Dystopian fiction has been something of a trend for the last decade. But two new books by Portland authors put an almost humorous spin on the genre. Jon Raymond’s “Denial” is set in a future that looks very much like our own, but after a global reckoning on the dangers of climate change and the fossil fuel industry. His characters stumble through the problems of an ordinary life - illness, love, - while grappling with the question of who is to blame for the problems of the world we have all created. In Mat Johnson’s “Invisible Things,” a spaceship exploring Jupiter discovers a suburban American city populated by 17th century settlers and later abductees. The residents live in a starkly divided world, where half the population denies basic reality. OPB’s former Weekend Edition host John Notarianni talks to Raymond and Johnson about their books.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Dystopian fiction has been something of a trend for the last decade or so and it can get grim. But two recent books by Portland authors put an almost humorous spin on the genre. We’re going to bring you a conversation today from the Portland Book Festival with those two authors. I’ll let former OPB Weekend Edition host John Notarianni introduce them.
John Notarianni: Dystopian fiction has been kind of a big deal in the last several years. But these guys, two Oregon authors have put an almost humorous spin on the genre. This is Jon Raymond, he’s the author of the novels “Half Life,” “Rain Dragon” and “Free Bird” and the story collection “Livability.” He’s also collaborated on six films with the director Kelly Reichardt, many which have been based on his fiction. His most recent novel, “Denial” is a New York Times Book Review: Editors Choice. It’s set in the future that looks very much like the present, but after a global reckoning on the dangers of climate change in the fossil fuel industry.
Mat Johnson is the Philip H Knight chair of humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications include the novels “Loving Day” and “Pym.” His latest book, “Invisible Things,” a spaceship exploring Jupiter discovers the suburban American city populated by settlers and abductees. The residents live in a starkly divided world where half the population denies basic reality.
[Audience laughter]
Notarianni: So weird…
Mat Johnson: Total fiction [laughter].
Notarianni: Mat, Jon, glad you’re here. Thanks for being here.
Jon Raymond / Johnson: Thank you.
Notarianni: So we’ve seen a lot of fiction that is based in this dystopian future recently, but it’s often really bleak. But in both of your books, it feels normal, like there’s this veneer that the world is really familiar. I’m wondering what went into the world building that you decided to create these worlds the way you have, Mat?
Johnson: I looked out the window. [Laughter].
I think one of the problems right now is that problems are very obvious, right? And at the same time, because they’re so obvious, it’s hard to address them because everybody already has preconceived notions about the issues. Either they totally are coming from an entirely separate reality, when we talk about issues, or they agree with you on 99.9% of your worldview, which is even worse because people kill each other over the .01%. So being able to take things into a slightly different perspective, to me, is essential to even attempt to look at it in a new light.
I used to write mostly (I thought) satirical work, but you can’t because we’re living in a satire. Ratcheting it up is not only not helpful, it’s not even enjoyable. My grad students at the University of Oregon - I work with pre-professional students who come from all across the country to come to Eugene to study. One of the exercises I do is I force them to lay on their backs or lay on their chairs. So they’re looking at the room upside down, and once they do that, their understanding of what the room is changes massively. Their spatial understanding, they noticed details they never would have noticed, ordinarily, and sometimes that’s what I’m trying to do in the fiction is just force you to look at the world upside down for a second, so hopefully you can actually see it.
Notarianni: And it’s interesting because your book feels so current. I was almost certain that there was some 2020 commentary, some election commentary. But you wrote it way before the last couple of years. You wrote it back in 2017 and 2018.
Johnson: Yeah. And then reality ripped me off. I came up with this crazy notion that denialism would lead to half the population ignoring things that would actually get them killed. And then we had the pandemic. [Laughter]. Watching it going, “oh my God, they’re really doing it.” It was kind of stunning. But it was another reminder you can only get so far away from our reality in order to be able to deal with it.
For me, I think that one of the things when looking at both of our books, one of the commonalities was an attempt to deal with these issues by, instead of looking at the specifics of the problem - which is how we spend a lot of time in the real world - looking at the humanity of the problem and the structure of the way we think and the way we interact with each other, and how they result in the problems.
