Interview with Julia Phillips

Award-winning novelist Julia Phillips writes marvelous thrillers grounded in sense of place. At The Dodge, we love to talk and think about what genre can make possible—how conventions and tropes can be turned to new uses. Julia’s internationally bestselling novel Disappearing Earth, a finalist for the National Book Award, offers a brilliant example of this. Set in Kamchatka, Russia, that novel explores the aftermath of the disappearance of two young girls in a remote community.

I spoke with Julia in mid-March 2022, several weeks after the invasion of Ukraine began. Julia and I hadn’t met in person, though she’d visited the College of Wooster (where I teach) virtually a few weeks before. We started with a quick chat about Julia’s work in progress, which happens to be a novel about an animal.

—Katharine Beutner, Editor in Chief

Katharine Beutner: Tell me about how you’ve been since I last talked to you on Zoom?

Julia Phillips: A lot has changed since we last talked to each other on Zoom, at least in the world–

KB: Yeah.

JP: I can say, in my life everything is great, I’m doing well, how are you doing?

KB: I’m okay. It is a weird time where everything feels extremely different… for sure. How is your project going—you’re working on a new novel, right?

JP: Yeah.

KB: Are you the kind of person who feels okay, um, [Laughs] talking about things while you work on them or are you very much—

JP: Yes, I do … I’m trying to think of how, now that I know that I’m being recorded, I’m trying to think about how to say it in a way that [Laughs]—

KB: You don’t have to! You can absolutely not, we can ‘unrecord.’

JP: No—I’m very excited. I’m working on a book about a bear. Basically, a bear that

comes to town. It’s a re-telling of a Grimm Brothers’ fairytale—did you like the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales?

KB: Yeah, yeah!

JP: I don’t know if you remember Snow-White and Rose-Red, it was this minor fairytale about a bear that shows up in these two girls’ house and they take care of him—he turns out to be an enchanted prince. So, I’m working on a book that’s a contemporary re-telling of that, but he’s not an enchanted prince—he is a grizzly bear. Doesn’t have magic, doesn’t talk, but he shows up.

KB: I’m a really big fan of…that’s basically what I did in my first novel, take something that is a story that has fantastical elements and then just treat them like they’re real?

JP: I love it, I love it!

KB: I don’t know—I find literalizing things really satisfying [Laughs]. Is your bear novel also going to be set in Russia or…?

JP: No, it’s set off the coast of Washington State. On an island, San Juan Island, where I’ve actually never been, and I’m planning to go imminently.

KB: Excellent. Yeah, that’s fun. I love—research travel is the best, as you know.

JP: I’m very much looking forward to it, um, it’s going to look a little different now than it did, you know, pre-covid, pre-baby, pre-…

KB: Pre-everything [Laughs].

JP: Pre-everything.

KB: Yes.

JP: It’s going to be great.

KB: I have so, so many questions.

JP: Oh boy!

KB: How would you define the kinds of stories that you’re most interested in writing, and how do you feel like that’s changed over time?

JP: I’m most interested in writing stories that deal, I think, with a few themes. That deal with violence, and identity, one might say—that is, how our bodies, who we are, and the power that we have in the world affect the way that we treat other people as well as the way that we are treated by other people—and community, especially community healing. I’m interested in writing stories about violence and then how that violence is dealt with in a community context. Those are the subjects that I want to write about over and over again and that I feel that I haven’t gotten to the bottom of. When it comes to where my books, I hope—fingers crossed—will be shelved, I write realistic contemporary literary fiction. I like to write things that are set right now and feel like they could happen in the world, or are happening in the world, and I also would like to write things that are propulsive or page-turners. That’s my hope always, I don’t know to what extent that is achieved in each individual project, but that is the kind of work that I like to read. I like to read something that has a lot of momentum to it, that has a question that’s posed in the beginning that we want to answer by the end, that has a plot that I find propulsive, and so I want to write those stories, too.

KB: That makes a lot of sense. I know that Disappearing Earth was often described by other people, at least, or by marketing teams, as a thriller—did you think of it as a thriller? I’m curious. 

JP: I wanted it to be. I want it to be a literary thriller. And so in researching it I would read literary thrillers. And I think the marketing teams had that language in part because I was trying to supply it to them. I think it is more towards the ‘genre’ of literary than it is towards the genre of thriller, but I want it to be more thriller.

KB: I totally get it. I feel like with the novel that we’ve been talking about that I sold recently, it’s a ‘literary crime novel,’ but I kind of can’t help it ending up being more literary than crime. [Laughs]

JP: [Laughs] Exactly, despite our best wishes.

KB: Yes, no matter how hard I lean on structure--

JP: Hundred percent.

