An Interview with Brad Kessler
by
Kathryn Pope
[Brad
Kessler’s newest novel, Birds in Fall, shows what happens after a plane
falls from the sky and into the North Atlantic. In the story, Kessler knits
together the experiences of families who flock to a small island off Nova Scotia
to wait for news and grieve for their dead. In doing so, he threads together the
mysteries of mythology, ornithology, and community. In this interview, we hear
the story of how Birds in Fall came about.]
KP: I'm
curious about how you began working on this book.
BK: I had a friend who died on Swissair flight 111, the plane that went
down off the coast of Nova Scotia in September of 1998. They didn’t find his
body right away. In fact, it took several months while the recovery people
sifted through the bottom of the ocean trying to find a piece of him large
enough for a positive identification. There was something incredibly haunting
and poignant about those weeks for his family, while they waited for news from
Halifax. I think the origins of the novel came from that waiting period, that
limbo period. It had something to do with the tides and it was fall and bird
migration was underway, and I’d always loved that stunningly beautiful and stark
part of the world: Nova Scotia.
KP: Have you spent much time there?
BK: Actually, I’ve only been there a couple of times, but they were formative
times. When I was nineteen, I hitchhiked up to the Maritimes and spent a week
camped, illegally I’m afraid, on Cavendish, the Anne of Green Gables Beach, on
Prince Edward Island. I brought with me a copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse which I tried to read over and over. I was too young to really
understand the novel, but there was something about it—the language more than
anything—I absolutely loved, even then. So ever since, I’ve conflated the
landscape of the Canadian Maritimes with Woolf’s Outer Hebrides. Both seemed
wonderfully rich literary terrain. And the image of the lighthouse appears, as
you know, briefly in my novel. I couldn’t help myself.
KP: In many ways, your story is a portrait of grief changing over time. Did you
know the story would progress this way when you started?
BK: I didn’t know where the story was going exactly. I started off with that one
strong image – the family members waiting along the shore for news of their
loved ones. It wasn’t exactly an image, but more like a strong sense of being
placed, there beside the coast, and it was a place where I wanted to dwell for a
long time, where I knew this story could be told. To live beside the ocean –
particularly in the north Atlantic – always seems to me like living on the brink
between life and death.
But to get back to your question. I did have a sense that Ana, the main
protagonist, would, over time, change. This is a book about metamorphosis. I
knew, five years down the road after the terrible event, she’d be a different
person.
KP: What about the Maritimes made it seem like being on the brink between life
and death?
BK: In the case of the novel, the inn where the family members retreat does
exist somewhere in that luminal space between life and death. The living are
waiting on shore for news of the dead, and the dead seem to be hovering, right
out there, over the waters. But, in a larger sense, whenever I stand on a beach
in the north I always feel that old subconscious Conradian feeling: the ocean as
dark and brooding and unknown, the ocean as the unconscious, as the origins of
our species, as the place we came from, as in the womb, and the place we’ll go
back to. It seems so antithetical to human life, and so huge and forceful and
planetary. Like any edge or border, it seems to mark the limit of one life and
the start of another. Like when you enter death after life.
KP: The sense of waiting in the book is particularly haunting. I think the first
person, past tense narrative at the beginning of the story adds to this, as the
reader waits for Russel’s voice to return (not unlike Ana does, in a way). Can I
ask how you chose Russel’s point of view for this scene?
BK: Because this is a novel about metamorphosis, I always had in mind that the
first chapter and the last chapter would mirror each other in some way, and yet
show the complete cycle of the metamorphosis undertaken in the course of the
book. So the first chapter is told in first person in Russel’s voice, but then
Russel dies, and I think it does set up an expectation in the reader’s mind. How
can the dead guy be telling this story in past tense if he’s dead? Well, I
wanted to suggest that he is not completely dead, and there is a reason for the
reader—as well as Ana, as you say—to be actively waiting. What he turns into is
part of the core of the novel.
KP: Without giving too much away...you’re referring to the myth of the halcyon
days, or the kingfisher myth.
BK: Yeah, I’ve been carrying that myth around for years – how the Gods turn
Queen Alcyon and her husband into kingfishers. I’ve always loved that story.
KP: I'm curious about what you mean by carrying the myth? Have you considered
using it in other writing?
BK: I guess what I mean is that some things lodge in your consciousness and take
root there. That story of the Halcyon days I first read about probably twenty
years ago, and kingfishers themselves became a kind of totemic bird for me. The
year I started writing this book, I discovered a kingfisher nest right near our
house! There’s a beautiful enigmatic poem by Charles Olson called “The
Kingfishers” and that too became a something of an inspiration for the book.
