The Other Valley

Debut novelist Scott Alexander Howard drops by the podcast to discuss his eerie literary work, The Other Valley. We discuss Ferrante, Atwood and the story behind the term speculative fiction.
The Other Valley tells the story of Odile, an awkward, quiet girl, vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns a spot, she'll decide who may cross her town's heavily guarded border into the next valley over. There, it is the same valley and same town, but to the east, the town is 20 years ahead in time. To the west, its 20 years behind.
Scott holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard where he studied the relationship between memory, emotion and literature.

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Website: scottalexanderhoward.com
Instagram: @scottalexanderhoward.com

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Are definitions of speculative fiction now that I like to say things like it's any fiction that doesn't take the rules of our world for granted,

Amy Mair: 0:11

I like that. Yeah,

Unknown: 0:12

that's a pretty good like all purpose term, right?

Amy Mair: 0:42

Oh, hello, welcome back to the Red Fern book review. I am your host, Amy Tyler, and today we're going to talk with first time author Scott Alexander Howard, and his book is the other Valley, and it's a mash up. It's a work of speculative fiction which just really simply is literary fiction with a sense of otherness or a dash of sci fi thrown in, but otherwise a very realistic kind of story setting. And his background is quite interesting. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. And this book kind of meets the space where memory, emotion and literature come together. And what I really like about it is it is very philosophical, but I also found it to be a bit of a thriller. So another interesting thing to me about Scott is he is, we're both from the same or we both live in Vancouver, so that's always kind of fun. And the way I found his book is I went to my favorite local bookstore, which is it's book warehouse on Main Street and about 10 minutes from my house. And I went in there, and I always say, well, what's the latest? What should I be reading? And they suggested this book. And then they let me know that if I do get them on the podcast, to get them in there to sign some books. So I've I passed on that message to Scott, but anyway, let's move over and talk with Scott. Hi, Scott. Thanks so much for joining the podcast today.

Unknown: 2:36

Thanks so much for having me before

Amy Mair: 2:38

we get started. I just wanted to comment on your background. I love I'm looking at the furniture behind you. Looks like you have some mid century modern furniture, sofa and bookcase. But I'm also looking at all the books in your collection. You've got a big library behind you. What if, if I could get a little closer, if people could see what? What are some of the books that you have on your shelf that inspire you.

Unknown: 3:04

This shelf was built by my father in law. Actually, I'm craning my neck to see what I actually have back there. Let's see. I mean, there's a lot of there's a lot of Ferrante, actually, that's the first thing I see. It's very recognizable with the Europa additions.

Amy Mair: 3:17

Oh yeah, yeah. Maybe

Unknown: 3:19

that's when we can talk about later. Okay,

Amy Mair: 3:21

so to start, what I wanted to first talk about is the genre that you're writing in, or that you wrote in for this novel. And so this is a work of speculative fiction, which I think a lot of people know about, but maybe not everybody. And I was wondering if you could kind of explain to people what is speculative fiction and why did you choose to write in this genre?

Unknown: 3:49

Yeah, I think I don't, I didn't prepare, like my, my history of speculative fiction as a term, but I think for my this is defeasible, but my understanding is that it's actually a term coined by Margaret Atwood, I think was maybe meant to distinguish The Handmaid's Tale from sci fi, which at the time she was really keen to do, because I think her view is that nothing in the book actually is impossible. There's no spaceships, there's no, you know, counterfactual time travel or anything like that. It's just, you know, a political change, and everything that happens in the book had already happened at some point. And, you know, in our world, so speculative was meant to sort of, I think, bring some kind of, like literary respectability to the story and distinguish it from from sci fi, which is regarded less favorably by the literary sort of mainstream. And then the funny irony is that over time, speculative became this big tent kind of umbrella term that incorporates sci fi itself as well as a lot of fantasy and other forms of magic realism in any kind of counterfactual, including things like The Handmaid's Tale. So I think. It's maybe kind of, it's flipped its meaning from what she originally intended. But I would, I've read like definitions of speculative fiction now that I like to say things like, it's any fiction that doesn't take the rules of our world for granted,

Amy Mair: 5:17

we like that. Yeah, that's

Unknown: 5:18

a pretty good like all purpose term, right?