KB: People are like, ‘But the writing is so pretty!’ And you’re like, ‘Thank you! But also—’

JP: ‘But also, I need you to keep turning the pages.’ Absolutely. When we’re steeped in the genre of literary fiction, our writing will tend toward that, and so to try to draw on the strengths of different genres, of the crime novel or of the thriller, is really challenging. But really helpful.

KB: Yeah. I totally agree. A lot of my other questions—

KB’s Cat: [Loud catty noise]

KB: Oh my gosh, cat. We’re just going to have, like, interjections from this old thing right here [points webcam to cat on her lap].

JP: Oh, what a sweetie! So fluffy!

KB: She’s very fluffy, she’s very scruffy right now.

KB’s Cat: [Old cat meow]

KB: [To cat] Mm-hm. [To JP:] She’s at least twenty or twenty-one.

JP: Oh my God. She’s a grand dame! What’s her name?

KB: Inge. Yeah. Indeed. And, yeah, you goober [to Inge]. She’s fragile at the moment, but that means she can get on my lap whenever she wants.

JP: Yeah, she has to get lots of pets.

KB: As I was saying! So, a lot of my other questions are about place and landscape and translation and all the things that I was asking you about when you visited Wooster. Getting back to that idea of a question at the beginning of the novel that you want answered by the end: Disappearing Earth starts with a story, of course, as it’s embellished by your younger story-teller character about a natural disaster, and I was curious how you imagined that sense of natural threat, or the dangers of the environment in rural Siberia, in conjunction with the social threat that the female characters face. So you have this opening, with the disappearance of the girls, it’s intertwined from the beginning—this sense of the threat of a tsunami or the threat of some kind of external natural disaster—but then also, in terms of the chronology of the story and also feeling, tone, it seems very connected with these social threats. And not just the social threats that the female characters actually face, but also the ones they imagine. 

JP: Right. I was so glad that you felt that, and I’m so glad to hear you say all that. That is what I hoped that structure and that story would achieve. I wanted to include that story of natural threat because in that particular place the landscape is vivid and intense and alive. I live in New York City, where there are a lot of efforts to control the landscape, or to subjugate what is going on naturally. And so, I don’t have many opportunities to interact with the elements, and when I do interact with the elements it comes as a surprise and an intrusion. That is a very different thing than living on Kamchatka. There, the engagement of people with the land around them is more constant and expected. And I wanted to have some of that relationship to the land, or to weather, or to the environment in there as a way to illustrate the threat that is present, at least in my mind, in both places, in all places, which is that you don’t have control over whether something or someone else hurts you. If someone else hurts you, there’s nothing you can do to decide that away. There’s nothing you can do to say, ‘Actually, I’m going to behave in this certain way, or do this certain thing, or protect myself with this behavior, or with this mindset change, or with this positive attitude, so that you will not decide to hurt me.’ If someone decides to hurt you, it is not in your control and the experience then becomes, ‘How do I survive this? If I survive this, what happens afterwards?’ You’re going to get swept up in something that’s out of your control, that is initiated by someone else, and that is going to be damaging. And to me, the experience of violence and of threat, in this book, a kind of gendered experience of threat, is that experience. That you know that at any time, someone can decide to hurt you. That is a very real threat, and that does happen. There’s nothing that you can do to predict it or avoid it, if it’s going to happen. The tsunami story became a representation of that. The characterse are playing with the fear of this shocking and out-of-their-control threat, they’re telling a story about it to try to contain it. And then, just after their telling, they get hit with something in their lives that is out of their control and unanticipated and shocking and terrifying. So, Kamchatka’s environment and history and landscape and conditions, natural conditions, became for me, in the story, a good way to illustrate that human phenomenon of the unanticipated experience of violence. The out-of-control feeling of experiencing violence.

KB: That’s so interesting. I can’t remember if I mentioned this—I teach a class on climate change and narrative, and there’s a book that I’m obsessed with by Amitav Ghosh called The Great Derangement, that’s about—

JP: I haven’t read it.

KB: Oh, I think you would be fascinated. It’s about why has literary fiction has not figured out how to tackle climate change. One of the main analytical points he makes about our frameworks for understanding the world is that we have been living in an atypical historical period in which we thought we could predict and tame nature. He links it to the development of the intellectual discipline of probability, that when people figured out probability theory around the late eighteenth century, we sort of decided that, ‘Well, clearly, we’ve always thought that nature was unpredictable and potentially dangerous at any moment, but here’s this new discipline and here are these new ways of kind of taming, and graphing, and charting. Oh, well, tsunamis aren’t unpredictable. You can predict them as long as you know about this other thing.’ He’s basically arguing that one thing that feels so unsettling to us about climate change is that we are having to recognize that that’s a fiction. Not that probability isn’t a useful tool, but that it doesn’t actually enable us to—it gives us the ability to understand and discern some things, but doesn’t actually gives the control over them that we thought we had—

JP: It’s not protective. 

