In Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season, she describes relocating to Sonoma County from San Francisco in 2017, just as the drought-driven wildfire seasons began to accelerate. The turbulence of the years since the pandemic and the out-of-control California wildfires started changed her life, and inspired and shaped her new memoir.

“When the pandemic started, I was working on a novel,” she explains. “Cut to three years later and I’ve just published a memoir. A lot has happened! The Last Fire Season takes place in 2020, which as we all know was also the first year of the pandemic. The events in the book arguably began in 2017, when I moved from the city to the woods during a different horrific wildfire season. At that time, I also began experiencing the health crisis that has accompanied me ever since, in the form of chronic pain, which also plays a role in the book. So 2020 wasn’t my first wildfire experience, but it was a turning point for me in my awareness of fire as a permanent presence in my life, and of the wildfire crisis as one that is linked to others.

“Unfortunately,” she adds, “the years since 2020 have continued to be excellent case examples of what’s often called polycrisis. With the memoir, I’m interested in finding a way to portray life amid all these shifting baselines while also exploring the context—whether historical, ecological, or personal.” Our email conversation took place within miles of each other, in Sonoma County. The fact that I, too, had experienced the chaos of Northern California wildfires coming in the night, with no warning, no option but to run, shortly after relocating from an urban environment (Brooklyn) brought with it an appreciation of how well she captures these intense, nearly indescribable moments. The Last Fire Season is both heart-stoppingly dramatic and profoundly rooted in an understanding of where we fit in the natural world.

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Jane Ciabattari: How did you decide to structure the book by months, from August through October, according to the dramatic turns of the fire season of 2020 in California?

Manjula Martin: There’s a note I wrote myself at one point in the drafting process that I tacked up above my desk. It says “just write what happened.” The book weaves together a few different threads—the fire crisis, my own bodily pain, and the larger polycrisis of this moment in time. So from the beginning I knew I needed a simple, straightforward structure. A chronological timeline is a classic for a reason!

In addition to following the months of that fire season, each section of the book is inspired by the qualities of a different natural element, with Fire as a constant thread or presence. This concept could easily get a bit precious, so I don’t call a lot of overt attention to it on the page, but it was an important part of my writing process. You’ll see it show up in things like chapter names, and the little icons at the start of each section (which are actually images from element-inspired tattoos that I have, thanks to the book’s graphic designer!).

JC: One chilling aspect of your fire season chronology is how close fire comes. You describe driving in the Sierra “with spotty cell reception over an unpopulated mountain some part of which was already on fire,” with a towering cloud of pyrocumulus smoke visible out the window, to the summit of some 8,300 feet, and coming down the other side safely. A suspenseful trip to read about! And the helicopter rescue of a group of tourists at the reservoir near where you had hiked the day before, “three hundred vacationers…corralled toward by lake by flames on all sides.” (The Creek Fire “surged through 20,000 acres within the span of a day.”) How did you describe the experience from inside the fire? Did you take notes at the time? How did your fire narrative evolve?

MM: Yeah, during those weeks there was such a sense that fire was following me everywhere I went. Yet, interestingly, I didn’t encounter fire face-to-face until I formed a direct relationship with it while learning about prescribed fire, later in the narrative.

In the scene you mention, I actually took a video with my phone, with Miles Davis audible on the car stereo and everything. That moment felt so strangely beautiful and terrible at the same time, I knew I’d later want to prove to myself it happened. Of course, it turned out I didn’t need the video, because it was imprinted permanently in my amygdala! When it came to fire scenes I wasn’t personally present for, I started with my own memory of hearing about them, and then went to research—local news, social media, interviews, and similar reporting sources.

One challenge I encountered in writing the book was portraying fire itself. In the first chapter, I write about how wildfire is always described using these monstrous, ravenous verbs, and so throughout the book I play with different ways of portraying fire, using vocabulary that evolves and changes as my understanding of fire changes throughout the story. This is where you’ll see the elements show up too—in the way fire is embodied, sometimes moving like water, sometimes acting ethereal, and so on.

JC: You have another story you set out to tell after you relocated from San Francisco to rural Sonoma County—the story of how your garden and the forest around it had become your “companion in damage and renewal.” How did you figure a way to weave that into your ongoing fire season narrative? Or vice versa?

MM: I knew I wanted to include the story of my body in the story of the fires, in part because they happened simultaneously (“write what happened”!) but also because these crises are intrinsically connected. Like the rest of the natural world, women’s bodies have historically been idealized as both fonts of fertility and objects of purity, ripe for possession—with harmful and lasting results. Both these stories involve site-specific injuries caused by larger, systemic harms. In the case of the land on which I live, the harms are the result of colonization, extraction, and an exploitative relationship with nature.

In the case of my body, the systems at play include a for-profit healthcare industry and a sociopolitical system obsessed with controlling women’s reproductive health. The interweaving of these two storylines in the book actually came very naturally once I realized that the place where they connected for me—physically as well as metaphorically—was in my garden. So the scenes in the garden became the key to interlacing all this stuff. I think I figured this all out somewhere in the third draft!

JC: How did you research the parts of your story based on Native American use of fire focused on the overall health of the ecosystem (including “prescribed fire,” sometimes referred to as “good fire”) and on renewing important cultural and survival resources?

MM: In my research I read widely, of course, but I think the ideal way to learn about fire is to have relationships with living people who are out there every day putting fire on the land. Traditional ecological knowledge, including that of fire, has been violently suppressed since colonization. As a result, the archives of institutions (many of which were colonialist institutions from inception) aren’t always going to show you the whole story.

So if I was able to interview a person or go visit a place, instead of quote a study, I tried to do so. Some of the awesome Indigenous fire practitioners I had the pleasure of learning from included the staff of TERA—Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance, in Lake County—and a fire expert named Margo Robbins, who is cofounder and president of the Cultural Fire Management Council, based in the Yurok nation in Northern California.

JC: How did you come up with the concept of “future memories,” in which you jump ahead into another moment? For instance, you describe standing in your yard with Sasha Berleman, a fire scientist, wildland firefighter and nonprofit director, looking at wildflowers that have grown in a cleared area. She asks for seeds to sprinkle in burn areas, and says, “Good fire changes fear into action.” All of this is a future moment inserted into the ongoing narrative.

MM: I could talk endlessly about memoir structure choices! But for the sake of brevity, I’ll say that from the beginning I knew I’d place the main narrative in what I’m calling a hard past-tense. (There is probably a better grammar word for this but I do not know it.) That choice was necessary for me to gain distance from the book’s events, which were ongoing in my life, enough so that I could successfully write about them.

So the “past memory” scenes—which are told in the present tense, as are other memories—began as a bit of a formal trick. I needed a way to work in the research and interviews that I conducted after the events of the main storyline. For me, with memoir, these kinds of decisions about the book’s formal structure all serve a purpose: they remind me to question my own perception of time, history, what is and isn’t fixed, and who—and what language—decides that.

JC: How have your attitudes toward fire changed in the course of these years of experiencing and writing about California’s wildfires?

MM: Drastically. The more I learn about fire; the more I see and interact with fire; the more I understand the histories that brought fire to play its current role in the landscape and my life—the less afraid I feel.

JC: How has being in nature, fostering beauty through gardening—“linking” your body more closely to the body of this place” where you lived, served as a healing process?

MM: I think the healing I’ve found in gardening is in the ways gardening makes space for ambivalence. In many ways this book is trying to push against binaries—fire is bad or good, nature is innocent or ravaged, etc. That includes the idea of being “healed by nature,” as well as the concept of being “damaged” at all. My body is all of those things, all the time. It’s also a damn miracle. And that is something I am learning directly from the land. Gardening allows me to inhabit pain and pleasure, powerlessness and control, joy and grief, life and death, care and violence—all of it.

JC: What was the most difficult aspect of writing this memoir?

MM: Living through the events of the book, then immediately signing up to live through the events of the book over and over, in my head, for the next few years, was in retrospect perhaps not a super healthy thing to do! I’m partly joking, but the writing process was more difficult than I anticipated—psychologically because I was still living through it, and physically because of my chronic health issues.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

MM: Everyone says you’re supposed to start your next book before your current book comes out, so you’ll have something to obsess about that is within your control, and also, you know, a career. But I’m not sure when one is supposed to do that. In some ways it feels like I just finished final edits! Last week I did finally have time to clean out my little writing lair for the first time since finishing the memoir, and I put up a big sheet of butcher paper and began mapping a new novel.

The new novel is (roughly) a multi-decade narrative about two sisters who take very different, sometimes surprising, paths in life. It’s about women’s relationships, solitude, and the subversive potential of art during the rise of fascism. So, not at all timely, haha!

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The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History by Manjula Martin is available from Pantheon Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn, published in 2010 and based on his service as a much-decorated Marine during the Vietnam War, has become a wartime classic, linked with All Quiet on the Western Front. In Deep River, his second novel, Marlantes, whose maternal grandparents came from Finland, wrote about Finnish immigrants to the U.S. during the early years of the twentieth century.

His new novel, Cold Victory, combines his visceral sense of wartime with a sophisticated awareness of Finnish culture and terrain and the complexities of postwar diplomacy and intelligence gathering in a country that was nearly absorbed into the Soviet Union. His narrative is crisp, empathetic, and highly visual, beginning with the opening lines: “She’d followed Arnie Koski a long way from Edmond, Oklahoma. Louise Koski was now standing on the open passenger deck of the Stockholm-Turku ferry as it formed a channel through the thin, early December ice leaving floating shards reflecting the wan sunlight in its wake. The angle of the somber sun in a clear comfortless sky was only a held-out fist above the southern horizon.” Our email conversation was effortless and swift.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have your life and work been during these turbulent times? Were the writing, editing and launch of Cold Victory affected by the pandemic?

Karl Marlantes: Thankfully, I haven’t been much affected, personally. I think Dylan Thomas once said something like “writing is a lonely and sullen craft.” So, I tend to keep myself in self-imposed quarantine all the time.

JC: What inspired you to write about the immediate aftermath of World War II, years 1946-1949 in Finland, a country that was invaded by the Soviet Union, losing huge amounts of its eastern territory. After the war, Finland fell under Soviet dominance and teetered on the edge of becoming totally absorbed into the Soviet Union, an outcome that would have been calamitous for the U.S. and a Western Europe struggling to stay free.

KM: I started writing the novel several years after the West’s tepid response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. In February 2022, well after I’d started writing Cold Victory, Putin attacked again. I think the West’s timidity and naiveté, and I might even suggest cowardice, after the 2014 invasion, greatly influenced Putin’s decision.

I set the novel just after WWII because I saw that the historical situation between Finland and the Soviet Union then was very similar to what Ukraine and other Eastern European countries face now. As you must know from my previous books, I’m no lover of war. I do, however, believe strongly that there are times when wars need to be fought.

Usually, wars happen when the unbridled ambition and narcissism of some people in power are not checked by clear signals about the consequences of defying established rules of international cooperation, backed up with credible military force. Europe was totally naïve about Russian ambitions, particularly Germany, which got hooked on Russian energy. It and many other countries freeloaded for years off the few who were spending to maintain a credible deterrent force. Although the United States was one of those doing the spending, it was wasting its deterrent force on dubious engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I also have despaired at our own citizens’ lack of understanding of just how privileged we are to have rule of law, privacy, freedom of expression—all the rights delineated in our founding documents. I think we are dangerously close to losing them, not just to external threats, but to our own foolish disregard of what it takes to keep those rights.

