Truth and Resilience: An Interview
By: Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum
The novel Blithedale Canyon, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in June, begins in the summer of 2001 when thirty-something Trent Wolfer finds himself back at home in the Northern California town of his youth, working behind the register of a fast-food restaurant. He’s living with his mother, wrestling with his addictions, and fighting the fear that has driven him again and again throughout his life to lean into his self-destructive impulses. It’s at this moment that he runs into his first love–Suze Randall–and sees in her a reason to seek something else. An exploration of wreckage and recovery, resilience and redemption, Blithedale Canyon is–as its publisher writes–“a literary love story for every man who has ever wondered why he keeps smashing up the things he cares about.”
Blithedale Canyon is author Michael Bourne’s years-in-the-making debut. Michael, an American living in British Columbia, Canada, has written for Poets & Writers, The New York Times, and Salon, among other publications. The Millions has chosen Blithedale Canyon as one of its “Most Anticipated” books hitting shelves in the first half of this year, and author Edan Lepucki has called the novel “a compelling and lively debut with a narrator I won’t soon forget [...] A story of love, addiction, regret and hope.”
In the following interview, Michael and I discuss his process in writing Blithedale Canyon, the challenges and surprises of publishing, and the universal truth that honing one’s resilience is an essential practice for sustaining a career as a writer.
KSL: From its first lines, Blithedale Canyon situates readers as close intimates of its deep-in-trouble narrator, Trent, whose worldview has been warped both by the privilege of his surroundings and by the traumas he’s navigated throughout his life. What about Trent’s voice and way of seeing determined him as this novel’s center for you, and what was your process in developing his character as the novel evolved from early draft to finished manuscript?
MB: I can’t really say his character evolved that much through the process of writing the book. The world around him did, in big ways, but his baseline Trentness was always there. This is a love story about an addict who is trying to put together some clean time before he blows up the life of a woman he loves, and I wanted to be honest about what it’s like to be an addict who isn’t using, how painful and scary that can be. A saint, maybe, could handle it well, but Trent is no saint. I wanted to be true to that.
My sense of Trent is that he grew up in a bullshit world and he knows it. He lies to everybody else, and he’s happy to glide along on other people’s delusions, but he’s onto himself. That’s his one essential decency. He’s angry and irresponsible and self-destructive, but he sees himself and the world around him with clear eyes. Oh, and he’s capable of love. He doesn’t know it at the start of the story, but he is.
KSL: It seems to me not inconsequential that you’ve set the narrative in the months just preceding and just following September 11th, 2001–a distinct turning point in recent history that has simultaneously led to the entrenchment of a right-wing extremist push to preserve existing systems of privilege in America and to the growing awareness of and active work to dismantle those systems. As an American who has spent a good portion of the last decade living outside of this country, how has your experience both within and outside of American culture shaped Blithedale Canyon?
MB: It's funny about 9/11. That was in the book from the start. A lot got thrown out and a lot came in later, but that was always there. Years before I actually wrote the scene that’s in the book, I had this vision of Trent, this epic screwup fresh out of jail and rehab, waking up one morning feeling like his loved ones are under attack and he needs to go to war. In the book, the joke is that he’s in California, and 9/11 is just another sunny day in September. But the moment is still real. He’s the terrorist in that household. He’s the one with the power to blow the whole thing sky high. In the book that morning is the moment he realizes he actually has something to lose.
To my mind, 9/11 was a moment of national loss of innocence. If you remember that time, we were all so shocked that people in other parts of the world hated us. It just didn’t compute. They hate us? For what? We’re the beacon of freedom. We quickly turned it around so we were the blameless victims and they were the senseless murderers, but still there was that little moment of recognition. And that’s very much what this book is about, about seeing yourself as you are, not how you’d like to see yourself. If you’ve ever been an addict, you know that moment of recognition when the veil is pulled away and you see how everybody else sees you. It isn’t pretty. Maybe that’s why 9/11 stayed in the book through so many drafts.
KSL: You’ve just noted the beautiful remove of California on that day, and that raises for me a question about the novel’s setting—for which it is titled, by the way. The backdrop to Trent’s story is a California town that, at the turn of this century is beginning to lose the golden gloss of its mythic past (that golden past suggested even in its name), and though its inhabitants are clearly not living that west coast dream fulfilled, they nevertheless still seem infected with its promise. How does that nostalgia for a fabled past inform your characters?
