On this episode of The Desk Set, we talk about re-reading books. Then, Emily interviews author Emily St. John Mandel, author of the The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven. Finally, Emily chats with Kira Jane Buxton about her novel Hollow Kingdom, which is full of nonhuman characters.
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A transcript of this episode is available at the end of our show notes.
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Credits
The Desk Set is brought to you by the King County Library System. The show is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, and produced by Britta Barrett. Our theme song is "I Know What I Want" by Math and Physics Club. Other music provided by Chad Crouch, from the Free Music Archive.
Transcript
Emily Calkins:
You're listening to The Desk Set.
Britta Barrett:
A bookish podcast for reading broadly.
Emily Calkins:
We're your hosts, Emily Calkins-
Britta Barrett:
And Britta Barrett.
Emily Calkins:
On this episode, we're talking about two of the categories from this year's reading challenge. First up, Britta and I will talk a little bit about re-reading an old favorite. Then we have two author interviews. I'll talk to Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Glass Hotel, which was a KCLS best book of 2020. It's now out in paperback. And Emily is also the author of Station Eleven, which is a personal favorite of mine that I'm hoping to re-read this year. And then I'll talk to Kira Jane Buxton. She wrote Hollow Kingdom, which was also one of our best books for 2019. It's about a crow named S.T. and his bloodhound friend, Dennis, among many other things. So it's a great fit for the category, read a book with a non-human character.
Britta Barrett:
So as we alluded to in the first episode of the season, when we were announcing challenge categories, we're not really re-readers.
Emily Calkins:
No, not at all. I think because of our jobs I feel like there's always something else that I am trying to read so I can share it on the podcast or in a column or on the website or on our social media. Part of our job is helping people discover new books and so we're always on the lookout for new books. So this re-reading is going to be interesting. Have you had a chance to do that, to re-read yet this year?
Britta Barrett:
I totally intended to go back and revisit The Plague by Camus, but it turns out that I didn't need any more existential dread in my life.
Emily Calkins:
I will say I put this category in the challenge this year thinking of re-reading as a source of comfort. So a lot of last year when I would ask people how are you reading? Has the pandemic changed your reading life? More people than ever told me, "Oh, I'm re-reading. I'm going back to things that are familiar. I'm going back to something where I know I'm going to get my happy ending or just something that feels like coming home." So Camus was not exactly what I was thinking of, although always I encourage people who are doing the challenge to interpret the categories in the way that works for them. So if you decide you want to revisit Camus in 2021, more power to you. Have you had any thoughts about what you might choose for your re-read this year?
Britta Barrett:
Yeah. So instead of re-reading, something I often do is try to find more books by an author that I really love or something in a similar category or theme. And I needed some help with that recently so I reached out to BookMatch and BookMatch actually reminded me of a book that I loved in high school. I was looking for spooky, supernatural mysteries, and I was primarily interested in audiobooks, but they couldn't help but mention that I would probably love something that's impossible to read as an audiobook which is called House of Leaves. Did you ever read this book?
Emily Calkins:
I have not. I'm not much of a horror reader. So tell me what it is.
Britta Barrett:
It is a puzzle box of a book and I fell in love with it in high school. It was pitched to me as deeply weird. It's by a person named Mark Z. Danielewski who by the way is the brother of that angsty nineties girl musician, Poe, just only added to the allure. And it is on the surface moving in to a spooky old house family drama, but it's a story within a story within a story that is formally quite experimental. It is the fictional manuscript that has been cobbled together from notes of a person who has died and left this manuscript behind in a house. And it is found by the editor who has included all of these footnotes which tell an entirely different story. And the manuscript is about a documentary of a family moving into this house and all of the strange things that happen.
Britta Barrett:
And then there's an appendices, which is an entirely separate epistolary novel that you can go down a rabbit hole in decoding all of these messages, so there's a lot going on there. And then there's a word for this and I might mispronounce it, so I'm sorry if I do. It's referred to as ergodic literature.
Emily Calkins:
Never heard that word.
Britta Barrett:
It means that you have to do a calculation to create meaning that extends beyond the ordinary bounds of what we normally think of as reading.
Emily Calkins:
So what does that look like in this book?