Amy Mair: 5:23

So why did you choose this genre? I

Unknown: 5:28

think that it kind of chose me. It wasn't that I decided to write a book. Then I thought, you know, which book, what kind of genre should I choose to write in? It was more like I had the idea in a flash one day, which was of this eternal sequence of small towns that are all staggered precisely in time from each other. So in these kind of this succession of valleys that goes on forever, the same town repeats, but always 20 years ahead or behind in time, depending on which way you go, that idea is inherently a kind of fantastical idea, because it involves time in some way. It's sort of a time travel story. So it kind of puts it into the Sci Fi camp. But it also has no science in it. You know, the world's very rustic, and the rules of this are never like, you know, the explanation for why this town exists in the way that does is never given. It's just treated as a as as a fact. So it kind of became speculative fiction by default, you know, but it was sort of the idea that led that decision, rather than the other way around.

Amy Mair: 6:28

What made you keep it somewhat grounded in reality? Because I guess you could have taken that kind of story idea and made it more fantastical. What made you want to keep it sort of a little bit grounded? I when we were emailing back and forth, the one thing I said to you, this seems to me like kind of, I would describe it as eerie literary fiction, like there's just something about it that's a little bit unsettling, which I think is intent, obviously, intentionally so. But what, why did you decide to keep it a little bit grounded?

Unknown: 7:08

Well, first of all, eerie literary fiction is great. That's, that's precisely what I was gunning for. So I'm glad that it landed that way. Oh, good, yeah. I had sort of eeriness as one of my if I had not, I did not actually do, like a, like a teenage mood board, or something like that. You know, my took out my writing, but I feel like, figuratively, I did have one, and the eeriness was kind of one of the main notes, I think, one of the main moods that attracted me, you know, something like that, or the uncanny, as for, I don't know, I kind of liked, I liked the combination, though, of eeriness with something a little bit more grounded and a little bit more like rustic and physical, like the I made sure there's a lot of description in the book of the way that the world, you know, smells and tastes and feels, you know, sensorily. That's just the kind of writer that I am. But I think it also created an interesting tonal balance between the sort of loftier metaphysical strangeness of the world and, yeah, just the feeling of what it would be like to actually be there. I like to sort of treat something unreal using the register of realism and so sort of the rustic, vaguely past, like setting of the towns they're sort of old fashioned, combined with something that's more usually a futuristic trope, like time travel. I don't know, it just felt interesting to me. You know, I felt like there was some, some fertile ground there.

Amy Mair: 8:30

Now, talking about the physical town, if you look at the cover, it's quite a beautiful cover, and it's, you know, it looks it's it's a vantage point of overlooking a lake that over with a mountain in the background, and it looks like the Ogan Okanagan, which is not, you know, a few hours to the east, or it's from Vancouver, and you're from that region. And so I wanted to ask you, Was that intentional that the cover is, is that supposed to be where you're from, and if also, how did the how and where you grew up? How does that appear or not appear in this book?

Unknown: 9:12

It definitely appears. I think it's, it's fairly common for a debut novelist to sort of use their hometown to some extent. It's kind of Yeah, for the taking, you know. And I also think that, you know, I started reading, I didn't write any of this book in Kelowna. I had left by that point. Kelowna is, I sort of grew up in West Kelowna, Rose Valley area of of, sort of the Central Okanagan, but also the southern Okanagan, like Oliver, so it's a much smaller town. And, you know, I moved. I moved away from there when I was 18. But I really like I sort of enjoy accessing writing through memory. I think that the distance between where I was writing the book and what I was writing about, the sort of landscape I was evoking, was helpful for me, as far as why. I used it beyond just kind of the convenience of knowing this landscape very well. I think that so for those who don't know that, the Okanagan is kind of a weird region in Canada. It's not really what we think of when we think about British Columbia, which is sort of, you know, the huge trees in the Pacific Northwest, and very rainy, and it looks like Twilight, you know, and the Okanagan is home to Canada's only desert, you know, it's a strange ecological environment where there's these deep fjord like lakes that are surrounded by orchards and sort of rolling hills. But then in the mountains above that, it's very it's pretty harsh, like it's very dry and arid. There's sort of these, like barren pine dotted mountains. And I really liked that kind of combination of the pastoral and sort of bucolic mixed with this, or surrounded by this sort of harsh emptiness. I think that worked well with the tone of the book and the tone of the world, which is this mix of longing and foreboding, you know? So I felt like there was kind of a complementarity between the landscape and the story in the world. And I think also just using valleys, the original idea for this book, for a day or two, I just thought of this sequence of towns, kind of existing on a flat plain. And very quickly I realized, you know, if that presented logistical challenges, you could see what was going on too easily, perhaps from one to the other. And so logistically, natural borders of mountains was helpful for me, but I think it also worked thematically, because the past and the future are so close in the book, you're aware that they're there, but they're they're also just out of sight, and that kind of felt appropriate, too.

