Survival is a Gathering: A Conversation with Keely Shinners
Keely Shinners’s How to Build a Home at the End of the World (Perennial Press, 2022) occupies a near-future landscape of drought and isolation in which the U.S. population has been collectively abandoned by the state in ways not (quite) yet manifest. In the wake of this abandonment, characters–particularly Mary-Beth, the queer teenager whose lives and deaths the text orbits–must come of age and confront fractured social relations while fighting for their lives. What does it mean to make a life worth living in a world holding equal parts violent corruption and radical potential.
A chance meeting with a terminally ill neighborhood organizer pollinates Mary-Beth’s imagination both with queer desire and new ways of imagining care. An impromptu road trip with her father troubles the assumption that we must leave our birth families behind in order to grow up. And ultimately, a disastrous medical incarceration by self-described radicals leaves her clear-eyed as to the dangers of hierarchy in pursuing social change.
Slipping between activism, political theory, and speculative memoir, How to Build a Home at the End of the World is a story of loving and living on, together, when the world refuses to improve. In this conversation, Shinners and I discuss modes of writing, hoping, living, building, and being that do not demand we ignore histories of harm but collect the tools to imagine other worlds, elsewheres.
Cavar: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview, Keely. I’d like to begin with the amount of moving parts in this novel. There are so many distinctly political and relational twists packed into such a small space! As I watched these characters scavenge for pieces in order to survive the “end of the world,” I was also thinking the whole time about writing as a form of scavenging. I was wondering what your process was in composing a work with so many political and relational threads. Is writing, for you, like scavenging?
Keely Shinners: For sure. And for a bit of context, the idea for the novel came in 2017. I actually went on a road trip with my dad from our hometown to Los Angeles because I was going to school at Scripps at the time. We did this drive, my dad and I (but definitely didn’t experience the things that happened to Donny and Mary-Beth!). That semester, I was taking a creative writing course, and I knew we had to write a forty-to-fifty-page thing by the end of our time. I was thinking about what I was going to do, and I thought it would be interesting to write a road trip story about a father and daughter and set it at the end of the world.
Everything I was living through already felt so dystopian. I was driving through these burned-out landscapes, Trump had just been inaugurated… I just felt like you could write a novel that was very realistic, that was also taking place at the end of the world, and no one would bat an eye.
C: And look at everything happening around us. How does it feel for you to “work” right now, in the midst of social collapse? To write a novel about the end of the world, at the end of the world?
KS: How does it feel to work in the midst of social collapse? Depends on the mood, I suppose. In a good mood, it feels like art and imagination are some of the best tools we have to make sense of a collapsing social world. Other days, I think, You can’t eat art; you can’t shoot a book.
At first, I didn’t want to explain what the reason for end of the world in the novel was. My classmates suggested that there should be a reason. I was living in Southern California at the time L.A. was going through a couple periods of drought and just learning about the water politics of Los Angeles-who gets it, who owns it, where is it coming from.
I began to think about life as a tower, with water as the foundation. If you take away water, the whole tower breaks down. I wondered, What would it look like if everything was pretty much the same, but water was taken away?
Another way I look at writing in relation to scavenging is that I feel a bit like a magpie. Looking around for shiny things, things that interest me, and trying to fill the nest.
C: You make great use of Le Guin’s idea of the novel as a space of collection rather than inherent conflict.
KS: Yes! At the moment, I’m actually working on the first draft of my second novel, Archeology of Angel, about a boy, Edgar, and a ghost, Angel, working together to uncover the story of Angel’s life and death. When I write, I’m just not interested in that patriarchal myth of sitting by myself just spewing individual “genius.” I’m not interested in individual “heroes,” either; no one works alone.
What I’m really interested in is putting things together, building relationships, and synthesizing the personal and the political. The plot [of How to Build] kind of ties that together, it’s very chaotic.
C: I feel like the road trip novel is the perfect form for tackling that synthesis. I oftentimes read “queer novels”––and I have no idea if you consider this a “queer” novel as such––and assume that the biological family will be sacrificed in favor of the chosen family. Your novel turns this on its head: Mary-Beth’s father, Donny, who starts out as a quintessentially “backward” character, ends up being her closest confidante. They travel together out of necessity, but in the process, remake their relationship. They become chosen family.
