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- [00:00]
Tito's Vodka Narrator
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- [00:30]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
AE Lanier
Hello and welcome to New Books and Fantasy. I am your host, AE Lanier. Today I will be speaking with Kaski Russell about his new novel, the Door on the Sea. The novel follows Ulan, the youngest member of the once revered Flicker Clan, on a journey to find a weapon that could defend his people from the shapeshifting Kush invaders threatening their existence. To reach his goal, Alain must captain a canoe crewed by an unlikely team and force the cooperation of a raven who is the only one that knows the weapon's location. Throughout their journey, the crew must navigate an increasingly hostile political landscape as the Kush invasion throws old laws and alliances into disarray. Kaski Russell is a writer, professor and musician from Seattle, Washington, and an enrolled member of the Tlingit nation of Alaska. The Door on the Sea is his debut novel. He is here with us now. Hi, Kaski, it's great to have you.
- [02:31]
Kaski Russell
Hello. Great to be here. Thank you.
- [02:33]
AE Lanier
Could you start off by just telling us a little bit about how this novel came to be? When did you start the Door on the Sea and sort of what were you working to do with the novel?
- [02:42]
Kaski Russell
Sure. I started it in 2013. I had a sabbatical in New Zealand and I took my two young boys, my family, with me, my wife, my two young boys. My youngest son, Aidan was in first gr. My oldest son Chet was in fifth grade. And we all moved to Hamilton, New Zealand. And I was going to spend six months at the University of Laikato in the College of Maori and Pacific Studies. And I thought it'd be a wonderful opportunity for the family. However, the boys were terribly homesick. They, in fact, miserable, did not want to be in New Zealand at all. Asked me to send them back home so they could live with their cousins while I stayed in New Zealand. I said, that's not possible. The one thing that entertained them and drove away their homesickness those first few weeks was watching Lord of the Rings and going to the Hobbit movie was just, just come out in New Zealand. And all of New Zealand was crazy about the Hobbit. And so after about two weeks of homesickness and tears every night, I decided one day at work, I'm going to write like a Hobbit esque Lord of the Rings esque narrative and read it to my boys every night. But I'm gonna base it on Tlingit oral tradition. And some of the characters I heard growing up from my grandmother when she would tell me stories of Tlingit oral tradition. So I wrote a page, I brought it home to them one night and they were captivated and they wanted to be characters in it. So I asked them, okay, where should we take the narrative? What should happen? And we created characters for them. And they're two. Both my boys are characters in the novel. And then I put the novel aside when we came back from New Zealand. It was about 80 pages. And then during the pandemic, I found it on my computer, just kind of out of happenstance. I was going through my computer, found the novel, read it, and thought, this isn't too bad. I finished it in 2019, 2020, and then found an agent in 21 2021. And we sold it to Solaris Press. I think in 2022, we went through a few editing stages and it just came out in October 2025.
- [04:56]
AE Lanier
Well, I think the thing that's so fun in the way that this is in some ways a response to Lord of the Rings is that we get this really grounded quest narrative where we have a group of people trying to accomplish a goal that I think has fallen out of favor for a while in the genre because for a long time it was very cliche and passe. But now it's honestly kind of been decades since we've really had a lot of those novels. And so for me at least it was really fun to get back into that sort of like nitty gritty quest narrative that's very heavy on logistics and interpersonal things. You mentioned briefly sort of the group of people that are going on this quest. Could you talk a little bit about who that group is and how you designed it?
