The playful, tortuous subtitle of Mooallem’s first book, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America makes no secret of this human-centric focus. But as Mooallem narrates the inspiring, heartbreaking, and often just plain strange efforts of people who’ve devoted their lives to saving endangered species, the question of who exactly the “wild ones” are in the book becomes uncomfortably hard to answer.

Mooallem was kind enough to take a break from caring for his newborn second child to talk about Wild Ones at a cafe near his home in San Francisco.

***

The Rumpus: I had to remind myself several times as I was reading your book that it was nonfiction. Some of the things you describe are really bizarre. You’ve got Martha Stewart chasing polar bears around the Canadian tundra. You’ve got men dressing up like whooping cranes and flying in little planes with them. You even describe something called a “copulation hat.”

Jon Mooallem: In the ’70s, people started realizing that DDT was thinning out bird’s eggs. Peregrine falcons were one of the birds affected by this, so they created a captive breeding stock. But breeding animals can be a lot harder than you might think, and they found, through this weird process of trial and error, that they could wear this leather helmet. It looks kind of like a cross between a rugby helmet and maybe the helmets they wear in the Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. The male bird would land on the hat and be coaxed to ejaculate by the human handler into the hat so that they could inseminate other birds. Somehow, I find it weirdly symbolic of a lot of the work I’ve written about, both in its ingenuity and its total absurdity.

Rumpus: And yet it worked.

Mooallem: It did. There are peregrine falcons around now. We have them here in San Francisco, in large part due to the persistence of some very brave ornithologists wearing the copulation hat for more than a decade.

I think there are two levels of these sorts of interventions. You’ve got the very hands-on manipulations, like the copulation hat and like Operation Migration, where they’re reintroducing whooping cranes. Whooping cranes are the largest birds in North America. In the 1940s, they were down to the teens in terms of number of birds left, and so people started breeding them in captivity, which had its own copulation hat-esque obstacles, but then they realized, how are we going to get these birds back in the wild? They usually learn migration from their parents, but their parents were bred in the lab, too. So they hit upon this solution of training the birds to fly behind men flying ultralight airplanes. But the men have to do it in costume, so that the birds won’t get acclimated to people.

Then there’s this other kind of intervention, which is more of a psychic intervention, where the way we talk about these animals and feel about these animals can really play into their ecological situation. It’s more abstract, but that was the case with the Martha Stewart thing. I was in Churchill, Manitoba where there’s an NGO trying to spread the word about climate change, and they’re using polar bears as a symbol of the problem. And we wound up chasing Martha Stewart in these little buggy-like vehicles across the tundra so that they could make sure that she was interviewing the right scientists and putting across the right talking points on her show. The polar bears have PR handlers these days. And I’m sure that, for them, that kind of intervention is just as important as the copulation hat was for peregrine falcons.

Rumpus: You write that animals’ survival in this day and age depends “more on Barnum than Darwin.” What do you mean by that?

Mooallem: The level of compassion and persistence and passion that we dedicate to these species is going to do more for them than any ecological force. Our imaginations are an ecological force now. And to stir that up, you need salesmanship, whether it’s as extreme as the Martha Stewart example or something as simple as putting the panda on the logo of the World Wildlife Federation. There are certain creatures that we care about and certain ones that we simply don’t care about.

Rumpus: We don’t care about the Hawaiian blue-tailed skink, for example.

Mooallem: No. It’s gone. And I didn’t know that. Here I am writing a book on this subject, and I didn’t even know what it was until like two years into the process.

Rumpus: So there’s this kind of species-ism, where we put our energies into saving so-called “charismatic megafauna” like polar bears or pandas or bald eagles.

Mooallem: Yes. And I’m not necessarily criticizing that. I think it’s miraculous that we care about any of these animals. We don’t have to. And for most of human history, we didn’t. So I think it’s a little funny when you have these conservationists saying, “Pity the poor reptile or the poor insect that humanity can’t be bothered to care about.” I mean, isn’t it amazing that we care about all of the things that we do care about? But we don’t really acknowledge that our interest in an animal is vital to its survival. That’s literally the case scientifically and legally, in tons of different ways. Human interest is the key to survival now on earth.

Rumpus: At one point in the book, you call the efforts of Operation Migration—the guys flying planes in whooping crane costumes—”sublime,” but you say you meant the word in a different way than the philosophers meant by the term.

Mooallem: Well, I didn’t actually know what the philosophers meant…but I checked it out on Wikipedia and I think that it was originally applied to natural landscapes like waterfalls and mountains, and being overwhelmed by the grandeur of the natural world. I had a similar feeling watching these airplanes fly in front of a flock of birds. I think a lot of people do. You feel a kind of wonder, an excitement. You can’t believe it’s happening, so I used the term “sublime” even though I was looking at something that is not natural at all, and is in fact meant to make up for the fact that we’ve destroyed what was natural.

Rumpus: Isn’t that wonder also about connecting with something so different than us, so other?

Mooallem: Yeah. I think there is a real craving for that kind of experience of otherness in the world right now, even if it’s just a hike on a nature trail. There’s a hunger to be in the presence of something that’s beyond you and beyond your grasp.

Rumpus: I think that craving might be called anxiety. We’re anxious to connect to the otherness of the natural world because we’re terrified that we’ve fucked it up beyond repair.

Mooallem: Without a doubt. I think that motivates a lot of the recovery efforts I was writing about. It’s not just the particular species at stake but that, if we let go of this one, where does that leave us? Each battle becomes a battle of principle that cannot be lost.

Rumpus: This anxiety seems to be especially pronounced here in America, and I think it’s no accident that you made sure to include the phrase “in America” in the subtitle of the book, even though a good chunk of it is actually set in Canada. Our identity as Americans is so connected to the bounty and grandeur of our wilderness, and I think people are really freaked out that we’ve spoiled it. I see that anxiety reflected in all the reality shows on TV these days about Alaska and survivalists. People are desperate to believe that we still have that wildness in us.

