1. Necronauts is told through 95 obituaries that detail the lives of townsfolk and a peculiar boy in a cosmonaut helmet, exploring themes of alienation, family, and belief. How did you choose to weigh hope compared to existential loss in the fragmented stories?

This was probably the thing that frustrated and worried me the most while writing this book. Truman Capote talks about writing from a detached space. He calls it writing with a “deliberate, hard, cool head,” which I interpret as being entirely unsentimental and sincerely brutal. You can’t flinch; you can’t fake it. You have to write your savage, honest truth. And it’s a savage book. Given the obituary form, I literally had to kill characters on every page. And there’s a morbid playfulness to that, but it’s depressing too. And it weighed on me writing it as I knew it would weigh on the reader with a kind of heavy existential despair. Especially publishing it in the current shitshow that is global politics. But I tried to balance that out with humor. And maybe this falls flat for some people, but for me humor is hope. It’s a tricky kind of humor I’m playing with in the book because it’s a razor-thin satire. Like you might not be sure if I’m being satirical or serious, which produces a kind of grotesque feeling. And satire loves the grotesque, no doubt about it, which makes some people misperceive the grotesque as being cruel and alienating. But I adhere to the Mikhail Bakhtin notion of the grotesque that it is more life-affirming than bleak and cynical and demoralizing. I’m fascinated by grotesque things. Our culture is designed to speed through everything now, perpetually obsessed with the next thing, obsessed with convenience and comfort, but the grotesque slows us down, gives us pause. You got to really sit with something grotesque because it’s neither this nor that. The grotesque doesn’t fit any algorithm. It’s an abnormality, a sock in the gears of the cultural machinery. So, the laughter that comes from grotesque satire is not just cathartic but has an eye on the future. It’s a hopeful, dreamy, defiant laughter that echoes into the future even as it boomerangs back to slap you in the face. It’s like laughing and crying at the same time. There’s an awful beauty to that. But that’s the kind of narrative space I wanted for this book.

2. The editor’s note that prefaces the novel introduces a personal connection of the narrative to your life; how much of this story was grounded in perceived experience as opposed to what you combined into the narrative’s amalgamized perspective of life?

When I started writing the obituaries that eventually became the book, I was working off a lot of family oral histories. That was my original source material. My father is an amateur genealogist, and his life’s work has been to not only map out our family history going back centuries but archive as much material culture as possible. So, he’s collected photos, letters, postcards, and all sorts of artifacts and heirlooms. It’s this rich repository of information and a wellspring of creative fodder. Initially, I conceived the novel and the town of Calypsee as full of my Habermeyer ancestors. I thought it would be interesting to straddle this line between fact and fiction and invent this pseudo family history of my ancestors living and dying in the Utah desert. But as I worked with that source material, I found myself straying from the nonfiction into more and more fiction. I wanted to invent more than I wanted to stay tethered to and imagining with facts. Plus, it felt so narcissistic to me. It was like this crazy town of incestuous Habermeyers and it didn’t feel believable. But who knows. At some point I may return to that Habermeyer pseudo-history. I have some interesting ancestors. But the “Editor’s Note” that begins the book is the residue of that original idea that survived the drafting and revision process. I wanted to keep it because I love “found manuscript” novels, first of all. There’s something really pleasurable about the aura of authenticity that comes with a “found manuscript” text; it does a kind of intellectual gymnastics in my brain. But also because it frames the book at the crossroads of fact and fiction—of folklore—which is one of my intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations. Everything I write is obsessed with folklore, albeit in indirect ways—exploring half-truths, rumors, gossip, embellishment, falsehoods, prevarications. Folklore is really about making sense of that tenuous, ever-shifting line between reality and imagination, between belief and certainty. But folklore is also about community: who belongs and who doesn’t. And if you look closely, I time stamp the editor’s note as being “discovered” in March 2020, which is probably the last time people—globally, locally—genuinely agreed on a sense of reality. So, from the get-go the book is designed to get you thinking about how community unravels under the strain of folklore, but also—I hope—about what binds community together.

3. Each vignette filling out this patchwork novel is full of recurring themes and motifs; did you collect these elements over time, building the story as you went, or were they established for you at the start of your creative process?