- [05:38]
Kaski Russell
Yeah, I designed it with my boys in mind. And I thought the boys wanted a young character, young male character, a little bit older than them to go on this quest, like in the Lord of the Rings, but they also wanted to be their own characters in it. So I created the character of Elan, or in Tlingit that L is a different sound. We pronounce it Ehlon, but Elan is fine. And he was a young school kid in his village who dreamed of doing greater things. And then I surrounded him with Chettle, who's a wolf in armor, kind of a warwolf. My son Chet, his middle name is Dylan. So I put Chet and Dylan together. We got Chettle and Chet had brought to New Zealand a stuffed wolf that he loved. And so he wanted to be a warwolf. In the novel, Aidan liked the character of Aragorn and Lord of the Rings and he wanted to be a middle aged warrior. He was in first grade, but he wanted to be a middle aged warrior. So Aidan's middle name is Carl. So I took Carl and put it at the beginning of Aiden. So Caridin is the middle aged war that goes with him. There were female warriors in Tlingit society. I wanted one of them to join the crew. So her name is Quat Qua, which is my great grandmother's Tlingit name, shortened it to Kwa. So Qua joins them. A character named Eat joins them as well. He's a young warrior from the same village as Eklon. And. And then the raven. Yeah, the raven is. He's a trickster character in Tlingit oral tradition. I loved hearing stories about the Raven when I was growing up, especially how contrary he was to everything. And those stories are full of humor. So I realized the boys enjoyed if the more kind of almost childish and trickster ish I made Raven, the more the boys would laugh at night when I was reading it to him. So that's why Raven is such kind of a. I can't swear on this podcast probably, but a jackass. And he's kind of a contrarian in the novel.
- [07:54]
AE Lanier
Raven is definitely the kind of character that you're like. This would be so annoying to be in a space with this being and attempting to get something from him. But must have also just been so much fun to write. Like truly is such a joyful experience as long as you personally are not actually having to interact with him in really any way.
- [08:15]
Kaski Russell
That's exactly right. He would be very annoying to hang out with, you know, in person, but really fun to write.
- [08:25]
AE Lanier
Yeah, absolutely. As you sort of alluded to, Alain, our protagonist is very young and inexperienced. He's kind of at a point where like we would sort of see him as grown, is not quite grown necessarily in his cultural context, and is not training to be a warrior, is training to be a teacher, and yet ends up in charge of this expedition in a way that creates, I think, really interesting tensions. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to that decision specifically.
- [08:58]
Kaski Russell
Yeah, the longhouses, the are made up, but I wanted a longhouse for warriors and longhouse for non warriors who went on to do other things. It's a pretty simple binary and I thought it would be nice to have a young school kid who's read a lot about the outside world, but not experienced, forced to deal with how his book knowledge. We call him a book eater. It's kind of a negative term in the context of the novel. How a book eater deals with reality when confronted with realities that might go against his imagination or ideals. And that was important to me. I use some Tlingit characters from oral tradition. I don't use oral stories, but some characters as the basis. But it was important to be able to fantasy and world build. And so I not using. I don't use the name of the Tlingit tribe in the novel. The thought of trying to be as authentic to 19th century Tlingit culture as possible robbed me a little bit of calmness and made me anxious. I wanted to be able to have a combination of fantasy and world build and not worry about trying to stick strictly with Tlingit culture, which is why I don't use the Tribe, I use them as the basis. Sorry, Angela, I forget the original question as I'm floundering here.
- [10:32]
AE Lanier
No, absolutely. Just talking about sort of that decision to have him be young, not a warrior, which I think does interesting things around violence as well. Right. Because this is like there is fighting in this book. There is violence in this book. And that's something that Alan really struggles with. And he is interested in pacifism at one point. So it was also very interesting.
- [10:54]
Kaski Russell
Yeah, thank you for reminding me. And the violence is shocking to him. And he takes a bond not to hurt any people, but then he struggles with that bond because he's the one who has access to a weapon that could push back and fight back against the invaders coming into his territory. So he struggles with that. And then book two, I don't want to give too much away, but he's really struggled with what he's done on that quest. Book two comes from Kwa's perspective. And so she becomes the main kind of point of view in book two. And Elon is dealing with a lot of what happened in book one. Yeah, it was important. And like I said, the Longhouses aren't from Tlingit culture. Those I made up. The C bond that he takes, I made that up. So I was world building with a basis in Tlingit culture. Important for me, I think, because my boys were so interested at the time in kind of Tlingit warrior culture. They were reading about it, we were talking about it. But I wanted to also impress upon them how traumatic I'm sure a lot of that culture was and young men having to deal with violence and how they kind of exorcised or understood the violence of that time.
