by Lynnell Edwards
Kevin Prufer is a poet, writer, editor, and now, a novelist. His 2024 debut novel is Sleepaway, from the newly launched Acre Books. The novel imagines an alternative history of the mid 1980s where a mysterious “mist” travels across the globe, bringing with it deep sleep that is usually, but not always, temporary for the population it drifts over. Specifically, the work focuses on the experiences of Glass, the nicknamed middle-school-age protagonist, and Cora, a young woman experiencing writer’s block and working as a waitress in the small, midwestern town where they both live. Of Sleepaway, reviewer Lisa McCormack writes that the work “brings beautiful language and poetic tension to the page, along with a tight, dystopic plot and originally drawn characters.”
Our conversation this summer ranged over the origins of the story, writing about and researching a digital-free 1980s, and what a literature of the pandemic might look like both now and to future generations.
Lynnell Edwards: First, congratulations on a first novel! Sleepaway is an incredible book: both lyric and plot-driven, meditative in depictions of interior and exterior spaces, while also being an absolute page-turner. You've talked in other places about how fictionalized many of your poems are, even as the stories and scenes are often based on memories or events you heard about. How and when did you realize you had this story of an alternative history of the 1980s to tell in novel form?
Kevin Prufer: After I turn in a book of poetry, I take a break and work on something that isn’t poetry. Sometimes, I’ll write a short story or two. Or I’ll pick up an editing project. I do this because I need time after a large poetry project to reset, to rethink things so that the next book doesn’t look too much like the last one. Back in 2022, when I turned in the final draft of The Fears to my editor at Copper Canyon Press, I decided to write something fictional, but to set it in a time and place I knew well. I have vivid memories of the 1980s, of being a child of about the same age as Glass, one of the two main characters in the book. I felt like I could see the 1980s through a child’s eyes because I’d lived through the 1980s as a child. And I set the story in (an unnamed) Warrensburg, Missouri, because it’s a town I knew well, having lived there for fifteen years. It was important to me to have this kind of close familiarity because the events in the story are so deeply unfamiliar—the ever growing, threatening sleep storms; the sense of certain doom. I needed a comfortable, grounded place from which I could reach out into the unfamiliar and, to me, horrifying.
But I didn’t know it was to be a novel, at first. At first, I was just writing this story and using my familiar old plus-signs to separate sections, to suggest shifts in point of view or position or time. I was many pages in when I realized it would be a novel, and even then I told myself I was writing it for fun, that the point wasn’t to find a publisher. The point was to see where the story would take me. I loved writing it. It consumed my thoughts for months.
LE: You've set the book in 1984; what about that time period was compelling for you? Related, how much or what kind of research did you find you had to do to synch up with or correct your teenage memories of that time?
KP: Well, as I said, I have vivid memories of 1984, so that helped. Also, I wanted to write a story with no cell phones, no social media, no apps. It seems to me there’s something inherently un-dramatic about Facebook and text messages and all that. It felt good not to have to worry about those things. And I don’t remember doing much research for the book. I probably looked up what songs would have been on the radio or what highways one might take to get from Warrensburg to Omaha. But that’s it. Instead of research I did a lot of thinking about the 1980s, how well-intentioned people talked about race or ethics, how we all lived then. I tried to imagine myself as Glass or Cora in that particular place and time when I was out taking walks during the day, getting that place or time set in my mind before I worked on writing the novel in the evenings.
LE: In the first pages of the book, we seem to be in the hands of a third person narrator, when suddenly, there's a first person voice that interjects in a surprisingly intimate way. This speaker makes only a few, brief interjections over the course of the novel, suggesting that this story is being told from some time in the future. Without giving anything away, what can you say about who that narrator is and what role they play in telling this story?
KP: Something I always ask myself when I’m writing a poem is this: “Who is speaking in this poem and why?” “I am speaking” is not a suitable answer, even if it’s true. I need to know who the speaker is in the moment he or she speaks (or thinks?) the poem and what makes this person utter (or, again, think) the poem in the first place. What action, what quality of person, what anxiety causes the poem to happen. Without being able to answer these questions, I can’t finish a poem—because, at my core, I believe poetry (my poetry, anyway) is an act of personality and occasion (not necessarily my own).
