If you could eliminate a memory from your mind completely, would you do it? And what would it mean for society if everyone had the ability to erase memories? These questions are at the heart of Portland writer Karen Russell’s latest novel, “The Antidote.”
The book opens on Black Sunday, the dust storm in April 1935 that swept thousands of tons of topsoil into the air over the Midwest. One of the central characters, a “prairie witch” known as The Antidote, can remove people’s memories and store them in her own body. As she and the other main characters' lives intersect, they learn more about the value of those memories and the history of the land and the people who came before them. And that more complete past enables them to see alternate futures. Karen Russell joins us to talk about the book.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Portland writer Karen Russell joins us for the hour today. In her award-winning short stories and novels, Russell often invents supernatural or fantastical elements to explore painfully real aspects of our collective existence, including grief, memory, environmental collapse and the possibility of reclamation. All of these scenes are threaded throughout her new novel. It’s called “The Antidote.” It takes place largely in the Dust Bowl ravaged Nebraska prairie in 1935, but it goes back and forward in time as well in various ways. It includes characters known as vaults, women who, for a fee, can store other people’s memories inside their bodies.
Karen Russell, congratulations on this new book and welcome to Think Out Loud.
Karen Russell: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
Miller: I thought we could start with a reading. It’s from near the beginning of the book and it’s a helpful description of how that memory transfer that I just mentioned works in practice. Do you mind reading it?
Russell: Yeah, happy to.
[Reading an excerpt from “The Antidote”]
“Most everyone on the Great Plains knew about us, even those who denied our existence. The vaults, some called us, the prairie witches. Now, I remembered what I did to earn my bread, what I had been doing since I was a girl of 16, taking a deposit from my first landlord, absorbing and storing my customers’ memories, banking secrets for the townspeople of Uz, sins and crimes, first and last times, nights of unspeakable horror and dewdrop blue mornings. Or who knew what my customers had transferred from their bodies into mine. These were only my guesses.
“I disappeared into a spacious blankness during my transfers. A prairie witch’s body is a room for rent, a vault to store the things people cannot stand to know or bear to forget. Half the town of Uz banked with me, and even those who denounced me as a fraud and a blackmailer knew that I was open for business in room 11. People came and paid me to store some portion of their lives, a memory that felt too heavy to carry into the future, too precious for daily reminiscence. As they whispered their stories into my green ear horn, memories lifted out of their bodies and into mine. It was a painless exchange. Nothing my customers told me had ever disturbed me because I was not awake to hear them. Cocooned in blue trance, I could dilate to absorb anything. I did not return to my waking mind until the transfer was completed.
“I know as little about what I contain, I reassured my customers, as a safety deposit box knows about its rocks, as a jar of pickling vinegar knows about its floating roots, as an attic knows about its ghosts. Their dead were alive inside me, patiently waiting to be recollected. The weight of these deposits re-freighted me. After a transfer, I often felt a heavy ache in my rib cage or my pelvis, sometimes a swimmy brightness like goldfish circling my chest. And in this way I knew that our exchange had been a success. My new customers would smile sheepishly at me and say, ‘I wonder what I just told you, ma’am. It’s gone clean out of my head.’”
[Reading ends]
Miller: When did this idea come to you?
Russell: Oh my goodness, thousands of years ago [laughter] in a prehistoric past when I was like a single person working on my first novel “Swamplandia!” I mean, putting the finishing touches on that novel, I got this image of a woman who was receiving secrets through an ear horn. My kids are the only children in 2025 who know what an ear horn is, those antique hearing aids that look kind of like gramophone horns. And so that conceit was there really early, these women who make their living storing memories for people.
Miller: Like 15, 16 years ago?
Russell: Oh my God. I mean, yeah, it’s like humbling to recollect. This book is so much against revisionist history. I kind of want to lie. That’s how long ago it was. And I tried to write it right after “Swamplandia!” and it just never really took off, I think. I sort of had some more living to do and learning to do before I could find my way back to this book.
Miller: How do you know that a novel isn’t working? I mean, you had this idea and then … and it felt like a novel, not a short story? You knew.
Russell: It always felt like a novel.
Miller: So what’s the message you get or that you don’t get that tells you that something is working or not?
Russell: In this case, I had a lot of ideas and I think it always felt like I was trying to write it from the third person. And it felt just sort of stiff. It never really came to life. It felt sort of like bad ventriloqui or it just felt a little self-conscious. I tried sort of multiple times. During the years that I was failing to write this novel, I wrote these story collections and a lot of the stories I think now, in retrospect, were kind of rehearsals or kind of testing grounds for some of the questions in this book. But yeah, I think I am so stubborn. I think this is one of my best and worst qualities. [Laughter]
Also this book just haunted me. I really went through some stretch where I was like, I think I’m a story writer. I write novellas. I write shorter things. I’m not a novelist. That one novel was an anomaly. Just during the pandemic, I think for mysterious reasons, I really felt like I came back into range of the voice of this prairie witch.
