Henry Baum’s Eschatology

Henry Baum is an outsider. He’s been a part of the small press movement for several years now, and his books are always swift, violent and compelling. His latest novel, The American Book of the Dead, is no exception. With keen prose and an original metaphoric vision, Baum catapults us into a dystopic America in the not-too-distant future with terrifying similarities to the world we recognize as the one we live in each day. Henry was kind enough to conduct this email interview with me, briefly discussing this book and the unusual place he holds in small press publishing.

CW: Most books start out with a point of inspiration, either and image or concept in the writer’s mind. What was that impetus for The American Book of the Dead?

HB: I’ve always been attracted to fringe ideas – especially those ideas that have such profound implications, but are treated like a joke, which is basically the case with most fringe subjects: UFOs, the paranormal, near death experiences, etc. This is somewhat connected to my interest/advocacy of self-publishing: derided by so many, but a really important development for writers to help get the word out. UFOs are the same – “what if” is important enough of a question that laughing it off seems really ill-advised.

Anyway, going back a bit – I was in New York City during 9-11, living downtown. I saw both planes hit in real time and the experience broke something open in me. My girlfriend and I moved to Wilmington, North Carolina soon afterward and I went sort of nuts reading about every fringe idea I could find: UFOs, conspiracy theory, psychedelic research, and so on. I’m not totally credulous, but I find the stuff fascinating, and just fun. I think I was looking for meaning, proof of God, proof of a better future, after witnessing the worst of the present. The American Book of the Dead came out of that research. It’s about a writer whose book about the apocalypse turns out to come true. Not a small part of me believed my vision of the apocalypse was actually possible.

CW: Your previous books like The Golden Calf and North of Sunset both have themes of violence and the danger of celebrity culture. The American Book of the Dead seems to operate on a much larger scale. Maybe this is reductive, but it seems there a sea change in your writing between psychological stories of isolated individuals to a more thorough social novel. Were you aware of this change as you were writing and how do you explain it?

HB: It’s funny, when I was done with North of Sunset – which is about serial killing – I thought, All right, I’m done with outlandish stories, I’m going to get back to writing about the small, everyday interaction between people. But that didn’t happen. At all. I went from serial killing a handful of people to killing virtually everyone on earth.

But I do see this as a sort of natural progression. Though The American Book of the Dead is about religion – specifically the Christianity of the far-right and some New Age ideas about consciousness – it’s not that far off from what I’ve written before. The first novel is called The Golden Calf, after all, and I do think that Hollywood/celebrity culture is a kind of religion. People are fanatically devoted to it and celebrities are elevated to a bigger than life, Godlike status. I wonder where I got my interest in spirituality and religion and basically I was raised in it. My parents are basically atheists, but they’re also kind of religiously devoted to Hollywood – they both work in it. So instead of moving on to a smaller story, I instead moved away from writing about Hollywood to writing about religion directly.

CW: As the newest member of the guild of writers writing about the Apocalypse, why do you think eschatology is such an active part of the literary imagination right now?

If I’d actually finished this book when I started it I could claim to be more prescient, but this novel took me 7 years to write (not writing constantly for 7 years, mind you). I started writing in 2002, before The Road, et al. But now the apocalypse is everywhere.

Also when I started writing my novel it was the era of George Bush – as was the case with The Road or when “2012″ was being developed, or Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012 book. It was hard to not think apocalyptically during those years when the fear and volatility they unleashed seemed almost purposefully designed to cause unrest. And when you factor in Bush’s born again calling, his calls for a “crusade,” it didn’t take a great leap for me (and other writers) to feel a sense of doom about the future. 9-11 pretty much ripped a hole in the fabric of everyone’s sense of peace. Watching the Twin Towers fall was sort of like watching the world come to an end – at least the world we’d known up to that point.

What’s so strange to me is this sense of paranoia about the Bush administration has now been replaced by paranoia by Bush’s own supporters – who think Obama’s out to create an American apocalypse with socialism, “shredding the Constitution,” and the other mass-delusional stupidities that are thrown about. Seems like there will always be this fear of the end, whatever your political affiliations. Might just tie into something so simple as the fear of death. But global warming/worldwide strife is growing so it’s understandable if people are overly worried about the future. So much is coming to a head – wars in the Holy Land, global warming, 2012 projections – out-there ideas seem to be becoming manifest. It’s a pretty incredible time we’re living in, even if it can be depressing.

CW: You’ve put out ABOD with Backword Books, which is a writers’ consortium that pools resources. It’s a great idea, I think, and one that undercuts a lot of the traditional stigma of self-publishing.You, of course, have had success with traditional small publishing, as seen with your first novel coming out of the prestigious art house publisher Soft Skull Press. Tell us how Backword Books is working and if you have any new info you’d like to put out there.

HB: Backword Books is going well and had some good press to start – a mention in Publisher’s Weekly (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6687523.html) – so people are open to this idea, and more open to self-publishing itself. Our ultimate goal is to bypass the traditional model and get brick and mortar distribution via this set-up. That hasn’t happened yet, but I think collectives like this will start popping up more and more – taking some of the “self” out of self-publishing, but still allowing writers to remain independent and have an outlet if the book’s not picked up by a traditional publisher.

I’m not one of those people who thinks self-publishing is superior to traditional publishing. I just don’t think the very short window writers have with traditional editors should determine if a book’s released or not. Plenty of good books get rejected (often based on monetary concerns) and this shouldn’t stop writers from finding readers. That’s basically what Backword is about.

