An Interview with Holly Jean Buck

Why did you write Crossing the Blue?

Well, I spent a month living in Needles, California, in this motel along Route 66-- It was August, and 118 in the shade, so I was pretty much confined to the air-conditioned motel room. Then I thought, why not write a novel to pass the hours? I mean, I don’t watch television, so... there wasn’t much else to do besides listen to my own mind.

The story came from Florida, really. I had just spent a month working in southern Florida, driving around the subdivisions and the cane fields, and the whole place had this spooky feel to it. You could still see damage in West Palm Beach from the last hurricane-- and I was driving around thinking, this whole landscape will be underwater one day. Already it felt doomed-- they had drained the greater part of the Everglades to create these subdivisions and cane fields, and you can’t completely alter a landscape like that without changing the energy of it. Anyway, I flew from Florida to Las Vegas-- another booming area that feels doomed to me, all these housing wastelands and no water-- it got me thinking about how the fate of America is really going to vary by region. By ecosystem, with the changing climate... But I was still stuck on Florida, about really vividly imagining how those luxury McMansions could look, assuming sea levels rise faster rather than slower... that was how the book got started, anyway...

But why did I write it? I think Americans need to think more realistically about their future. Everybody in the year 2007 knows about climate change-- they’ve seen it on Fox News, at least-- but are they imagining how the future might look? With the fossil fuel supply, too-- It’s not just higher gas prices, it’s the impact on food production, on plastics, etc... I wrote this book to help Americans imagine what the future might look like if we continue to be carefree or careless about it. And to showcase the different reactions that people might have to a difficult future. There’s people in my novel that build sustainable communities, and there’s other groups that resort to violence or madness. I wanted to show that there’s a variety of possible reactions to the challenges of the twenty-first century... and I wanted to show people reacting to the challenges without fear. Just going through the difficulties with all three eyes open, with music, with community... Because when the media talks about the future, there’s a lot of fearmongering, you know, that’s how people like Bush got into control. I’m hoping Americans will face the future gracefully now, so they don’t end up petrified later, and continue making stupid decisions that will hurt the whole planet.

So why not write, say, a magazine article? Or something political?


Because, really, who wants to read a bunch of nonfiction or statistics about the state of things? We all know the world’s pretty screwed up. At this point, our problem isn’t lack of knowledge... it’s lack of imagination. I wanted to stir the imagination... and write something that’s fun to read. This work was prompted by the situation of the moment... but the story of Blake and Juliet’s love, that’s eternal. Blake’s coming-of-age, coming into himself, learning to be a magician, so-to-speak-- that’s a timeless story-- and the musings about civilization, those transcend the moment too. This book isn’t just concerned with the future-- it’s also about the past, about how we got to this state.

Right, but it does take place in the future. What genre would you say this is?


(Laughs...) Fight genre discrimination! Really, I see this as commercial fiction with literary moments. There’s a few dream sequences that wander into poetry... but I tried to keep them accessible. I do see it as a trans-genre work, because of landscape-- the landscape of this continent gives the work its flavours. You’ve got these Southern Gothic moments when Blake and Juliet are traveling through New Orleans-- it’s a cozier piece towards the heartland, straight-up home-cooked fiction-- and a Western when they get out west, dust storms and desperadoes... And of course one could easily label it post-apocalyptic or science-fiction because it takes place in the future, but I wasn’t trying to invent some wild future, wasn’t trying to use those tropes. I made the time-frame pretty vague, because I’m not into prophesy. And there’s so much history, too, so much of the past in this book-- it’s a very non-futuristic future-- I was trying to pick one of the more realistic futures one could imagine. I wouldn’t even term it post-apocalyptic, because I think the apocalypse is here now-- all around us-- an apocalypse-in-progress. Progressing right through this novel.


Who is the audience for Crossing the Blue?

I think this is a book for everyone. I mean, I think everyone’s interested in the state of the world, to some degree-- and if not, at least interested in the great American road trip, or the great youthful love story. I got so frustrated when I was doing my graduate studies at Naropa [Jack Kerouac Institute of Disembodied Poetics] because it seemed like the poets and writers there were trying to write for such a cloistered circle of “in”-mates. This is a book for your mom’s book club, for your high school English class, for gypsy punks and cybernerds, for scholars, for people interested immigrant issues, for everyone who loves a good story.

What other projects are you working on?

Right now, I’m working on a prose/poetry hybrid piece called The Thirst for Color about the history of color-- and empire and the environment-- the extinction of the Murex shells to make Tyrolian purple, the cochineal trade and the harvesting of the logwoods by the Spanish and British empires to make red, the advent of synthetic color... really neat stuff. Told with stories and shreds of poems... Research-intensive. I could also imagine two more books intertwined with Crossing the Blue... One, telling the story of what happens to Blake in Cascadia, and another as sort of a prequel, telling the story of Juliet before she meets Blake. There’s a lot there, still...