Notarianni: Yeah, I think that’s true and I do feel like your book does feel like a pandemic book. I feel like there’s a certain pandemic paranoia that is woven through it.
Raymond: I think that’s fair. I started it just before the pandemic hit, like really just before. It was a similar kind of inspiration, of looking out the window and seeing a lot of . . . Even before the pandemic, [there was] incredible doom on political and ecological fronts. And for me, it was just a thought experiment: can I even imagine a future? Is it possible to somehow avoid what feels to me like a lot of the cliches of dystopian thinking, even just at a 30-year horizon, about as long as a mortgage? Can you imagine the world still existing in some kind of way?
So for me, the perverse thing I wanted to do was just imagine a world that is humanly unchanged. There have been many changes, but it’s exactly like Mat was saying, human nature and human relationships still basically have continued. So you still are shopping at Old Navy and you’re still falling in love with old people that you used to know. It’s sort of this combination of the cataclysmic and the banal. Those things are never gonna go away. Most of your day is still gonna be boring even after the end times.
Notarianni: You said you wanted it to be a really optical book and when I was reading it, it was so interesting how tactile it was, it all is through the protagonists’ eyes. What they’re seeing, what they’re experiencing. But this environmental calamity is just in the background and you never really see it. I wonder how you got to that point of knowing that something awful has happened, but it’s not really in front of you.
Raymond: Well, I wanted to leave the sort of geopolitics, I guess, a little bit out of the frame in a sense because I’m again, like Mat said, the issues facing humanity are so obvious and so intractable. I don’t have the scientific or political knowledge to write even an Op-Ed that would change anyone’s mind or add anything to the conversation. So what I could do was hopefully just create a space for projecting ourselves into the future. And I wanted it to be a not entirely bleak and horrible experience for those characters. And so for me, the optical element, partly had to do with just being pretty things in the future. The early drafts of the book had lots of pretty clouds. Pretty clouds everywhere you could look at and I just wanted it to be speckled with those small things that make a day endurable.
Notarianni: Well, pretty things. Also ugly things [Laughter].
A big part of the book is when the characters visit the murals of José Clemente Orosco in Guadalajara. I saw an interview that you did and you referred to them as “a flaming collage of anti-fascist, anti-communist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-human, basically carnage.”
Raymond: [Laughter] I love Orosco. Orosco is like a total foundation for me. He was one of the big three Mexican muralists, along with Diego Rivera and Alfredo Siqueiros. And Orosco is the most bleak by far, really unremittingly dark. I encountered those murals as a teenager and they have just stayed in my mind for my entire life, it turns out. And I wanted the book to go to this place where these characters had to kind of deal with this vision that was created in 1937. So in another very intense moment of global history. I just really wanted to kind of extol the vision that he put out which is horrible, but also kind of without blind spots. I think that’s an important thing to exist in the world.
Notarianni: How do you balance horrible with funny because both of your books are funny. I mean in different ways, I feel like the tone is different, but there is humor and there is a sort of awareness of the absurdity of the situations that we’re in today.
Johnson: For me, humor is just a language. I’m a mutt from a bunch of different cultural influences. From the African-American tradition, the Irish tradition, the Jewish-American tradition, all those groups dealt with incredible moments of pain and oppression through humor, as a sort of relief valve. And so for me, it might as well be an accent.
What I learned in the beginning of my writing is good writing is not supposed to be funny. Like in America, Toni Morrison is not funny. I just wanted to be a very serious writer and serious writers are of course serious and they’re not funny. For a while, in the beginning of my writing life, I was just trying to suppress it and suppress it and suppress it. And yet the way I live my life, moment to moment, is filled with humor. The way I teach is filled with humor, the way I deal with my friends. So I just had to accept that that was my truth, and come from that point. So I say that because a lot of times people look at it like a seasoning that you add in there. And I think for some people it is. But for me it’s just the way I’ve interacted with things and I’ve had to just come to peace with it.
