Sequoia Nagamatsu ’04: How High We Go in the Dark

Transcript

Marshall Poe:

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and you're listening to an episode in Grinnell College's Authors and Artists podcast that we're doing with our friends at Grinnell College. I happen to be a Grinnell College grad many, many years ago when dinosaurs walked the Earth. Today, I'm very pleased to say that we have Sequoia Nagamatsu on the show, and we'll be talking to him about his book, How High We Go in the Dark, which is out from William Morrow in 2020. And I'll tell you, I read some reviews of your book. Honestly, I did. And you're doing much better than I ever did. Sequoia, welcome to the show.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Thank you for having me.

Marshall Poe:

My pleasure. So could you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Sure. Well, I'm a Grinnell College grad class of 2004. I majored in anthropology. I kind of bounced around a lot, probably much like a lot of other college students in terms of my major. But I think even at Grinnell, I think throughout my life I've always been very bookish and interested in writing. And I did some volunteering for the Grinnell Review when I was a student. I had some short lived writing groups, but I never really considered myself a writer or never seriously pursued writing then. I didn't think of it as a viable option. But I think after college I kept going back to it. It was something that I was doing after work. I started writing groups in San Francisco, and I realized that it was something that I wanted to pursue seriously. I didn't major in English. I didn't take many creative writing classes. I fancied myself more of a poet actually at Grinnell. But I think once I had the time and space to really reflect on my identity as a writer and really start reading more contemporary writers, I was all in. And I think that time in my life was when I was working in Japan as an English teacher. I just really had more head space away from America to really just devote to two words.

Marshall Poe:

That's great. Thank you very much for that. It is quite a commitment to begin calling oneself a writer.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Oh, definitely.

Marshall Poe:

You get questions when you do that.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

I usually just tell people I'm a professor to avoid further questions.

Marshall Poe:

Can you tell us how you ended up at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa?

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Yeah, I think I'm the only person from my graduating high school class to leave California. I went to high school in Silicon Valley, not far from Palo Alto, next town over in Los Altos. And as you can imagine, like a lot of Californian kids, you're either going to a UC or Stanford or Claremont. And the idea of even leaving California is this foreign concept. But I was very disenchanted, I went to high school in the mid '90s with the emerging tech space. It was a very much a bubble universe, that the real world didn't really exist outside of Silicon Valley, and I wanted to escape that mentality. So I was automatically looking at small colleges because I went to a small private high school, and the thought of going to a big research type university horrified me. I'm somewhat introverted, so I think even more so I was looking for a tighter community.

So I picked up a book called Colleges That Change Lives. I think Grinnell was in there at one point, along with some other colleges, including St. Olaf College, where I teach now. And I just basically applied to every school in that book and similar books like that that were focused on the small private college. Grinnell flew me out a couple of times, and I had a really wonderful time with my fellow prospective students, prospies, as they call them at Grinnell. And I was sold, despite it being in a more rural location, despite me not knowing anything about the Midwest or Iowa, I really fell in love with the community. I think the counter culture, social justice mindset of the students there was something that I really appreciated.

Marshall Poe:

Well, I fell in love with it too. And it did change my life, I can say that quite honestly.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Oh, for sure.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. This is sort of a hard question, and I'm a little bit hesitant to ask it because I know when... I read a lot of novels and when people ask me what's it about, I always sort of smirk, because every novel is about a lot of things. But if you were pinned and asked to answer the question, "What is How High We Go in the Dark about?" Could you talk a little bit about that?

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Yeah. In a nutshell, it's a multi-generational journey that follows a cast of characters in the aftermath of something called the Arctic Plague. Full disclosure, this was written before the pandemic. And these journeys that follow these linked characters focus primarily on their everyday lives, even if they are a scientist or people that have skin in the game regarding finding a cure or finding alternatives regarding the virus or the climate crisis. The core of the novel focuses on how people find connections in their lives, how they honor their lost loved ones, and how they conceive of tragedy as this kind of liminal space where they can reimagine their future and better versions of themselves and society even.

Marshall Poe:

This is another silly question. I'm full of them. How'd you come up with the idea for the book?