Mooallem: As soon as something is almost gone, people grasp onto it the hardest. [America] was the place where people came after all the Old World countries had already extinguished their wildlife. It was a fresh start, where wildlife was so abundant that colonists were writing ad copy back to Europe about how they could sweep fish out of the ocean with a broom. You could make an argument that that’s where the American dream starts. It wasn’t just this vague belief. It was actually a matter of math. There were X amount of animals and so much fewer people, you could get by just by showing up.

Rumpus: Speaking of colonial America and its relationship to nature, another point in the book where I had to remind myself that I was reading nonfiction was the story of Thomas Jefferson and the mammoth.

Mooallem: Mammoth fossils were being discovered around the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and Thomas Jefferson and some other Founding Fathers figured they must still be out there somewhere in the whole two-thirds of North America we hadn’t set foot in yet. In fact, when Lewis and Clark set out, they had instructions to keep their eyes peeled.

Rumpus: For mammoths.

Mooallem: Yes. The mammoth became kind of the first bald eagle, the first species people really identified with America because it was so big and powerful. It was everything that a new country wanted to see itself as. And it hit people hard when more and more evidence started emerging that mammoths were, in fact, extinct. They had to change the mammoth story and rewrite their feelings about it. The new story went that instead of America being so magnificent that it was filled with mammoths, it was actually an empty place just waiting for white settlers to take it over. God had wiped the mammoth out to clear the way for us. It’s another example of the narratives we build around creatures.

Rumpus: And the real irony is that, according to some theories at least, the mammoth was wiped out by people.

Mooallem: That’s right. People wiped the shit out of this place long before any European settlers came. There were all sorts of Pleistocene megafauna walking around, and then humans developed a new kind of stone point that enabled them to bring down bigger and bigger animals. So, basically, we’re living in this impoverished ecosystem that preceded the wasteful, reckless white man that is so easy to vilify. We were already down to the dregs before any of our grandparents or great-great-great grandparents got here.

Rumpus: So this cycle of people damaging the natural world and causing extinction goes back a long way.

Mooallem: That’s always the big question and a giant hole in a lot of the reasoning. If you’re going to say that things aren’t like they used to be, when exactly are you referring to?

Rumpus: It complicates the whole idea of “saving” one species or another.

Mooallem: Exactly. As does the other stuff we were talking about, this kind of perpetual intervention. Can we really say that we’re saving the whooping crane if we’re breeding it in a lab and then flying it around with planes? I mean, we’ve saved it from disappearing. But it’s not the same thing.

Rumpus: The best example of this dilemma comes in the second part of the book, where you focus on the Lange’s metalmark butterfly. This is a very fragile creature that only lays its eggs on a specific plant growing on sand dunes near Antioch, California. But the sand dunes are almost all gone. There’s a drywall factory there. And yet, the federal government has spent millions trying to keep this particular butterfly from going extinct.

Mooallem: There is a strong case to make for keeping that butterfly where it is, but it’s not scientific. I could not find a scientific justification for it. It just doesn’t matter. And even if it did matter, the context in which it did matter is completely gone. This butterfly is not like the panda bear or the California condor. But the people involved with it are very passionate and it’s the policy of the U.S. government to save it. It has all the same protections as a whale or grizzly bear.

Rumpus: That brings me to the word “wild.” As the book goes on, the definition of that word starts to get slipperier and slipperier. The creatures we want so badly to keep wild, like polar bears or whooping cranes or certain butterflies, need such finely-tuned environmental conditions that, without constant human intervention, they would perish.

Mooallem: We’re in a very paradoxical place. If wildness is the thing we’re passionate about keeping in the world, it’s up to us to preserve it. That doesn’t seem to make any sense. But then again, that’s where we’re at. It’s not going to change.

These animals are not necessarily hard to save. They’re just hard to save in a way that conforms with our romantic ideas about their wildness. You could take the plant that the Lange’s metalmark butterfly lays its eggs on and grow it in pots in my backyard, and then bring the butterflies and I’m pretty sure they’d be just fine. You could do that anywhere. You could do it in Central Park, in Golden Gate Park, in Asia. As long as that plant is there, the butterflies will be there. But they’re not going to live at Antioch Dunes, which is the one place they lived before humans showed up. But why isn’t that option on the table? Is saving the butterfly in that way better than doing all the backbreaking work we’re doing now?

The fact is that a lot of the people working on these recoveries are career conservationists. And a lot of time, it takes an outsider to say, “Hey, what are we really doing here?” I felt like I was engaging a lot of these people in conversations they had been dying to have for a long time, but they  just haven’t had the opportunity to. They’re just not prompted to think this way within the bureaucracies of their work.

Rumpus: A lot of the older conservationists you profile have become disillusioned. They started off young and idealistic. But as their careers have gone on, they’ve lost a fair amount of hope and drive.

Mooallem: I tracked down some battle-scarred conservationists and for the most part, they weren’t cheery. A lot of them failed to do what they set out to do. And even the ones that had success, it was often indirect. So I don’t blame them for feeling that way, but I’m glad I could write about them in a different context and show what role they did play.

And I will say that even though some of them told me they had given up, they really hadn’t given up. That kind of moral energy doesn’t go away just because you get beaten to shit trying to exert it on the world, and that’s an amazing thing. It makes me proud to be a human being. I would talk to all these sour old men and women, and I would leave feeling exhilarated to see how this process plays out every generation. People start out full of energy, they meet obstacles, but then someone else comes and they pick up the baton and keep going.

Rumpus: Is that the “weirdly reassuring” part of the story you refer to in the title?

Mooallem: Yeah. It goes back to this idea of the sublime. For the people who have worked on Operation Migration or the guy who spent fifty years at Antioch Dunes with the Lange’s metalmark, these things can be completely dispiriting. But then you zoom out and you see the that there is this fight that we’re all in together. I find that incredibly reassuring. Humankind can’t control the entire world and solve all of its problems, but we’re engaged in this big ecological bar fight where we’re trying to do this stuff.