Amy Mair: 11:43

So could you give everyone just a kind of beyond you've talked about the setting like these were like worlds years ahead and years behind, neither direction, these valleys. But can you talk a little bit about, maybe the main character, Odile, and what's, what's the synopsis of the book, or what's the kind of central tension of the book?

Unknown: 12:08

Yeah, well, so to recap, kind of the basic landscape of the world, you know, we've got, it's a, I like to say it's a small town that's physically neighbored by its own future and past. And so, you know, across the mountains to the east, the same town reappears, but it's 20 years ahead in time. To the west, it's the same town, but 20 years in the past and so on forever. And travel between these towns is forbidden, but if you are grieving, you can ask permission to hike to a past version of the town where your lost loved one is still alive and well. And if you can, if you're allowed to go there, you are not allowed to interact with this person or be recognized by them, but with a mask on and under armed guard, you can stand at a distance and look at them again. And some people find this ritual consoling. And the story follows a teenage girl, 16 year old named Odile, who notices some of these visitors from the future near her school, but against protocol and by accident, she does recognize who they are, and thus she realizes which one of her classmates they must be there to see, and thus which one of her classmates must be about to die. And instead of staying away from him, as she's sort of told to she becomes closer to him and starts to fall in love with him, but this secret that she knows about his future creates a obvious moral and emotional dilemma for her that changes the course of her life until she's tempted to go back in time and try to change it.

Amy Mair: 13:37

Okay, that's a good and why did you, why did you choose Odile like to tell, through which to tell the story. You could have chosen one of the other characters or someone of a different age, like, what appealed to you about her? Um, I mean, in

Unknown: 13:58

a way, I do kind of have someone of a different age, because the story is bifurcated into Odile at 16 and Odile at 36 so I kind of got to have it both ways. That's I think, I mean in terms of the process, the way that I started to write this book, when I finally I had the idea for it for years before I did anything with it. And then the idea was, was of that world, and I didn't have a story to put there. And so when I started to get serious about writing it, I've likened it to bird watching. I would kind of sit in the bushes of this world and kind of just watch characters that I would make up a new one each time I sat down to write. And I would just create these little vignettes where I write about, you know, one person going about their day in this world. And after a few of these, I wrote somebody who was based on, very loosely based on, a girl that I went to elementary school with who used to do what Odile does at the start of the book, which is out of a kind of mortal shyness she would stand against the wall at. Recess, and at lunchtime, she's just stand against the wall of the school beside the cloakroom door and just stare straight ahead. And I didn't I never really figured out why she did that, but this kind of memory worked its way into a character, and as soon as I had that on the page, I started to just wonder more about her, you know what? What made her that way? What was she thinking about as she did that? And from there, I kind of just poured a lot of myself into the character, and, you know, dialed up a lot of my own traits, like shyness and a certain kind of, you know, severity and indecisiveness and worry and stuff like that too, like some of my more negative traits, I feel like Odile, like it's a little bit of a psychological raw deal for me. And then other parts of myself, like my irreverence and humor, a lot of that went into other characters that surround her and sort of draw her out of her shell, which is people like Ed May, who's the boy I was talking about earlier, who's doomed, and his friend, Alon.

Amy Mair: 15:55

So Odile grapples with a lot of deep existential questions, and you yourself have a background in philosophy. You're an academic, and I'm just wondering how did your academic background and your personal philosophical beliefs show up or inform your writing of this book.

Unknown: 16:23

Well, I like the word inform more than I like words like Inspire. I think because like inform is sort of like a structural thing, and that's kind of how I feel about it. I feel like philosophy really forms the background to how I approach certain questions. But it's not as though I'm bringing particular philosophical ideas, you know, from dry as bones academia and then sort of dressing them up in fiction. I think I was at the time when I wrote this. I was just leaving academia after many, many years, and so I was, at least in my mind, I was trying to write as unphilosophical novel as I could, which, it turns out is still quite a philosophical novel. I think that the one of the things that I recognize the most in terms of continuity between the world I used to be in and philosophy. And in this book, my dissertation was about emotions that have to do with time's passage, especially nostalgia and other forms of lyrical affect. So like the Japanese concept of mono nouaware, which is sort of the feeling that you get from a haiku poem, sort of the definitive mood of Haiku. It's this poignant sensitivity to life's transients, and that's a feeling that's very much threaded throughout the other Valley. Within academia, it was kind of a weird fit, because, or not all of academia, but within academic, analytical philosophy, that's a very dry and technical discipline, and I think I took a sort of weird delight at the time in approaching this softer subject matter using these really hard tools. But it was a trick that kind of got old. I found. And instead of, you know, analyzing lyric, poetry and fiction, like I was doing within philosophy, I think I knew that eventually I had to have the guts to try to write it instead, which is what I secretly wanted to do the whole time the

Amy Mair: 18:16

book is also, I think of it as a little as a bit of a thriller, and that, to me, is sort of counter to philosophy. Or maybe they seem just so different, and somehow you've married them together, and you've created, you know, philosophy, not for you, but for some people, could be a bit dry, depending.