Miller: I want to come back to what actually unbroke that and let this come out. But it’s fascinating to me that people choose to use these vaults for completely opposite reasons – to store their happiest memories and also their most painful, their most traumatic ones. Why both of those?
Russell: I think it was interesting for me, just as sort of a thought experiment with my own life, to think about what are the things that I scroll up? What is so painful to know or to feel that maybe you set it aside out of your waking consciousness. And also, that was a surprise to me too, that there’s real happiness, I think that can sort of unsteady the cart. Happiness can be very destabilizing, too. I think I know a lot of people who had dreams when they were younger that either didn’t come to fruition or their context made those dreams feel impossible. Maybe that’s a map to some other life you scroll up because you find the demands on …
Miller: When you say scroll up, the image that came to mind first was a finger on an iPhone, but you mean like paper, rolling it up and then put in the crypt?
Russell: Yeah, I was just picturing a map, right? I think a lot of people have maps to unlived lives that they put aside and there’s some economic demand or it’s not doesn’t feel possible at a certain moment in your life. Old friendships, right? I think everyone’s haunted by people who are still alive that they love, that they scaffolded a lot of earth time with that maybe they’re not in touch with now or that they lost. So I think that idea of sort of unborn lives or other opportunities, how those can haunt the present as much as horror, that started to feel important to me in this particular book.
Miller: There’s also the sense – and Radiolab, I think a great episode about this – that when you remember something good or bad, the remembering changes the actual memory itself, which would be maybe another reason why you want to preserve it. The less you remember it, the more it can be preserved. And I guess with the way these witches work you can then go back and say, this is my number, and then you can get access to it again.
Russell: Absolutely. I mean, it’s almost like photographs [which] you put in an album because you don’t want them to become faded, you don’t want them to blur with your thumbprint. So I thought about that. too, that a memory, whatever else it is, is not what happened, right? It’s a recreation, the imagination is making that live again.
Miller: How important do you think it is that it is women who are holding these memories? I mean, I’m curious what you see is the gendered piece of what they’re doing.
Russell: Yeah, it’s a great question. Could there be nonbinary prairie witches, male witches? Probably somewhere in this universe. This book is focused on this one woman who loses her child at a home for unwed mothers. I think that there are analogies to be made to sex workers. Some people have asked about that. I do sort of think that women are often the fleshy insulation system, sort of.
I wrote another story about this woman who’s a masseuse. She’s kind of a caregiver for veterans and she literally unknots the story of the past out of this one veteran. I guess my own experience with that is my dad was a Vietnam veteran. I think about how the past haunts families, lives in people’s bodies, how other people can become palliatives in a way, and this can feel so private or individual. It’s hard to really reckon with what it becomes an aggregate when many people and many families are doing this work.
Miller: Eleven years ago you published a novella called “Sleep Donation,” which has some echoes in this new novel. Can you explain the premise of that earlier work?
Russell: Yeah, “Sleep Donation,” absolutely, I think, was a precursor to this in a way. It’s a world where there’s an insomnia epidemic and they’ve found one solution, which is to donate sleep and dreams from healthy sleepers to insomniacs. And it’s a world also where sleep is becoming a commodity available just to a few people, and there’s a sort of slippery line between a genuine gift and a coerced donation of sleep. That just felt, in the emergency lighting that we’ve been living in [chuckle] …
And I guess also, just like this story which is about memories going into some spandrel, that notion of like an exchange system of dreams for a writer – that’s just what books have always been to me. You are sort of receiving something with the texture of memory and making it live in your own body. I mean, it’s deeply weird, right? [Laughter]
Miller: You’re implanting memories.
Russell: Yeah, yeah. So storytelling and how important it really is in our ability to reckon with our present. I think both novels are concerned with that. There’s a nightmare contagion in “Sleep Donation.” This was all before COVID, too.
Miller: So bad that it makes people not want to sleep. They’d rather die than experience that nightmare again.
Russell: They’d rather die than go back into that nightmare.
Miller: One big difference between the way sleep donation works in that novella and in the new novel is capitalism. A company gets involved in that novella, in a way that … I mean, there’s no big business of the vaults of prairie witches. And it’s even regional. Someone on the East Coast in the novel says, yeah, we don’t really have those there. But what would it look like if memory vaults were corporatized, were turned into a bigger business, as opposed to what one person offers on the second floor of a bar?
