom she has a history. She
is clearly struggling to fill her life, which now feels even emptier than it
was, and her judgment may be clouded by her sense of loss. How do you think the
climate situation has impacted her?

LL: I think she finds
herself feeling a kind of nihilistic “what’s it all for?” pull. She’s done
everything she was supposed to, been just what the world wanted her to be, and
she finds herself wondering if it has resulted in anything like liberation. Or,
at a bare minimum, has it resulted in her being on the receiving end of respect
or consideration? When she starts to see that the answer to these questions is
no, all hell breaks loose for her. The climate heightens this (again). If everything is ending, why bother
following the rules or doing what a “good girl” ought to? The fact that she
turns to the men she turns to, however, is an indication (I think) that she’s
fumbling in the dark a little bit as she aims for liberation. (Some readers
don’t agree with me on this, though. I respect the fact that the book is not
exclusively mine.) She has the right to fumble, like we all do.

CG:
Claire and her husband had not agreed to have a baby, in part because he seems
to have considered it irresponsible given the fragility of the environment.
Claire, on the other hand, is desperately in search of fulfillment that she
thinks a child will bring. Can you comment on this conflict between them—John
who is pessimistic about the future and Claire who feels a need to move on?

LL: At the beginning of the
book, I think the conflict is framed in terms of something like pessimism and
optimism, but by the end of the book, Claire understands that it’s a more
complicated issue, having to do with who is taken to be capable of shaping
shared lives–who gets to make decisions, who gets to think about and orient
lives toward a future, who is granted agency in this sense. Claire wonders, by
the end, if John’s pessimism and concerns about having a baby are less about
pessimism, per se, and are more about controlling the shape and direction of
Claire’s life. Now that I think about it, it seems important to keep these
concerns up front, to ask ourselves to remember that issues of gender politics,
for instance, will not be magically resolved at the end of the world. Even as
crises continue to upset normalcy, we will have to grant ourselves permission
to ask who is making decisions for us
and why, and who they benefit. With Claire and John, we see this playing out on
a micro scale–the scale of individual lives.

Questions
for Johanna Stoberock

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CG:
I loved (and was horrified by) the descriptions of all the trash that washes up
on the beaches of your island which the little tribe of children then feed to
the pigs. While it’s easy to see the point about our wasteful society, it’s
maybe a little less clear what’s being said about the children. Partly, I
suppose, it’s that we’re leaving our mess for our children to clean up, but maybe
there’s something more there, too? What are we doing to our future?

JS: I mentioned above that, early
in the writing process, it seemed like I couldn’t turn on the radio without
hearing another story about the world’s mistreatment of its children. This, of
course, has been the story since long before I started writing, and has
continued to be the story during the long process of finishing and then
publishing the novel, and will continue long past its publication. One of the
things I tried really hard to do was write love into the book–it’s dark, for
sure, but I loved every piece of garbage that washed onto the island’s shore
(partly because it was fun writing them, and partly because I think that, if
we’re throwing something away, our job is to look at it first and try to love it).
With the novel’s children, I wanted them just to be ordinary kids who have to
deal with the mess of the world with the ordinary tools that they have. No one
is going to save them but themselves–they know it, even if the only
compassionate adult on the island (Otis) thinks he can make everything better
for them.

CG:
Jonathan Lethem calls your book a “dark-inflected allegory,” which I’d
certainly agree with, and he also mentions its connection to Lord of the Flies. He might also have
mentioned Animal Farm, given the
importance of the pigs to the story as well as the oppression of the children
by the adults on the hill. Can you comment on your inspiration or influences
for the book?