- [12:13]
AE Lanier
Yeah, absolutely. Sort of continuing on with that theme of violence, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the invading force and the main antagonists in this novel and sort of what decisions went into building them.
- [12:27]
Kaski Russell
Yeah, would love to. So I've taken a shape shifting character from Tlingit oral tradition. They weren't always scary characters. They had a lot of. In traditional society, they're called the Kushta ka and that translates to land otter man. They shape shifted. My grandmother used to scare me as a young kid with these characters she would tell stories of. And I remember when we heard dogs howling somewhere around where we're living, she would say, ooh, the pushta ka are out and about. Better stay inside. Because they try to lure you into and to coming with them. They often show up in the guise of your relatives who have Passed on. So they're kind of. These really can be scary, shape shifting characters. I use that as these otherworldly characters that are coming into this world, the world in the novel, kind of coming in through an island. I won't kind of say more than that, because we get into that in the later books. They're coming into the island and they're taking over villages, they're cutting down trees, they're building ships. And then when we get to the novel, they're just coming into the tribe's territory and they call the tribe the Ani. And they're coming into Ani territory and the tribe is trying to figure out how to deal with them. And they've heard that they can shape shift into your dead relatives. They heard that they are destructive to the environment. And Raven in particular is worried about salmon. If they destroy the environment, they destroy his favorite thing in life, the salmon. So that's his motivation. And they have a. The Kush have a weapon called the Dzanti, which is Tlingit for flounder. Because my boys and I, in my mind back in 2013, when we created it, we thought it would be like a handheld weapon that looked like a flounder. Flounder that you put your hand in. When you have it, you have access to immense power. And so that's what one of the kind of basis of the novel that Kush have lost one of these weapons. And so Ehlan and the crew are off to find that weapon with Raven's help.
- [14:49]
AE Lanier
Amazing. We also get quite a wide variety of responses to the Kush. So the story opens mostly with Raven doing shenanigans, but then with a council where people are basically debating, do the Kush, like, are they even here? Is this even a threat? And they end by being like, well, we'll figure this out next week. Which feels like a very familiar human response to crisis. And then we see a wide variety of different responses, sort of as the invasion gets closer. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to sort of the ways that you were thinking about political structures responding to this kind of threat.
- [15:24]
Kaski Russell
Yeah. I meet up what is called, I call the novel of the Ani Islands Elders Council. So in the novel, there's 20 main Ani Islands. Each of them has an elder that is concerned with the health of all living things. And so they're meeting at this island and they had met a month before, and a group of elders were given a task to find out if it's true about who the Kush are. If they're invading and what's going on. And then they meet. When we open the novel, they're meeting and discussing the knowledge that they've gathered. And a few of them have gathered, gathered knowledge that, yeah, these invaders are coming and they're taking over. And they have a bunch of tribes from the southern area that they've taken as slaves to help them. And people can't believe it. They're skeptical. They haven't seen them. It's this rumor, but it ends with raving saying, you believe me when I say they're coming and they are coming. And so the tribe gives it another month to how are we going to deal with it? Now we have this gathered knowledge, off you go and think about how we'll deal with it. And we'll come back in one month and we'll make the determination. In the meantime, the elder for the island that the novel takes place on realizes that Raven has roped young Ihlan into going on this journey and retrieving this weapon. That's more of a summary than kind of the political structure. But I made up that Ani Island's elders council to kind of be the political structure, like the main kind of clan leaders or tribal leaders for this area. Limu Gimu and Doug.
- [17:09]
Commercial Voiceover
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- [17:24]
AE Lanier
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [17:27]
Commercial Voiceover
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- [17:30]
Kaski Russell
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty Savings. Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.
- [17:37]
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- [18:06]
AE Lanier
Yeah, well, there's also, I don't know, something very like sort of fun and affirming about watching people fail to respond to crises in perhaps the most ideal way. Because that is always very concerning when it is happening to you. And I always find it grounding to sort of get that reminder. This is a big quest fantasy and so we spend a lot of time on the road, except we're in an island culture. And so we are instead on the water. Can you talk a little bit about our canoe? But it's sort of at the heart of so much of the story.