KP: In many ways, this seems like a novel that could only come in a post-9/11
world, but you've mentioned that you were actually writing the story before
9/11. Could you tell us about that?
BK: Yeah, I started the novel in the summer of 2001. In the first version, there
was the plane crash, but I’d also written all these scenes that took place
around the World Trade Center. Basically, one of the characters was a window
washer who worked on the towers and would wear a scarf like a Saudi prince over
his head and make faces at the businessmen inside to provoke them (they all
studiously avoided him). Meanwhile, I had this woman who would walk around the
Twin Towers in the morning during bird migration picking up the dead birds who’d
flown into the glass the night before.
KP: I don't want to use the same word twice, but this is haunting. Do you think
it's a coincidence that you had written these elements into the story?
BK: I did think it was a bit spooky, and I’d forgotten all about what I’d been
writing. My wife had been at jury duty on September 11th, a few blocks away from
ground zero. She’s a photographer and called that morning and said that she was
going down there. I turned the TV on and saw the obliteration and wasn’t sure if
she was in that cloud or out of it, and we lost communication for several hours.
About two weeks later, I read what I’d been writing—the stuff about the Twin
Towers and the guy looking like a Saudi and the businessmen inside, and the dead
birds crashing into the towers. I went downstairs and showed the pages to my
wife. My hands were shaking. She just shrugged and said, oh well, you plugged
into the collective unconscious.
KP: That's amazing and at the same time, seems very natural. Part of being
creative, I think, is being sensitive to the world around us, which might
include things that aren't physical as well as those that are.
BK: I agree. I keep coming across great coincidences which don’t surprise me any
more.
KP: I'm curious about how migrating birds came to be part of the story? Of
course, the image of birds in flight reminds us of people in flight in the
story, but there's something about the way Ana talks about the migration
(especially the birds falling mid-flight) that shows the vulnerability of life
in a way that I don't think just a plane crash could do.
BK: After September 11th, I had to put aside the novel about the plane
crash. How could you write about a plane crash after that day? So I started
writing another novel. This one had an ornithologist as the protagonist. I did a
lot of research on bird biologists, and spent some time in the field. I’ve
always been an amateur birder myself, so this was pure pleasure. The migration
thing just sort of evolved over time thematically, but turned out to be a
perfect metaphor in a way for a whole host of things. Eventually, I was able to
pick up the plane crash novel again. I lost the Twin Towers, as you’d expect,
but I’d gained this ornithologist character, who I loved.
KP: It's hard for me to imagine the story without the ornithologists.
Were there other elements that came together from the two stories?
BK: Well, what I found out was that they weren’t really two separate
novels at all. I write gropingly, in the way they say lost cats find their way
home—by going in ever-widening circles. It takes a long time and lot of area
tends to be covered and I end up tossing most of the material away. But in both
stories there was this woman ornithologist and this Iranian American. It was
kind of like the TV show Survivor. They were the ones who ended up staying on
the island.
KP: But there’s more than just the Iranian and the ornithologist on your
island....One of my favorite parts of the book is how the families from all over
the world grieve separately (and in such different ways) and how a community
slowly forms in the midst of the pain everyone's going through. I'd like to hear
about how you decided to bring together this group?
BK: It wasn’t really a conscious or premeditated decision. In the first
few drafts I really did only have the Iranian, Pars Mansoor, and the American
Ornithologist, Ana Gathreaux, on this island – along with the innkeepers. Then
slowly, as the story evolved, more people started populating the inn. More
family members of the survivors. Like the Swissair flight from which the novel
gets its inspiration, the flight in the book is filled with people from around
the globe, and this became really fascinating. What happens when people from
different cultures literally drop out of the sky and their families all end up
gathering in a very isolated rural place? I wanted to explore the different ways
they react to the stark beauty of the coast, and the different ways they deal
with death.
KP: These differences, I think, make the island and the connections
between the people there so striking. Can I ask if you're working on another
project?
BK: I’m about three-quarters of the way done with a novella and gestating
a longer novel. I’m also starting work on a nonfiction book.
KP: What’s the nonfiction book about?
BK: Goats.
KP: That’s fascinating! Can I get you to share one tidbit about goats
with us in parting?
BK: Hmmm. Well.
We actually raise goats, believe it or not. But I’ll leave you with this,
because it’s related to goats and to this novel: the word for tragedy in Classic
Greek comes from “Tragos” the cry of the goat. I’ve always loved goats.
<<read an excerpt from Birds in Fall>>
<<read praise for Birds in
Fall>>
<<visit Brad's website>>
<<buy Birds in Fall>>