I never know what I’m writing about when I start. Maybe that explains why I’m such a slow writer. I spend a lot of time with introductory paragraphs and opening pages trying to get the mood, the rhythm, the voice, the vibe, the sound of things right. I have the inkling of an idea, a premise, a voice, or a vague sense of where things are going, but for the most part I’m stepping into the fog and grasping for what might be there. That’s part of the pleasure of writing, honestly, a kind of maddening satisfaction. Donald Barltheme’s essay “Not-Knowing” is very instructive in this regard. This not-knowing is essential to creating art. You’ve got to rely on instinct and intuition to guide you forward one sentence at a time. And that’s a frustrating surrender. Full of dead-ends and do-overs. But it’s the better way, I think. If you have a preconceived idea you end up with a preconceived story and readers can sniff out that bullshit fast. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader, I think Frost said. Most of the time I think that’s true. Preconceived themes end up with derivative and didactic writing. So, I’m not one of these writers who maps out everything and writes with a definitive end in mind. I try not to ever think about theme and motifs and stuff like that until maybe the final draft. Let it all accumulate like a tumbleweed. Then fine-tune and polish and prune in that last frantic draft before you ship it off to the editor. My experience has been that if I think about theme and motifs too early then I get obsessed with proving those things exist within the book. I get insecure and soon it’s like I’m on the soapbox with a megaphone making sure the reader “gets it” which is probably the worst approach to writing imaginable. It’s easy to confuse writing with preaching, with pontificating, but that’s a dangerous gambit and too many writers—even famous ones—have been seduced by that false muse.

4. Necronauts references various sci-fi films, myths, and religions; are there any relevant authors or works that you emulated in this story that weren’t explicitly referenced on the page?

Plenty. I mentioned the predominant influences in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. The premise of the novel—a boy with a cosmonaut helmet grafted to his head who watches too many 1950s campy sci-fi movies and, believing he is an alien, builds a catapult in the desert trying to launch himself into outer space—is an homage to Don Quixote. I learned a lot about writing compressed micro-narratives from Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator. I’ve cultivated my sense of satire from an eclectic cast of old school satirists like Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, Voltaire, and Gogol, to more modern ones like Bulgakov and Vonnegut. Had I not read W.G. Sebald I probably never would have considered integrating photographs into the book. This is admittedly a very masculine reading list, but Necronauts is emphatically a story about fathers and sons and so most of what I was reading and being influenced by while writing the book were male authors.

5. Necronauts is darkly satirical at times and confronts existentialism and alienation within society while cyclically following two characters; nobody and the dentist. Would you say this tale has a clear antagonist and/or protagonist?

As a writer, I would probably classify myself as a fabulist. And there are plenty of fabulists whose work I admire: the old guard of Kafka, Calvino, and Borges; but also this new wave of women like Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, Kelly Link, Kate Bernheimer, Carmen Maria Machado, and Helen Oyeyemi. Necronauts does have a strong fabulist thread to it, and I think some reviews and even the marketing of the book have emphasized it as a “dark fable,” but this is probably the most realistic thing I’ve written. I’m trying to peel back the layers of the realness of the surreal. Which is a long-winded and weird way of trying to answer this question and say that I don’t think in terms of that dichotomy of protagonist/antagonist. It never crosses my mind, honestly. Or sharp moral binaries like good and evil. I know fables lend themselves so such binary dynamics, but I don’t think reality functions like that. It’s far more muddied. So, I’m disputing the question a little because in thinking outside of protagonist/antagonist what I’m saying is I don’t really care who readers identify with, or if they do at all. I reject the idea that the point of fiction is to identify with a character. Some of the worst terms in the literary marketplace are “relatability” and “likeability.” Is that why people read? To justify their own existence? To narcissistically reinforce their own worldview? I read to step outside of myself and my way of thinking, feeling, believing. I read to shed this skin and walk inside the life of a stranger and be made uncomfortable. To discover my own ugliness. To blow up the metaphysics of my existence. To have my soul disquieted. You don’t get that with relatable or likeable protagonists and antagonists. So, when I’m writing characters it’s me trying to honestly portray them as messy, dumb, beautiful, cruel, heart-breaking, awful fools whose choices are often illogical, inane, petty, desperate, confusing and aching with desire. Because that’s my experience of living with and being human. 

6. Can you offer any insight into the perspective throughout the story and how you chose to close or deepen narrative distance?