MB: Blithedale Canyon is a real place, a neighborhood of sprawling homes perched on the side of Mount Tamalpais in Mill Valley, California, which happens to be my hometown. Like Trent, I’ve watched Mill Valley morph from a half-hippie town filled with college professors and refugees from the Summer of Love to a magnet for investment bankers and tech gurus. I have such an ambivalent relationship to the place. With its stratospheric wealth and unexamined liberal pieties, Mill Valley is the locus of a great deal that I think is wrong with the world, but at the same time–and this is the thing I wanted to get into the book–it’s a real town. People know each other and look out for each other. Or they did, anyway. They still do probably, though I wouldn’t really know, not having lived there since the 1980s.
Trent romanticizes that 1970s hippie era because it’s the last time his life made any sense to him. His parents were these young scenesters, but he had his grandparents, who ran a local shoe store and helped raise him while his mom and dad were off partying with rock stars. He aches to get back to that time, and he can’t because he’s changed and so has the town.
KSL: I love the phrase “young scenesters,” which conjures up a kind of superficial happiness, situated in a specific place. Can you talk about what this book says about the larger American visions of success and happiness?
MB: Trent is a poor kid from a rich town. His mother has remarried and has money now, but for most of the time Trent was growing up she was a single mom who struggled to make the rent. She cycled through bad men and Trent basically raised himself after his grandparents died. All this gives him an outsider’s insight into hometown and its warped vision of success. In Mill Valley, as Trent says in the book, “you had to have everything–the right house, the right clothes, the right politics, the right friends–and then you had to pretend you didn’t give a shit about any of it, that truth be told you hadn’t noticed you had all this money.”
Honestly, I think there’s a lot of that going around in American life. Americans are so profoundly full of it when it comes to privilege. This is especially true of wealthier white Americans in leafy suburbs like Mill Valley, but it’s not just them. We spend so much time getting and spending and meticulously documenting all our getting and spending, and then we go around denouncing privilege as this terrible moral disease–somebody else’s privilege, of course. Not ours. Never ours. I confess I share Trent’s deep cynicism about this peculiarly American brand of poormouthing.
KSL: Let’s talk about the practical work of seeing a novel from idea to publication. What were your writing and publishing processes with this novel? What have you learned about both novel writing and about publishing that you could share with readers eyeing the same trajectory for their own manuscripts?
MB: This book took forever to write. I wrote the first half ten years ago, set it aside and wrote another book before I came back to this one and finished it. Between the two halves I became a much better writer. The characters, the setting, the basic plot, all that was there from the start, but I didn’t have the craft to pull it off, so I’m really glad I waited. This is a much better book than I would have written ten years ago.
KSL: I’m curious, then: How did you go about working toward that development as a writer? People are always interested in a writer’s process. Were you working with other writers, reading? And–along those lines–what do you do now to continue moving your writing projects toward your vision for them? When you’re stuck or a project has stalled out, for instance, where do you turn?
MB: I wish I had a more interesting answer to that question. Honestly, I just kept writing. The old Beckett chestnut obtains: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” By the time I started this book, I could write dialogue and shape a scene, but I just had no notion how to tell a book-length story. It looks so easy when other people do it, but whenever I tried it, the story died about a hundred pages in. By the time I came back to the book a few years ago, I had written one complete novel and a part of a second and I just had a better idea of the kind of character and plot momentum you need to carry a reader through 300 pages.
KSL: Blithedale Canyon is being published by a small press, which is a route to publication that doesn’t get enough attention among debut novelists. Can you talk about your publishing journey? Publishing has many points of access, and smaller presses are where much of literature really thrives. How did you and your press find one another?
MB: Well, like most writers, I didn’t start out thinking I’d publish it with an indie press. I sent the book to a number of agents and kept coming close, over and over. Ultimately, for them, I think, it came down to a business decision. Blithedale Canyon is a character-driven love story, which is bad enough, but then you add in that the narrator is a guy who can be tough to like at times, and it doesn’t exactly add up to “book-club pick.”
I have no beef with the agents who passed on my book. They’re businesspeople and they made what I’m sure they see as a rational business decision. That said, it was refreshing when I started sending it to indie presses how the discussion shifted from concerns about marketing to the book itself. My editor at Regal House, Jaynie Royal, just liked the book and went with her gut. I thought then, and think now, that there’s a hard-nosed business case to be made for my book, but I liked that she just went for it. I couldn’t be happier about the way things turned out.
