Feature
Not Quite 20 Questions with Nathan Poell
(Book cover by Matt Lord.)
Nate Poell and I became fast friends when we started library school together back in... 2003? Something like that. Anyway, Nate's the kind of guy who will casually tell you over beers that he has hiked the Long Trail or spent time in the Army. So when he sent me something to rewrite in my own handwriting as if the world had ended for an epistolary novel he wanted to post, I wasn't surprised and was happy to oblige. When he told me that it would be published as a book, I wasn't surprised as much as happy for him. Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office is a masterful work of fiction that is at once experimental and easy to read. Nate was nice enough to discuss the book, regionalism, and how you brew beer in a pumpkin of a couple of weeks of emails.
HL: Before we begin, can you give us a brief synopsis of the book?
Nathan Poell: It's a collection of undelivered letters written to and/or from mostly Kansans after an unexplained event throws technology back to a pre-industrial age. Many of the events and people in the letters intersect, some don't.
HL: Two parter: What do you think was the impetus for the story and what was the impetus for you wanting the book published?
NP: I thought it would be fun to take a subgenre (post-apocalyptic science fiction) I enjoy, situate it in an uncommon style (epistolary) and put an artsy, midwest-focused and experimental spin on it. Combining the concept and style allowed me to play with all sorts of different things: voice, form, plot structure. At first I didn't fully know how to exploit that combination, but as I got to writing I figured out how well it worked.
RE: publication, once I had written it and done a first revision, I decided it would be cool to put the manuscript into a physical form . So I got in touch with the MetaFilter Mail Art group [Metafilter's an online community--H] and some friends and asked them to transcribe the letters on scrap paper -- stuff that would be left over after the cessation of mass-production of paper. I continued to revise the manuscript as that project was taking shape. Once the handwritten letter project was done and online I felt really good about the whole thing and ramped up the query letters.
Uniqueness, aka "It's never been done before!", isn't a particularly good reason for trying to publish something. Fact is, though, I thought then (and still do) that it's an inventive take on a somewhat tired subgenre. I mean, I don't have anything against zombies unless they're trying to eat me and the fact that they're an affront to everything good and decent in the world, but if you want to talk about thematic oversaturation, "zombie-ridden post-apocalypse" is an excellent example. Also, I have an affinity for books like this one -- where the narratives are chopped up and the reader is left to piece things together, stuff like Spoon River Anthology and Dictionary of the Khazars -- and while this isn't quite as good as many others I figured it was a decent enough example to publish.
HL: For what it's worth (and without giving anything away), I thought the ending was exactly how it should end and really beautiful. Did the end play into your reversing the chronology of the book?
NP: Thanks, and while there were other considerations, the last/first letter definitely did influence how I ordered things. The first draft of the last (chronologically first) letter of the book was somewhat off the mark, and so I went back and revised it quite a bit. I think the final version of the letter ends on just the right note, and I'm glad it's the last letter the reader gets to.
But there were other considerations, too. There's the realism aspect: the newer undelivered letters would be put on top of the older ones (with a little shuffling -- my editor really wanted some letters closer to each other, and I relented a bit). Also, I thought it was fun to fit the denouement of some of the characters' plots into letters that appear in the book's text before (but again, chronologically after) letters specifically about those characters appear. Sort of a misdirection or judo throw. I used a real light hand with some of those -- so I guess I'm asking readers to pay super close attention and piece things together a bit, certainly more than they would if the book were in regular chronological order and/or in a nonepistolary form. Maybe that was assholish of me, or just being too clever for my own good, but I feel like I'm off the hook at this point. The book's out and people can make their minds up however they please.
HL: What, besides the town on the letter, makes the characters in the book more midwestern do you think? Language? Reactions to the apocalypse? I kinda also noticed that the trail of the letters seems to follow the Oregon Trail a bit. Was that by design?
NP: There are particular details of their environment, geographic things that situate them and influence what they do. That's mainly what I meant by midwestern. As far as language, I think there are words that get used in a certain way and ways of phrasing things that are different. That sounds real generic, and I'm trying to think of examples off the top of my head but am coming up empty at the moment. But also, since some of the letters come from places outside the midwest, it's not a homogeneous midwestern voice. At least I hope not.
Toiling through and making the best of diminished circumstances is not exclusively midwestern, but it's a lock with this scenario + a midwestern setting. Also, there are hints of passive aggression -- that hallmark of being a midwesterner -- in a few of the letters. It's such a flagrant stereotype that I limited its use.
With regards to the Oregon Trail thing, I didn't intend for there to be that sort of pattern. There are a couple letters (and one of them has letters nested inside of it) that move or project between the midwest and Oregon. The course of those two are certainly by design, and they overlap. Oh, and the one from Seattle, and one from Eureka -- there's more to this than I thought. If readers are catching stuff I didn't mean to put into the book, that's pretty cool.
