Dan Simon is the author of the new novel Ashland. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Seven Stories Press, and he lives in New York and New Hampshire.
Q: What inspired you to write Ashland, and how did you create your cast of characters?
A: The story I wanted to tell, the question I was trying to answer, has to do with someone growing up without a father. It is very common today for a child to grow up with their father and not to know him.
A close relationship with one's father is quite rare, I think, in part because so many men lead lives and do work other than what they might have chosen if it were up to them. So they are not exactly open books, not even to their children. But here it is more extreme, a question of a child, a daughter, who grows up without knowing her father at all.
I'm always writing from what I know, from what I see, from people I know. So my approach to writing is quite a lot like Carolyn's approach to writing inside Ashland.
The characters are built out of my observations, things I experienced, people I knew in real life, especially as a child, growing up spending significant parts of every year in and around this town. I think I was in awe of these surroundings and the people that inhabited them.
Q: The author Andrew Solomon compared the book to the classic writers Thornton Wilder and William Faulkner--what do you think of that assessment?
A: I like it a lot in both cases. Here's why: what interests me most is American literature. How are each of us going to come to have a relationship with this country of ours at this moment in our history unless we have a literature that shows us to ourselves as we are now?
You will never get that from a news segment, or 10,000 news segments, and you aren't going to get it, not at this moment, from a work in translation either because the history is so different elsewhere, and American history so particular. Only a new American literature will give us that.
To me Thornton Wilder and William Faulkner are both quintessentially American writers. And of course, Our Town takes place in New Hampshire! I believe his town—is it not called Grover's Corner?—is completely imaginary, whereas my town, Ashland, is completely real.
And in the life of the imagination with which I am trying to capture it, I am not trying to add color or drama, I am using all the skill and heart I have in the very ambitious attempt to describe it just as it is, just as I see it, in relation to its own history, its past and future, and its inhabitants.
But I do think it is time for a new contemporary American literature to emerge and I hope I can be part of that, as a writer and also as a publisher.
Q: As you mentioned, the novel is set in New Hampshire--how important is setting to you in your writing?
A: Extremely important. The ship—the story—would have drifted off and gotten lost completely were it not for being anchored to the place in which it is situated. And this is true for the individual characters too. Each of them.
Ashland is a novel of survival, a question mark then. Will these people, and Carolyn especially, survive? If they do it will be in large part thanks to some nourishment they are able to draw from their surroundings.
And this is true in real life; people in New Hampshire have a knack for drawing a kind of strength from their surroundings, in the same way that maple syrup is drawn from the sugar maple trees.
And as you know from reading the book, there is simply a lot of description of the land and the trees and the seasons, and virtually no physical descriptions of any of the people in the book, so in some strange way the natural landscape that is being described acts almost like the chorus in a Greek drama, a kind of grounding presence.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I suppose yes, I knew it would begin and end with Carolyn, but whether she would still be alive in the end, no, that I did not know until I was done. I did not know how everything that happens would impact her survival.
You know from the minute you meet her at the beginning of the book that she is not going to play anything safe, that she is not going to protect herself well. In a sense, she cares about everything so much and at the same time is almost indifferent to her own survival.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Thanks for asking, Deborah. I completed the next novel. It is sitting on my editor's desk and he's told me he will read it the week after next.
I don't want to assume anything, but I am hopeful that he will like it and will want to publish it because, well, he has been such a believer in Ashland, and to me the next book goes deeper and is also trimmer and, to me, better, as much as I do love Ashland of course.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Well, perhaps this. As much as Carolyn would tell you this book belongs to her as the main character, I would say it's a bit more complicated than that. Each of the six characters really is equally important.
Someone recently described Ashland as a choral work and I like that for two reasons, both because of the allusion to a musical form, which sits well with this novel, and then also because a chorus has its own collective voice and I'd like to think that's true of Ashland as well.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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