Britta Barrett:
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned, what does it look like? Because it's much easier to understand visually. I wish I could show you some of the pages. But the way that the novel uses words and text, ink and pages is so inventive. Some of the pages might remind you of say like a concrete poem by e.e. cummings in the sense that the typography also becomes images. You might have to turn it around to follow the text, and it's very much elaborate. It reminds me of Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. I'm wondering if I go back and re-read it, knowing what I know about its postmodernist tricks, will it still be as haunting and exciting as the first time I read it. And it's been about 20 years so I think I've forgotten almost all of the plot points beyond the initial premise, so it might be able to surprise me.
Emily Calkins:
That's one of the things that I think is so great about re-reading is that inevitably re-reading a book is different experience than reading it the first time. So you're saying all this time has elapsed and you have forgotten the plot points, but you know some of them and you'll be revisiting it with a whole couple of decades worth of life experience and thinking about literature than you had when you first re-read it as a high school student.
Emily Calkins:
I'm thinking about the first time I read Great Gatsby, I was, I don't know, in eighth grade or something. And it was one of those things where it was like, yeah, technically I can read the words on the page here, and I was trying to be an impressive eighth grader. But I remember just being like, "What? Why do people like this book?" I re-read it in my mid twenties, and obviously it was an extremely different experience for someone who is 25 than it was for a 13 year old. I think there's a whole different conversation to be had there about how we choose literature for young people and the difference between the ability to read the words and the ability to get the themes. But I think there's something really powerful about revisiting something with a different set of life experiences under your belt.
Britta Barrett:
Yeah. Part of why I'm excited to revisit House of Leaves is that because it deals with epistemology and semiotics and has all of these deep footnotes and illusions, I think there's so much I missed the first time as a 14 year old that either I've read all those books that they're talking about now and will get it more. And there are so many different readings of this particular book that there will inevitably be something fresh to see. But I'm a little bit worried about the narrative voice of the editor, because from my memory he's a misogynist jerk and I'm not so sure how well that will age.
Emily Calkins:
I re-read The Glass Hotel to talk to Emily St. John Mandel. So it was a pretty different re-read than when I re-read The Great Gatsby, because I first read The Glass Hotel when it came out a year ago. Obviously I didn't have the change in myself that I did - it wasn't 20 years later, it was 13 or 14 months later, but it was still a very different reading experience because I'm such a plot reader. It's one of the reasons that I love mysteries and romance is because I'm propelled through a book by the plot. It's one of the reasons I struggle with non-fiction. It doesn't mean that I don't care about other things, but it's just really hard for me to slow down if I'm drawn in by the plot and I like to be drawn in by the plot.
Emily Calkins:
But I had already read The Glass Hotel and I knew what the plot was and I knew where the ending was going. And so it let me think about different parts of the book. It let me see themes a little bit more and knowing what was coming let me find connections that I didn't see the first time, partially because I didn't know what was coming and also just again, because I was like, "Okay, but what's going to happen? What's next?" No matter how much time has elapsed, I think it's a really interesting experiment to re-read something. I wish that I had time to do it more, but like we said, it's just a function of our jobs that we don't have a lot of space in our reading lives to re-read. So it's fun that it's on the list this year because it's encouraged me to do that.
Emily Calkins:
But I'm excited to hear how it goes for patrons, and I'm excited to hear what you think of House of Leaves when you have a chance to get back to it.
Britta Barrett:
So we would love to see what you're reading, and one way you can do that is by tagging us on Instagram, on Twitter, anywhere you follow us and send us a picture and let us know what it is that you're revisiting. So you can follow us all across social. We've got a Facebook page. Our Twitter handle is @KCLS and our Instagram account is @kingcountylibrary.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. We'd love to hear from readers and hear how re-reading is going for you.
Emily Calkins:
I'm here with Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Glass Hotel. For listeners who haven't read the book yet, can you tell us a little bit about it?
Emily St. John Mandel:
The Glass Hotel is honestly the most difficult to describe of all the books I've ever written. With my previous novel, Station Eleven, I could say, well, it's about a traveling Shakespearian theater company in a post-apocalyptic North America. But with The Glass Hotel, what I've been going with lately is that it's a ghost story. It's also a story about a massive white collar crime, and it's also got a lot about international shipping. And I realize that doesn't sound riveting. It's a very hard book to describe.
Emily Calkins:
It is a hard book to describe. And as I was putting together my questions for you, I was trying to figure out how I could talk about it without spoiling it. Although, because the way that it unfolds is not linear, spoilers aren't even necessarily really a thing.
