“The Ties That Connect Us through Time and Space”: A Conversation with Sequoia Nagamatsu
Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel, How High We Go in the Dark, is everything I love about speculative fiction. It’s sweeping in scope, yet profoundly personal in its concerns; its explorations cast light on intimate aspects of the human condition even as it casts shadows on the wall that thrill us, frighten us, make us question what we know.
Told by a series of narrators in increasingly tightly interlinking chapters, How High We Go in the Dark is, on the surface, the story of a fantastical plague that transforms the world—coming first for our children and then for us all. At the core, though, it’s a study of grief. In his note in the advanced reader’s copy, Sequoia asks, “How do you grieve when you’re not able to say goodbye or when tradition is supplanted by dysfunction or technology or the wishes of the dead?”
It’s a question that, presented with a myriad of deaths, the myriad narrators of HHWGitD grope toward answering. Their pandemic doesn’t look like ours and their rituals don’t either—running the gamut from commercial theme parks for terminally ill children, breeding pigs with human speech, building robot dogs, and launching ships to the stars. But their love and loss feels all too familiar, and ultimately, we readers move with them toward something like healing.
I spoke with Sequoia about his novel over email.
Kendra Fortmeyer: Let’s start with the elephant in the room: your novel featuring a pandemic—which you’ve been working on since well before COVID-19 was on the horizon, as far back as 2008—is debuting in the middle of a pandemic. How has this affected your experience of working on and publishing your debut novel?
Sequoia Nagamatsu: This elephant in the room is definitely something that will likely be an ongoing explanation, since many people outside of the writing world aren’t aware of the writing process let alone publishing timelines. But regarding having my novel on submission in the early days of this pandemic? I was horrified, anxious, and dispirited. I felt like editors wouldn’t be able to see beyond what we were experiencing and would make judgments about the manuscript before really reading it.
I suspect this might happen with some readers, but fortunately my editors at both HarperCollins and Bloomsbury saw that this wasn’t Dustin Hoffman trying to save a town from an outbreak. This isn’t really a plague novel so much as a novel about human connection, love, and our capacity to reimagine ourselves and the ways in which we honor our loved ones and move on from grief.
I know there will be readers who might assume that this book is exploiting the moment, and I expect that there will be some readers that won’t give the book a chance at all. And that’s fine, and I can understand that. But I also suspect that those readers wouldn’t be the right audience for this book in the first place (or simply didn’t read closely enough—it’s both a highly readable book but also a book that contains secrets and threads that you need to work for). My hope is that the readers who pick it up will be able to see that How High We Go in the Dark, despite it being a tough read in parts, is ultimately about hope, human resilience, memory, and the ties that connect us through time and space.
In many ways, this novel kept me afloat during the COVID pandemic—not only because edits kept me busy, but because the lives of my characters gave me hope and helped me reflect on recent losses and family drama in my own life. Ultimately, this book was born from my own grief and regret as a way to reimagine the past, a way to move forward. Already, I’ve been heartened by early reactions...the people who get the book see the light and possibility. I hope the majority of readers have that experience.
KF: Let’s dig into craft and structure. As you know, I’m a huge fan of your interlinked collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). Can you talk about making the transition from writing short stories to writing a novel? Did you know HHWGitD was a novel from the outset?
SN: Well, with this particular book, the move to longer form writing was certainly a leap, but one that also allowed me to hold onto discrete narratives that branched out and extended tendrils across pages. So, it does resemble a kind of souped-up novel-in-stories...much more than just being thematically linked. I knew it was a novel probably after a few years of working on disparate parts, but it was a long road in getting there. It’s more than just a tapestry of narratives that don’t need to interact with each other. How High We Go in the Dark does demand to be read in order lest you lose out on the evolution of the world (and some clues about an overarching story that reaches toward the stars).
With a traditional short story, you’re beholden to thinking about moving through a character’s journey quickly. You have to choose your pivotal scenes to immerse the reader in and tend to summarize the rest. You move through time with space breaks, with convenient time stamps. And these were moves that I had to resist to some degree. I wanted the chapters to be long enough for readers to immerse themselves fully before moving on, which meant I had to get used to leaning into scene more, allowing my characters to wander and breathe, describing things in detail that I might let slide in a shorter format. And I had to keep track of recurring details across chapters—minor characters might take center stage later on, a minor detail could become the crux of a later chapter, for instance. I certainly looked toward the work of Jennifer Egan and David Mitchell as I wrote.
