[caption id="attachment_9917" align="alignright" width="258"] Astral Weeks album cover[/caption] In this Behind the Pages interview, Walsh reveals what sparked the creation and writing of ASTRAL WEEKS as well as how this book may resonate with readers in 2018.   What was the genesis of ASTRAL WEEKS and the vision that it could become a book? This book started out with me searching out for some comfort via music. I was 22, heartbroken, lonely, and I stumbled upon the record in a store. Something about the cover and title told me to buy it. That led to a curiosity about its origins, which surprisingly led to my own backyard here in Boston.  Boston magazine gave me the go-ahead to write a piece about it, which led to Ed Park at Penguin Press reaching out to me and asking, “Could this be a book?” [caption id="attachment_9918" align="alignright" width="259"] Van Morrison, Spring Sing on Boston Common, April 20, 1968. Courtesy of MONTUSE/Dick Iacovello/https://www.facebook.com/diacovello.[/caption] During the writing process, how did you go about assembling the myriad characters and researching the stories as well as sub-plots that you wove together so masterfully in telling the tale of the making of this iconic Van Morrison album and the many intersecting worlds in Boston, circa 1968? I set rules for myself: all stories had to have an anchor point in Boston during the year 1968. They could go to other cities and years, but some vital part of each person and story had to exist inside of those parameters. Secondly, I was looking for stories about people striving for something spiritual or mystical in music and other pursuits. I was also looking for stories that bled the reality between creativity and real life.  So many people in the book were questioning themselves and the world around them: Is this real? Am I real? Is this a genuine moment?  [caption id="attachment_9916" align="alignright" width="300"] Orpheus in 1968. (l to r) Eric Gulliksen,Jack McKenes, Harry Sandler, Bruce Arnold. Courtesy of Bruce Arnold Music/Orpheus.[/caption] What elements of your book do you think will resonate most strongly with readers here in 2018? People often say that 1968 in the USA was a year in which the country seemed hell bent on tearing itself apart. It seems to me that could end up being a sentence that applies to 2018 too, sadly. But mostly, I think that the stories in the book are universal, human stories. You don't have to love Van Morrison or be familiar with Boston to enjoy this. You just have to love a good tale told in front of a campfire.   Photo of author Ryan H. Walsh courtesy of Marissa Nadler.

[caption id="attachment_9400" align="alignright" width="200"] Francisco Cantu, credit Beowulf Sheehan[/caption] What inspired you to become a writer and chronicle your life experiences on the page? FC: What initially led me to become a writer was the need to make sense of the years I spent working as a Border Patrol agent. I signed up for the job after college, looking for answers to all the questions I encountered in my studies of immigration and border policy.  I was looking for the something that would bring me close to the border, something that would let me experience it to its fullest extent. The Border Patrol seemed like the only way to do that, to witness the harsh day-to-day realities of the border, to be out in the desert day in and day out. The job, of course, was a violent one, in ways that were both obvious and more subtle. Instead of finding the answers I was looking for, I ended up coming away with more questions, and that’s what led me to writing—it became a compulsion, something I had to do in order to come to terms with all the complicated ways my work had caused me to normalize and participate in structural violence. How did you discover this author and what were your first impressions of the manuscript for this book? RS: I received an early draft of the book on submission in late September 2016, weeks before the election. Although we did not know then how large the border would loom in the national conversation, I could not stop thinking about it. Sometimes projects move so quickly editors don’t have time to see how the reading experience sits with us, but because the author was coming up from Tucson to meet with interested publishers, I had a little time to take my own temperature. What stayed with me was the understated force of the storytelling. I felt haunted by it, the way the US-Mexican border—the border whose line becomes a river—haunts America. The way the past and the present and the fate of those on both sides of it are inextricably entwined, no matter how high a wall we build. [caption id="attachment_9401" align="alignleft" width="300"] Rebecca Saletan, credit Louie Saletan[/caption] What was involved in working with Francisco during the editorial process? RS: I like to say that editing is 99 percent deletion, taking out what doesn’t need to be there, creating white space for the reader’s emotional response. But in this case what was needed was to imagine what wasn’t yet there that would help deepen and sharpen the arc of the narrative without making it heavy-handed.  I thought readers needed to feel a little more the effect of Cantú’s experience on him so that we could feel its effect on us. That meant judiciously adding material: signal moments from his childhood, his family background, and the deeper history of the border itself. These elements, which he deftly wove in, amplify the narrative and allow the reader to accompany him toward a kind of reckoning that we don’t see coming until it is upon us. What takeaways do you hope readers will glean from your book? FC: If nothing else, I want readers to come away feeling that the border is a place that is immensely complex and nuanced, to the extent that they reject simplified rhetoric about immigration and border policy. I think it’s important at this particular moment to take stock of all the things that are missing from our conversation about the border, such as the actual human costs of our current policy. People seem to forget that migrants are dying in the desert, and it’s not a small number, we’re talking about hundreds of people each year, and those are just the ones that get reported. Our current policy of “enforcement through deterrence” has weaponized the landscape, pushing people to cross in the most rugged and inhospitable terrain there is. There’s a humanitarian crisis occurring at our border but we don’t seem to recognize it as such—we don’t acknowledge the people who are dying there, we don’t name their bodies, we don’t mourn their deaths. That’s unacceptable; it has to change. We have to understand each number in each statistic as representing an individual life.    