If I can paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., we will never permanently defeat the forces of fascism and repression, but each generation must fight to keep them in check. I don’t think it will be difficult for readers to see that what Mikhail and Natalya are forced to suffer under a totalitarian government, we are doing to ourselves.

JC: Why did you decide to make your primary narrator Louise, an Oklahoma-born woman who arrives in Helsinki with her husband, Arnie Koski, who is serving as military attaché to the American legation there, gathering military intelligence?

KM: Louise’s character represents my view of most Americans: energetic, big-hearted, go-getters, but very naïve about the world outside of the United States. I think most Americans are increasingly ignorant of the fragile institutions that keep us safe and free, which wasn’t the case in 1947.

Close to 300,000 young Americans died defending those institutions and nearly everyone knew it and believed their sacrifice was worthy. I picked Oklahoma because it is in the heartland, and in the 1940s was even more isolated from the rest of the world, both geographically and culturally, than, say, New York or Massachusetts.

JC: How were you able to infuse Louise with such energy and naivete?

KM: I’d guess by showing, not telling. I was aware that making her so naïve might stretch credulity, but I stand firm. People who think she is too naïve, are naïve. We have members of Congress who are no smarter than oysters and as ignorant as medieval peasants—and American voters put them there.

As for Louise’s energy, people like her get things done. They are all around us. I just thought of my own mother, who left school when she was 14 and worked waiting tables and bookkeeping and bought us books, bicycles, and music lessons, at the same time managing to keep my brother and me from killing ourselves under the influence of a drug called testosterone.

JC: The secondary couple in Cold Victory are Mikhail, a much-decorated Red Army lieutenant colonel with a Hero of the Soviet Union medal, and his elegant and war-weary wife Natalya, who survived the siege of Leningrad. You weave a connection between Arnie and Mikhail, who had met briefly on along the Enns River in Austria during the war, celebrating that moment of allies meeting on the battlefield with a bottle of brandy. How common are such experiences with allied troops?

KM: Meetings between allied armies are very common between advanced elements. April 25, 1945, is the day Soviet and American troops met at the Elbe River, near Torgau, Germany. There were numerous publicity photos showing Russian, English, Canadian, and American soldiers with Red Army soldiers.

I worked in India in the 1980s and one night was happily accosted by a drunk Russian arms seller who showed me his watch which had been given to him by an American soldier he’d met when the two armies made contact, sealing the fate of the Wehrmacht. Even enemies have met, although much more rarely. The most famous example is the spontaneous Christmas truce of 1914 when English and German soldiers sang carols together and played soccer.

JC: What sort of research was involved in tracing the fraught relationships among the Finns, the Americans, and the Soviets in Helsinki at that time?

KM: I have been interested in WWII my entire life, particularly how it affected Finland and Greece, my grandparents’ native countries. My father landed at Utah Beach and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, all my uncles also served, as well as the fathers of my close friends. So I had considerable background and only needed to fill in details which I did through a lot of reading about the time. I also was helped by Finnish friends who are historically savvy and kept me straight. I thank them in the acknowledgments. Then there is good old Wikipedia. I contribute.

JC: The spine of the book is the 500-kilometer ski race between Arnie and Mikhail, spurred by a drunken challenge at a Soviet embassy party, set to take place in arctic Northern Finland, where daytime temperatures hover around zero, and the nights are “brutal.” How did you go about creating the details for such a complicated race?

KM: I grew up on the Oregon coast in a small logging town and spent a lot of my childhood in the woods. If I walked due east from my back porch, I wouldn’t hit a paved road for 16 miles. It was also a hunting culture, so we boys had a lot of common sense drilled into our heads about how to survive in the woods if we got lost.

When I was younger, I did a lot of off-trail skiing in the Cascade Mountains. I also had a secret weapon, my friend, Marcus Prest, who is a Finnish Marine and has spent thousands of hours patrolling on skis in the wilderness along the Finnish-Russian border. He mapped out the entire race between Arnie and Mikhail.

JC: Louise and Natalya, who are able to communicate in French, get involved in fundraising for a Finnish orphanage—a project Louise, who has no children, sees as a joint good-will effort between the Americans and the Soviets. Natalya, the mother of two, who was raised in a Soviet orphanage, understands the project as a hopeless drop in the bucket for orphans from the war, with the potential for disaster. Louise’s intuition said Natalya was a friend, but, she muses, “how could she trust her intuition in a world filled with disinformation and deceit?” How did you skew these two characters to exemplify the contrast between American and Soviet perspectives in that era?

KM: I made it clear that Natalya had suffered greatly during the war, and Louise had not, just as the people of the Soviet Union suffered greatly and Americans hardly at all. The leaders and the people of the Soviet Union would do nearly anything to avoid such suffering again, hence the expansion into eastern Europe and subjugation of Eastern European people. This was a brutal solution to Russian security problems but undertaken with few qualms. Americans—whose equivalent safety barrier was two oceans—never had to make a hard choice like that, making it easier to be more scrupled.

Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe was most certainly cruel and immoral. But in the minds of most Russians, that cruel expansion was justified. In addition, the fact that Eastern Europeans lost most of their civil liberties was of little consequence as they were living no differently than Russians. I also show how Natalya must guard her every word except when she’s sure she’s alone with Mikhail. Louise has no privacy issues—until she’s suddenly thrown into Natalya’s everyday reality.

JC: “To win it would come down to heart—and what one was willing to risk,” you write of the race. Is sisu what it takes? My half-Finnish husband Mark has long spoken to me of sisu. Arnie refers to sisu from time to time. Can you explain the concept, its history?

KM: Sisu is nearly untranslatable, which is why it is used in the Finnish even when speaking English. It is different than heart, but it includes heart. It has the sense of the English expression, “bloody minded.” It has to do with “sticking to one’s guns” in the face of adversity that those without sisu would say was unreasonable. The best way to explain it is examples.

If I fell down when I was a child and started to cry, my mother would ask, “Where’s your sisu?” or say, “Find your sisu.” She’d expect me to get up, ignore the pain, and most importantly stop crying. I’m not saying that’s all good, but it breeds really tough fighters. It is also something that one finds within themselves, like it is highly individual and expressed individually, although the net effect of all this is a national character. I asked my grandmother once what sisu was. She paused only a moment and said, “It’s what beat the Russians in the Winter War.”

JC: What are you working on now/next?

KM: I’ve got a couple of articles to write immediately, one as a response to an article about being a sniper and the other about my recent return to where I fought in Vietnam. My next novel is tentatively called In the Shadow of Saddle Mountain. It is set in the same time and place as Deep River only it involves Greek merchants, revenge killing, and government corruption.

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Cold Victory by Karl Marlantes is available from Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.

Louise Kennedy says she came to writing in her late forties, after thirty years as a chef. “I began writing by accident, when a friend bundled me into her car and made me join a writing group,” she explains during our email exchange between Sonoma County and Sligo. “At the first meeting, the facilitator asked each of why we were there, and it quickly became clear I was the only person at the table not involved in some form of creative practice; I had been a chef for many years and did not think that counted. I realize now I was wrong.” How has working as a chef influenced her fiction writing?

“Working in kitchens taught me discipline and trained me to turn up at all hours whether I felt inclined or not…to just bloody get on with it. Also, kitchens are a highly sensory environment, one in which all the senses are engaged at once, not just taste. Chefs know by the change in sound from a pan behind them that a steak needs attention, they know by touch when it is ready. This has served me well, I think, perhaps sharpening my descriptive abilities, and hopefully allowing the reader to experience my work in a visceral way.” Her acute sensory details, as well as her nuanced awareness of Irish culture and the ambiguities of relationships, are abundant in The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac.

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Jane Ciabattari: How was your life—your writing (this collection and other projects), your family—affected by the pandemic?

Louise Kennedy: My father-in-law died in hospital (not from the virus) in March 2020, the day before Ireland entered its first lockdown. His funeral was heart-scalding, eight of us standing what felt like miles apart in a draughty crematorium, weeping. The following weeks were a strange and frightening frenzy of doom-scrolling, manic cleaning and bickering with my children over handwashing. With the libraries and bookshops shut I had nothing to read, so friends left bags of books on my doorstep.

I moved into the spare room and powered through seventeen novels in three weeks, which somehow calmed me; I was ready to go back to work. I barricaded myself into the shed in the garden and added three stories to the original twelve in The End of the World is A Cul de Sac, brought my novel Trespasses on by several drafts and completed a PhD. It was awful not to see friends and family, and to see the effects of lockdown on my then-teenage children, but I also loved being at home gardening, cooking and writing. Part of me would love to be locked down again.

JC: Your story “Hunter-Gatherers,” which is set in the northwest of Ireland and spins around a Yeats story about a “mysterious hare” that leads a hunter astray, is one of the first short stories you wrote. The focus is on a disconnect between the narrator, a “Townie,” and her boyfriend, whose raw connection to the land repulses her.

In “What the Birds Heard,” an artist who has left her husband and plans to spend a winter in a gentrified cottage in coastal Inishowen, has a brief liaison with a fifty-ish workman who understands the ocean, the estuary, the tides and the birds. What draws you to this recurring theme of class divisions and urban/rural settings?

LK: My fixation with these differences and divisions undoubtedly comes from my always having been an outsider. In fact, I have been aware of the nuances of class since I was a small child. My family, although aspiring to be middle class, was Catholic in a majority Protestant state, and could therefore never really rise in status. When we moved to a country town south of the border, it took me a while to understand that the townfolk looked down on farmers and “bogmen.” I had believed that poverty was an urban phenomenon but was shocked at the extent of rural deprivation.

JC: I’m curious about the title story in this collection. Sarah, known as “the gangster’s moll from down the hill,” has been deserted by her husband, dead-ended in a cul de sac in the “ghost estate” he developed, easy prey for a predator in the area. What inspired the story? How did you name it? Why did you make it the title story?

LK: There is no dominant style of home in Ireland, and during the foolish years of the “Celtic Tiger,” houses that would befit a Bond villain began to pop up, sitting incongruously amidst 1970s bungalows and traditional cottages. Then the country careered into the economic catastrophe the Irish government hilariously dubbed “the downturn.”

In its wake it left a landscape blighted by half-built apartment blocks and the unfinished housing developments we called “ghost estates.” The airwaves and newspapers abounded with stories of ruin—bankruptcy, evictions, suicides—and reports of escalating drug use. I do not recall deciding to put a donkey in that showhouse, but it is possible that subconsciously I was employing a symbol of an older, more innocent Ireland —from the days before we got carried away with ourselves—to shit all over our greed and materialism.

The title came from a question my sister asked as a spacey five-year old: “Is the end of the world a cul de sac?” Initially, the collection was to be called Hunter-gatherers, but my lovely agent, Eleanor Birne, thought The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac was rather more memorable. I think she was right.

JC: Several stories in this collection—“In Silhouette,” in which a woman is haunted for decades by her older brother’s role in a murder, and “Sparing the Heather,” about the whereabouts of the body of one of the “disappeared,” buried in a secret location—are haunted by the Troubles. How have your life and your writing been influenced by the Troubles?

LK: It was not until I began to write that I understood the extent to which growing up in the north of Ireland had affected me. In 1971, when I was four, my grandmother was critically injured in a bomb explosion. After bomb attacks on our pub in 1973 and 1974, my family sold up and most of them moved south. These events were certainly trauma-inducing, but day to day life—the anxiety, the hyper-vigilance…the systemic and casual sectarianism, were at least as difficult.

We left the north when I was twelve, and my early years are therefore in stark relief against my life since. My background also affected my relationship with language. Growing up, my speech was peppered with words I now know are Ulster-Scots; when we moved south, I was surrounded by people who use Hiberno-English. And I am told I pay a lot of attention to details, to naming things. I think this need to categorize, comes from having had to navigate a world in which I was not welcome.

