Love, Graffiti, & Audacious Sentences: An Interview with Jackson Bliss, Author of AMNESIA OF JUNE BUGS

Bonnie Nadzam, author of Lamb, interviews Jackson Bliss, whose debut novel, Amnesia of June Bugs, was released recently.

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There are so many things I love about Jackson Bliss’ debut novel, Amnesia of June Bugs. In the first place, there is no voice like his voice, which is totally outrageous and utterly unapologetic in its audacity. In the second place, the content is as unexpected as the form: a Chinese American NYC graffiti revolutionary and his mixed-race partner (a tender elementary school teacher), painstaking level of description in every punk rock gastronomic feast, and the ruthlessness of Jackson’s embedded love stories, which always slay me. Finally, and maybe best of all, there is a tremendous, fundamental act of rebellion in this story’s formal experiment.

One of the curses of modern technology is that every single experience of beauty must be offered up to the great digital ledger—fixed in time and space, gathering data—as if the stutter of experiencing that moment a second (and third, fourth, fifth) time, wherever it lands online or in our devices, becomes the only thing that matters and makes us human. Jackson Bliss takes one such instance—one snapshot in time, as it were—and explodes the frame slowly, one page at a time. This novel is really an endlessly arising and endlessly unfolding human story that, for all the suffering at its core, remains one of community and empowerment. These are individuals who are as present in their joy as they are in their suffering, which made me curious about their author, whom I’ve still not met in person. Someday. And we’ll post no pictures of the event. In the meantime, here are my questions for, and responses from, an artist I respect and am grateful for.

Why graffiti? Why is this the necessary and only artform for our protagonist? 

I've always been fascinated with graffiti since b-boying (i.e., breakdancing) was hot. From my first trip to Chicago as a boy to my first trip to New York City as a teenager, I've been mesmerized by the way that graffiti tells stories about its people, its cultures, and its communities in a common visual field, not to mention the unique ways that BIPOC communities are represented but also reimagined in colorful caricatures. After I'd moved from California to Chicago when I was seventeen, I began studying graffiti in my neighborhood (Little Vietnam): they were full of these secret codes (numerical codes, visual codes, esoteric tags) I was dying to understand. During my MFA, I studied culture jamming and became obsessed. The basic idea of culture jamming is graffiti added to a billboard or advertisement that critiques market capitalism, that makes the advertisement self-destruct by using the ad against itself. Culture jamming is a cultural x-ray to viewers, showing them the truth behind the ad. Whether it's the squalid working conditions of factory workers making textiles in sweatshops in a FEZ (free economic zone) in South Asia for a Gap t-shirt, the starvation, anemia, and dangerous weight expectations of the modeling industry in a high-fashion billboard, or the inhumane living  conditions, abuse and destructions of animals, the deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, the environmental degradation, and the toxic runoff of animal waste, all of which are part and parcel of factory farming, in each instance culture jamming attempts to sabotage advertisements, hijack their message, and expose the hidden moral, economic, and cultural costs of those products and industries to the public. In that way, I guess you could say that culture jamming is sort of a declaration of war against advertising but also a wake-up call for consumers, many of whom would rather look away. Ever since I started studying it—thanks Naomi Klein—I’ve always appreciated how political, ideologically informed, and culturally incisive culture jamming is. In Amnesia of June Bugs, I wanted culture jamming to be much more normative than it is. Unfortunately, it has mostly died out. Maybe this novel will start a culture jamming renaissance!

Do you have any personal connection to or experience with the art form?

Not personally, but I have been faithfully taking pictures of graffiti in Chicago from 2004-2008, in New York from 2005-2006 when I lived in Bed-Stuy, in Buenos Aires from 2008-2009, and in LA from 2009-2019 because that's one of my things. I've also taken pictures of international graffiti in Hong Kong, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Bratislava, Vienna, London, Madrid, among other cities. If you scan my IG feed, you'll see a good amount of graffiti. I like to capture street art before it disappears because lots of graffiti is intentionally ephemeral. One minute it's there and the next something else has taken its place. Our collective memory fades so quickly, but pictures tend to linger in the cultural imagination. Graffiti, like many murals, is street art with an expiration date and in this novel, you can see my fascination for the way that artists see themselves and their own cities, the way they create their own cultural spaces using their own distinct visual vocabularies of reality and their own unique perspectives of graphic narratives. I guess this is why I think of graffiti as a unique narrative modality that locals can use to tell their own stories about themselves to their own people in their own way. That’s powerful shit! And maybe that's one important reason why Winnie, the culture jammer in Amnesia of June Bugs, feels so important to this novel, why his Buddha Maos show up all the time in this book. Even though Winnie is deeply in love with Ginger and would do anything to be with her, that tenderness and devotion he has for her is matched by the intensity and the righteous fury he has for his art (and his frustration with the incessant economic exploitation of capitalism that exploits AAPI workers). Dude is not playing around with love or politics! Interesting aside: when I lived in Chicago, quite a lot of teenagers I met thought I was a graphie (i.e., graffiti artist) because I was a mix of preppy and hip-hop and I went everywhere with my backpack. The backpack, as it turns out, was one of the most important accessories for graphies because they used them to store their spray-paint. So, every time someone asked me if I did graffiti, I became more and more fascinated with it. Truth was, I was just another nerd with a sensitivity to language, music, and love who read novels and wrote bad prose and did my homework at cafés and started smoking.

The story of the novel unfolds during 2012, but it is so much a novel of the current moment. It's a world that seems both on the point of collapse and on the verge of transformation. Which does the author think it is? 

I hate the answer I’m going to give you, but I actually think it's both. I think both regionally, nationally, and globally we are are at an inflection point as a species where we are either going to cross the Rubicon and sadly say goodbye to this beautiful planet that we failed to be good stewards of, or we will be forced to make a series of radical decisions over the next decade that will fundamentally change our relationship to this planet and to each other and to the economic systems that we work in. As awful as the pandemic has been (and it's been atrocious for so many people), it's also been a unique opportunity to reimagine and question reality too, which crises give us permission to do uniquely. Questions Americans normally don't ask themselves like, do I actually like my job? Is this how I want to make money? Am I willing to work in these conditions? Am I being paid my worth? Was I ever? Is anyone? Is this horrendous world all that there is? Is there even a point of starting a family when earth is a giant fireball? What's the point of human existence? Why are Americans so goddamn selfish? Is this really the life I want to live? All of these questions have sprung up everywhere and I think that's a good thing. And I feel like in its own way, Amnesia of June Bugs wants readers to know that love, rage, hope, and hopelessness don't cancel each other out. They're part of the emotional counterpoint of being alive in 2022. This world damages us so much of the time, but it doesn't have to be that way. We live in a dysfunctional, violent, greedy, and myopic reality, but we could code reality differently if we really wanted to. In fact, we'll have to if we want to survive and not lose hope. So, Amnesia is both a scathing critique of the damage we cause each other (e.g., racism, sexism, violence, historical amnesia, classism, xenophobia, numbness, dehumanization) but also a love song for the endless beauty of this world and the importance that love can play in protecting, nourishing, and saving ourselves from ourselves. At least, that’s how the story goes.