I think the narration in Necronauts is a bit tricky, both to write and read. Tricky because of limitations imposed by character dynamics but also because it isn’t a conventional POV. My instinct is always to write in 1^st POV. Part of the pleasure in writing is pretending to be someone else and inhabiting a consciousness that’s not my own. I love the wild unruliness and linguistic pyrotechnics of 1^st POV and once I find the right voice the story tends to write itself. But I didn’t want that kind of eccentric voice overwhelming this story. I wanted something different: a bit more restrained, a little more of that detached minimalism. Which, admittedly, is hard for me to do. But that’s what’s common in old newspaper obituaries. It’s dry and deadpan and sparse, almost monotone to the point of absurdity. So, the book feels like 3^rd POV, but it really isn’t. If you pay attention, you’ll see it’s a 1^st POV plural—that weird “we” narrator. Like a hive voice. And that felt right given the setting and community I was writing about. Because the novel is a story about this strange kid who doesn’t fit in and so that “we” voice—the fundamentalist town voice—amplifies his alienation even as it creates this kind of unsettling intimacy. Ultimately, I think distance creates nearness. Detachedness creates intimacy. It’s counterintuitive, I know, but that’s the way it feels to me when I’m writing. Like when you read an old fairy tale. So much is left out, so much has been stripped away, that you have to fill in the gaps. It forces the writing to reveal more through subtle illustrative details, while at the same time enticing the reader to slow down, to squint, to dissect and infer what’s being said between the lines. 

7. Was it always clear to you that “Nobody’s” name would be Nobody? The conflation of the name with the indefinite pronoun seems to work in an ambiguous way through the narration.

My academic background is in folklore and comparative mythology, so whether it’s deliberate or subliminal I’m often cribbing from transnational myth and lore. And in this case, I stole Nobody’s name from The Odyssey. There’s that famous scene where Odysseus and his men encounter the cyclops, Polyphemos, and to escape Odysseus tricks him by saying his name is “No Man” or “Nobody.” When I first started writing the vignettes about the cosmonaut boy, I resisted giving him a name because names have a tendency of pinning things down; a name, like any definition, will trap you. I wanted him to be a bit more ambiguous, his existence a bit more amorphous. Is he an alien or is he a real boy? I never answer that. But I also didn’t want to keep calling him cosmonaut boy over and over again. So, I just sort of stumbled into it. And then I discovered I could get a lot of mileage out the slippage you mention between using it as a proper name and the indefinite pronoun. There was a lot of pleasure in crafting sentences that could mean two things at once. It forces a certain slowness onto the page, a stillness. You read it once and it can mean one thing, then go back and read it again and it means another. So, the name really was a lucky accident but it allows readers to make their own interpretations and determinations about what things mean.

8. What is a worldly issue throughout your career that you always come back to? What resurfaces itself and drives you in your creative writing?

I think the world is fundamentally absurd. I mean that sincerely too. Scroll through the news feed. One second we’re curing certain cancers and then billionaires are launching themselves into outer space and then an armed militant is raiding a pizza parlor hoping to save kids from a cabal of Satan-worshipping vampiric Deep State political elites while the president of the free world rants about transgender mice. It’s a circus out there. Bullshit is an insufficient term for the 21^st century. I’m not sure if there’s been a more insanely absurd time in human history. And existence itself is fundamentally pretty preposterous. Think about it: we each have this flap of meat in our mouth that bends and curls and taps against teeth to produce these various sounds and from that verbal carnival we’re able to love, hate, cry, scream, wonder, and so on. And then someone had the crazy idea to write this all down, to fix language so we can better fantasize. Books are absurdly monstrous things. Think about how we used to make books before factories. You thinly slice a dead tree then scrawl into those fibers with ink made from a chemical complex of larval wasp secretions and sap before binding all those pages in the skin of a dead calf and from all that—to borrow some phrasing from Margaret Atwood—a word after a word after a word becomes a hallucination. I mean, there’s a meme out there that says something like that. Books are like prosthetic limbs, a zoo for all our thoughts. I’m rambling here but what I’m trying to say is life is absurd and I’m fascinated with absurdity in all its permutations. But I’m interested in the seriousness of the absurd. Yes, life is absurd, but we can’t just dismiss it as such and throw up our hands in frustration. We have to wrestle with it. And the absurd is at the forefront of all my writing, I think. I think it was in her book Mystery and Manners that Flannery O’Connor talks about how violence is this fundamental feature of her writing because violence is revelatory—it discloses something about who we are and what we desire like nothing else. And that’s the way I feel about absurdity. The absurd illuminates what it means to be human, but only if you treat it seriously. That’s the catch. Don’t laugh it off, don’t water it down. So, I’m always coming back to different ways to understand whether we’re absurdly divine or an absurd evolutionary accident, or something else entirely.