- [18:39]
Kaski Russell
Yeah, happy to. The canoe is named Waka. That's a Maori word for canoe. So I thought, oh, that's a nice tip. My hat to the time I spent in New Zealand. I think we named it that when we were there. It has two outriggers and a net between the main canoe. And I envision the canoe to be about 25ft, 30ft long, 6ft across in beam, with a jib mast and a main mast and a tiller and two nets that span most of the length of canoe that attached the outriggers. And I worried in putting it together that people who are not into sailing or the ocean might find this a little boring. So I worked heavily with my agent and editor to pare down a lot of the. The nautical talk. And they made me cut down the how to sail section into just a quick paragraph. And then I tried to. I do have a map and it's on my author's website. We were thinking of keep putting it into this, the first edition hardcover, but we couldn't get it in there. But if readers are interested, they can go to my website, kaskirusslebookeater.com and they can look at a map and they actually see where the quest goes and all the islands. My boys created the map and they got us so excited when we were in New Zealand about the story we were writing that they actually created a map. So I've been using that map ever since Chet, who is in fifth grade, created it. But it's important, of course. Canoes, ocean voyaging, different types of canoes are important to the Tlingit, important to the Ani. There's small canoes, there's military canoes. Waka is a special canoe built by a canoe maker who I used the canoe maker from my grandmother's village. So this is a. I believe. I think I can remember the canoe maker's name. I believe it's the actual canoe maker from Kowak, Alaska, circa 1910, 1920. And he has made this incredibly fast canoe that can go twice the distance under sail in a day than your average canoe. Can go so fast, as fast as anything on sea, Faster than anything on sea, and can even outrun the enemy. The Kush is big ships that are coming after it.
- [21:11]
AE Lanier
The canoe is so cool and you do a really lovely job. There's a really interesting Use, I think of second person direct address in this novel where you're often speaking to us in ways that are very explicitly explaining the world. And sometimes it's things that as someone who's not from a sailing background, that was very useful to be like, hey, here's the logistics of how this works and the significance, but also is in a very grounded way where you're also explaining what a mast is, which if truly you have no experience would be necessary. And I just think that the role of second person in this story is so interesting, especially because oftentimes I think when we see it now, at least in sort of American publishing, that question of like, who are they speaking to? Is very central. Whereas it feels quite apparent that you're speaking to the reader in a way that is really joyful.
- [22:01]
Kaski Russell
That's good. I gave a lot of thought to that and I thought it gives it a storytelling feeling. And it is a storyteller. And at the end of book three, we learn who that storyteller is. So it is. I don't want to give too much away, but that the you, the second person that comes in and explains what things are. I mean, it's a useful device too to kind of get info to the reader, of course, and to help world build. But we learn at the very end of the trilogy who that is telling the story and where they're telling the story from.
- [22:37]
AE Lanier
That's very exciting. This novel also does such a good job of being just like this very grounded, like survivalist quest in a way that I hadn't really thought about fantasy as kind of survivalist fiction in a while until I was reading this and then was sort of remembering the ways in which that was like. One of the things that first brought me to the genre, right, is kind of this nitty gritty. How do you go from one place to another? Which again is definitely not the only thing that fantasy can do. But I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to sort of that nature of the logistical quest fantasy, right, where it's a lot of like, what supplies do we have, how do we have them, where do they go? All of that kind of stuff.
