Girls in Lakes, Soldiers in Boots: A Conversation Between Bill Roorbach and David Abrams

David Abrams and Bill Roorbach first met at PNBA, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association conference, which took place in Tacoma, Washington back in 2012, when David’s book Fobbit was new and Bill’s book Life Among Giants had just been released. These friendships on the road with new books bloom quickly, and are reinforced by chance meetings across years to come. On the occasion of the publication of their newest books, Bill and David thought they’d better have a virtual conversation, as the road wasn’t going to bring them close this time around.

Two dapper gents: Bill Roorbach and David Abrams at PNBA in 2012

Bill:  David, David—if only we could do this in person over a stack of books and a cup of coffee. I’m a fan since Fobbit, and love that you’re continuing to mine your own Iraq War experience for the new novel. I hope it won’t give too much away to say that Brave Deeds follows a squad of six men going AWOL and crossing an explosive Baghdad to attend the funeral of their late, lamented leader—sounds like they’re going to be up against it from both sides. Is there an incident in your own experience that got you inventing this terrifying journey?

David:  Bill, first of all, it’s great to have a dialogue with you again. We need to make plans to reunite more than once every five years; that PNBA encounter was too long ago, my friend. Fortunately, I have your newest book, the short story collection The Girl of the Lake, to keep your wonderful voice close at hand. I gotta tell you, I am enjoying the hell out of these stories!
       You know, I actually tried stalking you last autumn. My wife and I spent two weeks in Maine, driving all over the eastern half of the state. I never did see you, though. You’re elusive. Do you retreat to a rustic cabin in the Allagash and write your novels by kerosene light?
       But circling back to your question to me....
       Brave Deeds was initially inspired by a 2007 Washington Post article by David Finkel (whose The Good Soldiers and Thank You For Your Service are war literature classics). In that account, an entire company of soldiers--27 of them--performed a similar “memorial march” across Baghdad to attend a funeral for their sergeant killed in a bomb blast a week earlier. While nearly every mission in Iraq at that time carried a considerable weight of danger, these particular soldiers were backed up by a full contingent of Humvees, gunners, maps, and compasses. In Brave Deeds, as a cruel creator, I stripped away all of that security. Despite their best-laid plans, my six soldiers are left with no Humvee, no maps, no compass, no food, and only limited ammunition for their rifles. They are AWOL and they have gotten in way over their heads. I thought that might make for more interesting reading. And so, I stripped away the reliable “comforts” of military life, heightening the “strangers in a strange land” aspect of wartime deployment and giving them a ticking-clock timeline to get the job done. So that’s how it began: I read a story in the newspaper while drinking my morning coffee and started plotting the fates of these foolhardy, loyal, and brave soldiers. Never having walked in the figurative footsteps of my characters--my deployment to Baghdad in 2005 was nearly all served within the confines of the Forward Operating Base--I was definitely writing as an outsider, a non-infantry soldier. But none of that mattered much once I got underway with this book because my intent was not to write a bombs-and-bullets military thriller but a character-driven story about six co-workers who go off the grid and must survive not only the enemy but themselves.
       How do you approach writing something that’s well outside of your experience? I’ve just finished reading the first story in your collection, the wonderfully-named “Harbinger Hall.” Surprises peel like an onion in these thirty pages, so I won’t say too much except that we, the reader, eventually end up in Russia around the time of the 1917 Revolution. How did this story come about? What paths brought you to these two characters--a sixth-grade boy skipping school and an elderly recluse whose first words to the boy are “You want to play war?”—and this dazzling story?

Bill:  I love that you stripped away the security apparatus. Your mission sounds like it cost a lot less! At least in dollars and cents. Yes, I felt your presence in Maine. Actually, I saw you were here through your posts on Twitter. We live a little isolated from the coast world up in Farmington, which is western Maine, foothills of the White Mountains. It’s been a great place to live relatively inexpensively and at the edge of civilization. We have a place now in Scarborough, too, that puts us closer to the sea and to Portland, a city I love, and full of writers, too.

       I wrote “Harbinger Hall” a while back, published it in The Atlantic, and then revised it for this collection. It starts with a ten-year-old deciding to bail out of school forever, using a method I dreamed up in sixth grade but never dared try. Great thing about fiction is you get to see what might have happened. We kids used to play war extensively, and one of our battlefields was on an estate you could approach through the forest from my neighborhood. We’d spy on the old guy who lived there, pretend we were going to rescue him or kill him or kidnap him depending on the various storylines. This story has a kid braver than I who goes ahead and skips out of school, begins to hang around the estate on the far side of the woods. But he gets caught, and gets a dose of history. I’ve always been fascinated by the Russian Revolution and all the mayhem that preceded it. Here was a chance to be in two worlds at once. I did a lot of research, but in the end, as you say, the story has to be about characters in motion. And really, a boy’s imagination, which is still alive in me.
       Did you have any personal experience to go on for Brave Deeds? I know you were part of some dark times in Iraq. Have you been back at all since? Is it hard to sit still and write when the memories, or the imagination they've unleashed, start coming back to life on the page?

David:  While portions of Fobbit were lifted almost whole-cloth from my war diary, the plot, characters and much of the setting in Brave Deeds were far beyond the scope of my experience in Iraq in 2005. I was, sadly, a headquarters-bound Fobbit during my entire time in-country. So, Brave Deeds gave me a chance to think about soldiers whose lives were vastly different than my own (infantry vs. support soldier) and to virtually and vicariously step out into the more dangerous world of Baghdad beyond the Forward Operating Base. If I had “dark times” during my time in Iraq, they came when I read about (or, worse, saw photos of) the grisly and unpredictable violence which more courageous soldiers saw nearly every day. Looking at a photo on your computer screen in an air-conditioned office is nothing compared to actually standing on a street, staring down into a crater made by an exploding mortar, smelling the blood, and seeing--well, sights too horrible to describe. I’ve seen the pictures—many of them—from these types of attacks and they were enough for me.
       To answer your other question: no, I have not been back to Iraq. Nor do I plan to vacation there in the future. Baghdad is a chapter in my life I hope to never re-read.     
       Speaking of stretching exercises we authors perform at the keyboard, what about your story “Broadax, Inc.”? The narrator is a self-proclaimed corporate shark who finds himself deep in a love triangle (and, boy, do I dig these lines: “Sharks do fall in love. It isn’t all just gnashing and splashing and arms coming off clean.”). You don’t strike me as the Wall Street executive type. (But maybe you have a hidden double life? If so, I have a few questions about how I can sweeten my investment portfolio.) Ted Broadax is the kind of guy who bites his sentences into chunks, prides himself on his immense wealth, and is a total mess when it comes to personal relationships. This doesn’t sound like the Bill Roorbach I know. How did Ted arrive in your head? And have you ever watched the Showtime series Billions? Your Ted reminds me an awful lot of Bobby Axelrod (whose name, if you stutter-slur resembles “Broadax”).