JC: Another story that intrigues me is “Gibraltar,” a story told through a series of photographs, dated out of chronological order—starting in 1983, jumping forward into 2016, ending in 1973, glimpses in the life of Audrey McGuigan, nee Lynch. What led you to the shape of this story? How long did it take order the sections?

LK: A few years ago I reread Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Shah of Shahs, his book about the fall of the house of Pahlavi and the unfolding Islamic Revolution. In a chapter entitled “Daguerreotypes,” the author describes what is in a series of photographs, several of which are unseen. I wondered what it would be like to tell the story of a family through a set of photographs. I wrote a series of vignettes, and tried to use an omniscient narrator, which was very difficult.

But I persisted, applying discipline. The photographs had to appear to be random yet needed to follow a narrative arc. Arranging took months but got easier when I decided that the photographs were taken from Audrey’s funeral montage. It is the only one of my short stories that is conceptual in origin.

JC: How long did it take you to decide the order of the stories in this collection? How did you go about it?

LK: Declan Meade, the editor of The Stinging Fly, gave me some advice. He has published several collections of short stories by Irish writers and suggested I do it “the Kevin Barry way.” “Blow their minds with the first three, put anything experimental or weird in the middle, and finish on a high note.” I am not sure that “Garland Sunday” constitutes a high note, but there is acceptance, which is often all we can manage in life. And a bit of sex. Which I suppose is positive!

JC: You weave Irish folklore into many of these stories, including the final one, in which a wife prepares a bilberry cake, following a tradition in which a girl presents a special cake to the boy of her choosing on Garland Sunday. This, despite knowing her husband has turned away from her.

LK: Many of the feast days and festivals celebrated in Ireland have their origins in pre-Christian times. In rural places, these tend to be closest to the ancient ways, possibly because the land is relatively untouched and still carries the marks of those who moved over it before, and the traditions are less diluted. I guess I think writing place is a form of deep-mapping; the closer you look, the more it reveals to you.

When I looked at the Caves of Keash where “Garland Sunday” is set, I found that mythology and folklore involving stolen children, infanticide and monstrous women were associated with the area. In my story, the wife, an outsider, bakes the cake almost as an apology to her husband, a local man committed to tradition, who has rejected her after an abortion he initially agreed to. Then the wife learns of a woman a generation earlier who faced an unwanted pregnancy but had no choices available to her.

JC: You write of troubled marriages, misunderstandings, complicated relationships between family members, betrayals and memories thereof. And yet, this collection carries a lightness of being. How do you make that happen?

LK: I did not plan this short story collection. An idea would come to me, often something slight, almost elusive, and I would footer with it until I felt I had reached some emotional truth. After a while I had a dozen stories. Something happened when I put them together, I began to see connections and themes. I am told there is darkness, but also humor, so perhaps that has helped lighten them. Rarely is everything terrible in life. Sometimes we are in heaven and hell simultaneously… a woman can be betrayed by a wandering husband yet still find joy in her baby’s smile.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

LK: I am working on a novel which features a character from my short story “Belladonna.” It is about a lonely teenage girl who misunderstands the adult relationships around her and wreaks havoc. In my novel, we meet her later in life, in London and Dublin, continuing to make mistakes. I am finding it a delight and a challenge to age her and put adult problems in her path.

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The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy is available from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Kate Christensen has a genius for capturing the interiority of intimacy, the aromatics of place, the closest connections among couples, families, neighbors, rivals. Her PEN/Faulkner award-winning fourth novel, The Great Man, centers two authors who are writing biographies of a newly deceased figurative painter and vying for access to his sister, wife and mistress, all in their seventies and still seductive. The Astral, her sixth novel, is named after the landmark apartment building where her protagonist, a floundering poet, lived until his wife of thirty years kicked him out.

It evokes the sensory details of Greenpoint and Williamsburg down to the junk shops, bodegas, working-class bars and lumberyards. Welcome Home, Stranger follows an ex-pat Mainer who has returned home for her mother’s funeral. Step by step, the structure of the life she has built for herself, far from Portland, collapses. “Coming back to Maine is complicated,” Christensen writes. “No one is prouder or more defensive of the place than a native daughter who went away somewhere bigger to seek her fortune. But along with my pride is something else, a small quailing dread, the knowledge the I’m an outsider here.” Our email conversation spanned the distance from Iowa City to Sonoma County.

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Jane Ciabattari: How has your life, including your writing and teaching, gone during these years of pandemic and turmoil? Where have you been living? In Taos? Are you teaching this semester at your alma mater, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?

Kate Christensen: The years of pandemic and turmoil were dark and difficult for me, as they were for many people. My husband Brendan and I spent 2020 and much of 2021 in lockdown in a remote New Hampshire farmhouse that belongs to his family, an hour from our house in Portland, Maine, isolated with our two young dogs in the deep countryside. (Luckily, we love each other’s company, so it never devolved into a scenario out of The Shining.) Wanting to somehow grapple fictionally with the horror of the Trump years, as well as my own intense climate grief, I had started a new novel, which I was then calling The Change, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t bring myself to make my narrator really suffer. I kept saving her from herself, probably out of a need to find answers in fiction that I couldn’t find in life.

Then in the late fall of 2021, we sold our house in Portland and moved to Taos, New Mexico. I never wanted to leave that beautiful old house or Maine, but it no longer made sense for us to live there—Brendan is a screenwriter and needed to be closer to Los Angeles. So we stored our books and furniture in the barn in New Hampshire, packed up the car, and headed west with the dogs.

To my surprise and joy, Taos has been a great place for both of us. We’ve found a warm, close-knit, interesting community of friends, and we recently bought land and are planning to build a house there this spring. And after the move to New Mexico, I was able to write a draft of my novel that finally worked. The structure came together for me, as well as the title: Welcome Home, Stranger. Maybe I had to leave Maine for that to happen.

I’m currently in Iowa City, teaching a fiction workshop and a novella seminar at the Writers’ Workshop for the fall semester, and I’m planning to come back to teach another workshop this summer.

JC: I’m fascinated with the way you deconstruct the life of your narrator, Rachel, beginning in the wake of her return from a reporting assignment in the Arctic, back in Washington, D.C., where she works as a staff writer for an environmental magazine. When the novel opens, she’s on a plane to Portland, Maine for her mother’s funeral. How did the stages of the major changes you cover in this novel evolve? Did you plan out the plot, often driven by Rachel’s impulsive actions, in advance?

KC: The premise was clear to me from the beginning, but as I’ve said, the structure revealed itself to me slowly, over several drafts. And the evolution of Rachel’s decisions and actions, the whole idea of her as a character in free-fall, an innocent hard-working person who’s acting in good faith, who’s scrambling to keep up with the terrible shit life keeps throwing at her, came about deliberately.

In other words, her impulsiveness and desperation, her questionable choices and rash acts, are strategic choices I made, intentional and thought-out. My other first-person narrators have always been people who generated their own trouble, characters for whom problems are self-made, their own damn fault. Rachel is different. She’s in an existential crisis that’s wholly external, facing pressures bearing down on her from the world, and her internal resources are taxed, challenged, as she tries to adapt and surmount them. Once I gave myself permission to do this, it interested me greatly from a narrative perspective.

JC: Welcome Home, Stranger takes place during springtime in Portland, Maine, which you describe in a blog post in 2015: “Spring in Maine is always like a protracted gasp of apology that feels sexually dysfunctional but really, really hot—I’m sorry I hurt you, baby, I know that snow was deep, I know you were cold, I know it was dark, but look what I’m doing now with my rich green grass and unfurling buds and vibrantly feathery, bursting blossoms, smell this sweet air, baby, you know I love you, I’ll never do it again. I fall for it every year.” You once lived in Portland, Maine—for how long? Maine inspired How to Cook a Moose, your food memoir. How did Maine inspire Welcome Home, Stranger, which, by the way, also describes food and drink vividly?

KC: I lived in Maine for 10 years, from 2011 to 2021. It’s a very particular place. There’s that famous stoic reserve among Mainers, a sweetly laconic sense of humor and stubborn work ethic. Characters in my novel occasionally refer a little defiantly to the “real Maine,” as opposed to the coastal Maine of summer people and huge shingled “cottages,” meaning a place of hardscrabble provincial community, claustrophobic landscapes circumscribed by thick woods, where people live in small Cape houses with vinyl siding and assume an attitude of resentment toward wealthy outsiders, practice a centuries-old survivalism and adapt to scarcity and hard times.

The character of Aunt Jean in particular feels very Maine to me—she is the landscape and culture brought to fictional life, an Acadian elder, almost 90 years old, who hasn’t slowed down at all in terms of physical work. There’s a hitch in her step, but she never complains or acknowledges that anything hurts. She shows her family she cares about them by shooing them out of the way so she can cook them a greasy, cheap, functional meal. Aunt Jean embodies that very Maine spirit of utilitarian pragmatism, a kind of belief system that encompasses an understated, almost subliminal kind of passion and generosity.

JC: Rachel describes herself as a “middle-aged childless recently orphaned menopausal workaholic.” How does the life she has created for herself reflect the upbringing she is fighting against? Is regret one of the mechanisms driving her narrative?

KC: Rachel escaped a childhood of deep poverty and neglect—a junkie father, a mentally ill mother. Her ambition and intelligence saved her, got her out of Maine, but they also define and limit her in middle age. She finds herself alone and lonely at 53, married to her work, divorced from a husband she loved but who turned out to be closeted and gay. Maybe trying to escape a difficult past is ultimately a limiting way to move forward, to feel as if you’re running from instead of toward something. In going back to Maine, she’s forced to confront all of this. And maybe she finds a new way of moving forward, now that her mother is dead, a way that involves more conscious choices, decisions that might lead toward actual emotional fulfillment.

JC: Rachel describes her late mother Lucie as a “kook,” who “came at life with a cosmopolitan woman-of-the-world confidence, jaunty and arrogant, whether she was tying on a gauzy, tacky Ren’s scarf or professing undying admiration for a famous but mediocre artist or proudly bringing to the kitchen table a deeply terrible dish.” Their relationship has been at a stalemate for a decade. Returning to her home town for her mother’s funeral sets up to an in-depth exploration of their fraught relationship.

KC: The novel is haunted by Lucie’s ghost, the residue of her powerful presence, in the wake of her recent death. In inheriting and dismantling her mother’s house, sifting through all her possessions, inhabiting the space her mother lived in, sleeping in her bed and looking out her windows, Rachel has to reckon with her mother as a person separate from herself. It’s a kind of act of empathy, really, to allow a dead parent to have a kind of life in your own imagination that they could never have when they were alive. For the first time, Lucie becomes fully realized for Rachel. And then she can let her mother go, find a kind of hard-won peace, forgive the damage she did as a mother through understanding why she was the way she was.

JC: Rachel’s younger sister Celeste, an aspirational woman who was closer to their mother, has maintained a life in Portland, marrying a man who inherited wealth and raising twins, now teens. How were you able to delve into the nuances of sibling rivalry and sisterly love so expertly? Do you have sisters? 

KC: I have two younger sisters as well as two older half-sisters, my father’s daughters from his first marriage. Sisterly love is, in my experience, a powerful, passionate, complex thing, colored by judgment, competitiveness, disappointment, yearning, guilt, misunderstanding, and anger. And I definitely drew on my own experiences in writing about Celeste and Rachel, although their relationship is different from mine with all of my sisters. I would say that the truth between them, that shifting and always receding horizon of emotional closeness that never seems to stabilize no matter how hard Rachel tries or how much she yearns for it, the sense that Celeste resents and even hates her sometimes, is very much drawn from my own experience with my younger sisters.