When my book “Pym” [came out] in 2011 - the first novel I wrote that people really read - early reviews came back and they were all like, “This is really funny.” I was like, “What the hell are they talking about?” [Laughter] I remember, there’s a funny part here and there’s a funny part there, but I was getting a little insulted, like “I am a serious author.” And so I went back and I read it and I was like, “holy shit.” Because what happens is I’m writing two, four, or five pages at a time, and that takes a couple hours. Now, to keep awake, in part, there’s going to be one or two funny things in a couple of hours that I’m gonna write. But then when you read the whole damn thing together, all of a sudden those one or two moments of humor, over the course of 400 pages, ends up becoming this nonstop kind of thing, which I did not realize. That was a big waking up for me about what I actually do.
Notarianni: “Invisible Things”, there’s a lot of plot, we’re not going to get into it. How much of the story did you know? And how much were you finding as you wrote it?
Johnson: My process is usually a mix of order and chaos. If there’s too much order, then it becomes dead, it doesn’t go anywhere interesting. It just does exactly what I tell it to do. That doesn’t sound like it would be a bad idea. Coming in doing it that way, it’s kind of like serving bread that you cooked a month ago. It comes out stale. So the energy on the page you get a lot of time is the chaos energy. You can feel that it’s popping into the [writer’s] head at that moment, you feel the risk that the writer is taking. You feel like whatever the moves that are happening, they’re so organic that they couldn’t have been planned. But, if you let chaos take over completely you get a hot mess.
So all these things I start up with a basic idea about where I’m going. With this one, I just started with the silly idea of “what if everybody who was abducted by aliens in the last 400 years in North America was just living in one city.” And that was just this dumb idea I had driving around in my car and I told my daughter who was 15 at the time, and she was like “Dad, that’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”
Notarianni: That’s when you know you got something good [Laughter].
Johnson: Yeah, I was like, “I’m gonna show you,” right? And that came from there. But a lot of the other stuff, I just didn’t know. The “invisible things” was not in the initial attempt to write the book. So the biggest element of the book just wasn’t there, that all came out organically.
Notarianni: I see you nodding along to what he was saying about the process of chaos and order.
Raymond: Oh yeah, for sure. I wouldn’t call it an outline, exactly, but I need to have a sort of aerial view of it to begin with. It wouldn’t be recognizable as an outline to any other person. But there are a lot of weird chicken scratches on a legal sheet of paper. And it’s true, it doesn’t need to be very detailed, but in order to have those “sentence level” surprises and those kinds of moral insights, I have to know where I’m going. Because it’s kind of like jazz [Laughter]. But you have to have the structure to do the riffing on.
So I think, for me, it’s important to have a road map. I do follow it, [but it] still allows plenty of space to get lost.
Johnson: I tell my students, for instance, tonight, I decided I’m going to get in the car and I’m gonna go drive to Philly. So when the Phillies win, I can climb up one of the grease poles and scream on Broad Street with everybody else. I’m putting that out into the world. So in order to do that, I look at Google Maps and I can see where I have to go and how I’m gonna drive. Am I gonna go the northern route? It’s getting a little cold. Maybe go the southern route because it would be less icy. I have basic ideas about that.
So I know I need a car. I know when I have to leave, I can know for the first cities, do I want to hit Chicago during a rush hour period? No. So there’s basic things I know about that, but that’s all I know and that lets me pick the rhythm. It makes you pick the vehicle. But the actual trip is going to be something completely different. I can’t imagine where the traffic jams are gonna be. I can’t imagine where I’m gonna get lost. I can’t imagine the creepy guys sitting at the convenience store while I fill up my gas. All those things are utterly organic. So it’s that blend between the two.
Notarianni: Where did you get lost in writing, Jon, and what did you find there?