Emily St. John Mandel:
It's true. The woman falls off the container ship on page two, but at the end, you figure out why and how she fell off that ship.
Emily Calkins:
You said it's about shipping, and I think it's so interesting because in a lot of ways, the shipping industry has this huge impact on our daily lives, but it's largely invisible for a lot of people. But it's central not just to The Glass Hotel, but it also plays a big part in your last novel, Station Eleven. How did you get interested in shipping and why do you like writing about it?
Emily St. John Mandel:
It just came from this random article that I came across. And it was a piece that ran in the Daily Mail. I think the title was Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession or something like that. The author's name was Simon Parry. And it just described this really strange haunting situation where... The way the shipping industry is set up, there isn't really a parking lot. Ships are in constant motion. They just never stop. But what happens during an economic downturn is that of course there's much less demand because if nobody's spending money, then the goods don't need to come from China to North America, for example. So there was a huge overcapacity problem. And back in 2009, the solution that some shipping companies came up with was to park these massive container ships. I want to say it was about a hundred miles south of Singapore Harbor.
Emily St. John Mandel:
So from the perspective of the people who lived around there in this fishing village, they looked out one night and the horizon was a blaze of lights. All of these ships that had just arrived and were just sitting there, not moving for days and weeks and months. And some of them were a little bit afraid. They worried that there was something a little bit ghostly about them, which was frankly understandable when you saw the pictures. It looked like a sort of abandoned fleet way off on the horizon.
Emily St. John Mandel:
So I think I was just struck by that image. And then as I read more about it, I was really struck by what you just alluded to, which is the combination of immense scale and invisibility, that we don't really notice shipping because we don't have to. Our bananas arrive on our breakfast table. But that banana was piloted through the Panama Canal. There are people involved in moving all of these goods. So it's just become this oddly invisible part of our economy that's also an enormous part of our economy. So I think that's what interests me in it. I don't know that I would write a third book that featured the shipping industry. But it was interesting for a couple of projects.
Emily Calkins:
So that invisibility is a theme in the novel in a couple of ways. Especially this idea that there are these cultural currencies, mostly money in the case of The Glass Hotel, but also beauty that can give people visibility, but there are other ways that people can become invisible, not having money or these service jobs that several characters find themselves in; bartending, housekeeping, even being an administrative assistant.
Emily St. John Mandel:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Emily Calkins:
Can you talk about how characters in novel experience invisibility as both powerful and agency stripping?
Emily St. John Mandel:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, invisibility will let you fly under the radar and go unnoticed. The day job that I had up until a year after Station Eleven came out was, I was an administrative assistant in a cancer research lab at the Rockefeller University. And I remember one day the philanthropist who had funded the opening of the lab came to visit. And that was a big deal. He'd given a lot of money to the university. By that time I was publishing novels. So my boss introduced me as a novelist, and the philanthropist could not have been more lovely or interested. He started telling me all about his daughter who was attending... I can't remember what she was doing, but it was some sort of arts degree at a university.
Emily St. John Mandel:
And then a few months later that same philanthropist visited again. This time my boss wasn't there, so I was just an administrative assistant, and he literally couldn't see me, which I found fascinating. I tried to catch his eye just to say good morning. And his eye just slid right over me like I was part of the office furniture, which just fascinates me as a phenomenon, the way classism can lead to this really interesting invisibility. And I'd say the way it plays out most clearly in the novel is probably the character Simone. The criminal, Johnathan, employees a staff who's dealing with logistics of perpetuating a massive crime. Everybody's in on it except for the new receptionist. She's not in on the crime and yet he has her shredding evidence because he kind of can't see her. He can't quite wrap his head around the idea that this is actually a person who might actually understand that some of the documents she's shredding are incriminating. But to his eye, she's part of the office furniture.
Emily Calkins:
The other person that I was thinking of with this is Leon, who goes from being the shipping executive to living in what he calls the shadow country, which is not just invisible people but this whole invisible economy. People don't even see the people packaging things in warehouses or working behind the desk at the Marriott.
Emily St. John Mandel:
Yeah. I think that we don't want to see those people. I think for those of us who don't feel like we're in the margins of society, who are doing okay, we're afraid to see those people who are really struggling. Because if we can be honest here, for all of the great things about living in this country, there's not much of a social safety net. You can fall really pretty far pretty fast in the United States relative to a Canada or an Australia or much of Western Europe.
