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- [00:01]
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Chris Holmes
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- [01:31]
Chris Holmes
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Rahman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous episodes@burnedbybooks.com and on Instagram and Twitter. BurnedByBooks. Let's start the show With a stuffed animal in hand, Dylan and her mother retreat from a dying world to the depths of the ocean to live in near isolation in a pod dangling on the precipice of an undersea cliff. And so begins Earth 7. Deb Olin unfurths latest novel, full of the whirlwind of prose, dynamism and thrumming humanity that we have come to expect from the writer of books like Barn 8. Dylan's underwater hideaway from Earth's decline is marked by loneliness and the ever present search for connection across unimaginable distances. After a missed connection with Z, a Martian colonialist with whom she shares her dreams and vulnerabilities, Dylan will reemerge on the surface with a conviction that a new Earth may be possible even amidst the ruins. Meanwhile, the population of Earth is decimated by ecological collapse and the decampment of those with means to the Martian colonies. There, Dylan will meet Melanie, an augmented being whom she mistakes as a robot and who will be her greatest partner in the Sisyphus like adventure Combing, combing the sand dunes of an arid Earth that holds secrets of unexpected life that may change everything. In its next terrestrial chapter, dramatized with a tension between the pessimism of a gone away world and the ever hopeful promise of human community and love, Earth7 steps firmly into the void of discourse and debate abdicated by governments overseeing a world on fire, and it gives notice to those who still hope that they may indeed thrive. It is a triumph of speculative fiction that reminds us to look for life and chance in unexpected places. Deb Olin Uttenferth is The author of seven books, including Barn 8 and Wait Till youl See Me Dance. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and four Pushcart Prizes and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Harper's, the Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney's. She's a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches for the Michener center, the New Writers Project, and she also directs the Penn City Writers, the Prison Creative Writing program at a south Texas penitentiary. Welcome to Burned by Books. Deb Olin Unferth hi.
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Deb Olin Unferth
Thanks so much for having me. It's really a delight.
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Chris Holmes
I'm so pleased to have you here. I was a huge fan of your novel Barn 8, and I am similarly a huge fan of Earth 7. I want to start by asking just what drew you to the end of the world for this latest novel? Why was this the moment for Earth 7?
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Deb Olin Unferth
I mean, I think that a lot of people are sort of looking that direction. I think for me, the moment that or the, the instigator of this book was that I started hearing a lot about the different kinds of technological band aids that scientists and researchers are coming up with to try to prolong humanity on Earth and to, you know, not exactly to combat climate change, but to mitigate the effects of it. Things like, like, and I, I think this is the, the opening sentence of my book. The idea of scattering different kinds of elements into the sky that will reflect the sun and, and kind of scatter the sunlight. Things like diamonds and sulfur and other strange things. Like, I read about this floating disk that they're developing that will, that will follow the sun as it circulates around the Earth and block and block sections of it or the purity of it to try to, or there's other things like because of the fact that, that the ocean absorbs so much carbon, if we can create robots that will assemble different kinds of plant life under the ocean, that because we're killing off so much of the ocean, it's not holding as much carbon as it used to. So, so there's all different kinds of strange band aids that are being developed that don't really address. And then of course there's like carbon capture that will, you know, suck carbon out of the sky and like shoot it into the earth or, or pile it up in, in giant rocks in the desert and, and things like that. And so I think I just started to think, wow, things are going to get very strange going forward.
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Chris Holmes
Yeah, no, I, I, it seems like everyone is starting to grasp just how weird things will be. And I, I, I'm always thrown back to an early interview I did with Ruman Alam who said that we're all writing eco fiction even if we don't know it. And I wonder if you subscribe to that.
- [07:16]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, I mean, I hope we are. I, I think I have been for a very long time and I think I'm seeing more and more of it everywhere I look. But I mean, if you think about, I mean, I'm trying to think, when he said that, I'm trying to think what he might have been referring to, like in the sense that can I think of a book that I would never think was about the climate, that when I think about it in a different light, does that mean that, can I inter, reinterpret it in a way that suddenly it means, oh, this is actually about climate. If I think about relationship stories or you know, Jane Austen or you know, something like that, is that really about the climate? I mean, I guess that that's just a different way of saying we live in the world and so everything is about the world.