Bill:  Well, I’m loving seeing your imagination at work--it’s clearly well informed. I haven’t seen Billions, not yet, but I’m really enjoying these long-form cable series, which are like novels on TV. I can even read them the way I read novels, going back to check on plot elements I might have missed, flipping back a few pages when I realize I’ve been spacing out. I worked with HBO a while developing a show based on my novel Life Among Giants. It was fascinating to pull that thing apart into seasons and episodes, and to write scripts as opposed to novels, where nothing’s getting done by actors or cinematographers—that’s all in our hands. These are great narrative minds, is what I’m saying, and I learned a lot from them. Before they killed my show, that is. You wouldn’t want to see the pictures of that carnage. Though in fact my main emotion was relief--I could get back to being a novelist, which is where I live.
       As for Broadax—I just wanted a name that included a weapon, because that’s the way he’d come to see himself as the story opens. I’ve got a number of high school friends who went into finance, as they used to call it, and these guys, math whizzes, all of them, seemed pretty mild-mannered sitting in Algebra II. But the aggression when they went out in the world, and the pure focus on money! Astounding what was hiding behind those khaki slacks and Bass Weejuns. I just wanted to see what was left of a particular guy if every bit of his business success and money dependence was taken away from him. I’m also interested in how easy it might be to manipulate the electronic everything of our lives to destroy someone. Or a country, come to think of it. “Broadax” the story comes from that. In the end, what he’s got is love, and that turns out to be enough.
       You’ve been busy--this I know based on our exchange, which has taken quite a few weeks between questions and answers. A new book is a whirlwind, even months before it ever hits the shelves. The Girl of the Lake is my tenth book, amazingly, and the experience of every single book has been different, with emotions from despair to ecstasy along the way, and back again. And again. Second books are notoriously tough—how is this one different from your first? The reception has been fantastic. Did you feel more prepared?

David:  Putting out a second book is like the Grand Central Station of Neuroses for self-doubters like me. On the exterior, I may look much the same like I did when Fobbit came out in 2012; but inside, I’m a storm of worry. The early reviews for Brave Deeds and the reception I’ve gotten from readers on this book tour have certainly been reassuring. And yet, there’s always that second-guessing that goes on: a reverse of Sally Fields’ famous line from her Oscar acceptance speech, “Do you really like me?” But that’s just ego talking and has nothing to do with the finished, published book we now hold in our hands. No matter what my conflicted, complicated feelings are about the so-called “sophomore slump,” Brave Deeds the novel stands on its own. It’s written, it’s published, I’ve tossed it like a homing pigeon from my worrisome grip. It has to fly to readers with its own wings. But, yes, anxious voices inside my head still clamor. I’m not sure how to tamp them down, muffle the overthinking. As a seasoned veteran in this business (ten books!!), do you have any Rilke Letters to a Young Poet type of advice for me?

Bill:  We really like you! I have no advice for you—I think your art and life are well in hand. The only observation I really have after a lot of ups and downs is that nearly all of the pleasure of writing comes in the making. That’s what lasts, and that’s where we’re most in our element. Please keep it coming!

David:  You are entirely right! I will carry that forward with me to Books 3 and 4 and beyond. Thanks again, my friend.

Bill:  But wait—I want to ask you about the Cave of Rewrite you mention on your Twitter page. It sounds fucking scary!

David:  The Cave of Rewrite can be a dreadful place, can’t it? Sometimes I look at the process with the same amount of joy I once felt for trips to the dentist (Dr. Rusty Pliers, DDS). All those words—All. Those. Fucking. Words. –demanding reevaluation and judgment. It’s deflating, isn’t it? Or maybe that’s just me. One of my faults is trying to take an all-encompassing, long-range view instead of just relaxing and taking small bites from the elephant. Too often, I deflate my tires before I start driving. Then again, revision is the time of discovery: plunging my hand into my characters’ chests and pulling out surprises (“Wow, Rusty--I had no idea you were a dentist by day and stamp collector by night!”). So, yes, the Cave of Rewrite is dark and frightening, but if we self-doubting artists can swallow our fear and keep walking forward to that pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel, the rewards can be infinite.

Bill:  Revision is where it all happens, for me. It’s what makes our stories smarter than we could ever be. Okay, brother! See you in the wings!

David:  Maybe Texas Book Festival?

Bill:  Nope, not me, but I’ll be at National Book Festival over Labor Day weekend. We’ll cross paths again yet, my friend.

David:  Wait, wait! There’s still so much more to talk about. Like how “The Girl of the Lake” is shaping up to be one of my favorite stories of all time--it goes on the shelf of honor next to the other long-time residents: Mr. Carver, Mr. (Richard) Ford, Miz O’Connor, et al. Other things I still want to talk about include “The Fall”--good googly-moogly, I LOVE that freakin’ story about a wilderness hike gone bad!--your style/voice (alluded to a little in that remark about Broadax’s choppy dialogue), and the relationships between men and women in these pages, not to mention your marvelous novel The Remedy for Love. All those things, and more. I think the most bro-romantic thing I could say to you is, “You have a way with words.” So, if you’re up for it, I’d like to sustain this conversation on down the road (the literal and figurative one).

Bill:  That is a promise! Loved it, David. And thanks for kind words. More talk soon!

Finish What You Start: A Conversation with Alex Segura

Interview by Andrew Scott

Alex Segura is a novelist and comic book writer. He is the author of three Miami crime novels featuring Pete Fernandez—Silent City, Down the Darkest Street, and Dangerous Ends—published by Polis Books. By day, he works at Archie Comics. He lives in New York City.

Tell us a little about Dangerous Ends, your new novel.
       Dangerous Ends is my third novel, and the third in a series starring Miami PI Pete Fernandez. Pete debuted in Silent City, which introduced us to the drunk, washed-up journalist who had just returned home after flaming out on his investigative sports reporting gig in New Jersey. He’d also just lost his father and his fiancée had just left him. Not an ideal moment for him. Since then, Pete’s evolved—he’s solved a few major crimes (as detailed in the first book and its sequel, Down the Darkest Street), decided to make the leap into being an official private eye, gotten his drinking under control and managed to cobble a life together. That’s where we meet him at the beginning of the new book—dealing with the more mundane aspects of PI work and trying to keep his head down and his life simple. Unfortunately for Pete, it doesn’t work out that way. His partner, Kathy Bentley, drags him into a controversial case involving an ex-Miami Narcotics officer named Gaspar Varela. Varela’s serving life in prison for the murder of his wife. The case has been a hot-button topic in Miami for almost a decade—debated, dissected and the subject of myriad books and even a documentary. Varela’s daughter, Maya, hires Pete and Kathy to discover any bit of evidence that might lead to a new trial for her father, and perhaps grant him his freedom. At the same time, Pete and Kathy find themselves in the sights of a deadly Cuban street gang known as Los Enfermos, who have some mysterious ties to Cuba, Fidel Castro and perhaps Pete’s own past.