And their mother’s part in the two sisters’ lifelong inability to solidify the very real, very deep love they have for each other, the way Lucie plays them off against each other by comparing them, competing with them, and blocking their bond by always needing to be the center of attention, is familiar to me as well. Sisterhood can be so painfully complicated, but in moments of real connection, there is almost no greater joy. 

JC: Returning to a former life means revisiting lovers past. One of the first shocks Rachel faces at dinner at Celeste’s her first night in town is the presence of her longtime lover David—who arrives with his new wife. The scenes in which she and David reconnect push further plot points, reminding us that the body doesn’t necessarily synch with small-town norms of proper behavior. How do you write so well about erotic attraction and sensuality? Are there pitfalls you make sure to avoid?

KC: I write viscerally, empathetically inhabiting my characters’ bodies along with them, feeling what they feel, hungers and sensations, cravings and pleasures and pains. I don’t personally have a lot of interest in (as you put it so well) “small-town norms of proper behavior.” Fiction is a place where that kind of small-minded morality runs counter to dramatic energy. Whatever is most interesting and true, that’s what I’m after. Rachel has real reasons for doing what she does, and these reasons have everything to do with how people actually behave rather than what I think a moralistic reader will approve of.

I like to get at people’s secret hungers, give them free rein, set them loose and see what happens. For most of her life, Rachel has been tamping down and denying her sensuality and appetites because she’s afraid of how unfulfilled they are. For her to give in to them, as she does, little by little, through the novel, feels risky and dangerous. But the fact that she takes these risks, the fact that she cracks her own shell open to allow life in, is the key to the novel’s ending. Her behavior serves an essential purpose for the entire underlying thematic movement of the novel.

JC: Rachel muses frequently about her fading youth, and details the shifts in those she knew when they were all younger, including David (“David, my wild boy, has become an old man”), her sister Celeste, her brother-in-law Neil, whose drinking has taken a destructive turn. What appeals to you about the narrative lens in which Rachel, older now, recalls younger days?

KC: Well, I’m 61. I share it. I’m deeply engaged right now in acknowledging and fully experiencing this new phase of my own life, here at the threshold of becoming an elder—accepting this shift from prolonged youth to impending old age, embracing this newfound sense of responsibility and evolution in myself. It’s a real change in the way I feel in the world. Instead of wanting to fulfill my own ego, I primarily want to give back to younger generations now, share what I’ve learned, my decades of hard-earned knowledge and perspective.

I’m finding an outlet for that here at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, working with so many young writers, most of whom are in their twenties. I can feel both how distant I am from them in terms of years, and how pleasurable it is to have this opportunity to give them whatever I can to help them move forward and succeed: encouragement, criticism, information. I see my younger self in them, and that gives me pleasure, too—the connection between older and younger writers, passing a torch.

JC: You’ve lived in many places—Arizona, Berkeley, France, Oregon, Brooklyn, Iowa, Maine, New Mexico, where else? Reading this novel, your eighth, makes me wonder, what have you learned about home? Is it possible to ever truly leave home? Or find home?

KC: I said jokingly to Brendan a while ago that for me, home is wherever he is. I’ve had a very peripatetic life. My family moved every couple of years throughout my childhood, changing houses and towns and schools. As an adult, I repeated this pattern, although my moves became less frequent. Along with this physical unsettledness, I was always lonely. Ever since I met Brendan fifteen years ago, no matter where we’re living, I feel at home in the world, because of our bond. So home for me turns out to be more about connection and love than place or geography.

 JC: What are you working on now/next?

KC: Because teaching is taking up all of my time and attention, I’m not working on anything at the moment, but I plan to start a new book as soon as we get back to New Mexico. There’s a short novel I want to write next, working title Good Company, about a particular dynamic between men and women, and it’s strongly based on my own experiences. I can envision the structure and the characters already, so I hope it won’t take nearly as long as my last book.

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Welcome Home, Stranger by Kate Christensen is available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Naomi Alderman made her mark as a speculative fiction genius with her fourth novel, The Power, in which young women had the power to send electricity from their fingertips, flipping the gender equation (“Already there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far,” Alderman writes). It was written during a mentorship with Margaret Atwood, whose The Handmaid’s Tale helped set Alderman’s course as a writer.

The Power won the 2017 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and launched this year as a streaming series, with Alderman as a screenwriter. Alderman continues to examine the uses and abuses of power with edgy wit in The Future, a galvanizing follow-up, an end-times narrative that asks, Is it possible for those with power to use it for the good of all? Our email conversation connected us in Sonoma County and London.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have you managed during these tumultuous times? To what extent was The Future inspired by the Covid pandemic?

Naomi Alderman: Oh I’ve done alright. I am incredibly lucky that my job involves sitting on my own in a room and not driving a bus, so I got through the pandemic with probably the average level of mental trauma. Which I think is very underdiscussed. We’re all still in the post-traumatic phase. My mother died this March though—she had a stroke on the day of The Power premiere and her funeral was the day the show was released. So it’s been a very strange and hard year.

Annoyingly I was working on The Future long before the pandemic! I had a full draft completed at the end of 2019 and was going to get to work polishing it. It used to start with fifty pages of pandemic—I had thought “ah, we haven’t had one of these since 1918 so we’re sort of due.” And then at the start of 2020… well, you know. In March 2020 I thought the novel was lost completely. Who would want to read that? By 2021 I started to find a new way through.

JC: Your opening sentence is a spot-on: “On the day the world ended, Lenk Sketlish—CEO and founder of the Fantail social network—sat at dawn beneath the redwoods in a designated location of natural beauty and attempted to inhale from his navel.” Why start there?

NA: Thank you! In essence this is the question about the future. What is it that we find so hard as a species about being in the present moment. When you sit and try to meditate, you find your mind constantly going between the past and the future. So this sentence begins (what I intend to be at least!) a funny scene where Lenk tries to meditate but his mind keeps wandering to his aims, his ambitions, his anger with the limitations of the present moment. He is intensely focused on his navel, as in navel-gazing. But he’s also confronting the central problem of the novel, which I think is a central problem of humanity: how to deal with the fact that we can’t truly know what’s going to happen even one second into the future. And how not being able to deal with it makes things a lot worse.

And you know, if your novel gives you the opportunity to start with “on the day the world ended” I think you probably should do that.

JC: Lenk is one of a triad of narcissistic tech billionaires—with Ellen Bywater, who runs Medlar Technologies and Zimri Nommik, head of Anvil, the “logistics and purchasing giant”—at the center of the failing world in The Future. Who inspired these characters?

NA: Hahaha. They were definitely not inspired by anyone specifically who could sue me for everything I’m worth and barely notice it, if that’s what you’re asking. They are composite characters made up of some of the ridiculous and awful things that tech billionaires have done and some of it just made up out of my head. But of course the companies are inspired by real companies.

JC: In this dystopian universe, these tech titans are separate from the rest of the world because they have set up “intense survival bunkers” so they will live even when the world ends. I’m curious about how close this plan is to reality? Do real world tech billionaires have such plans in place? Is it possible? If not, soon?

NA: Oh this is already happening, it’s been widely reported. Read Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff. Or Evan Osnos’ New Yorker piece Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich which was published in 2017 and started me thinking about this novel.

JC: The counterpoint to these three powerful egos is a team of four “of one mind” tech wizards who are able to stand up to the powerful three and try to shift the value system toward preservation and community—Martha Einhorn, Lenk’s assistant, the child of a survivalist fundamentalist cult leader named Enoch; Badger Bywater, Ellen’s rebellious nonbinary youngest child; Albert Dubroswki, the ousted founder of Medlar; and Selah Nommik, Zimri’s wife and a brilliant coder. Are there prototypes for these characters?

NA: I have met so many good people working in tech. I would say that is the majority—as it’s the majority in most places. In tech there are so many people who really joined these companies because they were excited about doing excellent work and creating things that would really help humanity and the world. If all of those people were simply to refuse to create the products that do so much harm—or insist on retooling them so they were less extractive and thieving—things would change very quickly.

JC: Lai Zhen, who has parlayed her childhood survival of the Fall of Hong Kong and years in a refugee camp into a role as a survivalist influencer, has a brief intense love tryst with Martha in the midst of a tech conference. This disrupts their lives, and transforms Zhen into the central narrator of The Future. In a novel with eight key protagonists, which came first?

NA: Hahah. Oh god in the first draft of this novel I think there were more protagonists than that! I’ve never written a book in this way before—it came in individual scenes with interesting characters where I didn’t know how it was going to fit together at all, I just knew that those scenes were all somewhere in the same book. So Zhen was always fleeing in the mall in Singapore. Martha was always meeting Lenk Sketlish at a party in Silicon Valley. And in even the earliest drafts—where they were called something different—they were going on a date that went unexpectedly well. I just had to figure out all the other bits!

JC: Part of your narrative unfolds through the “Name the Day” survivalist forum, which includes Martha as OneCorn. The forum offers Bible study focused on Sodom and Gomorrah and the story of Lot, his daughters, and his wife (who is turned to salt) along with survivalist advice for a new generation of Enochites. What drew you to include this biblical story in the tech forum and your plot?

NA: When I started thinking about the billionaires in their bunkers I thought immediately of Lot. Of course, I grew up reading the Bible in the original Hebrew, so I have a lot of literacy in those ancient stories! Lot is a man who lives in a terrible place, a place on the edge of destruction, and who believes that he and his family can escape that destruction and be safe.

The story of their family—including the wife turning into a pillar of salt—is of the ways that the callousness of believing that you can get away absolutely fine while others perish will itself eventually destroy you. Lot doesn’t try to help anyone in that city outside his family, doesn’t try to warn them, doesn’t try to influence them to be different. He and his two daughters end up living in a cave and…it doesn’t go brilliantly. If you were never the kind of person who knew how to care for a community, you’re not going to suddenly become that when your city is destroyed.

JC: Throughout this novel, especially in the scene in Zhen’s friend and mentor Marius’s classroom in Budapest, when he’s explaining machine learning (“Human learns. Machine iterates,” he points out), I wondered how many years of training in the internet/digital world you’ve had, and how much research you needed to do to build the worlds you do in The Future.

NA: So! I have worked in videogames in parallel with my career as a novelist. I love it. Videogames is a wide open field with so many novel solutions yet to be discovered to complex and interesting narrative problems. It’s an exciting place to work and think. So I understand why a person like Martha, a serious person with a difficult life history, would end up working in technology. In terms of understanding how machine learning works—I think I learned this in a BBC program from about 1992! I realized it was constantly in my mind when I was thinking about the novel so I thought: well, I should find a way to have it in the book. Marius was already in the novel so I thought he’d do it in an entertaining way!

JC: Your plot is complicated, and involves an app called AUGR (both an “augur” and an “auger”), life-preserving suits of armor, aka digital pathways. How has your work as a gamer (including the Zombies, Run! app you developed in 2011) had a role in your plotting? (In 2011 you wrote about “storytelling in short arcs,” and this: “Writing-craft geekery: four or five sections is how US TV dramas are often divided up, which interests me. It’s a good number. Teaser, plus three or four ‘acts’.”)

NA: Definitely working in games has taught me how to write very plotty, propulsive work. I do think that in this world of Netflix, Playstations, social media, that readers deserve a bit of help with a novel, and I like to write things that have a lot of serious stuff going on but are also page-turners.