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Well, I think my journey in writing this was very kaleidoscopic. I took about, including writing another book before this, and just life, about 10 years from the very early seeds to publication. But the early foundation of the novel began with research and exploration of how people grieve in non-traditional ways, innovative funerary practices. I mentioned I was living in Japan at one point, and this was at the heels of grieving for my grandfather, who I had lost in the early 2000s. And he helped raise me, and there's a lot of guilt and drama revolving around that death. And living in Japan really opened my eyes to how different cultures grieved loved ones, and how a society like Japan, and especially in a city like Tokyo, where there's really no places to build cemeteries, so you have to build up. So there are funerary skyscrapers. There are various tech oriented ways of merging the world of temples with the world of holograms and skyscrapers. And that really just fascinated me. And I started to look into other ways that people were conceiving of seeing goodbye and actually giving ourselves spaces to grieve, because our modern form of death really doesn't leave much room to honor the dead. You cry and then you have to plan a funeral and have to worry about finances. It's a very capitalist, materialistic enterprise that dying has become. So I wanted to look at other ways.

Marshall Poe:

That's interesting you said that about our ways of death, because it's quite accurate, I think. I know from my experience living in other places in the world, there's a tradition of visiting the graves of relatives every year. I have Korean friends who do this. There's nothing like that... Well, maybe I'm wrong. Some listener will write me, but I don't visit the graves of my ancestors. So we can call the book speculative fiction or science fiction. I don't know if you have a preference there.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Yeah, categories are slippery. In some ways it's more of the purview of marketing departments than writers. But I would say that speculative fiction is probably more accurate, at least in terms of how readers tend to use that term. Where speculative being, and again, it's an umbrella term, but I've seen readers understand that to be science fiction or fantastical fiction that is literary in nature. So it's kind of a merging of genres.

Marshall Poe:

By the way, many people probably don't know this, but oftentimes you don't even get to pick the title of your book because the marketing people are on you about that. I know this is true for magazine articles, you don't get to decide what the title of your magazine article is. Some marketing person or somebody in upper editorial is going to decide for you what your labor of love is going to be called. Were there any writers that were particularly influential when you were developing a prose style or coming to this? It's another silly question, because... Yeah.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Yeah, too many. It was a long journey writing this. But I think Italo Calvino, all of its work, but particularly Cosmic Comics was an early influence for me, just in terms of writing crazy stories about the universe. But also I think its Fabulous Sensibilities really influenced all of my work, not just this novel. José Saramago Blindness and Death at Intervals. He's kind of a big concept writer. Blindness, I think they adapted into a film. Everybody in the world loses their sight, and what happens to society. Death at Intervals, what happens when everybody stops dying? So there's explorations of what happens to the funerary industry, what happens to hospitals, how does our culture change when death stops? And Cloud Atlas has been used as an early comp for this novel for probably some obvious structural reasons. But I think a lot of David Mitchell's work was very informative for me when I was thinking about how to puzzle together the disparate pieces of this book.

Marshall Poe:

Now, would you call yourself a speculative fiction or a science fiction writer, or would you call yourself a novelist full stop? Do you have a direction you're going?

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

I resist categories. But if I had to use a term, I guess speculative is as good as any. I resist also calling myself a novelist because I write in multiple forms. And calling this book a short story collection isn't right, but also calling it a novel isn't quite accurate. And if I use the term novel in stories, people don't know what that is. So we just call it a novel. So I think just labeling writers sometimes is a little tricky, especially for somebody like me who entered the world in a more of a short story space. But my stories, even my individual stories have been getting much, much longer. And when I describe the narrative of a book like this, you can read a specific chapter and feel fulfilled, like it's contained. But if you were to skip around, you would miss a through line of the book. And a lot of my revision over the last few years has revolved around the connectivity and the Easter eggs and the framing to make the book more than the sum of its parts.

Marshall Poe:

Did you have the plot laid out before you started? I know when I write, sometimes I end up at a very different place than I thought I was going to.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Oh yeah, for sure. For some of the individual chapters, I had a pretty good idea of where things are going to go for the novel at large, because it was something that evolved over years, it ended up in a very different place than what I imagined at the beginning. And just to give you a sense of that, my first chapter was the last chapter I wrote. And the last chapter, which pulls together a lot of these cosmic other worldly threads, was a failed novel that I wrote in grad school that I didn't want to let go of. And I was like, "Oh, I want to do something with this." And I kind of injected it into this narrative.

Marshall Poe:

I have a drawer full of pieces that are unpublished. And I'm always thinking, "What am I going to do with that?" So how did you do the research that was necessary for the book?