What is it like coming back to the same protagonist for multiple projects? What is the benefit to you, as the author, and how is this a challenging decision?
       There’s a comfort level there—dealing with the same world, characters and general conflicts. But the appeal, to me, isn’t in the static. It’s about showing how these characters—specifically Pete, Kathy and their FBI agent friend Harras—evolve from book to book. I’d get bored if it was more about the case and they remained the same. I’m not into writing that kind of book. I want the characters to change and be in a different position at the end of the book. So, for me, it’s about Pete’s arc as much as it is about the mystery or whodunit aspect. The challenge there, though, is that you have to make each book feel open—so anyone can pick it up and not feel like they’re completely lost. The other side of that, though, is that you have to also make it worthwhile for the people who’ve been around since the first book and want those Easter Eggs and hat tips to what came before. It’s a balancing act. That’s part of the challenge and the fun of writing a series.

Many authors who write a series of books about the same character seem to find a real groove during the stretch you’re in now—the third book, the fourth book. Do you have plans to write many more Pete Fernandez novels?
       I’d like to. When I first wrote Silent City, I didn’t know what I was doing or where it was going. Toward the end of writing that one, I knew I could do one more, maybe two. I thought three would be it. But now it feels like I get a new Pete idea every other day. I think I could definitely write a couple more and keep him on his toes, they’d just have to feel like stories that had to be told. I don’t want to crank them out just to do them.

Miami is, obviously, such an important part of your work. I know it’s your hometown, and you bring it to life vividly on the page. Did you always plan to write a series in Miami, or did you suddenly find yourself writing that story one day?
       Writing about Miami went hand-in-hand with deciding to write a PI novel. I wanted to showcase my hometown and present it through my eyes, as opposed to the way I’d seen it portrayed on TV or in movies. There’s so much more to it than the surface stuff most people see. It’s a big, sprawling city with corners and neighborhoods that are extremely different—from inner cities to suburbs. I wanted to show that, and have Pete explore those areas for the reader. Now, as I enter my 11th year as a New Yorker, the work of writing about Miami becomes more research-intensive. I visit a lot—at least twice a year for extended periods—but it’s different. So I find I have to spend more time making sure the facts are straight. Which is a long-winded way of saying I could see myself writing a book set elsewhere, if the idea struck at the right time.

In a recent interview, you said that you thought you would write literary fiction. How did you get started as a writer? And how did you find your way into your current genre?
       When I first started writing—short stories, poems, that sort of thing—I was in college and I wanted to be the next Michael Chabon. I wanted to write these deep, literary tales. I still love literary fiction, though I kind of cringe at that genre label, but I have to laugh at my younger self. I hadn’t really lived much yet, so I don’t know if I would have had any stories to tell. I think it just felt like that’s where you went, work-wise, if you wanted to be a writer. But I didn’t have a passion for that kind of writing. It wasn’t until I started embracing the kind of books that I read for visceral pleasure, the mysteries, true crime books, pulp novels, that I realized I could combine passion with craft. Then I dove in head-first. Because I now had the spark to go with the direction. The turning point, for me, was reading more modern hardboiled fiction. Books like Queenpin by Megan Abbott and White Jazz by James Ellroy. Novels that crackled and felt sexy and rough all at once. They showed me that you could do a lot within the crime genre, perhaps you could do more inside the genre than outside, because you get so much cloud cover by being a “genre” or “mystery” writer. It really lets you do anything.

What is the most difficult thing about writing for you? Not the writing life, but actually putting words on the page and bringing a fictional world to life?
       I think the challenge is always in making time. I have a family, a full-time job, other writing—we live in a world where excuses are everywhere. So the challenge for me is to get into that routine, even if the routine is not “wake up at five each morning and write,” because that’s not realistic for me. My “routine” is more about being aware enough to jump on found time when it appears, and maximizing it to create the words I want each day. I’m not a word counter, though it’s fine if people are. I do try to, when I’m actively writing a novel, write every day for at least a few hours. I feel like you need that momentum pushing you from one day to the next, and when it stalls, you run the risk of losing the whole thing.

If other writers are thinking of “crossing over” into your genre, what are the five crime/mystery/detective novels you would recommend they read first?
       Oh, great question. Off the top of my head:

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith
The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson
The Galton Case, Ross Macdonald
Beast in View, Margaret Millar

       These aren’t my top five overall, but I do love each of these books. It’s a good starter kit, though, which is I think what you were asking. It’s a good cross-section, and you get a taste of different takes on crime books. If I had to list the five books that got me, someone who was thinking of writing a crime novel, they’d be:

A Firing Offense, George Pelecanos
Darkness, Take My Hand, Dennis Lehane
Baltimore Blues, Laura Lippman
The Black Echo, Michael Connelly
The Big Nowhere, James Ellroy

       I cheated on this question. Forgive me.

As a writer of comics, you’ve tackled Archie Meets Kiss and Archie Meets Ramones, as well as Archie’s “Occupy Riverdale” storyline. What skills as a prose writer translate easily, and what’s challenging or more difficult in writing for the comics medium?
       Prose is a solitary endeavor. You’re the be-all, end-all. You may have an editor or beta reader or what have you, but by the time they look over your work, you’re done with at least a draft, which is a huge undertaking. Comics are much more collaborative. You give your script to an artist, they interpret your direction and then it moves on down the line, each person, from inker to colorist to letterer, adding their take on the script. The final product is always different from what the writer envisioned and the hope is that it’s better. It usually is, if you’re working with skilled people. But that’s extremely different from prose, where you have to do everything, at least in terms of how you communicate with the reader. In comics, you also have to be more compact with your words—which, honestly, you should be in anything you write. You have only so much space and you don’t want to cover the pretty art with words. It’s a visual medium and it should be embraced.

I’ve known you for a while now—first as a publicist for DC Comics, then as a publicist for Archie Comics and editor of Dark Circle Comics, an imprint of titles that includes The Black Hood written by Duane Swierczynski. You’ve written three Pete Fernandez books. You also have a small child. What does your average work day look like? How do you manage to stay productive? Do you own stock in a coffee company yet?
       We have known each other a while! Time flies.
       I don’t have an average day, which I like. At least in terms of the work I do. It can range from writing press releases or generating PR to collaborating with a creator I admire on a new or established Dark Circle book. Most days, I wake up, go to work, come home, make dinner and write. My family is important to me, so I try to maximize my time with them. Those are the broad strokes. But there’s a lot of room in there to allow for other things, like teaching a LitReactor class, editing a line of books or running a PR department, not to mention writing novels and comic scripts. I like to keep active, so this works out. But yes, coffee helps.