Rumpus: Isn’t the bar fight really within ourselves, though? Isn’t it really a fight over what kind of animals we are? I just read today that carbon levels in the atmosphere are higher than they’ve been in at least 800,000 years.

Mooallem: Stuff is fucked up. I’m not trying to be rosy about it. I can’t explain why but being around these people, despite their imperfections and disagreements, who are engaged in questions of how humanity should exist in the world, is completely life-affirming.

I don’t have the most optimistic outlook on the future. Part of the reason I wrote this book is because I had just brought a kid into the world and it got me thinking about these things in a different way. That doesn’t mean I think things are going to turn out great. I can still be pessimistic but at least I can feel better about being pessimistic sometimes. That strikes me as the secret to a lot of things in life, being able to sit with your fear.

I hope I’m not mistaken for a kind of Pollyanna, but I think there’s a big space between feeling like the world is coming to an end and feeling like we don’t have to worry at all. And I think I’m getting better at occupying that space.

Rumpus: Getting back to the American relationship to wilderness. We exterminated thirty-million buffalo—or bison, to be more precise. It struck me that the guy who led the effort to save them is a perfect embodiment of our conflicted relationship with nature and animals.

Mooallem: William Temple Hornaday. I want to write a whole book about him. He was a taxidermist at the Smithsonian, a young guy, maybe thirty-two. And he finds out there’s only three hundred or so buffalo left, and he says, “I’ve got to do something about this—I have to go to Montana and kill a bunch of them!” He decides to stuff these things so that his children and grandchildren can know them after they’re gone. But a few years down the line he realizes that, hey, maybe we can save these things instead of just preserving them.

His story is such a great microcosm of a lot of what we’re struggling with in trying to expand the bounds of our compassion and what we think is possible. It was a moment where people were inventing environmentalism. He was a fascinating figure. He was also a total racist and a really disgusting figure in a lot of ways.

Rumpus: He called the buffalo stupid, didn’t he?

Mooallem: Yes. He blamed their extinction on their stupidity, which you would never hear an environmentalist say now. It dates him to his time. There wasn’t this gushy sympathy for animals. He was one of America’s first wildlife conservationists but he hated wolves. He wrote an entire section of a book that was a fake trial where he was a prosecutor and he sentenced wolves to death because they ate chickens and livestock.

Rumpus: And yet, some modern-day conservationists have seemed shockingly callous, too. You write about a particularly grisly incident where someone filmed polar bear cubs starving to death.

Mooallem: It was a horrible video. And this person put it online because he thought it had a chance to be iconic and stir up emotions. But nobody would watch it, and some people got really angry at [the videographer]. They said, why are you just standing there with a camera? Why didn’t you feed these bears? And that’s a debate that been going on a lot more lately.

There’s a whole slew of logistical questions involved [in feeding polar bears], but I think the more interesting argument is the emotional or the philosophical one. Do we want a world in which polar bears survive because we’re tossing them road kill? That makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but we’ve been doing similar things with other species for decades.

Rumpus: The bears themselves have become purely symbolic. They’re being used by these well-meaning activists to make a larger point about climate change.

Mooallem: They’re mascots.

Rumpus: You tell the stories of several local people in Churchill, Manitoba. Even though many of them don’t believe in climate change or don’t care about the issue, they seem to have more of a connection with the bears than the environmentalists who are supposedly campaigning to save them.

Mooallem: A lot of these guys spend months at a time out on the ice living in ice shelters and hunting and trapping, and it’s hard for them to conceive of a big, menacing polar bear as a victim, which is the story that the environmentalists are telling.

The videographer thought the video would get people outraged and motivated to help polar bears. The locals saw a video of someone not helping polar bears. They saw a video by someone who should have put down his camera and thrown the bears some meat. With all the arguments and compelling ideas about polar bears that everyone gets bombarded with, it’s easy to forget that they’re actual animals living in time and space.

Rumpus: That tension between the townspeople and the environmentalists shows how complex these issues are. It’s so easy to caricature attitudes about nature and animals. You’re either Ted Nugent or some kind of tree-sitting hippie. But it’s just not that simple, is it?

Mooallem: No. My editor said that this is not a book that ties everything up in a neat ribbon. It actually unties what we think are neat ribbons and then asks us to deal with the big mess on the floor. Not the greatest sales pitch, perhaps. I don’t think Oprah is going to go for that.

Rumpus: Or Martha Stewart.

Mooallem: Or Martha Stewart. But I think our job right now as people is to deal with the complexity, and to see through the catchphrases or [simplistic] ideas like “wilderness good, people bad” or “polar bears good, hunters bad.” We’re not going to get solutions to any of these problems thinking of them in clichéd terms.

Rumpus: I don’t want to ask you something trite like, “where do you think things will go from here,” but where do you think things will go from here?

Mooallem: Maybe in ten years somebody will write a book like this with more answers. But right now, I feel like we’re at a point where we just need to pull back the curtain and say this is where wild animals are now and this is where conservation is.

I remember right after I started working on this book, my daughter was two years old, and she was sitting in her highchair having a fit. There was a bowl of food in front of her and she threw it on the floor. It smashed, food spilled everywhere, and she suddenly shut up. I don’t know what she was thinking but it seemed pretty clear to me that she was astonished at the kind of wreckage she had created, the power she had exerted. She was just staring at this thing she had broken. I think that’s where we’re at.

WILD ONES book trailer from Jon Mooallem on Vimeo.

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• Caribou

The writer and public speaker obviously had a lot of fun reading and thinking about these books again, and it’s hard not to get caught up in his enthusiasm for the project. He quotes from Spider-Man 2 to explicate Emily Dickinson. He openly admits that he still can’t stand The Scarlet Letter and that he included one book, A Separate Peace, because his mom made him do it. But he also displays a surprising depth of feeling in his responses, and a strong faith in the future of books even in the age of the 140-character limit.

I met up with Smokler at Philz Coffee in the Castro District of San Francisco, the same café where he wrote Practical Classics over cups of coffee made “Kevin-style” (iced, with plenty of almond milk).

