Lawyer-turned-author Krassi Zourkova mines the traditions of her Bulgarian childhood in a magical debut, Wildalone. When Thea leaves Bulgaria to study at Princeton, she becomes entwined with two sexy brothers as she works to uncover a long-hidden familiy secret. We asked Zourkova a few questions about love triangles, the literature that inspires her and the appeal of the alpha male.

Like your heroine, Thea, you are Bulgarian born, Princeton educated, and something of a musician—are there any other similarities between the two of you? What’s one way in which the two of you are absolutely not alike?
I hope we are similar, as she is quite the girl! Joking aside, there is a softness and innocence to Thea that I have tried to preserve in myself, no matter how life unfolds. It gets tricky at times, both for me and for her, as these qualities are often misperceived as weakness or naïveté, when in fact they are anything but. True strength doesn’t beg to be loudly manifested.

The main difference between us is that I didn’t grow up in a family damaged by prior loss of a child. My parents were quite strict, and this certainly kept me in check. But they also gave me freedom to make my own choices without the burden of guilt. It was wonderfully liberating.

Wildalone is an enchanting mix and fascinating intersection of both Bulgarian and Greek mythology—can you tell us a little bit about your personal history with these kind of stories? What made you decide to incorporate these specific myths into your first novel?
I grew up in a tiny town in the Balkan mountains where, if you opened the window at night, you would hear crickets and frogs. It was magical. I think that’s when my fascination with Bulgarian folk tales began. The wildalones, in particular, are extraordinary creatures who are vicious by nature but are also susceptible to falling in love, like all of us. They have haunted my imagination for years. I even wrote a poem about them, back in 2001, which a friend of mine liked so much he’s kept it framed on his living room wall ever since. Was that a sign from the universe? Who knows. Maybe the book was asking to be written.

The Greek myths have been another fascination of mine since childhood, but I didn’t set out to write about them. It so happened that, as I delved deeper into the story and its mysticism, the parallels became apparent.

You actually studied law at Harvard and have worked as a lawyer for some time. When did you find the time and inspiration to write?
We hear a lot about the corporate culture on Wall Street and how, in just a few years, it sucks one’s soul out. This hasn’t been my experience, so let me give the world of finance a good name. I’ve had my share of grueling hours (who hasn’t?), but I have also been lucky to work with people whose souls are definitely preserved. My first boss was an extraordinary woman, a mentor in the truest sense of the word. When I signed up for a poetry writing workshop at the New York Public Library, she sat me down and said, “Krassi, when 5pm on Tuesday hits each week, I want you out of here. I’ll cover any fire drills myself. If poetry is what you love, no job should stand in the way.” She has since passed away, but continues to be my role model. The book is partially dedicated to her memory.

You’ve built a smoldering love triangle with Thea and her two suitors. As an author, what do you feel is the key to writing a successful love triangle?
To me, a love triangle is best when it carries no obvious mark of a happy ending. Desiring the impossible—there is a beautiful madness to it. Sartre wrote a smash-hit play about one such doomed triangle: A man falls for a lesbian who falls for another woman who, in turn, falls for the man. It is smoldering gone terribly wrong, to become—quite literally—an infernal flame (the play depicts Sartre’s vision of hell). Not surprisingly, the title is No Exit. And this, I think, is the key: to give the trio no way out.

Love rivalry charges a story with tension early on, but if this is all you have, eventually the reader will yawn. So, I thought, why not give the rivals a reason to be fiercely loyal to each other? Make them best friends. Or even better—brothers. That’s when the real tension kicks in. The most fascinating struggles in literature aren’t between a character and his opponent, but between a character and himself.

If you were in Thea’s shoes, would you choose Jake or Rhys (and why)?
Jake, for sure. He can match Rhys in every respect, but he also has humility. To me, this is one of the sexiest things a man can be. And the lack of it is a nonstarter.

There has been a real resurgence of the “alpha male” in popular fiction and Wildalone’s Rhys joins that list. What do you believe is the allure of such a dominant (and dominating) love interest?
You mean, what is the allure of a man who takes on the world, loves like a hurricane, and has depth to boot?! Unfortunately, being an “alpha male” is often equated with arrogance, but that misses the point. An arrogant man can be (and often is) a coward. A true alpha man is fearless. He is a creature of impetus and intent. He has vision. While all the “beta” boys cower in a corner, he compels momentum, forcing the universe to accelerate. So it’s no surprise that, in response, something in a woman’s DNA tingles.

"A true alpha man is fearless. He is a creature of impetus and intent. . . . it’s no surprise that, in response, something in a woman’s DNA tingles."

Can readers and writers still be good feminists while enjoying these types of relationships in their fiction?
Absolutely. And not only in fiction. Dominance and submission are a rite of heightened intimacy; a consensual role play which, at its best, has the complexity and nuance of an art form. For a woman who is independent and confident, surrendering control this way can be an incredible turn-on. Of course, this shouldn’t be confused with needing to be “saved” by a man—emotionally, financially, socially. Unless there is absolute free choice, dominance falls on the abuse spectrum. But barring that, if you want to explore those sides of yourself (and aren’t forced or coaxed into it), by all means surrender away!

How would you say growing up in Bulgaria—particularly during times of heavy Communist censorship—influenced your approach to storytelling, writing and books?
The censorship was much less heavy than people here were led to believe. No books were banned when I was growing up. One that I recall as being kept out of print was Gone with the Wind, and this had nothing to do with Communist propaganda per se, but with the novel’s supposedly favorable portrayal of slavery. Everything else was published—in smaller print runs for the foreign titles, making them a hot commodity sort of like the Super Bowl tickets here in the U.S.—and very widely read. You could be on a crowded bus, and two out of three people would be reading a book.

I was lucky to grow up in such an environment. The thing about a centralized economy is, there is no corporate pressure on the bottom line. No strategic advertising. No budget boosts to “brand” a product and inflate demand. Instead, there was a genuine obsession with merit. Everyone, writers included, had to stand his or her ground. For me personally, this translated into a compulsive disregard for formula. When a story works, it works. 

Many authors report having a “soundtrack” to which they write their novels; given the huge role that music plays in this book, were there any songs or pieces of music that you found yourself listening to while you wrote?
Yes. I listened to a lot of music, and chose for the story those pieces that I thought would affect people most viscerally. I still have the entire soundtrack mapped out in my work files. I even had a fantasy that a multimedia eBook device would allow the reader to click and listen to each piece right after its description in the text. I have no idea whether technology has come that far. As a fallback, I wrote the story with specific references, so all the music can be found online. My personal nod goes to the French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, whose Chopin I am in awe of. His “Journal intime” on YouTube starts with a nocturne that is also the last thing Rhys plays in the book. Look at his hands, his face—he doesn’t just play the music, he lives it.

As a first-time novelist, did you encounter any unexpected challenges while writing?
Way too many to list. You read a good book, and it tricks you into believing that writing can be effortless. Someone obviously had talent, so the story just poured out, right? It doesn’t work that way. At least for me it didn’t. Rewarding as the process was, I also found it to be isolating, consuming, and so fraught with hoping against the odds, that I often had to re-examine my own sanity.

What shocked me most were the random acts of cruelty or kindness. I remember one agent’s rejection in particular, saying there was no way those first 50 pages could ever keep a reader’s interest. A personalized sting from a complete stranger, meant to damage and linger. It was hard to go back to writing after that. Then there were also people who were incredibly generous with their time and advice, and whose attention was kept—in the 50 pages and beyond. Which is what makes this universe of ours a beautiful place: There’s room under the sun for everyone.

"The most fascinating struggles in literature aren’t between a character and his opponent, but between a character and himself."