JS: You know, it’s funny, but I
hadn’t read Lord of the Flies since high school when I started
writing Pigs. Half way through, I realized how much I owed to
that novel, and I reread it then (P. 108 tries to find a way to say thank you
to that book, and I’ve tried to include thank you’s throughout to other works
that wormed their way into my head and came out in the novel–the television
show, Lost, Peter Pan, etc.). But the more explicit influences
are these:The short Brazilian film, Isle
of Flowers, by Jorge Furtado (1989), which I saw as part of the
Seattle Human Rights Film Festival in the mid-1990’s. It tracks the life of a
single tomato plant.  An indelible image from the film is that of pigs
getting access to a garbage dump to look for food before children are allowed
access.The TV show Criminal
Minds, which aired an episode shortly before I began writing Pigs in
which a serial killer feeds his victims to his pigs.My backyard chickens, who eat
everything.

CG:
Possibly my favorite character in the novel is Otis, the adult who drifts
ashore and joins forces with the children. He seems to undergo the greatest
change of all the characters. Since we don’t want to spoil the ending, could
you talk a little about his past? He behaved pretty badly as a husband and
father, so is that why he lands on this island? And is he there to atone?

JS: I’m glad you liked Otis–he’s
my favorite character, too! It’s funny, I have whole drafts of the novel that
show his past, but, ultimately, the thing that seemed right for the book is
that characters are only in focus on the island. So I’ll just say this–he is
where he is because he’s just one of those people who can’t help but throw away
the things that matter to him most. And he finds a way to move forward (maybe
atone) because going backwards is simply not a possibility: his marriage is
over; he can’t get back to his son; he can’t love the world through his
eyes–what’s done is done, and we all just have to move on instead of looking
to the past. And he does act well in the end, and he does find a new way to
create meaning in the world.

Interview with Chris Register

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Chris Register is a Charlottesville, VA writer I bump into from time to time at writing events. We discovered that we have some things in common–we both served in the Peace Corps and have practiced law–so when I heard about his Conversations With US project and that he had a new book coming out, I invited him to chat with me about it here.

The second volume of your Conversations With US series is about to appear on March 19, 2020. What prompted you to start the project?

Cliff, I started the project because America is in trouble,
and everybody knows it. I think I put it best in the introduction to the
upcoming Conversations With US – American Southwest:

Wondering
often leads to wandering, though I suppose the opposite is equally true. …While
perhaps an eager participant, my innate restlessness was not the genesis of Conversations With US. The project began taking shape in
my mind alongside concern about a different unraveling, one threatening the
nation itself. I worried the headlines and social media posts were right—that
the United States of America was coming undone. Cable news experts and internet
trolls were tripping over themselves to portray us as little more than a
corrosive amalgamation of distrust, tribalism, and misunderstanding, centered
in a dysfunctional and disconnected Washington. I wondered if that dire
narrative would stand up to an on-the-ground inquiry, out in the real America.

I wandered to find out.

What
can we expect to see in Volume 2?

The first thing that comes to mind is that you can expect
to be captivated by the epic story behind the cover photo, and the hair-raising
experience that followed shortly after I took the shot.

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How’s that for a teaser? After that, I’d say you can expect an eye-opening adventure that will leave you with a much richer and more nuanced understanding of the people of the American Southwest. I covered some 1,900 miles, much of it through lonely ranchland and desert, and I interviewed something like 30 Southwesterners—archetypes included—over the course of 5 weeks. You can expect to meet folks whose perspectives you agree with, folks who you vehemently disagree with, and—if you go into this with an open mind—I think you can expect to see your patience with the other side—whatever that might be for you—grow in some material degree.

What
is life like on a long trip like that? Where do you sleep? How do you survive?

Exciting, lonely, unforgettable, tough, invigorating,
harsh, reassuring, depressing, uplifting. I undertook all of my Conversations
With US tours completely alone, almost always in places I’d never been. I
go into detail in the books’ introduction about my sleeping situations but if
you can dream it up, I probably had to do it. For example, on the American
Southwest tour, I slept in a casino motel, under a bridge, in random people’s
houses, beside a pumpjack, in a rodeo arena, in a hostel, in a kid’s bedroom
next to his pet tortoise, on the lip of the Grand Canyon, and 300ft below sea
level in Death Valley. I survived with the help of my credit card and the
goodwill of countless Americans.