***

The Rumpus: Just before I picked up Practical Classics, I re-read The Great Gatsby for the first time in a long time and I was struck by how much I had missed in that book the first time around. It reminded me of a kid watching a Simpsons episode and having all the best jokes go over his head.

Kevin Smokler: That’s a good comparison. I didn’t remember much of Gatsby from when I read it as a teenager. Mostly what I took from it was the Gatsby of our popular imagination, which is fancy parties and beautifully dressed people and raised martini glasses and the sort of romantic bullshit about a love that cannot be.

What I missed was that the book is told in flashback, which means that the age that Gatsby gives a name to, the Jazz Age, is done. And I think the reason the book’s ending is so murderously beautiful and hard to read at the same time, is because it’s about what we can’t get back. The whole book is about what we can’t get back and what’s already gone—a notion you simply don’t have as a teenager, not really.

Rumpus: You cite two primary influences that inspired you to write the book: Clifton Fadiman, who wrote The Lifetime Reading Plan, and Harold Bloom. I suspect connecting the word “practical” with great works of literature might cause Professor Bloom to break out in hives.

Smokler: Probably. Maybe that’s why I used it!

I’m much more of a Fadiman acolyte than a Bloom acolyte. I find Harold Bloom’s dedication to literature really inspiring, and I often use him as a sort of baseline guide of what I should familiarize myself with. But to his mind, reading and appreciating literature is kind of a sour, humorless cross to bear, and I just think that’s silly. I think it’s the very last thing books need in this culture, really.

When I started public speaking, I used to get all the time, “How do we get books to be taken more seriously?” And I said, “No, no, no, we need books to be taken far less seriously!” Literature does not need any more seriousness. What literature needs is chocolate and not broccoli.

Rumpus: And yet, at various points in the book, you warn against reading or consuming any media as escapism. It seems like you’re trying to walk between two poles: Bloom and Fadiman—reading for a kind of empty pleasure and reading for a similarly empty kind of erudition. You seem to think we can have that cake and eat it, too. We can have fun and learn at the same time.

Smokler: I think you’re absolutely right. I see books and music and film and the arts as a bacchanalian feast, or as a symphony with lots of different tones and notes and different kinds of experiences. The opportunity to be different kinds of people in their presence. To me, that is really enjoying the richness of what they offer.

If we’re too serious, we see the arts as something to be slogged through and dealt with and not any fun. And if they’re only there for our enjoyment, then we don’t see how we can grow and change and be better because of them—they’re only there to comfort us and make us feel better. That’s one kind of relationship, but it’s a very shallow relationship. I wish to be challenged by my friends and my wife and my life experiences, just as I would with the fifty new friends I made doing this book, with Margaret Atwood and Dorothy Allison and Carson McCullers and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Rumpus: You recommend what you call the “doggy-paddle versus cannonball” approach to great writers.

Smokler: Yes. I’m much more of a doggy-paddle kind of reader, which means you find the easiest road into an author’s work. If you want to go off-roading and go over some potholes and stuff like that—down some gorges—help yourself. But if you start with the gorges, that’s the very first association you have with that author, and it’s probably not the most accurate one, because I think any author who’s built up a body of work has accessible books and less accessible books, all different gradients.

Rumpus: You definitely took this approach with David Foster Wallace by including the shorter nonfiction piece A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, instead of, say, Infinite Jest.

Smokler: I was pretty convinced that David Foster Wallace was only writing for his own amusement when I first read him, and if I didn’t get it, there was something wrong with me. There was something very condescending and high-handed about it. And I was completely wrong. I was one hundred percent wrong. I’m not saying I’m going to run out tomorrow and buy Infinite Jest, but I feel much more comfortable forming a relationship as a reader with his work now.

Rumpus: Speaking of finding the most accessible way into an author’s work, you openly advise people to buy the Cliff’s Notes to Shakespeare, which I think would give Harold Bloom a full-blown aneurysm.

Smokler: I’m sure it would, if it hasn’t already. As a consumer of culture, I am more interested in how rather than what. I’m more interested in how we find out Rosebud is the sled, than the fact that Rosebud is the sled. That doesn’t mean I feel at liberty to go around ruining the experience for everybody else, but I don’t think I’m going to get anything less out of Shakespeare’s work if I happen to know that the main character in The Tempest is named Prospero before I start reading it.

Rumpus: This gets back to the notion of practicality. The takeaway from your essay on Shakespeare is that people should derive joy from his work. What’s practical about that?

Smokler: In that essay, I don’t say anything like, “Oh, Shakespeare’s going to make you better at your job or a better parent or a better friend,” or anything like that, because I don’t believe that, as of yet. I’m a relative newbie to Shakespeare. But I think that one of the lessons I’ve taken away from getting older—I’m going to be forty in August—is that there are things that everybody is supposed to appreciate and admire that I just won’t understand, and that’s okay. That’s what the Scarlet Letter piece is about.

Rumpus: You really didn’t like that book!

Smokler: I didn’t, I didn’t, and I’m not going to. To no fault of Mr. Hawthorne’s—there’s plenty of his stuff that I have liked in the past. But I’m just not going to get on board with The Scarlet Letter. I was three-quarters of the way into that book when I’m like, “No! It’s just not going to work!” I wasn’t content to just throw away my effort on that, so I said, “Is there something I can wrestle out of this?” And what I wrestled out of it was that The Scarlet Letter is kind of a stand-in for difficult reading. Books aren’t all supposed to be our best friends. Sometimes they’re supposed to be that difficult friend who encourages us to do things that we don’t feel are rational or grown-up.

Rumpus: In a lot of ways, you’re giving the reader of Practical Classics permission to see these books as living works, as perfectly okay to criticize. They’re not put on some kind of altar, and yet they also shouldn’t just be swept away as some remnant of a past you don’t want to revisit, like high school.