What is the best piece of advice you have received that has influenced you as an author?
That perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. The man who said it wrote one of the most unforgettable—and shortest—gems of literature, The Little Prince. So much wisdom and heart are packed into that book, it could easily have been 500 pages. But it’s tiny. And that’s part of the magic of it.

When we read, language often stands in the way. It demands effort, which ruins the intimacy. So, every word must earn its place. I didn’t want to write a 500-page book, and I deleted obsessively, to a point where I wouldn’t allow myself even the natural “he said/she said” in dialogue. This probably has to do with my background in poetry too, but to me the white space on the page is as important as the text. It belongs to the readers; they are the ones who get to fill it in. As a writer, I am still learning the art of not claiming that space. I think of Hemingway, who squeezed his own 500-page book into a six-word short story: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” Now try to top that!

Your book has been compared to everything from Twilight to Jane Eyre, and is a truly fascinating mash-up of genres. What books or writers have influenced you that you would urge them to check out?Ironically, perhaps, the biggest influence on me while writing this novel has been the theater. I say “ironically,” because there isn’t apparent connection of genres or themes. “What’s hard isn’t writing,” the saying goes, “but writing what you mean.” And, as a writer, I love to watch live theater and learn from it, from its unforgiving economy of language, time, and setting.

My top list? Beckett, who seduces us into dwelling for hours on a single word. Ibsen, who turns his frail, baby-doll heroines into the kind of women hurricanes are named after. Lorca’s poetic reveries of love and revenge. And, of course, Chekhov, in whose hands the human heart becomes a force of nature. So, if you aren’t a theater buff already, check out your local stages—these plays are classic staples, and the performances are often stunning. Or rent them on DVD. Or read them. The spell carries through, I promise!

In terms of fiction, I was influenced by the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez (and what to me remains the ultimate love story, Love in the Time of Cholera); the fairy tales and fantasies of Hermann Hesse; the unapologetic eroticism of Anaïs Nin and Marguerite Duras; the mysticism of Paulo Coelho. And Nabokov. Don’t get me started on Nabokov.

The story isn't neatly tied up by novel’s end, suggesting a sequel is in the works. Is that what you’re working on next and, if so, how long will we have to wait to read the next installment of Thea’s tale?
Hopefully, not very long! This book took five years, although most of that time was spent learning how not to write. As for the story itself, it came to me within a week, back in 2009, and it ran through my mind with surprising clarity like a film reel, big-bang ending and all. But it had a much longer plot arc, which scared me. I felt that, if given enough space, Thea’s tale could turn into a saga. So I made a deal with myself: Write the first part, and if people react well to it—do the rest. It was a stroke of luck to be able to work on this book and know where the characters were headed in the long run. And since nobody writes about witches without being a bit of one, I planted a few clues of what’s coming next. You know, for good luck.

Stephenie Harrison writes for BookPage from around the world. Follow her journey on her blog, 20 Years Hence.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Wildalone.

Much like Ana, the heroine of her engrossing debut novel, Sara Nović isn’t entirely sure where to call home. “This is what I’m trying to figure out,” the author says, laughing, in a recent interview. “I really don’t know.”

Nović, 28, has lived in Queens for about a year, and in New York City for a few years, but she grew up dividing her time between the U.S. and Croatia, where she has friends and family. The dual perspective informs her powerful story.

Remarkably well-crafted and emotionally mature, Girl at War plunges readers instantly into the world of 10-year-old Ana, who lives in a tiny flat in Zagreb with her parents and baby sister, Rahela. The city seethes in the oppressive summer heat, and Ana hears whispered rumors of “disturbances” in nearby towns, but she’s still relatively carefree, spending her days playing football and riding bicycles with her best pal, Luka.

Then one day the guy at the corner store refuses to sell her the usual pack of cigarettes for her uncle unless she can tell him whether it’s a Serbian or a Croatian brand. War has arrived. In Nović’s skilled hands, it takes the form of such concrete details, interruptions of daily life—small at first, then catastrophic. Ana and her family adjust to the sudden chaos: They forgo their annual trip to the coast, make do with severely restricted food and water and hide in underground shelters during air-raids. But when Rahela falls ill and no local hospital can help, the family is forced to take a huge risk. The consequences of that decision will shape Ana’s entire future. When we see her again 10 years later, in New York City in 2001, Ana is still reeling.

Ana’s difficulty dealing with her past is complicated by the general ignorance of the American public about the Croatian War of Independence, which Nović was awakened to after her first extended trip to the country. “I was shocked that nobody [in the U.S.] had heard about the war. It kind of freaked me out, because it still feels very fresh there.”

In response, she wrote a short story for a creative writing class. In it, the character who would become Ana was “having a meltdown,” as Nović puts it, triggered by news of the death of Slobodan Milošević and the memories it dredged up.

After she’d turned in the story, her professor called her into his office; she assumed she was about to be scolded. Instead, he told her, “You are going to write this novel, and you’re not going to pull any punches.”

“I kind of doubted that I had a novel in me,” she says now. “I was like 18! But eventually I just kind of started writing out in a web from that starting spot.” She kept working at the story, in chunks, for a few years. Getting the structure right was especially tricky.

“I knew I didn’t want it to be chronological,” Nović says. “I wanted readers to have a break after what happens in Part 1. I tried all sorts of weird stuff—I tried starting the book in the present, but that was terrible.” Then, while working on her MFA at Columbia, she had a meeting with writer Sam Lipsyte. He hadn’t read the novel yet, but he said, “Just tell me about it.” That did the trick: “I just spilled my guts, and he drew a picture on an envelope, and that ended up being the order in which things are now.”

As it stands, the narrative structure works beautifully, adding a whole extra layer of tension to the story. Readers slowly discover that there’s a secret buried in Ana’s past, even beyond the dark history she keeps from even her closest friends, but uncovering it is not a simple process.

Ana’s ambivalence about discussing the war might also reflect Nović’s experience. “Some people adapt better than others,” she says. “There are people in Croatia now that just don’t want to talk about it. Then there are other people who want to get it all out, and there’s a lot of cool art coming out of it.” She mentions, for example, a theater group called Heartefact that stages performances in some of the villages that were hit hardest because of their ethnically mixed populations. Still, she says, “It’ll take a long time for things to get better.”

She’s certainly not one to sit around waiting; Nović is busy. In addition to fiction, she writes essays and nonfiction, works as an editor at Blunderbuss magazine, teaches at Columbia and is the founder of the deaf-rights website Redeafined.

Nović, who is deaf, says the site started as “an anger project, but a productive one.” She’d been reading some op-eds about parents of deaf kids advocating for cochlear implant surgery, and she wrote a counterpoint op-ed in response, but no one wanted it. So eventually she decided to publish it herself, and Redeafined was born. To her surprise, “people are reading it!”

The topic is heated, she acknowledges, in part because it’s usually the case that a deaf kid has hearing parents. That means “it’s a weird kind of identity . . . you probably don’t share it with your family.”

She’s working on a story now that’s set at a deaf school, and she’s been trying to figure out a good way to put sign language on paper.

“When I finished this book I thought, well, that’s it, those are all the thoughts I really had,” she says, which is probably how everyone feels after their first novel. “It’s literally everything you’ve ever thought about. But now I have thoughts again, so that’s encouraging!”

Nović also loves teaching. There’s a character in Girl at War, a professor who acts as a sort of book angel, lending Ana new books each week and guiding her reading. Nović says he was inspired by a professor she had at Emerson as an undergrad, whose office was similarly crammed with piled-up books. “I’ve been really lucky to have a couple of teachers like that who just feed me books,” she says. “I hope to become that person.”