Why are your characters vegan? Did they emerge that way or was it a point the vegan author wanted to integrate? How do you manage this formally, giving the characters space to develop and surprise you while discovering or even insisting that they share some of your values? 

Not all of them are vegan! I’m not even vegan, lol. Ginger and Winnie’s younger sister, Tian-Tian are, but Winnie is a pescatarian, Suzanne is a vegetarian (paneer and daal give her life), and Aziz is an ecotarian, so he'll fucking eat anything that’s locally available, the little food slut. But this is such an interesting question. I definitely have omnivorous characters in other books of mine, but the more I construct characters, the more I need some of them to understand the value in living and eating consciously. That doesn't mean they have to be like me because that shit would get boring fast, but I do want some of my fave characters to have considered the impact that meat eating in the form of factory farming has on the environment because it's environmentally unsustainable and bioethically harder to justify in 2022 unless you raise your own livestock. The reality is, not only are we cutting down hectares of forests to create farmland for livestock (that purify the air and give us a tiny security blanket against global warming) but then there's all the pollution of groundwater, the recombinant bovine growth hormone, the use of grains (which could be used to feed humans directly), the methane emissions, the inhumane living conditions for the animals, the dehumanizing working conditions for workers, and the medical and financial consequences of red meat consumption. It's literally a predictable but avoidable catastrophe. But I don't need—or even want—my characters to be morally perfect in any way because flawed characters are real characters as far as I'm concerned. I do want some of them to embody a spiritual, moral, and bioethical value system in some way that aligns to my own as a (admittedly terrible) Buddhist. I don't care if the shitty characters in my work eat hamburgers because that's what I expect asshole characters to do, to not give a fuck about anyone or anything, but I want some of the main characters to have considered these issues much more deeply, whether or not they eat meat, because those are the type of people I want to center in my fiction. At the same time, I intentionally don't make all of my characters straight-up vegan because vegans can be hella obnoxious and also, veganism can be incredibly ethnocentric, a surefire way of erasing your or another person's cultural, racial, and culinary histories, which are so often embodied in the food they eat. My wife and I are both mixed-race and both 90% vegan and 10% pescatarian, so the instant we got fish back, we felt like we got our families’ cultures back. I'd like to believe that's one reason why Suzanne (the Indian American character in this novel) eats dairy and why Winnie (the Chinese American character) eats fish, and Aziz (the Moroccan French character) eats lit everything is because these flexible eating strategies allow them to eat so much of the food connected to their own histories, identities, and cultures. Last thing, most of my characters do end up making some big choices for themselves that I didn't predict, want, or intend, and I'm cool with that. Once I have a strong idea of who they are, I usually let them decide for themselves what they end up doing. Not every decision, mind you, but some of their biggest decisions were their decisions and I felt like they just made more sense than what I'd planned for them.

This book includes a few of the most unbearably beautiful, heart-breaking love stories I have ever read. And that's saying something. How do you tell a love story? If you had a 10-step process—like a recipe—what are the necessary ingredients? 

That’s such a huge compliment! I'm trying not to cry right now, but it's kinda hard not to! Thank you so much for saying that. That really means the world to me. Tragically, I have no idea. I really don't. Mostly, I just focus on the humanity of my characters first and foremost and then let them kinda take it from there. Because I do give them leeway with their own decisions and because I value and fight for their humanity, above all else, I feel like the love that's sparked between them mostly happens organically. What’s interesting is that in Amnesia of June Bugs, half of the love is counterfactual (i.e., it doesn’t actually happen, but it could have happened under different circumstances) and the other half is real, but comes with tragedy, heartbreak, and disappointment.

The only rules I have for my characters with love stories is that at least one character must be capable and/or willing of falling in love. They might not make great life choices, they might have shitty taste in partners, they might make the same damn mistakes over and over again because human beings, but at least one person must be in a space where they're willing or capable of being vulnerable in some way. Otherwise, love can't happen. It'll just bounce off the characters if they're not in the right place. I think love becomes self-destructive if it’s offered to someone who is not self-aware, courageous, empathetic, and vulnerable enough to value and reciprocate that vulnerability. Interestingly enough, this is also why I don’t believe in falling in love with someone who isn’t ready to fall in love. You can't make someone love you and they won't value your vulnerability either if they're in a bad place. Other than that, I don't have rules for love. I think love defies, contradicts, and resists most rules, whether inside our heads or inside books, so I try not to use them in my life or in my writing.

Your sentences are outrageous. Over and over I'd read one and think/feel: How dare he? How does he get away with this? Tell me about your influences at a sentence level?  

Lol, this is like, one of the kindest things anyone has ever told me before. Considering how much I loved and admired Lamb, this is an even bigger compliment than you can imagine. My influences on the sentence level are Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, Karen Tei Yamashita, Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, John D'Agata, Leslie Jamison, Jamaica Kincaid, Kendrick Lamar, Noname, Jay-Z, and Rick Moody. My influences on the conceptual, cinematic, and macrolevel are Wong Kar Wai, early Sofia Coppola, Haruki and Ryu Murakami, Life is Strange, Fallout, Mass Effect (all video games), and movies like Run, Lola Run, City of God, Amélie, Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, Coffee & Cigarettes, Les Trois Couleurs trilogy, and Pulp Fiction.

What are you working on now? And why? 

Ugh, so many things! In addition to doing PR for Counterfactual Love Stories and Amnesia of June Bugs, which takes up so much time, most of it leading to absolutely nothing because I'm not famous and I don’t have a publicist, I have a choose-your-own-adventure memoir coming out in late July called Dream Pop Origami about mixed-race/hapa identity, AAPI masculinities, love, travel, and metamorphosis, which I'm kinda proud of. Mostly because it took me over ten years to write and rewrite. I'm also working on a couple screenplays. The one I'm most excited about right now is called Mixtape. It's about two mixed-race/AAPI/BIPOC almost-forty-something friends and fiction writers who meet up after ten years in Silverlake. They've had divergent literary careers after graduating from USC where they’d worked with all the writers you and I know from our time there. There’s always been a spark between Misha and Taka that was never explored. Mostly, they just talk and reminisce for ninety minutes, slowly making their way to Venice where they eventually say goodbye.