Smokler: That’s absolutely right. If I’ve accomplished anything in this book, what I really want to have happen—and it may happen to one reader, maybe none—is for someone to read my take on one of these books and say, “Shoot! I never thought about Fahrenheit 451 in that way. Maybe Guy Montag’s crappy job, which is making him miserable, sounds a little bit like my crappy job that is making me miserable. Maybe Fahrenheit 451 isn’t just a good story but a useful story, and contained in it and the story of how it came into being is the idea of how work need not eat away at our soul.”

Rumpus: We’re back to the practicality thing again. The essay that impressed me the most in that regard was the one on To Kill A Mockingbird.

Smokler: My memory of that book was that the trial, the case of Tom Robinson, began around page ten. It was that fundamental to the narrative. In fact, it begins around page ninety-five. The beginning of the book is about family life, which, to me, says it’s as much a book about growing up and parents and children and siblings and family as it is about race relations. It is, of course, about race relations, too, but we get a lot more about Atticus Finch as a widowed father than we do about Atticus Finch as a crusading civil rights attorney.

Rumpus: And that’s not how most people remember it.

Smokler: No. This is terrible for me to say, but being a good father is valued a lot less than being a crusading civil rights attorney.

Rumpus: Are you saying that you think that book could be a useful guide for parenting?

Smokler: Yeah. I think it makes a great Father’s Day gift. Harper Lee made the biggest decision of her life to move to New York to try and put this book together far away from home, working a job she didn’t like in the dead cold of the winter of ’58 or ’59, whenever it was. Somewhere in her mind, she remembered the person who had believed in her the most, which was her dad, who gave her a typewriter when she was nine years old and expressed an interest in writing stories, something I don’t think you did with young girls in Monroeville, Alabama in the ’20s and ’30s. He was clearly a remarkable guy. Harper Lee’s older sister became one of the first practicing female attorneys in Monroeville and practiced law for seventy years or something crazy like that.

Rumpus: One of the things I liked about reading all fifty essays straight through, rather than a little bit here or there, is how much I learned about you that way. There aren’t a lot of first-person sentences in the book, but by the end of it, I felt like I had come to know you quite well through your reactions to literature. At one point, you state flatly, “I’m not a novelist.” And yet, in writing about novels, you show an incredible amount of sensitivity about character and setting and narrative. So I have to ask, why not? Why aren’t you a novelist?

Smokler: I love novels but I have nothing to invent. I have plenty to say and things I want to explore that aren’t me, but I don’t hear other voices, I don’t inhabit characters, I don’t do any of that. I only write as myself. To me, writing is not some Dance of the Seven Veils, where I’m trying to conceal who I am and what I’m saying. I’m a really, really bad liar. So everything I write sounds like me, contains some part of me. I’m just really Midwestern and wholesome and earnest in that way.

Rumpus: Do you share some of the anxiety that’s out there about the future of the novel? Do you think fiction or the novel as an art form is in trouble?

Smokler: No. The novel, frankly, has never been in trouble, ever. When we say that, we’re really talking about two things. We’re really talking about, “Is the business of the novel in trouble?” I can’t speak to that, I don’t know anything about the economics of publishing, or not much anyway. The other meaning of “Is fiction in trouble?” is “Are people like us who like fiction in trouble?” Is the world suddenly going to be inhabited by people we don’t recognize, don’t like, who don’t speak our language. I’m not saying you are, but to ask that is a fundamentally chauvinist notion. “Is something changing that I don’t like? Is the world not like me? Does it not represent my concerns?” That’s always at the base of that question, be it about fiction, be it, “Is the documentary film in trouble?” or “Is good writing in trouble?” There’s always an overblown romantic notion about how things used to be.

The great thing about the cruel brutality of business is it always kind of works itself out. If there is a problem with the way an industry works, eventually time and the crude forces of capitalism will roll past that roadblock and move us on to the next thing, whatever that may be.

Rumpus: To cite another book you write about in Practical Classics, that seems a tad Panglossian to me.

Smokler: It could be. I think that’s fair. I’m not saying we’re going to like the result on the other end. The delivery mechanisms are certainly changing, distribution is certainly changing, but the desire for story and fiction is as great as it’s ever been.

Rumpus: Okay. Let me try a different way of phrasing what I’m interested in here by getting back to Clifton Fadiman. Back in Fadiman’s heyday in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, literary types were terrified that television and radio were going to kill books. Fadiman very cleverly used those very mediums to promote books. You seem to have a similar project. You have 70,000 Twitter followers. You’re totally comfortable in the new digital reality. And yet, you’re urging people to read books, these kind of ancient, weird things. “Black squiggles on white paper,” as Fadiman called them. You don’t seem to see the Internet as a threat to books in general or the novel specifically.

Smokler: No. John Stuart Mill was convinced that the end of novels was going to be newspapers. Why in the world would you engage with a 300-page book when someone will drop the fifteen-page version of everything important that’s happening in the world on your doorstep in the morning and you can finish it before breakfast?

The same thing was said about the automobile, if you can believe that. Why would anybody ever sit still and read the classics? You can’t read and drive! I cannot believe the level of pessimism we have about life’s wondrous possibilities as readers. It must make us the worst kind of company. Who wants to hear that?

Reading is a wild act of daring and risk. Reading a book, imagining the world different than how it is where you’re currently standing, is a great psychological, social risk. It should make us more daring. It should make us eager to see what the world has to offer us. It should not have us building some sort of hermit-crab shell around ourselves, afraid that something’s going to take away our precious books from us. I don’t know where we get this idea from, but it’s not only childish, it’s just plain wrong. History has never borne out this fear. The only time history bears out this fear is when fascists start marching and burning things. Otherwise, you can spend the next two hours running off a list of things people were convinced would be the death of books and weren’t. It has never happened.

Rumpus: So you’re confident that in fifty years, somebody could write a book similar to yours, inviting people to revisit books they read in high school?

Smokler: Sure! It’ll be a different list. It’ll probably be delivered in a different format—hell, there might be a chip implanted in your head. I don’t care.