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Oh, some of it was just... I remember reading an interview with the writer Laura van den Berg, and somebody asked her about, "How do you write all about all these worldly places?" And she was like, "Wikipedia." And I'll just be upfront, a lot of it was just internet research, but some of it was on the ground research. When I was living in Japan, I got to travel to some places and went to a funerary, mortuary expo, things of that nature. But a lot of it was just internet research. Some time in virtual reality, just immersing myself in different places to get a sense of what is it like walking around in the Siberian Tundra. I'm not going to go there necessarily, especially during COVID. But I could come close, at least with technology. I spent a lot of time on the NASA Exoplanet website as well. So yeah, just mostly internet research, some on the ground, just going to conferences and things of that nature, emailing scientists. My research process is that I want to make the information organic. I want it to be part of just my knowledge base so when I'm actually writing a story, I'm not tempted to just include things that don't need to be in there. It's only there because the character needs to be there.

Marshall Poe:

Right, you're not referring to your notes every...

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Yeah, no.

Marshall Poe:

I use the same technique. If I can't remember it, it's not significant enough to be in the book. So it must be very strange to have your work become so suddenly relevant, because as you say, the book was conceived long before COVID.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Yeah.

Marshall Poe:

And so what has that been like?

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Well, it's been a ride for sure. When my agent said we were ready to go out with this, it was the very early days of COVID in 2020. And we had the conversation of, "Should we wait? Should we go out with this? We don't know what the reception is going to be." I think ultimately we decided to submit it, shop it to publishers, because if we didn't, one, I was ready. I've been waiting for this for so long. But if we didn't go out with it, there would be a chance that somebody else would come out with a book that was like this and that I would be suddenly playing a second fiddle to that.

So we went out with it. And fortunately, we were very careful with our talking points. We wanted to make sure that whoever we partnered with understood that this wasn't Dustin Hoffman and Cuba Gooding Jr saving of the day in a helicopter or something. And it wasn't Outbreak, it wasn't like the hot zone. The virus was part of the backdrop, but it wasn't the core. Our editors at Harper Collins, at William Morrow and Bloomsbury, I think both got that. They understood that it was ultimately about community and connections and it was transcending the moment. I think once we had those partners, we were doing the hard work of making sure that message was part of the marketing, it was part of the revisions in the book. And over the past several weeks since the book has launched, I've been heartened that, I would say, the large majority of people, even readers that have no connection to me whatsoever, understand that this isn't like a plague novel with a capital P. It's much more akin to a Station 11 than anything else.

Marshall Poe:

Did you enjoy the editing process? I'm saying this is someone who's had published books, and it's always rather shocking when somebody asked you to change something, or even a lot of things.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Yeah. I had been working on developing the novel with my agent for a little while, and I think once I sold it, I knew that there was going to be work ahead, just in terms of shoring up the evolution of the world and making sure that it does feel more novelesque. I think I became a better writer just from the editing process. I just became much more aware of how collaborative publishing a novel with a large publisher is. You're the writer, it's your work, but it's a huge team of people that's making it happen as well. So that was something that was just very eye opening and I think educational for me. But yeah, I love the editing process. I think I've learned a lot about my own process, of what I'm capable of. If somebody's putting the fire to me, I can crank out work.

So it's good to know that about my capabilities, because I procrastinate a lot, like anybody else. But it's good to know that can actually crank out work if I really need to. But yeah, when my editor at William Morrow first gave me her edit letter, it was a little daunting. I'm not going to lie. It was daunting. It was like a 15 page something edit letter, and then 800 comments that had to resolve. And most of the comments were pretty slight, but some of them were like, "Oh my God, this is an overhaul." But I think the book ended up much better for that dialogue with very smart and attentive people.

Marshall Poe:

It's always very nice when somebody who knows what they're talking about pays a lot of close attention to your work. And I've received those edit letters as well, and they're always very bracing. But my experience has been that editors have done great work with my work and I'm very grateful to them. I've also had the experience of editing books myself. And I don't find it a particularly pleasant one, to be honest with you, but I've done it. So there's something called climate fiction. I didn't really know this, and maybe you're not comfortable talking about it, I don't know. And maybe you don't even consider your book climate fiction. What is it and how does your book relate to it?

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Yeah. Well, I guess I would sort of say that my book could be considered climate fiction, or at least climate fiction adjacent. The virus, it's an other worldly virus. It's a very strange thing. But the virus is unleashed in part because of climate change. The permafrost in Siberia is melting, and that uncovers this ancient girl that harbors this virus. And there are nods along the way throughout the novel that shows the evolution of the world through the climate crisis lens. There are increasing wildfires, there's sea level rise, there are efforts at mitigating global warming. So all of that's present in the novel, and how could it not be? We're living in this world now. So climate fiction for me, I teach a climate fiction, of course, and have been for years.