Unknown: 18:42

Yeah, I don't, I don't shy away from the term thriller. I think that one of the things that I learned from quite honestly, while I was writing, I read a lot of literary fiction, but I also, you know, was watching kind of prestige TV, and, you know, something like as propulsive as uh, Breaking Bad, or something like that was actually an influence on this book, too. I really wanted to kind of keep that tension ratcheting up. I find that I need tension as a writer. I think writing without tension for me is like, is kind of like driving on empty, you know, just sort of rolling along. I I sort of see the tension in the book as more fundamental than anything that could be considered philosophical. So it was never a challenge, I guess, to create that or to marry those things. I think I'm, you know, a novelist who likes tension, and then just happens to have this, this big, weird background and philosophy. So that stuff just kind of bubbles up, whether I want it to or not. The philosophical stuff is just, it's built into how I approach, you know, the subject matter. And since Odile is in this book, kind of training to become a kind of like judge of other people's grief. And I had sort of worked on the emotions as an academic, you know, some of that stuff kind of came to bear in a natural way.

Amy Mair: 19:57

Well, why don't with that? Why don't we do. A little reading.

Unknown: 20:01

Yeah, I'd love to, so to set this up, because I'm not. I always, I always read from the very start of the book, and I'm not going to do that so, but then I have to do a bit of setup. So the government of this town, which oversees all of those travel and visitation requests that have to do with with grief. The government's called the Conseil, and there's a few candidates from local schools, including Odile, who are trying out to become apprentices at the Conseil. And this vetting process involves learning more about the way that the Conseil operates. And then candidates have their reasoning skills and temperament sort of tested each week. And if you pass the test, you advance. If you don't, you get cut. And the pastel read is a little excerpt from one of those training sessions. So odile's Teacher, who's a concierge named Madame avrat, is talking to them about what would happen if the Conseil authorized a visit to the west, which is back in time by 20 years, and then the visitor slipped their guard. No she repeated, the present is a delicate thing. We picked up our pencils. Yes, there are much greater risks associated with Western visitation. She said, if something were to go awry, if there was any interference in that valley, we here at home would receive no warning. The result will be instantaneous, a relationship, an occupation, an individual, a family, vanished, eliminated. You'll have heard it referred to in such terms, interference means disappearance. Well, the slogans are useful enough, but those are crude schoolyard concepts, and from you, we expect a deeper understanding. Consider this, something that vanishes, creates an absence, and such an absence, in principle, can be detected, whereas what we are talking about now is undetectable. Why? Because there was never anything to detect from the moment of interference in the valley West that change, whatever it may be, is a 20 year old fact. To you and me, it is not a new fact entering our lives to our horror or delight. It's important not to picture it that way. No, it is simply a fact like any other, just as obvious as the taste of a tomato, something you'd have no reason to second guess at your age 15 or 16, you'll have lived your entire life in a valley where that thing is taken for granted. Thus you might be a person who never had such and such a family member, who never fancied such and such a relationship, who never did the things which today you swear are your most treasured experiences. Those things are not gone. They never were and never words leave no trace, no obscure memory, No nagging sense of something amiss, no fleeting shiver, nothing at all. These are the stakes of interference. This is why the Conseil is so vital. We are the bulwark against non being against a replacement so utter and complete that what is lost is never mourned.

Amy Mair: 23:12

A lot of the words or names. There's a lot of references to French words and names.