If you could give your younger self one piece of advice about writing and one piece of advice about life, what would you say?
       Work hard, be kind, stay humble and finish what you start.


Andrew Scott is the author of Naked Summer, a story collection. His fiction and nonfiction credits have appeared in Esquire, Indianapolis Monthly, Glimmer Train Stories, The Writer’s Chronicle, and other outlets. He is a Senior Editor at Engine Books and lives in Indianapolis.

Living in the Flux: The Glimmer Train interview with Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly

I’ve been enjoying the latest issue of Glimmer Train Stories, reading it in small doses each day so I can stretch out the experience. (Full disclosure: one of my stories, “A Little Bit of Everything,” can also be found in these pages.) While many of the stories are outstanding, for me the real centerpiece of the Spring/Summer 2016 issue (#96) is Kevin Rabalais’ interview with Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly, the husband-and-wife team behind The Tilted World. Tom is also the author of the short story collection Poachers and the novels Crooked Letter Crooked Letter, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk; Beth Ann, a poet, is the author of Tender Hooks, Unmentionables, and Open House.

I thought I’d share some of my favorite portions of the interview because they have a lot to say about the writing process—especially doing research for historical novels (The Tilted World, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk are all set in times past). I’m at the very beginning of a writing project which is set here in my adopted hometown of Butte, Montana in the early 20th century, so Tom’s comments really resonated with me.

Here he talks about writing Hell at the Breech, which is set in Alabama in 1897:

When I read the newspapers of those times, I would get both high and low language. Whenever someone wrote an article for the paper, he was generally trying to show off. If they wrote for the paper, they were educated. So instead of writing that the passengers were “spitting” in the rail cars, the writer used the word “expectorating” just to show off a bit.

I think that a certain kind of research would only give you that surface quality. You have to go deeper into it and try to find diaries or letters. That’s where people talk the way they really talk. There, you’re catching people when they’re naked. You can look at old photographs and see the way people are stiff. Compare that with the way they sit on their own front porch. As a novelist, you need to write about your characters not as though they’re posing for that photograph but relaxing on their front porch.

*     *     *

Here’s Tom discussing Smonk, which he says is “my favorite of all my books and the one that sold by far the worst,” and how it compares with the composition of his earlier novel:

With Hell at the Breech, I started in the middle and wrote toward the end and then came back to the beginning. I did a first draft of Smonk in ten days, two hundred pages in ten days, and then it took me a year and a half to fix it. I’ve now learned that’s how to write a novel. Start and don’t look back until you get to the end, even if you know it’s all wrong. You can always fix it later, but you have to follow the momentum. You need to be able to judge the whole animal, which you can see and weigh as opposed to just having pieces of it. If you’ve got a whole big quilt, even if it’s missing pieces, you can still see how to fix the corners.

*     *     *

I’ll let Beth Ann have the last word. When Kevin Rabalais asked the couple “What keeps you both excited about writing and about literature?” she replied:

It’s the narrative impulse—simple, yet essential. That’s why we’re on earth. The world is this flux of events and noise. The writer’s job is to live in the flux but to perceive a shape in it, to find the story and to trace the arc of the human experience. Narrative gives shape and meaning to life.

Fathers and Sons: An Interview with Brian Panowich

Interview by John J. Kelly

“The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son” is a maxim as old as Scripture. Can individuals step out of the shadow of a shameful family past and still preserve the pride of legacy? It is also the question that dominates the highly acclaimed debut novel Bull Mountain by Brian Panowich. Bull Mountain, with its blood-soaked soil and dangerous backwoods hills, is home to the Burroughs family. The novel traces the family’s lawless lives at the edge of society in north Georgia from the moonshining decades of the 1940s till the even more deadly meth-fueled present. It’s a multigenerational saga told from various perspectives and points of view; a dark and violent family tragedy about how people learn to live lives of unspeakable cruelty and still believe in their own righteousness. The Los Angeles Review of Books had this to say about the novel: “What Panowich puts together is more than a history of family, but a chronology of the violence perpetrated for nearly a century in maintaining an empire built on bootleg hooch and drugs–not in the name of power, women, or money, but of home....He tears apart the hardened, Southern man so popular in rural noir. Even more, he does so while maintaining that those characters have a moral, human center.“

Author Brian Panowich grew up a military brat, moving from city to city with his parents and then hitting the road again as a touring musician for more than 15 years. He finally settled with his wife in Georgia, where Panowich fell in love with the close-knit mountain folk. He says he wanted Bull Mountain to be about “the people you don’t hear about” who risk everything to protect their own from the rest of the world. Panowich now works as a full-time firefighter and says he wrote Bull Mountain in the time between alarms at the firehouse, hiding away in the corner with a computer. I recently spoke with Brian in a series of wide-ranging conversations in which we talked about the family ties that bind us, fathers and sons and the importance of always remembering where you come from.

John Kelly:  How did you go from touring as a musician for more than 15 years to sitting down to write Bull Mountain?

Brian Panowich:  I was writing little short stories to keep myself entertained when I came off the road, because I needed to keep myself busy and keep my creative juices flowing. There was another writer named Ryan Sales who was doing the same thing as me. He called me one day from Missouri and said, “Hey man, I keep submitting my stories every day to small presses and I keep getting rejected and I’m sick of it, so I’m gonna start my own press and I was wondering if you wanted to get involved. ” And I said, “Sure, what kind of thing did you have in mind?” He said, “I don’t know, I’ll write one story and you write one story and we’ll put them out like punk rock bands used to do with .45s.” He suggested we start with zombie stories, because they were popular, so we started with those. Before too long, we asked two other guys to get involved. So we had this little cabal and we named it Zelmer Pulp after Ryan’s son’s first name. It was more of an exercise or workshop than anything else. One of the guys who got involved was Chuck Regan. He’s a former comic book guy and he suggested we do science fiction, which scared the shit out of me, because I didn’t know anything about science fiction. But it was just strictly for fun.

One of the other guys was a guy named Chris Leek. He’s a brilliant British writer. He had written a story called “Candy’s Room” and had it published on one of these small crime fiction websites. And the guy who ran the website said, “We should do a whole anthology of Springsteen songs. You know, like everybody pick a title of a song and write a story.” We had no publisher, no distributor, no nothing. Just like five guys and idea. But when we started putting some feelers out we got contacted by Springsteen’s people and they said, ‘We think it’s a great idea, do it.’ The Boss says it’s cool. We had a sign-off from the Man himself. A few weeks later, Dennis Lehane got in touch with us. He’s a huge Springsteen fan and he wanted to know if he could put a story in it.

And so we put out this anthology, Trouble in the Heartland: Crime Fiction Based on the Songs of Bruce Springsteen, and people loved it and it was nominated for an Edgar Award for Mysteries. It was almost like we brewed that stuff in the basement and now it’s on the same shelf as Jack Daniels.

