A Conversation with Seth Clabough
Ian Ragland interviews author Seth Clabough (seth clabough) about quantum mechanics, characterization, and Clabough’s novel, ‘All Things Await.’
Seth Clabough is the author of All Things Await, which has been nominated for the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction. His work appears in such outlets as Smokelong Quarterly, Barely South, Magma Poetry, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Blackbird, Litro Magazine, New Writing, Women’s Studies, The Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, The Atlantic (rpt), alongside Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Doerr in Hearing Voices, and in numerous other journals and magazines.
Ploughshares Blog selected his work for their national “Best Short Story of the Week” column; other work has been editor-nominated for Best of the Net 2016, the Luminaire Award for Best Prose, storySouth’s Million Writer Award, and the Best Small Fictions Prize. He has a PhD in English from Aberystwyth University where he won the LBA Fiction Prize. He directs the Communication Center and teaches in the English Department at Randolph-Macon College. Find him at sethclabough.com. [Note: Music autoplays at this link.]
Ian Ragland: First and foremost, I’d like to know how and why you chose All Things Await as the title of your book.
Seth Clabough (seth clabough): There’s a passage in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet” where Emerson’s lamenting that we don’t “with sufficient plainness […] address ourselves to life, nor dare we chant our own times [but we] should not shrink from celebrating it” and it ends with the line: “Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await.” This was sort of the initial way I conceived of the narrator’s somewhat ridiculously lofty but well-meaning view of himself. I also thought the title was equally appropriate for the narrator’s quest and the presence of parallel universes that the narrative suggests. Lightly sets off on his “big adventure” feeling as if all things are possible and waiting for him out there, and then, of course, as Lightly believed, he’s able to glimpse all these parallel versions of himself living out their variant lives in all these other universes. In that sense, all things really were waiting for him at the end of his trip.
Immediately upon reading, your reference to “Schrödinger’s Cat” double-slit experiment as the ‘cat in the box paradox’ grabbed my attention. After some quick research, I was still consumed by this lingering concept of utter uncertainty and parallel existing worlds. With the knowledge of your interconnection to Lightly’s character in mind, I’m curious as to when your infatuation with quantum mechanics began. Did your spiked interest occur in the midst of your college career, or well before?
I’d say my interest spiked very early on in the writing process when I realized that the narrator was obsessed with it. At first that was not a pleasant realization because it meant I’d have to do a lot of research. I was somewhat excited to apply certain aspects of quantum theory to the structure of the novel, but it did take some work to have his obsession with it cohere and achieve a sort of symbiosis with the structure of the narrative as a whole. It’s certainly true that the incorporation of quantum mechanics in the creation of literary fiction is not a new undertaking. Writers as different as Ian McEwan and Jorge Volpi have experimented with the application of it in their novel-length fiction, and both John Barth’s On with the Story and John Updike’s Toward the End of Time, make significant use of the metaphorical aspects of quantum physics.
So, it was challenging, but when Lorrie Moore describes writing as “running as far as [she] can with a voice, a tuneful patch of a long, nagging idea,” I see a connection to my experience with ATA. Although I did worry whether it was wise to incorporate it in my narrative at all, I relieved those concerns through a combination of research and accepting that this was, in part, Lightly’s obsession, and I would have to concede that to him if I wanted to run with his voice as far as I could.
I understand where you’re coming from, as I quickly realized how numb I was to the quantum physical world — It was a bit disheartening to know how much work I had cut out for me if I wanted to pick up on important allusions cohesively throughout the storyline of ATA.
Slightly digressing momentarily, I’d like to speak on behalf of the Randolph-Macon College community and let you know how pleased we were with your familiar references to locations on our campus throughout the beginning of the book. Specifically, I am curious if Greenwood Library, mentioned in ATA, was a pseudo-place in substitution for the McGraw-Page Library that stands on Randolph-Macon’s campus today. If so, it is very ironic that the “most beautiful spot on campus” is now the location of your office as the Director of the Communication Center there.