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Chris Holmes
And it's sort of as, as climate goes through this, you know, catastrophe and, and, and radical change our long time, especially as Americans sense that nature is this thing distinct from us. You go to nature and you go out and you know, have a walk in nature and then you return to your, your life is, is going away because we have to face the, the fact that we are ourselves, nature, and that we are immersed in a planetary ecology that determines everything about us. But do you see that becoming more the case, people's awareness of themselves in nature?
- [08:47]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, I mean, I mean I have a lot of Thoughts about the fact that. That we think of ourselves as so separate. I'm work. I mean, I see it in myself. And I have spent many years trying to combat that impulse in terms of thinking my thinking of myself as separate from nature, but also just remembering that I'm an animal and then I live in an ecosystem of animals all around me, that there are these sort of pulsing civilizations of insects and plants and trees and other kinds of animals all around me, even. Even in the city. And so, yeah, absolutely. I think that that's a really. It's a really important thing to be thinking about. And I do think that people are considering it more. And I. And I feel like it's coming in this. In this wave of sort of grief over the fact that our awareness that we're. That we're destroying it.
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Chris Holmes
Yeah. I want to talk for a second about the fact that one of the things that I really enjoyed about reading Earth 7 was the fact that even though Dylan, child of the fallen away Earth, is certainly the protagonist in many ways, you make room for focal point characters to inhabit that sort of main character space in a way that fleshes them out. So Melanie, and to some extent Z, and then even peripheral characters get times at which we believe they. They have sort of taken over the. The focal speaking role or thinking role. And I wonder if you'd take us through a little bit of your process of how you build these characters into Dylan's world.
- [10:42]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, I mean, I did that also in Barn 8, and I have a story that I did that with. And it's this kind of kaleidoscopic effect of trying to pull in everything in the world that's around these. This character Dylan, in this case, trying to sort of just keep widening the circle, widening the community. Trying to think about it from, you know, from a historic perspective, from like, a perspective of where we are in time in relation to the rest of the universe. Thinking about it in terms of. Of non. Non human animals and even microscopic animals. What, you know, what are they thinking about? What are they doing? What is their place and participation? I really. I really love that. Like, I love. It's something I've been trying in my last couple books. And I. I really. I love it because it feels very. It feels just sort of global. It just feels bigger and bigger and bigger the more I dig into it. Yeah.
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Chris Holmes
Because I didn't even. I didn't even give tardigrades their fair due as having. They. They get to have a. Intentionality and a. And a being and. And feelings in this?
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Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, I mean I, you know, I did a lot of research into tardigrades. I mean not a ton, but I did quite a bit of research into tardigrades and I was, I was very struck by how active they are and how with how much they do with so little they do. They move all over the place. They have eyes, they can see with just two little photoreceptor cells. So they just have two cells and each one has, has vision and you know, so they have these, they have these very active lives and they can live for a long time. And so yeah, I just wanted to imagine myself into that space trying not to be too cartoonish or goofy about it. Yeah. And with my last book I imagined the lives of chickens. And in this book, you know, I had been thinking a lot about kind of like the line between life and non. Life has become important to me in this, in this recent iteration of myself. And so I also tried to sort of bring in the, the being of sand and you know, how it has come here, it landed here from outer space and, and you know, just sort of landed in our ocean and from there it created life and that contained all of these different elements that eventually be, you know, eventually became life and how matter moves between life and non life, like something can be matter and can become life and then die and become just organic material and then can return to being life again. And, and was so interesting to me when I started thinking about that as I was studying sand and thinking about how, how I prioritize life because I am alive but actually non life also has value and presence. And so I tried to sort of work those thoughts as well into the book, as crazy as that sounds.
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Chris Holmes
No, I, I'm, I'm totally, I'm, I'm, I'm very into that idea as, as one that philosophically like at, at first glance feels like something that I would like, want to push back against. But at the same time, now that you're saying it, I feel like as I was reading the book I was aware of that, of that dynamic. I want to talk, I want to, I'm going to come back to sand and, and tardigrades. But I wanted to talk about the question of, of leaving and staying because it's as, you know, our imaginations turn to the, the solutions or lack of solutions for an, an Earth that's in dire, dire troubles. We're seeing the American oligarchs desperate to start the process of getting to Mars, already seeming to give up on the Earth. And lots of recent fiction has taken up the complications, ethical and epistemological and in the ways that, you know, governments have refused to, to take up those questions about what it means to have people leave. And I just interviewed Joe Mungo Reid. I don't know if you read his terrestrial history, that novel. It's in wonderful conversation with Earth 7 and I highly recommend it. But in any case, he, he spoke quite a lot about this split and in, you know, how people view the need to stay and, and look for hope and life and those who, who want to leave it behind. And I wonder how that question of a commitment to Earth resonates for you and, and whether you think fiction is a form that can intercede in that debate that we should be having but aren't.