JK:  What were your reading habits when you were growing up?

BP:  My father taught me how to read. He loved to read comic books to me. And I say this with pride that I’m a comic book geek. My Dad love Marvel, DC, crime stuff, all of it. And he had a massive collection. That’s how I learned to tell a story. Stan Lee taught me how to tell a story and Chris Clairmont’s X-Men taught me how to tell a story in sequential art. Eventually, I moved up the food chain a bit. My Dad had all these Tarzan novels and that old pulp Doc Savage. Mickey Spillane came up next and then I discovered Elmore Leonard, who’s probably the greatest writer I’ve ever read. My Dad dug it and he turned me onto it and that’s how I ended up here.

In the early ’90s, when I was massively into comics, I went to Georgia Southern to take Journalism was because it was the closest thing to a writing degree I could get.

I started getting away from my comic book obsession in high school because chicks weren’t into it. They just didn’t dig it. And I’ve always been skinny and I couldn’t throw a football. Sports never interested me, so I had to figure out something to attract women. My father was a musician, so I inherited some of that, too. My three chords and love of music was something that chicks were into.

A bunch of my buddies in college were in a band so we hit the road. It seemed like I was doing that forever—playing guitar. I loved it. I might still be on the road, but my daughter was born. And as soon as she was born, I was done. I wasn’t going to miss a second being on the road. I actually got back into reading a lot because I had her in my lap.

To be honest though, I started to get to where I was miserable all the time, and actually resentful of my wife and my daughter, because I missed being out there writing songs and being part of that “thing.” So that’s how I started writing again. Being able to write out little short stories and posting them and getting feedback made me feel like I was part of something bigger again. I was creating something again. And that’s all the aspiration I had, right there, was to do that. I wanted to say I was part of this community of writers who appreciated each other.

When I got the call from literary agent Nat Sobel in New York who said he read one of my stories and wanted to turn it into a novel, I was kinda shocked and surprised. I had no intention of ever being a novelist.

JK:  Seriously?

BP:  Yeah. (Laughs) It’s a tough story to tell especially in front of 15 to 20 aspiring writers who come out to hear you talk. To find out I’m a failed musician and I turned to this as a substitute and it’s paid off. But the way I see it, I was chasing success for so long that the minute I let it go and dedicated myself to my kid, it found me.

JK:  So your dad played mostly guitar?

BP:  Yeah, but he played anything. He was one of those guys who could pick up any instrument and fiddle with it for a few minutes and he could play it. I don’t have that gift. I inherited the ability to shoot the shit and spin a yarn. So for me, writing songs was lyrically where I got my strength from.

JK:  What were your lyrics like?

BP:  Most of them were like Springsteen songs. I liked story-songs. Songs with characters.

JK:  How did touring as a musician inform the kind of characters that fascinate you?

BP:  There’s a lot of my musical background in Bull Mountain that you don’t see, like Mobile was one of my favorite places to play, so I based one of my characters in Mobile. One of the most important bars in the book was a real bar I knew and the character Lewis was the culmination of several scumbags that I knew and combined into one construct.

JK:  My mother died a few weeks ago and it’s been a tough stretch. It’s been a lot harder than I ever expected. Are your parents alive?

BP:  My mom is alive thankfully, but I lost my father when I was 29. And it was the worst experience of my life. I stayed angry about the death of my father for a long time. It really defined how I looked at the world for a long time. My dad and I were solid. And he’s the reason I write. So I can relate. It doesn’t get any easier. You just learn to deal.

I just had this conversation with my buddy, because he just lost his dad and he’s going through a pretty rough time because he didn’t have a good relationship with his dad. All he could think about were all the times he let his father down and was a shithead. And as a child of a parent, that’s what you think about some times. You’re not thinking about all the good times you had, you think about all the things you did wrong. And as a parent of four children, I see now that all the angst and anger I had because of all the things I did wrong weren’t at all what my father was thinking about when he was sick. All he saw during the end were the times we hung out and went to the movies and all the times I was there for him. All the little things he saw about himself in me. That’s the big difference between being a parent and being a child. When we lose a parent, we dwell on those things. And we think about how we wish we could go back and fix things. The parent only sees the things the child does right.

But I was so angry with everybody – it was the doctor’s fault, it was my mom’s fault, it was my brother’s fault for not being around, it was God’s fault, it was everybody. Most of all it was my fault, I thought.

But no, man. It wasn’t. It was cancer’s fault. Cuz that’s some non-biased shit and it doesn’t care who it affects or hurts. So you can’t blame a disease. You just have to accept that it happened. It took me damn near six years to do that.

JK:  Some of the characters in Bull Mountain seem so completely despicable, even when they are not.

BP:  That was the point. That was exactly the point. If I could get you to understand why these guys are doing what they are doing, then they’re not evil. I explore a lot more of that in the book that I just finished writing, which is a sequel to Bull Mountain.

Everybody thinks that they are the hero of their own story. Gareth was doing what his father taught him to do. So for him to go off and do the heinous stuff that he did, I want you to ask yourself, “Was he a monster? Or was he simply a product of the way he was raised?’ He was abused and subjected to some pretty horrible shit from the time he was nine years old on. And that informed who he was.

JK:  Bull Mountain received phenomenal reviews from the start. What was your reaction to all the good reviews?

BP:  I had kind of a mixed reaction. The rave reviews are suspect and to make matters worse, they set you up for a fall. I’m a big fan of the three-star reviews. The five-star reviews, man, all they do is put pressure on me to make the next book even better and then I might have to start selling myself out. The one-star review doesn’t really do me any good either. But the person who says, “This book’s pretty good, but here are my problems with it…” That is what makes me a better writer.


John J. Kelly is a veteran of more than 30 years in journalism. Born and raised outside of Boston, MA. he graduated from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. While in Boston he worked as a journalist, writing for such publications as the Boston Herald, Boston Phoenix and Boston Magazine. Since relocating to Detroit in 2009, he has contributed book reviews and author interviews to the Detroit Free Press, Detroit Metro Times, and Cincinnati City Beat His book reviews and author interviews can be seen at BookLust.org.

Getting a Grip: a Conversation Between Kathy Flann and Julianna Baggott

Authors Kathy Flann (Get a Grip) and Julianna Baggott (Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders) recently got together to talk about writing, Bill Clinton, Baltimore, and ducks that sabotage your homework. Here's their conversation, starting with Julianna...

When super-agent Nat Sobel tracked me down as a newbie short-story writer and asked me if I was writing a novel, I lied and said yes. Then I wrote it and was pretty sure it wasn’t very good. So I called up my MFA alma mater, UNC-Greensboro, and asked them who, of the current crop of MFA students, was the best reader. The answer was Kathy Flann. I asked Kathy—a stranger to me at the time—if I could hire her to critique the manuscript. She said she would. It turns out—lucky for me—that Flann is brilliant. The novel, Girl Talk, went to auction, and sold to Simon and Schuster who would go on to publish my next two novels. Kathy and I have stayed in touch and I’ve watched as her career has taken off. Her new collection Get a Grip has just hit bookstores and it’s my great pleasure to interview her here.