Ha! I hadn’t thought of that. I should be super happy how it all worked out! The truth is that since the first section of the novel takes place at Thomas Jefferson College, a small, fictional institution which I locate in Virginia, I decided to root much of the events that occur there — and, indeed, the particulars of the campus and buildings — in my own experiences as an undergraduate at Randolph-Macon College. My direct connection to the places made certain things easier to localize in my head. I did not have to dream up the backdrop to events early in the novel because my intimate familiarity with those areas allowed me to focus nearly all of my creative energy on dialogue and the movement of the characters against what essentially was a prefabricated scenery.
I can see how knocking out the physical placement in a fiction piece allows you to dive into interaction and progression much easier than if you had to conjure up every component from sheer imagination.
Of course, and to add on to that, such connections between the fictional events in ATA and my own actual experiences can be found — to varying degrees — in every scene of the book. Yet, although the root of actual experience runs through them, there’s not a single scene in the work that actually happened exactly as presented. I strongly believe that such authentic roots are essential to writing compelling fiction, and if I were to attempt to include such scenes literally, the book would certainly fail as a whole.
My recognition, though, of the need to root fiction in actual experiences provided me with an interesting opportunity. All along, I knew Lightly would soon be setting out for the remote fishing and surfing village on Costa Rica’s Peninsula de Nicoya, and I was keenly aware that it was a place that I had virtually no knowledge of — no considerable foundation of experiences on which I might rely as I built the narrative. Rather than worrying over this issue, I found that it contributed significantly to the energy and curiosity I needed to see the project through to completion. Although I’d felt connected to the early events in the novel, I’d also felt a little shackled to my own experiences. In other words, to make the work authentic, I felt I had to root scenes in environments that I was familiar with; therefore the limitations of my firsthand experiences of place restricted me only to those particular locales where I’d spent significant time. Just at the point where Lightly became free of the places he’s known (Thomas Jefferson College, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Charlottesville, etc.), I, too, became freed from them — my narrative no longer bound to familiar places.
It’s interesting you say that, because as a reader, you do feel the reins of the story loosen as the narrative develops — allowing you to meditate hundreds of possible interpretations and really amplifying the experience of sifting through Lightly’s experience.
Changing direction a bit, I’d like to address the happenings on the beach, during the meteor shower that took place in the beginning of the book, leading to an epiphany you had. Did the meteor land dangerously close to you all, or did it seem closer because of how extravagant the moment was? Also, was the scene entirely fabricated for the story, or did literally witnessing a parallel situation in your own life inspire you to include this in the story? Going back to the beginning of the book, you said your dad was both alive and dead. Did something superposed daunt you, leading to a forever-changed perspective on life and death that fateful night?
Not too personal and no, not entirely fictional — It did happen, but the particulars were all different. I was a (not-so-great) beach lifeguard on Hilton Head Island for a summer and had a friend drive down from New Jersey to visit one weekend. The girl I was seeing on the island at the time was really into psilocybin ’shrooms for some reason, so we ate a bunch and went out for $1 White Russian night at Hinchey’s. Things went downhill from there. My girlfriend was unhappy that I’d let my buddy come down to stay without telling her, and my buddy had been having problems with his dad so the culmination of things became increasingly more tense and unpleasant no matter how many White Russians went down the hatch, and eventually my buddy ran off in tears. I ended up leaving her and going after him. I caught up to him on the beach, and we laid there in the sand in the dark and talked about what was going on with his life at home. By pure dumb luck, there really was a meteor shower over the island that started just at that moment and lasted for quite a while. Perhaps it was the effect of the psilocybin, but it really did feel as though the planet were hurtling through the stars at a great speed and that’s exactly how the narrator describes that meteor scene in the book. It’s a different beach in the book and with different people. There are also no ’shrooms, but, going back to what we were just talking about, I do think writers ought to root their fictional scenes in some actual experience because I think that personal connection makes the writing better and the scene more likely to connect with readers because it’ll feel authentic.
The writing style made for a very relatable read, so you’re right, you’ve found the method that works for you undoubtedly, I’d say. Your book was divided into many subsections. Because of that, I found it very easy to retain it all along the way. Did you structure the novel in such a way to highlight micro-components in the storyline, or did it end up being this way inevitably due to the limitations that your daily allotted time to write may have created?