- [16:05]
Deb Olin Unferth
I mean, I am so interested in that book that sounds so good, I want to read it immediately. Yeah, I mean, I thought a lot about that. I actually, I went with my father to the Mars Society conference a few years ago when I was writing this book.
- [16:20]
Chris Holmes
I didn't know there such a society existed.
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Deb Olin Unferth
Oh, it's so cool and exciting. And my dad has gone for many, many years. He's gone, I think he's probably gone to like 20 of them. And it's just, it's a group of people who get together every year and they talk about how are we going to get to Mars? And they, they bring in all kinds of experts who are working in technology and in space development and you know, it's, what kind of food are people going to eat? And you know, and they, they even, you can, you can even go and put on goggles and experience it for yourself, like walking around on Mars and you know, all these different things and oh, it's, it's really fun. Like, I had so much fun going to this and I've, since I've, that was a few years ago and since I've wanted to go again and I haven't been able to, but I might go this year again. It's, I mean, I am horrified by the idea of going to Mars. I, for so many reasons. For so many reasons. I mean, not the least practical. It's, it's. Why on Earth would we go to a different place that is way more hostile than Earth currently is and try to create a new, a new world system there? I mean, it just seems ludicrous to me. And I, and you have, and you
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Chris Holmes
have Z so wonderfully dramatize the deep, deep desire just to exist on a planet in which you are organically Meant to be there and what that feels like versus one that wants to. Wants to off you.
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Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, completely. I mean, that's kind of why I created that character. Yeah. I have a character, Z, in the book who. He has been living on Mars and then he takes a job where he comes to Earth and he's supposed to be collecting. He's supposed to be collecting items that are like souvenirs for the Martians to bring back, because all of the Martians want to be back on Earth. They all are so sad that they're in this incredibly cold, hostile, dark place where they can never actually be outside in any way. They. Their skin, they always have to be in so many layers and they live underground and, you know, it's just. It seems so terrible and so. Yeah, so. So I have this character and he just kind of expresses this love of Earth and all he wants to do is be there. I worked on him for a long time as a character. He was. For a while, I thought that the book would just be his and there would be no other.
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Chris Holmes
That's fascinating.
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Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah. And I wound up deciding against that. But there is a version of the book, of the entire book, written just from his point of view and him wandering the Earth in search of this. In search of this. Of. Of Earth 6, which is the other. This. This, like, DNA, this trove of DNA that he believed existed and he was looking for.
- [19:42]
Chris Holmes
It's. So it's very interesting to think about him as the. As once the sort of central focal character, because for a while we only experience him through Dylan and. And in these sort of very disembodied, you know, tech, essentially text messages across the universe. But then when we. We, you know, are gathered into his universe and understanding of the world, all of a sudden he becomes this really rich character. And. And we, you know, I won't spoil anything, but we kind of think poorly of him up until that point. But then he becomes something totally different.
- [20:21]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah. Thank you. I. I'm glad that you noticed that, because I worked hard to sort of achieve that. That it does seem like he sort of abandons Dylan and. And you're not really sure, like, what his deal is. And then at one point, kind of late in the book, he just sort of takes over the narrative and has a long. A couple long chapters all to himself and he. You get his full story and. Yeah, that was part of the. Part of the book that I threw away. Or threw away some of it. Yeah. But. But it is about that question of just trying, you know, from an outside perspective. What is so special about Earth? And he comes to tell us. He. He arrives and he's like, this place is so beautiful, even. And he sees it in its very final gasps when there's so little of the planet that's still livable. And he's still.
- [21:17]
Chris Holmes
He's stunned. He loves it.
- [21:20]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, he loves it. He just wants to stay. He. He doesn't even care that it's mostly ruined. He. To him, it's just. It's a miracle.
- [21:29]
Chris Holmes
Oh, yeah. I. I love those. Those scenes with him. There are many profound relationships in this novel, but certainly Dylan and her mother's relationship, daughter and mother, is a thread that runs through the entire novel. And I'm wondering if you would read the short opening chapter of Earth 7 that introduces us to this relationship and to the moment of the Earth's future that you depict.
- [21:54]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, sure. So I've never read it aloud before. This will be fun.
- [21:58]
Chris Holmes
Oh, exciting.
