(bell dings) (typewriter clacking quickly) (soft music) - I am Silas House, and my book is, "Lark Ascending."

(soft chime music) My book is set against a climate disaster that sort of fuels a demise of democracy.

It's about a young man on an epic journey trying to get to a safe place, and he's trying to be the best person he can be up against huge obstacles.

- So where did the idea of this come from for this book?

- I lost my aunt in 2015, and we were just incredibly close.

She was a second mother to me.

I grew up in a very strict fundamentalist family, and my aunt sort of was the only other person that really rebelled against that and sort of made me think very complexly about all of that.

So I wasn't just living in an echo chamber because of her, and I was just so stunned by her loss.

I had never experienced profound grief before.

And so I wanted to write a character who was going through incredible grief.

Lark has lost everybody that he loves.

He's lost his country.

At the same time I was beginning to feel like I was losing my country as well.

I was seeing things happen in our democracy that I still can't believe.

And so, to some degree I think the book is a meditation on that sort of national grief that so many people are feeling and what we're witnessing happen in the country with all the division and vitriol.

And I was thinking, you know, if this gets worse and worse, what would happen?

And so the novel was born out of that.

(soft dramatic music) - I read "Southernmost" before I read "Lark Ascending," and both books obviously start with an environmental disaster.

So I wonder if you wrote that intentionally or is that just a gripping way to start a book?

- Well, I never even thought of that until you brought that up.

You know, I didn't think about how "Southernmost" deals so much with catastrophic floods, whereas "Lark Ascending" deals with catastrophic forest fires.

So I guess the main thing is both of them are just dealing with people put in very intense situations but I'm just looking at the way that brings out the best in us and the worst in us.

One of the first things I like to figure out when I'm writing the novel is the trouble.

And I layer the trouble and I put the trouble on as thick as possible, because if you have your character in a lot of trouble, you have plenty of stuff happening and it reveals, your character's reactions to the trouble that reveals everything you need to know about them.

- It's one of the first early lessons I learned about writing is to put your characters through hell.

- Yeah.

- And you almost become protective of 'em, and you're like, well, I don't want that to happen.

But then you realize that's what makes us as people, is the trauma we go through and how we respond to it.

This novel is not for the faint of heart.

- Yeah.

- Especially from the beginning, you know, that first chapter's bleak.

I wonder if you do that on purpose so that readers stay with a story or if you concerned at all that it is so bleak at the beginning that you may have some people that'll say I don't know if I can do this.

- Yeah, what I was going for was, it is a dark book, it's my darkest book, it's my most violent book.

There's necessary violence and necessary darkness.

What I'm aiming for is the hope and the light.

And so to make the reader properly appreciate that hope and that light, and crave it, I gotta take 'em through the darkness.

(soft upbeat music) - [Jeremy] Conservation and environmentalism are really core to a lot of your stories.

It really, I think, bleeds through the pages.

And I wonder how much of an effect that has on your books?

- I was raised outside, I'm so grateful that I was a child who was turned loose in the woods, you know?

When I think about my childhood and the best parts of it were spent in the woods, in the creek, you know outside playing with my cousins and my friends.

On the flip side of that I was also raised very near a massive strip mine.

And so it was like I was seeing the best of the natural world and I was seeing the worst thing that could be done to the natural world.

And I think that really caused me to appreciate it even more and never see it as sort of, never take it for granted.

To me, the book is sort of a warning of if things get worse you know, that's why it's set 20 years in the future.

I never thought I would write a book set in the future.

And I never thought of the book that way.

I don't think of it as like a dystopian novel, or Cli-Fi, or anything like that, I just think of it as a literary novel that happens to be set 20 years in the future.

- Yeah, and I'll tell you, it could literally happen next year.

- Sure.

- Right, I mean, the way that you know is I think purposely vague enough as to what has happened in the very early chapters is that this could happen very quickly.

And then you do read, of course, that they have lived kind of in this remote area for quite some time before they have to flee the country but it does feel very timely.

And I think that's kind of scary.

- In interviews I talk a lot about, you know, the climate crisis that's happening in the book the demise of democracy and all that, but when you're reading the novel, that's actually sort, that's all going on in the background, you know because they're living apart from it.

They're on the run from it.

- Right.

- So it occasionally comes up, but the real focus of the story is all of that is an impetus for the relationships that are happening in the book.

So it's very much a book about community.

How does community survive amongst collapse?

You know, how do you keep that alive?

(soft upbeat music) - So you mentioned this before that you don't consider this to be a dystopian novel, but there are so many- - Yeah, it is.