Beyond that, I'm working on a novel about a family of mixed-race/hapa/AAPI prodigies and a literary fiction trilogy about Addison (formerly, Hidashi) who makes three major life decisions, each decision becoming the premise of one novel. So, in the novel you read, Ninjas of My Greater Self, which is a postmodern novel about racial self-discovery, Addy breaks up with his girlfriend, moves to Japan, and discovers that he's part of an ancient ninja clan. In We Ate Stars for Lunch, Addy stays with his girlfriend and moves with her to Argentina where he realizes that she used him to start her new life without him. He moves back to Chicago where he meets a mixed-race/hapa daughter he didn't know he had from his ex in Argentina. They move to LA to help her acting career where Addy eventually publishes his first novel. And in the third novel, The Light Which Slices Through Me is a Lost Dream, Addy breaks up with his college girlfriend, gets his PhD, abandons his literary career to adjunct, and eventually searches for clues of his best friend who was killed by her partner. This novel will be in epistolary form. Don't hold me to the plot structure in the last two books because I might change them both in a heartbeat, those are just the plot lines I've been considering. So, yeah, I guess I have a lot of shit going on.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you're not part of the creative writing teaching circuit anymore. What's it like out there in the wild as a poet and fiction writer in an expensive and sometimes unforgiving city? How do you make it work? 

Word. After the pandemic hit, LB (my wife) and I kinda re-evaluated all our major life decisions and decided that we were much happier in LA and that living in California for over a decade had irrevocably Californicated us. We didn't fit in the Midwest the way we used to. And we missed our Asian, Black, Latine, queer, and indigenous friends so much. We missed the food! We missed the cafés and restaurants. We missed the style. We missed the beach. We missed the endless flow of creative energy here. I told LB to follow her heart and center her needs. I said I'd figure my shit out eventually. This is me still figuring my shit out, by the way. She wanted to return to LA, so we made that decision together and I decided to leave my tenure track job, so now I'm trying to break into TV writing, trying to get my books optioned by a production studio (I just had lunch with Aimee Bender today where we talked about this very thing!). I'm considering doing some extra work because LA, applying to a bunch of writing jobs that actually pay real money, and oh, also investing in cryptocurrency and the stock market too. I've become such a stock market/crypto geek and I kinda love it. So, I'm considering all of my options right now because money gives you freedom and in my case, money helps me help those I love, which is probably my biggest motivation right now. I'm not sure what my next job will be yet, but I have faith something is gonna work out. I always do. Maybe that's one of my problems.

That said, I've always felt like LA is the best place to live in when you're rich AND poor. When you've got money, it's so easy to drop it like it's hot and there's so many places to drop it, but when you're poor (as all of us were in grad school), many of the best parts of LA were and will always be free: the beach, the blue sky, those 70º days in the spring, those indescribably beautiful drives through picture-perfect weather, the sun pouring into your office window, the bleeding sky after sunset. And for seven bucks, you can get a vanilla oat latte and it will be so damn good. I might be fashion conscious, but so many of my fave things here are free. It is true that LA can be such a tough city to live in because it's fast, rich, dirty, and it seems like everyone is doing it better than you are. At the same time, this might be the only city left in the whole country where it's possible to live off of your art if you make the right connections. You can’t do that shit in New York or Chicago for different reasons. You def can't do it in SF. But LA has a range that I appreciate. There's literally something for everyone here. You just have to find your muse, your mundito, and your medium.

Fields of (Missed) Opportunities: A Review of Shawn Rubenfeld’s The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone

In many ways, it’s easy to think of the 1995 film Mr. Holland’s Opus as a feel-good movie. When Glen Holland (played by Richard Dreyfuss) retires as a musician and composer to become a high school music teacher, he’s hopeful that he will spend more quality time with his wife and compose his own symphony. Although over the next 30 years Mr. Holland inspires students to become passionate about music, even when budget cuts threaten the arts program, he never spends the time he thought he’d have on his own work, and after being let go, he’s merely left to conduct his final performance with the help of an auditorium full of ex-pupils. While the ending may appear to put a neat bow on Mr. Holland’s career, what is apparent to the close observer is that he settled for a job that although he was suited for, didn’t measure up to his dreams. In Shawn Rubenfeld’s debut novel The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone, Joshua Schulman’s life in many ways follows a similar trajectory to Mr. Holland’s, and when he convinces himself that the sudden opportunity to teach at a prep school a few thousand miles away from New York is the right choice, his goal of collecting the most prestigious retro video games begins to slowly dissolve, and the feelings he develops for a fellow teacher become much more complicated that he expected.

A debate that has arisen within academia lately is the extent to which attaining a PhD is worth pursuing. The job market, especially given the past year and the pandemic, is not necessarily the best for recent graduates, and academia can be a cutthroat world when job candidates are attempting to move into more secure positions. While Joshua recognizes the reality that awaits him, his life during the course of his studies is falling apart: divorce, mother with cancer, father turning exclusively to religion. Inevitably, Joshua loses interest in his own work, which he comes to believe might not have any real-world application and point (his research centers on Yiddish dialectology). When life doesn’t go our way, we all turn to something that helps us cope, and for Joshua it is collecting retro video games, a casual hobby that turns into a passion that turns into an obsession he becomes increasingly good at. Joshua’s pursuit comes with online bidding wars, constant monetary transactions, and gaming conventions, and it is at one of these conventions where he makes the mistake of tripping The Eggplant Wizard, a character from the Kid Icarus series (imagine an anthropomorphized eggplant with one giant eye and a staff). Conventional gaming wisdom says that doing such a thing will lead to a dreaded “curse,” but Joshua’s luck doesn’t seem to change for the worse, at least not initially. In fact, he receives an email shortly after with a job offer to the Fairbury Academy of Roll, in Roll, Iowa, population 1,412. Seeing that there is little left from him in New York, Iowa seems like the best idea, but Joshua quickly discovers that when that landscape becomes barren, and there is not much else to do than refine his online buying skills, the need to connect with something more becomes overwhelming. Enter his coworker Natalie Grey, a married woman with her own interests in higher education.  

This is the classic “boy falls for girl” narrative, but what Rubenfeld does so masterfully is show how sometimes simplicity has the power to sway even the most skeptical of people. Natalie is not remarkable in the traditional sense of the word, but she is honest, witty, and true to herself, and her stability (marriage, job, the desire to learn) represent for Joshua everything his winding days in New York didn’t. She makes Joshua laugh. She pushes him beyond his comfort zone (convincing him to go on a hike), and most importantly, she takes an interest in his video game collection. The irony in all of this, however, is that Natalie is by no means the model of stability, at least not on the surface. While divorce has become quite common in many societies, there are a number of reasons why people still remain in a marriage they deeply want out of, and though there are hints here and there with her conversations with Joshua about wanting to break free from her stasis, it’s evident that Natalie believes that her marriage and her future are set in stone. She recognizes that despite her attention to Joshua—holding hands with him on their hike, rubbing the tension out of his neck, going over to his place to enjoy a few hours of gaming—she can never be with him, and—call it fate, responsibility, obligation—she knows she has to distance herself from whatever it is they can claim they had, which becomes a much clearer task to do when she learns Joshua’s been lying repeatedly.

