Alexi Zentner explores the harsh environments of the north in 'Touch'. Photo: Laurie Willick.

It’s said that you can judge a nation’s cultural progress by the strength of its debutantes, and if that’s the case, then America is certainly in good shape. Recent months have seen a number of notable debuts, from Urban Waite’s The Terror Of Living to John Stephens’ The Emerald Atlas – and Alexi Zentner’s Touch can be added to that list.

When you read Touch you’ll be surprised to note that Zentner currently lives in Ithaca, New York. The cold, harsh, physically challenging frontier that provides the setting of Alexi Zentner‘s debut novel is a far cry from the modernity and luxury of New York. Maybe we can read it as a nod towards his Canadian upbringing.

Ostensibly the story of a pastor who returns home to care for his dying mother, Touch tracks the progress of the fictional town of Sawgamet from gold rush to logging boom, tracing the personal history of the narrator’s family along the way. It also dips into myth and magical fantasy, lending Zentner’s tale a timelessness and resonance that’s rare in debut fiction.

We caught up with Alexi Zentner prior to his appearance in Seattle on April 13, to ask him a few questions about location, mythology, and his fascination with the wild places.

Dan Coxon: Some of your descriptions of Sawgamet seem rooted in an actual place… did you have a specific location in mind when you created it?

Alexi Zentner: Funny, I got that question from one of the Canadian booksellers who swore they knew the town that Sawgamet was based on, but Sawgamet is created from whole cloth. It’s completely fictional. That being said, while I didn’t draw maps or build a scale model or do any of that sort of thing like some other authors have, it feels completely real to me. I know where the buildings are in relation to each other, the sense of the landscape and where the river meets the banks. I usually prefer to completely invent towns when I write. I feel like it gives me more latitude to do what I want, that I don’t have to worry about a building or a street being somewhere other than where I want it. I didn’t do this in Touch, but I do occasionally use real houses or physical objects that I’ve moved and obscured, since they give me something physical and real to hang the story on: a real world model for a fictional universe. Sawgamet is real to me now, though.

DC: What was it that fascinated you about this kind of harsh, wild environment?

AZ: I think that if you live in a city – even a smaller city, like the one I live in now – you can quickly lose sight of just how terrifying the wilderness can be. There are still great swaths of the country that are dark and desolate and scary, the sort of places where if you are in the woods at night and you hear a sound you can’t identify it makes you jump. I used to rock climb (poorly) and still like to hike and camp, and there have been times when I’ve been places where the closest city is far enough away that there is no halo of light brightening the sky, that it is only the vastness of the night and whatever mountains and trees and streams surround you, and the isolation available to you is stunning in and of itself. I was actually rock climbing on September 11, 2001, in Wisconsin, and I didn’t have a radio or a cell phone with me, and I remember thinking how beautiful and quiet the day was. Of course, it was only that evening that I realized why the sky was so empty.

Some of my fascination with the harshness of the environment comes from rock climbing, too. When you are rock climbing or ice climbing or hiking or skiing in the back country, or doing anything when you are outside, really outside, there is less room for error. In Sawgamet in particular this is true, and the harshness of the environment means that the landscape is almost a character. It’s the sort of place where if you make a mistake, you can die. As a storyteller, that gives you so much latitude. I think, ultimately, everything comes back to the family and the love story in this book, but the harshness of the environment, the wildness of the land they have settled, allows for so much more complication, so much more tenderness, and so much more danger. It’s also something that is important for Stephen: the harsh wildness in it’s incredible scope allows him the space to believe in both God and the monsters and witches of the woods. For him, if there is space for the magic, there is space for God, and vice versa.

DC: Several times in the book you talk about the nature of oral storytelling, and the ways that time and memory play a part in shaping and changing stories. Was this an intentional theme, or did it spring out of the tale you were telling?