- [23:15]
Kaski Russell
Yeah, love to. I do like the fantasy mixed with survival. I do read a lot of post apocalypse predict literature. You know, I just got through Station 11 and loved it. And I grew up on fantasy and. But at the same time, I do like survival narratives. I'm a sucker for any TV show about survival. I do spend a lot of time. I spend a lot of time on the Water, growing up, the ocean. And I spend a lot of time in the woods. And so I was hoping to bring a little bit of that knowledge and just put it into the novel. There's a list of supplies needed before the crew takes off. My agent had made a good point. She said, you have this list you should show in the novel them being all these items being used. And I think I do. I think I checked them off, maybe in an edit. I had to take some out. So there's supplies there. There's how to repair a canoe. There's some knowledge on sailing, some knowledge on fishing. I think I have how to troll for salmon in there. And then if people are knowledgeable about catching lingcod and halibut, there's some description of that as well. Lingcod. The flesh of lingcod is a little bit bluish green when it's raw. And then when you cook it, it's white. That's, you know, it's done. So there's a little stuff in there. And then on how to shoot an arrow, and then I remember there's one section in there where Caridin tells Ethlon how to do watch at night and how to be kind of on watch for a few hours. And then I remember growing up to the. From my uncles and great uncles, saying that one of the biggest things that the warrior tradition taught youth, Tlingit youth, was how to survive the cold. And cold being one of the biggest killers up in Alaska. And so training to survive the cold is very important. And so I brought that in there as well.
- [25:19]
AE Lanier
Well, those scenes are so fun, too, because these are things that I think that we often take for granted in these kinds of stories. Right. Like keeping watch, for example, is like, such a cliche and staple in tabletop in lots of genres. And this novel does such a good job of sort of breaking down, like, what is challenging about being out in the cold, about having to pay att through the night and things like that in a way that. Again, I know I keep saying that it's very grounding, but it was just so joyful to sort of see all of those intricacies really examined and played with.
- [25:54]
Kaski Russell
Thank you. I tried to write stuff that I knew about a little bit.
- [26:01]
AE Lanier
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's also this central tension in this story between respecting and challenging tradition that is a recurring theme that Helon is wrestling with and that he's having many conversations about. And obviously this is also happening at a time of extreme change for his people. So that's sort of a natural time for that to come up. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about those themes.
- [26:28]
Kaski Russell
Yeah, I found that tension very interesting to write about. And to some extent, Caridin and KWA represent following a traditional way of life, really important for the warrior culture. You got to rely on your fellow warriors and protect the people first. We're Heclon Heklon. He's a student. He's dreaming about the outside world. He's just about to graduate. He has to take some exams and then he'll graduate and then he'll do his year kind of mandatory service elsewhere. But he wants to be able to control his life rather than tradition controlling it. And Raven is in the middle of those two polarities. He doesn't care. He doesn't really care for humans. He prefers tradition as long as it protects the salmon. But he realizes he needs someone like Helan who questions tradition. So he go off get the powerful weapon and he's more creative in his thinking or open in his thinking. And he can better fight off these enemies who come in, are invading and threatening the salmon. So he's caught in between these two and he loves teasing both of them. And we'll find out in later books that it's not so black and white. The Kwa Elang characters are not so black and white in terms of traditional and questioning tradition. Book two especially, we find some of those that black and whiteness that is in book one kind of problematized. But it's very interesting in the book itself. As I mentioned, I didn't want to try to be. To talk about, discuss, emulate and write about authentic Tlinga culture. I wanted to use some of the characters and stories and the kind of ethos for a larger kind of expansive world building and make some new stories. Yeah.
- [28:35]
AE Lanier
There's sort of one more person I'd like to talk about a little bit, which is essentially Ilan's mentor, whose name I may mispronounce. And I apologize, but ixt or old ixt is both kind of quite present because they're able to communicate via eagle and also is very removed for a lot of it. And I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about his character.
- [28:56]
Kaski Russell
Yeah, that's. The term comes from traditional doctor in Tlingit culture. I envision him this. Readers probably see a bit of Gandalf in him and my boys. I can remember when we were creating it, my boys liked Gandalf. They wanted a Gandalf, an older character, older wizard. I didn't want to steal directly. So I kind of made this islands, the Samish island elder, to be this almost like doctoring land doctor character. And he's the voice of wisdom. He guides Ehlon, but he's guided generations before Ehlan. He was good friends with Ehlon's grandfather, too. And so, yeah, an important character. I forget the initial question, but he really is, in my mind, he embodies the wisdom of the elders and he really embodies Tlingit tradition even more so maybe than Kwa and Caridin.