Raymond: Well, this book was weird because it actually happened much more quickly and painlessly than other books. Not that they’ve been super painful, but as I mentioned this started at the end of 2019. I had just really started committing stuff to paper when COVID hit. So the writing of it largely happened in quarantine, which was very good writing conditions. That was very solid for people who had stuff already going. It was kind of lucky. If you weren’t already engaged, I think it got hard. Also, this is a short book. This is an advertisement for the book, it’s quite brief.
And it has a big hook in it, which is different than other books that I have. One of the inspirations for the book was this concept that’s been floating around in public for a while of Nuremberg-style trials for climate criminals. The idea of actually holding some people accountable in that way for the mass global death. That struck me as an interesting plot device, and allowed me to think about, to do in a sense, a kind of Nazi-hunter story in eco-drag in the future. So it takes place in the future, it’s about this hunt for a fugitive oil executive. That’s a more high concept that I’ve really dealt with in the past. And it did simplify the writing in a certain manner and the book itself ended up having a certain kind of noir DNA.
None of which is to say it was simple, and none of which is to say it satisfies any of those expectations. As a thriller, it’s pretty quiet, but it allowed the writing to happen pretty quickly.
Notarianni: I do think of you as a very Northwest writer. I feel like a lot of your writing feels very steeped in this part of the country. And I thought it was interesting that this is one where the majority of the novel takes place in Mexico, not quite as far as [Johnson’s] book, which is on the moon of Jupiter but also kind of next door. But I’m wondering what did you get out of getting so far away from here?
Raymond: I made a decision early on to be a regionalist writer. It was one of those stupid ideas where you’re like, “That’s so stupid, no one would do that. I think I might do that.” So I somewhat arbitrarily was like, “I’m gonna write things that are set where I grew up and use that.” And then as it turns out, that is what a lot of people continue to do. But it’s something you think of as being kind of old fashioned I guess. So I have accomplished that, to become a minor regional writer.
But at a certain point, the region starts to become a little bit blurry. The book before this was largely a California book and this book is sort of Mexico. And I’ve just started to expand the theater of operations a little bit beyond just merely the land of Douglas fir trees and to understand the region in a larger, more holistic sense. The west coast, and even beyond the American west coast, becomes to me, a single culture with difficult lines to draw in a certain way. And I’m interested in blurring some of those lines. The spur into Mexico, to me, still feels like that is part of larger American Western culture.
Notarianni: You threw us out on a moon 40 million miles away. And I’m wondering what you got out of that setting that you wouldn’t have been able to if you were to set it in Pasadena.
Johnson: I find that one of the ways it’s difficult for us to get any further on some ideas is that there’s all these touchstones that, as soon as you say them, indicate an entire worldview and indicate an entire calcified notion about reality. For instance, if I’m talking to somebody and at some point they just say, “Yeah, I think he’s a member of the Democrat party.” That’s a touchstone and they (members of the Republican party) hear touchstones from me.
I was at the airport the other day and I saw somebody wearing a Star [Wars] shirt and when I got closer, it was a female character from “The Mandalorian”. The actor was fired for saying right wing things in person. And it said like “The Resistance”. Everywhere I’m seeing all these nods to camps and what camp you’re in and what partisan group you’re in. And part of the scary thing about partisan groups is that when you reject uncomfortable truths in your partisan group, you actually get a moment of elation because what you’re saying is, “I don’t care what actually happened. I’m so loyal to my partisan group that I’m willing to deny reality.” And that’s euphoria.
So by taking it not just out of the country, but then out of the planet, it allowed me to play with it. And play with things that are happening here, in France, and Germany, and Britain, and play with them in a way that there weren’t these immediate touchstones that pulled it down. Now, over the course of the narrative, I found I couldn’t pull it as far away from our current reality as I wanted to, because there’s so many things that were specific to this historical moment, and to the rise of fascism.
But still, pulling it away like that allowed me to deal with the actual way we think, as opposed to issues of race, issues of climate change, issues of misogyny, but how we actually interpret them. There’s a common thread with how we are failing to deal with the biggest issues that were faced. And I think that’s it.