KB: Yeah, exactly. I absolutely think that you succeeded in what you were trying to achieve in the novel. The environment, the atmosphere of threat that the women face—some more directly than others, and very different kinds of threat. I’m going to forget character’s names, and I apologize, but the wonderful woman narrator who I believe is also one of the indigenous characters whose husband dies—whose second husband dies in the wilderness, that’s a kind of threat that feels quite different from the miasma of male violence that seems to be hovering over just about everybody else. As you were moving between your different narrators, how did you think about the different relationships—to threat, for sure, but also just to the place? Some of the characters are really deeply grounded in Kamchatka, some of them can’t wait to get out, some of them are dealing with the distinction between the indigenous communities that they came from and being in the city. I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about how you thought about all those very different relationships to place.

JP: That’s such a good question. For me, as the writer of this story, the fuel for it, the spark for it initially was the place itself. I decided on the setting before I had the idea for the plot. And I was in love with the place. Passionately in love with the place. A motivator for every character and every story was to depict some different part of the place, and it was a way for me to funnel my own kind of obsessive love for it into them. I think every character shows a different facet of things that were preoccupying or obsessing me about this particular place. When it comes to how that plays out for them… there’s a pretty substantial urban-rural divide in the characters—the folks who live in the city have a very different relationship to the place and landscape and the perception of ability to control their environment than the folks in the more rural areas. I think there's also a divide between people who engage in some way with the land, like someone who leads tours, or is going camping, versus the people who work in an office or in an administrative setting.

KB: I keep thinking about the—I want to say her name is Nadia but I could be wrong—the young mother whose apartment gets flooded. That makes me think about what you said about living in New York City: the intrusion of nature, and how it’s representative for her of how unreliable she thinks her partner is. That he can’t control it. Why can’t he stop this water from coming into her apartment?

JP: Yes, how dare he, how dare he? That is so interesting to think about in terms of a larger thesis or mindset around nature and landscape and the environment and humans’ relationship with the environment, in which they live and of which they are a part. That moment for her is very much based on a friend of mine who was living in that village in Kamchatka. She was living by herself in a house that frequently flooded. For her it was such a representation of money—of not having enough money to live somewhere else better. It wasn’t that rain would come and it would flood, it would flood from the water pipes going through the house. It was such a potent thing to her—she would wake up in the morning and her room would be flooded. It would be so representative of, ‘I can’t leave. I’m stuck here. My job’s not good enough that I can pay for something else. They’re paying me too little. I’m totally trapped.’ That character’s experience of her environment is totally inspired by the feeling that I would have or that my friend would have when she would talk about this. But you’re so right that the character in the story who has this partner that she’s frustrated with, is like, ‘Why can’t you make the water stop?’ [Laughs] It became a totally different story in that character’s experience.

KB: Yeah, interesting! You mentioned in class that the first story-slash-chapter that you had conceived of for this was about the missing dog, the dog disappearing. Our magazine focuses a lot on eco-writing, but also on writing about animals. Especially now that I know you’re writing a bear book—I was curious about this. That character’s relationship with her dog is the most close and devoted relationship in her life. How else did you think about non-human characters and figures—are there other non-human characters and figures in the book that you think are important? I keep thinking about—I really do not know how to pronounce her name, but …Ksyusha?

JP: Yeah, really close, actually.

KB: Her memories of being out with her parents doing herding work, and how she hates it, but she misses it, and she has all those sense memories of the presence of the herd.

JP: Yeah, but not as individual animals. More as this nostalgic and frustrating mass… How fascinating to think about. I think the dog is probably the most prominent non-human—oh well, then there’s the bear too! There’s the bear that comes to the campsite.

KB: Oh, of course! Speaking of natural intrusions that represent how unreliable your male partner is.

JP: [Laughs] There’s a couple of those in the book, for sure. Absolutely. Interesting.

KB: I hadn’t thought about that, because it’s—it is partly because unreliable Dog-Losing-Guy has also not secured the food, right? Isn’t that part of the…

JP: She doesn’t secure the food! And then she is mad at him, but she’s the one who makes the mistake.

KB: Oh, interesting.

JP: Katya, yeah.

KB: Yes, Katya. And Max?

JP: Yes! Oh my gosh, Kate, you’ve got such a good memory. I’m totally blown away. I can’t remember the characters’ names half the time, believe me. I’m really impressed.

KB: I mean, you wrote the book a while ago, that’s how this all works. Then you have to talk about it for a million years afterward until you forget your own characters’ names— [Laughs]

JP: [Laughs] True. It’s so interesting to think about the role that animals play in the book—I’ll tell you what, I will never again, thinking about eco-writing and writing about animals, I will never again endanger a dog in a narrative, because the number of messages I’ve gotten about that in particular, and the outrage and offense of this fictional dog being fictionally endangered. The girls who go missing and are kidnapped in this, no big deal—but the dog? [Laughs] Disaster.