- Dystopian novels that are written, but it is, and there are so many dystopian novels that are written these days, and I wonder what it is about that that draws writers to write about that.

What is it?

- I think it's a way of commenting on what's happening right now to write about the far past or the future.

Yeah, I think we can examine the present in a much more acute way when we do that, you know.

I mean, if you think about, I don't know like, Arthur Miller wrote "The Crucible," and that illuminated so much of what was going on with McCarthyism, you know so he had to go way back to the 1600s to find a way to really shine a light on that.

Or, you know, if I wanna look at what I fear is happening in my own country with the narrowing of separation of church and state, I need to go a little bit in the future to really emphasize that.

- But this is in so many ways, an adventure thriller.

- Yeah, I'm glad you think so.

- And it seems to be a bit of a departure for you.

And I wonder what drew you to that?

- I always write the book that I want to read.

I love a lot of old adventure stories, and we don't have a lot of adventure stories for adults these days, at least in literature.

I think superheroes sort of things have taken the place of that.

And so I wanted the book to have a real sort of timeless quality to the narrative voice.

And so I looked to books like "Kidnapped," by Robert Louis Stevenson, or "The Call of the Wild," by Jack London.

And that was my way of, of telling a story set in the future was to look to the past and to see the way that those adventure stories were told.

- I wonder when you started writing this and you told your family and your friends what you were working on, were they surprised?

- Yeah.

And I mean, I was surprised.

I never thought I would write something set in the future.

And, you know, there are lots of books like that that I love.

But when I pick a book, it's mostly just, you know because of the writing, and first and foremost the language, is the main thing.

It's not necessarily, you know when it's set or where it's set.

(soft upbeat music) - Silas House is a great writer's name.

(Silas chuckles) and I just wondered if you always wanted to be a writer?

- I never wanted to be anything else.

And I was really lucky in seventh grade, I had an English teacher who gave me permission to be a writer.

And I think children need that.

They need somebody to validate that for them.

Especially for me growing up, I didn't know anybody who was deeply moved by literature.

You know?

I mean, there were people in my family who read but it wasn't something they talked to me about.

But my seventh grade teacher, you know she would come in and she would read a Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, and tears would spring to her eyes, and I would be the only other person in the class who would be deeply moved by it.

She recognized that in me and took me under her wing.

And I mean, it's just, I give that testimony everywhere because I think it's so important that we talk about how teachers, you know, can change your lives.

- And they do.

And I think about it in my own sense.

I had a fifth grade teacher that gave me that permission.

She was the one that said, oh, they see it before we see it.

- Right.

- And, but, and that's when you knew, and I knew too that you thought, this is what I wanted to do.

So is there a book that changed your life that you look back on and say, - Oh yeah.

- What's the book?

- So many.

- Okay.

But the one I think that changed me in more ways than any other was "The Color Purple," by Alice Walker.

It just blew my mind wide open.

It made me reassess the way I thought about race, gender, orientation, my concept of God, I mean, doesn't get much more profound than that, you know?

- And trauma.

- Yeah, and also just what could be done with language as well and structure.

- Right.

- I always want to write a language driven book that moves.

I want you to luxuriate in the language but I also want the pages to go by, you know.

I like a book that moves, but I also wanted it to be pretty short.

I wanted to be under 300 pages.

- Okay.

- To do that, I had to really worry over every sentence and distill every sentence down to its barest essence and- - Cut the fat.

- Yeah, and so I wanted it to be descriptive, but also it has to be the perfect description to give you just enough to keep moving.

(soft upbeat music) - [Jeremy] There's a lot of warnings to us in this book.

What keeps you up at night?

- [Silas] Climate change is something that's, you know has hovered over my entire life.

And it just seems like it grows closer and closer and wider and wider the older I get.

It's inevitable, I mean, we're already seeing it happen.

But I still think we can be more conscious and we can do everything in our power to make it as easy on our children and grandchildren as we possibly can, even if it's too late to totally change it.

I think I'm just always wanting to goad people into being more conscious about that, to think more about that.

And I'm also in the book trying to think about, you know the things that carry me through.

And one thing in the book are dogs.

Well, a dog, is really important in the book.

And that's one way that I tried to keep the book from becoming too dark, is some of the book is told from the point of view of a dog.

So I think that that levels it out more for the reader.

- Silas, I can't thank you enough.

- Thank you.

- I think it's an important book.

It's a joy to read, and I'm glad you wrote it.

- Thank you so much.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm Jeremy Finley.

Remember, keep reading.

(bell dings) - [Silas] The villains are the people who weaponize religion.

And as a person of faith, I find that deeply offensive and deeply troubling.

And that's one thing I'm writing about in the book.