Notarianni: “Invisible Things” is the name of the book, and there are a number of invisible things in this book. Some of them are very fearsome that might just crush someone’s head in the middle of a moment. But then there’s also this presence of religion and ritual and these things that are really comforting to the characters as well. And I was wondering how you were thinking about that duality of what we don’t want to look at is both terrifying, but can also be this space of comfort for people?
Johnson: There’s a comfort in agreeing to a very well established status quo. There’s just a comfort in it. You don’t have to think and everything is set up for you. And not only is it set up for you, it’s set up to tell you’re a good person for not challenging those things, right? And it’s exhausting. We live in this world of constant new information. It’s almost impossible to do anything that isn’t morally troubling at some level. Anything you do, somebody can come in and say, “You know they kill dogs to do that.” There’s always these things. So part of us has to shut off.
The other part of this partisan way of looking at the world (or tribal, really) is [it] allows us to shut off portions of our brain and we need to do it. So we can’t rethink every single thing. If it wasn’t fulfilling for people, they wouldn’t join into these tribal groups in the first place. It’s providing something.
Raymond: I’ll just agree with that fully. And it’s part of what went into the writing of my book as well. The book is called “Denial” for a reason. It’s not a great title, but it’s a very true title. And one of the ideas I was having was denialism, or denial, it is really just a part of consciousness. It might be one of the primary ontological characteristics of consciousness. You need to block certain things out in order to create meaning. Something needs to be excluded in order to have a sort of idea. And in many different ways, everyone is walking around in states of denialism and it just becomes toxic and problematic when it metastasizes into these forms of fascism and climate denialism.
Also just [to] pivot a little bit off what I was saying, one of the interesting things I’ve been finding about the rise of fascism in my lifetime, which I certainly did not expect to see, is exactly that kind of “fascism” in quotation marks, that has been the trojan horse of a lot of it. This idea that like, “Oh, we know this is bullshit, but we’re gonna say it anyway.” This is all sort of this joke that we’re playing. That if you’re in on it, you understand, and if you’re not, like, “Good, we’re gonna make you suffer for it.” But it’s not the fascism we were raised to expect. I’ve said this before, but Pink Floyd lied to us, I feel like.
[Mutual laughter]
It’s not hammers in lockstep. It’s not this gray world. It’s a world of clownish asshole mafiosos that are making jokes with each other and that are inviting you to be offended by them. I just find it interesting being an eyewitness to that.
Johnson: In Charlottesville, when that incident happened . . . Charlottesville is a beautiful town, but there we go. But one of the moments, one of the white supremacist protesters was isolated from the rest of the group and realized they were completely surrounded by counter protesters. And immediately, if I remember correctly, they took off their shirt which matched up with everybody else and threw it. “I was just kidding, I’m just kidding.” A key tactic with fascism is that it’s always a joke until it’s not a joke, right? And part of that is related to the same thing of rejecting truth. Part of fascism is saying they get to control what is true and what’s not true and when it’s true, and that’s what’s so upsetting.
I’m teaching right now “Berlin” by Jason Lutes, which is this amazing graphic novel and it focuses on the Weimar Republic. And it’s just scary how many of those things . . .
Raymond: And again, this is part of, for me, the reason for trying to imagine a future horizon because it turns out, part of authoritarianism is upending your sense of reality on a daily basis because if it wasn’t, then you would be in a place again with a systemized rule of law. The point of a cult of personality is that the cult personalities’ whims change every day and you have to go do whatever the hell they’re doing. I remember hearing once the explanation of goose stepping: the point is to look utterly ridiculous and everyone has to pretend that you don’t look ridiculous. That’s the whole point of this particular kind of march.
It’s a similar thing with a figure like Trump or Bolsonaro, where everything is changing all the time except this figure. Whoever is on the dias changes, whatever the positions are change. And that’s sort of how they create powers by robbing you of the sense of orderly life. It’s not a creation of a totalitarian, every day is the same, “here is your ration of food.” It’s like, who knows what today’s gonna bring?
Notarianni: And I think, Jon, in your book, the person who should be the villain, who is the climate criminal, is very charming. He’s a very enjoyable character, and I’m wondering what you were feeling about him, yourself, as you were writing it?