Part of the stipulation for Joshua’s employment in Iowa was that he continue and complete his PhD. Even though he acknowledged to himself that he was not returning to that path, he indicates, in a state of panic, to Dr. Kirkland (the Head of the School) that he was well on his way to attaining his degree. We all know how one small lie can lead to another, and another, and another, and Joshua’s own experience was no exception. While he knows his lies will eventually catch up with him, he continues lying, even saying to Natalie that his wife (who in the spur of the moment he calls Natalie too) has recently died. Joshua suffers what we all suffer in our lives: he yearns for affection and attention, and because he fears that the real him will not live up to how he thinks others view who he is, he digs his hole even deeper.

The guilt that he begins growing inside him, however, starts to manifest as an old foe, The Eggplant Wizard. He sees the character, in the same custom as at the convention, randomly throughout campus, and these sightings intensify when he fails to receive the coveted game BattleSport from an online buyer. The buyer avoids Joshua’s follow up messages and begins taunting him in online posts. Subsequently, Joshua loses all concentration and even becomes physically unwell. He eventually loses in the game Splat (a game the students and staff at Fairbury Academy participate in and whose objective is to smack your target with a stick when they don’t have their own stick in their hands). In the end, Joshua succumbs fully to his guilt, since he knows that he can no longer pretend to incorporate huge details of his life that are untrue. In confessing everything to Natalie, he understands that he has closed the door to their relationship, and even though he suspects he will continue with his job, he won’t be able to share the joy he finds in it with anyone else.

It’s never revealed who exactly is The Eggplant Wizard was (best bets, however, would lie with Dr. Kirkland), and there might be parts in Rubenfeld’s novel that feel slightly underdeveloped—the teachers-student relationship he has with Tyler, the banter with the other staff members. But even if readers don’t find the answers that we were hoping to find, there is no doubt they will see part of themselves in Joshua Schulman, and just as with Mr. Holland, or any character of that matter who has had their dreams interrupted, you will find yourself rooting for him every step of the way.

Camels in Kansas: The Alternative History of Farooq Ahmed's Kansastan

Farooq Ahmed’s Kansastan is a lush and poignant portrayal of familial rivalry set against the backdrop of a Civil War-era dystopian Kansas. The story of our anonymous narrator begins when he is a young stowaway in leg braces on a cart piled high with corpses. After his delivery to the mosque where he would spend his formative years, a woman named Maryam (apparently his aunt) arrives with Faisal, the narrator’s cousin, in tow. Faisal is believed to be a prophet, and from the beginning of his arrival at the mosque, the local community is in awe of his feats. (Faisal, at one point, creates a small geyser that people from miles around come to witness.) The narrator, however, finds himself feeling like the village idiot. He’s pushed aside and ridiculed, while Faisal’s “magic” affords him not only preferential treatment but also intense — and dangerous — reverence. From that point the story shifts to what is, in my mind, the overarching theme of the novel: competition. When Faisal and the narrator fall in love with the same woman, the mysteriously named Ms. A_____, their competition only heightens.

The unreliable narrator often dispenses sour thoughts about his cousin, but even before Faisal and Maryam’s arrival, he is plagued with adolescent bitterness that can only come from being continually referred to as variations on a theme of “the ‘malformed urchin.’” As such, he reads like a Civil War-era Muslim Holden Caulfield. Sarcasm and an overinflated sense of injustice constitute the brunt of the narrator’s personality, which makes an even more interesting character juxtaposition with Faisal, whom we recognize as insufferable in a pious sort of way based on the narrator’s point of view. Anyone who has ever been an angst-filled teen can relate to the narrator, and I often found myself chuckling at his internal monologue. At one point, following a festivity at the mosque, the narrator remarks, “And like that, my cousin and I passed into official man-hood. We shook hands and then hugged, though I had to fight the urge to smother him in my embrace. As I have said, I was merciful.”

It’s important to note that Ahmed has chosen to write from an often under-represented perspective in a completely novel way. In regard to a wider conversation about religious fanaticism (present both in this novel and in our society), the narrator’s home is Kansas, which is embroiled in a bitter battle with Missouri (“spit after saying it.”) Early in the novel, during a moment of anger and inspiration, the narrator decides he will be the one to take charge of the crusade against Missouri. He says, “I resolved that I would undertake this labor in a manner befitting a stalwart Fanatic — a hard veteran of Kansas! I was all on fire for it.” Throughout the novel Ahmed expertly provides poignant examples of zealotry from both Kansans and Missourians, reinforcing the idea that fanaticism in any form is, of course, a scourge.

While Muslims, of course, existed in America during the time of the Civil War, we very infrequently hear about their contributions to society in any way. Here, Ahmed has rearranged history so that Muslims are at the forefront. This provides readers with much-needed perspective on the effects of historical alienation. Kansastan is full of references to Islam and the Quran, which was exciting to discover for a person unfamiliar with the religion. The novel itself reads as a sort of mythology, with a deep sense of humanity and humor.

With this novel, Farooq Ahmed has created a vivid world in which the history very nearly mirrors our own — with several unexpected, devastating, and delightful amendments.

The Light Source: An Interview with Kim Magowan

I met Kim Magowan in late 2014. We both entered a Sixfold fiction contest. If you don’t know it, it’s a contest in which the winners are selected by the various writers who enter work into the contest. Stories are submitted anonymously, and voting takes place over three rounds, each writer randomly assigned six stories per round. Kim was assigned my story during one of those rounds. Kim was one of the few readers who left me detailed feedback, and her comments were insightful and generous. If you’ve never submitted to Sixfold, let me tell you, this is a rarity. Somehow, despite all the voters who said things like, I kid you not, that they wished the protagonist of my story would drive off a cliff and die, I ended up winning that contest, and I emailed Kim after to take her up on reading an edited version of the story. We hit it off, and we’ve been sending each other our drafts ever since. Since July of 2017, we’ve been collaboratively writing a short story collection together.

The story Kim submitted in that Sixfold contest was the opening chapter from her debut novel, The Light Source (7.13 Books). Kim is also the author of the short story collection, Undoing, which was winner of the 2017 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her stories have appeared in Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Indiana Review, New World Writing, SmokeLong Quarterly, and many other venues. Her story “Madlib” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press). Her story “Surfaces” was selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2019. She is fiction editor of Pithead Chapel. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. www.kimmagowan.com

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Michelle Ross: The Light Source began as a few individual, but linked, short stories and at some point you made a conscious decision to expand the grouping with the intention of shaping them into a novel. Which stories/chapters had you written already when you made that decision? What was the first chapter you wrote after you decided you were working on the novel? And how did knowing it was now a novel change the writing process or did it?