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Girl at War.

The carnival scene in Gilded Age New York City forms the colorful backdrop of Leslie Parry's remarkable first novel, Church of Marvels. Here, the Chicago-based writer opens up about the inspiration behind this high-wire act of historical fiction, reveals her dream sideshow act and shares her instant cure for writer's block.

Church of Marvels takes place in and around New York City at the end of the 19th century—what about this setting appealed to you as a writer?
The Gilded Age was a time of such extremes—unprecedented wealth and abject poverty, sumptuous mansions and teeming slums, booming industry and westward expansion and an unprecedented wave of immigration. And nowhere was that more visible than in New York City, hub of both robber barons and rag-ships. It’s a world in which a dizzying number of cultures and subcultures co-existed, often within the same square feet. I was curious about those people who had perhaps slipped away from history, who had disappeared among all that color and noise. What did they fight for; how did the live? Not only is the city in the late 19th century a spectacular sensory experience to imagine as a writer, but the stakes would also be very high for its denizens. I wanted to feel what it might be like to walk those streets with a sense of urgency and desire.

"I was curious about those people who had perhaps slipped away from history, who had disappeared among all that color and noise."

Prior to writing Church of Marvels, you focused largely on short stories. Did you approach writing a novel in the same way as you would a short story?
It’s interesting. I wrote the first pages of what would become this novel early on, before I’d ever really written—let alone published—a short story. And I grew quickly overwhelmed. I set the project aside (for years!), uncertain what it was or how to proceed. During that time I wrote only short fiction—a form I wasn’t completely comfortable with, but it afforded me the discipline that I needed and craved. It required a kind of hyper-focus, a distillation, a strong sense of scene. I was able to concentrate on specific tasks: characterization, mood, setting, the building of tension, etc. I think I built up my individual muscles during those years (in terms of confidence and discipline, if nothing else). Then I was ready to run.

Writing the novel was a little more freeing. It was gleefully sloppier. I went down all sorts of divergent pathways and colorful loop-de-loops. It was challenging to keep the tone consistent, the characters curious and active, and the momentum up (both on the page and in life). In the end I felt supremely exhausted—but vital, too.

One of the impressive things about Church of Marvels is how meticulously it is plotted and how cleverly the various storylines flow together. How much of the novel did you have planned out before you sat down to write it, and how did you approach the writing process?
I pretty much knew nothing about the book when I began to write it—except that these four people intrigued me, and I wanted to know who they were and how they lived. Gradually I developed a loose outline, but left enough room for discovery and improvisation. At one point I tried to write the novel in discrete blocks, character by character, but that was short-lived. I would lose the thread of the plot, or the overall tone and voice; I’d forget the rhythm. Writing sequentially had its challenges, but overall it worked far better for me—and when I got stuck with one character, I just ran off with another. Instant cure for writer’s block!

Did you do any specific research in preparation for writing this book? If so, what was the weirdest bit of information that you stumbled upon (and did you include it in the book)?
I did read a lot—mostly out of curiosity, just to get a sense of the world these characters lived in. While it’s very tempting to cram everything in—there is so much fascinating stuff—I tried to use only what was relevant to the world of the novel. And the great joy of historical fiction (in my mind, anyway), isn’t analysis or even accuracy, but imaginative interpretation. Some details I had to invent—either because I couldn’t unearth all the morsels of information I wanted, or because the imagined details were truer to the characters’ situations and inner lives.

The weirdest bit of information, which I didn’t use in the novel, was the concept of dentistry as a sideshow act. I read about it in a book on dime museums and medicine shows. People would gather to watch these very real, very bloody tooth extractions, replete with costumes and props (sometimes performed by actual dentists, sometimes not). One hustler, who went by the moniker of Painless Parker, became so successful that he started his own Dental Circus and entered the show on the back of an elephant.

Sylvan is particularly intriguing by virtue of the fact that in a novel populated largely by women, he is a man. What was your thought process involving this character, and was it a conscious choice on your part that the action of the novel revolves nearly exclusively around women?
That’s a good question. It wasn’t a conscious choice, although I’ve always been intrigued by women who don’t conform to the expectations of their era (not because they have a specific desire to outrage or rebel, but because their own lifestyle is normal to them—and true). Sylvan was the character who came to me first, actually, years ago. I had an image of a man finding a newborn in an outhouse. I wonder what that story would be? I remember thinking. Even though Sylvan is independent, self-sufficient and muscular—qualities we associate with masculinity—I don’t think of those as his greatest strengths. I was interested in the side that he was kind of frightened of showing: his compassion, his nurturing, his need for love, for family, a sense of belonging—as much as those impulses might scare him at times, as much as he might try to dismiss or conceal them. I think it’s his sensitivity that keeps him grounded, that humanizes him in a world that doesn’t always see him as worthy or capable of much. How do you hold on to that bit of vulnerability, I wondered, especially in a world that leaves you so hardened, where your own preservation is paramount?

"I’ve always been intrigued by women who don’t conform to the expectations of their era."

Sexuality plays an important role throughout this novel, and at times make what is a historical story feel very current and modern. Can you talk a bit about the gender politics of Church of Marvels and what you hope readers will take away from it?
Sexuality and gender were obviously discussed and understood differently in 1895 (as were things we take for granted now: psychology, biology, codes of masculinity and femininity, sexual drive and desire). But that doesn’t mean homosexual or “androgyne” subcultures didn’t exist, or (in certain circles) even thrive. It may be easy to forget—especially in an era that favors speed, access and instant phenomena (the flipside of which is instant amnesia)—that there’s a long, vibrant history to what seems like a modern issue. And I hope that gives some people comfort, and others perspective. Language may change, circumstances may change, politics and social spheres may change—but the heart remains familiar and constant.

It may be impolitic to pick favorites, but if forced to choose, which of the characters in this novel do you relate to the most? Which character was the most challenging for you to “crack”?
All the characters have traits I relate to: Sylvan’s solitary nature and occasional prickliness, Odile’s stubbornness and loyalty, Alphie’s romantic sensibility. Initially Alphie was the most challenging character, because she’s clever in many ways, but also naïve. She doesn’t think of herself as savvy or particularly strong, and yet she’s forced to be cunning, often out of sheer desperation. That was a difficult—but rewarding—conflict to explore.

Two of the characters in this novel are performers in a sideshow and perform incredible feats. If you could have your own act in a sideshow, what would it be and why?
Great question! I would be a snake-charmer. The L.A. Zoo had a two-headed snake when I was a kid. I was absolutely terrified of it—and also transfixed.

There are some really incredible twists and surprises throughout this novel—what’s one novel that you recommend to readers who like a mystery that keeps them on their toes?
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

Now that you have your first novel under you belt, what are you working on next?
I have a few projects underway—another novel, a play. I’m curious to see what takes shape. Otherwise I’ll have to go join the circus.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Church of Marvels.

In her perceptive debut novel, Among the Ten Thousand Things, Julia Pierpont examines the effect that an extramarital affair has on one artistic New York City family. We asked Pierpont a few questions about the allure of the affair as a plot device, the brother-sister bond and smutty "Seinfeld" fan fiction.

Many novels are about marital affairs—why people have them, what comes next. Why do you think readers have such an endless appetite for this perennial family conflict?
I think adultery, really affairs of any sort, will forever compel our attention: It’s certainly the sexiest of the Ten Commandments one can break.