What I love about Clifton Fadiman is that to his mind, there was no distinction between intellectual improvement and enjoying yourself. He didn’t see those two things as different. He saw them, in fact, as one and the same, which I really admire about him. And I do too. But Clifton Fadiman was also very much a man of his time. He had a very midcentury, boom-time America point of view. My era, the time I’m living in, is one with endless access to information at the click of a mouse, which means we can get anything we want as quickly as we want for a reasonable price, and the default setting for the faucet is “on.” I’m not saying any of that is bad, but I’m saying we have the option to do differently. In fact, I believe that we should exercise that option. We shouldn’t be overclocked all the time, any more than we should be running all the time or talking all the time or only eating one kind of food or only engaged with one kind of person. To me, that’s a very, very myopic way to go through life.

What I’m arguing in Practical Classics is we actually do have time to slow down if we want to. We’re not going to miss anything. None of these books are going to go away. No one’s ever going to say, “Well, you could’ve reread Death of a Salesman, but now you can’t. Sorry, you missed that boat.” The truth is nothing is going to go away. Going away is almost a condition of a previous era. If I miss the Veronica Mars movie when it comes out, what does that actually mean? If I’m arguing anything, I think it’s that we have more time than we think.

Rumpus: And preserving books, specifically so-called “classics,” is an important way to help people realize that.

Smokler: Yes. If I have a conservative streak, it’s that I don’t think we can look at things that are canonical and just dismiss them out of hand and say, “Ah, dead white guys, who cares?”

Rumpus: Wait! Harold Bloom is appearing! There he is!

Smokler: There is a reason [these books] have persisted, and it’s not because a cabal of English teachers made it so. They have persisted because they have meant something to generations upon generations of humanity. We can decide for ourselves whether or not they mean something to us, and they’re not all going to (see: The Scarlet Letter). But we can’t dismiss them just because everybody likes them or just because everybody thinks they’re important. As clichéd and uninteresting as it is to say, “I love Shakespeare,” given that people have been saying that for 500 years, it’s probably worth poking around and seeing if you actually do or not.

***

First photograph of Kevin Smokler © 2013 by Julie Michelle.

Second photograph of Kevin Smokler © 2013 by Cariwyl Hebert.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Jon Mooallem
• The Rumpus Interview with Ayize Jama-Everett
• Letters Home

Like all good genre stories, The Liminal People sneakily explores some deep questions. In between cool fight sequences and imaginative depictions of the not-quite or perhaps more-than-human, it makes you wonder about what it means to belong and who gets past the gates of that exclusive country club called “normal.”

It’s little wonder Jama-Everett would be interested in these kinds of subjects. Like his work, he’s hard to categorize. And he’s quite familiar with the experience of liminality. He grew up as a kind of real-life Oscar Wao—a bespectacled, comic book-reading punk rock fan in 1980s Harlem. After travelling the world and living for a time in Morocco, he settled in Oakland, where he works as a therapist and practices a particularly lethal form of martial arts known as kajukenbo. He’s just turned in a draft of the second installment of The Liminal People to his publisher, Small Beer Press, and the series is currently being optioned as a film.

I caught up with Jama-Everett recently, over a few too many shots of mescal at Prizefighter Bar in Emeryville.

***

The Rumpus: Tell me about your name.

Ayize Jama-Everett: Ayize means “let it come.” It comes from an African root language. It always means “let it come,” but it’s used in different ways. In South Africa, it’s a name. In Eastern Africa, it’s a celebration. They have an Ayize festival. In the desert, in the Maghreb, it’s a saying. If a giant sandstorm is coming and nobody can get away from it, they just say “Ayize.” Like, “Let it come, motherfucker, we’ll handle it.”

Rumpus: Who named you? Your mom? Your dad?

Jama-Everett: My mom. I didn’t really grow up with my dad. He’s a political prisoner by the name of Mutulu Shakur. I haven’t told this to anyone—not to my publisher, not anybody—but one of his many liaisons was with Afeni Shakur, the mom of Tupac. Tupac wasn’t his kid, but he raised him like a son.

Rumpus: Tupac Shakur was your step-brother?

Jama-Everett: Yeah. But I didn’t find out until I was twenty-five, after he had died. Like most black boys in Harlem growing up, I didn’t know my dad. So I didn’t grow up with ‘Pac. I didn’t know ‘Pac. But I found out later when I met my half-sisters that they knew who I was and that they would always tease ‘Pac and tell him, “You’re not our real brother, Ayize’s our real brother.”

There was this one time, they were shooting the movie Above the Rim around the corner from my mom’s job, and a bunch of friends of mine went down to check it out. I was in a different place [musically] than them. I was like, “Bad Brains is the best band ever!” I had just discovered Fishbone. I was hanging out at CBGB. So I wasn’t that into it, but I went down there with them and somebody called out my name, “Yo, Ayize!” and ‘Pac stopped what he was doing, and he turned around, he looked right at me, and he said, “You’re Ayize?” and I said, “Yeah.” And he asked me, “Do you know who I am?” And I was just kind of like, “Um. Of course I do.” And he said, “Okay. Cool.” And that was it. It was bizarre. I didn’t know what the deal was. It was only years later that I figured it out.

Rumpus: You assumed he was asking if you knew who he was as a celebrity, but he was really asking if you knew how the two of you were connected.

Jama-Everett: That’s right. And I had no idea about it. It was a moment of utter confusion. My friends were all excited for me. They were like, “Tupac talked to you! How do you know Tupac?” and all I could say was, “I don’t know him.”

Rumpus: Did you have any contact with your father at all?

Jama-Everett: I saw him a few times when I was very young. And we talked on the phone sometimes. But he’s in jail. And I don’t like jail. Also, his notion of what it is to be politicized and black is annoying to me. It’s just straight annoying. He wanted Tennessee and some other states to secede. And I’m like, really? I don’t have a dad because you wanted to do that? And not just me, there’s like fourteen other motherfuckers out there, too. Papa was a rolling stone, you know?