On sale from Putnam on January 9, this profoundly moving and compulsively readable family love story asks the question: If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?  Beautifully rendered in Benjamin’s lucid, magical prose, THE IMMORTALISTS  is a sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, probing the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next.  It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds. Read on to go Behind the Pages of THE IMMORTALISTS. Sally Kim: How did you discover Chloe Benjamin and what were the first things that struck you about THE IMMORTALISTS manuscript? [caption id="attachment_9111" align="alignright" width="199"] Sally Kim[/caption] I was lucky that Chloe’s agent included me on her submission list, and I remember loving the book from its pitch alone. (I think I might have even sent her an idiotic note like, “I love this book already!”)  There are 101 things I love about this book, but what struck me right away is how Chloe takes such a high concept (to continue that overused term) and completely delivers on the page-turning story level, but also just slays you with her beautiful writing, line by line. I remember having to pause at times, just to fully savor a turn of phrase or a stunning moment. It’s so rare to have both strengths—both incredibly hard to accomplish—live in one novel. How would you describe the editor/author process as this book reached its final form? It may sound funny, but we started the editing process even before the auction! I’ll always remember that first call with Chloe, when I was trying to woo her, and we jumped right into talking about changes for certain characters, amping up a story’s thread…what if we tried this, and what about that.  We clicked right away and talked for over an hour, and I knew I’d love working with her.  She was smart, funny, humble – but she’d worked *hard* on this book, over many years, and was confident and firm in all the right ways: she was open, but also had a strong vision. In other words, my idea of the perfect collaborator! What elements of THE IMMORTALISTS do you think will resonate most strongly with readers? Another question with too many answers! But if I had to whittle it down to the one people continue to write in, comment, post about: It’s the way this book takes such large ideas—such as: Can you change your destiny? Can a story be real, just because you believe it to be true?—and gives you a way to examine them up close, with characters you live a lifetime with, without proposing to give you one final answer at the end. Chloe Benjamin: What was the inspiration behind THE IMMORTALISTS’ plot premise and creation of the primary storylines? [caption id="attachment_9112" align="alignright" width="300"] Chloe Benjamin
(C) Nathan Jandl[/caption] I’ve always been drawn to big questions: What are the benefits and perils of knowledge? How can we live fully in the face of uncertainty? And how do we love through and despite the possibility of loss? These questions simmered in the background as I built the structure of THE IMMORTALISTS, which follows four siblings who, as children, receive prophecies about the dates that they will supposedly die. The structure of the novel–it’s told in four sections, one per each sibling, each picking up where the previous one let off–came to me very early. I also knew I wanted each sibling to be quite different, both in their life experiences and in their orientation toward the prophecy. All four required a great deal of research. How do you see readers identifying with your novel and its characters? A reader may not be a magician like Klara, or a gay man finding himself in 1980s San Francisco, like Simon–but the questions about life and loss that these characters struggle with are, I think, universal. Secretly, I hope that readers will connect with the siblings who are on the face of it quite different from them. We live in hard, fractured times, and books are rare in their ability to inspire empathy.