- [30:09]
AE Lanier
Well, I think that we're more grounded in his point of view. That often happens in these kinds of novels, which the experience of attempting to get a teenager to make the choice that you would prefer that they make is, I think, quite a central part of the human experience, but is often one that Art doesn't talk a ton about. So he was a lot of fun there, and I really enjoyed that.
- [30:34]
Kaski Russell
I was gonna say he also knows the stories of the island. So he's. The island is. He's in charge of the island kind of spiritually and in terms of knowledge, he doesn't have an apprentice. In book two, he'll get an apprentice, but he also knows the stories, the backstories of Ehlon's family and Kwa's family. And we see him guiding Kwa in book two, the way he's guided Eglon in book one. Yeah. So he's important throughout all three of the books. And he and Lakeland have a very tense relationship. They're not really. They don't really like each other, but they have to work together to. Icht is interested in saving the people and the culture. Raven is interested in saving the salmon. So they gotta. They have. Well, they can work together when they have kind of common mutual purposes.
- [31:30]
AE Lanier
I feel like that is such a generous description of Raven's motivation, and I really appreciate that generosity. You sort of alluded to this sense of legacy in history. Ulan's grandfather was a very important person, and also he is now the youngest member of essentially a dying clan. Flickrclan is very small at this point, so I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to that sense of legacy.
- [31:56]
Kaski Russell
Yeah. His grandfather's name is Klatzyn, which means strength and Tlingit. It's also my son Chet's Plinket name. His grandmother gave it to him. So Hlatzin was the head of a large. Was the kind of leader of a large clan and in charge of a big battle against enemy tribes. But towards the end or the end of his life. It was against another battle. We get into it later in book two. I don't know. Won't go into it too much, but he lost a lot of the Flickr clan. So a lot of the warriors family from the clan, it's dwindled down. So not only the clan has kind of dwindled down, but they have this larger than life character that young Ekhlan wants to live up to but really can't live up to. And he comes across a statue of his grandfather in the friendly tribes village that he's staying at and kind of sees him and is trying to picture himself and his grandfather and is having a hard, difficult time doing that. So he stands as a. He's a real person, but an ideal for Erlon that he knows that he can't live up to.
- [33:16]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. I was wondering before we wrap up, if we could just speak really quickly about sustainability as quite an important sort of technology that is central to Ani culture and that we see sort of changing over the course of the novel. In particular, the idea of, I think protecting forests is really big. And this idea that we don't cut down large trees, we just allow them to fall, which is, you know, that preservation of old growth forests in the Americas is such an incredible thing that did not happen in many other places. So I was wondering if we could just speak briefly about that. Yeah.
- [33:56]
Kaski Russell
The preservation of forests comes from my love of being out in the mountains, being in the forest. But also the Tongass forest up in Alaska is an important forest traditionally for Tlingits. And the cutting down of forests often ruins a lot. I mean, it's a. The rave for Raven knows. Raven knows that when they cut down forests it's going to pollute the rivers, destroy the rivers and destroy the salmon runs that he so loved. So he's. He's shocked and abhorred. He's. He hates the fact that the Kush are cutting out forests and the other tribal members, ONI members are hear of this destruction and can't believe it as well. So this notion that they're there to protect their culture, but they're also there. Part of the culture is the salmon and the trees in the natural world. They're trying to protect the natural world in this novel from an invading force that has a different viewpoint than they do regarding forests and trees in the natural world.
- [35:00]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. That sense of place and of nature is such a strength of this novel. And this novel is just so much fun. Overall, thank you for taking the time to speak about it with me.
- [35:13]
Kaski Russell
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate the questions.
- [35:16]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. I have been speaking with Kaski Russell about his novel the Door on the Sea, out now from Solaris. Thank you so much for listening. And please consider supporting the show by subscribing or leaving a review. I will speak to you soon. And for now, happy reading.