Unknown: 23:22

I think that a lot of the writing process is sort of it begins as whimsy and just mucking around, throwing things in, and then the things that serve a purpose, the things that stick in some way, they have a different meaning for why there's a different reason for why they stick than why they might have initially been thrown in. So the kind of happenstance explanation for the French is that I was, I was editing a book about the cartography of Paris at the time, and there was, there were words like conseil and a name like Ed May, and I liked the flavor of them. I also had already started to base the landscape on the Okanagan, and I had noticed that the Okanagan resembles parts of the Mediterranean in that sort of aridity. And so I started to think, well, what if we bore a little bit from the land that looks like this other land, and sort of put in not just French, but also some Spanish and Maltese and Italian place names or not place names, mostly the place names are French, but the people's names sometimes are Maltese as well. So that was kind of why it worked its way into the early drafts. And then the reason it stuck around was precisely, as you say, this sense of, I think it was the right degree of otherness. You know, I I knew that I wanted it to feel slightly foreign, slightly alien. I didn't, I didn't want people named Scott Howard in the book. But then I think that at the same time, I didn't want to go for full on Sci Fi, fantasy naming convention side. Like names that have no earthly precedent. So I thought that a foreign language, at least foreign to most of this book's readers, was the right kind of otherness, you know, just using something that's familiar in a way, but also unfamiliar in a way, it just kind of helped create the tone that I wanted.

Amy Mair: 25:17

So I wanted to ask you a bit about the publishing and writing process. Um, you're a first time novelist, and it's a very unique, special, scary time. Um, how did you get your first get get your book deal? How'd that go, come about?

Unknown: 25:36

Yeah, I mean, so I, as you're saying, I have, I have a PhD in philosophy. It's not an MFA in Creative Writing, which is, I think, the most common route in Canada to make those kinds of professional connections that assist in publication. I also didn't have short stories or poetry published. I only have, you know, peer reviewed philosophy papers that are very tactical and completely useless. No connection to the publishing industry at all going into this. So I had to just cold query for an agent, which, if you don't know, just means emailing people who get 1000 emails a week, basically in a small, compressed bit of time, saying, Please read my book, and then your email ends up in what's called a slush pile, and you have to just pray that you know an agent will, or an agent or an assistant of an agent, will pull your email out of the slush pile and actually pass it on and give it a chance. And that's a notoriously hard process, at least if you don't have kind of connections to recommend you to an agent's attention. And so, yeah, I got no interest in Canada. But then eventually, two American agents read the pages, and I got offered representation, I think after about five months of querying, which is, you know, not a huge amount of time. It's not, yeah, it's, I always, I always think, like, on one hand, it's not bad, but on the other hand, there are very long five months when you don't know if there's ever going to be light at the end of the tunnel, because it just kind of happens all the sudden. And then, in my experience, the sort of conventional wisdom that once things start happening, they happen fast, that was born out. It took my agent about a day to sell the book, you know, after I was just thinking, like, Oh, this is going nowhere, you know, then all of a sudden, I have an agent. Then she sells the book very quickly. We had an overnight Read and request for a meeting from an editor at Simon and Schuster in New York. And, you know, we met with some other people, but nobody really matched her energy, especially once Simon and Schuster Canada got on board too. So I think it took ultimately, like a week or something. So after writing in isolation for so long, it just felt like surreal, and I think more than joy, which is what people expect, it's just felt like relief, like, Oh, thank God, this worked out.

Amy Mair: 28:00

That's amazing. And then I wanted to ask you, from the initial idea, like you talk about this kind of idea coming in your head, of these valley after Valley, different time periods, how different is the final book from your initial idea. And I know you would have had people working with you, and then you went through the process yourself. But is it very different from what you initially thought of?

Unknown: 28:36

Yeah, I think it is. I mean, it's funny how much I have, sort of, I still possess, like the original notes. You know, I first wrote down the idea for the book. I remember talking to Anita prose, who wrote the maid, and, yeah, she was saying how the idea came to her on a on a plane, and she wrote on a napkin. I wonder if she still has the napkin. So I still have my because I did it in Microsoft Word. I have, I still have my my figurative napkin ended up becoming like 80 pages long because I kept on adding notes to it as I thought of them. And it's funny for me now to look back at the first page or two of that and see all the things that remained exactly intact from the start, and an equal amount of things that are radically different and completely opposite to how I had initially imagined that this project would go because I had the idea, I think, yeah, it's 10 years ago this year coming on to 10 years, like, within a couple of months, and I didn't do anything with it for a long time because I was still an academic, and it's just an all consuming job, especially if you're trying to find, You know, trying to generate more work for yourself. So when I finally decided to crack down and prioritize the novel, I think it took me about three and a half years to write it all in, during which time I my wife and I moved like five different times, and then the pandemic hit. You know, it's not an easy time. Um. Um, so it's hard for me to kind of individuate how many drafts that I wrote, but, you know, maybe like two and a half full rewrites from scratch and then years of revising. You know, so much, so much on the cutting room floor. But I think the the main difference is, from the very start to the end, I think I'd initially imagined that the book would be a lot more kind of dreamy and just purely kind of contemplative, the philosophical sort of side of it would have been maybe dialed up a lot more. And then as I wrote and I reread my first draft and just a lot more kind of causal connective tissue started to grow between these scenes that I sort of thought of as these dreamy fragments, until I could just feel like this gravitational pull that the book wanted to be something more tight and with a lot more narrative momentum than I think I'd originally conceived of it as having so and you kind of just have to accept what the project is telling you it wants to be, you know, you have to just be like, you know, I can't force this book to be, to kind of conform to what you know, the first idea I had for you have to sort of listen to listen to what it's telling you and go with it.