Raymond: That was the goal for me. Villains are fun because they do often have a certain charm. But it was important for me that the villain is someone that the reader develops a kind of affection for. In my own life, there are many vile people I’ve met who are individually quite pleasant. A lot of people I have personally liked, I reviled their opinions in some ways. The moral trouble of this novel has to do with how do you deal with a person like that? But yeah, he had to be charming.
Notarianni: Mat, in your book, I feel like there’s a lot of characters that are all, in some way, looking out for their own best interest. I find it hard to see a real, true, unscathed protagonist in that book. And it does feel like everybody is just sort of scrambling against a world that is crazy. I’m wondering who you think of as being the villain in your book?
Johnson: In “Denial,” one of the things that pops out to me is, when you finally meet the monster, the monster is you. The monster is humanity, with all these real positive attributes and negative attributes and you can’t make it black and white. You have to deal with something far more complex and also something that indicts you, as well.
I don’t tend to look at a world where I see heroes. I probably see villains, but I don’t see that many heroes. And not because people can’t be heroic on an issue or heroic in a moment or have the potential for grace and beauty and all those things, but being a hero makes somebody not human. All of a sudden they’re beyond the normal trepidations.
I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in the 1970s and even though Martin Luther King was already gone, the shadow of him over my childhood was massive. And we looked at him as being almost God-like. That did a couple of things, just a couple of positive things that gave us a moral compass to point to, but it also let us think, “We don’t have to do that kind of work because that’s for the God-type people. I’m just gonna play video games.” And even when elements started coming out more about his humanity, about his infidelities, about his jokes with other people, they’re very human flaws and human ways of interacting. A lot of people rejected that and got really upset if that was talked about. But I thought it was important because, if we start thinking there’s a select group of people who are heroes and they’re going to lead us, and until they get here we can just sit around and wait and do whatever, then nothing ends up happening.
Most of us, even when dealing with these issues, are dealing with it at a very personal level, for personal needs. Even with all the protests we had right out here, on the streets, after George Floyd, if you talk to people individually, there’s a very personal reason why they were there. It’s not just a broader issue. So with my characters, I try, not that people don’t act in that way or think of themselves in that way, but I was really more interested in much more human responses. Which is: “I want to do this, it’s the right thing, but it’s also good for me.” I think that’s probably, for me, a healthier, more realistic way of dealing with this stuff.
Notarianni: Speaking of protests, there are protests that play a role in both of your books, but in very different ways. In your [Raymond’s] book, they’re almost perfunctory. It’s this routine: “It’s 4:00, it’s time to go and do the protest.” And you [Johnson] have these scenes of protests that are kind of the culmination of the novel that leads to this moment of change. I’m wondering how you thought about writing those protest scenes and what they say about the worlds that both of you have created?
Johnson: The civil rights movement had been so successful, that by the time I was a teenager in the eighties and young adult in the nineties, we looked at all these tools from the civil rights era, and from the anti-Vietnam war protests; we looked at them as the way of of dealing with the issue. So we would have a rally against apartheid and there’d be 30 of us, it would be 1986, and we felt really good that we had done this. But [it] really didn’t serve a purpose. Later, I found out part of the reason they were marching in Selma was they knew they were going to get attacked, and they knew the press was there, and they knew the press was gonna film them, and [it] was going to go to the North and people are gonna be faced with this reality.
I started to think about different types of protests, whether it’s marching or sit-ins or whatever, that they are specific tools that we use to deal with certain things. And for most of my life, the marching and rallies were just not particularly effective. It was kind of like a ghost tactic, you know? But when I was working on the book I started to feel like there’s now massive rallies, massive protests all of a sudden could be a useful tool again. And also, particularly when we have a world where everybody is at home, they’re on the phone, you don’t even see your friends that much that you interact with in person. The act of physically meeting up with each other in mass is even more powerful now, because it’s also something that almost never happens, it’s still limited.