Russell: It’s interesting because I was thinking a lot about “Surveillance Capitalism,” this excellent book. That came out after “Sleep Donation,” but it’s a real lens for me to understand that novella where people’s interiors are now mining sites. I can imagine … like the iCloud, right?
Miller: Our data centers.
Russell: We do actually have technologies in our data centers and we have these devices that are like a kind of temporary oblivion in a way. It’s what they’re providing. I mean, I certainly feel very addicted to this tiny oracle in my pocket.
It’s interesting, too, to think about these women. I guess I was thinking there’s a real need out there. I was just reading, actually, a few days ago about fracking communities. Workers will go there to make a living, to make money in this very extractive industry. Then there are also prostitutes and sex workers who set up kind of on the periphery of these mining operations. Just to our discussion about the fleshing insulation system that makes possible a lot of violence … this everyday violence, I think a lot of us, however unhappily, feel pretty welded to it, right?
So I think these women are in an interesting spot, like this particular protagonist has suffered something immense and now finds herself an accomplice to real evil in this town. So it felt like it’s morally complex to me. And I think veterans would be another category of people who participate in the legal murder that is warfare, suffer moral injury themselves and are kind of collateral for empire in that way. I think, in this book, settlers, people coming from formerly Polish lands that are fleeing persecution, a campaign of ethnic cleansing, find themselves in the role of colonizer here in their new home.
Miller: Well, you’re getting here to the expansion of this idea. So one person goes and gets rid of some painful, joyous or challenging memory for them, but then there’s a question of what happens on the societal level when we do that? What did you want to explore there?
Russell: I think that when I grew up learning about the Dust Bowl, a lot of my understanding as a young person was shaped by Steinbeck’s classic, “The Grapes of Wrath.” These Farm Security Administration photographs of migrant mothers, farmers fleeing a dust storm. And the story that I knew was very regional on the Southern Plains in the ‘30s and very white also. So when I started researching this book – I really didn’t know going into this at all, I just thought I was going to write about a collapse of memory in the American West – drawing that line between what happens in the stories we tell in families, what happens in what we don’t really ever get an opportunity, maybe, or unable to or refuse to kind of reckon with, not just the sacrifices people make to make a start in this country, but who and what are sacrificed? That started to feel really important to me and something fiction can do that you can’t really study in another way. Just to draw a line from these private losses and sort of the holes in some of our own popular accounts of this period and a kind of mass denial.
I just did not grow up connecting the dispossession of Native nations with this environmental catastrophe that happens very recently, like in our memory and also shortly after the forced exodus of so many Native American communities, families. This particular town is fictional, but it’s set on Pawnee Homelands in Nebraska. And the Pawnees were removed to a very small reservation in Oklahoma, which then became the epicenter of the Dust Bowl. That wasn’t part of my understanding of this history at all. And it just made me think about how if we had a fuller understanding of the root causes of our own climate emergency, it would have to include ecological imperialism. It would have to include colonial violence and you would get to different solutions, maybe.
Miller: I want to turn back. This novel, after some aborted attempts to write it, wasn’t working, as you said … and then it did. When did this work start to flow?
Russell: It was really during the pandemic. I’m glad to talk to another Oregonian parent. Dave, were you here during the wildfires?
Miller: Do you mean the summer of 2020?
Russell: Yes, sorry not our more recent one. There have been a lot of wildfires.
Miller: I think of that as the worst time, among many challenging times, of the last 10 years.
Russell: The worst time for us, right?
Miller: We were sort of trying to figure out a little bit about how the pandemic worked, even though it was pretty early on in retrospect.
Russell: Right.
Miller: There was still tear gas lingering in the air, and then we were stuck at home in an entirely new way and the sun was red.
Russell: The sun was red. There was choking dust everywhere. I mean you had little kids, too. Our house is really poorly insulated. I remember the smell in the baby’s room, but also feeling like it wasn’t really safe to go anywhere else because we didn’t understand COVID,
Miller: Yeah, taping windows.
Russell: Taping windows. I really think in some visceral way that was a bridge back to this time. And I think, too, it just felt so acute to me, the costs of living as we do. And I was writing some pretty dark stuff immediately in the wake of that. I wrote this story, “The Ghost Birds,” that is like an extrapolation of business as usual to a real dystopia here in Portland, in the not-so-distant future. And there’s like a little glimmer of, I guess, hope. I don’t know. There’s a wish in that story to take action today while we still can, to make sure that the most dire predictions don’t become fact. And I think this novel was connected to that wish too.
Miller: So you started writing this after those fires?