JC: You have spoken about being influenced by Margaret Atwood, including being mentored by her while writing The Power. Has the Atwood influence continued? Are there echoes in The Future?

NA: The Atwood influence will always be with me. She is wonderful and we’re still good friends. I think certainly her influence is there in my being willing to keep on taking on subjects on a wide canvas, to weave together the real and the imaginary, to never lose sight of humor.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

NA: Well. A new book is emerging. I am unexpectedly working on something about my mother, and about the contradictions of her life. It’s a book in which my mother has died and also there is a strange new animal that’s appeared in the UK. I didn’t decide to start writing, and when I did start I thought it would be a short story. But it keeps growing and growing.

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The Future by Naomi Alderman is available from Simon & Schuster.

Sigrid Nunez opens her ninth novel with the first line in Virginia Woolf’s The Years: “It was an uncertain spring.” Not surprisingly, given the rigor with which Nunez approaches language, it’s an acutely accurate description of the early pandemic months in New York City she describes in The Vulnerables, when it wasn’t clear how COVID-19 originated, how it spread, and how to protect yourself. Later she nails it again: “…and weren’t we all sick of hearing it: uncertainty was the only uncertainty to be had.” The Vulnerables, which follows the 2018 National Book Award-winning The Friend and What Are You Going Through (2020), is Nunez’s ode to this strange historic moment—to survival, community, random connection, and even isolation. “…I couldn’t help feeling guilty about the pleasure I took in the lifeless streets,” she writes. “To be the only pedestrian for blocks, to have an acre of Central Park to yourself.”

How did the pandemic affect the writing of The Vulnerables? I asked Nunez via email, each of us on a different coast. “Like so many other writers, at the outbreak of Covid and in the early days of lockdown—not to mention the ongoing mad, bad behavior of our political leadership—I was too stunned to get much writing done,” she responded. “I did manage to finish a long review essay. Then it came time for the annual spring faculty reading at BU, where I’d been teaching. That year or course it was on Zoom. Each of us was asked to read briefly and I decided to write something new just for the reading. So I began writing about was happening right at that moment—to me, to all of us—and sometime later I took those pages and went on writing, and that turned into The Vulnerables. I finished it before showing it to anyone. I was particularly pleased that my agent and my editor and other people who’ve read the book so far have appreciated the humor in the novel. You’re always worried that what you find funny might fall flat for other people.”

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Jane Ciabattari: You also wrote about a pandemic in your 2010 novel Salvation City. Were you influenced by earlier authors who wrote about the plagues/pandemics of their time, like Katherine Anne Porter, whose Pale Horse, Pale Rider is drawn from her own experience surviving the Spanish flu of 1918?

Sigrid Nunez: With Salvation City, I’d known for a long time that another pandemic like the Great Flu of 1918 was—according to Dr. Fauci and other experts—not a question of if but when. I thought it was more than likely that a global pandemic would occur during my lifetime. I wanted to imagine what a crisis of that magnitude might be like in a polarized and in so many ways dysfunctional country like the US. Also, I knew that many children were orphaned during the Great Flu, the writer Mary McCarthy among them. William Maxwell lost his mother then and never got over it. I wanted to imagine what it would be like for a kid to lose both parents after becoming extremely ill himself. I also write about the effects of global warming in Salvation City. As it turns out, many things that I describe in that book actually came to pass with Covid. In my book, the president of the United States is just one of millions who are infected, as of course happened to Trump. But in my book, I made the president a woman.

JC: During the pandemic in The Vulnerables, as in “real life,” older people began to be separated out, considered more “vulnerable.” As a friend who recommends your narrator stay home tells her, “You’re a vulnerable…and you need to act like one.” How do you feel about this latest social categorization? What else inspired your title?

SN: I don’t think of it as a social categorization. It’s a medical categorization. There are groups of people, among them older people and people with compromised immune systems, who’ve been warned to take greater precautions against getting infected. It’s a matter of risk factors, like people with a history, or family history, of skin cancer being advised to take extra precautions against sun exposure. “Separated out” makes it seem as if some stigma has been attached to the categorization, which isn’t the case. There wasn’t any other inspiration for the title.

JC: You bookend this novel with references to Virginia Woolf. Your opening line is from The Years. Near the end you quote Woolf again, in reference to The Waves. “Autobiography it might be called,” she wrote when she first began planning the novel, written “to a rhythm not a plot.” How has Woolf inspired your work? And this novel?

SN: I’ve read all Woolf’s work, most of it more than once, and although my writing isn’t anything like hers she certainly has been a major influence—not just through her writing but her thinking about writing and about reading and the writer’s life, all of which can be found in her letters and diaries and literary criticism. I started reading her when I was in college and I admired her so greatly that for years everything I wrote was bad Virginia Woolf. During the lockdown, when I sat down to write something new, that first sentence popped into my head. And of course it was a sentence that described precisely our own spring of 2020.

JC: Did you really forget about a V. Woolf story about a woman and a parrot named James? First published by her two young nephews for their daily family newspaper?

SN: I did, and I decided to give that same memory lapse to the book’s narrator. A student gave me a copy of Woolf’s book, The Widow and the Parrot, many years ago, and one day as I was nearing the end of writing The Vulnerables it caught my eye on the bookshelf.

JC: You make reference to so many iconic writers and their books throughout The Vulnerables, it’s like having an ongoing conversation with an erudite and passionate author/professor, which you are. Proust, Annie Ernaux, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion, Faulkner, Brian Moore, Oscar Wilde, R.P.Blackmur and so many more. Were these the authors you were drawn to during the pandemic? Do you have a process by which you weave cultural commentary into the scenes, or does it come organically?

SN: Whenever I make a reference to any writer or literary work, it’s because I happened to think of that writer or work in the course of my own writing. So no, I didn’t think of any of these particular writers because of the pandemic. And I don’t have any special process for weaving commentary in. Certain things will occur to me and I’ll think, This would fit well here in my narrative and I should include it.

JC: You write, “Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the stages of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described.” Is this your treatise for The Vulnerables, which captures the feelings of the early pandemic, the memories and brain fog, the isolation and odd new interactions (being scolded by the barista at a familiar coffee shop for touching the counter), the unexpected alliances?

SN: Not really. I think it’s an interesting observation about reading in general, but I didn’t mean to suggest that this was how I wanted or expected readers to approach my novel.

JC: Your narrator gives us a chain of memories that amount to a memoir of her attitudes toward love, beginning with the twelve-or thirteen-year-old classmate Charles, who follows her home from school and wants to see her (she refuses, against her mother’s advice). Her insistence upon independence, her willingness to be solitary, define her. To what extent do you think her generation’s opportunities made her life possible?

SN: I don’t think her attitude toward love or her desire for independence and willingness to be solitary have anything to do with her generation’s opportunities but rather simply with her desire to be a writer. Many writers of generations past have felt similarly—women writers in particular. But in the case of Charles, of course, this is a boy she isn’t at all attracted to. If she had been, chances are she would not have been put off by his crush on her.

JC: Early in the book, just before lockdown, the narrator reunites with a group of friends at a funeral for Lily, “The first one of us to get married. The first to have a baby. The first to die.” Their reminiscences cover their college years and “youth” cover the love stories of a generation new to the birth control pill and sexual “freedom.” Which leads to a series of memories. Does the isolation of the pandemic give your narrator more time to focus on her past?

SN: Yes, but I would say her age—she’s in her sixties—has even more to do with that focus. I don’t imagine younger people in isolation, college kids, say, were looking back at their high school years or childhoods. I think they were quite painfully focused on the present, and all that they were missing.

JC: The narrator breaks her isolation by helping out friends (or friends of friends) in need. At the request of Iris, an author of her editor friend Violet, the narrator moves into an apartment uptown to bird-sit Eureka, a parrot, who is “[a]ll green except for a dab of scarlet on each shoulder and white patches around his eyes.” She tends to Eureka in his specially built room. She lets a doctor, another friend of a friend, stay in her apartment, leaving her committed to the temporary place. And then a college dropout vegan she names Vetch who ghosted Eureka returns (he kept a key). Again, I’m reminded of Woolf. Your “plot” unfolds by a rhythm of unexpected encounters, a way of interacting that became part of the COVID world. Erratic, uncertain, sometimes oddly joyous. Is that how it felt to you as you were working on The Vulnerables?

SN: I’d say that’s a good description, but in fact it describes the way I’ve felt writing each of my novels. Though everything else in life was abnormal during that time, the writing process was pretty much the same as always.

JC: Vetch suffers from “Intermittent Explosive Disorder” (I.E.D.); his mother has written about this in her memoir, edited by Violet. How did you learn about this disorder?

SN: I can’t recall exactly, but it’s something I’ve known about for some time. And I’ve known people who’ve suffered from it all my life.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

SN: I’m working on a long review essay. I have no idea what I’m going to do next.

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The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez is available from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Novelist, playwright and screenwriter Marie Ndiaye has had the attention of the French literary world since she published her first novel, As to the Rich Future, at seventeen. Born in Pithiviers, the daughter of a French school teacher mother and a Senegalese father, she won the 2001 Prix Femina for Rosie Carpe and the 2009 Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women. Her latest, Vengeance Is Mine, is a true crime novel about a mother who has murdered her three children presented as an existentialist monologue by a troubled lawyer who holds onto her worldview with great strength (or stubbornness), even as her home, her relationships, and her body crumble. “I began thinking about this book at the same time as I was working with Alice Diop on the script of her latest film. Saint-Omer,” Ndiaye told me. “That movie is based on a true story that happened in France about twelve years ago: a woman who evidently had no particular problems, a woman who was educated, refined, drowned her sixteen-month-old daughter in the ocean even though she’d cherished her from the moment of her birth. Working on that movie led me to try to understand those ‘excellent mothers,’ loving and devoted, who very deliberately kill their children. As for my book itself, it’s an invented story.” Our email conversation spanned several weeks and many time zones, from Paris to Nebraska (for translator Jordan Stump to work that magic) to Sonoma County.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have the past three years of pandemic and global turmoil affected you, your work, the translation and launch in the US of this new novel, Vengeance Is Mine? Where have you been living, and how has COVID affected your residence?

Marie Ndiaye: During the confinement I was still living in the country, near Bordeaux. When you live in nature, you don’t have the same perception of what’s going on in the world, everything seems somewhat distant. I lived essentially the way I always do: writing, working in the garden. I was lucky enough not to be affected in any painful way by that time.

JC: The layering of placid conversation, deception, confusion, horror, and journey backward into unclear memory in this novel brings to mind the work of Stephen King. Is he an inspirati? Or Claude Simon, whose investigations are fragmented and searching? (He once noted, “The novelist today tries to make his way through a kind of fog; it isn’t really a question of irony, but one of vertigo: he just doesn’t know the answers.”) Others?

MN: Those are two writers who have an enormous importance to me, for all their differences. Claude Simon taught me, I believe, not to go “straight to the point” in writing to twist and turn around a secret or a mystery that language tries to get as close to as it can—and yet the writer knows he’ll never find the way into that core of darknesses and silences, he can only try to get close enough to knock on the door, and he hears the echo of that knock but he knows the door is not going to open. My favorite Stephen King novel is It. He knows better than anyone how to understand and describe the terrors of childhood. Joyce Carol Oates as well, whom I’ve admired since I was twelve years old. There’s also Anna Maria Ortese, Javier Marias, Russell Banks, Sigrid Undset, so many others!

JC: Vengeance Is Mine is set primarily in Bordeaux, where your narrator, a lawyer we know as M^e Susane (no given name), is based, with side trips to nearby La Réole, where she grew up. Your 2005 book Self-Portrait in Green (reissued this year in a hardback edition with Jordan Stump’s translation by Two Lines Press) also is set in this area “eternally under the threat from the floodwaters of the Garonne.” Is this a region of France you know well? Have you lived there?

