Keely Shinners sat down with SVJ Online to discuss the inspiration for their debut novel How To Build a Home for the End of The World and the context it carries.
Told through the lens of a post-apocalyptic case history, this story follows seventeen-year-old Mary-Beth and her father Donny as they traverse from Fox Lake, Illinois to California in a time of extreme drought and crisis. Despite the state of the world and the strains within her family, Mary-Beth’s quest to save the girl she loves ebbs on. The novel mirrors life and the constant strive for connection, comfort, and safety. However, the route doesn’t veer away from the ruminations one often has to confront in life in order to build a home, especially within themselves.
How To Build a Home for the End of The World is unlike any other book I have ever read. When did the idea for this novel come to be? What came first, the plot or an idea for a character?
In January 2017, I went on a road trip with my father. We drove from our hometown, Fox Lake, Illinois, to Los Angeles, where I was doing my undergrad. We elected to go the southern route, following the ruins of Route 66. As we drove from ghost town to ghost town, one nondescript landscape to the next, punctuated only by beige motel rooms and stale cups of coffee, I got to thinking. One could write a story—say, about a father and his daughter, about a girl’s first love, about a road trip—tell it as close to the grain of truth as possible, and call it out for what it was. A dystopian novel. Or, a realist novel for dystopian times.
In my view, the world ended in 1492 with the acceleration of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the genocide of indigenous peoples the world over. Therefore, I think most Americans know what it's like to grow up in a post-apocalyptic world. And yet, we still fall in love, still, break each other's hearts. We endure drama with friends and family, we get sick, and we grieve. This is the world I set out to depict: a world that was socially, politically, and culturally ravaged, but a world in which people still found joy, healing, resistance, love, and life.
Do you have any techniques for developing characters?
Usually, I contrive some lesson for my characters and then see how long it takes them to figure out what the lesson is. In How To Build a Home for the End of the World, Mary-Beth needs to let go of her innocence. At first, she assumes that means she needs to sacrifice herself to save someone else. Only later does she realize that sacrifice will not absolve her; she must learn to live with her past, her guilt, her heritage – and choose love in spite of it all.
Was Dr. Maria Camphor always an integral part or did the concept develop as you were writing?
At the end of the day, it is a coming-of-age novel. To put it in other words, it's the novel I wrote in order to grow up. The protagonist, Mary-Beth, is very much a surrogate for my younger self: sheltered, naive, eager to please, and struggling to come to terms with the fact that she is no longer innocent – maybe she never was. In order to put that girl down on the page, I needed a surrogate for the writer I had to be – the writer who had grown up, who was capable, who could see things from a distance. What emerged from that need was Dr. Maria Camphor, the book's narrator. I named her Maria Camphor because that's the name of the woman who had my phone number before me. During the years of writing the book, I often got calls asking Maria Camphor to please pay her cable or some other bill. I thought this a great name for the alter ego I was developing. She's kind of an amalgamation of Joan Didion, Anne Carson, and my future self. She's also a grieving widow and a raging alcoholic who realizes that she has some growing up of her own to do.
What was your biggest challenge while writing?
The biggest challenge was the revision process. I revised the book twice on my own and twice in the editing stage with my publisher – so four times in total. Each time I faced a new re-write, it felt like I was changing the fabric of reality. At the risk of sounding dramatic, it was spiritually daunting and neurologically disturbing. But in the end, I arrived with a manuscript that had sweated off all doubt and denial to expose the raw prose underneath.
What does your writing process look like? Do you have any routines around writing, and do they differ depending on the form/genre?
When I embark on a writing project, big or small, I take tons of notes. I read, research, and feel through the story I wish to tell and record little fragments in a notebook or on a document on my computer. When the time comes, I begin to organize the notes into a structure. For an essay or short story, this whole process can take a week. For a novel, it takes years.
Do you have a preference when it comes to the time of day you write or the setting?
When I write, I write first thing in the morning until it's time for dinner. I sit on my cane chair in my office overlooking Plein Street in Cape Town. I usually accumulate a stack of books around me – sometimes for guidance, sometimes for protection!
Besides the amazing outcome of your novel, is there anything you gained from this experience (writing or publishing your first full-length book) that you think will carry into future projects?
I enjoyed writing a literary novel with a dash of genre fiction (in this case, spec fic) and have been so pleased with the warm reception it's received. For my next book, I hope to do the same. This time, I'm playing with the ghost story and the erotic romance novel.
You once shared online that your dad found the cover photo in a barn. Can you share more of that back story?
My father is a carpenter. On a job a few years back, he found this stack of photographs and brought them home. Most of them were a bit mundane, a bit bizarre – a photograph of a stove, a photograph of a river. There were no figures. Except for this one photograph – the woman standing behind one of those coin-operated binoculars. The image was so bizarre that I kept it and carried it around with me for years. Since the novel is about a carpenter (like my dad) and his daughter (like me) on a bizarre road trip at the end of the world, I thought this image would be a great cover.
Is there anything else you’d like to share about How To Build a Home for the End of The World?
I finished How To Build a Home for the End of the World in February 2020, just days after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global emergency. My book is not about a pandemic. But, the questions the pandemic raises feel relevant to the project. To what lengths would you go to alleviate another person’s suffering? No matter what, it feels poignant and sometimes eerie, to be a writer concerned with the End of the World when there is so much talk of it. I won’t claim prescience. I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t expect my book to have any answers or voice the anxieties of a generation. My only hope is that this novel allows us to look at a dystopian scenario and not succumb to nihilism, but ask ourselves, have we been here before? How did we survive this the last time? What can I learn from history, from my ancestors? What histories, personal and collective, have I been running from, and how might reckoning with those histories allow me to imagine a better future? What justice do we demand? What beauty might spring out of the mess of the world? How might we best take care of each other? What integrity of love is required if we have any hope to survive? How do we remake the world?
How To Build a Home for the End of The World (released May 2022) is available through Perennial Press.
Keely Shinners is a writer from Fox Lake, Illinois. They are currently based in Cape Town where they write fiction and essays about literature and art. How To Build a Home for the End of the World is their first novel.
Brandi Spering is the CNF editor at Schuylkill Valley Journal Online. Her first book, This I Can Tell You (Perennial Press 2021), is a poetic narrative dealing with the fragility of memory due to trauma.