Amy Mair: 31:15

So to that point, are you? Because you talk to authors, and sometimes they know the very ending when they start, and others say the characters lead them. And is that kind of So is that what you're saying, that you have this idea and then it the characters kind of lead you, or the story kind of leads you like you're Did you sometimes feel like you weren't leading the story?

Unknown: 31:42

Yeah, it's funny. I had the other day. I had this weird dream. I had this dream that Toni Morrison was still alive, and I, like, got off a bus, and I just got suddenly, like, Toni Morrison was giving a reading, and I was the only one there, and I was so excited, because I get to talk to Toni Morrison, and she said this now, not in the dream, but in real life, she's known for saying something about if your characters are leading, you're doing something wrong. You know you have to be in control of the characters. And I've always agree

Amy Mair: 32:10

with that, but, yeah, I don't want to disagree with her.

Unknown: 32:14

I know you can, but I'm the same way. I've always thought, you know, well, that contradicts common, wisdom that you should, if it's a character led book, then the character should be leading. I think, though, that you can sort of reconcile the two intuitions, because, you know, like a good parent, for example. To go back to the child analogy, like a good parent, sort of the child thinks it's leading, but you're actually setting the parameters for it. And at the same time, you also have to accept, like, Okay, this kid does not want to be in piano. To be in piano lessons. I'm not going to force them to do it. They want to be in sports. I'll let them do sports. So I feel like there is kind of a give and take with your characters. They lead a little bit, and you also sort of gently adjust the world they're living in so that the way that they choose to go is somewhere that you want them to go. So I think that there's no easy answer to the do the characters lead or do you lead them? Question, it is sort of a collaboration, which is, it's a bizarre thing, you know, because, of course, it's all you you've made them up.

Amy Mair: 33:13

And what about your writing routine? Do you write at the same time every day? Do you have to have a special? Do you write by hand? There was someone I interviewed recently, I can't remember that writes their books by hand. I could not on that. But anyway, just what are your sort of quirks, or what's your process?

Unknown: 33:37

Yeah, I think, I think I read that Martin McInnis, who's another sort of literary, speculative novelist who wrote a book called in ascension. I think I read that. He does it longhand. I don't know. I really, I admire that. I don't. I just do too much. I change things too much. I kind of can't do that. And also, I think computer uses just degraded my handwriting so badly, but my process is very much like word count based. So some people go by putting in time. I have to go by putting in words, because I'm very good at wasting time. If that's if I just have to make it four hours, I'll sit around for four hours and do nothing. So I need to, I have a program that locks me into a certain word goal, like I have to produce, you know, 1200 words a day, or whatever it is, or else I cannot use any other part of my computer like, no internet, no, no, nothing.

Amy Mair: 34:23

I just read about this. What's it called?

Unknown: 34:25

It's called cold turkey. Oh, okay, yeah. I wrote the whole all of the other Valley until I started to really revise. It is written in cold turkey. And my the next book I'm writing is also, it's great. It basically just turns your computer into a useless typewriter until you meet whatever goal you found yourself to meeting. So I do that, and I think for me, like mornings are best, I'm kind of useless as the day goes by, but the thoughts do keep percolating. So you can kind of make notes as you go along. And as far as locations, I I wrote the whole. First Book in public libraries I've never had, like a home office. Can't afford one, so it's just, you know, finding some place to go, yeah, and then as far as motivation goes, you know, just a existential fear of failure, just sprinting ahead of the gaping maw of catastrophic disgrace, I think keeps me going most days.

Amy Mair: 35:20

Okay, so I wanted to ask you, especially as a first time novelist, you you've never done this before, and you create this piece of art, and what was the message that you really main message that you in your head you want to get across. And I'm asking you that because I want to know then you put it out in the world, and readers are going to have their own ideas. And I I just wanted to find out a little bit about what were you what did you think you were putting out in the world? And this novel is done well, so you're getting feedback. And I'm just wondering, are you learning things about your book that you didn't know, or are people keying into things that you didn't think were special, but are like, what is that like?