- [22:00]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah. Okay. In those years, the sky was full of sulfur and diamonds shot into the air by cannons to scatter the sunlight. The population of Earth had been falling for decades, and the drop did not have a sole cause. And Rosemary was leaving. She was taking her child with her, of course. The child was 5, had a grave face and a funny little march, and could have become anyone at that point, her mind still plastic and watery. They said their goodbyes to the team. Dr. Dass came in with a gift for the child, a cloth animal. No one could tell what it was supposed to be. A snake. Everyone assumed Rosemary was leaving to protect the child from radiation or disease, and she let them think that. But really she was leaving because she was sick of people. Had put up with them long enough, she felt, had certainly given them a fair chance. There were fewer people, yes, but still too many, too close together, and she'd had it. She and the child got on the company bus and rode it to the coast. They slept on a ship, ferried below in a submarine. Two days of travel at last. They sank into a circle of glowing pods. Rosemary pointed at one of the orbs. That's ours. A few sea trees, a hulking nuclear generator, some leftover construction equipment. The child clutched the cloth animal. Can we go back up now? Not yet. They gathered their things. They walked through the decompression chamber and entered the pod. Years went by.
- [23:35]
Chris Holmes
Years went by. Hits with a. With a real weight, especially once you start to submerge with them into the life in the pod. And I think this opening really showcases both the vivid painting work you do with your prose and the subtlety with which you introduce very powerful emotional struggles. Here we have Rosemary electing to leave the surface and to essentially entomb her and her daughter. Daughter in a pod deep in the ocean. Do you often think about working with the tension between extraordinary images and subdued emotions?
- [24:12]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, I guess I do. I must. I mean, in this case, this particular passage I wrote when I was. I was in an Airbnb in, like, a Buddhist colony or.
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Chris Holmes
Wow.
- [24:27]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah.
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Chris Holmes
Silence.
- [24:29]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, it was like in the redwoods. And. And I was with my friend Lucy, and we had. Had rented this. This space and just for a few days as sort of like a little mini writing residency for two people, you know, and. And the place had a little. The place we rented had a separate little tiny tower that at the top of. It was. It was. It was like windows all the way around and trees out the window, and it was super quiet and enclosed and private. And I slept up there one night, and it was freezing, freezing cold. It was supposed to be like a yoga room, I think. And then I woke in the morning and just was surrounded by. By fog. And. And I thought of that opening piece, like, what if it just. It looked sort of like I was underwater because of the strange light that was coming in. And I thought about what it would be like to be underwater and in that quiet space and, like, who would be there. And I just. I started writing the opening of this book, and, yeah, I liked. I liked the idea that these two people, this mother and this daughter being. Being there and at cross purposes, like, one wants to leave, one wants to stay, one has control, one has no control. They. They just desire very different things. They're very different kinds of people at that point. And. And I. I liked the tensions that it set up and the. The fact that any possible solution was so far away and would be so hard to get to.
- [26:25]
Chris Holmes
You know, I thought a lot about my students, the ones who especially were at home during COVID and their isolation in their bedrooms while their parents worked and. And. And essentially left them to their solitude. And I thought of that as a kind of, you know, a torture of being kept away from society in which technology is really the only lifeline to connect to others. And I wondered if you thought at all about our Covid solitude as well.
- [26:57]
Deb Olin Unferth
You know, it's so funny because I actually wrote that. That passage in 2019 when I was. I had just finished Barney, my last book, and I was trying to start a new book. And so Lucy and I had gone on this little Retreat. And I wrote that passage. And then a few months later, we were all shut down, and I was like, did I cause this? Did I write reality?
- [27:27]
Chris Holmes
You're going to be in big trouble if you did so.
- [27:32]
Deb Olin Unferth
But I mean. So, I mean, I'm sure that it, it helped me, I mean, because then a few months later, you know, there I was, trapped in my office, zooming in with my students, watching all my students, you know, lie in their beds with their, with their covers up to their chins and sitting in the dark room with a, you know, blinking computer in front of them. It was just so crazy. And so, yeah, I mean, as I revise it, of course I was thinking about, about the pandemic, but I hope I, I, I'm going to be careful what I write going forward.