In my case, I was interested in depicting the sort of betrayal that would affect each member of a family, though in different ways. Why should children be so injured by their father’s betrayal of the vows he made, not to them, but to their mother? It isn’t about the children directly, and yet for that very same reason it is, it does hurt them. And then there is the added complication for the parents, once the kids are brought into it. How much more difficult does it become for parents to move beyond such transgressions without seeming to condone the same amoral behavior that we are taught, as children, to reject?

“I think adultery will forever compel our attention: It’s certainly the sexiest of the Ten Commandments one can break.”

I enjoyed observing the development of Kay and Simon’s relationship. Do you think their parents’ marital troubles brought them closer?
I’m glad that relationship resonated with you. Initially, yes, when Kay realizes that the only person she feels free to confide in is her brother, that recognition is something that really binds them to each other. They are both their parents’ children: The only two people in the world equipped to share the same burden. But then the way they each process their father’s affair is so different, which is pretty inevitable given their respective ages.

When we meet Simon, he is just embarking on the world of girls and popularity and mild drug use. He’s affected by his parents’ problems, but he’s reluctant to admit it on a conscious level. Kay’s world hasn’t opened up in the same way yet, she’s too young—her family is still everything to her. So Simon finds it irritating to be around his sister’s devastation, while Kay feels estranged by her brother’s apparent indifference.

Do you have a sibling yourself? If so, did you draw from your own sibling relationship to create the dynamic between Kay and Simon?
I’m an only child, which I’m sure has only amplified my interest in sibling dynamics. I remember begging my mother to have another kid—but what I really wanted was an older brother or sister. I would have loved it if she’d somehow managed that.

The four main characters in your novel have very distinct personalities and characteristics—though they’re all relatable in different ways, and it’s a pleasure to follow their stories. Do you have a special fondness for one specific character? Why?
I really did come to love them all—it’s strange now to go on without them. Jack was actually the most fun to write, though he’s liable to be the most difficult character for a reader to like. I think it was his way of looking at the world—even when circumstances were terrible, he’d notice what was funny or absurd about them. He also happens to be the only character with whom I have the least life experience in common, and so in a way he arrived more fully formed, separate from me.

Your novel has an unconventional plot structure. I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll say only that readers do not discover the beginning, the middle, and the end in their natural order. Why did you decide to structure your book in this way? In your opinion, what do readers gain from this choice?
I knew early on that I wanted to look at time. In our lives, just as in the stories we read, there’s always a great deal of importance placed on endings. It’s an understandable, and very human—uniquely human—focus to have, but it can be detrimental to our days as we live them. In the Galway Kinnell poem from which I took my title, as well as the novel’s epigraph, we hear a father address his young daughter about the passing of time, though she is still far too young to understand, urging her to soak up her days on this earth though they will soon be over. There’s a passage in my book that refers to “between-time,” time that we spend waiting to see what will happen next, but which really winds up constituting our whole lives. The structure of the book is meant to remind us: These are the days we have.

Kay’s “Seinfeld” fan fiction is a hilarious entry into the young girl’s creative mind, and it’s a clever way to show how she understands her dad’s infidelity. Why “Seinfeld”? (Did you grow up catching those after-school re-runs?)
Thank you, those sections were fun to write. I watched reruns of sitcoms religiously after school, though when I was really young I was under the impression that the episodes were premiering that day, the way it is with soap operas. I knew I wanted a way into Kay, who’s a very shy, closed-off child—closed off to herself as well as to the people around her—and I thought her feelings could be more believably explored through her writing.

Why “Seinfeld” in particular? Putting aside the fact that I was already tremendously familiar with the show, I liked that it didn’t fall into any of the genres one typically associates with fan fiction, and that the more mature themes Kay would ultimately integrate into her writing would be especially incongruous with the cartoonishness of its characters.

How did you conceive of Jack’s art installation, complete with explosives? Did any real-life artists or installations inspire his work?
It was very important to me that the work be credible. For the most part, Jack’s projects weren’t inspired by any artist’s in particular; rather, they were the product of what I’d been able to glean about the art world and the kind of artist I imagined Jack to be.

There was one real-life artist who inspired some of Jack’s later art, in which he makes images by using the smoke of burning objects to singe his canvases. That artist’s name is Rob Tarbell and I found his smoke art online by total accident a few years ago; he makes these haunting pieces that really stuck with me.

What books are on your own personal summer reading list?
I’m reading Edward St Aubyn’s Melrose novels right now. Then I mean to pick up where I left off with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. So many series lately! Summer’s a good time for them. I read all of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books one summer while I was working behind a dark bar, wishing I were traipsing around Paris or Tangier or wherever Highsmith sent him.

Are there any authors who inspire you over and over? 
Oh sure, there are so many. Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster are big for me. Richard Yates, Harold Brodkey. Amy Hempel, Philip Roth, Nicholson Baker. I’m just reading what I love, that’s as inspiring as it gets for me. Lorrie Moore’s “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” was the first book I read that made me want to write. I loved what she was doing and I remember thinking, that, I want to do that.

What can you tell us about your next project?
Not as much as I’d like to! I’ve been working with siblings again, sisters, only this time the characters are closer to my own age, which is something I’ve been predisposed to avoid. It’s enough just to live it, without going home and writing about it too.
 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Among the Ten Thousand Things.
 

August is First Fiction month on BookPage.com. Read more first fiction coverage here. 
 

Novelist J. Ryan Stradal spent months working on his vibrant first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, without ever knowing if anything would come of it.

“You spend a lot of time alone in a room thinking, I don’t know who’s going to read this. No one might care,” he says from his home in Los Angeles. “But it’s just what I wanted to do. If someone said, Tell me your perfect day, I would say, I wake up with an idea in my head and I write it. Then I go out with friends around 7:00 for fish and chips.” 

Set in Midwest kitchens in and around the Twin Cities—a region that Stradal, a native of Hastings, Minnesota, knows well—Kitchens of the Great Midwest is a masterfully woven set of stories that all connect, in some way, to the lovely and slightly mysterious Eva Thorvald. Eva’s mother abandoned her as an infant, after deciding she wasn’t ready to be a parent. “I wasn’t cut out to be a mother,” she writes in the note she leaves behind. “The work of being a mom feels like prison to me.” 

Soon after, Eva’s doting father, a chef, suffers a massive heart attack, leaving his daughter to be raised in poverty by her kindhearted but alcoholic uncle and overworked aunt. 

The few food experiences her father imparted in her before his death stick with Eva—or maybe cooking is just in her DNA. She grows to be a wunderkind chef, starting as a child by cultivating searing-hot peppers under grow lamps and selling them to local restaurants. The adult Eva becomes famous for hosting legendary pop-up restaurant meals with years-long waiting lists, inspired by her participation in a Sunday supper club.

When her mother reappears years later at one of Eva’s pop-up restaurants, Eva is faced with her past—and must decide whether her mother can be part of her future.

“Eva, to me, feels like the person I want to be,” says Stradal. “Eva was decisive at points in her life where I felt a lot of us weren’t decisive. The trauma of her childhood made her grow a thicker skin. The vicissitudes of youth, like being attracted to a douche-bag guy—that happens to everyone in their 20s! It was all something she worked through and ultimately assembled a family of choice. You see that a lot in places like LA, where we’re far from where we came from. Eva’s sort of a personification of that.” 

That’s not to say that Stradal has shallow family roots like Eva. In fact, he credits his mother, who died a decade ago, with giving him the desire to write.

“Our house was filled with books,” he says. “She was one of the few voracious readers I knew. From a young age, I got the idea from her that the most important thing you could do was write a novel. It was the pinnacle of human achievement. The process of writing this book was like having a conversation with her every day. It really felt good.”