Unknown: 36:13

Yeah, I think, I think in one sense, it's not like a messagey book in so far as a lot of contemporary fiction kind of gets, I don't know whether it actually is intrinsically this, but it gets talked about as though, you know, a novel is more or less an essay that has characters and dialog, rather than, you know, than just being nonfiction. It's not really a thesis book in that sense. I think it's because it's eerie and uncanny. I think it is a bit more cryptic than didactic. It's evocative of a mood, and it tries to sort of make certain themes and questions live for the reader more than certain theses. But the kinds of things I was dwelling on that I sort of see the book as pointing towards are maybe like reflections on the contingency of our identity, like what makes you the person that you are, how much of that is happenstance and circumstance, how much of that could have gone otherwise with little changes. And I think also, at the risk of sounding sappy, I also think that it's kind of about the preciousness of happiness in a life, and the sometimes narrow window that we have for joy, and the cost of trying to sort of pry that window open and extend it against the way that the world is taking you, I don't know. I'm not sure if I've said that well, but I feel like that's kind of the main things, or questions about identity and questions about happiness and regret. And then, as far as the book being out in the world, and like, which reader reactions have surprised me, I think, yeah, it has been really interesting. And I'll preface it by saying that I I try to stay away from hearing too much about reactions. Yeah, I know, yeah. And it's not even out of, like, fear so much and like, I know some people are how to say, I think it's kind of like,

Amy Mair: 38:12

you don't want it to totally impact your art, or your or the work that you're doing, you want to do,

Unknown: 38:20

yeah, I think it's, it's unhealthy, maybe, to let readers responses affect the way you see your work, because my part of the process just to create something that satisfies me and to sort of write the book that I'd want to read, and if I start worrying about how the story is going to be received by by people, then, you know, it feels less like I'm writing and more like I'm marketing, you know, like I kind of have to just keep it private and then hope that it, hope that it speaks to someone else, from the privacy of me to the privacy of them reading right, but as but then that said, you know, I also I am exposed to reader responses, sometimes through reviews, sometimes through Instagram, sometimes through just My fan mail, which is really nice. And I think what has been the most surprising has been maybe bemusing, is like the diametrically opposed descriptions that people will give of how the book reads. So we were talking about kind of this melding of philosophy and thriller materials, I think that that's kind of something that sometimes readers will sort of see it as just one or the other. So I've for every number of blurbs and reviews that I have that say that it's like a quiet, very slow meditation on grief and loss. There's a number of reviews that'll be like it's a rip roaring stay up all night, jumbo jet page turner. So I kind of have to try to balance those out and be like, not sure if this is coming up, if it's looking like a coherent description of the same book. But at the same time, I obviously was trying to do both of those things. And I think it stands to reason, because every reader is different, and, you know, every book is hopefully kind of multi dimensional. So I. Yeah, it makes sense that readers would sometimes pick out different dimensions of your book as the dominant one. You know, like, if you go to like, a whiskey tasting or something, one person will say the main taste is x, and someone else will be like, No, the main taste is y, and they're not wrong. They're just, it's just hitting them differently.

Amy Mair: 40:15

Well, it doesn't surprise me that people would think it's a stay up all night thriller in that. I mean, this is not, as I call it, an airport novel. This is, you know, it's not a difficult read, but it's for somebody that's wanting a deeper experience, and so maybe that type of reader finds it.

Unknown: 40:35

Thank you. Yeah, I do think that what I'm always looking for as a reader is sort of that literary page turner, you know, something that's got lyricism, that pays a lot of attention to language, but it's also, you know, it's got romance and suspense. And I think a lot of readers do see that combination. It's not just polarizing. You know, I had a, there was an Italian reader recently who said they described it once I ran it through Google Translate. Anyway, I'm not sure what it was in the original, but she described it as a tender and ruthless novel. I was like, that's pretty good. I like that. It

Amy Mair: 41:06

is Ruth. It is kind of ruthless. But maybe that, that does seem like maybe that wasn't the exact word that she meant. Well, it was, it

Unknown: 41:15

was praise. Yeah, it was praise. Um,

Amy Mair: 41:19

okay. And before we go, I wanted to ask you about authors that have influenced you and you were you obviously like Veronique. So what do you like about her, her writing, or this? We assume it's a her, the the yes, we don't know for sure.