HL: So do you think regionalism is important in art or do you think regionalism is a bunch of doo doo?
NP: I guess it depends on what a person is trying to do, and how much of a goddam genius the person is. A writer can easily wrap a murder mystery into Sweden or medieval Britain or Poland -- but that's just a setting, not heartcore regionalism. One of the best articles/essays ever written about literature and how to situate it in a television-oriented and ironically detached society -- you can say society has moved on to the web, but I would counterargue that since YouTube and NetFlix comprise the lion's share of traffic on the internet, that we are still absofuckingcertainly still in a televisually oriented age -- is "E Unibus Pluram" by that guy that everyone knows, and one of his points is that literature has to not just tackle things and present itself as they are in the present but also make an argument for what it's like to live decently in the present. So holy shit, that seems to blow regionalism right out of the water, right? Unless, I suppose, you're living in a teevee-less commune or in the Peace Corps or something the zeitgeist is mediated/brought to you by what is shown on cable news and/or YouTube (which is often clips of cable news that go viral)... well, that and what peoples' cats do.
But I think that there is an error in his line of thought. (Seems like it should be obvious now, but then think back to yourself 15 years ago; you probably had a line of thought that was erroneous, too. God knows I've had several.) Maybe you don't have to tackle things so head on (i.e., situate your entire novel in the here and now, where- and whenever that may be), maybe you can come at those problems obliquely.
As an example, one of the best books I've read in the last few years -- and it came out just this year -- is Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman, and it does this. Her book tracks three generations of Appalachian "witches" and flows from the Great Depression/New Deal era to about 2005. The central character is a kid in the New Deal era who transitions into being a local TV celebrity and later he's an old man whose daughter is a CNN-style network anchor and whose opinion affects millions of people. I hope more people read that book, because it's not only smooth and stylish, but it deals with the forces acting on people whose world is not much more than 30 miles in diameter and the the tension between the old local (mysterious but also simple) and the modern (exciting and liberating but ultimately un-pin-downable). In certain ways it -- like Spoon River Anthology -- is an indictment of the way those folks had to live, but it's similarly critical of the way the 24/7 news cycle shapes public opinion (even though that's a truism). It also has superbly done sexuality, gender and genre themes in it.
So here's the upshot. I think a writer/creator can frame a regionalist take on how things are and how people can aspire to be morally in whatever current time may be and have it still be literature, in the way that one guy thought. I hope that's the case, because I have an idea for a book (which is still a ways away, like four+ years out) that relies exclusively on the geography and radical history of Kansas. And if it comes off the way I hope, I think it will be maybe be a third as good as Witches on the Road Tonight. Seriously, read that book.
HL: Are you working on other writing right now or just occupying yourself with gardening and libraries?
NP: I'm close to completing the first draft of another novel right now, but it's been slow work. I'd like to say that not getting it done is due to being too busy with my job and gardening and brewing (and its sister activity) and reading, but it's pretty much a simple lack of discipline on my part. I could put in an hour or two a couple nights a week on this thing, I just don't. The kicker is that I really dig the concept of this current work -- it's in the same vein as P-ADLO, in that it uses primary source documents to tell the story -- and want to get it out, on paper. I keep thinking of things to work into it, and that's good, but there's only so much I can finagle into this thing and at a certain point I have to just push it forward. With luck and maybe a week off, I'll finish the first draft this summer.
HL: Non-book related: How do you brew beer in a pumpkin?
NP: First, get a couple big ass pumpkins. You can get three if you're really adventurous, but two is plenty for the effect. The first is used as the mash tun -- the big kettle sort of thing where malted barley is mixed with hot water and left to sit for an hour or so. So you have to have a big hole cut out of one side to put in the water and barley, and a spigot on the underside from where you can run the wort into the kettle for boiling. (This is where -- if you're adventurous -- you use the third pumpkin as a kettle and boil the wort in it using an electrical heating element. That's pretty much the logical extreme of what you can do w/a pumpkin brewing-wise, and again, you don't have to go that far to get the full effect.) Anyway, once the boil is done you transfer the wort into a vessel for fermentation -- this is the other pumpkin. Like the other one, you have to de-gut it, and also sanitize the inside. Then you put the wort in and pitch yeast and let it sit for a few days. If you're lucky the lid won't fall in -- ha. Then when the fermentation dies down a bit, rack it into glass for a week or so, keg it up, and serve it to people you don't like (or just some undiscriminating college students) because it's going to taste like raw squash. Afterward, deny your involvement in the whole fiasco.
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