While his childhood was filled with books, it was not filled with gourmet cuisine. A child of the 1970s and ’80s, he recalls frozen dinners and a local soda he calls “basically suicide in a can.”

“I definitely find myself engaged by the evolution of food consciousness in my life,” he says. “Since 1975, when I was born, it’s stark. I remember the microwave came out and my parents said, this is great! It took such a turn in the 1970s and 1980s toward convenience at the expense of taste and safety, frankly. And now, we’re excited about exotic farmer’s market vegetables. It’s not just hipsters on the coasts who are shopping at farmer’s markets. It’s all across the country.”

Although the book is packed with scrumptious descriptions of food and a bounty of recipes for everything from French onion soup to wild rice casserole to carrot cake, Stradal does not consider himself a foodie. He has worked in publishing and television production, but never in a kitchen. 

“I’m an enthusiastic end user,” he says with a laugh. “I like food quite a bit, but I’m not an accomplished chef. I sure can swipe a credit card with the best of them—I love restaurants and can spend with alacrity.” 

Stradal was inspired by pop-up restaurants in and around Los Angeles, which by their very nature offer a unique dining experience.

“They’re wonderful, especially if they exist for logical reasons other than financial,” he says. “For example, there was an interest in Georgian food, so some local chefs sell it out and serve Georgian food for a night. Then you can maybe hire them as caterers or fund their next pop-up if you’re a real enthusiast.”

Stradal is half-worried that pop-up restaurants, a somewhat unknown phenomenon when he started writing the book, will evolve so quickly that they will be passé soon after publication. 

“I feel like by the time this book comes out, it’ll be historical fiction,” he says. “People will be charged $5,000 and there’ll be a year-long waitlist. At the time I started writing, it felt very in-the-future, borderline satire.” 

Kitchens of the Great Midwest is one of those fantastic, kinetic books that simultaneously entertain and make you hungry. (Think Like Water for Chocolate or Heartburn.) But it is not, Stradal insists, a book about food.

“I feel it’s a food book second,” he says. “It’s a family book first. I really wanted to write a book that was emotional and about families: one with empathy and heart, with interesting, character-driven stories. I set out to write a book with characters I don’t often see—where they live, how they behave. I didn’t think about writing a book about, like, a white guy falling in love in Brooklyn.”

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In her debut novel, New York Times reporter Stephanie Clifford takes readers to New York City in the years before the 2008 stock market crash. Everybody Rise follows young striver Evelyn Beegan as she attempts to break into some of New York City’s most elite circles—and will go to almost any extreme to make it happen. We spoke to Clifford about her move from reporting to fiction, social power structures and the “unlikeable” female protagonist.

This is your first published novel, but you’ve worked as a court reporter for the New York Times. Given your experience with the legal world and the undoubtedly juicy stories you’ve covered there, were you ever tempted to write a thriller or crime novel?
I’m actually pretty new to courts—I covered business for years at the Times before switching to a courts beat last year, and a lot of my observations from that coverage made it into the book. Reporting on the 2008 crash and its aftermath made a huge impression on me—we were suddenly having a national discussion about wealth, class and how we got into this mess. I wanted Everybody Rise to reflect the lead up to that time, from the easy money that the young bankers are making at first, to their confidence that the stock market will continue to rise and buoy their fortunes.

As Evelyn thinks at one point, the “more” is always there, taunting her, as it was for so many in that time. As to the courts question—I am starting work on a second novel, set in the criminal-justice world, and there is daily fodder for it in Brooklyn’s courts, as you can imagine!

Your heroine, Evelyn Beegan, goes through quite the transformation over the course of the novel and, at times, behaves absolutely abhorrently. How did you approach Evelyn’s metamorphosis and did you ever worry about taking her past the point of redemption?
There were points when I was watching in horror as she made bad decisions, but I tried to follow where Evelyn led, and to put aside worries about whether she was likeable. I was rooting for her—I felt she had this underlying social anxiety that we’ve all felt at some point (well, most of us have felt). We’ve all wanted something that’s not good for us; we’ve all tried to be something we’re not; and Evelyn is so desperate to belong that she’s willing to do anything for it. Once she realizes what she’s done, it was important to me that she figure out how to get back from this bad situation she creates—and to do so on her own, without being redeemed or rescued by a man. She gets terribly lost, but she ultimately figures out how to find her way back to herself.

You revealed on Twitter that you quietly worked on this novel for years. What was the most difficult part of the writing process? How did you manage to find the energy and creative space to write a novel in your spare time?
There are two answers to this—one practical and one theoretical. I was working on this in fits and starts for a couple of years, and then I realized that if I wanted this novel to be finished, I’d need to structure things differently. I needed to set up regular time that wouldn’t be interrupted, so I would get up at 6 and write until 8 every morning before work. Then, theoretically, I had to make sure that every morning when I finished, I’d get up the next day too and keep working at it. So until I finished a draft, I tried to turn off the critical voice in my head, and I made a deal with myself that I just had to get my rear in that chair from 6 to 8, and even if I only typed a single word, I was still ahead of where I was the day before.

At one point in the novel, a character says to Evelyn that she has been “trying to make it in Edith Wharton’s New York.” In many ways the world depicted in Everybody Rise seems not altogether dissimilar from that of a Wharton novel; in your opinion, how has New York and its society changed in the last century?
Ooh, good question. Parts of the book were inspired by “House of Mirth,” and I think Wharton remains one of the best writers about social class. What’s changing now is that the world is now a lot more diverse and a lot more meritocratic than it was in the Gilded Age. A small cadre of WASPs no longer controls, say, the business world, or colleges, or social life. In fact, growing up in Seattle, where everyone gets the same standard-issue hiking boots and fleece, I didn’t even know this echelon of people still existed. When I shipped myself off to boarding school in the East, I was startled to find not only did they exist, but they held immense social power. The question of why—of what made them so alluring despite the drastically changing times—was one of the sparks for Everybody Rise.

Let’s talk about all the Sondheim and musical theater references in the novel (including the title!)—what was your inspiration for weaving those into the story?
When I was first writing this, after Evelyn was deep into her bad choices, I felt really bad for her. I wanted to give her something that would soften her landing just a little bit. I was listening to Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” basically on repeat at the time, and that offered an answer. Musicals appeal to Evelyn’s escapism and dreaminess, and remind her—even when she’s throwing herself at this world—that there’s something different out there. The book is also a family story, about Evelyn’s fractious relationship with her parents, whom she’s eager to please and embarrassed about at once. Musicals offered something that Evelyn and her mother could share: as much as Evelyn initially disappoints her mother, and as cold as their relationship can be, they are able to share emotion through musicals. Also, it gave me an outlet for my voluminous and heretofore useless knowledge of musicals lyrics!

The movie rights for this book have already been secured. If casting were left up to you, which actors would you like to see in the film?
I feel achingly old, because my knowledge of twenty-something actresses is not very good—I’m still like, “How about that woman who was in Mystic Pizza?” I actually think the role of Evelyn’s mother, Barbara, would be the most fun to cast—a fifty-something woman who is disappointed with her own life and pushing her daughter into the life she never had. Such a fun Mama Rose role to play.

In recent years, there has been increased discussion about the “whitewashing” of literature, television and film. For instance, the TV show “Girls,” which is also set in present-day New York City, was criticized for its lack of racial diversity, and Everybody Rise is populated almost exclusively with Caucasian characters as well. What is your perception of this issue and what do you feel is your responsibility as writer when it comes to the stories you tell and the characters you populate your novels with?
Not everybody in the novel in white, but it is true that virtually everyone in the stratum Evelyn wants to break into is. While Everybody Rise isn’t journalism, but I approached researching this book as a journalist—interviewing people from this circle, spending time at events, reading sociology about class—and when I spent time in that world, that’s the makeup I found. My responsibility here, I felt, was to write about how something is, not how I wish it were.