MN: Yes, that’s the part of France I know best: I lived there for about ten years before I left for Berlin. When I set my characters in motion I need a very precise image of the roads, the streets they’re moving through, even if I don’t necessarily describe them. That’s why I have never, I think, made any character live in a place I haven’t seen.

JC: Your opening is enticing and mysterious. A new client “timidly, almost fearfully” enters M^e Susane’s office on January 5, 2019, to request her services on behalf of his wife Marlyne, who is accused of murdering their children. We follow your narrator’s thoughts intimately as she realizes she may have met this man, Gilles Principaux, thirty-two years before in the Caudéran neighborhood of Bordeaux, when she was ten and her mother took her along on a job: “he was the teenager she’d fallen in love with for all time, long ago…” The question Who is Gilles Principaux to me? drives your plot. Did you begin with this opening? Or did it emerge as you worked on the novel?

MN: I never start writing a novel without having long reflected on an image that, for one reason or another, fascinates me. In this case the image was this: a woman—I don’t yet know who she is or what she does in her office—sees a man come in, and him too I don’t yet know who he is or why he’s come to see her, and she’s so shocked that she feels like she’s been struck right in the face. That was the image that made me want to write this novel, like a mystery I had to explore.

JC: M ^e Susane, her mother and her father have radically different memories of the incident in Caudéran. This conflict in what they recall leads to a rift in the family. It’s as if the unreliability of memory is a character in the novel. Is that what you intended?

MN: M ^e Susane is fighting off her father’s determination to make her a victim—he’s convinced that in that house she suffered something unnamable (he certainly doesn’t give it a name!). She doesn’t want to be the victim of anything or anyone. And even if it happened the way her father thinks, she’d rather be on the side of her enchanted memories than on the side of the truth.

JC: M^e Susane’s housekeeper Sharon, is an undocumented mother of two from Mauritius on whose behalf she is working to get legal papers. You portray vividly the lawyer’s inner turmoil at their relationship, her sense that Sharon pities her and doesn’t appreciate all the efforts she is making on her behalf (and Sharon certainly doesn’t signal that she is superior and admirable, which is what she feels entitled to). Sharon’s role in her daily life grows, yet there is no true connection between them, which makes her feel even more isolated. How can we understand what binds these two strong women whose roles and class place them so far apart?

MN: M^e Susane’s problem with Sharon is that she feels guilty. She doesn’t know how to be a boss. She mixes up friendship and a work relationship. She wants desperately for Sharon to like her, but Sharon isn’t interested in anything like that. And so M ^e Susane feels a sort of resentment, because it seems to her that she’s doing a lot to help her housemaid, which is true. But you can’t demand love in exchange for the help you give someone.

JC: Rudy, a former law firm colleague and boyfriend, calls on M^e Susane to arrange babysitting for his young daughter Lila, a process that grows increasingly complicated. Is Lila a doppelganger for the younger M^e Susane when she first met Gilles Principaux?

MN: Ah, I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s interesting!

JC: Given the range of characters in this novel, how did you decide on the narrative point of view?

MN: I wanted the narrative never to leave the point of view of M ^e Susane, as strange as that might make it sometimes. I wanted the reader to be literally a prisoner of Me Susane’s mind.

JC: M^e Susane’s client, Marlyne, refuses to see her husband (although she does speak at length to her lawyer in a breathless ten-page section). Gilles Principaux rants at M^e Susane mercilessly, at one point without noticing she is bleeding from an injury, offering her a first-hand experience of his self-involvement. M^e Susane’s sense of horror builds as she begins to understand Marlyne as if from within her stultifying marriage. How is she to know who is the guilty one?

MN: I think she listens to Marlyne’s and Gilles’ respective accounts without really judging either one of them. That was another thing I wanted as I wrote this book: they both have a right to their own interpretation of the facts, their own account of their lives. But the fact remains, it was Marlyne who killed, not Gilles.

JC: How does the translation process with Jordan Stump, the translator of this novel and others (That Time of Year, Self-Portrait in Green)—and this interview—work?

MN: Jordan always asks me a few questions about the text, and from those questions I can see he’s an extraordinary translator: they always show a pertinence, a subtlety, and perceptiveness that fill me with joy and gratitude. Thanks be to translators! Without them how would I have access to literature from all over the world?

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Vengeance Is Mine by Marie Ndiaye, translated by Jordan Stump, is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Fire season in California goes from the driest months of summer until the first rains come, if they come. (Traditionally October 31 was the date to circle.) It’s a time when people stay alert to rising winds, the smell of smoke, sirens and alerts signaling that a wildfire is on the prowl and it’s time to evacuate. Daniel Gumbiner’s immersive second novel, Fire in the Canyon (after The Boatbuilder), captures the surreal landscape of the fire zone in the Sierra foothills and how it challenges and transforms the Hecht family and their rural community. Having evacuated from wildfires in Sonoma County multiple times, I read it as a richly detailed and truly told chronicle of our times.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have the past few tumultuous years been for you? Managing your work as editor of The Believer, which was folded by the University of Nevada, its archives sold, then resurrected after a community-driven campaign and change of ownership back to McSweeney’s with you as editor? Writing, editing and launching this new novel?

Daniel Gumbiner: They’ve been surprising and uncertain—but also quite rich. When the magazine was defunded, I really believed it was the end. So I started to look for other jobs, and was trying to think about what my next steps would be. And then there was this miraculous turn of events, where we were able to bring the magazine back to McSweeney’s, and that was an exciting, busy time. There was this outpouring of support from so many people who helped make that happen. And that was a really special thing to witness. We had a party for the first issue back and it was wonderful to see so many writerly friends all in one place. I think magazines are such important community hubs. As writers, we often operate in our isolated silos and we need excuses to come together. Like my friend Oscar Villalon said the other day: you can’t be a bohemian by yourself. 

JC: How does Fire in the Canyon draw upon your own life, your early years? What was the initial spark that began the project?

DG: I think it draws on my own life in many ways—and probably in ways I don’t even realize. I remember I first saw the impact of a wildfire when I was on a bus going up to the Sierras, to summer camp, in Desolation Wilderness. I was struck by the magnitude of what the fire had done. And also, honestly, a bit terrified by it. It was one of those moments where you realize that the adults in your world can’t control everything, that there are powers larger than them.

So since I was a kid, I think I’ve had a lot of respect for wildfire. And of course, in recent years, due to the climate crisis, we’ve seen increasingly destructive fires. Almost everyone I know has been affected by them in some way—some more than others. We could all sense that something was shifting. So I wanted to write about witnessing this shift, about the experience of living in the midst of these more intense fires.

Wildfire continues to be frightening and awe-inspiring to me. I was up in Placerville at my family friend’s farm a little while ago, and he took me over to Grizzly Flats, the town that was basically entirely destroyed by the Caldor Fire. We drove around the burn in that area, where loggers are felling trees to salvage the wood. We probably drove around for three hours or so and everything you saw was burned forest. The scale of that fire’s impact is just indescribable. It is so vast.

JC: Fire in the Canyon implies no way out. At least it does for those of us who have been evacuated during wildfires or followed the trajectories of disastrous fires. Is that what you had in mind with the title?

DG: I think there are a few ways you can read it. And I like that interpretation. One of the reasons I liked the title, too, is because the canyon is a kind of boundary, to the people in the town. There’s a certain way in which they’ve understood how fire works in their community, how it interacts with the canyon. But this dynamic is shifting, and that’s part of what the characters are confronting.

JC: You introduce Benjamin Hecht, 65, a former cannabis grower (he served 18 months at Lompoc for growing medical marijuana) turned winemaker who has lived for decades in the gold country. The fire season grows worse each year, yet he persists, with a farm that needs constant tending: “ten new chickens, two dachsunds, honeybees, a small flock of sheep, one guard dog, ducks, geese, several CBD plants, one acre of Primitivo, two of Grenache, two of Barbera, three of Gamay, and three of Syrah.” (Plus two baby emus.) How were you able to capture the daily routine of the farm over the months of the novel?

DG: I spent a fair amount of time hanging out on vineyards and meeting winemakers over the course of researching the book. I have several friends in that line of work too, so I relied on them at times. But I also just read a lot. I love getting absorbed in that kind of research, reading about sheep forage or what have you. In that way I’m a bit similar to Ben. He’s someone who likes diving into these new hobbies, new interests. In his case, he’s always adding these new elements to his farm.

I think I was drawn to writing fiction, in part, because I’m a generalist in this way. If I had to study one thing, one subject, my whole life, I’d probably get bored. But writing novels allows you to move through different universes, spend time with them, and then continue on. I think my fiction writing is a kind of odd ledger of my general interests over time, as a result.

JC: Ben’s farm is near the small town of Natoma. Is this based on a real place? How did you craft the details about the Gold Rush history, the shifts in the land and in industry, the ebb and flow of rain and wind and heat, in this region?

DG: The town is fictional but it draws on some aspects of other towns in the foothills. I’ve always loved that region. It was an area we used to visit as kids, and it always had a mythic quality to me. It’s kind of a passed over place, in some ways. Most people from the city go straight through it to get to the mountains. But it’s a beautiful region and I always thought it would be an interesting setting for a novel. When I started writing about Ben moving around on his farm, I knew he was in the foothills, but I didn’t really have an idea of what kind of town he’d be in, or what the setting of the story would be, more specifically.

So I began to build out the setting in more detail as I went. I really enjoy developing the setting of a story, though it’s always a challenge. For it to work, you need to weave setting into the fabric of every scene, through all these discrete details, like you mention: climate, history, etc. I know a setting is working well when I feel like I could keep spinning a story in that world forever. I could just open another narrative thread and let it unfurl in the environment that’s been created. So that’s the feeling I’m striving for. Once I get to that point, I know the setting has depth to it.

JC: The novel unfolds as Ben, his novelist wife Ada, their son Yoel, who has stopped speaking to his dad but is visiting from Los Angeles, face evacuation as a fire comes precariously close. Your descriptions of the wind, the flames, the damage, are spot-on. Have you experienced wildfires? How many? Were you evacuated?

DG: I’ve never been evacuated for a wildfire myself. For those passages, I was relying on interviews I did, with friends and strangers, about their experiences with fires and evacuations. I also listened to a lot of oral histories about people who had been forced to evacuate. Friends would share photos and videos with me too. I really wanted to understand that experience as closely as I could. In a lot of ways, it’s the most common experience related to this crisis. Not that many people die from wildfire—though of course all these deaths are terrible—but many people are evacuated, many people lose their homes. And that is its own kind of devastation. So when I was thinking about those evacuation scenes, I tried to tap into my own experience of times when I’ve thought I might lose something really important to me. That helped me try to understand what the characters in the book might be feeling in those moments. What do you do when you’re on the precipice of that kind of grief? When you know something might be truly gone and there’s nothing you can do about it? I think that’s something we can all relate to. And unfortunately, it’s an experience that will become more common in the years to come.

JC: Fire in the Canyon could almost serve as a primer for a contemporary winemaker, as you trace the cycle of the crop, the harvest, the fermenting, and so forth. How did you learn so much about the traditional forms of winemaking in Europe, Argentina, California, as well as the new style of making natural wines, which currently fascinates those in the wine industry?