As I was writing Sleepaway, which is told almost completely in the third-person voice, I still had a compulsion to grapple with these questions. Who is telling this story, I wanted to know. And why? Even in a third-person narration, there has to be a storyteller somewhere behind the curtain, on the other side of the computer screen, in the reader’s ear.
So I began to imagine who that narrator might be and, as I did so, a new character took shape, someone who didn’t necessarily live in the world of the novel, but who lived somehow outside it, who was able to peer into it, to take a keen interest, to observe, and to tell. I kept returning to that character, who I imagined lived invisibly in the sky and, as I was completing a first draft of the novel, it suddenly occurred to me why he was there, where he was from, what his stake might be. I don’t want to explain that here because I think it will take away from the novel to tell it up front. There’s a reason I saved that bit of narration for the end.
LE: Having read Sleepaway almost immediately after reading The Fears, I was struck by the similarities of imagery and motifs in the two books: of fathers in hospitals and sons and the thin places between sleeping and death and dreaming; images of snow and sleet in poems and the glittering stars in the peripheral vision as sleep comes on when the mists move through a town. There's a persistent interest in the past in both works, in ancient and gone things, whether it's the rise and fall of Roman emperors in The Fears or Glass's preoccupation with his sleeping father's archeological collection of skulls and artifacts; in both books you use a “+” to indicate breaks: in the white space within chapters of Sleepaway and to divide stanzas in the poems of The Fears. In both books there's a scene developed where young people break into a museum and spend the night. And of course, the specter of an actual contagion in The Fears and a fictional contagion, "the mists," in Sleepaway. I'm curious about the relationship between these two books and both your writing process—were you working on them at all at the same time?—as well as how you see the two books in conversation with one another.
KP: That’s a big question.
I did not work on the books at the same time. I finished The Fears and then I began Sleepaway. But they are clearly in conversation—not just because of my comfortable vocabulary of images and tricks (glittering things, snow, plus-signs etc.), but the larger concerns that have motivated my writing these past several years: considerations of history and annihilation and the void. Fear. The irretrievability of the past and the way our cultural and historical sins might seem buried in the past and, at the same time, visible on the surface today. These are my larger concerns and they inspire me to write, so I think it’s natural that those concerns come out whether I’m writing poetry or fiction. That is to say, the two books can’t help but be in conversation with each other, even as they are quite different superficially.
The fact is that when I was a boy in the 1980s, my father was an archaeologist. And he had a small lab in our basement where he kept shelves of Native American remains that he’d dug up through university-sponsored excavations. When I was a boy, I didn’t think anything of this. It was interesting that the skulls were in the basement, and I’d look at them and show them to my friends. Only as an adult did I realize how ethically, morally, and historically problematic that was—to say the least. So I stole that bit of my past and put it in the book, because it became a way for me to think about some of the issues the book deals with—unredressed wrongs in the past, seeming injustices in the future, the idea of death that exists in the basement of the house, always present below the floorboards. I think I have learned—from writing poetry—how to think with images as well as with words, how an image might resonate with complex unarticulated thought.
The museum in The Fears works similarly—the doomed student and the student who tells the doomed student’s story, both spending the night among the mummies in the museum. Those mummies—you’re right—work the same way, suggesting vastnesses of time and death that the two students are unaware of, that one of them—the doomed one—will come to know quite well.
And, yes, contagions in both books, too. It’s interesting to me that reviewers haven’t mentioned that in The Fears, but mention it all the time in Sleepaway, asserting that the novel is about the pandemic. I never thought so. Not really. Maybe I couldn’t have written it without the pandemic and maybe I could have. But to me it’s a novel about race and history and the certainty of forgetfulness and death. But that’s just me. If other people think it’s about the pandemic, that’s OK, too.