KSL: Blithedale Canyon doesn’t offer any of its characters easy redemption, but neither does it cast them as hopelessly incapable of change. One particularly memorable (and difficult) character–Trent’s sort of accidental mentor, Frank–wisely says, “So what would I hear if you told the truth?” This reads to me as a recognition that stripping the varnish off the lies that lead us to fail ourselves and each other might be the only redemption any of us can get. Can you talk about honesty as a prerequisite for recovery in this narrative? How does fiction work as truth-telling for you?
MB: Yeah, Trent doesn’t have a drug and alcohol problem. He has a lying problem. He just cannot tell the truth. He knows the truth. He watches himself lie his ass off, and he always knows what the real story is, but it’s so much easier to coast along on a river of lies. That’s what Frank T., the defrocked priest who becomes Trent’s mentor, is trying to teach him: Quitting drugs and alcohol is easy. Telling the truth is hard, and if you can’t tell the truth about who you are and what you’ve done, sooner or later you’re going to get high again.
So many of the stories we tell about addiction follow a fairy tale structure: There’s the bad Beast addict, who finds Beauty. Maybe in this fairy tale Beauty is an actual woman, or maybe Beauty is just a moment of clarity of What It’s All Really About, but whatever Beauty is, she kisses him once and–poof!–the Beast turns into a handsome prince collecting his ten-year sobriety chip. I was trying to write against this narrative, which makes it sound like all you have to do is quit using and you’re golden. That’s just not how it works for most people, Trent included. When he quits getting high, he’s left to deal with who he has become, a lonely, pissed-off ex-felon working at a fast-food joint and living at his mom’s house. I admire the guy, honestly. Sure, he’s selfish, and, yes, he took good people down with him when he fell, but, like Suze, he’s trying. He falls down a lot in this book, but he keeps getting back up. And he keeps his sense of humor. I don’t know where Trent is today, but I’d be willing to bet one way or another he’s made it work.
KSL: It’s the carrying-on that defines his change, really.
MB: That’s the part of the book that’s autobiographical, I think. My falls have been softer than Trent’s, but I sure have taken a lot of them. But I keep getting up. They should put that on my tombstone: “He took a lot of falls, but, damn him, he kept getting back up.”
Blithedale Canyon is author Michael Bourne’s years-in-the-making debut. Michael, an American living in British Columbia, Canada, has written for Poets & Writers, The New York Times, and Salon, among other publications. The Millions has chosen Blithedale Canyon as one of its “Most Anticipated” books hitting shelves in the first half of this year, and author Edan Lepucki has called the novel “a compelling and lively debut with a narrator I won’t soon forget [...] A story of love, addiction, regret and hope.”
In the following interview, Michael and I discuss his process in writing Blithedale Canyon, the challenges and surprises of publishing, and the universal truth that honing one’s resilience is an essential practice for sustaining a career as a writer.
KSL: From its first lines, Blithedale Canyon situates readers as close intimates of its deep-in-trouble narrator, Trent, whose worldview has been warped both by the privilege of his surroundings and by the traumas he’s navigated throughout his life. What about Trent’s voice and way of seeing determined him as this novel’s center for you, and what was your process in developing his character as the novel evolved from early draft to finished manuscript?
MB: I can’t really say his character evolved that much through the process of writing the book. The world around him did, in big ways, but his baseline Trentness was always there. This is a love story about an addict who is trying to put together some clean time before he blows up the life of a woman he loves, and I wanted to be honest about what it’s like to be an addict who isn’t using, how painful and scary that can be. A saint, maybe, could handle it well, but Trent is no saint. I wanted to be true to that.
My sense of Trent is that he grew up in a bullshit world and he knows it. He lies to everybody else, and he’s happy to glide along on other people’s delusions, but he’s onto himself. That’s his one essential decency. He’s angry and irresponsible and self-destructive, but he sees himself and the world around him with clear eyes. Oh, and he’s capable of love. He doesn’t know it at the start of the story, but he is.
KSL: It seems to me not inconsequential that you’ve set the narrative in the months just preceding and just following September 11th, 2001–a distinct turning point in recent history that has simultaneously led to the entrenchment of a right-wing extremist push to preserve existing systems of privilege in America and to the growing awareness of and active work to dismantle those systems. As an American who has spent a good portion of the last decade living outside of this country, how has your experience both within and outside of American culture shaped Blithedale Canyon?