KB: Isn’t there a website that tells you about the movies… I think it’s called doesthedogdie.com.

JP: People write to me and they say, ‘Does the dog die?’ And I’m like, ‘You know what, it’s a made up—’ This is, I’m sure, very unsatisfying— ‘It’s a made up story. You tell me. You’re asking about something that isn’t on the page, so why don’t you make up the ending that you want?’ That depiction of the dog…I wonder how this sits with the Dodge’s readers, who I imagine are dog-lovers, although I don’t know if that’s the case. So many dog-lovers out there. I grew up without any pets. I had a couple friends who grew up in pet households, and specifically in households where they had a dog, a childhood dog. And the relationships, by the time I met these friends in elementary school—I’m thinking of two people in particular, who had already had the experience of having a beloved childhood dog die. And this was a fundamental tragedy in their lives, that the most beloved, accepting best friend since you were born was gone. It was like having a sibling die, it was an absolute core loss and core love, the love for this dog. Because I had not had the experience of having a dog in the house, or growing up with a beloved animal, to me this experience was very fascinating and very… sort of out of my realm of knowledge, out of my emotional range. And I wanted that character and her relationship to her dog to live in that core feeling. These friends are actually still dear friends, I talked to them a lot in the researching and development of this character. I would ask them to tell me childhood stories, because I wanted it to be the way that you feel when you’re little and maybe you don’t feel understood or accepted, but this one being understands you totally and accepts you totally and loves you unconditionally no matter what. That character in the book, she’s also having that experience with her dog. Her dog is really her partner in this life; fundamentally, she feels accepted and loved by that dog in a way that she’s never felt accepted and loved by anyone. And it was really moving and educational for me to think more about that emotional experience and that bond. Meanwhile, the dog is a wild animal and is not made to be kept in an apartment all day while someone else is at work and if the apartment door is open… he’s going to run off and explore his world.

KB: Yeah, interesting! It’s so funny, I actually have my first dog ever now.

JP: [Gasps] What’s it like, Kate, how are you feeling?

KB: Well, I’ve had her about three years, but I did not grow up with dogs either, I grew up with cats. Um, which is—I would defend the emotional bond with cats to anyone who may disagree.

JP: My cat is downstairs waiting for me, they’re lovely, beautiful. Different vibe.

KB: Very different. This is a dog who would never run off… all she wants is to be near people and assess their well-being at every moment.

JP: Aw, what a sweetie!

KB: She’s an extremely emotionally hypervigilant dog, which makes me feel a lot of kinship with her. [Laughs] We’re both just like, ‘Is everyone okay? Does anyone need anything? What’s happening? Someone raised their voice just slightly!’ Speaking of dogs—I have not traveled in Russia, but I have traveled briefly in Bulgaria. I know that historically—in America as well—the process of how people have conceived of their relationships with pets has changed in different ways, at different rates, in different places, right? For example, my grandmother, who I never met, grew up on a farm and wrote a really terrible memoir.

JP: I love this.

KB: Yes [Laughs], which she actually tried to get published and when I worked at the Harry Ransom Center, I found the rejection—

JP: [Gasps]

KB: —the reader reports in the archives—

JP: For her?

KB: Not for that mauscript, but for another book she’d queried them on. They were right, she was not a good writer! [Laughs] We interns put together an exhibit on rejection—reader reports rejecting, you know, Anne Frank: ‘This book is too depressing, who would want to read it?’ and Sylvia Plath and Salman Rushdie. It was reassuring, in the sense that those readers were wrong.

JP: Totally.

KB: But I remember reading her memoir, about growing up on a farm in the 1900’s, 1910’s in the U.S., and what she described was a transactional, practical relationship with animals. They had pets, she loved her pets, but at the same time the pets would kind of pop in and pop out; they would be there and then they would be gone. There would be kittens, and then something would have happened to the kittens, and who knows. I know that in Bulgaria, for example, when my ex-partner was living there in the 90’s with his family, it was just post-dissolution of the Soviet Union and all of a sudden there was a huge push for pet ownership.

JP: [Surprised] Huh, how interesting.

KB: People started importing golden retrievers and all kinds of—

JP: How fascinating!

KB: I was curious whether you had a sense, in wanting to develop the emotional intensity of that connection between that character and her dog, did you feel any difference in the ways people conceived of relationships with animals in Kamchatka? I mean, perhaps, perhaps not, but I definitely felt that there are a lot of, you know—Bulgaria also, at that point in the 90’s at least, still had just massive numbers of stray dogs.

JP: Yeah, totally.

KB: There are places in the U.S. where that’s true but it’s a lot less true these days.