Kim Magowan: I feel like my process with the novel is textbook “what not to do”! I wrote the book all out of order. The first section I drafted was the Beth chapter, Chapter 3, when I was in graduate school, around when the chapter takes place (1994). I saw it as a stand-alone story. Soon after, I wrote the Heather chapter (Chapter 2). In 2011, when at long last I became serious about writing, I dusted off those two stories and substantially revised them. That same year I went to my 25th high school reunion, and afterwards wrote the Mamie chapter (Chapter 6). Once that was drafted, I wrote the Porter chapter (Chapter 4)—he was my villain, he needed to tell his side of the story. All this time I believed I was writing a bunch of linked short stories, along the lines of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, but I was becoming increasingly uneasy. For one, both the Mamie story and Porter story are really long, and for two, the Porter story was too profane to publish. It was my favorite thing I’d written to date, but I knew it didn’t really work as a stand-alone story. Around this time (2012), an agent contacted me to ask if I was working in a novel, and I realized (duh!) of course I was—kicking and screaming, denying it all the way. So in the next 5 weeks, when I was in New Orleans with my family, I slapped together a first draft of both the Julie chapter (Chapter 7) and the Ian chapter (Chapter 1). It was the most intensive writing experience of my life—I wrote about 70 pages in 5 weeks. In the next few years I added material, mostly to the Julie chapter. I cut a chapter that seemed too Sesame Street song “One of these things is not like the others,” though that’s the opening story to my Undoing collection (and if you read “When in Rome,” you’ll see I never bothered to change the character names, so Julie has a cameo appearance). The Pam chapter (Chapter 5) came last. Unfortunately I suspect the only way I can write a novel is in this Homer Simpson “Doh!” backdoor way. I am too intimidated to write a NOVEL (oh my) unless I fall into it accidentally.

MR: Probably my favorite chapter is the Heather chapter. A lot of that chapter is Heather strolling through memories—of Julie over the years, but also of Heather’s family and her own life—but at the same time, the chapter/story feels grounded in the present because Heather is physically strolling around Amsterdam as she broods and you do such an amazing job of bringing that place to life. Writing that particular chapter in the way you did seems now like such a natural, inevitable choice. How else do you pull off so much meandering into backstory unless the character is presently meandering through space, right? Is this something you were thinking about as you wrote the chapter?

KM: Thank you! I like that chapter too. Heather is my favorite character. She captured my imagination early on. I got loads of nice rejection letters for that story before The Gettysburg Review published it, and I think it kept getting rejected because nothing really happens—Heather writes a letter and ruminates. Amsterdam, for me, is the perfect setting for deep-dive introspection that isn’t necessarily productive. It’s a beautiful city and also a decadent city. My memories of Amsterdam are a weird combination of precise and smeary. I needed Heather to be in a place where she felt lost, far away from Julie, trying to get her bearings, sifting through a past made complicated because of Julie’s denial and Heather’s collusion. Heather feels alone, even when she isn’t physically alone (she makes a friend but a friend who doesn’t speak her languages). A lot of my novel is about watching—characters are always watching each other, particularly observing Julie. Amsterdam for me is the essence of a voyeuristic city.

MR: There is a lot of voyeurism in your novel, but it’s largely a kind of claustrophobic voyeurism in that this is a group of friends studying and commenting on each other over the years, much in the way that families often do. There are quite a few moments in the novel when one of them says something about Julie or Heather to others in the group along the lines of “You know Julie…” or “You know Heather…” There can be something comforting in people thinking they know you, but on the other hand, it can be stifling and annoying as hell. While this novel is on one level a love story between two people, on another level, it’s a story of the dynamics between a large group of friends, the kind of group that operates much like a family, yes?

KM: Yes, absolutely—when I (inarticulately) describe my book, I say it’s about love and friendship. I went to boarding school, and your point feels absolutely true to me—one’s friends are like family, in both positive and negative ways. There’s this kind of intimate knowledge boarding school friends have of each other, and like family members, they know exactly how to wound. Beth refers to this precision wounding in her chapter as “many small splinters that embed themselves under our skin.” I tried to capture their intimacy by shorthand—for instance, through the obnoxious ways they “tease” each other, and the nicknames they have. They love each other but annoy each other. They think they have each other entirely figured out; they get a lot wrong. In different ways Heather and Julie both experience that group knowledge as stifling. Heather is regarded as the cavalier slut (for years none of them realize she’s deeply in love), and Julie is the good girl/ homecoming queen (if boarding schools had homecoming queens; they’re too patrician). It’s very hard for outsiders to break in to this kind of closed loop. Porter legitimately sees Julie’s friends as exclusionary.

MR: The Pam chapter is another favorite of mine. It’s tiny compared to the other chapters/stories, but Pam is no less realized than other characters in the novel, and it’s a perfect little story that reveals much about Heather. In choosing peripheral characters for the novel, did you plan out in any way what you thought these chapters needed to accomplish within the novel? Or did these characters and their stories come about more accidentally?

KM: I wrote the Pam chapter after I cut the Emily chapter (and threw that one into my Undoing collection). I decided Emily was too peripheral, but I wanted to insert a character who was an outsider, not part of this incestuous, warm knot of boarding school friends. Also, I wanted a tempering perspective on Heather. Mostly the reader experiences Heather as lovelorn, so I wanted an example of her treating a partner cavalierly. Heather is honest with Pam, but nonetheless she hurts her badly (even if Heather points out later that heartbreak is an inevitable risk of falling in love). Pam is my way of showing that Heather also has some blood on her hands.

MR: Was any particular character easier or more difficult to inhabit than the others?

KM: Strangely enough, Porter was very easy for me to inhabit. He’s the bad guy of the novel, but I felt like I completely understood him—I was channeling his voice. That chapter was the most fun to write. I needed to lay out clues that Porter was ignoring or misinterpreting. He’s a smart guy, but he misconstrues what he sees.

MR: We don’t hear Julie’s voice until the end of the novel. All that time we’ve gotten all these different characters’ versions of Julie, so when she finally speaks, it’s a little bit startling, in a good way, to finally get into her head. What’s more is that you do something different in Julie’s chapter with time. The other chapters in the novel move chronologically through time, each chapter occupying a distinct moment in time somewhere from 1994 to 2013. Julie’s chapter is composed of slices of 1994, 1997, 2006, 2012, and 2013, so we’re not only getting a present-time Julie, we’re getting the various Julies of the past as well. Would you talk about this choice to break the pattern of time in this way and to save all of Julie’s sections for last?

