Novelist and poet Meg Files recently spoke on a panel at the Associated Writing Program’s annual meeting.  She talked about researching for writing her novels. After her talk, Meg and I conducted an email interview about how her research affects her writing, her imagination, and her teaching.

What research did you do for your first novel, which is set where you once lived?

My first novel Meridian 144 is set on a South Pacific island after a nuclear war. So there were two major research efforts here. The first, the island, was both easy and difficult: easy, because I’d been living on a South Pacific island for three years when I began the book. All I had to do was look out my window for atmospheric details. But difficult because, well, all I had to do was look out my window.

I couldn’t see the jungle for the banyans. I looked out the window above my desk at the flapping banana tree leaves, at the snake twisting down an ironwood trunk and beyond to the ocean’s blues advancing to the horizon, from light and shallow to deep Prussian. When I wrote about the reality before my eyes, the descriptions might have been suitable for a naturalist’s guide or a tourist brochure, but not for the true picture I wanted to reveal.

Often it works better to write about a place after we’ve left it. The mind’s eye sees the true details.  We find our experiences’ truths when we look backward, when we squint, when we see from afar. Writing Meridian 144 took off for me when I got off what my husband called “that goddamned hunk of rock,” which I saw as Eden destroyed.

I began the real work on the book in southern Illinois, at my mother-in-law’s kitchen table (bless you, Dorothy), and continued through a stretch of time in South Dakota, about as far in many ways from a South Pacific island as you can get. I finished the book in Arizona, which does have palm trees but not much beachfront property.

What was it like for you looking back?

I had just enough distance to hold the island in my mind and to see its essences. The island time was still fresh enough that the details were clear and I wasn’t romanticizing the experience.

And what was the second part of your research for your book? 

The second half of the research was nuclear war.  It was much easier– oddly, perhaps, because it didn’t come from familiarity.  I read all about the military-industrial complex, who sells arms to whom, biological warfare, the probable effects of nuclear winter, and how my character might survive.  The horror of it all, in all its specificity, made me understand that I could not use a nuclear war as a device for isolating my character and forcing her to come to terms with her messed-up life. After the research, I could never destroy the world lightly. Once you’ve done the research, you cannot use the information as merely a backdrop to the story. It is integral to the story – or it is the burned-up heart of the story.

That is a great phrase,  “the burned-up heart of the story.”  Can you offer an example of how research about nuclear destruction became the “burned-up heart” of your story?

 Near the end of the story, Kitty is holed up in Lim Bong’s Liquors, a boarded-up shop, with two other survivors of the end of the world, a Japanese tourist named Norio and a wounded islander named Jesse as well as a dog and a goat. They’re caught in a typhoon. Here are Kitty’s thoughts, with all this chaos and destruction and human pain swirling around her:

The wind alternately blew and sucked. Objects, rocks or buckets maybe, hit the concrete walls. Occasional spurts of rain sprayed our heads and our hunched shoulders.

Did you ever think this is natural? I wanted to ask Norio, but he could not understand me and I could not bear to hear my own voice in the moment’s vacuum when the wind reversed direction. Stop continental drift indeed. No nukes. Stop the war. Right. As easily stop the entire flux from birth to the end. There was only one current and only one destination. Whenever you disembarked, you arrived. Forget your Baedeker, your Fodor’s. There was no wandering, there was no navigation. The current had you, and you have to go the way of all flesh.

Norio and the wounded man and Kitty and the dog and the goat were merging, tangling into a sargasso island, pulling the flocks of rain, the sanguine darkness, the continents to us. My mother died and they all died and our old species died. As easily stop the entire flux: the tail dropped away, we breathed air, we looked into our brain, we were ashamed, we were towed into the spiral, we believed we could escape. But my mother died, and Daniel and all the others were carrion now, and holocaust had always been the end. The rain was salty. I reached across the wounded man and felt Norio’s wet face and carried his hand to my wet face. The wounded man absorbed our shaking. The island was coral, collective bodies, and in the jungle rotted carcasses of boar and rat snakes and tiny deer and geckos, and in the sea settled husks of crabs. So the creatures died. I didn’t believe a Japanese man would weep. It’s natural, I wanted to tell him. So the species dies. We wept with our hands on each other’s face. We had been as lovely as the coral, as the geckos, and now we would settle with the ragged claws and the mammalian bodies, buried and unburied.

“No, no,” the wounded man cried and flung his arms out.

We held him, converging like coral breathing water.

This is striking writing:  “We had been as lovely as the coral, as the geckos, and now we would settle with the ragged claws and the mammalian bodies, buried and unburied”.  It’s as if “the burned-up heart of the book” is the way the state of the world and the woman’s inner state wrap together and in so doing, the woman is not isolated even in the most isolating of circumstances.  Instead of emphasizing alienation, you emphasize a coming together as part of nature:  “We held, him, converging like coral breathing water.”  I experience the outcome of your immersion in the imagined end-of-the-world scenario in the poetry of these lines.

You’ve done a lot of writing since that first novel.  What are you researching now?

My new novel has required research about the American West, where I’ve lived most of my adult life and about which I know a fair amount, in terms of environmental issues, terrain, small-town life, education, and the newspaper business, too. But personal experience has its limits. Ambiance isn’t sufficient. In the first part of the book, a mine explodes, killing many men and implicating the father of one of my key players, and though the events are based on fact (that old excuse) – I had been advisor to the student newspaper at Colorado Mountain College when the student editor wrote a story (based on inside information her boyfriend, a miner, told her) about how the miners tampered with their instruments so they could stay underground longer, and were in fact tacitly encouraged to do so, and the story in the student paper led to a blow-up between the mine president and the college president, and you can imagine the falling debris – and when a week later the mine itself blew up, killing 16 men, the paper received kudos from the Columbia Journalism Review, a horrible vindication – but the point is, all of that wasn’t enough to allow me to write about what it was like to be down there. So I read a bunch of different miners’ accounts and found an actual miner who’d quit the exploded mine a week before it blew up (because his wife was nervous), and went down in a mine to smell the damp details. And the fictional father survives but loses his leg, and so now I need to research amputation and pain and phantom limb and prosthetics. . . .