MB: It's funny about 9/11. That was in the book from the start. A lot got thrown out and a lot came in later, but that was always there. Years before I actually wrote the scene that’s in the book, I had this vision of Trent, this epic screwup fresh out of jail and rehab, waking up one morning feeling like his loved ones are under attack and he needs to go to war. In the book, the joke is that he’s in California, and 9/11 is just another sunny day in September. But the moment is still real. He’s the terrorist in that household. He’s the one with the power to blow the whole thing sky high. In the book that morning is the moment he realizes he actually has something to lose.
To my mind, 9/11 was a moment of national loss of innocence. If you remember that time, we were all so shocked that people in other parts of the world hated us. It just didn’t compute. They hate us? For what? We’re the beacon of freedom. We quickly turned it around so we were the blameless victims and they were the senseless murderers, but still there was that little moment of recognition. And that’s very much what this book is about, about seeing yourself as you are, not how you’d like to see yourself. If you’ve ever been an addict, you know that moment of recognition when the veil is pulled away and you see how everybody else sees you. It isn’t pretty. Maybe that’s why 9/11 stayed in the book through so many drafts.
KSL: You’ve just noted the beautiful remove of California on that day, and that raises for me a question about the novel’s setting—for which it is titled, by the way. The backdrop to Trent’s story is a California town that, at the turn of this century is beginning to lose the golden gloss of its mythic past (that golden past suggested even in its name), and though its inhabitants are clearly not living that west coast dream fulfilled, they nevertheless still seem infected with its promise. How does that nostalgia for a fabled past inform your characters?
MB: Blithedale Canyon is a real place, a neighborhood of sprawling homes perched on the side of Mount Tamalpais in Mill Valley, California, which happens to be my hometown. Like Trent, I’ve watched Mill Valley morph from a half-hippie town filled with college professors and refugees from the Summer of Love to a magnet for investment bankers and tech gurus. I have such an ambivalent relationship to the place. With its stratospheric wealth and unexamined liberal pieties, Mill Valley is the locus of a great deal that I think is wrong with the world, but at the same time–and this is the thing I wanted to get into the book–it’s a real town. People know each other and look out for each other. Or they did, anyway. They still do probably, though I wouldn’t really know, not having lived there since the 1980s.
Trent romanticizes that 1970s hippie era because it’s the last time his life made any sense to him. His parents were these young scenesters, but he had his grandparents, who ran a local shoe store and helped raise him while his mom and dad were off partying with rock stars. He aches to get back to that time, and he can’t because he’s changed and so has the town.
KSL: I love the phrase “young scenesters,” which conjures up a kind of superficial happiness, situated in a specific place. Can you talk about what this book says about the larger American visions of success and happiness?
MB: Trent is a poor kid from a rich town. His mother has remarried and has money now, but for most of the time Trent was growing up she was a single mom who struggled to make the rent. She cycled through bad men and Trent basically raised himself after his grandparents died. All this gives him an outsider’s insight into hometown and its warped vision of success. In Mill Valley, as Trent says in the book, “you had to have everything–the right house, the right clothes, the right politics, the right friends–and then you had to pretend you didn’t give a shit about any of it, that truth be told you hadn’t noticed you had all this money.”
Honestly, I think there’s a lot of that going around in American life. Americans are so profoundly full of it when it comes to privilege. This is especially true of wealthier white Americans in leafy suburbs like Mill Valley, but it’s not just them. We spend so much time getting and spending and meticulously documenting all our getting and spending, and then we go around denouncing privilege as this terrible moral disease–somebody else’s privilege, of course. Not ours. Never ours. I confess I share Trent’s deep cynicism about this peculiarly American brand of poormouthing.
KSL: Let’s talk about the practical work of seeing a novel from idea to publication. What were your writing and publishing processes with this novel? What have you learned about both novel writing and about publishing that you could share with readers eyeing the same trajectory for their own manuscripts?
MB: This book took forever to write. I wrote the first half ten years ago, set it aside and wrote another book before I came back to this one and finished it. Between the two halves I became a much better writer. The characters, the setting, the basic plot, all that was there from the start, but I didn’t have the craft to pull it off, so I’m really glad I waited. This is a much better book than I would have written ten years ago.
KSL: I’m curious, then: How did you go about working toward that development as a writer? People are always interested in a writer’s process. Were you working with other writers, reading? And–along those lines–what do you do now to continue moving your writing projects toward your vision for them? When you’re stuck or a project has stalled out, for instance, where do you turn?