Unknown: 41:38

Yeah, I'm on I'm on Team. It's a her. I think what I connect with in the Neapolitan quartet, I guess, is just this, like, simple frankness and Yeah, speaking of tender and ruthless, I mean, there's a certain ruthlessness to the world she's describing. There's a ruthless honesty to the character that I really was inspired by, you know, it's just like, oh, wow, you can do this. And so that was something that felt very liberating to read around the time when I started to write this book. I think other, I mean, Isha Guru is a big one.

Amy Mair: 42:17

Oh yeah, I can see that in this work. I can see, Never Let Me Go, obviously, like,

Unknown: 42:26

yeah, the way that he is so sparing with kind of the exposition, you know, the world building there is so much just by a vision, rather than giving you a bunch of information about, oh, here's how the cloning works. You know, it's just it provides the kind of structure of their lives, and it's just taken for granted from there. And that was inspiring, too. People like Yoko Ogawa, like the memory police, was kind of, it's much more on the dreamy side, but it's but that was also one that I thought of in speculative fiction. More kind of died in the bull speculative fiction, I guess, like Ted Chiang and China vieville were sort of big, but also I was writing about a teenager, and at least in the first half of the book. And it occurred to me recently that, in a way, some of my favorite writers when I was a teenager have sort of bubbled up in this book too. So those were Kafka and Whitman, which is a sort of a weird combination, not often like seen as buddies and but I do think that, you know, the eeriness and the crypticness of Kafka married with sort of that big hearted tenderness of Whitman. I do sort of see it in what I was trying to do, like the kind of strange tonal marriage that I was trying to execute in this book, maybe kind of stems from those early influences.

Amy Mair: 43:49

Can you tell us, I'm sure you're probably working on something new. Can you tell us about that what you're working on?

Unknown: 43:57

Yeah, so the new novel is, it's not speculative fiction, as far as I know. Yet, I think it's only like lightly counterfactual. I think of it as primarily a kind of domestic, sort of kitchen sink drama. But I might toss out key words, like it's kind of like about the academic underclass and economic precarity. It's about art and ambition. There's a lot of stuff about kind of climate strain, especially wildfires, and the decision to have children or not, and about hope and hopelessness and time and a bit of nostalgia seems to always kind of crop up in my writing, no matter what I try to do. But then also it's wrapped into this sort of story of a missing person. So I'm trying to do another weird sort of tonal hodgepodge and see how, see how it works. I just wanted

Amy Mair: 44:48

to add one little note, the bookstore that I really like in Vancouver is book warehouse on Main Have you been over there or recently? Or have you been over there yet? I.

Unknown: 45:00

No, I haven't been to book warehouse on Main for a while because

Amy Mair: 45:03

I went in there. And the reason why, the reason why we're doing this podcast, the reason why I bought the book was they told me I had to read it, and then, and when I went to the checkout, they know me, and I said, I said, Well, I'm gonna put this on the podcast. They're like, Okay, well, if you get a hold them, tell them to come over and sign some copies. So I've got to

Unknown: 45:23

do that. Yeah, so you should go over there. I absolutely will. Yeah, I haven't gone everywhere in Vancouver yet. Yeah, but

Amy Mair: 45:29

that's a good, that's a nice little it's a, well, there's not a lot of independent bookstores anymore, but it's, it's one of the ones. And I always say the name doesn't sound like it's an independent bookstore, but it is, it's a good one. So, okay, well, I

Unknown: 45:42

publicly apologized to book warehouse, and I will be there right quick.

Amy Mair: 45:46

Thanks so much to Scott for coming on the podcast. That was really fun, and I learned something new. And I think you probably did too, that the term speculative fiction came from Margaret Atwood. Potentially, that's really interesting, and that makes perfect sense with The Handmaid's Tale, and I'm really glad that she invented the genre. So I also wanted to let you know that we're back. It's fall, and this is officially season five, and I'm going to be publishing at a more regular rate this fall. I'm going to be aiming for two times a month. And I'm also in working on some new things. I'm thinking about changing my name to my podcast. I named it the red firm book review, because that was a personal it was something personal to me. Where the Red Fern Grows is my favorite book. It was my favorite book as a kid, but now I think I want to grow a bit and maybe have the podcast named after more what I do as opposed to what I liked, and with that, I'm working on some other new changes. So if you have any ideas for a podcast name, let me know. I'd love to hear it, and you can reach me on Instagram at Red Fern book review. So I will talk to you soon, And thanks so much for tuning in. You.