LE: One hundred percent. Sleep is a beautiful and complex metaphor for both death and forgetfulness, themes resonant with The Fears. And Glass's child-like sorting out of how the mists don't equally impact white people and people of color (who fare much, much better) is a brilliant kind of "what if" to the problem of racial inequality, that if anything is more difficult now than it was in the 1980s. And I agree that nothing about the pathology (if you can call it that) of “the mists” really operates like a disease, though as with a pandemic we see how the persistent and evolving occasion of it shapes a society. I do think there are ways in which we are already forgetting the Covid pandemic and the ways we behaved during it. Literature has a role to play in the documenting and remembering, though. And Sleepaway does strike me as very much a book of pandemic times. Though I can think of several other titles that have come across my reviewer's desk in the last year, is it too early—is it useful—to talk about a literature of the pandemic?
KP: I think it might be too early to evaluate how the pandemic has changed literature, how it has affected writers and readers of literature. Though Covid-19 may seem in some ways to be slipping into the background, in other ways it’s very much around us—and not just for those with bodies that are at high risk, vaccinated or not. The pandemic has changed the ways we do business, the ways we teach classes, the ways we inhabit spaces, electronic, cyber, or otherwise. It’s changed how we think about the interconnectivity of the world and our own bodies. Obviously, these changes are going to have an influence on how we write about the world and ourselves, even if we’re not exactly consciously writing about the pandemic (as I was not).
So, yes, I think there is a growing literature of the pandemic, as I think you mean it—a body of work that addresses Covid-19 directly and thoughtfully, a body of work worthy of study. I also think there’s a way the pandemic has affected the way we read backwards in time, too. Station Eleven, a brilliant pre-pandemic novel about a pandemic, is a different book for me now than it was when I first encountered it. Still great, but tangibly different, now that I’ve lived through one. And I think the way we move forward in literature has been changed by the pandemic because the pandemic changed the way we think of ourselves, our vulnerabilities, and our place in the world. That’s probably the biggest part of this for me.
LE: I love Station Eleven! And I agree, it’s a different novel for those of us who read it before the pandemic (published in 2014) and those who are encountering it now, who have living memory of the Covid-19 pandemic, and those in future generations for whom Covid-19 will be as remote as the Great Influenza of 1918 seems to us. But to your point about how the pandemic changed “the way we move forward in literature,” can you see any ways in which those years in lockdown and fear changed your habits or subjects as a writer?
KP: That’s a hard one. I think my pandemic experience wasn’t in any way extraordinary except that, unlike many people, I had the kind of day job—teaching and writing—that easily moved online. And because my wife has ongoing issues with heart failure, I probably sealed myself off more than is average. I didn’t go into any stores or, really, any buildings other than my own home for a couple years. I suppose that heightened the intensity with which I wrote and also heightened my interest in people outside of those I used to interact with but now heard from only on the phone or through Zoom.
I have always been a little bit obsessed with scary movies and I remember, as the pandemic spread across Asia and into the USA, telling friends, “this feels just like the first fifteen minutes of several horror movies I’ve seen!” And, after experiencing that, it became important for me to try to capture that feeling of slow realization, of knowledge that something enormous was on the horizon that I couldn’t quite make out yet, of knowledge that bad change was coming to the provinces and there was nothing anyone could do about it really. I know the experience of those feelings shaped the way I wrote and paced Sleepaway—perhaps more than any particular book or movie or etc.
But, again, I have a hard time thinking about it as a “pandemic” novel. The sleeping sickness in the book is in some ways incidental, is part of the setting. I was much more interested in the characters and how they interacted with that setting, what their other concerns were, how those concerns changed.
In addition to Sleepaway, Kevin Prufer’s most recent books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Rilke Prize for Poetry, and eight other books, including Churches, which was named one of the best ten books of 2015 by The New York Times, and How He Loved Them, which was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from the American literary press. Prufer’s work appears widely in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Paris Review, and The New Republic, among others. He is Professor of English at The University of Houston, where he also directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to rediscovering great, long-forgotten authors. He also teaches at the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA Program.
Lynnell Edwards is poetry faculty and Associate Programs Director for the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. The author of six books of poetry, her most recent collection is The Bearable Slant of Light (Red Hen Press, 2024). More about her other writing, including reviews and essays, at lynnelledwards.com.