Mark Sundeen is the author of the new essay collection Delusions and Grandeur. His other books include The Unsettlers. He is an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Montana.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the essays in your new collection?
A: I wrote the Wendover casino piece in the winter of 2000, and the book’s final piece, “The Shinglewide,” during the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 while I was locked down with my wife and our baby boy in a bespoke Moab trailer. So it’s a huge span—20 years! There were about 15 additional essays that didn’t make it into the book.
As I went to collect the essays in one book, I started to see themes and patterns emerge, for example the continuous overseas wars of those two decades—and how they affected those of us back at home.
A few of the more autobiographical essays stretched back even further to the early 1990s, and the book ultimately had a very personal arc, too, of showing me coming of age and connecting to a landscape and culture where I began as a full outsider.
Q: The writer Vauhini Vara said of the book, “Delusions and Grandeur is about what it means to be a man in the West--but if that conjures images of steely-eyed cowboys and oilmen, put those out of your mind.” What do you think of that description?
A: I am so grateful for Vauhini’s ability to distill what I’m trying to do in language more eloquent than my own!
I did not set out to write a book about men or masculinity, but once I finished it, that was clearly what I’d done. I was so unable to write candidly about myself in my youth that I leaned into reporting and found others to profile who expressed something about me that I was unable to say.
Both the Jack London impersonator and the Hole N The Rock sculptor had such grand ambitions for their work and yet were working in a cultural vacuum with nobody paying attention, which is of course how I felt about my own writing. I admired them even as they never created the eternal art they wanted to make.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I came up with the title years ago in an earlier iteration of this collection and it outlasted all the others that came after.
I think the grand landscape of the West is not incidental to the quixotic dreams of the people who live in it. The spectacular-ness makes us think we are spectacular, too. For every Teddy Roosevelt or Ansel Adams or Cormac McCarthy whose vision meets the landscape’s promise, there are millions more who perhaps continue to feel like just one more grain of sand.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope that in an era where a lot of nonfiction feels to me like concept-driven think-pieces, this book is about people, and in-depth granular reporting from places far from the regular lens of the media. I like to sit with my subjects long after the news camera would have turned away. That’s where I find their true humanity.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have been working on stories about crime, rivers, the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas, fatherhood and grief that hopefully someday will all come together in a singular work.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I just published a piece from the new book I mentioned, a missing person mystery wrapped up with the fate of the threatened desert tortoise:
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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