JP: That, I think, is a really fine-tuned, sharp question. It makes me reflect on the fact that when I was in this region, Kamchatka, most of the—I would say more than most—almost all of the close-up experiences I had between people and their animals were in a working context.

KB: [Nodding] Sure, yeah.

JP: I spent a lot of time with, for example, folks and their reindeer herds, and people and their sled dogs, in a dog-sledding context. I spent more time, much more time, with people in those contexts than I did with people and their domestic animals—that is, like their pets, their household pets.

KB: Yeah.

JP: And… for some reason, I don’t know why, but the folks whose apartments I was hanging out at the most didn’t have pets. And so, observing those working relationships…was really fascinating, really educational, because they were at once extremely intense, totally intertwined—the animal’s survival meant the person’s survival, and vice versa. But also, very separate—there wasn’t a conflation between human and animal. The sled dogs didn’t sleep in the home. No matter how cold it was outside, the dog is not a person, it doesn’t come inside and sleep in the bed and eat at the table, it has its own realm and its own sphere, which is outdoors and with other dogs. The relationship between person and dog is extraordinarily intimate, but also with an acknowledgement of separation. And I don’t think that character in the book has an acknowledgement of separation. I think she feels about the dog like she does about a….a partner or a child. She feels an intensity that is…it’s like a conflated intensity—she feels about it the way she does about a dog and she also feels about it as like a replacement for the people in her life that let her down. And that was not an experience I had with people in Kamchatka, but I think it was because of the limitations of my own…traveling research—the places that I was or the people I was with.

KB: The sample that you ended up with.

JP: Yes! The sample I ended up with, absolutely.

KB: I do think that in a lot of strands of U.S. culture—I mean, I’m sitting here with my cat on my lap, right—there is a slide toward that emotional conflation. I think about all the younger millennials and Gen Z kids who proudly, and a little provocatively I think, refer to their pets as like ‘this is my son’, you know?

JP: [Laughs] I know, I know. I have a lot of millennial peers who do that, yeah. Yeah.

KB: Yes, Anne Helen Petersen, I think, wrote a piece about, like, why she refers to her German Shepard as her daughter, partly because she doesn’t know if she will ever have the money to have a child… [Laughs]

JP: [Nodding] Yeah, yeah totally.

KB: I think it’s fascinating to see—culturally, geographically, where is that conflation moving faster. Of course, I don’t doubt at all that people living in Kamchatka have deeply bonded relationships with their—

JP: Oh my God, yeah!

KB: —pets, it’s just that clearly, there are lots of places where working animal relationships are also a huge part of the culture, and I think that, for a long time, that was much more the dominant model.

JP: Right, right. And it is such a class indicator and a work indicator: what your job is and what your day-to-day life is and what the demands are. The relationship that often surrounds me in the U.S., that people have with their pets, it’s like… the dogs are young princes walking down the street.

KB: Yes, right. Before I ended up adopting my dog from the shelter where I was volunteering at, I walked dogs at shelters for years. You don’t have to go far from those little cultural enclaves of people buying $50 dog-jackets or whatever—

JP: Yes, yes.

KB: —to encounter people who simply don’t have the means or resources to create that kind of relationship—not that it means the emotional investment is any different.

JP: No, totally. In fact, I was just thinking about the dogs I see outside in Brooklyn who have tiny shoes on, and then I thought again about the sled-dogs who also all had tiny shoes on and would have, you know, foot massages every night, their owners would massage their feet with fat every night. Because they have to be taken care of to do the work they’re going to do. So, it’s a fuzzy line, isn’t it? As we talk I’m thinking more and more, it’s really hard to say ‘here’s one way of being, and here’s another of being.’ It’s all sort of mixed up together, but there’s certainly a range in the human-animal relationships and how it looks and what the attitude is. Cultural range, and individual range.

KB: I’m an extremely digressive person, I apologize—but have you happened to see the German film I’m Your Man that came out this year?

JP: No!

KB: It’s about a woman, an academic, actually, who gets tapped to beta test a romance robot.

JP: Fascinating.

KB: At first she’s like ‘Ughhh’, you know? Like, ‘please don’t.’ Especially because his algorithmic understanding of what women want is ‘I will sprinkle rose petals on this bed for you’ and she’s just like ‘Not if you paid me,’ you know? [Laughs] But there’s a moment where his character says, ‘I’m just going to act like somebody who wants things, and who would be able to tell the difference?’ It makes me think about that question of, ‘well, if you’re rubbing the dog’s feet every night, you’re behaving with love and care.’ For a lot of caretaking relationships in the world, between people as well as between people and animals, what’s the difference between—is love the action? Is love the feeling?

JP: There’s ‘behaving with love and care as an obligation’ and there’s ‘behaving with love and care as a luxury or a choice.’

KB: [Nodding] Yes.