KM: Along with Heather, Julie’s the main character, but Heather is so open, and Julie is the opposite: closed and guarded. I needed her story to come at the end. I knew that choice was risky. She is not someone the reader is inclined to sympathize with by that point in the novel. My goal was not to make Julie likeable (frankly, I get very impatient with that adjective! I could give a crap about “likeable”), but to make her comprehensible. There are, as you say, various Julies, so I didn’t feel like I could write the 2012-13 version of her and leave it at that. I needed to show what she was thinking and feeling at earlier stages in the novel: why she chooses Heather, why she bails. The Julie chapter begins right where the Beth chapter ends—Beth sees Heather and Julie talking on the beach. I wanted to dramatize that conversation. Again, that was a chapter I wrote all out of order. I feel like I should attach a warning label: do not follow my madwoman, counter-productive process! The first part I wrote was the kitchen scene where Julie talks to Heather and their twins. Then I wrote the section where Julie has coffee with Porter, then a first section I later cut, then the ending. But I had to keep going back to that chapter and filling in more material, trying to flesh out Julie’s character, to clarify why she made her often problematic choices. I made her suffer more: the scene with her husband Rob was a later addition. So was the trampoline scene, because my novel was a love story missing a scene of Heather and Julie actually being a couple, in love, but struggling and at odds. The chapter originally began in 1986, when Ian, Julie, Heather, and Beth are in high school. I cut that section (it was leaden) late in my revision process, after Leland Cheuk had accepted the novel and I was doing a final tighten/ compression.

MR: Your story collection, Undoing, also contains several linked stories and you’ve written a few more linked stories since then. Why do you think you find yourself returning to particular characters again and again? Are you thinking about them between writing those stories or do they come back to you out of the blue?

KM: Ha! This goes back to what I said regarding your first question—the only way I can write a novel is to back into it, unawares. Either of those linked sets of stories (the Laurel ones, the Ben and Miriam ones) could have easily turned into a novel. This year I wrote yet another Laurel story and yet another Ben and Miriam story. Those characters have a hold on me; I know a lot more about them then I put on the page. But who the hell has the time to write a novel? And yes, I think about them in between writing about them, and I write about them when those thoughts get so brim-full they overflow. I may well end up writing a novel about them, but it will be entirely against my will.

MR: How would you compare the process of putting together the novel versus the story collection? Is there some metaphor that suitably encapsulates the different experiences?

KM: Oh man, the processes for me are so entirely different! With the short story collection, the big challenge was getting the story sequence right (though of course, as you and I have laughed and wailed over, no one seems to read short story collections in sequence, so so much for all those hair-tearing hours!). But I could yank any story I had doubts about, so the short story collection process appeals to the perfectionist in me. With a novel, you can’t just toss a chapter, because it holds up scaffolding. Revising novels is more frustrating and laborious. I kept imagining Tim Gunn from Project Runway, when he’s shaking his head over some godawful jumpsuit or ball gown and dictates, “Make it work.” A metaphor? I’d say putting together a story collection is like curating a museum show, figuring out which paintings belong in which rooms and how to light them. Putting together a novel is like being a 15th century cartographer who constantly has to adjust the map of the globe: “Oh shit, there’s a continent there. Must move everything around to make room for that new continent.” There are lots of smudgy eraser marks all over the novel map; it’s much less pristine.

MR: I asked you this question before in another interview when your story collection, Undoing, was published. Will you list ten words that encapsulate The Light Source?

KM: Friendship

Voyeurism

Denial

Betrayal

Trojan Horse

“Addiction”

Charades

Forgiveness

Circles

Light

MR: Why did you put addiction in quotation marks?

KM: I was thinking about one of my characters who identifies as a sex addict, and another character scoffs— she has no patience for that characterization, she believes it’s a way of letting himself off the hook. And I suppose the scare quotes represent for me a broader theme in my novel, a complicated relationship between abjection and accountability. Addicts are under a compulsion, whereas “addicts” persuade themselves they are under a compulsion. Sidenote: when you asked me for ten words, I resisted the urge to look up our last interview, but I bet Addiction was on my list for ten words about Undoing, and I bet there were no scare quotes around it. In an interview George Saunders said he consistently writes about class struggle, and that he doesn’t feel like he chooses that subject: it’s hardwired. There are certainly themes and plots I find myself returning to again and again.

MR: Finally, what’s one of your favorite lines from your novel?

KM: The Heather chapter is the prettiest, I think—the most pull-quotable. This bit is the essence of that chapter, because it shows Heather’s longing for Julie but also her frustration: “Last summer I read my little cousin Lucie a myth about a Greek girl who, unable to settle for having her god-lover only at night, against his warnings burns his fur cape and consequently loses him. ‘Why are you crying?’ Lucie asked me, and I couldn’t say, because I know how Psyche feels; because I want to burn that fucking cloak of fur.” Sidenote: I’ve always been fascinated by the Psyche myth, because it shows what is sexist about quest stories. Male characters go on quests and receive a reward—the princess, the crown. Female characters quest to retrieve what has been lost or stolen from them. On that note, I also like this line from the Porter chapter: “To some degree, all lovers are time machine conjurers, seeking to recover and to repair the past.”

Nightwolf: An Interview with Willie Davis

Sometimes things come to you unexpectedly, in a plain wrapper with an unfamiliar return address. And the best that can happen when you open these unexpected things is that you make a welcome new discovery, unwrap something that you didn’t even know existed before this very moment. Something exciting, something you are not eager to put down.

That’s the feeling I got when an email from someone I didn’t know showed up in my inbox. I opened it to discover an evocative new novel Nightwolf, by a very engaging writer, Willie Davis. Immediately the book excited me, its story, its prose, its damaged and compelling characters; I read it deep into that first night, and the next, and more after that. By the time I finished it, I wanted to talk with Willie about it. Lucky for me, we were able—through the miracle of email—to have that conversation.

*

Patty McNair: There are quite a few things I’d like to ask you about Nightwolf, but let’s start with the role Lexington plays in the novel. The city serves more like a character than just a backdrop, as some settings might. I have traveled quite a lot, but I have never been to Lexington. It felt wholly unique to me, its seedier parts, its neighborhoods, its inhabitants. Would you talk a little about how you chose Lexington for this story and why? It seems like a choice made not just because you know the city, but because this story could not take place anywhere else.

Willie Davis: My mother lived in Lexington, and my father lived in East Kentucky (the hillbilly, coal-mining part of the state). I grew up bouncing between the two places. Lexington, the urbane college town, called East Kentucky a bunch of stupid rednecks. East Kentucky called Lexington a bunch of pussies. I’d switch accents and agree with whichever set of friends was talking. I left Kentucky when I was eighteen because I couldn’t figure out a way to leave there sooner. If you’d have told me then that they built a moat around the state line of Kentucky I doubt I’d have cared. I pretended I didn’t like country music because I didn’t want to be thought of as a stupid Kentuckian. But, of course, the minute I left, I began to find Kentucky fascinating. In short order, I went from being embarrassed by my accent to playing it up to make girls think I was interesting. I wrote about Kentucky, and through writing, I fell in love with Kentucky, but only at a distance. I wanted to tell the stories of Kentuckians, but I wanted to stay away.