DG: I’ve always been interested in wine, but I never knew that much about it. The book was a fun excuse to explore that world in more detail. There’s something alluring and elemental about winemaking. As one of the characters says in the book, it’s kind of like midwifery: you are guiding something into existence. You take what the particular conditions of a season give you and you work with that. So you are not entirely in control—you’re responding to the natural world. I just really fell in love with the nuances of that process. Perhaps a bit too much at times…Part of the editorial process was trimming back some of the winemaking details.

For Ben, I think, growing grapes and making wine is a chance for him to reinvent himself. He was a cannabis grower for years, and made lots of money doing that, but then he was prosecuted for one of his grows, and ultimately, growing cannabis was no longer an option for him. Moving onto wine felt like a natural development to me. So many of the people I’ve met in the wine world come from unusual places. Often they’ve lived many lives. I’ve met winemakers who used to be club promoters, philosophers, pharmacologists. The craft seems to attract a certain kind of searching, experimental character.

JC: The community of Natoma—the winemakers, the new bar owners, the fusty sheriff, Yoel’s high school friends and the newcomers in his life, including Halle—arrive on the scene as organically as shifts in the natural world. You describe their interactions beautifully, including the awkward moments, the long-held grudges, and the helpfulness. Halle and her friends, Argentine natural winemakers Seba and Yami Garcia, help Ben and Yoel and Ben’s old friend Wick, whose band is popular in the area, and others at harvest time. The evacuations bring people into contact, helping strangers, reaching out to friends and neighbors by text. How do you think about plotting when you’re pulling together a community devastated by fire?

DG: One of the things I wanted to show was the way in which the fire puts all these characters into relationship with each other. This was a story I heard over and over when talking to people about how fires had affected them: it connected them with their neighbors in new and surprising ways.

I was interested in showing how a fire might shift the social landscape of a town. In terms of plotting, that was definitely something I had in mind. I don’t tend to plot out my fiction too meticulously, but in this case, I did know that I wanted a fire to set in motion the different narrative threads of the book. From there it was a matter of following the characters, considering how they might change and grow in response to it.

I met a group of people, up in El Dorado County, who banded together to help protect their property from the Caldor Fire. They called themselves the Ant Hill Army. This was a group of people that really ran the gamut culturally and politically. You had people who lived on communes working side-by-side with ex-Marine Trumpers, cutting a fire line in the forest. Some of them didn’t have insurance or they had bad insurance, so they had everything on the line, in terms of saving their homes. They worked nonstop for two days straight and they were successful in stopping the fire from moving in on their properties. And they’re all still closely bonded now. They had an anniversary party where they commemorated the fire together. And one guy who I was talking to there told me that they just don’t talk about politics together. Obviously, it’s not a perfect situation, but I find stories like that inspiring.

JC: Yoel joins other younger members of the community and an activist group called the San Andreans to protest climate change and the attitudes of fossil fuel companies. Are the San Andreans based on real environmental activists in these times?

DG: No, they’re not connected to any real activists, but I think they represent something that a lot of people feel, which is that the response to this crisis is still deeply inadequate. We are dealing with an existential emergency but we all go about days as if it more or less doesn’t exist, which is pretty crazy. I think Yoel, as a sensitive person, feels the desperation of the situation quite acutely. So he is pushed to action more rapidly than others are.

At various points in the book, Yoel’s sensitivity is a hindrance to him, and the family. I think, at times, he feels like it’s a challenge he needs to overcome. But it’s also kind of the source of his strength and value to others. I think the parts of ourselves we feel we need to reject are often the most powerful. I’m interested in the ways in which we can all be of use, despite our flaws or hang ups. 

JC: What are you working on next/now?

DG: I’m not sure. Have a few ideas I’m excited about but I don’t feel fully committed to any of them yet. Stay tuned!

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Fire in the Canyon by Daniel Gumbiner is available from Astra House.

Jayne Anne Phillips’ Night Watch is a dazzling and original masterpiece that evokes little-known aspects of the Civil War and its aftermath. The settings range from a sheltered ridge in the Appalachians to the Battle of the Wilderness to the West Virginia Lunatic Asylum that follows the teachings of a humane Quaker physician. The characters are idiosyncratic, consistent, vivid, and haunting. Phillips makes a case for this Civil War era as a prelude to our own turbulent times. “Night Watch is about the post-apocalyptic world of the Civil War years, the tribal divisions, the search for scarce resources, a specific family fallen apart and struggling to survive,” as she put it during our email conversation. “Now we seem to be living in a slowly unfolding apocalypse, climate emergencies everywhere, online-assisted conspiracy theology, ever-evolving viruses. It’s somehow reassuring to enter a turbulent (novelistic) past in which changed characters adapt, and stay in our minds. Time is a bellowing freight train, and it’s also the floating presence of all things, in all times.”

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Jane Ciabattari: How have your life and work been going in the post-quarantine world? How have the years of pandemic and turmoil affected the writing, editing, and launch of your new novel, Night Watch?

Jayne Anne Phillips: The pandemic closed down the world, but it was mostly during those years that I began to understand the layering threads of the novel, and I wrote the ending. I felt as though the isolation and turmoil, the need for safety and refuge, were present inside Night Watch—the cyclical nature of history, the cycle of creation/decline, felt compassionate, comforting, mournful, yet hopeful. Science and technology in the 1860’s-70‘s included railroads and daguerreotypes, whereas today technology is seen as both savior (Covid vaccines) and devil (the pathogen that escapes the lab, bots that agitate political dysfunction, disinformation that undermines trust of legitimacy itself). Launch of my novel? More and more stacks up against the literary novel, the book of poetry…Feeling a true passion for literature is almost like membership in a medieval guild, a time when artist monks wrote out illumined texts and comprised most of their readership. Flashing forward, one can imagine, after the dystopian Long Pause or Full Stop—the cessation of the machine, the end of readily available electricity—forest dwellers and urban survivors breaking into structures looking for canned food and…books.

JC: What drew you to write about characters immersed in the Civil War and its aftermath in West Virginia, your home state, with a focus on brain injury, trauma from sexual abuse, and the healing theories of the Quaker physician Thomas Story Kirkbride, who created the philosophy behind the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum?

JAP: I grew up twenty minutes from what began, in 1858 Weston, Virginia, as the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. It was the only appropriation Virginia ever supported in the mountainous western “frontier” of the state. Many educated Americans don’t know that West Virginia seceded from Virginia to fight for the Union. And the asylum itself, like most of the vast State asylums built in that era, followed guidelines laid out in Thomas Story Kirkbride’s 1854 book, On The Construction, Organization and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane. Kirkbride emphasized “moral treatment,” strict regimens of physical exercise and activities, the asylum as healing refuge with gardens, barns, dairies; he demanded a strict maximum of 250 patients, each with a private, well-ventilated room. Trans-Allegheny, its wings extending a fourth of a mile, enclosed nine acres of interior space on nearly three hundred acres of farmed land and marked walking trails. Today the asylum, part ruin, part restored fantasy, is open to the public and remains one of the largest hand-cut sandstone buildings in the world, second only to the Kremlin. I visited several times and took some of the photographs that appear in Night Watch; other images are documents housed in State archives.

But my novels begin with the voice of a character involved in an ongoing, specific situation; I saw ConaLee and her mother, Eliza, on a journey to the room I photographed in the “restored” asylum. War is trauma. Abuse of “civilians” and sexual assault of women is common, even weaponized, in every war, then and now. Soldiers maimed for life in the 1860’s remained devastated. Imagine, in an American population of roughly 30 million, 1.5 million dead, wounded or captured (according to the Battlefield Trust). Numberless widows and orphans. Night Watch invites the reader to survive that devastation in the experience of one family, already rendered nameless, fleeing one hard won refuge for another, and another…

JC: What inspired your title, Night Watch, and the character known as Night Watch, and John O’Shea, among other identities?

JAP: There are always those nameless, forgotten individuals who are moral fulcrums no matter what threat or loss they suffer. Dearbhla is such a character, and refers to her adopted son as “her one.” He’s known as “Sharpshooter” during the war, and later “lent” the name, John O’Shea. His identity shifts as he inhabits one ‘life’ after another. “Night Watch” is a position at the asylum, and namelessness is a theme in the novel. Even before the War, ConaLee, Eliza, Dearbhla, and her adopted son, keep their family name secret for reasons that unspool in the novel. Think of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” that massive, moody portrait of guardsmen charged with defending their cities. Night Watch is a moral and physical necessity, comprised within one man in the novel—a man secret even to himself—whose nature it is to protect, defend, survive, thrive, if given the chance.

JC: You begin Night Watch in 1874, as a mute mother and her daughter, who pretends to be her servant, arrive at the asylum in Weston, Virginia, and are welcomed by Night Watch and Mrs. Bowman. What research did you do to be able to re-create this asylum for 250 women and men with multiple activities, its chief physician, Dr. Thomas Story, and complex staff, including the Hospital Cook, Mrs. Hexum, with her staff and the group of children she nurtures?

JAP: The novel starts in 1874, nine years after the war, inside the immediacy of ConaLee’s voice. A twelve-year-old girl, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, she undertakes a journey with her mute mother and the man she’s been told to call “Papa.” And so our story begins, while the novel, after we “know” the characters, moves back to 1864, amidst the War, to reveal what made and changed them, though revelations continue throughout the novel. Research included Kirkbride’s book and books about him, my own preoccupation with the irony of “moral treatment” within such a brutal, tortured era, and, well, shelves of books about the War and the times: Ken Burn’s PBS series, “The Civil War;” The Civil War Told By Those Who Lived It, four volumes of diaries, military accounts, letters, published by Library of America; Rankin Sherling’s The Invisible Irish, Keri Leigh Merritt’s Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South and numerous books on herbal medicine and medical practices of the time. Realizing the enormity of national trauma and the myth of “the good death” as characterized in Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Republic of Suffering: Death in the American Civil War, was key.

JC: You include illustrations—maps, photographs, drawings. How did you choose them?

JAP: There were originally many more illustrations, but those that remain are intrinsically connected to the narrative: the ladies’ magazine page, referred to as “thee and thine” in the novel; historical photographs of the asylum that comprise spaces the characters actually know. All are meant to. History tells us the facts, but literature tells us the story, and these images help underscore the reality behind the story. Night Watch almost begins with “You’ll tell the story,” a phrase tossed off to ConaLee as she’s left behind. Without story, we don’t truly penetrate history.

JC: Your characters Eliza, and her daughter ConaLee, the daughter of the sharpshooter, are at the heart of the novel. In 1864, Eliza knows about “woodcraft, home craft, trapping, hunting.” She and Dearbhla “used woods medicine, cooked, grew vegetables in sunny patches of ground.” I’m curious about the archival information about such homesteading in those mountains, and how you were able to detail the herbs, animals, garden produce used in these times?

JAP: Herbal remedies were the only medicine for most, and babies were born at home, in whatever served as home. I loved entering this world unspoiled by industry, in which nature dominated, when it was possible to survive in the mountains, devoting all one’s time to daily provisions and preparing stores for the next season. Living “off the grid” was hard, grinding work nearly two hundred years ago, when the grid itself was so limited; the resourceful and fortunate succeeded. Years of continual research, including films, books of photographs and Appalachian folklore, accounts of the past, family stories, and familiarity with real places still reminiscent of the wild, like New River Gorge and the “hills beyond hills” I saw from my childhood home.

 JC: In 1874 Eliza, now known as Miss Janet, is mute, admitted to the asylum. How were you able to render her trauma so powerfully through the flashback scenes leading up to the asylum days?

JAP: I was living inside her, I suppose. And Dearbhla and ConaLee were witnesses to pieces of her experience.