To me, the most revolutionary thing you can do as a black person is raise some happy, cool kids that feel good about themselves and the world around them.

Rumpus: All this talk about your family makes for a good transition into the book. For all the fighting in it and the action and the supernatural stuff, what struck me was that it seemed, in the end, to be a story about family and finding your place in the world.

Jama-Everett: Yeah. I’ve never really felt family or the whole notion of home. I wish I did but it just never worked for me. I’ve always felt like the outsider. When I was younger, I had an idea that I could make family. I think that is what most people try to do. You go from your family of origin to your family of choice. I think that’s what Taggert is doing and I think that’s one thing I’ve been dealing with, too.

Rumpus: And yet, not to give anything away, the book does seem hopeful in that regard, with Taggert moving from his family of origin towards a family of choice—or at least beginning to see a way to make that happen.

Jama-Everett: I think everybody’s on a grind. Everybody’s working through something and trying to figure it out. And Taggert’s grind is trying to find support. It’s like joining a gang. A lot of times you have to get jumped in or you have to take somebody out. And that gang can be different things. It can be the military or it can be the Vatos Locos. But everything requires a sacrifice.

Rumpus: What was the first sci-fi book you read that got you interested in the genre?

Jama-Everett: It might have been Chocky, it might have been A Wrinkle in Time. You can do so much in kid’s books. Back in the ’80s, nobody paid attention to what was in there. I remember Elf Quest. In the fourth book, they find elves in the snow and they decide they’re gonna have a big war with the trolls, but before they do, they start having orgies. And I remember sitting in the Barnes and Noble on 81st and Broadway as a kid just going, “Whoa! Okay. I guess this is what’s in books.”

Rumpus: Is it safe to say you were one of the only kids in Harlem reading stuff like that?

Jama-Everett: Totally. People thought I was slow because I didn’t really like to read. But then I got a bunch of comics and suddenly I liked reading. It was from a really young age, too. Like second, third grade.

Rumpus: What comics were you reading?

Jama-Everett: X-Men.

Rumpus: That’s some heavy stuff for a seven- or eight-year-old.

Jama-Everett: Oh yeah. The graphic novel I remember the most was God Loves, Man Kills. It was this parable of Professor X being Martin Luther King, Jr. and Magneto being Malcolm X. I loved it.

Rumpus: Why do you think the X-Men resonated with you so much?

Jama-Everett: I was born in ’74, and if you look at New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it was one step away from Mad Max and the Thunderdome. I mean, it was grimy! And I wasn’t cute. I wasn’t perceived as smart. I was a geeky kid with glasses and I was a little stick, very skinny. People forget, it wasn’t always cool to be a geek like it is now, you know? So I was constantly scrutinized and seen as a potential victim. I had to learn how to navigate the world and other people’s perceptions and I think that taught me about narrative. It was like, This is what this other person’s story is about me. Do I want to play into that or do I want to play against that? So when I saw these stories about mutants versus humans, I really got it. It made sense.

Rumpus: And now you’re writing about liminal people, people on the edges of society.

Jama-Everett: Yep. When I first started writing, that’s what I wrote about. People on the fringes of the fringe group. One of the things I got from growing up in New York was that you should never assume you know the full story about people, never assume that you know everything that’s going on.

I remember riding the A train one day when I was about nine years old. I had headphones on. And this dude and this girl were talking, so I took off the headphones because I wanted to hear his game. The guy is talking at her: “What’s up with you? You got a man? Blah, blah.” And the girl keeps telling him to leave her alone, but the guy won’t shut up. All of sudden, this other guy from across the aisle gets up and punches the guy three times in the head—knocks him out. Bam bam bam! Then the girl gets up and goes through his pockets and she says, “I told you to back the fuck off.” Then they both get off the train together! That taught me, hey, you need to pay attention. You need full awareness at all times. Everything is a risk.

Rumpus: I find it interesting that you grew up in Harlem, the Mecca of black culture in America, and that you’ve wound up in Oakland, which has been called the Harlem of the West.

Jama-Everett: That’s true. But, you know, I don’t just hang out with black people…

Rumpus: I guess I’m getting back to the family of choice versus the family of origin thing, and finding a place to belong.

Jama-Everett: Black people are my family origin. It’s not that I don’t like being black. I am thoroughly fine with being black. What I like is to be around other people who are fine with me being thoroughly black. And that’s not as common as you might think it is. A lot of people have tension. And that’s what I love about Oakland. It accepts all kinds. It’s like, “Are you working? Do you have a job? Are you trying to get through? Cool.” I think Oakland has more middle-class pride than any place I know. If you’re making it through somehow, you’re good. I like that spirit.

Rumpus: Do you think you’ve found your home then, in Oakland?

Jama-Everett: I definitely feel comfortable here. And if someone were to come step on my head and say, “This is what home feels like!” I guess I wouldn’t argue with them. But I think having not grown up with it, there’s always going to be a question. Is this really home? I’m never quite sure.

Rumpus: Have you ever thought about moving back to New York? It’s a pretty popular thing to do these days.

Jama-Everett: The Harlem I grew up in is gone. The hill I grew up next to used to be called Sugar Hill, because that’s where everyone got their heroin. About five years ago, I went back and I’m walking from the train to my mom’s house at like nine in the morning on a weekend, and I saw two white gay dudes walking their dog, and in my mind, I was like, “Run! Run!” But then I realized, this is their neighborhood now. I’m the stranger. I’m reacting to some shit that hasn’t been around here for twenty fucking years.

The other thing is, a lot of my friends growing up were street kids, prostitutes, spare-changers, and you know, Giuliani, Koch, all those assholes, they killed them. They threw them off the streets, they put them in psych wards, they put them in juvie. I used to hang out in Washington Square Park and Tompkins Square Park. And those spots have totally changed. All the spots that were landmarks for me were landmarks because of people. And the people I chilled with can’t afford to live in Manhattan anymore. So, you know, talking about family of origin, it’s not there. That city is gone. I remember watching Sex and the City and I’ll be honest, the first two seasons, I was hooked.