9. Is there anything you edited out of this novel that you’d like you share?

Like every writer, I edited out more things than I remember. The cosmonaut boy’s backstory was much more extensive in those early drafts when I was writing in a more conventional style. A lot more about his mother, too. She was a janitor in some secret government bunker in the desert in one version; and in another iteration she worked in a condom factory and every night she came home and gifted the cosmonaut boy a condom which she blew up and twisted into a balloon animal. In that version, instead of building a catapult to launch himself into outer space the cosmonaut boy’s idea was to inflate enough condoms and float away. It was a wild mess. There was another draft that took place in a boarding school for aspiring astronauts where a resurrected Brigham Young was the headmaster. I had to tame all that imagination. The other significant editing I did was with the obituary form of the book, which gave me the chance to create a panoramic overview of this small Utah town and its inhabitants. Initially, I think I wrote somewhere between 300-400 obituaries. Some of those original 300+ obits got conflated into a single vignette; some of them got cut entirely. In the end, I included 95 obituaries (although I cheat in the very last section of the book) because that was something of a magic number for me. I guess in a way these are my 95 theses nailed to the coffin of my Mormonism. 

10. What is something you quietly hoped readers would connect with and take away from Necronauts, that you didn’t want to make explicit on a sentence or plot level?

There’s a very subtle and suggestive time travel thread in the novel. I won’t say too much about it, because once you publish the thing it’s out of your hands and readers get to construct the meaning and interpretations irrespective of authorial intentions, but I was very deliberate about when the boy was the “cosmonaut boy” and when he was referred to as “Nobody,” and there are italicized sections by design. The opening section of the book is titled “I Am a Traveler of both Time and Space” (which also happens to be a Led Zeppelin lyric), so a careful reader can make some discerning interpretations with that information. Although, I was adamant about not making this a hard sci-fi story. I prefer the soft touch of lo-fi sci-fi. Books and movies that engage with sci-fi concepts, but not the space opera kind of thing like Duneor Star Wars. More along the lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or certain Black Mirror episodes. Where the sci-fi is percolating in the background or creates a certain ambiance and enriching what is going on with the characters but not overwhelming the story with techno babble and futuristic world-building. Just enough sci-fi so that it feels more like a sideways version of reality as we know it rather than trying to pontificate about the future.

11. If you’re willing, could you share what you’re working on now and/or what you are currently reading that you would recommend to Copper Nickel readers?

This is something of a roundabout way of answering but there’s this Philip Roth quote somewhere, maybe in his Paris Review interviews, and I’m going to botch it but essentially he talks about how when writing a novel he’d often get stuck and instead of surrendering to writer’s block he’d just stop what he was working on and shift to a different project. And while distracted with that new undertaking, he’d realize the flaws in the original project. Like a literary side quest that, while feeling like an errant detour, actually instructs you on finding your way to wherever it is you want to go. He describes it as blasting his way through a tunnel, as if each book unexpectedly clears a path so you can complete the next. There’s a lot of truth to that in my experience. And it’s a pretty good strategy for never really having writer’s block. It’s certainly something I did while writing Necronauts, but also in the sense that Necronauts has given me a boost of creative confidence moving forward. It’s such a strange book formalistically and stylistically I thought nobody would ever publish it, but it has freed me up to do even more experimentation with my next project, which I would describe as a speculative autofictional lyric novel. I know the term genre-bending gets overused, but the next project is part memoir, part alternative history, part lyric essay, and part hallucinatory fable that braids a few threads: in one, I’m exploring the death of my childhood best friend who (truthfully) also happens to be named Ryan; in another, there’s lyric meditations on jellyfish evolution seen through the eyes of 19^th century naturalist Ernst Haeckel who—anachronistically—is friends with Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith; in another, a man with a literal jellyfish for a face cares for his dementia-stricken mother; and in another, a marine biologist who may or may not be Ryan Habermeyer searches for cryptids and Mormon ancestry in the surreal Icelandic wilderness. So, mothers, Medusas, and Mormons. It’s a crazy book. I’ll be doing a residency in January at the Gunnarshús in Reykjavik where I hope to finish the manuscript. Most likely nobody will want to publish it either, but I’m writing it anyway. 

As for book recommendations, I can tell you what’s on my summer reading nightstand at the moment. Ethan Rutherford’s North Sun. Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night. László Krasznahorkai’s Spadework for a Palace. Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid. Karen Russell’s The Antidote. And Alla Gorbunova’s (Th)ings and (Th)oughts.