- [28:06]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, please do. Yeah. For all of our sakes. Eleni is one of my favorite characters and, and she really just radiates human humanity, despite the irony of her having augmented herself or been augmented to live longer and essentially look unaged. Although, of course, that sort of fails in all these kind of unfortunate ways. And she is, in fact, mistaken for, sometimes mistakes herself for a robot. And I think you had fun playing with the dissonance between her vulnerable heart and her hybridized body. And I wonder if you could talk about that irony and your clear love of Melanie as a character as, as Dylan's love and one of the great ethical barometers in the novel.
- [28:58]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah. You know, I mean, did you watch the original Star Trek?
- [29:03]
Chris Holmes
I sure did. Yeah.
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Deb Olin Unferth
So Spock, who is considered to be, you know, he's, he, as a Vulcan, he doesn't experience emotions the way that humans experience emotions, that, you know, emotions that humans are, are so dramatic and emotional and, you know, he's so logical. But yet, if you watch it, there are so many episodes that involved Spock being overly emotional and, like, falling apart. He's like a wreck. He, like, falls in love or someone dies.
- [29:44]
Chris Holmes
Yeah. Remember when he has to duel Kirk over the, the, like, volcanic lava? It's very emotional.
- [29:51]
Deb Olin Unferth
Totally. He's always falling apart. And then there's, like, at the end, there's, you know, the doctor will, you know, say in the closing moment, he'll be like, oh, you showed a little bit of emotion, Spock. And then Spock says, you know, something like witty and, and in response and raises an eyebrow and this kind of thing. So, So I think I was thinking a little bit about, about him when I was developing Melanie, Spock was always the one that I had a crush on. I was, like, disgusted by the captain.
- [30:23]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, good choice.
- [30:27]
Deb Olin Unferth
And maybe my husband is a little bit like Spock in a way, as a philosophy professor.
- [30:33]
Chris Holmes
Oh, yeah, I'm sure he is.
- [30:36]
Deb Olin Unferth
So I. So I wanted to create if. I mean, I don't know if I was thinking of it consciously when I first began drawing Melanie as a character, but I do. I did really take a lot of joy in thinking of her as. As being mistaken for a robot and as also containing a lot of robotic components to her and. And of. And of our understanding of what those are in augmenting across the novel. Like, we. We. We understand, like, what it means to have these robotic components in her winds up being a really important part of her character and of what becomes of her at the end of the book. And so. And so I. Yeah, I was. I was. I. I just loved her from the start. I loved how she came off as such a kind of a badass bitch. You know, she was really. She was really in control. But then it turns out that it was all kind of a front, and she actually loves really deeply, and she has wide, expansive emotions, and she'll fight for the things that she loves and, you know, and she has so much complexity to her, and. And she winds up taking over the book. I mean, by the end, she's, you know, she's the main character. I liked playing with that switch, too, that you think that she's just gonna be sort of like love interest for Dylan. But then the book turns out to be her story by the end.
- [32:22]
Chris Holmes
There's plenty of sorrow to go around in the novel, but it's also really funny. And I was tickled by the ways in which you plant the absurdities of everyday quotidian life into the work that characters are doing to save the very traces of human existence. You didn't forget about our foibles in just trying to live day to day. And there's a particular moment that I'm thinking of in which I laughed out loud when Z and his Martian colonizers drop down to Earth to engage Dylan, and they land their ship, but then they then have to take a public bus to get the rest of the way to her. And the bus is shockingly clean and efficient and asks for a review. And I found its unlikeliness so wonderful. How does humor in this novel come out of the everyday tucked into an apocalypse?
- [33:12]
Deb Olin Unferth
I mean, I have always had a lot of humor in all of my books. I think this is my most serious book. And, yeah, I mean, there's still, like, it's Still, I just keep sort of lapsing into humor again and again.
- [33:29]
Chris Holmes
Thank goodness.
- [33:30]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, I mean, I enjoy it. I. I enjoy doing it because. And I mean, if I think about any of my other books, they're like. The humor is like, the cornerstone of most of my books. And it's, you know, they're. They're. It's deeply embedded in kind of like my understanding of the human race as this sort of ridiculous. The ridiculous species. To me, we seem the least dignified of all the species, probably, and the most messy and the most insecure and the most. So in. In a. In some ways that's, you know, tragic, like our warlike tendencies and things. But. But it's also. It's also very.
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Chris Holmes
It's.