JC: The vision of Dearbhla, descended from Protestant Irish indentured servants, infuses the novel’s narrative throughout. Is she based on a real character? Or immigrant group?

JAP: Dearbhla is not based on a real character, but on what is known about poor Irish whites, illiterate for generations, who migrated with nothing and served long terms as indentured manual labor. The Irish in the South, particularly, were judged by the rampant alcoholism of the men, who could not find work in economies based on slavery, many of whom gave up, leaving their women and children to lives of bitter poverty.

JC: You describe the sharpshooter’s brain injury, the battlefield hospital where he recovers, his treatment, his gradual return to awareness and ultimate state, in great detail. What was the process of writing these scenes like? How much did medical professionals know about brain injuries at that time?

JAP: I’m fascinated by consciousness itself, by simultaneous time as reflected in the floating mind, the blinkered mind. Medical doctors knew very little about the brain then, or they subscribed to myths about “humors.” The Civil War hospitals in Alexandria, a city given over to the treatment of the wounded, were probably among the most enlightened of the day. “Old” Dr. O’Shea and his assisting nurse, Mrs. Gordon, are two more of the mostly unsung heroes in Night Watch. Their close attention, their common sense, their encouragement of the injured to help one another, their recognition of their patient’s innate abilities despite his maimed appearance and diminished faculties, are still at the heart of what healing humanity can manage.

JC: Are you visualizing the country’s current state of division as resembling this time in American history?

JAP: Absolutely. The Civil War, with its migrating populations, separated families, displacements and broken governments, entrenched points of view that lead to heartbreak and breakdown, casts a long shadow, and that shadow emerges more and more starkly. I see Night Watch as the third of a trilogy of war novels, beginning with Machine Dreams (the Vietnam war as experienced by one American family) and moving through Lark And Termite, which imagines a real event in the Korean War and its generational impact on two motherless children. In a sense, we are all those children. Statistics vary, but the Union that survived the War saw 4,743 lose their lives to lynching between 1882 and 1968 (NAACP). The Tuskegee Institute puts that number at 3,446, of whom 72% were Black, and 1,297 were white “provocateurs,” or those seen to be aiding Blacks. Entrenched institutional attitudes still reflect Civil War tropes. Foreign entities, effectively undermining what was once referred to as Western Civilization, actively support division and domestic terrorism.

A soldier character in Lark And Termite believes “It’s all one war,” implying that locations, weapons, ideologies, change, but the same fires flare up.

Yet the timeless nuances of human identity pull in an opposite direction, the direction of whoever and whatever stands as night watch, acting to protect and sustain despite chaos, to gather up, to survive to a time when all of us can finally say our names.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

JAP: I’m working on a collection “about writers and writing” that includes memoir and addresses the very recent lost past, and the idea of origins in a world obsessed with origin stories.

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Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Christian Kiefer’s most recent novel, Phantoms, reveals the sorrows and lingering guilt of wartime through the stories of Ray Takahashi, returning home to the U.S. after World War II, and John Frazier, a Vietnam veteran. (I so treasured the beauty of that novel that I selected it as a BBC Culture “best book of 2019.”)

Kiefer’s new novel, The Heart of It All, is a stunning next step. He details how life changes for an ensemble of characters in a failing Ohio industrial town struggling with heartbreak, betrayal and tragedy during the year after of Trump’s election. “Death brought casseroles,” Keifer begins, “and Tom took them, every one,…many warm from the oven, others cold so their foiled tops wept with moisture.” The novel unfolds through multiple points of view. There’s Tom Bailey, a factory foreman, his wife Sarah and teenage children Charlie and Janey; Khalid Marwat, who moved to the U.S. from Pakistan, bought the transformer factory, and considers the town “a kind of earthly paradise,” his wife Rafia, teenage children and parents; factory workers Mary Lou, who lives with her mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, and Sam, whose racist jokes and growing interest in conspiracy theories unsettle his community; Paula, the “only Black woman in town,” who works at Kroger’s, and her nephew Anthony from East Cleveland. In powerful, lyrical prose, Kiefer offers a sympathetic portrait of a community in search of solace. Reading The Heart of it All creates a sense of possibility, that we might at some point engage in healing dialogue despite multifaceted divisions.

This email conversation spanned many days on West Coast time.

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Jane Ciabattari: What inspired The Heart of it All? I couldn’t help but think of Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson’s long-ago portrait of small-town Ohio. But The Heart of It All incorporates most of the troubling aspects of the past decade. How difficult was it to weave political, racial and class conflicts into fiction?

Christian Kiefer: The country inspired, as it always does, in all its terrible beauty and ugliness. I’m not certain what brought me along the path that it took other than some absurd notion of hope that I harbor in my heart—hope that folks will understand that we’re all struggling and that, in the end, we don’t have much to lean on but ourselves. This is, I think, a lesson we find in much great literature both in and outside the canon.

You’ve asked about the weaving of politics and race and class and all the rest. I was speaking with writer-friend Kendra Atleework recently. We both live in conservative-leaning parts of California and it’s easy for the more liberal centers to throw stones from their bubbles. What I’ve found—and what Kendra and I spoke about—is the goodness inherent in people and how that looks unreconcilable at a remove. It’s fairly easy to find white people in our communities who might use derogatory language—based on race or sexual orientation or what have you—but who might also have a friend or coworker who matches that language, and whom they might consider a friend or even family member. “I don’t mean you, Bill, I mean those other %$#%$%s.”

So I was trying to push toward some essential humanity. At least that was what I held in my heart while I was writing. Everyone is just trying to get by and a lot of it is scary. Human beings tend to look for enemies and if we can’t find one, we’ll blame someone “other” than us. This is particular true of white Americans, of course, as our long history of racism and the incarceral state upholds. As Peter Hedges has noted, war is a force that gives us meaning.

JC: You begin with a tragic moment—the funeral reception after the burial of James, a six-month-old who died from a hole in his heart. Was this always your opening scene? How were you able to pare it down into such a lean but heartbreaking chapter?

CK: My youngest child, my only daughter, had exactly the heart defect that the baby in the book has. She had open-heart surgery at three months and survived. Much of the whole book was just imagining what my life would have been had the worst happened. That was always the opening scene but I had no clear idea what would happen next or how things would unfold. I generally outline and have a sense of the shape of the thing, especially where it’s going to land, but not this time.

JC: Your setting is a small town in Ohio: “In the best of times it is, truth be told, a haggard place, once a center of modest industry but that time is a century gone and what remains struggles for simple continuance, its citizens surviving paycheck to paycheck, on loan, on credit, on faith, a small town growing smaller as the years pass and the hard winters continue.” What draws you to tell this story in this Ohio town? Did you model it on a real Ohio town? What sort of research was involved?

CK: I run the low-residency Master of Fine Arts program in Ashland, Ohio, which is to say that I direct the program from my home in California, flying back and forth as necessary for meetings and such. I was born and raised in California so I find the whole of the Midwest to be a fairly exotic place. Ohio, in particular, has been interesting to get to know. We have some downtrodden areas in California—most often areas of cities—but in Ohio a traveler might encounter an entire town that looks as if it is just barely holding on.

Ashland is not such a town, but it was easy to remove two big employers—the hospital and the university—and to imagine it more like some of the rougher towns I’ve explored. That was something of the blueprint. These are small towns based on some industry that is long since gone. Seems every town has an empty factory at its center, or a sense of some industry from which the world has moved on.

JC: You tell your story through an ensemble of voices. What led you to choose multiple narrators?

CK: I can probably blame two great, great writers for this: Kent Haruf and Richard Russo. Both are so good at this kind of ensemble narrative. I wanted to tell the story of the whole place, the whole town, in this particular historical moment, and the only way I could do that was the quilt it all together in such a way that, I hope, readers will see that it’s a quilt and not just a bunch of fabric scraps.

JC: What sort of challenges were involved in telling your story from the points of view of multiple generations? The teenagers, the middle agers, the elders?

CK: The biggest challenges were cultural. I’m a straight white cis-gendered middle-aged male writer and there’s a great deal of unearned privilege there. I feel quite comfortable imagining myself into most straight white characters but moving away from that—as I’ve done in this book and in the previous book—brings to the fore certain responsibilities and questions. Matthew Salesses has us asking why a writer like me (or any writer, perhaps) wants to write about people of color. It’s a good question and a worthwhile one, and one I hope I’ve answered in the book itself.

One of the choices I made early on was not to try to write in any alternative Englishes. So there’s no AAVE, for example, in the book. I don’t think anyone needs a middle-aged white writer trying to approximate any of that. Frankly, I don’t think anyone needs a middle-aged white male writer saying much of anything right now, but this is the only think I know how to do so I keep doing it.

JC: You write with great detail about the factory setting, how Tom and his co-workers socialize at lunch outside (and on smoke breaks) and Tuesday nights at the Bowl-O-Rama, Mary Lou’s interaction with Mr. Marwat (and later Mrs. Marwat). What sort of research was involved in this aspect of the novel? (Are you a bowler?)

CK: I worked in a very similar factory in Iowa, where I also took up bowling for lack of anything else to do. That stuff was mostly from memory. I worked in a very similar factory in Iowa, where I also took up bowling for lack of anything else to do. That stuff was mostly from memory.

JC: What were you doing in Iowa?

CK: Iowa was meant to be the start of my academic graduate work—not the writing program but American Studies—but I got a graduate degree in divorce instead, which really put things in perspective pretty quickly. For a time I was working a bunch of jobs all at once to make ends meet, in addition to doing grad work full time: delivering newspapers, being a farm laborer, working in an industrial printing office, and of course doing the factory gig. It was a mess but so it goes. This would have been twenty-five years ago or so.

JC: Among the aspects of the small-town you capture beautifully is the way people look out for each other. Paula keeps an eye on Charlie, when he comes to visit his friend Kent, whose father is a vicious man, and she also shows great empathy toward Janey. Tom helps Mary Lou process the changes in her life during this year, and drops by to visit Sam after he’s lost his job. Charlie helps out Mary Lou’s mom when he encounters her on the streets on a frigid night. And so forth. Does this come from your own experience? Research?

CK: I guess this is how I wish it was. Maybe it is this way in some places. Maybe it is this way in Ohio. But also, the ways in which the white characters take care of each other also separates the characters of color from the heart of the town. Paula is identified as perhaps the only Black woman in town and she looks after some of the white kids but who looks after her? No one, really. I mean that’s the division of emotional labor there. I hope that the reader falls in love with how much everyone cares for each other while also understanding that there’s real isolation happening at the same time. People do fall through the cracks all the time and some of that is via the same social systems that hold us together. Race, economics, chronic illness, country of origin: all of this plays into who has agency, what kind, and so on.

JC: Sarah, the grieving mother in the first scene, experiences months of depression and physical pain, which doctors seem unable to solve (they give her Oxycontin and other pain killers, antidepressants). Her dilemma gives a human face to the national Oxycontin epidemic. Was that a complicated element to include in this novel?

CK: Sarah feels very real to me. We have chronic illness in my family and I also know many fellow writers who suffer from ongoing illnesses—some diagnosed, some mysterious, and all of whom are women. We have a long history of tagging women as “hysterical” (Lauren Groff has commented on this), a gaslighting so painful that it comes to feel nefarious. And it’s not just the medical community but the insurance companies that make even getting a proper diagnosis difficult, not to mention any real treatment. It’s maddening. And it’s also totally fucked.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

CK: Gosh I wish I knew! I’m struggling to get the next thing together and to get some aspects of my life in order. Maybe when I get the second thing worked out I’ll have a better sense of the first thing.

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The Heart of It All by Christian Kiefer is available from Melville House.