There’s a reason why most of these protests happen on the left, and that’s because they’re urban ways of protesting. You don’t have those types of protests on the other side of the Cascade Mountains, even though people also have very strong beliefs about things. And so it’s a tactic, mass protest is a direct attack tactic to mass denialism. If there’s mass denialism and everybody has decided we’re all gonna pretend this isn’t happening, then it makes sense that the direct protests that we know we’re all going to say this is actually happening. And so when I did that, that was the other part, it was already written in the book and [at] the end of it, there’s a massive protest and they deal with the issue where they come to head with the issue. And then we had these massive protests happen here, and again, I was like, “These people are ripping me off.”
[All laugh]
By the time the book comes out, we’re going to actually have invisible things picking people up because that’s the only thing I got left.
Notarianni: But now, I want to know what’s in your hard drive now, so I can know what’s going to happen [Laughter].
Johnson: There’s a thing in “Catch-22″ where one of the Native American characters says, “Everywhere they move, the white people come and then strike oil.” So they follow them wherever they go to strike oil and eventually they just find out where they’re moving next, and go there.
[Mutual laughter]
Notarianni: I do want to get you in on it though, because I feel like the protests in your book are really different, and like and speak to a different you know…
Raymond: I found the BLM protests so amazingly inspiring and incredible in that moment. And I remember so vividly listening to the radio and hearing like “Oh they’re gonna be sending in the feds.” And just that incredible feeling like we need as many people as we can get out in the streets right now, this just demands asses in the streets. Like this is something that is undeniable in that way. Then watching Portland do that was just incredible. I found such moving moments during those times. And yeah, breaking that dam of COVID was definitely part of it. It has been so amazing and in some ways dispiriting to watch what seemed like an undeniable event become eroded by the Fox machine, and sort of turned into some other thing as it is [was] carried elsewhere.
And the reinterpretation of that event and the negative propaganda that it became, it was just really horrible, but not not necessarily surprising. Certainly there were elements of the nighttime stuff that went on here that were really disturbing. But for me, writing this book, they’re predicated [on] a sort of a large-scale mass protest movement that happened 30 years ago in the book, called the ‘upheavals,’ that sort of resemble the George Floyd moment, but on a global scale. And that are mostly environmentally based and that lead to a green new deal that alters but does not entirely transform the world. But in a sense, the thought experiment was “What if there was a massive global protest movement that actually did initiate what [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] wants.” Which would be great, I would love that.
I’ve been in a lot of protests over my life. My entire life has been spent periodically going down and joining a crowd. Anyone who’s has a history of that understands that there is that sort of moment of inspiration, or sometimes just a dutiful trudging, that then doesn’t really lead to that much. And that there is this sort of hangover or this aftermath, that is not totally what you imagined. So for me, it wasn’t that hard to imagine looking out my window and seeing an incredible mass protest going on. It wasn’t hard to imagine having that happen and then having it not really lead to the utopia that you most want. But that’s just in the nature of protest. That is sort of how it works. The Arab Spring did something. It didn’t do exactly what anyone wanted, there. The law of all this stuff is really irony. It’s never gonna be what you think it is. It might possibly be the opposite.
Notarianni: Well, not to spoil anything, but Mat, I feel like you end with this collective action on behalf of the characters in the book. Yours is more of a personal action, I guess I would say, of one person acting and making a decision. And I’m wondering, talking about protests and what they mean, how you’re thinking about personal responsibility and personal agency to make change right now?
Johnson: The similarities I can see, even though they’re very different in some ways, has to do with the scope that we’re doing. “Denial,” to me, is a story of people and individuals, and dealing with the issue on an individual level. Whereas my book is about a city and it’s about a society trying to deal with stuff. The other part of it is that there’s a big event happening, but the actual thing that changes, is just so slight. I would tell you, but I want you to buy my books [Laughter]. But even the “slight” thing has a massive impact.