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Deb Olin Unferth
It's funny and fraught. And so I think that that's. That's one reason why I'm constantly sort of leaning that way. And then I think it's also just like a way to make many different kinds of points through humor. I. You know, like, the court gesture gets to sort of tell the truth. So. So I enjoy that position. And. Yeah. I mean, the bus. I mean, it. The bus. It feels like that bus. I have so often been in some crumpled town and where it just seems like people have given. There's just, you know, it just looks like the place is falling apart. And then. And then someone installed this fancy new bus system that really only goes to, like, two places. And so it's really only built for a handful of people, but you can get on it, and it's going to be really bright and cheery and it's going to be really lit up. And so I decided to sort of. To sort of throw that in there. That this. This bus really. It's a company bus. It's actually not a public bus. It's, like, owned by the company that's kind of. Company sort of has. And the company wants to, you know, bring its workers here and then return them to the sort of the riffraff area where poor people live. So it just kind of goes to those two places. So, yeah, these Martians. But. But truthfully, no one really uses it anymore because the company doesn't really have workers anymore or almost any. And so it's. Everything is. Has been. Is. Is. Is run by AI and robots and stuff. So. So the. The. But the company bus, which runs on solar power, just kind of drifts back and forth over the land again and again and again, and the Martians just kind of get on it, and there's no one else on it. And, and they ride it at one point. I think Melanie rides it at one point. Dylany, I think I. I think as I wrote the book, I just was like, you know what? Let's just like everyone winds up on the bus at some point. No one else is ever on it.
- [36:37]
Chris Holmes
That should be a title for one of your stories. Everyone ends up on the bus.
- [36:43]
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- [36:53]
Deb Olin Unferth
You could say that again.
- [36:54]
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- [37:03]
Deb Olin Unferth
Now we party. This is incredible.
- [37:07]
Chris Holmes
Wow.
- [37:07]
Deb Olin Unferth
I am clearing the rest of the day.
- [37:09]
Disney/Pixar Hoppers Advertiser
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- [37:14]
Chris Holmes
So there is for me a powerful intertext living at the heart of this novel, which just may not exist for you. And that isn't a problem. But as Dylan was doing her work as a groundskeeper at the lab, which technically meant sweeping away the endless repiling sand, I was rushed back to the world of the Woman in the Dunes. Kobo Abe's allegory for Japan's post war modernization. Is that a text that means anything to you? And even if it doesn't, let's get into the sand dunes.
- [37:49]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, I've read that book. I've read other books by Kobo Abe. I love him. I love his weird, surreal. I mean, Woman of the Dunes is his most kind of accessible and friendly. True. And I love it. And I love his other, you know, completely crazy, weird books as well.
- [38:07]
Chris Holmes
Arc Sakora maybe is my favorite, I think. And it's so weird.
- [38:11]
Deb Olin Unferth
Oh, I like that one too. It's so weird. It's been a long time since I read that one, but I remember loving it. And there's a movie as well. So.
- [38:21]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, it's quite good actually.
- [38:24]
Deb Olin Unferth
It's really good. Yeah, all of that is familiar to me. But I also, I read read those many, many, many, many years ago. The Kobo Abe back in like, I mean, at least 15 years ago I was reading Kobo. Really. This was. And, and so it stayed with me for sure. But also I read like probably eight or ten books about sand when I was researching. Yeah. And nonfiction, almost entirely nonfiction about sand. About. I read a fantastic book just called Sand. Just explaining like where sand comes from, how it moves, what, like naming what sand, like different kinds of sand dunes. Talking about what individual little tiny grains of sand are made up of in different parts of the Planet. A very long, complicated, in depth book which I just loved so much. I read another really interesting book about human use of sand. That's a very contemporary book. I think it was published like five years ago or something. I think it's called World in a Grain. That explains how all of the different ways that we use sand, like how basically I'm sitting right now in a room that is made mostly of sand. Like the glass, silicon glass.
- [39:48]
Chris Holmes
Yeah.
- [39:49]
Deb Olin Unferth
The, you know, construction materials like cement contain, you know, are mostly made of sand. And how plastic is made of sand and how, you know, the sidewalks all around us are made of sand, how glue contains sand, how just basically everything is made up of sand and how, you know, eventually it's all just going to crumble and be. Become sand again. So just thinking about that, it was so interesting to me and about how there are now like whole islands have been constructed in different parts of the world that are just made of sand and, and how, how makeup contains sand, like everything, soap, everything, everything is made up of sand and microchips are made up of sand.