JP: And to what degree is distinguishing between the two of those two helpful for you? That’s  a fascinating distinction to make, and it’s also a distinction that once you make it, one wonders: ‘is there a difference in what happens in our lives once we make it?’ Which—maybe! Maybe, maybe the answer is ‘yes’, I don’t know, it’s so—people and their animals!

KB: It makes me think too of the end of the chapter in which the woman who has lost both her husbands now—she’s basically saying that, but about life? ‘I have this duty and obligation to keep living and keep surviving, and so I’m going to behave as if I want to, but I don’t want to, but I’m going to.’

JP: [About the character] ‘And whether I want to or not, I’m going to keep doing it. So, I don’t even need to behave as if I want to, I’m just going to keep doing it.’

KB: Yeah, yeah.

JP: That is… an experience that we have, sometimes.

KB: Yeah, I think that’s an experience a lot of people have had.

JP: Yeah, yeah.

KB: If not many, many other people in other contexts before, for sure.

JP: [Nodding] Yeah.

KB: Thinking about cultural attitudes—when I lived in Hawaii, it felt very evident to me that because of the physical environment that we were in, living on these really small islands surrounded by the ocean, people were more extensively aware of climate change.

JP: Right, it was not possible to say it was not happening.

KB: Right, exactly. I mean, everybody talked about ‘Oh the winds are so different this year, the coral is white’ You could be a jerk who wanted to be a denier—they did exist and there were a very small number of them in the State house—but I was curious whether… Kamchatka is a peninsula. Did you get a sense from people when you were there, whether it was described as climate change or not, was there any awareness of people talking about how the environment was changing?

JP: Yes, very much. Same thing. Everyone who had been there who was observant of or interacting with their environment, especially those people who had generational knowledge, whose families had been in the area for longer than a single generation.

KB: Yeah.

JP: There was not a person I met in that context—whether that was, for example, an ethnic Russian person who worked in tourism and would take people around to the rivers or go fishing or take them out to the mountains, or people who lived in the city who were snowboarders. A lot of people I knew were snowboarders and skiers so they would often, every single weekend, every day after work they would be on the mountains.

KB: That’s why they didn’t have pets!

JP: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah. They had things to do! Actually that makes a lot of sense, because I was like ‘why didn’t I know anyone who even had cats there?’ Because when I was in Moscow, everyone had a cat, it was such a thing. Somehow I fell into—really improbably as someone who doesn’t know how to do any winter sport—a social group of snowboarders and extreme winter sports people.

KB: Yeah, that’s great.

JP: It was great, and also people who, for example, like… the folks who were Even, who were reindeer herders, and whose families had been on Kamchatka for, let’s say, 150 years, 200 years. Even people are not indigenous Kamchatkan, they’re indigenous Siberian; Even people came to Kamchatka in the 1800’s. For anyone who basically had any degree of interaction with the natural world in which we’re living, and certainly for those who had people, who, from previous generations, told them ‘it used to be like this and now it’s different,’ it was not a discussion, it was not a controversy, it was just a very clear acknowledgement of ‘well, the seasons used to be like this and now they’re like this’ and ‘there used to be snow on this volcano that you could see from the sea, never melted and it was there year-round, now it’s not there year-round anymore because of global warming.’ It was a constant explanation in the same way that like ‘the bus comes at this time, and this is what we do, and you have to turn left at this stoplight’ like, ‘there is global warming and things are changing’, and that was a matter of fact.

KB: Yeah.

JP: Is that how it is for everywhere in the world? It’s not surprising to me that that’s how it was in Hawaii.

KB: Yeah, I don’t think so. I mean, I think that there are places, I feel like I’m living in one of them right now, where there absolutely are day-to-day effects that are evident, but you can ignore it if you want to.

JP: Yeah.

KB: You know? There are places like that right now, and then there are places where—it may or may not translate into either individual behavior change or direct action, but there is just this practical, sort of no-nonsense recognition that obviously it’s different, a ‘you’re not going to go out and expect to find the rivers at the same level that they were before because they’re not, and so what good would it do to deny it?’ kind of thing.

JP: Yes, yes. Exactly, right. When it comes to behavior change…  Some of the lessons for me being in that particular place as compared to the place I’d come from and the place that I came back to afterwards: the infrastructure, physical infrastructure, on Kamchatka is markedly less than great. That makes a huge difference in people’s relationship to the land, to resources and stability. The feeling of ‘we need to take of each other because nobody is taking care of us, we need to look out for each other.’ It’s a huge attitudinal difference toward how to behave in the world. I wonder if this is similar in Hawaii too… the supply chain was either much, much, much longer or much shorter. So, like, if you wanted to get an orange at the grocery store, it was going to be imported on a boat. You were very aware—in the grocery store it would say ‘here are apples from New Zealand.’ So, probably, you’re not going to go to the grocery store and buy an apple for $5, you’re going to go to the market and you’re going to get potatoes, and beets, and carrots grown by someone who lives a couple miles from you.