Emily St. John Mandel:
So I think it scares us when we see the tents under the expressway, or we see people in our cities who are collecting cans that are going to turn in for the refund to survive, or even a rung above that on the socioeconomic ladder, people who are behind the desk at the Marriott, or washing your dishes at the restaurant. I think that people who are doing okay in this economy, they're afraid to see those people because they're afraid that could be them, that it would not take too many moments of misfortune to find yourself in a very compromised position in this country.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. That touches on one of the other themes that I noticed in The Glass Hotel, which is this idea about potential stories and the way that a single decision or a moment can change the course of a life. So I pulled this quote: "She was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being moved without her, other Vincents engaged in different events." Can you talk about that idea of other stories and other lives and how it shows up in the novel?
Emily St. John Mandel:
Absolutely. Yeah. That's an idea that fascinates me. That's the counter life in the novel, your counterfactual life, which is to say the life you didn't live. And you could think of that in terms of the fairly large decisions you made in your life. Imagine what your life is if you married a different person or if you immigrated instead of staying or vice versa, or if you went to a different college. You can even break that down much further to tiny moments that changed your life. I remember a moment in Toronto when I was probably 21, when I was out for a walk. I remember it was a really beautiful afternoon, and on a whim I picked up a copy of one of the alt-weeklies in Toronto. And I read a review of a novel which led me into a correspondence with the novelist, who became my boyfriend.
Emily St. John Mandel:
And to make a long story short, that began a chain of events that takes us to this moment where I'm living in New York City and I'm married to my husband who I would not have met without that novelist. And we have a daughter who would not exist without that chain of events. And it all comes back to the moment of choosing to pick up a newspaper on a street in Toronto. So I'm just fascinated by that idea that there are countless shadow versions of your life. We tend to think of ghost stories and these classic terms like the spectre or walking down the hallway in a Victorian mansion, that kind of thing. But imagine the idea that your life is haunted by the ghosts of the lives you didn't lead.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. And I think for readers who read Station Eleven and then read The Glass Hotel, there's even some of that too, because there are characters from Station Eleven in The Glass Hotel living their other ghost lives. There's a little line about the Georgian flu and how it's contained which obviously is not what happens in Station Eleven. So I love that not only did you explore it in the world of this novel, but tied it back as well.
Emily St. John Mandel:
Yeah, definitely. And I really appreciate you picking that up because I know that confused a lot of people. I've seen a couple of really nice reviews of The Glass Hotel, but there will be a line in there that says something like, "And this is set in the years before the Station Eleven pandemic." But for anybody who's thinking about reading The Glass Hotel, I promise that it is 100% pandemic free.
Emily Calkins:
So speaking of the pandemic, I know that Station Eleven was in the process of being adapted for television, and I imagine that the filming of that was impacted by the pandemic.
Emily St. John Mandel:
If you want to talk about irony, the pandemic miniseries was interrupted by an actual pandemic. I was just Zooming with the show runner the other day and they're actually resuming work. The production is going forward in Toronto.
Emily Calkins:
Well, that's exciting. I'm looking forward to watching it. And I wonder what's it been like for you to think about Station Eleven, which is set, of course during a fictional global pandemic in the midst of a real one. Has it changed the way that you think about that work?
Emily St. John Mandel:
I think one thing that I didn't think about when I was writing Station Eleven is the idea that being in a pandemic isn't always a binary state. And what I mean by that is, I'd read a lot about the history of pandemics. And I think despite all of that research, I thought of it as being like, you're either in or you're out. You're either in a pandemic or not in a pandemic. But I'm haunted by the period when the pandemic is almost there, but not quite, which was exactly a year ago for New York City. A year ago this month, we were hearing these terrifying stories from China and then it was starting to appear in Italy. We were concerned. We were following it closely. Cases had appeared in Seattle, but we were still taking our kids to school and we were still getting on the subway and shaking hands with strangers. And it was this very strange interlude where we were kind of in and kind of out. And that was something that I just hadn't really thought about before when I was writing Station Eleven.
Emily St. John Mandel:
And then another thing that I find striking thinking about the book now, we're living in this era of alternative facts, where information is so siloed and where different people can live in totally separate realities depending on what news they consume. So in Station Eleven, there's that moment when all of the airplanes are grounded. A flight is diverted to this regional airport in Northern Michigan. The passengers get out and they gather below a TV news monitor, I think it's CNN. And they believe what they're seeing. And that was completely plausible when I wrote it in, let's say 2011. But if you try to map that onto our current moment, half the people watching would say it was a liberal conspiracy, everybody would be on Twitter. It's just much more chaotic now than it was then. So yeah, that's something that reads as implausible now just as a reflection of the way the world's changed.