What kind of child were you, and how did it shape you as a writer?

One day in first grade, the teacher said, “Okay, time to turn in your homework.” Homework? What homework? I watched the other kids open their folders and produce these worksheets that had a big cartoon duck. Inside the duck were math problems, and the kids had completed them, lots and lots of large child handwriting on them. My heart raced. I had never seen that duck in my life. Had I been absent the day before? I opened my folder. There was the damn duck. Blank. Looking at me with its big, googly eyes. I understood that, at some point the day before, a day I barely remembered, I had received the duck and held it in my hands. I had always daydreamed a lot and forgotten things, but that moment with the duck was the first time I remember engaging in self-reflection about it. Oh, so this is what kind of person I am. I think becoming a writer was a decision to lean into that instead of fighting it.

A collection of stories isn’t just an assortment of parts. It becomes a whole organism in and of itself. What are some of the elements that make Get a Grip a whole, not just a sum?

In the most basic sense, what connects the stories is location. They all take place in the Baltimore area, though I should say that it is a Baltimore of the mind. Parts of the location are real and other parts are made up. My previous collection had taken place in an imaginary town, and so it was new to me to use a place that actually exists. My subconscious interpreted the idea loosely. When I inhabited the mind of a particular character, I’d find that the map of my neighborhood would rearrange itself to suit (or confront) that person’s story, that person’s outlook and problems. Baltimore tailored itself to each character, and I grew to understand that I actually think that’s how place functions in our lives. My Baltimore is not the same as my neighbor’s Baltimore or my mechanic’s Baltimore. The characters long for connection, and they struggle to achieve it or they achieve it when they didn’t expect to.

Research. We all have to do it. Sometimes it’s delicious, sometimes brutal. Tell us a tale from the research trenches.

I actually love to do research. My previous collection had a story from the perspective of Bill Clinton, so I spent a ton of time researching his life. One of the things I learned was that his mom used to encourage him to stuff down his problems. “Lock up your troubles in an airtight box, Billy,” she’d say, which seemed important in thinking about his excesses and his thirst for connection and notoriety. It became the story’s title: “An Airtight Box.” As a result of that process, I always have these warm feelings when I see him on TV, almost like he’s a character I created. In a sense, I did. The Bill Clinton in my story is fictional, my own version of him, even though I tried so hard to use real information.

In the new book, “Heaven’s Door” was the one that required the most research. I learned a great deal about the world of meteorites. They’re more valuable if they’re witnessed falling or the fall is caught on camera. The value goes down the longer they sit on the ground. So a meteorite that lands in someone’s attic is worth more. The main character, known as The Meteorite Man, spends his life racing the clock, barely touching down on earth himself. But people don’t win races against clocks.

What’s your reading life like? Do you have any current favorites or sleepers that may have flown under our radar?

You know, this is going to sound like shameless plugging, but it’s the honest answer. I’m lucky to have talented friends who write, and I have many of their books in the queue (yours is one of them!). Some that I’ve read recently have included Let Me See It, a collection of linked stories by James Magruder about two gay cousins growing up in the seventies and discovering their sexuality as they get older; Highs in the Low Fifties by Marion Winik, a hilarious essay collection about dating after fifty; Could You Be With Her Now, award-winning novellas by Jen Michalski; My Life as a Mermaid by Jen Grow, also a collection of stories and a Dzanc Award winner; One Child for Another by Nancy Murray, a memoir about giving up a child for adoption; Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball, a wrenching novel in unsent letters. Reading stuff by people I know is something that I find inspiring and reassuring. We’re all in this together. And see? This is the end result of all of this work and uncertainty—these incredible stories that are out there now.

Have you learned to strike a balance between your writing life and the other aspects of your life?

Absolutely not. Who are these balanced people? I am going to refuse to like their cat pictures on Facebook.

Why do you do you teach—other than cash?

When I first started out, I had hourly-paid jobs in restaurants and hair salons. I was a clock-watcher. The hours felt like forever. I developed some understanding of caged birds that pluck out their own feathers. I went into teaching partly because it’s hard and keeps my mind busy, and because it’s different each semester because the people are different. I enjoy sharing my love of writing with people who love writing. For writers, people who spend time imagining what it’s like to be someone else, teaching can be a great fit. We have to figure out what makes students tick, how they’ll perceive our efforts, what will motivate them. As an added bonus, teaching others is a way to teach one’s self. Every time that I explain how to heighten tension or manage a certain point of view, I learn that thing more deeply. And that’s what’s really important in the classroom, as I like to tell the students: It’s all about me and whether I’m enjoying myself (which is more likely if the light is flattering).

What’s your advice to a writer who’s looking for a lifelong partner? Any particularly useful traits to suggest in said partner? (Do you want to tell us a brief love story here?)

I recently got married for the first time at forty-five, so I do have a thought or two on this subject!

Tip #1: Leave your house. As writers, we tend to be introverted and stay home writing or reading or simply recharging. Find a community you enjoy. For me, it was Atomic Books, a few blocks from my house. I loved to go there and spend time with the owners. I hosted events sometimes. People would hang out afterward and drink in the back room. And isn’t that what you want? To meet your husband-to-be while drinking in a back room?

Tip #2: Have a plan and don’t stick to it. When I was thinking about a lifelong partner, I pictured someone who loved fiction and was a vegetarian. Basically, I was looking for myself. Who did I actually end up with? A guy who likes books, but is not drawn to fiction. And not only is a he a meat-eater, but when we met he was in meat club, which involved getting together to eat muskrat or rattlesnake. But we shared a sense of humor, pop culture interests, and had similar priorities about our relationships with people. I love the fact that he’s less anxious than I am and ruminates less, a good fit for his career in medicine and a nice foil for a writer. I often think of that Seinfeld episode when Jerry dumps a girl who’s too much like him. “I can’t date me!” he says. “I hate me.”

Kathy Flann’s fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, The North American Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, New Stories from the South, and other publications. Her short-story collection Get a Grip won the George Garrett Award and was released by Texas Review Press in the fall of 2015. A previous collection, Smoky Ordinary, won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award and was published by Snake Nation Press. For five years, she taught creative writing at the University of Cumbria in England, where she created mini-courses for the BBC’s Get Writing website and served on the board of the National Association of Writers in Education. She has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, and Le Moulin à Nef in France. She is an associate professor at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.

Julianna Baggott is the author of more than twenty books published under her own name as well as two pen names. Her novel Pure was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her most recent release is All of Us and Everything, a comedic novel about an odd family, written under the pseudonym Bridget Asher. Baggott's essays have appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, Washington Post, Real Simple, Best American Poetry series, and on NPR. She teaches in the film school at Florida State University and holds the Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters at Holy Cross.