Marshall Poe:

Oh, cool. All right.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

And I'm part of this community at St. Olaf called The Environmental Conversations, which is a sequence of courses for first years. So climate fiction is essentially, it's not a new genre by any means, it's maybe a newer term, but it's essentially fiction that acknowledges and enters into a dialogue with the climate crisis, with human reactions to climate catastrophes, to exploring potential solutions to what if, distant future. So it runs the gamut from a book like Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow, which follows this corporate risk assessor, and suddenly New York City is under this deluge of this flood and just shows what might be possible with sea level rise and how humans react to that kind of catastrophe. And I think that book, if you're from the East Coast at all, probably reminded folks a lot about Super Storm Sandy. And then from a more realistic bent, you might have books like mine that play a little bit more with the speculative or see more extreme solutions of colony or generation starships, and then that's the core focus of the book.

But for me, I think the climate fiction is very important because it allows people to reflect on not only what's going on today, but it allows people to consider the importance of small actions, community, empathy, in addition to technological, sociological, financial considerations. But for me, the climate fiction that really engages me is the ones that focus on small human moments. And that's something that I hope is a takeaway from my book, is that empathy is important, connectivity and community is important. Because if we don't have those things, we can do engage with technology or other types of solutions, but we're still going to be steeped in old systems of inequity and prejudice and systems that honestly seek to exploit our planetary resources. So there's a see change, I think to some degree in my novel that is embracing that hope and love of our fellow human being.

Marshall Poe:

It is interesting... I'm a historian, so I say it's interesting when you can see writers responding to a significant apocal change. And just two quick examples, there were a spade of books written after World War I, because the war was so catastrophically wrongheaded in every way. And I'm thinking about Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. And then after 1945, there was a whole spade of books about the threat of nuclear annihilation, and you get a book Fail Safe, the name the author of which I cannot remember, but there were spade of books. And I think that's appropriate and proper that writers pay attention to this. And these aren't necessarily political books. They're not taking sides. They're asking us to look at it in new ways. So let me thank you for doing that. One kind of random question, and you don't have to answer it if you... What is the earliest climate fiction? Because you said it's not a new genre. Is there a place where we can say it started? Again, I know this is not really...

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Well, if you really wanted to go far back, I guess the modern climate fiction focuses on the fact that humanity is part of the drive of climate change. But if you go back as far as Jules Verne...

Marshall Poe:

I was thinking the same thing about Jules Verne.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

You're looking at books where there's... The title's escaping me, but there was a novel that he wrote that centered around, I think Earth had somehow been knocked away from our orbit. It was dealing with climate apocalypse of sorts. So narratives that played with climate change through non-human means has been around for quite some time. And I would say, The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard is another one that I think is getting closer to our modern sensibilities of climate change, where we start seeing humanity reacting in psychological and savage ways to a warming world.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, that's just terrifically interesting. We've taken up a lot of your time, and I appreciate it. We have a traditional final question on the New Books Network, and that is, what are you working on now?

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

I am working on, or I should be working on my second contracted novel, Girl Zero. And that's also going to be out with William Murrow and Bloomsbury. It's essentially about a couple who lose their daughter, their young daughter. And in this world, fantastical, crypted creatures exist, they're rare, going extinct. And the father decides to replace his daughter with a shapeshifter. And so it's kind of a journey of identity where they're coaching this replacement daughter to be the girl they lost, all the while knowing, at least the father acknowledging that this replacement is not really their daughter, is forming their own identity, is becoming somebody else as well. And his wife is perfectly happy to live in the fantasy that their daughter never died. So it's also a story about grief, it's a coming of age story. And there's also a little bit of a twist, because when the father replaced his daughter with a shapeshifter, he inadvertently created multiple copies and he had to deal with that. So I'll leave it that.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, we don't want to give too much away. You have to buy the book. Let me tell everybody that we've been talking to Sequoia Nagamatsu about his book, How High We Go In The Dark, and it's out from William Morrow now. You can go pick it up. I'm Marshall Poe, I'm the editor of the New Books Network. And you've been listening to the Grinnell College Authors and Artists podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in. Sequoia, thank you.

Sequoia Nagamatsu:

Thank you, Marshall.

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