One of Evelyn’s biggest downfalls is that once she starts lying, she can’t stop, until her falsehoods get bigger and bigger and she gets trapped by them. Care to share a lie you told but would like to finally come clean about?
Ha! I didn’t brush the cats this morning like I said I had, and I probably won’t do it tonight, either. . . .

Evelyn’s growing lies stemmed from some of the court cases I’ve written about for the Times. As I began to attend more cases, I noticed one commonality: The defendant’s missteps always started small. Giant drug dealers who’d committed multiple murders began by packaging one bag of heroin. White-collar criminals who’d defrauded homeowners of millions of dollars began by fiddling with their taxes. I wondered: how does someone get from a small lie—a place we’ve all been, where we’re futzing with the truth a little—to this life that is off the rails? That journey fascinated me, and I wanted to see what choices Evelyn made, how she rationalized it to herself, as she went from point A to point B.  

One of the major narrative thrusts of Everybody Rise is the pursuit of the “American Dream” in 21st-century America.  What is your personal version of this dream?
Put simply, it’s a world where everybody has a shot. One of the most frustrating things in covering courts is seeing how systemic problems affect regular people: court fines that people can’t afford, records for minor violations that keep them from getting jobs years later, even a midday court appearance that means their hourly job may be in jeopardy. Evelyn’s problems are far removed from those daily pressures, but by the end of the novel, she’s asking some of the same questions: who matters in society, who doesn’t, why some people get punished and others get off scot-free. Those are questions that, judging from political campaigns and national conversations, a lot of Americans are asking nowadays. 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Everybody Rise.

Naomi Jackson's The Star Side of Bird Hill is a lush and lyrical debut set in Barbados during the summer of 1989. Ten-year-old Phaedra and her 16-year-old sister, Dionne, are sent away from their home in Brooklyn to spend some time with their maternal grandmother, Hyacinth, in the Caribbean, but neither girl is quite prepared for what the summer holds in store. Jackson centers her tale around four women in the same family from four different generations and acutely sifts through the emotional landscapes of coming-of-age, claiming a cultural identity, grief and mental illness while including plenty of moments of brash humor and poetic insight.

We asked Jackson a few questions about her own ties to Barbados, her writing process, what she's working on next and more.

What was the initial inspiration for this novel?
I started this novel with just the opening scene of the novel, which features two sisters, Phaedra and Dionne, playing with their friends in a church cemetery in Barbados. I wrote The Star Side of Bird Hill to explore the lives and experiences of Caribbean people both at home and in the diaspora. Writing the book was also a way to answer a question that dogged me—what would happen if, like my parents sometimes joked, they sent me home to the Caribbean for the summer, and left me there for good.

I love the cover! Did you select the artwork?
I love the cover too! I met the cover artist, Sheena Rose, when I was in Barbados writing and researching my novel. A friend gifted me one of Sheena Rose’s paintings, “Too Much Makeup,” when I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and it hung above my desk as I finished the book. I was so glad that my publisher was open to and excited about my idea of featuring the painting on the book cover. I wrote about the cover story for Lit Hub.

Much like Dionne and Phaedra, you grew up in Brooklyn with West Indian parents. Have you spent much time in the Caribbean as a child, and did you travel to Barbados during your writing process?
I grew up in a predominantly West Indian neighborhood in Brooklyn, and I spent many childhood summers in Barbados (where my mother’s from) and in Antigua (where my father’s from) with my sister and a gang of cousins. I spent the summer of 2012 in Barbados researching and writing this novel. I found spending an extended period of time in Barbados to be really helpful. I felt that there was no substitute for listening to people talk and seeing the landscape with a writer’s eye and curiosity.  

Did your characters surprise you at any point during your writing process?
When I began this novel, I was telling the story from the perspective of the younger sister, Phaedra. I broke a number of rules in fiction by eventually choosing a roaming point of view that jumps between Phaedra, her sister Dionne, and their grandmother Hyacinth. I was surprised by the ways in which choosing multiple perspectives enriched the novel, and I was taken aback by how much the other characters had to say.

Depression and mental illness have large roles in this novel. Why was it important for you to openly and honestly explore this topic?
I wanted to write a book that honestly tackled mental health in black communities head on, like Bebe Moore Campbell’s 72 Hour Hold. I was inspired by Campbell’s book and related advocacy for mental health issues. I felt that writing honestly about this issue was an important way to lift the veil on a conversation about mental health that is often hushed and avoided altogether in Caribbean communities. I felt I was uniquely equipped to change hearts and minds by telling a nuanced, complex story about mental illness and how it affects Caribbean families.

As a graduate of many prestigious writing programs, what’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve received so far?
Writers write.

Aside from writing, do you have any other creative outlets and pursuits?
I enjoy the other creative arts—the visual arts, music, dance and theatre. I also love watching films; ideally, I get to see a few films each week.

Who are some of the authors that you turn to for inspiration?
Shay Youngblood, Marlon James, Tiphanie Yanique, Jamaica Kincaid, Sherman Alexie.

What are you working on next?
I am working on my second novel, a multigenerational family saga set in Brooklyn and the Caribbean from the 1930s to the 2000s. I am also writing a screenplay adaptation of my short story, “Ladies,” with Barbadian filmmaker Lisa Harewood.

Author photo by Lola Flash

Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel—sold for $2 million in a 10-publisher bidding war—has been the most anticipated, hyped and ballyhooed book of 2015. If the literary gods are fair, it’ll wind up on many shortlists. But unless you’re a connoisseur of literary criticism, you’ve probably never heard of the author.

Hallberg grew up in the small college town of Greenville, North Carolina, where he was the “resident beatnik.” Until now, he’s had a quiet career as an award-winning book critic for The Millions and a writing professor at Sarah Lawrence College. That’s about to change with the arrival of his first novel.

City on Fire is a postmodern epic in the vein of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Beginning with a mysterious shooting in Central Park and culminating in the real-life New York City blackout of 1977, Hallberg weaves a complex story with an ensemble cast. The book’s seven parts are divided by and interspersed with letters, news clippings and images, similar in form to Marisha Pessl’s Night Film. City on Fire encapsulates the many cities that are somehow one New York City during its most dramatic moment in the 20th century.

We spoke with Hallberg about City on Fire, New York City and how the book was inspired by September 11.

Let’s start with the obvious: most debut novels aren’t 900 pages long. Did you set out to write something so sprawling in scope?
The scope of the book was very much a part of the initial conception. The whole idea came to me in a period of about 90 seconds in 2003, and one of the things I saw about the book was that it would have the scale and sweep of Bleak House. And that was almost scary for me, so after writing a single page of it, I shut the notebook and said, “Oh boy, I don’t have the chops to do something like that. I’ll come back to it in 10 years.” But I came back to it about four years later. It had been building in my subconscious until the world was fully formed, so when I sat down to write, it was like going through the wardrobe into Narnia.

You’ve already been compared to DeLillo, Franzen and David Foster Wallace. What does that feel like as a debut novelist?
It’s sort of like asking a fish how the water feels. You’re inside it, but not necessarily aware of what’s being said around you. If there’s one predominant feeling, it’s surprise.

I loved the book’s interludes with letters, news clippings and images. What made you decide to play around with those?
I had a dream in which I saw the finished book, and I was giving it to someone. And as I was flipping through it, I could see that some pages weren’t just pure type. So I woke up and thought, either that’s a crazy dream that I’ll just forget about, or there’s something to it, and I’ll figure it out down the road. But I had written this letter, and it started to revolve around a magazine article, and I knew I had to write it, and I knew where it went.