Russell: Yeah, I did. And I will say too, I don’t know if people who might be listening know the great Emily Chenoweth. She’s a friend here, a beautiful writer, teaches for Literary Arts, and she is one of the most disciplined writers I know. I was telling her, I think the book felt like so much to take on, and I think I felt daunted by what seemed to be required of me. It felt sort of beyond what I knew how to do. Because she’s so disciplined, I think she was like, “just text me a goal and it doesn’t have to be to write a Dust Bowl epic,” like, “write one paragraph about the Dust Bowl.” [Laughter] She was wonderfully grounded. And kind of kicked my ass in a great way like all great friends do.
Miller: There’s a bit of a coach in her as well.
Russell: Genuinely, yeah. So she really belayed me out of a hole. I’m happy to shout her out here because we should all have such a friend who’s like, what do you mean you can’t do it? Write one paragraph, get moving.
Miller: I was struck by … you said you’re happy to talk to a Portlander who’s experienced this. The sense I get, it’s a telling phrase. So you’ve been talking about this book. The book came out, what, a week ago or so, and you’ve been on a mini book tour, but you haven’t talked so much yet to people in Oregon about it?
Russell: No I haven’t.
Miller: What is it about the shared experience of, in this case, the fires that you think helps people understand what you’re talking about. I mean, I guess it’s striking – if you’ve been talking to somebody in Nebraska, you could talk on and on for hours about the Dust Bowl, but they didn’t probably experience taping their windows or those smoky days in September of 2020.
Russell: Yeah.
Miller: So, what is the gulf that you’ve experienced?
Russell: I think part of it, too … obviously this isn’t my family. I don’t have family ties to the Southern Plains. So I think I would feel that way if someone was writing about a natural disaster that my grandmother had lived through. I think I would come with a kind of skepticism that they could understand the extreme interdependence of people in the weather. City people don’t experience it in the same way, right? When I was talking with farmers and ranchers, I was so struck by how it was almost like the instruments just confirmed something they knew with their skin. We’d be driving around and people would say, “Oh look, that storm will be here in two hours.” They were like the clairvoyance of the weather to me. But they had just grown up with a different literacy about the natural world.
Our family’s home was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew and that was like a Category 5 storm that really leveled South Florida. That was a real before and after for our family and a real early education for me as an 11-year-old. But I hadn’t experienced something where the air itself felt unsafe to breathe, where I was worried for my baby in that way.
Miller: Something that is literally giving you life.
Russell: Right, something that I take for granted, or had. The air itself. Everybody’s central nervous system who came through that, I think we had a similar stress response. And this book is more earnest and direct than other things I’ve written. It felt urgent to me in a different way.
Miller: When you say urgent and direct, what do you mean?
Russell: Well, I guess that it did feel important, like there’s sort of … Well, I was just rereading – because I love this book – “Paradise” by Toni Morrison. I love it and it was an influence on “The Antidote.” I was just looking for a quote from it and I came across a review that called it “hectoring and didactic” [laughter] and that’s not my experience of that book at all. But if I have written something that could be accused of being hectoring and didactic, I do actually think there’s sections in this book that feel very plain spoken, straightforward and a little bit an indictment in a way that it’s not coded. There is this metaphor of the vaults, the prairie witches. But it felt important to me just to say, oh my God, like a sane society would order everything around the ecological base of our existence and what we do is really heresy against the life cycle.
Mimi Casteel here in Salem is an amazing person. Everyone who wants to feel sincere hope that’s grounded in scientific facts should listen to her podcast.
Miller: Someone who you’ve profiled, talked to, walked around with and looked at dirt with – who is she?
Russell: Yeah. Well, she is a viticulturist. She runs Hope Well Wines, but she’s also really on this global stage trying to change networks, how we do global agriculture. She practices regenerative agriculture, which is pre-colonial agriculture, Indigenous agriculture. I didn’t know anything about soil, despite feeling like a relatively educated person and I was shocked that I had such a lacuna in my understanding of the substrate that gives us everything.
So it was fun to go out there. She overturned some, she let me smell what healthy soils smell like. She told me – which I didn’t know – that a third of our biodiversity is underground in the soil. It’s what puts the nutrients in our food. So much carbon and water can be stored underground. When they had the heat waves recently – I mean, recent in our timeline, like the last half decade – some of these heat waves, the land that she cares for was 10-degrees cooler than other places because she has put organic matter back in the soils there. So there are these local cooling effects. It did give me real hope.
And then the other piece that felt important to say is [that] the colonial model of occupying a spot and running it dry, it can’t work. Hearing some of the talk right now about, can we colonize space? Speaking of solutions that will fail, if you look at the history, I think this is one. Pretending that we can just …
Miller: Foul this nest and find a new one.
Russell: Exactly. I mean, manifest destiny is a response to a soil erosion crisis. Thomas Jefferson knew about soil erosion and manifest destiny is the solution, right? And we know how that went. So, I think it’s tricky because there is no single antidote. Even regenerative agriculture, if it’s not accompanied, I think, by massive social change to make this a more equitable world, it too is not going to be the thing that saves us. But I loved getting to talk to people who are actively working to change how we feed ourselves.