KB: Yeah.

JP: That was a very different way of sourcing food and resources than I had seen before, or noticed before, in my day-to-day life.

KB: Of course, especially compared to New York City.

JP: Oh my God, right, exactly.

KB: You can get everything.

JP: You can get everything, who knows where it’s from, I mean if you pay attention I’m sure you know where it’s from—I don’t pay attention. And it made me realize that I don’t pay attention, I just think, ‘I want this meat’, I don’t think ‘where did this meat come from?’ ‘how old is it?’, ‘what’s going on?’, I’m just like, ‘here is one package of meat in a million packages of meat at this place.’

KB: Yes.

JP: And it’s a very different relationship to—there’s endless supply.

KB: Yeah.

JP: And so the demand feels very casual and like it costs nothing. The feeling of scarcity or limitation on Kamchatka made me much more aware of, you know, ‘where’s the water coming from?’, ‘where’s the milk coming from?’ Also folks there would say, ‘this is local, you wanna have this cause this is local.’ The stuff that comes in from outside is not going to be as healthy, as cheap, as useful. Was that the case in Hawai`i too—I mean I know Hawai`i must be so abundant with food and things that are growing—

KB: So, I lived in Honolulu, which from day-to-day, generally feels a lot like any big city. It’s a huge port. Like Puerto Rico, Hawai`i is also under the Jones Act—so everything that gets shipped to Hawai`i, first has to go to the mainland. If something’s coming from China, for example, it has to go to the port of LA, and then go there. So things are very expensive. But there are lots of farmers markets. Where I experienced more of what you’re talking about was actually on other islands, in particular Moloka`i, which has very vew residents. It’s not really a tourist location, and they have maybe just one, maybe two grocery stores. You will see things being sold in the grocery store there that are, like, Kirkland brand, that people have bought from Costco on the mainland or on O`ahu.

JP: Good business. That’s the same model that the bodega around the corner from me has for just, like, opened-up boxes of pasta—

KB: Right, right. You’re like ‘I think these come in packs’… When I was on O`ahu, a colleague of mine said, ‘Well, you know, if the airport ever gets taken out in a storm, there are nine days of food for everybody on the island’—

JP: Oi yoi yoi.

KB: Yeah, indeed. If a person were to grow up on Kaua`i, on Big Island, on Moloka`i, they probably, I’m guessing, would have more of the feeling that you’re describing. You can still go to the big chain grocery store and buy things, there will be tons of abundance, it will be expensive… or you could go down the street and buy somebody’s eggs from the farm. The farmer’s market in Hilo, on Big Island—just amazing, dragon fruit, lychee, rambutan. I do think you’re right that living in a remote place gives you a bit of a different relationship to the process of choosing what you’re going to consume and what you are aware of.

JP: [Nodding] Yeah, yes.

KB: I did want to ask you one question about translations, since that’s also something that The Dodge focuses on. You talked about translating, sort of mentally translating, specific Russian phrases to give a sense of the ‘flavor’ of people’s speech and the idioms people use… you also talked about having come to the Russian language as an enthusiast and a Russian literature reader. Could you could talk a little bit more about what it was like to actually live in a culture that you had encountered primarily as a reader? And getting back to this urban-rural divide: I’m guessing, as in most literatures, that a ton of Russian literature is very urban.

JP: Yes, very urban and very western. As in, set in Western Russia, in and around Moscow and St. Petersburg.

KB: What did it feel like to go from this sort of ‘classics of Russian Lit,’ Moscow, St. Petersburg-focused environment, mentally, into this same language, but very different culture. How was that an act of translation?