Emily Calkins:
What you were saying about the liminal space at the beginning of a pandemic before it's really the pandemic reminded me of a line in The Glass Hotel where I think it's Miranda who says tragedy becomes boring or a catastrophe becomes boring as you're living in it. And she's talking about this financial collapse. You have the initial run on banks and it feels like a big deal and then it just keeps happening and you get used to living with it. And I think that's something that I have really noticed as we're going into now, like you said, we're heading into year two of the pandemic and it's amazing what you can get used to.
Emily St. John Mandel:
Yeah, absolutely. I've had the same thought. And a question I've gotten over the past year has been, well, are you able to work? And at first I really wasn't because in New York last spring, it was just constant ambulance sirens. It was really hard to focus. But the bigger issue was shock, honestly. Just this kind of incredulity, how is this happening? How is this possibly real? At this point, we're used to it, which actually scares me a little bit. I start each day by looking at the previous day's COVID numbers for New York City, which is not a great habit by the way. It's probably super unhealthy.
Emily Calkins:
I do the same thing.
Emily St. John Mandel:
Yeah. But you find yourself thinking, okay, well, yesterday it wasn't so bad. There were only 3,678 new cases and only 72 people died. It's kind of horrible, isn't it, what you can get used to.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. It's astonishing. Going back to, we were talking about Station Eleven being adapted for television. I read that you wrote a pilot for an adaptation of The Glass Hotel. How was writing for television different from writing a novel?
Emily St. John Mandel:
It's so different. It's so collaborative, which I didn't realize I was missing because to be honest, one of the things I've always loved about writing a novel is just the quiet and privacy of it. The way it's something you do on your own time. You just close yourself in a room and disappear into this magical world that you're creating. But writing for television, it's so collaborative in a way that I've found really fun. So I've been working with a writing partner. We just send scripts back and forth. I'll write a terrible draft, she'll send it back magically 50% better. I'll make some changes and send it back to her. And it's just really fun in a way I hadn't expected.
Emily St. John Mandel:
I have to say, it's also given me a new level of respect for just the way that different forms have different dramatic requirements. So as readers, we're all familiar with that thing where you see the screen adaptation of your favorite book and you're like, "Wow, they were so off. It's totally different from the book." Yeah, because it had to be. Because TV and movies have totally different dramatic requirements. Every scene has to be charged with tension. So yeah, it's given me a new understanding of why it's always different.
Emily Calkins:
So this interview will be part of an episode of the podcast where we talk about re-reading favorite books. Are you a re-reader and are there old favorites that you'd like to revisit?
Emily St. John Mandel:
I very rarely re-read books. I just have this feeling like there's so many books and so little time, and every book I re-read is a new book I'll never get to. But there is one exception to that, and that's a novel called Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson. And I think she's brilliant. That novel, it's a coming of age story set in British Columbia. There's a kind of sense of hauntedness in it, which it's very different from my book. The source of that sense of hauntedness in Monkey Beach goes back to indigenous stories about the land. But yeah, it's just the most striking, riveting, beautifully written mysterious book. And that's a novel that I've read at least three times.
Emily Calkins:
And then we always like to ask, what are you reading now?
Emily St. John Mandel:
I'm reading a book called Journey by Moonlight. It's a really interesting novel. It was written in, I want to say 1937. It was right before war broke out in Europe. And the author was traveling around Europe with the understanding that, that wouldn't be possible for very much longer and a war was obviously eminent by that point. So the novel's not about war, but it does have this atmosphere of dread, which I didn't know, maybe that particularly speaks to me at the moment living through a pandemic, but yeah, it's a beautifully written book. I've been trying to read more literature in translation lately.
Emily Calkins:
So thank you so much for being with us.
Emily St. John Mandel:
Well, thank you. This was fun.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
Kira Jane Buxton:
I'm Kira Jane Buxton and my debut novel came out in 2019. It's called Hollow Kingdom and it's a humorous literary dystopian novel with some fantasy elements and some horror and some nature writing. It is narrated by an American crow named S.T. He is a crow who has been raised by an electrician named Big Jim in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle. And he's a crow who really doesn't identify with being a crow since he's been raised by a human and he loves everything to do with our species, and he's been raised on this steady diet of Cheetos and a lot of trash TV and also a lot of educational TV. And so his understanding of our species comes through the filter of this Big Jim character as well as his TV education.