Miller: How does a trip like that … and you’ve done others, you have spent a lot of time in books and actually in person in Nebraska. But how does walking around, in this case, a Willamette Valley vineyard make its way into a novel?
Russell: I should say I got to go to Working Hands Farm. It was nice. I couldn’t always go to Nebraska with the little kids, so it was beautiful to really walk around with Mimi. One thing I love about Mimi is … I asked her, I was like, “if I could give you a camera, and you could take a picture of the world you want to inhabit and how we get there, what would that look like?” And I will tell you, too, I have a cynical side. Like, it’s hard for me even to receive some of these beautiful dreams because I think a lot of us have stunted imaginations. We haven’t had the experiences, maybe, in our own lives that would make this feel plausible. But Mimi is convinced that it is. She was like, “What if you had a giant circular green space in cities, autonomy, food sovereignty where people are growing and sharing this food? [What if] you have the right mix of annuals and perennials? And you’re really focusing on putting or rebuilding watersheds, and having sort of achievable goals on a 10-year scale, and ways that we can feed ourselves without having to export the products of photosynthesis and ship them somewhere else, without taking what the earth is doing, stripping it and selling it.”
Then I think there are so many financial incentives to go on destroying everything. What we subsidize is killing everything in terms of agriculture. But getting to walk around with her and just actually have something to extrapolate from helped me a lot because it wasn’t abstract. I got to smell this soil. I got to see what Mimi was up to and I got to dream with her, too. But in a way, she was saying people don’t understand biological sciences, so they don’t know what’s possible if we applied ourselves in the right direction.
Miller: Two very real institutions exist in this book, in I think only slightly fictionalized form. Can you tell us first about the Milford Home for Unwed Mothers?
Russell: Yes, the Milford Home for Unwed Mothers operated in the progressive era up until 1954, and there were many such homes during that period in our country. This was the first state-sponsored one. It was intended to be sort of a sanctuary for fallen women, for often victims of rape or unwed mothers. It was a crime during this period in Nebraska to be a single person and pregnant.
Miller: A crime, a literal crime.
Russell: It was a crime. Sometimes there were sort of ritzier homes. This was not one of those. Women could be sentenced by the courts to a year’s confinement there. If you had your baby the night you arrived, if your baby was stillborn, if you miscarried, you would still have to serve out a year’s sentence. I didn’t know much about this institution going in. I had had this idea that that was the loss that dynamites a space in this prairie witch character – that it was the loss of her child that opens up this space that she sort of rents as storage. So I was just sort of looking around to find an unwed mother’s home in Nebraska.
I spoke to the historian Brock Anderson who told me about this place and really helped me with those sections. I’m very, very grateful to him. Part of the horror of this story, for me, is there are people where they’re just spectacularly evil in this novel, or they’re predators, or they’re nakedly greedy. What was frightening to me about this was thinking about reformers, who I’m sure some of them sincerely believe they are doing God’s will, or doing the right thing, or helping these destitute young women. In the early days, the idea was that they would facilitate adoptions. So it’s just clear to me from the records that some of these adoptions are coerced, or the context in which that choice is made is not a free one.
Miller: It wasn’t a true “yes.”
Russell: It is not a true “yes,” I don’t think, for many of these often very young women, very poor women, Native American women, immigrant women, white women, Black women – many different people come through this home. I think 4,000 babies are born there.
Miller: You also have a section that’s focused on forced cultural erasure, which happened at Native boarding schools all across the country. The one that you focus on is based on a real school, the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School. What happened there?
Russell: So I will tell people, too, there’s a better source of this history than I can provide. If you go online, there’s a Digital Reconciliation Project that aims to bring history home to Native American families and communities, but to all of us who might not have grown up knowing about the Federal Indian Boarding Schools. The Federal Indian Boarding School at Genoa closes its doors in 1934, right before this novel starts.
Native American students from many different nations are kidnapped essentially, from their families. It’s the law that even families who would prefer to keep their children home must send them to these boarding schools. They are sites of forced assimilation where students are forbidden from speaking their languages. They live often hundreds of miles away from their homes, from their mothers, from their fathers. Some of them are run by the Catholic Church with federal funding, so students are forbidden from practicing their spirituality, their religion.
Even to call them schools can feel like a euphemism to me because it’s really a strategic attempt to sever ties between these young people. It’s a strategy of erasure.
Miller: One of the most striking and powerful parts in the novel is explicitly about that. There is one of those vaults that we talked about earlier who was hired there. Her name or nickname is the Counselor. Basically, her skills are used as a kind of weapon of cultural erasure, as opposed to the voluntary version that we were talking about earlier at the beginning of a conversation. Here, it’s her job to take memory, language and culture away from kids.