MB: I wish I had a more interesting answer to that question. Honestly, I just kept writing. The old Beckett chestnut obtains: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” By the time I started this book, I could write dialogue and shape a scene, but I just had no notion how to tell a book-length story. It looks so easy when other people do it, but whenever I tried it, the story died about a hundred pages in. By the time I came back to the book a few years ago, I had written one complete novel and a part of a second and I just had a better idea of the kind of character and plot momentum you need to carry a reader through 300 pages.
KSL: Blithedale Canyon is being published by a small press, which is a route to publication that doesn’t get enough attention among debut novelists. Can you talk about your publishing journey? Publishing has many points of access, and smaller presses are where much of literature really thrives. How did you and your press find one another?
MB: Well, like most writers, I didn’t start out thinking I’d publish it with an indie press. I sent the book to a number of agents and kept coming close, over and over. Ultimately, for them, I think, it came down to a business decision. Blithedale Canyon is a character-driven love story, which is bad enough, but then you add in that the narrator is a guy who can be tough to like at times, and it doesn’t exactly add up to “book-club pick.”
I have no beef with the agents who passed on my book. They’re businesspeople and they made what I’m sure they see as a rational business decision. That said, it was refreshing when I started sending it to indie presses how the discussion shifted from concerns about marketing to the book itself. My editor at Regal House, Jaynie Royal, just liked the book and went with her gut. I thought then, and think now, that there’s a hard-nosed business case to be made for my book, but I liked that she just went for it. I couldn’t be happier about the way things turned out.
KSL: Blithedale Canyon doesn’t offer any of its characters easy redemption, but neither does it cast them as hopelessly incapable of change. One particularly memorable (and difficult) character–Trent’s sort of accidental mentor, Frank–wisely says, “So what would I hear if you told the truth?” This reads to me as a recognition that stripping the varnish off the lies that lead us to fail ourselves and each other might be the only redemption any of us can get. Can you talk about honesty as a prerequisite for recovery in this narrative? How does fiction work as truth-telling for you?
MB: Yeah, Trent doesn’t have a drug and alcohol problem. He has a lying problem. He just cannot tell the truth. He knows the truth. He watches himself lie his ass off, and he always knows what the real story is, but it’s so much easier to coast along on a river of lies. That’s what Frank T., the defrocked priest who becomes Trent’s mentor, is trying to teach him: Quitting drugs and alcohol is easy. Telling the truth is hard, and if you can’t tell the truth about who you are and what you’ve done, sooner or later you’re going to get high again.
So many of the stories we tell about addiction follow a fairy tale structure: There’s the bad Beast addict, who finds Beauty. Maybe in this fairy tale Beauty is an actual woman, or maybe Beauty is just a moment of clarity of What It’s All Really About, but whatever Beauty is, she kisses him once and–poof!–the Beast turns into a handsome prince collecting his ten-year sobriety chip. I was trying to write against this narrative, which makes it sound like all you have to do is quit using and you’re golden. That’s just not how it works for most people, Trent included. When he quits getting high, he’s left to deal with who he has become, a lonely, pissed-off ex-felon working at a fast-food joint and living at his mom’s house. I admire the guy, honestly. Sure, he’s selfish, and, yes, he took good people down with him when he fell, but, like Suze, he’s trying. He falls down a lot in this book, but he keeps getting back up. And he keeps his sense of humor. I don’t know where Trent is today, but I’d be willing to bet one way or another he’s made it work.
KSL: It’s the carrying-on that defines his change, really.
MB: That’s the part of the book that’s autobiographical, I think. My falls have been softer than Trent’s, but I sure have taken a lot of them. But I keep getting up. They should put that on my tombstone: “He took a lot of falls, but, damn him, he kept getting back up.”
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of three books of short fiction, most recently What We Do With the Wreckage, which won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was published by UGA Press in 2018. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, One Story, North American Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Hugo House and lives near Seattle with her family.
Michael Bourne is the author of Blithedale Canyon, due out from Regal House Publishing in June 2022. He is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers Magazine and a staff writer for The Millions. He has written for the New York Times, the Globe & Mail, The Economist, Literary Hub, and Salon, and his fiction has appeared in more than a dozen literary magazines including, most recently, december, The Southampton Review, and Tin House. Blithedale Canyon is his first novel.
Michael Bourne is the author of Blithedale Canyon, due out from Regal House Publishing in June 2022. He is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers Magazine and a staff writer for The Millions. He has written for the New York Times, the Globe & Mail, The Economist, Literary Hub, and Salon, and his fiction has appeared in more than a dozen literary magazines including, most recently, december, The Southampton Review, and Tin House. Blithedale Canyon is his first novel.