Kira Jane Buxton:
And he has this pretty straightforward life with his owner, Big Jim, and this bloodhound, Dennis, that they live with. And then one day something a little off happens to Big Jim. His eyeball rolls out of his head, and poor old S.T. thinks, "Oo, that seems a little off." And so he sets about trying to figure out what happened and he has to venture out, not just outside of his cozy little Ravenna house, but into the larger world of nature and he has to confront some of his identity issues as a crow, as a bird. And it's all about how he goes about to try and figure out what this malady is that's happening to Big Jim and to ultimately save humanity is his goal.
Emily Calkins:
So we wanted to have you on the show because one of the categories for our annual reading challenge is read a book with non-human characters and Hollow Kingdom is full of them, not just S.T. and his bloodhound friend, Dennis, but lots of other animals. And one of the things that's fun about reading the book is there's all of these amazing facts about animals. I learned about anting, which is this thing that crows do where they rub ants on themselves to make their feathers shiny. How do you make those characters human enough that readers can connect with them, but still maintain their animalness?
Kira Jane Buxton:
First of all, I feel growing up that I read a lot of books that were with animal characters, and I missed that as an adult. And this buzzword anthropomorphism, I think people tend to look down on it sometimes, or to feel that it might be a little puerile or childish. To me, it was daunting to take on writing about animals. I grew up around them. I grew up abroad. I grew up in Indonesia and Dubai and various places. I was always around a lot of animals. My first job was at a zoo in Indonesia. I used to run around and have these amazing close encounters with animals. They all have complicated personalities. And for anybody that lives with an animal, they can tell you pretty quickly what those personality traits are.
Kira Jane Buxton:
And I had trepidation, but also a lot of joy in finding those voices and putting them to the page, especially for S.T., who is this kind of waggish, saucy little character, and who is largely based upon a crow that I know who I have befriended and I spend time with her daily and have done for the past four years. She's a wild crow who lives in my neighborhood, and I sit with her on the porch and she comes right up to me and I get to see what her personality is like. Using those experiences, I'd had being close with animals and then channeling it into a character and channeling it into voices.
Emily Calkins:
So you mentioned just now that you grew up abroad, and the city of Seattle is such a huge part of Hollow Kingdom. There's these pivotal scenes set at the aquarium and the football stadium, but there's also nods to a little neighborhood bakery. What made Seattle the right setting for this story?
Kira Jane Buxton:
Yeah. I think I have always been hunting for the home that might not be where I was born, but where I could really flourish in and feel like was my actual home, and I didn't really experience that until I came to the Pacific Northwest. It was really a wonderful experience. I was living in LA at the time and my husband and I came to Seattle on a vacation and it was the trees. Looking at these evergreens and the Douglas firs and the western red cedars, these gorgeous trees. And I turned to him and I said, what do we have to do to live around these trees? And that's not an exaggeration. That is actually why I live here. And fortunately we were able to move here and it just has been a really wonderful fit for me. I love it. I love the wildlife here, I love the people, I love everything about it. So yeah, I definitely think that the book is an absolute love letter to Seattle or the Pacific Northwest.
Emily Calkins:
So the book follows S.T. and Dennis pretty closely, but there are interstitial chapters from the point of view of animals all around the world. What made you decide to include those and do you have a favorite?
Kira Jane Buxton:
I think I included them because I'm just so interested in what's going on in the natural world and what we can learn and how we can use that to protect it. It was such a joy to include other viewpoints of animals around the world. And I think in part, that's to illuminate what's happening, because this is a story of a global event that happens to humanity. And so to see how the animals are all having a response to this and how connected we are to the natural world. We often talk about nature as being an abstract or a separation from who we are, but we're inextricably linked. And so animals would certainly, if something happened to humanity, have a response, good or bad.
Kira Jane Buxton:
And I had so much fun because these are animals that I've had experiences with. It's tough to pick a favorite because I'm so fond of these characters. I'd say Genghis Cat is pretty high up there because this is a very quintessential arrogant feline that might be recognizable if you live with a cat and he is based upon a cat that I had. And so I feel a real fondness for the unapologetic arrogance of this cat. It's hard to choose. I think it's lovely and I also feel like S.T. is such a loquacious and strong character that it's nice to get a little break from him.