Russell: Exactly. And that is true too, right? So there are these prairie witches that you can sort of use like a bank, and that’s a really willful sort of amnesia. Customers are deciding what they do and do not want to know. I think, in this instance, I really struggled with this decision because the real history is so overwhelming. It’s almost like, do you need some fantastical conceit? But I think if it works at all, I hope it just sort of underscores the horror of what that would be, to be sort of in this institution that is created as a site of erasure where you are being taught to forget, where you’re being told that your culture is being attacked. This is a place of attempted ethnocide and some of these losses are irreparable.
I will say, the last photo in the book … I met the historian James Riding In, and he’s a dear friend now. I could not have written this book without his assistance. He suggested … and I’m so honored to have it as the last photo in this book that contains a lot of photos from the Library of Congress from the 1930s. The last one was taken in 2023 and it’s the shuttered boarding school on the former Pawnee Reservation in Oklahoma. And next to it is this newly-constructed Earth Lodge. So I think part of the story, too, is this resilience and resistance to U.S. tactics of domination and attempted genocide, attempted ethnicide, because the boarding schools are relics now and that this culture is being revitalized. It’s so vibrant, still.
Miller: I’m fascinated by what you said just a few minutes ago about your sort of moral unease about dramatizing, supernaturalizing this very real cultural violence. Because I can imagine it going different ways. You could also argue that perhaps, especially for white people, this fantastical conceit gives us a fictionalized way to understand a real history or it adds a fictional layer that’s unnecessary. How do you think about those kinds of moral decisions as a fiction maker who’s also using the raw material of real life and real pain?
Russell: It’s so tricky in a book like this one. And this is the way I know how to write. Anytime I’ve tried to write something that feels like historical fiction that is “realist,” that doesn’t have some kind of speculative conceit, doesn’t change the lighting in any way, it feels so dead. It feels so false to me. I genuinely think there are places I have to disarm myself first or my waking mind wouldn’t go there.
Miller: Do you feel that in what you read as well or are you a happy reader of historical fiction?
Russell: I’m a totally happy reader of Hillary Mantel. I love Andrea Barrett. I love academic writing. I mean, I met James Riding In because I had been … Dr. Riding In is a professor and an academic. So, I love …
Miller: But as a creator?
Russell: But as a creator, I can’t do it. I can’t. I think a lot of style is capitulation, Dave. I mean, this is how I know how to be honest. It’s why I write fiction. I think there’s an emotional truth that I think is difficult to get to. And in this instance, where the history is so overwhelming, to write about something like a mass forgetting on the plains and its role in enabling this ongoing violence against people on the land, how do you do that straight? I don’t know.
But it is a question that I really ask and struggle with, and I still have doubts about the times where I’m using these things in a way that will illuminate something that’s hard to think through, feel through or know. “Sleep Donation” is another example, sort of a metaphor that, in some ways, just becomes the world of the story. I love that Flannery O’Connor quote that says, “The truth is not distorted here, but rather distortion is used to get at the truth.” But especially in this book, what a challenge because there’s a land lost acknowledgement that Dr. Riding In pens in at the at the end of the book. That felt so important to me because I wanted there to be a bridge from this alternate Nebraska with witches, scarecrows and what have you, to this bedrock of fact. It matters a lot, I think, and just point people to sources of history where you’ll get a perspective that’s not my own.
Miller: I wonder if we could get another reading. A few of your white characters have experiences that give them, in one way or another, a deeper understanding of the ways in which they’re complicit in genocide or ethnicide of Indigenous people. There’s an excerpt I put in front of you. This is in the voice of “The Antidote.” The Prairie Witch is one of the main characters. This is after she has met a young Native woman named Zintka who is based on a real person.
Russell: Yes, so this is a little bit in the future too. She’s kind of a retrospective. She’s my age now and she’s kind of recalling this period in the Home for Unwed Mothers.
[Reading an excerpt from “The Antidote”]
“I grew up in Omaha, and yet I knew next to nothing about the Omaha people. I did not know about the Pawnees, the Ponca, the Otoe and Missourias, the Lakota, the Dakota, the Iowa, or many of the other people who were living here long before my family became Americans. I hadn’t known. No one had ever told me that I was a soldier in a war.
“We newcomers to the Great Plains were invited out here by the U.S. government to hold ground. The Homestead Act, the Dawes Act, part of a battle plan. Over time, light-skinned children would grow old in this West with no memory of an earlier home, no awareness that they were the daughters and the sons of an invading army, second and third and fourth and fifth generation Americans, putting Native lands into white hands, putting forests and plains into production, turning soil into cash. If anyone had presented the history of our life in the West this way, I would have defended myself and my nonna with bare teeth.