KF: The chapters in HHWGitD do act almost like interlinked stories—each with a different narrator and different lens into loss and grief, granting us a myriad of personal windows into a larger global story. But the narrative threads become, as you note, profoundly interwoven as the book progresses. What was your process for developing these and piecing them together?
SN: There was eventually a complicated matrix in the form of index cards, lots of yarn, and Post-It notes that I developed in later drafts in order to understand how each chapter/character connected to each other, how the culture/technology/climate of the world needed to evolve. And there are hints at a character whose journey began billions of years ago dotted throughout the book, so I needed to consider how this other backbone of the book was subtly presented.
But many of the chapters themselves were initially conceived out of order (and, yes, as short stories in their early forms)—explorations into particular types of characters I wanted to explore, non-traditional ways of grieving and moving on that I had been researching, how technology might shape community and a climate-changed world.
KF: What advice would you give writers trying to bridge the divide between writing short stories/interlinked collections and writing novels? I know this is of special interest to writers coming from the MFA workshop structure, which has traditionally supported short stories as a craft over novels.
SN: Push yourself to write longer. Start with longer scenes, longer passages of summary, longer character descriptions, longer place descriptions. Explore. Forget about the arc of the short form for a bit and let your imagination and the world do the writing for a while.
I think once I let go, I began to see all of the paths a character could walk down vs. just the one or few I might entertain for a shorter work. Beyond this, I’d say that studying film has been invaluable for helping me organize and understand large narrative arcs. Read screenplays, watch a movie with a remote and think about the utility of particular beats. Study film adaptations alongside their novel counterparts to articulate the dialogue between these forms.
KF: Many of the book's narrators share the sense that they are grieving wrong—which is to say, failing their dying loved ones by not showing up, out of cowardice or circumstance or misplaced priorities. Do you think there’s a “right” way to grieve?
SN: I don’t think so. And that’s life, isn’t it? Very rarely do we as people grieve in a way that we feel is adequate, but we do what we can (or we do what we are able to at the time). And certainly during this pandemic a lot of people have been refused the right to grieve in the way they might want.
I think one of the reasons why searching for hope, new connections, reimagining grief takes so many forms in the novel is because I wanted to present a tapestry of possibility... all of my characters come from different walks of life, whether it be cultural or something more nuanced, were presented with different circumstances and opportunities, entered the stage with different kinds of existing emotional baggage long before the plague.
KF: Looking to the future, as an author whose debut novel features pandemic and environmental collapse that feels, unfortunately, all too real: do you feel hopeful?
SN: I’m cautiously hopeful. I think we need to be hopeful. We need to hold onto some sense that there’s a shred of decency left in the world that might allow us to persevere, despite how much we’ve already done to destroy our world and society.
Now let me be clear: there will be more fires, there will likely be more pandemics, there will be a lot of destruction and suffering in our future. I’ve taught a climate fiction course for several years now, and I’ve seen how differently younger generations have shifted the narrative from stopping climate change to mitigating disasters to come and addressing issues of resource equity.
My novel is ultimately optimistic in this regard after the flood waters recede, so to speak. We see communities coming together in the future, we see technology being deployed that might buy us a second chance, we see rebirth and adaptation despite cataclysm. And speaking of letters again, we see messages from deep space that tell us we are going to be okay.
In some ways, our own pandemic has made us reevaluate how we live, and in some countries there has been a real show of solidarity. I wish there had been more of this over the past couple of years. At least in fiction I can entertain what that kinder path might look like.
KF: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
SN: I’ll use this space to plug some books I’ve been particularly excited by this year:
Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki
The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan
Reprieve, James Han Mattson
Sequoia Nagamatsu (@SequoiaN) is a Japanese American writer and managing editor of Psychopomp Magazine, an online quarterly dedicated to innovative prose. Originally from Hawaii and the San Francisco Bay Area, he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University and a BA in Anthropology from Grinnell College. His work has appeared in such publications as Conjunctions, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Fairy Tale Review, and Tin House. He is the author of the award-winning short story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone and teaches creative writing at St. Olaf College and the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA program. He currently lives in Minnesota with his wife, cat, and a robot dog named Calvino.
Kendra Fortmeyer (@kendraffe) is the author of award-winning YA novel Hole in the Middle, and a Pushcart Prize-winning writer with fiction in Best American Nonrequired Reading, One Story, LeVar Burton Reads, The Toast, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and former visiting writer at UT Austin.