They just represent, for me, the end of one scene and the start of another. I can write in little or longer scenes, but I have no idea how people write chapters that adhere to a general length. I don’t think I could do it. It didn’t have to do with how much time I had to write on a given day, rather, the chapter sizes were organic and unrestricted to set guidelines. Whether I wanted to jump ahead a few hours or jump to a flashback or dream sequence was all based on what felt right at the time.
As a writer, it makes sense to me, now, why you would break up the story into relatively short and non-uniform chapters as you did. It’s the perfect balance of structure and novelty; really keeps you on your toes.
Straying from format, let’s talk about your intriguing word choice. Perhaps my favorite instance of your word choice fell specifically at the end of chapter 26. I was fixated on the word “entangled” when referring to “the kids’ dreams of magic and beauty,” as this specific verbiage pops up often in talk of quantum theory. In this very scene, Santana Montana asks Lightly’s brother about Lightly’s questionably supernatural, yet vivid visions of their destiny which kept recurring. Was this your way of concretely implanting the idea that Lightly is a beautiful mixture of brilliant and delusional in the reader’s mind?
I was thinking of Lightly and his dead twin as quanta entangled; they share this connection despite being separated by death, which is perhaps the greatest distance there is from the living. Whether Lightly is delusional or manic is probably the central question readers continue to have. He’s certainly incredibly manic, but those lines between madness and genius are often blurry.
As our conversation dictated earlier, it seems as though you crafted this novel to be open-ended for the reader’s delight — which I appreciated. That being said, it’s an adventurous feeling to be able to answer your own questions free-willingly without being bound to one concrete conclusion.
Yes, I wanted more than one ending to be possible. It may seem ridiculous, but I’m not sure at all what the ending actually is. In fact, I’m less sure now than I even was originally. I thought when I wrote the first draft that he was mad and that he’d had all these opportunities to be happy (staying with Emmy, going with Indigo, or going with Santana Montana and Rosa) and that it was his own insularity and self-obsession (I was thinking about America in general.) that left him on that beach, delusional and wondrous. Interestingly, a fellow author and friend who is an accomplished novelist was surprised after reading it to hear me say Lightly was likely mad. He’d formed the opinion that he wasn’t mad, but just eccentric and gifted and really had this vision and experience regarding parallel universes. The more I thought about it, the more I came to think, well, maybe he did. I think evidence is there for whatever reality you see as the reader, and the truth really is that I don’t know.
We haven’t really touched on Lightly’s mother yet, who is, in many ways, responsible for the upbringing of this extravagant and vivid character of whom we came to notice all the true colors relatively early on. There is one big knot I have yet to tie. Briefly throughout the story, Lightly’s mother is made out to be a Romance novelist. It seems as though the mother suggests she’s writing another book toward the end, but this time it’s not a romance novel. ... Rather, could it be assumed its contents revolve around what happened to Lightly? If so, does that mean your novel is really the mother’s novel?
Well, that’s the mother’s assertion, yes, but it’s really up to the reader to form an opinion based on the evidence in the novel. Lightly doesn’t buy it, but the mother’s explanation kind of makes sense if you look at it closely. There’s actually another level to it, which I was aware of as I was writing those sections regarding Lightly’s mother: Lightly set out to have this great vision, and supposedly his mother (who we learn likes to set out to capture backgrounds for her romance novels) claims to be in Costa Rica presently to research the disappearance of her son and the place where he disappeared so that she can write about it in her new book. That was also true for me — I was the actual author who had moved to Costa Rica and was writing about Lightly’s mother, also an author, who had moved to Costa Rica. Both of us were there to do research and figure out what happened to Lightly. So, in a way, you could look at it as I was writing a story about a mother who was writing a story about her son who was telling a story about what happened to him. I found these possibilities sort of interesting but, ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what I was aiming for; what’s really happening is up to the reader.
That’s an interesting response. After talking with you more, I feel motivated to give this book a “once more” and see if I can unlock secrets I did not think were there initially.
So, Seth, do you see this story paving the way for any imminent future work?
Yes. It’ll pave the way for a book-length work that is the opposite of ATA in virtually every way. I’m very proud of the book, but it was a long process, and Lightly’s voice, with its boisterousness and fast-paced high energy, is exhausting to narrate through. I’ll like having a withdrawn/introverted narrator in the next work or just go third-person. ATA is a one-off; there won’t be any sequels.