Have
you had any harrowing situations on your travels that you can share? Accidents?
Attacked by wild animals?

I wouldn’t want to give away too much, Cliff, because then
my teasers wouldn’t work. I’ll say this: imagine yourself traveling the entire
country on a bicycle over a cumulative year, sleeping in all kinds of random
places, and, again, whatever you dream up in terms of close-calls, I’ve
probably experienced it. I’ve had several encounters with wild animals (see my Alaska
blog post for examples). In fact, what might have been my closest
call with a dangerous animal happened while I was all alone, on Day 28 of the
American Southwest tour.

We
have some shared background—serving in the Peace Corps and then practicing law.
How have these experiences influenced your project or your writing?

With the Peace Corps, I think living among poor folks in El
Salvador and traveling much of Latin America has shown me how people suffer
when government and civil society aren’t functioning. If you think about, say,
Argentina or Brazil, and especially Venezuela right now, those countries all
have abundant natural resources, but the first two are not economically stable
and have serious poverty problems, and Venezuela is a complete tragedy of human
misery. None of those problems fell from outer space—they are the results of
failed, or foundering, civil society and rule of law. What really, truly
frightens me, especially in recent years, is how clear it has become to me that
our country is susceptible to the same failures. If we don’t get our act
together soon, and start working together as a nation to solve our problems, we
seriously might be looking at a reversal of quality of life as our institutions
and sense of shared purpose crumble. Conversations With US really is
just my humble attempt to do something to help us see that we’re in this
together, and it all depends on us.

As for being an attorney, I think practicing law helped me hone the clarity of my writing and interview questions. And, it also made me a stickler for consistency and detail, which has allowed me to design these books myself while producing, I think, a high-quality product, and also to run the business side of Spoke & Word Books. I think those are all good things, but I also think the precision with which I write is simultaneously my biggest weakness as an author. I often find myself, by default, placing clarity over flourish, which doesn’t always make for really moving storytelling. I’m still working on that, but I think readers will find a marked improvement from Volume 1 to Volume 2.

What’s
next?



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A little R&R, some salsa dancing, lots of public appearances, and the volume that might appeal most to folks around our Central Virginia home: Conversations With US (Vol. 3) – Appalachia & Bluegrass Country.

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How
can we learn more? What’s the best way to order the books?

Visit my robust website, conversationswithus.com, to access
tons of cool multimedia content, from maps to audio recordings to photo/video. There,
you can also order signed copies of Great Lakes States and American
Southwest (the latter will be released on March 19th). The Great
Lakes States audiobook
(produced in Charlottesville) and American Southwest Kindle
ebook are currently available on Amazon. If you’re just itching
to get a copy of American Southwest right now, I am offering PDF copies for
purchase on my website for early readers. Finally, the first public appearance
of American Southwest will take place at Horton Vineyards from 12-4pm on
March 28th. I’ll be signing books and answering questions, and will
have the touring rig with me for folks to check out. You can see the Facebook
event here.

Thanks, Cliff, and let’s go on a ride sometime!

Virginia Festival of the Book is Canceled

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Under any circumstances, I would have been disappointed to learn that the Virginia Festival of the Book had been canceled. (I just received an email from the organizers to that effect, over fears of the spread of the coronavirus. It’s a perfectly rational decision, and probably wise.) I always enjoy going to panels and hearing authors speak about their books. I was especially looking forward to this year’s festival, however, because my own book had been selected to be featured on a panel and I was slated to moderate another.

It’s darn hard to get exposure for a book if you’re not already well-known and your book is published by a small press. Festivals like this one are a huge help in reaching readers we might never find. And now that opportunity is lost for this year.

My disappointment aside, I sympathize with the Festival organizers who have put in so much work getting ready for the event, only to see it end in this way. Here’s hoping the festival comes back bigger and better next year.