- [40:47]
Chris Holmes
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [40:49]
Deb Olin Unferth
And so I read that and that became really interesting to me. And I also read another book that was about a much older book that, one of the original books that, that tracked the movement of dunes and the, the, the geometry of dunes and how, how wind affects dunes and how like, like how they, they almost move like animals across the planet. And so that was a really interesting book about sand. I also read several books about being in the desert, about like journals and memoirs of like very old ones and very recent ones about spending a life in the Sahara or in different, different, all the different kinds of deserts that we have in the United States and across the world. And I also visited many deserts while I was reading this book. Like I spent, I spent a month in Morocco and spent time in the Sahara and I, you know, here in, in Texas we have several sort of vast deserts that have like, like desert scrub. Like there's, they're not fully desert. You know, there's like seven different categories of desert classifications of aridness and variety. And so, so I tried to visit different kinds of. And so I spent a few months during the pandemic in different deserts.
- [42:21]
Chris Holmes
So you were just full on like, you know, both literally surrounded by sand, but also surrounding yourself in, in kind of a history of sand, which is the history of the planet. And, and when did you become interested in, in tardigrades as like one of the microscopic communities of sand?
- [42:43]
Deb Olin Unferth
Well, I wanted to, I really wanted to Find life in the sand. And there, you know, there's apparently, you know, if you look at a beach and. Or if you look at sand in a. Like a woods or something like that, it has more categories of species than the original rainforest is within. Yes.
- [43:08]
Chris Holmes
Wow.
- [43:08]
Deb Olin Unferth
There are so many species.
- [43:10]
Chris Holmes
Oh, I have.
- [43:11]
Deb Olin Unferth
But in the desert. That's not true of desert sand. So I was like, well, but couldn't it be true? Like, I mean, so I thought, what. Are there any species that can live a really long time with very, very little water, like microscopic species that could survive? And. And I found tardigrades. I mean, there are actually a few. There's several species that could have fit the bill, but tardigrades have such a storied history in art and culture that I kind of settled on tardigrades and just to sort of contribute to that. To that storied history, to that culture of tardigrades. And. Yeah, so then I was like, well, it would have to be a very different kind of tardigrade. So then I imagined, you know, how that could come to be and they may exist. It makes sense.
- [44:09]
Chris Holmes
Okay. I mean, that I have to talk to my. I've. Through being on the tenure and promotion committee for the. For the college, I've gotten to read tons of things about our scientists work at the college, and several of them work on tardigrades. And I always just instantly go down like a Google wormhole whenever I read their stuff because I find tardigrades so interesting. And as you said, they just, like, seem full of life for. For having one being able to exist in, you know, in incredibly harsh circumstances, including, I think they've sent them into space now.
- [44:49]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah.
- [44:50]
Chris Holmes
But also they just, you know, they don't live that long and. But they have like, all, you know, this liveliness, it seems.
- [44:59]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah. And you can watch videos of them online, which I did, to sort of just kind of get, like, how they move and, you know, how they interact with others of their kind and other species and. Yeah, they're very interesting.
- [45:14]
Chris Holmes
Yeah, no, they're fascinating and. And like a kind of ugly. Cute. I feel like they. They look like terribly ugly, but also cute little bears, which is fun.
- [45:26]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah. They have, like, little claws.
- [45:29]
Chris Holmes
Yeah. Well, tardigrades seem a hopeful and lovely way to transition to our. Our final question, which is asking you what things you've been reading and loving recently in your. In your reading life.
- [45:46]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah. I am a big reader, so I do have some suggestions. I'm looking at my list of books that I've been reading lately and I can think of a few. So one that I read. Do you know the writer Victor Pelavin?
- [46:02]
Chris Holmes
I don't think I do.
- [46:04]
Deb Olin Unferth
He is a Russian writer who wrote a book called Uman Ra or Oman Ra. I'm not really sure.
- [46:11]
Chris Holmes
That sounds familiar to me. Say, tell me more.
- [46:14]
Deb Olin Unferth
Oman Ra is. It was written in. It was published in 1992, so a while ago. And it is about a. A Russian cosmonaut who, you know, he. He joins the Russian space. Space station team as a. As basically as a child, as a very young person. And then he is training to become the first Russian who will go to the moon. And so it's this. It's. It is. It's a Cold War story. It's a communist story. It's a story of disappointment and of hope. And it's surreal and it's strange. It's super short and it is one of the best books I've ever read. It is so good. And that's an amazing.
- [47:07]
Chris Holmes
That's an amazing recommendation.