Emily Calkins:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So S.T.'s story has this mythic feel to it. He's on a quest. He's helped along the way by these mentors who come into his story briefly and offer him some wisdom or some clues. He learned some new skills and then he has to discover some things about himself. So I'm wondering if you were inspired by classic myths at all when you were writing it?
Kira Jane Buxton:
I definitely think I was inspired by certainly classic fantasy. As a child, an early favorite was The Hobbit. I also was influenced by things that I hadn't really realized had made such an impact until very recently. There was a book by John Christopher called Empty World. It's this amazing book about an apocalypse. And it was the first time as a child I read it that I had some understanding of this concept of human beings, what would happen if something happened and that they would no longer be around. I re-read it, I want to say a year, year and a half ago. And I was pretty floored by when you look back on what you've read and see how somehow it's planted little seeds in your mind. It's quite magical.
Emily Calkins:
There's a wonderful tension in the book between the devastation that humanity has caused - so there's a lot about the environmental degradation and our addiction to our phones and all of that, but also the amazing things that people have created. S.T., he has so much admiration for the MoFos, as he calls them. He is astonishingly foul-mouthed as a narrator. I don't know that I've ever read a book with so much delightful swearing in it, but he's also so tender. Can you talk about navigating that balance?
Kira Jane Buxton:
Yeah. That's such a great question. Well, to address the swearing first. I mean, I'm asked about this a lot. Why was it necessary to have him swear so much? And I think partly it's, they've done studies about swearing being a sign of higher intelligence. And so partly I was feeding into that idea that the corvid brain is... I don't think we've even begun to scratch the surface of how intelligent these birds are. I have friends who are licensed wildlife rehabilitators who live with crows, which is not something I recommend. Aside from it being illegal, it's a full-time job. Imagine like a toddler with wings. And so they have all said, "No, definitely this is how they would talk. Swearing would be right. Swearing like sailors."
Kira Jane Buxton:
He is a dichotomy. He deeply, deeply loves humanity and everything about our species. And because of how he's raised, he has this very anthropocentric lens on everything. And I think what he symbolizes is hope, and he has this unwavering belief that if we can just find a human and they could use that brilliant, brilliant mind, we could change the world. And I think there's an element of my hope in that, and balancing that with the environmental degradation and then thinking about what would happen and what is happening with climate change. I think that there is a hope that yes, that we could use our big, beautiful brains, which in many ways we are starting to do. The focus on climate change is very different since I started talking about this book. So yes, that I think is the impetus for having S.T. be such a hopeful human-loving bird who believes that we could do anything we put our minds to, even save the world.
Emily Calkins:
And you have a new book coming out in August. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Kira Jane Buxton:
I do. It's called Feral Creatures. And it is the sequel to Hollow Kingdom. It's also written as a standalone, but it is very much a continuation of the adventures of S.T. Coming in August.
Emily Calkins:
Very exciting. And then lastly we always ask, can you tell us what you're reading now?
Kira Jane Buxton:
I'm reading this book, it's called Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. It's nonfiction. It's about fungi. It's about the mycorrhiza and it's about the fascinating discoveries that Merlin Sheldrake and his cohorts have made regarding mushrooms and fungi.
Emily Calkins:
Do you read a lot of non-fiction?
Kira Jane Buxton:
I actually do, but almost exclusively about the natural world, which I'm trying to get better at. I'm trying to be more diverse in it. Not always be about the natural world. I did just read a wonderful book called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett who is a neuroscientist. So that was so fascinating. And I had the great privilege of being asked to read an early copy of a book called The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin, which comes out... I think it's out in April. But it's a beautiful book. It's a novel and it's really a book about redemption and finding family and persevering. And also the best part about it is that Eileen is actually a beekeeper. So it's threaded with all this gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous information about bees and the way they live and how it's woven into these characters' lives. Lovely book, highly recommend.
Emily Calkins:
Great. Well, we will put that and all of the other titles that we talked about as well as the link to Hollow Kingdom in the show notes. So thank you so much for being with us today. It was really fun to talk to you.
Kira Jane Buxton:
Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for having me. It was such a pleasure.
Emily Calkins:
Thanks for listening. The Desk Set is hosted by librarians, Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins produced by Britta Barrett and brought to you by the King County Library System.
Britta Barrett:
If you liked the show, be sure to subscribe, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.