“We came to this country to work hard and to live with dignity. Who would blame my father for wanting what he wanted: a home, a job, a chance to care for his family. We owed nothing when we arrived. At the age of 13, I worked nine hour days in the laundromat. How dare anyone suggest that we had anything to do with the murder of Indians or the theft of their lands. Had I never met Zintka I’d have felt no more responsible than a molecule of water might feel accountable for a flood.”
[Reading ends]
Miller: It is worth pointing out – even if, in some ways, the voice that you just heard comes later in her life, the realization of white complicity, that happened when she was really young and it happened before she became a prairie witch. Part of her job entails helping people forget complicity, guilt, things that they don’t want to remember. What does that tell us?
Russell: Oh, Dave, I’m so happy to talk with you about this. No one’s really asked about it in quite that way. I think sometimes people in their lives have these sandbars of lucidity.
Miller: Sandbars of lucidity.
Russell: You know what I mean? Like the tide rolls out and for a moment, you can see. You can exchange a glance with someone and you can know something … like this is evecting into language something that I would say is difficult to hold, feel and know. I think people know things. I don’t know what your consciousness is like. I don’t know that we’re always monologuing, right? It’s not like a Beckett play. A lot of us know it like in our bodies, like in the tightness in our chest, in the shame we feel understanding that what we have is coming at the expense of somebody else. Or what we’re not suffering is being suffered by another. Like I think people do deeply know this.
Miller: But then the tide comes in.
Russell: And then the tide can come in, or you tell yourself some of the stories in this book … I mean, I guess this is what I meant about feeling quite earnest and direct in a way. There’s this refrain in this book, “better you than me,” which outside of the book can sound, I guess, very reductive. I do sort of think that, for a lot of us, in order to just live a weekday where we know on some level that we are agents of destruction, whether we want to be or not … I don’t know. I drove my car here today.
Miller: Shame on you.
Russell: Yeah, but I was just thinking there’s a book out right now, “Waste Wars” about how we consign most of the planet to be like the garbage can of the United States. There’s so many kinds of examples you could look at. I don’t know that it’s ignorance necessarily. But it’s like you have to send that knowing somewhere else, and accept the terms and conditions of this world continuously. How do you do that? I think a lot of us, I speak for myself, this is me too … Like, this is entirely me, right? This book was maybe written on a sandbar of lucidity and it’s hard to sort of stay awake to some of the violence that is so every day that we become inured to it. You have to say, “that story has nothing to do with me,” or you have to say, “I can’t do much to change the world as it is.”
Miller: And it also gets harder if the messages we get are that the response has to be personal as opposed to collective.
Russell: Right.
Miller: If it’s like, a version of the paper or plastic question but writ large, but always on an individual level, as opposed to a collective, “now what do we do if we’re on the sandbar together?”
Russell: Totally. I think there’s another moment in this book that is going to sound so kind of simple outside the book. But this farmer – I want to believe this is possible for him because it’s sort of what happened to me writing the book – he shifts out of this rhetoric of self-justification where he’s saying, “Well, what choice do I have? I am like a destitute farmer. What choice do I have? What say did I have in any of this?” There’s a beautiful quote from a sociologist. I love Avery Gordon. She says, “The pain of being born into a contest you did not design.” And I just have to believe whoever you are in this story, you know some version of that pain. But then he shifts out of that into the present and into a collective we. And shifting out of the I into the we, I think that is such a powerful thing.
I was talking to a professor friend who said her students often feel despondent. They feel like impotent witnesses to so much of what’s happening right now. I mean, me, too. And she always says, well make a friend or find a movement, and it has to be that. People have to aggregate their power.
Miller: When you were talking earlier about the short bursts during which we can hold painful truths, it did remind me that near the end – and this isn’t a spoiler because the book doesn’t operate really in that way – here’s a moment when a lot of the protagonists get together and they try to convince their fellow townspeople of two big things. One, that the sheriff is a really bad man who’s been lying to them and doing terrible things. There’s a little bit of pushback, but then they get on board with that. The second thing that they try to convince their townspeople is essentially to understand and truly know that they are all these white people who are on stolen land.
Russell: Right.
Miller: That does not go well.
Russell: That goes very poorly. [Laughter]
Miller: That that message is not taken in. What’s the difference between those two lessons they’re trying to impart?
Russell: Well, I think there, I was sort of trying to draw a line, again, from these local instances of counterfeiting and corruption. When you can identify a villain, it’s very pleasurable. It feels great, right?
Miller: It’s also not you.