Raymond: Yeah. I don’t know if I have too much to add to that, but Mat’s book is hilarious and gripping. I haven’t got to the final page, so I don’t want to know the end either. It is a city, but it still feels very much like individual kinds of moral equations going on. It’s beautifully reduced and miniaturized in a certain way, as opposed to confusion of society, in general.
Johnson: That’s why I enjoy reading yours so much. Because of that personal part.
Raymond: That’s what fiction does is like it gives you an individual sort of perspective on something. I mean that’s why it’s not an economics paper or op-ed, and sort of demands human subjectivity in there.
Johnson (Speaking to Notarianni): You inadvertently referenced Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” at the beginning. Finally somebody brought it up [Laughter]. That book had a real impact on me. Because what that book in part does is look at these cities, but it’s not [about] architecture, it’s about trying to figure out about humanity through the places that they created.
Notarianni: I have one more question for you two that I was curious about. Because both of you are writers, but you’ve done a lot of work in visual mediums. You’ve done a lot of collaborations with filmmakers, you’ve worked in graphic novels, and you are still very prose forward. But I’m wondering how that visual sense kind of filters back in when you’re sitting down to write a novel?
Johnson: Portland is the center of American comic books, right now. There are more incredibly accomplished comic book writers and illustrators in Portland than there are anywhere, probably in the world. One of the reasons I came here was [that] University of Oregon had a comic book studies minor, which at the time, no other university in the country had. So I got to teach comic books and also teach fiction.
I think with a project, a lot of times, it’s a question to me of, “Is this topic fresh in this genre?” One, can I tell the story visually, primarily? If I can tell [it] visually, primarily, I’m thinking comic or screenwriting might be good. And then is it new in that field? So for instance, I had this book called “Incognegro,” which is about a white-presenting Black person who researches lynchings in the 1920s. Came out of nowhere. I don’t even know why I came up with that idea, but they got there. I knew if I did this as a novel, the majority of African American fiction deals with the effects of white supremacy on Black people. And that’s not because that’s all we want to write, it’s just for a long time, that’s all we could get published. Because the only thing people, the larger white publishing world was interested in, was basically explaining to them how we were affecting them. To hold up a mirror to white society. So it just would [not] have been new [or] interesting. Like [I’d have] been lucky if I got a “Kirkus Review.” And then if I did it in comics all of a sudden it would be something totally different that nobody in that world had seen before. And that’s what happened. I did it in comics, and people were shocked.
I found out my own family ran away from [a lynching]. My great great grandfather got in a fight with his the person who owned his sharecropping thing over a mule and they tried to lynch him and he ran away overnight and moved to Chicago. [He] opened up the phone book and saw the name that was most prevalent was “Jones”. And for the rest of the family: everybody’s name is Jones, now lock the door! Even to the point [when] he was a sleeping car porter and he would hide when they would get too close to that area. So to me it was very present and I had readers going like, “How did you even know about this? What is this lynching thing?” And I was shocked by that.
The same thing also goes with the prose work. If it’s not just going to be something visual, but something I have to dive in deeper if it’s something that is newer within that prose world, even something like the more surreal element of science fiction that comes within this large literary book. That is more interesting on the page in prose to me than would be in comics, where you constantly have fantastic elements happen.
Notarianni: What about you, Jon?
Raymond: In terms of the film stuff: generally, the film stuff that I’ve worked on, it’s either grounded in fiction that I’ve written or related to it in some kind of way. I think what you find out in the film world - it’s probably different with comic books [where] the images are getting made along with the writing of it - it all kind of starts with the book. It all starts with language in some way. So for me, whether it’s a book or whether it’s a film, generally, film couldn’t exist without books. The book still is really at the root of it. To me, that’s where the real writing work happens.
Notarianni: Both of your books are incredible. I really loved reading them and I appreciate both of you taking the time to talk with you.
Johnson / Raymond: Thank you so much.
Dave Miller: Jon Raymond is the author of “Denial.” Mat Johnson is the author of “Invisible Things.” You heard them in conversation with former OPB Weekend Edition host, John Notarianni in front of an audience at the Portland Book Festival, put on by Literary Arts.
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