Ellis Scott is the author of the new novel Night Terminus. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Iowa Review.
Q: What inspired you to write Night Terminus?
A: I published my debut short story when I was 55 years old, which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Time moves differently and folds in on itself as one gets older, and the long past often gains importance.
I considered several ideas for a first novel but kept coming back to the AIDS crisis. Only a handful of AIDS novels have been written in the last 10 or 15 years. There was more to say.
I think the aftermath often provides more compelling narratives than the calamity itself, and I couldn’t find novels about the survivors of AIDS: people who watched their friends and lovers die, who were supposed to perish then didn’t, and who suffer from complex physical ailments and emotional scars as they age. These individuals carry the heavy burden of history.
I was an out gay teenager when the epidemic started and am now 62 years old. I realized most survivors were older than me and would soon all be dead. Witnesses to that tragedy would be gone, so I was inspired to write the story of what happened, the joy and the sorrow.
Q: How did you create your unnamed protagonist--and why did you decide to make him unnamed?
A: Personal experience shaped my narrator, though he is fictional. He plays the everyman.
I wanted to emphasize his transient nature, and one theme in the novel is this idea of statelessness — a gay diaspora living in liminal spaces and a place of impermanence. Absence and dissolution play large roles in the novel’s plot and in the art and photography highlighted in the book.
The narrator anchors the narrative but from a distance, so that the weight of the catastrophe speaks for itself. He circles, watching what unfolds, but each chapter is named after the rebels, fugitives, and artists he meets along the way on three continents over 40 years.
Ia Genberg used a similar device in her febrile novel The Details, where the main character is revealed through other characters in four parts. I used a five-part structure to do the same. W. G. Sebald also employed a similar design for his novel The Emigrants.
Being true to his voice was more important than naming him. Not every story will have a traditional form. Life is messy. Things end abruptly. People are left hanging.
Q: In a review in The Brooklyn Rail, Henry Hicks IV writes, “Scott writes a queer novel that is full of abundance—even in its solemnity. Night Terminus is a haunting, a prayer, and an exhale all at once.” What do you think of that description?
A: I was so grateful and thought it aptly summed up the mood. He is a wonderful writer, and being lauded by peers is such an affirmation. The entire novel is a haunting. There is such a geography of absence in the narrative yet traces of the long dead and near dead are found everywhere — in 19th-century artifacts, 20th-century political events, the spectral photography of Édouard Baldus, and of course those who died of AIDS.
But Night Terminus is also my requiem for a lost generation. An incantation and an elegy. Perhaps the most impactful part of that sentence for me is the exhale. Few stories about that terrible time have been told in literary fiction. I have been holding those tales in for so many decades that writing them was a personal liberation from the grief that struck me so young.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: It’s always a difficult question because it’s not my place to suggest what someone would take from my writing, but I would say I hope they are changed somehow, as I am each time I read a wonderful book. There is nothing better than a reader who has grasped your intent and has been stirred somehow — their worldview either shifted or validated.
These are universal stories: the search for meaning and agency, the power of chance and coincidence, and the joy in resilience and community.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have struggled with illness most of my adult life. If my current condition remains stable, I am going to start writing my second novel.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I didn’t just write this for my fellow elders; I wrote it for the young people in my community struggling to find tales about their collective history that have so often been erased from history.
The novel is for readers interested in queer historical fiction, 20th-century politics, or just travel in a time with no internet or cell phones. My hope is that the audience is as abundant as the stories within its pages.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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