Russell: It’s not you. I love Girard on scapegoating. I mean, this is something that is fundamental, I think, to what we are as animals. There’s cohesion in the group. And in the same way, I suppose, that an antidote is kind of like a sin eater in a way … It’s like, oh good, there’s the culpable one and it’s not us. I always get a little bit frightened when white people are sort of saying, “racism is over there.” I think there’s some line in this about their understanding that they cannot indict anyone without indicting themselves. We can’t reveal the truth without indicting ourselves as liars. It’s something these characters know – the prairie witch, her assistant and this farmer. That’s sort of how I felt writing it, too.
I think that one thing that I feel skepticism or concerned about is that in the last half decade, land acknowledgments have become ubiquitous in institutions. But I don’t know that there have been mass returns of anything. I don’t know that that has led to material restitution. In some cases, definitely. So whether that knowledge gets metabolized into the right action is a question.
What that looks like for us as a family, that’s something I’ve been grappling with too. There’s a beautiful book by a Portland author Rebecca Clarren – I wonder if she should come on the show, too – “The Cost of Freeland: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance.” I met her after I wrote this book. I think she’s one of the best people I have ever met. And the book itself is such a model of what it can look like to take this history and transform it into action, into change.
Miller: In the time we have left, I turn to photography because it’s a really big part of the book. Visually, there are a bunch of photographs, and narratively as well. One of the characters is a New Deal photographer named Cleo, who ends up getting this camera that can do wondrous things. It can take pictures of the past or of possible futures. And she ends up mounting this display of photos that she thinks are the most hopeful ones of possible futures for this town in Nebraska.
What would you want to display if you were making a gallery like that now, potential futures, visual representations of possible futures of ours?
Russell: Oh, I wish all of us would do this. I had this idea for a visual essay that I didn’t get it out in time, but I really genuinely want to have a gallery where people take these photos with a quantum camera and caption them. I think we need that. I think we need to make these worlds vivid and plausible, more vivid and plausible than the smoldering hell worlds that everybody can sort of conjure right now. Yeah, we need to know where we live and we need, also, to be able to imagine it elsewhere.
What was striking to me, Dave, like a little bit humbling when I tried … I don’t know what technology is going to do to our world. Are there going to be big agricultural robots? I have no idea. So that part felt a little beyond what I could imagine. And I just kept thinking, if we get this right or if we make good change, the natural world, there will be an intact prairie. There will be birdsong, there will be clean air and water, the natural flow. We’re pulling the dams out now and watching biodiversity come back. We’ll pull out some of this infrastructure and also we’ll redraw the lines that we police here between people who have so much and people who have nothing. I just kept thinking of circles when I talked to Mimi about this, too. What she imagined was a huge circular green space where people farm in their own communities and have food sovereignty.
Just circles would be what I think this future world would be premised on, not these right angles that people defend but some sort of sense of just shared abundance. And it really sounds so childlike, but I was like, gosh, just a world where people have enough. There’s a photo here, potluck. There’s a beautiful Toni Morrison quote about how the idea of plenty as utopian should make us tremble. That plenty for all should not feel so far away, so impossible. And I think that’s what it would be. It would be just images of plenty for everybody’s kids, for the next people that will inhabit this home after us.
Miller: We started by talking about how that ear horn image came to you a long time ago at this point, more than 15 years ago. Is there another novel kernel that has been similarly lodged, that is waiting to come out?
Russell: Oh my God, no, it’s so strange.
Miller: It was by itself?
Russell: You mean for future novels?
Miller: Yeah, I’m wondering if you carry around these things that you think maybe at some point, when the time is right, I will turn to it. So this was unique?
Russell: This was genuinely unique and it’s a little frightening. I feel a little like Sandra Bullock in that movie “Gravity.” I’m like, oh wow, I really do genuinely feel like I don’t know what I’ll write next. I have a story collection that I’ve been working on, so I have some story ideas. But I do feel like I gave birth to an 11-pound baby, like those ladies in the National Enquirer. I feel like this was with me for so long. So, it’s curious. There’s some vertigo. I don’t have another novel seed that feels like it’s been dormant. For me, right now, it’s short stories, which aren’t even all that short.
Miller: The way you are talking, you do not sound like somebody who is out of ideas.
Russell: I used to feel like a pez dispenser of ideas, but I think in midlife, the kids, my ideas are like, “we have to buy lunch.” [Laughter] I think my ideas are like, “the kids need to go to the dentist,” so we’ll have to see. But I’m really so happy this book’s in the world. I’m really grateful to get to talk with you about it.
Miller: Likewise. Thank you so much for the book and for talking about it. I really appreciate it.
Russell: Oh, it was a great conversation. Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Karen Russell is the author of the new book, “The Antidote,” as well as the earlier novel “Swamplandia!” and a bunch of stories, some of which have been collected in books that you can buy.
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