I started writing this book shortly after moving back to Lexington. Suddenly, I love living here. A lot of that is how the city has changed but mostly it’s how I’ve changed. What irritated me about Lexington before now seemed gorgeous to me. I used to call it the middle management of cities, a suburb to nowhere. But, of course, the hillbillies of my youth have moved to Lexington. It’s a city that’s getting constantly reinvented. The rural and the urban mix down here, but not much.

Lexington is a city that has a great deal of joy and shame and anxiety for me. It’s a place I love and is very close to my emotional core. It’s worth noting that the Lexington of my novel is at best a second cousin to the real Lexington, Kentucky. Some of that is practical. I have—this is not an exaggeration—the worst sense of direction of anyone I know. My mind simply has no spatial memory. There’s no way I could keep a map of the real Lexington in my imagination. I fictionalized it so it can react to the characters’ needs. If they need a walkable neighborhood or a reservoir, then Lexington could react to them. In that way, my off-center Lexington could interact with the characters around it.

McNair: Perhaps that is why the city seems so unique to me as a reader; it is both real and not. Like your characters. Milo, for example, is a complex character. When your reader is first introduced to him, Milo is behaving rather badly. He is a tough seventeen year old, engaged in regular illegal and often brutal activities. But he is funny, witty, quick with the one-liners and sharp repartee. And there is a real vulnerability to him as well, despite his yearning that there not be. He longs for his runaway brother, for his mother to be well, to be normal. Later, he yearns for the people, friends and family, he has lost in one way or another. How did you discover Milo? I wonder if you have other characters you’ve read that might have influenced his forming?

Davis: Milo came to me in drips and drabs. When I first started thinking of him, I was in my early 30’s and so was he. He talked to me like a drinking buddy, full of good cheer and fun stories. In my mind, he seemed a little scarred but basically well-adjusted. I saw him as a conduit to his group of friends. But the story wasn’t working. I got about 200 pages into his story and realized it felt lifeless. Whenever he and his friends talked about their childhood, the story suddenly felt alive, like they had some secret they were keeping. I finally decided I had to deal with that time when they were kids head-on.

Suddenly, Milo wasn’t a conduit to a group of friends anymore—his hardships were the story. I still saw him as the same jokey, hardscrabble guy I’d known before, but suddenly his story was a tragedy. He was a kid dealing with these godawful hardships. Meanwhile, he’s joking through them. To me, it seemed natural, but some early readers saw this kid submerged in darkness. As far as I was concerned, he jokes about his tragedy because people joke about everything. Almost everyone surviving in adulthood has dealt with tragedy, and we all, at times, think it’s hysterical. I’ve had many generations of him in my mind, so he’s not scared to get into the meat and gravy of his misery.

One of my favorite stories is Mark Richard’s “Strays” about two kids abandoned by their parents, having to answer to their Uncle Trash. They wind up burning their house down, and in the summary of events, it sounds tragic. But the story is hysterical and hopeful and makes me want to scream with joy. I don’t know Mark Richard’s thought process, but he grew up in hospitals with one leg longer than the other. No doubt a child grabbing the reigns on his own circumstances would appeal to him. It’s grim, but it’s also wish fulfillment.

McNair: When Milo finds a baby in the backseat of a car he steals, he conceives of a way to try to return the child to safety. However, he is haunted by the baby, by the way he felt in his arms, held close to his chest. Much of this story has to do with parenting: Milo’s mother is very ill and dies midway through the novel, his buddy Meander’s father dies. There is another mother who has a failed relationship with her son, a boy who may or may not have been “played with” at a party held by one of Milo’s friends. Did you know as you started this story that so much of it would have to do with absent parents, with children and parents separated?

Davis: I don’t necessarily think of them as incompetent parents, although, as I say that, I’m unsure how to finish that sentence. They’re self-absorbed to a degree, lost in their own stories, and consumed with their own pain, and they bring that element to their parenting. So, yes, I guess, kind of bad parents. Until you asked this question, I don’t think I realized how much the notion of parenting—present and absent—hangs over this book. It makes sense. About twelve hours after I finished the first draft—which was over twice as long, and quite a different book—my wife went into labor. When I first envisioned a few of these characters, I was a bachelor, living in Baltimore. When the story started to form for real, I was married, living in Kentucky. Then once the characters approached their endgame, I knew fatherhood was imminent. It doesn’t exactly change the story, but, then again, how could it not?

Let me go ahead and say what you’re already thinking: there is a place in hell for all parents who talk about how people without kids can’t possibly understand the emotional depths of the world. I agree. I can’t believe how many otherwise sensible people say, “As someone with a ten year old, I find pedophilia disgusting.” Like people are saying, “As someone with no children, I find pedophilia hilarious.” We have imagination and empathy—the childless, like everyone else, can put themselves in strange situations.

Still, as I re-entered the book, the perspective had changed. The mother dying of dementia no longer felt like a tragedy for the son—it was a new level of pain for the mother as well. Milo rescuing a child from a car he stole started out as the most bizarre comet out of the blue that could hit him. Now I was thinking about what it would take for a mother to leave a child in an unattended car. It helped give me empathy for the parents, which I should have had more either way. I thought of these as comedic situations, but suddenly they felt more human.

Take the scene where Milo’s best friend’s father dies. It started as an exercise where I imagined a character taking a metric ton of acid, and, as he’s waiting for it to kick in, he gets the worst news he can: his father’s dying and he needs to deal with his extended family That’s a (kind of) funny situation, but when the confrontation happens, it’s not funny. The family understands he’s a kid in trouble and they treat him with kindness. Life feels comedic to me, but the harshness often blows it away. I wanted this book to show the spirit of forgiveness.

McNair: Speaking of what you knew when you started the novel, and how that shifted through the writing and re-entering (as you say), there are a few major mysteries in the story: what really happened to Otto, the boy at the friend’s party; where did Aaron, Milo’s brother disappear to; who is Nightwolf, a notorious tagger, really? These questions give rise to others in relation to them as well. I thought it was interesting how Milo changed his mind regularly about what he thought the answers to these questions might be. What’s that old writerly adage? No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader or something? I wonder if you knew the definitive answers to these mysteries at any time, or did it shift for you as well? Perhaps even now you may not know for sure what happened to Otto, to Aaron, and who is Nightwolf.

Davis: There’s no less satisfying answer to any of the questions than “I don’t know, so it’s up to you.” But I don’t know. Or rather, I don’t know exactly. This book is, in part, about the unknown—the way that there are major mysteries that drive us that we will never solve. The point is, we search, and by searching, we generate stories.