- [47:10]
Deb Olin Unferth
It is wild. It's so. It's surreal. Did I say it was surreal already? Now that I've read it and I've been mentioning it to people there, some people say, oh, wow, that sounds really interesting. And some people just light up and say, oh, my God, that book meant everything to me. Like, I love that book so much. So it's kind of like a cult classic, I think.
- [47:34]
Chris Holmes
Oh, wow. Or maybe you're making it a cult classic. It sounds like it.
- [47:39]
Deb Olin Unferth
I don't think so. I think is actually a cult classic. And it's just that I was not in on the cult, so.
- [47:47]
Chris Holmes
Well, I want to join this cult. It sounds so good.
- [47:50]
Deb Olin Unferth
I would. I highly recommend it. Another one I'm looking for on this list here. So let's see here. Where is it? What is it called? Oh, okay. One. One is called A Mother in History by Jean Stafford. This is an older book. I think it was written maybe in like, the early 60s. And it is the story of Jean Stafford going to interview Lee Harvey Oswald's mother.
- [48:20]
Chris Holmes
Oh, wow.
- [48:21]
Deb Olin Unferth
So Gene Stafford. They're both in their 50s by this time. Lee Harvey Oswald is dead, of course, Kennedy is dead. And the mother is so bereft. And she was this sort of crazy character who. She's. I first heard of her from reading Don DeLillo's Libra, where she's featured as a character and she sort of takes over the page and just starts, like, shouting and, you know, she's defending her son and apparently in the early days after the Kennedy assassination, she went around doing this on news shows and to reporters and you know, anyone who would listen, she would just spout off about all of her conspiracy theories about how it was not how, how Lehara V. Oswald had not committed murder, had not done this or was set up or a million different things. And so Jean Stafford, who was a great strange journalist with a lot of attitude, went and interviewed, went and interviewed her. And they're both women in their 50s. You know, Jean Stafford never had any children. Leaver, Oswald's mother had recently lost her son. So, and they're together on Mother's Day and they just have this experience together of having this long, like three day conversation and it's just beautiful. And it's also really short and it's funny and it's weird and it's heartbreaking. Like by the end, like I was really feeling for this mother who had, you know, lost her son and, and had become an, you know, a national enemy, an international enemy. So it's, it's another hilarious, beautiful like nonfiction story then.
- [50:21]
Chris Holmes
That sounds great.
- [50:22]
Deb Olin Unferth
Another one that comes to mind is a book called Split Tooth by Tanya Taga.
- [50:27]
Chris Holmes
That's your epigraph?
- [50:29]
Deb Olin Unferth
Yeah, it's my epigraph, yeah. She's an Inuit writer. She was raised in the Arctic Circle in Canada in a small Inuit village. And she wrote this totally just strange book about. It's sort of a mix of. It's published as a novel, but it's really like, it's songs, it's memoir pieces, it's short stories. It's just this sort of collection of pieces about living in the Arctic and the strangeness of it. The Northern Lights. It becomes a sort of like love song to the Northern lights and to the ice and to, and to the, and to nature. And it was a big influence on me as I was writing this book when I read it because, because of this, this deep love of the earth and this kind of personification of the earth and of like she asks in the book, does not even air have, have value? Does not even air have like a consciousness? And I, that made me sort of set me on this path as, as a vegan. I've always taken animal rights as like my sacred vow, you know, is that I'm not going to participate in animal suffering as much as I possibly can. Of course it's impossible to not take care, to not take part to some degree. But this made me sort of just think about like even sort of more widely like the, the the sacredness of the planet that we live on and everything about it. Every even the light has a sacred element to it. And she's the one who sort of got me thinking on that path.
- [52:24]
Chris Holmes
Well, these are three extraordinary books, none of which I've read, but I plan to remedy that very, very quickly, as I imagine my audience will, but not before they run out and get Earth 7. Deb, I just so enjoyed entering back into your imaginative life through this book that is, on the one hand, about a world that is changed irrevocably from the one we know, but one that is still filled with humans capable of love and hope and community. And I felt that radiating through the entire read, even at most moments of sadness. And it was a real pleasure to just be in your writing again. And thank you so much for coming on to talk to me about it.
- [53:11]
Deb Olin Unferth
Thank you so much, Chris. This was such a pleasure.
- [53:14]
Chris Holmes
The pleasure was all mine. Well, that's all from me for now. My thanks to Deb Olin Unferth for coming on to talk about her latest novel, Earth Seven Earth. You can find links to purchase Earth Seven and all of Deb's recommended books at the website burnedbybooks.com There you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books. Sam.