KS: I always wanted the father and daughter to go on a road trip together. I kind of liked that Mary-Beth sees or creates for herself this redemptive narrative. At first, she’s going to abandon everything she resents about her family and her upbringing. Ida is going to deliver her from her past, so long as she throws herself into this relationship. That way, she doesn’t have to deal with what’s inside of her, what made her.
By going on this road trip with Donny, she had to face everything she was running away from at the beginning of the book. By the end, they have a kind of queer kinship, where everything about their nuclear family structure has been destroyed, and now they’re living in new social formations. It’s not queer in the sense that everyone’s coupled-up with each other, but in the sense of choosing to take responsibility for each other.
Really, that brings me to another question, not just about Mary-Beth and her father, but about others too: to what extent would you go to alleviate someone else’s suffering, and should you even go there? Is there a way to live in a more caring way without trying to fix each other? Mary-Beth learns the answer to that question when Donny loses his leg.
C: You’re addressing really important questions about the nature of “cure” and “recovery” in relation to redemption. You have characters with unresolved, acquired disabilities, but you also have a macro-level political move: you have a group that appears nominally leftist, wanting to redeem the world and save Donny and Mary-Beth from dying of thirst. But ultimately, they get power-hungry, incarcerating people who misbehave. Liberatory possibilities don’t just come out of nowhere, there’s authoritarianism too.
KS: When I first started conceptualizing this book, I wanted to give the group that “saved” Donny and Mary-Beth really solid politics. Oftentimes, in dystopian works, you use the people in charge to say everything you don’t like about power structures. I thought it would be interesting if the people in power were actually trying to do good or were at least purported to have good politics. They’re trying to do the most good by the most people with limited resources, yet this inevitably leads them to marginalize people, especially the elderly and disabled.
I wanted to present a vision of collectivity that’s really complicated, well-meaning, and potentially unsustainable on a mass scale. They’d rather incarcerate people and feel better about themselves than let their organization crumble.
C: That leads me to the note I wrote again and again as I read this book: this book is strategy! This is, in a lot of ways, an anarchism 101 text. It introduces anarchism as practice in an intimate, familiar way. I’m curious as to your take on the idea that “all organizing is science fiction” (adrienne maree brown), that there’s an inherent science-fictionality in being able to dream of other worlds, to see our own through this refractory lens.
KS: I think that power is sustained by lack of imagination. Power is challenged through the collective imagination.
I wonder if there’s a disconnect between imagining collectively-which we can accomplish in fiction and other forms of art-and organizing collectively. For the left, there’s definitely some potential energy in science fiction, which is all about imagining into the future, whereas the Christian fundamentalist right imagines into some illusory past. The difference is (and correct me if I’m wrong), they meet every Sunday to discuss their plans for world domination in the name of God. And we gather… when? The uprisings against police violence in 2020 were perhaps the best display of this potential energy in recent memory.
Hannah Black said it best: “The government does nothing worth anything for anyone, and on good days, it feels as if the state could just evaporate overnight. When the young people say, New York will breathe or Abolition now, they mean it-they go outside, and, for a few hours, they make an image of the present condition of freedom.” This, to me, is science fiction in action. What we imagine can happen-it must.
So many leftist organizations get bogged down by searching for the “right thing to do,” without actually doing it, as if this thing that they do is inevitably going to be the new status quo. But in reality, opposition of power doesn’t always look like a big, singular revolution. It looks like an unraveling. It means you have to be flexible, imaginative, open-minded, and open-hearted. Fiction helps us do that.
Keely Shinners (@etheoryal_) is the editor of ArtThrob and the author of How To Build a Home for the End of the World. Their essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Flypaper Lit, Mail & Guardian, Mask Magazine, and Full Stop. Their fiction has been featured in The Sun and Peach Magazine. Keely lives and works in Cape Town.
Cavar (@cavarsarah) is a PhD student, writer, and critically Mad transgender-about-town. They are Editor-in-Chief at Stone of Madness and swallow::tale literary presses, and their work can be found in Bitch Magazine, Electric Literature, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their latest chapbooks are Out of Mind & Into Body (Ethel Press, 2022) and bugbutter (Gap Riot Press, 2022).