And that’s just the preliminary stuff. The real story is set (or, anyway, I believe it will be set) at a modern-day reenactment of the mountain man rendezvous, as a way for my characters to spend a little span of time in the land of myth), and in the name of research I have traveled to real rendezvous in New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, as well as to a couple tourist versions: what the buckskinners call “towndezvous.”  I’ve slept in a tipi, learned that the toilet is called a “hooter,” and seen boxes full of fox and otter faces you can buy for $2 each, and a dog in a buckskin cape.

The old-timey stuff doesn’t really matter to the book, but I got interested, and so I know that the original rendezvous were drunken feasts worthy of the Roman Empire, that during the 16 years of the mountain man time (1824-40), 100,000 beavers were “consumed” each year in the hat industry, and that in 1934 a white man would be paid $6-$8 for a large beaver “plew” (25 cents for mink or rat), while an Indian got one bunch of common cut beads, 30 loads of ammo, one blanket, one shirt, and a half yard blue or scarlet cloth. (Sometimes it’s more than you want to know.)

And the whole story is sort of a retelling, with a spin, of High Noon – or maybe not– and so I’ve watched that great movie a dozen times at least, and while I was at it, a slew of Westerns, taking notes and pulling quotes:

“Any time a man weasels out on you, turns out he’s doing you a favor.” – Hombre

“No such thing as an innocent man.” – Vera Cruz

“A man’s guilt’s his own burden. You can’t do anything about it.” –No Name on the Bullet

Ah, wisdom!

What do you think you will do with these quotes?

Right now I’m seeing them as epigraphs to start sections of the book and chapters.

Do you do all of your research at once or do you have to keep researching as you go?

I often return to the research.  I love the little research that requires me to look up a fact or a detail when I’m in the midst of a project.

When I was in the throes of my book about writing, I took a break and had lunch with a friend.  He told me about a technique of teaching drawing called “flash lab,” in which the beginning artists sit before their sketchpads and then the lights are turned off. An image, such as a chair, is projected onto a screen for a tenth of a second. Then, still in the dark, the artists draw the afterimage of the flash. The results are fresh, lively, and original as they catch the essence of the chair. The beginners produce drawings much beyond their level of skill and experience.

I couldn’t help but think of parallels with teaching writing, and I went off on an elaborate hunt for the dissertation that led to the “flash lab” approach and found the only two people, as far as I could tell, who’d practiced it.  I was regularly led astray in my search into all manner of odd things, consuming many hours, all for two paragraphs in the book.

Sometimes it spooks me to see that research and I don’t have a totally one-sided relationship, and research seems to notice me.

My editor at Soho wanted me to develop a scenario for the blow-up of the world. I’d left it vague, thinking my character, off on her little island and not particularly politically aware, wouldn’t know. (Maybe that was my excuse to avoid the research!) So I did my homework and found Saddam Hussein and all his dastardly deeds and made him attack Israel and, well, the rest was history in my book. And then Desert Storm came along and my scenario was close but not close enough, and my editor wanted me to return the end of the world to vague. But in the meanwhile I’d done all this research and written it into my novel, and, I gotta tell you, I was scared.

So there’s a downside to researching?

Yes.  One of the problems is that current events impede. Another is that you begin to feel, horrifyingly, like a prophet: as if writing it predetermines it.

I also hate research, because I know its wiles.

It will make you stray. You thought you were researching the cost of an illegal abortion in Puerto Rico in the 60s ($800, in case you want to know, with a moral lecture from the doctor afterwards) – but soon you’ve found a study that says kissing, not sex, is the first activity to go when a relationship turns bad, and somehow that leads you to some great lines by Rumi: “for the sea is in love with the drop / the sun is in love with the candle.” Research can lead you so far away you may never return.

And it can compel you too much – so that there’s too much fact and history and too little story.

Or you can spend so much time on it that you never get around to the story – and then even the research goes cold.

Or the research, finally used, shows. It proclaims all the hard work the writer did. Recently I read a book set in the 60s, written by a 30-year-old (if you can trust the jacket photo). She’d done her homework and was determined to use it all. The novel was pretty much the story of the bell-bottoms and slouch purses in the character’s closet.

The flip side is too little homework. I think of a novel featuring characters from New York City who go on a road trip, and in downtown Phoenix have to swerve to avoid running over a dead armadillo. That wrong detail made me question everything in the book.

If you were to have a last say about research, what would it be?

Research can be the best excuse in the world to avoid writing.  So research can go bad. Still, it is a great joy, and necessary.  We learn to follow the research and our private obsessions. They lead us to places we never could have planned (if we were organized).

We learn to trust the research. Lots of it will be wasted, in that you won’t use it directly. But sometimes you needed to go there to meander or leap to another place – and how could you have known?

Some of the research will turn out to be accidentally useful. I learned a lot about teen Satanism, which I thought was part of a book but later turned out not to be. But when a student of mine was sucked into a cult, believe me, it was useful to be familiar with LaVey’s 9 Satanic Statements.

And some of it’s not useful except to wow your friends: “Did you know that ghosts making regular appearances in mines were called “white socks’?”

Research reveals that it’s a wondrous world and that it all connects – from radioactive breadfruit to fox faces stripped from their skulls. T.S. Eliot enjoins us in “Little Gidding,” “We shall not cease from exploration.” I believe we do research to go into the world.