CW: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

HB: I know my book is weird. Not only am I writing about fringe subjects that people don’t take seriously, I’m using a publishing platform that people don’t always take seriously. One day I’ll be vindicated, I think. I just hope it doesn’t take 25 years.

http://theamericanbookofthedead.com

Mark Powell Story

For those of you who had a chance to see my interview with Mark Powell, it’s no secret I think highly of this brilliant young novelist’s work. Just found out he has a short story published online in the new Appalachian journal STILL. Check it out here.

Mark Powell Interview

If you are looking for ammunition to fight the prevailing idea that the novel is dying as important cultural discourse, then the slug for you is a writer named Mark Powell. Powell’s books, Prodigals and Blood Kin, are stylistically resonant and rich with an earnest moral concern. He tells stories of violence, addiction and redemption with the grace and distinction of a truly world-class novelist.

Powell currently teaches English at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. He was kind enough to conduct this short interview over email.

Novelist Mark Powell

CW: Both of your novels are deeply informed by two recurring themes—place and violence. This contributes to a rather mythic quality very much at odds with much fiction being written by younger writers. With writers like Tao Lin and Miranda July, there is often a lightsome, almost wryly humorous quality to their fiction when dealing with serious themes. It leads to what I would almost call a fear of commitment on the author’s part. There’s also a sense that these stories (and the many imitations) could have happened in any place. Your stories, however, feel authentically tied to where they are occurring and there is a narrative force that seems to run as deep as your own bones. Can you tell us if this is a conscious approach or one that has always been part of your impulse to tell stories.

MP: It’s interesting that you say that, as I often feel like I was born too late–at least when it comes to my prose. In my defense, I can only say that I have always viewed life as too serious to approach in any manner other than straight forward. Which isn’t to say others should do likewise. Only that I don’t know how else to face things. I recognize the legitimacy of writing that is clever or whimsical, but it doesn’t particularly interest me. Life is violent and terrible, but it’s also comprised of moments of amazing beauty, and I lack the ability to render it in any other form. My constant fear as a writer as that I will fail to convey the gravity of living. I know that to some degree that sets me up as boorish, but I’ll have to live with that, and, honestly, I’d rather err on the side of being “unredeemingly dark,” as one reviewer said about BLOOD KIN, than on keeping to the sunny side.

As for place, life has to be rendered in concrete specific terms. I like Eudora Welty’s quote about how understanding one place well allows you to better understand all others.

CW: Each of your novels features characters recovering from combat experiences abroad. This often translates into a fragmented sense of peace in their own lives once they return home. What is the impetus behind this concern?

MP: I’m not sure why exactly, maybe because had fate not played out slightly different I would have been a soldier. (I went to a military college and always assumed I would be in the service.) Or maybe because the narrative of my extended family has been one of men returning from war. With my grandfathers and my great-uncles war was always such a touchstone. There was before the war and then there was everything after, that terrible seismic shift. But if, as McCarthy says in BLOOD MERIDIAN, “War is and we are,” then maybe war is the only real subject, war and love, and everything else an after-shock.

CW: Readers will note a stylistic shift from your first book PRODIGALS to your second novel BLOOD KIN. While both books are recognizably Mark Powell books, there’s the obvious change from hyphens to quotation marks to denote dialog. But also, there’s an opening up of the syntax in BLOOD KIN, a kind of lofty ease that’s quite different from the sharp edged poetry of PRODIGALS. It would be inaccurate to call PRODIGALS more tight stylistically, but there’s something going on where you’re letting the rhythm of the language carry itself in BLOOD KIN, almost in a way that it becomes a voice driven novel, along the lines say of something by Virginia Woolf. This is very different than the close-up psychological interiority we see in PRODIGALS. How do you explain this change?

MP: The opening up of the language is, I think, my maturation as a writer (what little of it there has been). My prose continues to become more expansive. I’m not sure why. Confidence, maybe. PRODIGALS was the first thing I ever wrote and so much of the process was a matter of simply trying to make the book work.

CW: It would be interesting to hear about some of your influences, both literary and otherwise. Are there certain voices that keep drawing you back over the years?

MP: The earliest and, I suppose, strongest literary influences were Faulkner, McCarthy, and O’Connor. I love writers whose work occupies a dark space, and characters that are seekers. Denis Johnson and Robert Stone are two writers that I’m always rereading. And Joseph Conrad. And Dostoevsky. If there are Tolstoy folks and Dostoevsky folks in the world, I aspire to be a Tolstoy man, knowing all along I’m not and never will be.

But perhaps more importantly, I spent huge chunks of my childhood sitting on our front porch talking. My entire family. We argued, told stories, just talked, talked, talked.

CW: It seems that a keen awareness of the natural world is a large part of your stories. Talk to us a little about your sense of environmental ethics as it pertains to your fiction.

MP: I’ve been through periods of intense activism, but now more and more seem to be mired in despair. Nature, solitude, silence–these aren’t commodities therefore we have decided they have no real value. A coal seam–that has value–so we level the mountain. But I can’t imagine life without wild places, even, like in the SC mountains, when they aren’t even that wild. When you step out of the woods you cut off one major connection that binds us to millions of years of humanity. And we call this progress.

CW: I’ve read that you’re at work on a new novel. Can you talk about this project and when we might be able to get our hands on a copy?

MP: I’ve just finished a third novel called, right now, THE HOUSE OF THE LORD. It’s actually set mostly in South America but concerns a southerner gone afoul. It’s in the hands of my agent and hopefully by the time folks read this it will be going out to houses. I’m clawing (very slowly) through the first draft of a fourth novel which is set back in SC in the present.

CW: Is there anything else you would like to add?

MP: Just thanks for reading and thanks for the questions.