AZ: That’s an interesting question, and whenever I get a question about intention, I’m always split between who I am as a teacher, and who I am as a writer. As a teacher – and I love teaching and miss it enough that even though I’m writing full-time now, I’d jump at a good teaching opportunity – I’m pretty analytical. It’s easy for me to pull a story apart and to say, here, this is where it breaks down, or this is the thing that changes everything else. In my own writing, however, I’m pretty intuitive, and I almost never decide to push a theme or put something in. Of course, once I saw the storytelling aspect coming out, I did emphasize it in later drafts. I’m really interested in storytelling in general, and it was important to me that, beautiful language and all of that, I told a good story.

Alexi Zentner's magical 'Touch'.

DC: Your use of myth and fable reminded me of the current renaissance in folk music and other traditional forms. Why do you think we’re so attracted to these elements of an older age? Why now?

AZ: I think that some of it is that the forms of myth and fable are really powerful, and as a writer, they are wonderful to use because you can do things that have an effect on the reader even if the reader doesn’t recognize it. Using that familiar framework is also incredibly freeing, because there is enough that is recognizable to a reader that you then have the latitude to do new and different things, things that might not work if you were already stretching the boundaries of the form. Sort of like, if the container is familiar to the reader, what I stuff inside the container can be as wild and scary and different as I want.

As for why now, I think that some of it is a bounce-back from a generation of writers who trafficked in detached irony, who elevated wit over humanity. I’ve read for a literary magazine for a while, and I’ve come across a lot of submissions where the author aped George Saunders: they got the funny just fine, but they didn’t seem to catch how deeply sad most of George’s stuff is. In my own work, it’s important to me that the work makes a reader feel invested. I’m not particularly interested in just trying to show how clever I am. I am, however, really invested in having the work be something that the reader can fall into, can fall in love with, can be moved by. I said this recently in an interview for The Millions, but I’d always rather risk being overly sentimental than risk nothing.

DC: The use of rural mythology is reminiscent of so many old, traditional tales and fables. What books or authors inspired you to use this kind of tone and symbolism?

AZ: I grew up as a reader. I think most writers do. Books saved my life. You can’t be a writer without being a reader, and any writer who tells you they don’t read is either lying or not very good. As a kid, I was fascinated by Norse and Greek and Roman mythology, by fairy tales, but also by science fiction and fantasy, which are genres that borrow a lot of the same symbolism, if not tone. Some of the authors that I’ve most admired as a writer that may have rubbed off on this book have been Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Salmon Rushdie, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, at least in the way in which they’ve used tales and fables in their own work. I think my work stands on its own.

I should also say that I think what I’m writing is mythical realism rather than magical realism. Magical realism is so rooted in landscape and tradition – whether you are talking about south and central America or European – that to just take those frameworks and plop them down on north America seems to me to be problematic; you end up with a palimpsest when you do that, where the traces of those other things show through your own work. My hope is that I’m doing something new, that I’m weaving our own myths and culture together. Part of that comes from my own background: I was born and raised in Canada, but my parents were Americans who never quite adapted to Canada, and I’ve lived in the USA since college. So I have this sort of oblique take on the cultures and myths of both nations.

DC: What can we expect from you next? Is there another book on its way?

AZ: I’m at home in a variety of styles, and my short fiction has run the gamut. I don’t think I’m as versatile as somebody like Stewart O’Nan – whose work I greatly admire – but I will have books that depart from Touch in the future. Right now, however, I’m almost finished a new book called The Lobster Kings, which is set in the present day on an imagined island in contested water off the east coast of the USA and Canada. I’ve been calling it my Shakespeare novel, and while it is different in many ways from Touch, I don’t think it would feel unfamiliar. I’ve also got a thriller I’m working on, as well as a YA book I’m dying to write.

And, it kills me to admit this, because I’ve said before that I was done with Sawgamet, but I’ve started the preliminary work on a follow-up to Touch, one that picks up Stephen’s story two decades later. That next novel feels like an incredibly natural progression from Touch, though it probably won’t be my “next” novel in terms of publication timelines. Either way, I should be busy for the next half-decade.

Alexi Zentner is currently on tour, and will be appearing at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle on Wednesday April 13, 2011. For a full list of tour dates please visit Alexi Zentner’s website.

Touch is available now from all good bookstores, and online from the WW Norton website, priced $24.95.