Death is a Cartoon: Dr. Seuss and War of the Encyclopaedists by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite

What if Dr. Seuss went to war in Iraq?*

Of all the things to love about War of the Encyclopaedists by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite (and there are many things to love about the novel), I was particularly struck by the colorful Seussian paintings one character, Mani, puts down on canvas as a way of dealing with her husband’s deployment to Iraq. Robinson and Kovite have said that Mani is swept up in an “emotional tornado” during this period of the book and the candy-colored cartoons which depict exploding Humvees and severed limbs are just one way the stateside spouse copes with the pain of separation.

I’ll have more on the paintings--and a conversation with Robinson and Kovite--in a minute, but first a bit about the novel in case you haven’t already read it (and if you haven’t, why not? This Veterans Day would be a good time to start reading one of the better works of fiction to come out of the Iraq War).

War of the Encyclopaedists tells the story of best friends Mickey Montauk and Halifax Corderoy who are living a comfortable life in Seattle as the novel opens. They throw elaborate monthly parties with themes arbitrarily lifted from encyclopedias; one bash centers around “conspiracy,” another is about “monocularity” (their apartment is decorated with cyclopean monsters, monocled British financiers and a chandelier made of periscopes while Mickey and Hal go around wearing eye patches). They’re dubbed “The Encyclopaedists of Capitol Hill” and are the hit of Seattle’s hipster crowd. When we first meet them, Hal and Mickey seem to have their futures sewn up neatly. As the jacket copy of the novel tells us, “At twenty-three, they had planned to move together to Boston for graduate school, but global events have intervened: Montauk has just learned that his National Guard unit will deploy to Baghdad at the end of the summer. In the confusion of this altered future, Corderoy is faced with a moral dilemma: his girlfriend Mani has just been evicted and he must decide whether or not to abandon her when she needs him most.”

In the short time he’s been dating her, Hal hasn’t quite progressed to the next level of commitment with Mani. As Robinson and Kovite write:

Corderoy loved Mani because he couldn’t figure her out, and he had a deep need to solve things. She was a Rubik’s cube with one too many sides. No matter how he manipulated her, twisting her colors this way and that, she would always present another face, not quite aligned.

During the night of the “conspiracy party,” other things happen which will shape the lives of these characters. After Mani falls asleep, Hal seeks Mickey’s advice on what to do about his girlfriend’s homeless situation; he’s not quite ready to ask her to move across the country to Boston with him--that’s just too fast too soon. “Look,” Mickey says, “you can love her and still leave.” And so that’s what Hal does: he slips away in the middle of the night, leaving Mani asleep at Mickey’s place. When she wakes up and learns she’s been abandoned, a distraught Mani runs out of the apartment into the street and is struck by a car. This, in a sense, is a major turning point in the novel, one which thrusts the characters into a strange love triangle which will eventually see Hal move to Boston alone and Mickey hook up with Mani (whom he has nursed during her recovery). Shortly before his deployment to Iraq, Mickey marries Mani even though they aren’t sure if they’re really in love with each other. It’s complicated and I’m not going to spell it all out for you here because you need to experience it through the book itself, but I wanted you to have the setup for this excerpt from War of the Encyclopaedists which shows how Mani, missing her husband and trying to deal with her complicated feelings about the invasion of Iraq, starts moving her paintbrush across a large canvas in bold and startling strokes.

The authors have generously allowed me to reprint these two excerpts from their novel. I hope you enjoy these paragraphs as much as I did (and then stick around for my interview with Robinson and Kovite to learn more about how they collaborated on this and their next novel).

*    *    *

Shortly thereafter, she moved into a studio in Allston.

It was fairly spacious and lit by large factory windows on the eastern wall. The floorboards had been coated and recoated with thick white paint over the years as they collected uncleanable grime. With all the new art supplies she bought, with the rolls of canvas, the frames in various states of construction, the stretched and half-painted canvases on easels, the tarps and sheets and oil paints, the stacks of sketchbooks and charcoals and brushes, there was not much room for actual living. She spent most of her days painting, smoking joints, and flipping through art books for inspiration. She trashed most things she began until mid-October, when, after writing a letter to Mickey, she began a painting that felt real, that felt important.

When the subject came to her, it was not at all surprising, and she knew exactly why she had chosen it: her nominal husband was an American soldier in a war zone, and the number one cause of death for American soldiers was the Improvised Explosive Device. After looking at images on the Internet and reading some firsthand accounts, she began painting a Humvee tilted onto its right wheels, the explosion from an IED lifting it off the ground, the terrified face of the driver who knew they would flip and burn and die.

What she couldn’t explain, what she began doing without realizing it, was painting this scene of extreme and sober violence in the cartoonish style of Dr. Seuss, a surreal and childish distortion of bright primary colors and silly elongated shapes: striped and bendy palm trees, fantastic dunes in the background, the Humvee disproportionate and bright green, sporting oddly placed knobs and gears, the explosion bulging like an image under a magnifying lens propelling the truck right out of the canvas and toward the viewer, the driver’s face squashed and birdlike, six eyelashes on his wide right eye, a small pimple on his nose, the mouth a black hole with the barest hint of a tongue, a dark red mass being sucked back into the throat, a few wisps of candy-blue hair curling out whimsically from his helmet. She was drawing from a sense of loss; it was not an overwhelming condition but a subtle one that resided in the nethermost regions of her consciousness.

.  .  .  .

The next day she began work on a second painting in the same Seussian style, this time of a few bodies on the street, soldiers, clods of dirt scattered like popcorn from the small crater left by a homemade bomb. Small Iraqi children with gigantic eyes looking on from the periphery, peering out the curved windows of wobbly buildings, smiling. One of the soldiers was clearly dead, his eyes squinched into outsized X’s; the other with his legs blown off, was still alive, pleading with an outstretched hand toward the foreground, the plump four-fingered hand of a cartoon, the pool of blood and oil and dirt behind him swirling like a rainbow of melted Starburst.

It took her a week to finish, and when it was done, she felt an after-shock of what she’d felt for the first painting, but it came with a greater sense of fulfillment, that she’d brought forth value out of nothing, created something alive; she realized that she was not finished, that these were the first two paintings in a series. Over the next month, she confined herself to her studio and worked simultaneously on three new paintings. These proved more difficult, and she progressed slowly, limning the outlines of a dreamlike Bradley flipped on its back, a twisting convoy of supply trucks and Humvees, a rusty late-eighties BMW bounding through the chain-link at a checkpoint. In a month’s time, though these three were still unfinished, her confidence, her feeling of impending accomplishment, had grown significantly, enough that she took high-resolution photos of her first two and submitted them to the curators of a few Boston galleries. From then on, she worked methodically, the precision of her surreal lines and colors increasing while the rate of her progress diminished. On December 31st, she got a phone call from Mickey, on leave from his tour of duty. The last time they’d spoken, he’d flipped out and she’d hung up. She was a little wary of seeing him, but how could she not? That night, just after ten p.m., she buzzed him in and began rolling a joint while he trudged up the three flights to her studio loft. When she heard his footsteps on the landing, she panicked and quickly threw a few sheets over her new paintings, uncertain what he would think of them.