As a native of a small town, what drew you to New York?
I used to go up to New York with my friends as a teenager and just drive around, and it was completely intoxicating. New York was a place where everything that had been repressed or frowned upon or discouraged in the town I grew up in was given freedom of expression.

You’ve said New York seemed like a fantastical place when you were young. Why?
When I first started to read, New York was where all the books came from. Almost every book that I encountered as a kid was like a doorway to the wider world, and a world that I would return to the real world enriched by. Stuart Little, Harriet the Spy, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street—in many of those books the world that you walk into is altered and exciting and transformed.

This might be a strange analogy, but your conception of the city reminds me of the “multiverse” in Marvel and DC Comics, with all these different continuities and realities that somehow coexist in the same city at the same time.
I think that’s a good analogy! In my experience, we actually live in a multiverse, but that’s so challenging to keep remembering. We’re constantly tempted to imagine that we live in a world that’s less complex, or that’s just about us.

Do you think the New York City of 2015 is a less magical place than it once was?
I’m hesitant to pontificate on what New York might be in general. After September 11, there was this extraordinary feeling that everyone was still grieving. And for that reason, people seemed vulnerable and more open to change, in the same way people do at a bar after a funeral, this feeling that it would be a tribute to the people we lost to change your life for the better. But that feeling didn’t last. You can’t live inside that feeling forever. In 2015, it’s hard for me to say what New York means to anyone besides me.

I’ve heard you say that September 11 partially motivated your writing. What do you mean by that?
September 11 was seeing something I cared deeply about suddenly put in risk of not existing. I was just out of college, so it was my first initiation into life as an adult in America. Between then and 2003, there was a lot of ideological work going on in the culture, trying to say what September 11 really meant, and increasingly what people were saying was not what I knew to be true. So I think, subconsciously, I was looking for a way to talk about that period from September 2001 up until 2003, about what it meant for me.

This might be way too early, but what’s next for you?
Another writer asked me that a few months ago, and when I said I couldn’t answer, he said, “Good, if you were able to talk about it now, I’d think you were crazy.” So I’m among the healthy minority who won’t answer that question yet!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of City on Fire.
Adam Morgan is a writer and lecturer living in Chicago. His latest book is North Carolina’s Wild Piedmont: A Natural History.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Claire Vaye Watkins’ award-winning short story collection, Battleborn (2012), explored the West and the often disappointing truths behind its rich mythology. Watkins returns to the West in her luminous debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus, although it’s a West that has been drastically altered. 

The California of Gold Fame Citrus has been ravaged by unending drought, and only a handful of drifters remain, including disillusioned couple Luz and Ray, who are squatting in a starlet’s abandoned house until they take on the care of a strange, enigmatic toddler and begin to look east toward a more stable life. However, a vast stretch of sand has engulfed the West, and crossing the unmapped terrain is treacherous. When the trio encounters Levi, a prophet-like dowser, and his followers, more strange dangers present themselves in unexpected ways. 

I got the chance to sit down with Watkins during the Southern Festival of Books earlier this month, and we talked about the power of setting, the myths of motherhood and more.

This novel is firmly rooted in the West, and you grew up in the Mojave Desert. I was wondering what about the West really inspires your writing.
It’s hard to separate what inspires me from just who I am. I grew up there, and when I moved away from the West, I started to see it through more mythic eyes, to see how other people who never have been there saw it. And I started to think it was a really captivating place, and kind of haunted. I like the way that history seems to gurgle up to the surface a lot of times, wherever you are. It’s a relatively new place, but there are a lot of stories all layered on top of each other. And I think the landscape is beautiful, and I like putting characters who are in trouble in really beautiful places and seeing what that might do to who they are.

"When I moved away from the West, I started to see how people who never have been there saw it. I started to think it was a really captivating place, and kind of haunted."

Obviously this novel is coming out while there’s a major drought in the West, and I was wondering how that affected your writing. Did you keep abreast of the situation or did you try to ignore it and do your own thing?
I was born in the Owens Valley, which is the place where Owens Lake used to be, and Owens Lake was drained by the Los Angeles Aqueduct System in the 1920s. It set off what’s called the California Water Wars which is—have you ever seen the movie Chinatown?

I haven’t.
Well, it’s basically about the people in Owens Valley who try to resist—they dynamite the dams or the projects—so it was sort of like a microcosm of what happens in a much bigger scale in this book. So I was born there, and my family knew those stories and told those stories all the time. I mean, for most people in California, especially the dry part of California, drought and water has been on their minds their whole lives. So it was more like I was watching the rest of the country catch up to those people who have always been worried about it. Which was kind of nice, or at least refreshing. When I first started working on the book about five years ago, nobody even knew what I was talking about when I said I was writing about water and the Southwest, and some people would be like, “Oh yeah, it is kind of dry there, isn’t it?” But now, pretty much everybody knows. It’s a major issue.

Do you think at this point you’ll stick to the Western world in your writing, or do you think you’ll move out of the West?
I don’t know yet. I am getting increasingly interested in a less place-driven way of writing. I’ve always started with the setting in any piece of fiction, or at least the piece doesn’t really cohere until I know where it’s set. But I'm reading Lydia Davis’ stories right now, and a lot of them have no setting at all. There’s just a really minimalistic approach to place. And probably because I’ve been writing in that mode now for two books, I'm getting interested in other ways of writing. So not necessarily that I’ll be interested in writing about other regions. I don’t think I could write about any region other than the American West the way that I do, because I don’t know it as well. I don’t feel like it’s a part of me, even though I’ve lived in the Midwest and the Rust Belt.

Luz was a model before the West was abandoned. I was wondering about your thoughts on her beauty in this completely blown out world.
I think what’s interesting about Luz is that she is one of these models who’s really striking looking, but sometimes that can be seen as an ugliness. But sometimes, in the right campaign, with the right makeup and the right advertising, it can be really exotic. So her beauty is particularly exoticized. She would never be mistaken for the girl next door. I think I was drawn to that because it would be almost like she had this secret identity. And there’s some stuff about her race going on there, that they want her for this particular kind of look. Her job is always telling her, “You’re like this.” But she actually feels really, completely different. And then her whole childhood she was this baby Dunn symbol. I like that all of the characters have three or four different identities that they can slip into and out of depending on the situation.

I love the character Luz, and I strongly identified with her, but I was also distraught by her irresponsible—albeit realistic—choices. Did you intend for the reader to really connect with Luz?
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I like the idea that you would be allied with someone who would make really bad decisions, but she makes bad decisions for good reasons. I like the muddiness and the complication. I didn’t set out to do this explicitly, but it was important for me to really lodge the reader with a young woman who is a product of our culture and is trying to move around in a culture in which she is objectified. I mean, she is professionally objectified, but there’s threats of sexual violence here and there, and that’s just what it is to be a woman, you know? And it’s funny, because every once and a while I’ll get feedback that someone wishes Luz was more strong or powerful, and I'm like, “Yeah, I bet she wishes that too!” If only we could just make the characters that way. But I don’t think that’s the goal of a novel. Dora the Explorer should be a powerful young woman with agency, right? But that’s not what the novel is doing, it’s not a role-model project. It’s a mirror, it’s not aspirational. One of my teachers used to say that you can only give characters the endings that they deserve.

"Dora the Explorer should be a powerful young woman with agency, right? But that’s not what the novel is doing, it’s not a role-model project. It’s a mirror, it’s not aspirational."