These characters first appeared in a story called “No More Chatter” that revolved around a mystery. Milo, now thirty, was dating a married woman and while she was away, he breaks into her house, not to take anything, just to sit there for a minute. He leaves undetected, but the next day, he finds out that someone else had broken in after him and trashed all of the furniture. I never had any desire or interest to solve that mystery and figure out who broke into the house. The story was published, and I was happy with it. Then one woman told me she figured out who broke in the house, and she laid out the reason why. I tried telling her it didn’t matter, but she kept going. It was pretty annoying because she was right. I genuinely didn’t know the answer, but an answer existed below my detection. So I’m absolutely genuine when I say my reading is not a definitive one.

Fair enough, but it’s also a cop-out. If you ask someone whether God exists, there are a million intelligent, complicated, valuable answers, but you want to hear “yes” or “no.” So while, I don’t know exactly, here are my best guesses: Otto was most likely not molested by Thomas the Prophet. At the time, Otto doesn’t seem to think anything happened. But as his situation becomes more desperate, he loses any sense of surety that he had. He might have seen something that disturbed him, maybe was touched, but I doubt it was by Thomas. There’s nothing in Thomas’s nature that would indicate that. The accusations are all vague, and no one ever specifically says what they think happened. I do think Thomas endangered Otto: he let him in the house and didn’t take care of him. Thomas was caught up in the excitement of those times and forgot there was a child there he had to monitor. But I sincerely doubt he actively harmed him.

Is Nightwolf Milo’s runaway brother? I find the evidence that has convinced Milo of the fact pretty unpersuasive. The odds are that Nightwolf is just some random punk, and Milo’s brother is unobtrusively decomposing somewhere. But just because that’s most likely, it doesn’t mean that’s true. The unlikely happens so often that we usually can’t even be bothered to act surprised. Is it less likely than the rest of what happens to these characters? Is it less believable than the scores of absurd, crazy things that happen to us in our lives? As Milo says toward the end of the book, all it takes for miracles is for you to believe in what you do not believe.

McNair: Let’s talk about humor. How do you know it’s funny? Because there were a number of times when I spit coffee out of my nose reading this, sometimes at inappropriate moments in the story. How, too, do you balance the humor with the horror? Because there are some rather horrible things that happen in these pages, and still I laughed out loud.

Thank you, that means a lot. Humor in literature is hard because humor relies on surprise, and by the time you write something, rewrite it, edit it, sit on it for a year, and reread it, then it’s certainly not surprising. Humor ages poorly because jokesters stand on each other’s shoulders. Whatever shocks you into laughing tomorrow is going to seem tame in a month and it’ll embarrass you by Christmas. Most everyone reading this has left a friend in hysterics, but writing means you have to put the joke on a shelf, strip it of all context, and hope it connects with someone reading it in a different world than you wrote it in. The jokes that age the best are absurd, and that’s helpful, because these characters have an absurd view on life.

How do I separate the humor from the horror? I don’t. Horror, like everything else, contains comedy. That’s not a plea for edgier jokes, just an acknowledgement that people joked on 9/11, they joke through broken limbs, they joke after the cancer diagnosis. Not everybody, of course, but those who do aren’t doing it to mask their pain or to “laugh to keep from crying.” They do it because that’s the honest way they experience life.

McNair: This is a real coming of age narrative. Seventeen-year-old Milo becomes twenty-three-year-old Milo, and he learns a lot about life–good stuff and bad stuff–along the way. Characters on the verge of adulthood are fascinating to me; they know so much and so little at the same time. Why were you drawn to this age for these characters?

Davis: This was never meant to be a book about teenagers. Teenagers are a conglomeration of hormones trying to shape themselves into a passing fashion. So I guess, that’s like older people without the hormones or the excuses. I wanted to write about a group of friends.

The buried story is about Milo trying to understand his friend Shea’s disappearance. Shea vanishes shortly before Milo starts telling this story. He recounts these searches as a young man because he’s not ready to go on his current search. The telling of the story is Milo’s way of gathering himself for the new challenge he has to face.

McNair: Despite the toughness of Milo and other characters, despite their seeming autonomy, the role of friends and friendship is essential to the story. I don’t know what my question is here, but I guess I’d like to hear you talk about this some. Maybe specifically about Meander, Thomas, and Shea.

Davis: At heart, this is a story about people who genuinely care for each other. I’ve heard people assume that Milo and Shea are in love with each other. I think they are, but I don’t know if they are romantically. It’s about a group of friends who like each other, and within that number, four (Milo, Meander, Thomas, and Shea) who, in at least some twisted way, love one another. Thomas and Shea understand it. Meander can’t express it, at least not baldly. Milo comes to understand it through the telling of this story. But at its heart, this is a tribute to the ways lost people love each other.

McNair: You mention in the acknowledgements pages that storytelling was part of your upbringing, part of your family’s way of communicating. Is it this deep connection to storytelling that drew you to writing? Whose stories were you most eager to hear when you were growing up?

Davis: My family is unusual in a lot of ways, but I don’t know that our love of storytelling was one. My mother is a novelist who wrote one of the hundred most banned books of the 90’s. That novel, which is called Sex Education and is dedicated to me, was assigned to my 7th grade class. My mother’s sex book, dedicated to me and disseminated to my classmates, made for a long 7th grade. My father was a producer for a lot of Appalachian documentaries. When I was a child, he’d tell me goodnight stories, but if he tried to read me one, I’d say, “Tell me one from your mouth!” My brother was a storytelling savant from an early age. Once, when I was five or six, I heard my mother talk to her sisters about cynicism, and how she was a cynic, and how the country needed more cynics. I asked my brother what a cynic was, and without hesitation, he said, “Someone who has sex with corpses,” and then just watched as I regarded my family in horror. So my family prized telling stories above most things. Even lies were acceptable if they formed a story.

I don’t think this is particularly unusual. Kids grow up telling stories. While most families don’t have my stories, they have stories that are as strange and valuable as mine.

McNair: What are you reading now? What books are on your nightstand?

Davis: The best book I’ve read in the last year (maybe the last couple years) is The Tsar Of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra. When I finished it, I literally shook my head at how something could be so goddamn good. I just finished Because by Joshua Mensch, which is a memoir done in poetic form where he details his sexual abuse. It’s engaging but an absolute scorcher. I listened to the audio of Anthony DeCurtis’s biography of Lou Reed, and I’m about halfway through Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach. Up next is The Third Hotel from one of my favorite contemporary writers, Laura Van Den Berg.

McNair: Would you like to tell us about what you are working on next?

Davis: I’ve been poking around a couple of characters and see how they form together in a story. I have an idea about the son of a famous country musician, a man married to two women at the same time, and a boy who realizes his birthday is exactly nine months after 9/11 and he therefore hates his parents. I don’t know if these characters will come together. I had an idea of writing a full-on love story for no other reason than I don’t think I can do it. Then again, Nightwolf started as a light comedy that kept getting darker, so what do I know?