Rumpus: Sex and the City? Really?

Jama-Everett: Oh yeah. I’ve got weird streaks in me, man. I was all in it. I was like, “What is Samantha going to do next?” And then—and I hate when this question happens in my brain because it usually fucks up my experience—I thought, “Where are all the black people?” And it hurt, because I realized I had just watched two seasons of this show set in New York fucking City where I was born and raised, and it wasn’t even just, “Where are the black people?” It was, “Where is any person of color?” Even the cab drivers were white! If your cab drivers are white, where the hell are you?

I’m not necessarily mad about it, though. I mean, back in the day, a rat got on the subway with me once. It just walked on right behind me. I have a pathological fear of rats, so I was crying and shaking and climbing the poles to get away, and everybody else on the train was laughing at me. But that’s what I knew. And that’s just not there anymore.

Rumpus: Speaking of finding one’s place in the world, putting out your first novel must feel like a similar process in some ways. You can’t help but hope for some kind of acceptance, the sense that you’ve found people who understand you. Have you had a taste of that?

Jama-Everett: For sure. I’ve gotten e-mails from individuals—I feel weird calling them fans—who’ve been like, “That book was amazing.” That’s been cool. The industry response has been par for the course, though. They’ve been like, “Yeah, we see that you’ve done something,” and that’s about it. But that’s okay, because the shit that makes their dicks hard doesn’t usually make my dick hard, so I would be weirded out if all of a sudden I was nominated for a Hugo or something.

Rumpus: You’d be thinking, What have I done wrong?

Jama-Everett: Exactly! One of the things about the commentary is that people keep tripping about the fact that Taggert uses the word “faggot.” I’m beginning to think that what it gets down to is P.C. cred, like, “I called this author out for using the word ‘faggot.’” Either that or people just want to have a mode of connection with the narrator or the protagonist of a book, and that protagonist can’t do anything that they perceive as an insult.

I don’t feel like I need to defend myself on this front. I ran away to a transsexual house when I was a kid. I have queer friends left and right. I’m probably one of the more vocal black male queer advocates that you’ll meet. So, you know, when it first came up, I was like, “Okay, whatever,” but three or four other people have done it now, too. I mean, here we have this character who’s slaughtered a child. He’s tortured people. You’re okay with all of that. But he says “faggot” and now you’re offended?

Rumpus: So when you wrote him using the word, you did it knowingly, to reflect something about him?

Jama-Everett: It was just his voice. This is a guy who went to college, but he’s been living with hash traders in Morocco. He’s been sent around the world to kill people. And some no-account individual is messing with him, so he’s just like, “Fuck you, faggot.”

Rumpus: You’ve also voiced some disapproval when people have called it a “superhero” book. Is it the term hero that you don’t like?

Jama-Everett: To me, a hero is more than a sandwich, okay? And Taggert’s project in the book is to become human, not superhuman.

Rumpus: And you don’t think he’s heroic in that effort?

Jama-Everett: I guess when you have somebody reaching for what they could be instead of what they are and not just accepting their lot, there’s some heroism in that. But in terms of looking at Taggert as a model or a way to behave? Nope. Not at all.

If you want a classic morality tale, where good triumphs over evil and the black guys—I mean, the bad guys wear black and the good guys wear white, there’s tons of those out there. I am not interested in that story. I am interested in people who make hard choices and have to live with them. I’m interested in characters who reflect this world in a different world setting.

Rumpus: You’ve had an interesting process with this book. You put it out yourself first, right?

Jama-Everett: Yes. I kept sending it out and waiting three months and then getting these really great rejection letters. Then I had this one interaction with an agent, someone I had been referred to, so not just a cold call, and I waited months to hear back, and I called and they were like, “Are you sure you sent it?” That was it for me.

Not a lot of people eat off of self-publishing. I knew that. But then again, I didn’t know of a lot of people who had ever eaten off their first novel anyway. So I just figured, let’s get it out there. I hit up local bookstores and they carried it. I had an awesome website, and I sold some there. Then my friend Nalo Hopkinson said, “You should send it to Gavin Grant over at Small Beer.” I thought he would be interested in possibly looking at something else but he said, “No, we’ll just do this.”

Rumpus: How do you know Nalo Hopkinson?

Jama-Everett: It’s a funny story. I used to be on this thing called the Afrofuturism Listserv. For anybody who was into Afrofuturism, it was kind of a big deal. This was probably 1996 or ’97, back when listservs were big. And Harry Allen, the publicist for Public Enemy, had put something online to the effect of, “Black people should not be having sex with white people while oppression is still going on.” I had a white girlfriend at the time, and so I drafted this whole page-and-a-half thing about it, and I subject-lined it, “I just had sex with a white girl.” To this day, I have never gotten so much hate mail. I couldn’t believe it. “I feel so sorry for you, brother. Your mind is so fucked up. Blah blah blah blah.” Only three people came to my defense. Nalo was one of them. And so me and Nalo had this online friendship, and whenever she would come into town, we’d have drinks. She’s been such a great advocate. That’s my buddy. I love her to death.

Rumpus: You found a little bit of family there, it sounds like. A kind of writing family.

Jama-Everett: I look up to Nalo. She’s had her struggles. But she writes consistently. She gets out there. So in that sense, of her career, I would love to have that. But some of the shit she’s had to go through to get there, I don’t want all that.

Rumpus: Isn’t that what a big sibling is supposed to do? Pave the way? Go through all the hell so that you don’t have to?

Jama-Everett: All the biggies—Nalo, Sam Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes—I couldn’t be them. They put so much on the line. I still have two day jobs! I write on the side because I can’t trust these motherfuckers with my money. I’ve been broke before. I don’t want to be broke again. Octavia Butler was working in a library when she wrote Kindred. Sam Delany lost his mind a few times trying to get his shit done. I’m not that person. I like to eat. There’s only so far down the line I’m willing to go.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Jon Mooallem
• The Rumpus Interview with Kevin Smokler