In the same vein, we spend a lot of time with Luz, and we spend a lot of time inspecting her failures as Ray’s lover and as a surrogate mother, but we don’t spend as much time with Ray, who arguably makes just as many mistakes. I was wondering, what if it had been Ray’s book? Was the focus on feminine failure intentional?
It was probably just that I am more familiar with feminine failure. But I did want Ray to also be wrestling with masculine archetypes. He’s a veteran, so the word “hero” is often adhered to him, and he’s uncomfortable with that. Yet, a lot of the mistakes he makes are because he’s trying to be a hero, or he thinks this is what a "manly man" ought to do. What he would like to do, just as a little guy, a little speck on the earth, is not hardly ever the same thing as what man as hero and actor should do. I wanted to show that there’s a difference between being true to yourself and being heroic, and then being this cardboard cutout of masculinity, which is often just that. I mean it’s flimsy and frail and made of trash.

I noticed that the two central male figures in Luz’s life, Ray and Levi, are doling out sedatives, which I thought was interesting. Could you say a little more about that?
They are, aren’t they? I mean, you can certainly imagine the appeal of sedatives, just in our world right here in Nashville! Let alone in this near-apocalyptic hellscape. Maybe it goes back to that idea that they’re trying to be heroic, or they’re trying to help people, and they develop these coping mechanisms. And of course, in situations like the one Luz finds herself in in the colony, drugs are often used to control. I'm interested in drug use as being seen as a way to higher consciousness. Because I think that’s so alluring—I would love for that to be true! If I could just take a drop of acid and then access another dimension of existence. That’d be so cool! But I also kind of doubt it. Then again I haven’t taken acid. But maybe that’s my family.

Their central characters, Ray and Luz and the baby Estrella, are all named after forms of light. I was wondering how you settled on those names?
Luz is from the film Giant with James Dean. It’s kind of like Gone with the Wind but with cowboys? It's just a big epic, and one of the sister characters, her name is Luz. You never really know—I guess it’s because they’re Texans—why it’s pronounced that way. Ray—well, I think I wanted them both to be tight, short, three-letter names. And I had a dear friend who passed away whose middle name was Ray. He liked to go by Ray sometimes when he was up to no good. It was almost like an alter ego for him. I thought about him a lot as I was writing this. Then once I realized, of course, Luz is Spanish for light and Ray, like a ray of light, I thought they would have to be aware of this. I hate it when there’s symbols or some thematic thing going on and the characters are just totally oblivious, you know? I think it’s always a good idea to let your characters be as smart as you are if not smarter.

"I hate it when there’s symbols or some thematic thing going on and the characters are just totally oblivious, you know? I think it’s always a good idea to let your characters be as smart as you are if not smarter."

In society, motherhood is kind of held up on a pedestal and invested with these transformative powers and the ability to make women better people. I'm wondering—is that true? Luz has a lot of failings as a surrogate mother. Are we just doomed to be who we are—there’s no magic transformations out there?
That’s so interesting. You know, I didn’t realize that part of the myth of motherhood is that it can be transformational until I was pregnant, and so many people would describe it to me as this transformation. I read that one of the theories about natural birth is that it’s such a profound experience that it actually wipes away your past traumas.

That’d be neat.
Right? And that’s a cousin to the idea that you can take a pill and reach a higher plane of existence. We’re looking for something and hoping that maybe this experience will give us something. So I think that Luz is hoping that [motherhood] will be a major transformation and an upheaval for her. But of course, as with major transformations, you can’t really predict them. It’s funny. I have felt like motherhood is completely transformative, but in absolutely unpredictable ways. I wrote this book—I think I turned it in a week before I went into labor with my daughter—and sometimes when I'm talking about it or reading from it, I feel like it was written by somebody else, somebody that I don't even know anymore. An old friend or something.

How so? When you’re reading it, what strikes you as odd?
Partly that my worldview has been radically redesigned by being a parent. And the worldview in the book is still my old one that I used to have. Partly, in a lot of this book I was kind of rehearsing. My friend Peter Ho Davies talks about how, a lot of times in our books, people mistakenly think that writers are writing about their experience, but they’re actually maybe more rehearsing for experience. So for me, it was motherhood; I was thinking about what it would be like to have a child. And in some ways, I got a lot right about motherhood. Not for me, but for Luz. But then there are other things that I could never really have imagined till I did it.

And it’s interesting that it’s not Luz’s child.
That’s kind of another interesting layer on it. We treat mothers generally with more delicacy than we do non-mothers. It’s just the way it is; I don’t think it’s a great thing. And suddenly Luz, who’s been treated kind of roughly her whole life—she’s been objectified a lot, she was sexually abused when she was a model—now she’s suddenly treated like a mother. She’s been on the whore side of the Madonna-whore binary. And then just in an instant, she’s on the Madonna side.

This is embarrassing to admit, but I’ve never been farther west than Arkansas. So for a while, I thought the Amargosa Dune Sea was real. It very much melded myth and reality. I was really amazed by your ability to create this landscape, and I was wondering about the process of creating the myth and this dune sea.
There’s a big long chapter about the dune sea in the middle of this book, and that was the first thing I ever wrote. It ended up being about a hundred pages in, but I wrote that first, and I think it was because I needed to do exactly what you’re saying. I needed to figure out what this thing was from all different angles. How does the geology of it work—I mean of course it doesn’t really work, this would take millions of years and this happens in like half a generation. But let’s just suspend our disbelief for a little bit—and the culture of it. I found that if I figured out the mundane details, it made it more real for me. Like, whose jurisdiction is this? What kind of animals do or don’t live there? What happens to the houses?

I loved the fact that the foot of the dune crushes; it doesn’t cover anything up, and that’s what ends up convincing the people to leave. Their homes aren’t covered up, they’re gone.
Right! You know, there’s a wonderful Tony Earley story about a dam keeper called “The Prophet from Jupiter,” and it has this image of this town that’s submerged by the dam. It’s totally spooky. So I wanted to do a terrestrial version of that. But then I realized that the idea of the sand just gently coming—it was too gentle, it was romantic. So instead I thought about glaciers, how they scrape the land and leave these gauges and turn things into rock right away.

I felt that the drive for sex and companionship in this novel was really powerful, as well as being a huge threat and a tool for manipulation. I was wondering why sex is such a driving force and comfort for these characters.
I just like the idea that even though this is a disastrous landscape, that people would still be whole, they would still have their needs. They would still laugh, they would still need to go to the bathroom, they would still have sex. They would still get bored. They would still need something to occupy their time, they might like to play music. That we would just continue to be ourselves. So often when I read dystopian literature, it just seems like all people do is eat. And drink and sleep and eat and drink and sleep and eat. It just doesn’t seem real to me, or wholly imagined. They’re also young people, and they don’t have a whole lot to do.

Battleborn has a lot to do with the West’s history, and in “Ghosts, Cowboys,” there’s elements of your family’s history, as well. I was wondering if your mother and father influenced this novel.
Oh yeah, definitely. My mom’s the one who told me about the California Water Wars in the 20s and 30s and taught me the way the geology of the West works. She ran a museum—a very small little rock shop and museum at the edge of Death Valley, and I basically grew up there. So I learned about rocks, but I also learned about interpreting history. I don’t really know nearly as much about geology or natural history or talc mining or any of the thing I write about. I just learned what a good story feels like. If we’re trying to understand the past, what is the shape of that genre. So absolutely.

Are you looking forward to anything in particular at the festival?
That I get to be with Ben Percy on the panel is so fun. I think we’re going to run our panel more like a survivalist boot camp. Between Ben and I think we can teach everybody a lot about surviving the apocalypse.  

(Author photo by Heike Steinweg)