JP: It was a gradual transition for me—when I was twelve years old, I had a crush on a Russian-American camp counselor who spoke a little Russian. I thought that was so cool. I was like ‘this person blows my mind, Russian is so awesome.’ It was a very influenceable period of my life. And Russian, Russian language, Russian-ness, seemed very attractive because of this person, who I found very attractive. It started to grow from there. I wanted to be a writer, and I was like ‘oh my gosh, Russia has all this great literature.’ As someone who wanted to be a writer, stories of Russian history are also very compelling. Russia was a hugely formative nation through the 20th century, in terms of the formation of ‘American-ness,’ American identity. I started to learn more about this place. If I watched a movie and there was a Russian villain, or a Soviet villain, it began to be clear to me what that meant. There was so much in the stories I was learning about Russia or about the Soviet Union, that was not just limited to the literature that I was reading that was Russian or Soviet, it was the whole narrative around this particular place. So it was a kind of ‘ramping up’; I started to learn the language when I was in college, went to Moscow for a bit and got to spend some time in western Russia, which was such a dream come true, and then I started to apply for the Fulbright to go to Kamchatka—I was waitlisted twice, it’s a long process, the Fulbright application. So I had a good amount of time, I want to say two or three years, to… wish to go to this place. It wasn’t like all of a sudden I was immersed in this intense environment. I was watching movies about Kamchatka, corresponding with people from Kamchatka, doing translations… I did translations for a national park there and a tourist company, where they would send me their Russian text and I would translate it into English, which ended up being really helpful for relationship building and just for knowing more about the place. Taught me a lot of Russian words – taught me a lot of American, you know, English words too that I didn’t know… you know, geological words that I didn’t know. And so, I was sort of practicing, in my imagination, what this place was or trying to incorporate stories about it before I went there. That was helpful, to go in with some ground work. That said, by the time I got to Kamchatka, I had studied Russian for six years. I had lived in Russia for six months. My Russian was not strong at all. I was in Kamchatka for two months before I could ask someone directions on the street and they would tell me where to go, without saying like ‘oh I’m sorry, I don’t understand you,’ you know, ‘girl, I don’t understand you’ is what people say [Laughs], not girl, exactly, ‘miss’, ‘miss, I don’t understand you.’ I had a lot of practice in my head of what it would be like to be in this place, but actually being there and interacting was totally different and much more challenging.

KB: Yeah.

JP: I don’t know if I had enough fluency in the world of ideas to really understand what I was translating from or to. I think being there was so new, and stimulating, and exciting that it kind of kept washing over me every day, and was incorporated in ways that were not necessarily the reflection of conscious or deliberate decisions I was making. Kind of just washed in. Then when I was there, the literature I was reading was, like, Sherlock Holmes. I would speak Russian all day and then I would get so exhausted, and I would go home and I would read free books on Project Gutenberg, so I was reading all this classic, out-of-copyright British and American literature, English-language literature. And that too was a funny kind of translation, from Russian-self to English-speaking-self.

KB: It’s hard to talk about all of these things right now without thinking about Ukraine, to some extent, and so--

JP: Of course. I was wondering if we should even have this conversation.

KB: I know. I’ll tell you a little bit about what I was thinking. My general question was: as you are seeing the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, has it made you sort of… do you feel like your experience living in Russia in various locations is making you think back to things you experienced while there? My context for this was… your book explores so many hierarchies, right? There’s the central hierarchy of the ethnic Russian versus indigenous, regarding the missing girls and how resources are devoted to that. And Putin’s rationale for attacking Ukraine seems like really profoundly hierarchical to me. It’s focused on his understanding—his ahistorical understanding—of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, where Russia is ‘real’ and Ukraine is ‘fake.’ If you’ve read Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy—the Oankali, the aliens in that series, they tell humans that our destructive behavior is because we’re both intelligent and hierarchical. And there’s also a short story that Jane Smiley wrote called “Hillside” that’s from the point of view of a horse, set post-climate change. Animals are assessing the few remaining humans and asking, ‘What do we do with these humans who have messed everything up so badly?’ It’s also very focused on questions of hierarchy, and in particular a sort of macho, young, male human desire to control things, which feels very Putin-esque. So, uh, any of that that you want to engage with is fine.

JP: It’s interesting to think about Putin’s understanding as ahistorical with the idea of history being the stories we tell ourselves, stories that are compelling? He is voicing a story that is not only his understanding of history, and he’s testing out—Russian state media is testing out, too—a narrative and seeing how it works. It’s really been making me think about propaganda. The nature of propaganda around the world, as something that we’ve all engaged with, especially in this internet age, as we are delivered propaganda over and over and over again in different forms. It’s not only replicated by the government, but also by our friends and our family members, and we ourselves become deliverers of propaganda. I have been really interested…I guess the thing I want to say is I’ve been really interested in sources for news. I’m thinking about sources for news right now. People with expertise. I am a huge fan of the journalist Julia Ioffe and have been following her really actively. There are so many folks in Ukraine doing incredible reporting. People who are really on the ground, who have a robust understanding of what’s going on and a historical context that they can provide. I think some people in the U.S. had this realization around the past few election cycles: ‘I really need to understand where my news is coming from and what it’s trying to say…’ This war has been that moment for me. Realizing where I’m getting my news from, how much I value the expertise of those Ukrainian or post-Soviet journalists. Meduza is a fantastic Russian news site that shows an alternative to the Russian state media. People, and outlets, are out here trying to speak the truth as they see  experience it. So I wanted to say… Hooray for fiction. Love fiction. Write fiction. But when it comes to life or death, today, in this moment, right now? When it comes to war? Let’s support those people who tell the truth.

Julia Phillips is the debut author of the internationally bestselling novel Disappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A Fulbright fellow, Julia has written for The New York Times, ​The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. She teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and is the founder of the online event series Lit Mixer.  For more on her past and upcoming projects, please visit https://www.juliaphillipswrites.com/.

Published August 15 2022