*    *    *

Gavin Kovite (left) & Christopher Robin (right) share a laugh. (Photo by Erin Pollock)

I recently spoke to Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite via email between my home in Butte, Montana and their studio at Yaddo the artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York. To some degree, their own friendship mirrors that of their characters: Gavin was an infantry platoon leader in Baghdad from 2004-2005 and later attended NYU Law and served as an Army prosecutor; Chris is a Boston University and Hunter College MFA graduate, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and a Yale Younger Poets Prize finalist. Here’s part of our conversation:

I’m curious about the collaboration process on this book. The narrative seems divided between two ids: one of Hal and one of Mickey. I assume (perhaps wrongly) that Gavin handled the Mickey sections and Chris wrote the Hal portions...but were there overlaps? At the heart of it, I’m wondering how it was that two authors came to write a single novel and how that nuts-and-bolts process worked?

We talked over the plotlines, scenes, and characters extensively both before and during the drafting process, so each of us was on board for everything that happened in the book before it was actually drafted. We did split the labor roughly along the lines of character and setting—Gavin writing Mickey and Tricia in Baghdad, Chris writing Corderoy and Mani in Boston. There were some exceptions to this, though—where Chris would write a Baghdad scene and Gavin a Boston scene. The first section of the book, set in Seattle, and the final chapters back in Boston were joint efforts. For the most critical passages, we would actually sit down at a single computer swapping in and out at the keyboard. That said, even with the scenes that we drafted individually, we co-edited each other’s work so extensively that it’s not really correct to say that either one or the other of us wrote any particular scene—it was all a joint project.

We met in 2005 during a study abroad program in Rome through the University of Washington, and became good friends almost immediately. We started idly cooking up silly characters and mystery plots to entertain ourselves while we wandered the streets. Back in Seattle, we decided to write a novel based on those characters. Actually, it was Chris who really decided to write that book; Gavin mostly went along because it was a fun thing to do together; in this sense, we’re kind of like friends who both happened to play music and decided to form a band.

We never sold that first book, but it was a fun project and taught us a lot about writing novels. Chris had the idea for War of the Encyclopaedists in 2009 when we were roommates in NYC. Gavin was hesitant to commit to another large project, as he was in the midst of law school at NYU, but he gave in. Over the next four years, we worked on War of the Encyclopaedists mostly long-distance and in intermittent bursts; Gavin had joined the JAG Corps and was stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington, and Chris was traveling around the country, living at artist colonies like MacDowell and writing nihilistic poems.

While I loved many things about War of the Encyclopaedists, some of the most indelible images I carried away from the novel were Mani’s Dr. Seuss-inspired paintings. Could you talk a little bit about where the inspiration for these paintings came from?

Many of our best ideas come from inhabiting character as deeply as possible. The more time we spent with Mani as the novel developed, the more we tried to refine her mode of thinking, to make her interiority distinct from that of the other characters. The most obvious distinction is that Mani processes her world in a much more visual way than someone like Hal, who attempts to fit things into boxes, creating truth tables for example.

Knowing that this mode of thinking was a deep part of Mani’s character also led to new developments in the plot that we had not originally anticipated. We knew she would be working on some paintings in Boston, but what those would be was a mystery to us at first. While Hal is mediating his experience through literature, though words, consuming rather than making, Mani deals with the emotional tornado in her head quite differently: she puts it into her art, she paints her way into understanding her lingering feelings of love for Hal, her guilt surrounding her fraudulent marriage to Mickey, and her fear for his life in occupied Baghdad. So the idea that she would make paintings of horrific violence (IEDs killing soldiers) and the terrifying threat of violence (the child with a hand grenade held behind his back), that seemed obvious. Painting them in the style of Dr. Seuss was less so. That insight (for us, and for her), came from turning back to one of the central themes in the book: the disjunct between the civilian understanding of war and its reality. Like Hal, Mani feels very divorced from the war, unsure of what is happening, if we are winning, or what it would even mean to win (which, notably, Mickey is unsure of as well!). And the two main narratives offered to Mani, the collegiate Bush-is-a-criminal narrative and the stop-Saddam-get-bin-Laden narrative, they were simplistic, absurd, explanations meant for a child. On top of that, all these characters are struggling to grow up, Mani included, and part of that struggle is a yearning for the safety and simplicity of childhood. Hence her choice to represent the horrific violence of the Iraq War in a cartoonish, absurd, and nostalgic style. She uses the tools of irony in her struggle to be sincere, to admit that she fears something that she is incredibly ignorant of, that most of us are ignorant of.

I know the two of you are collaborating on another novel. Can you tell us a little bit about it and if this current co-authoring process is any different from how you came together on Encyclopaedists?

The next book will be set in Detroit in the near future. The basic premise is that Amazon.com strikes a deal with the FAA to beta-test its drone delivery program in the city of Detroit. Problems and hilarity ensue. Drones get shot down, captured even. There are four main characters and dozens of secondary characters, but the plot centers on a battle of wills between two women, one an Amazon marketing exec responsible for selling the city and people of Detroit on the idea of Amazon and drone delivery, the other a local anti-drone activist who launches a guerrilla social media campaign against Amazon, drawing together a disparate group made up of graffiti artists, rappers, fashion designers, filmmakers and tech nerds. It’s a character-driven novel that explores this new technology, the rise of automation, along with race, class, and the character of our society in the post-industrial age. Tone-wise, it’s a bit farcical and comic, but with plenty of heavy and moving (we hope) material as well.

Like a lot of our ideas, we came up with this one in the kitchen during a house party (actually, it was the launch party for War of the Encyclopaedists). We pitched ten ideas to our agent, and this was the one that came out on top.

We’re attacking this book differently than the others in a few ways. First, we’re lucky enough to be full-time novelists now, which is pretty new and different, and should really shorten the timeline for this one. We’re currently working on it at the Yaddo artists colony.

Second, we did three drafts of an outline on this book, figuring out all the scenes and how it would end before setting down a single word. We’re not adhering slavishly to the outline, but so far we haven’t needed to stray too far. In six weeks at Yaddo, we’re about 200 pages in, which is hopefully about half-way to a complete first draft.

Click here to buy a copy of
War of the Encyclopaedists

*Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) did, in fact, “go to war” with some of his early illustrative work. Some of his political cartoons, geared for adults, urged Americans to buy war bonds during World War Two. They have been collected in Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel.