Beneath the Prairie Sea: An Interview with Joshua Philip Johnson
Nonfiction - by Matthew Rettino
Joshua Philip Johnson is a fantasy novelist and English and Creative Writing university professor from Minnesota who grew up on what used to be a prairie.
His first novel The Forever Sea (2021) is about an all-women merchant crew and their adventures sailing a tall ship across a prairie of mile-high grass. Kindred, the ship’s hearthfire keeper, is responsible for the magic flame that keeps them floating and moving. She longs to follow the song in her heart and venture away from the settled grasslands to discover the true depths the sea has to offer.
Johnson is also the author of several short stories, including “The Ghost Repeater,” a post-apocalyptic tale about a girl and boy navigating a transformed world, and “The Child Seed,” a baba yaga story.
The Forever Sea was the first fantasy novel I read after a months-long pandemic reading drought. I am thus very enthusiastic to interview Josh about his novel, which has so many of the features I associate with the best of J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin: it’s a coming of age story filled with a sense of wonder at the magic of the natural world.
MR: In my opinion, one of the things fantasy as a genre does best is create a sense symbolically of an emotionally charged natural landscape. Your prairie sea is certainly one of these landscapes. I’m not sure if your novel is the only prairie-based fantasy novel out there, but the setting certainly struck me as original. You also wrote about the prairie in your short story “The Ghost Repeater.”
Can you describe what makes the prairie such a magical place for you? What kind of stories can happen on a prairie that can’t happen in forests, mountains, or deserts?
JPJ: It’s a strange thing to write about the prairie; it’s an often-forgotten, mostly eradicated landscape in the United States. Less than 4% of the original 170 million acres of tallgrass prairie in North America remain today, and what’s left is often in tiny postage-stamp preserves that, though wonderful and impressive, can’t help but evoke what has been lost just as much as what has been saved. And so, for me, the prairie is a landscape that mostly lives in my imagination and in the memory of the place where I now reside (an area of Minnesota called the Prairie Pothole Region, which, once upon a time, was covered in prairie grasses). That longing for a gone world is a big driver in my work, and it’s a big part of what makes the prairie so appealing to me.
Outside of that, the tendency to see grassland of any kind as boring, monolithic landscape is something I’m interested in. It’s easy to see huge mountains and sweeping oceans and rushing rivers as powerful, compelling settings in stories (and life), but I think a seemingly boring stretch of prairie grasses as equally compelling and interesting. I’m sure there are lots of other fantasies that show the prairie (or, at least, grasslands) in cool ways, so I don’t know if I’m forging a new path, but it felt fresh to me nonetheless.
In terms of the stories that can happen in a landscape like this, I think I cheated a bit by making my prairie a literal sea—miles high and infinitely wide, it’s a landscape that suddenly evokes (requires, for me) ships and sea tales, adventure and mystery, high-stakes journeys and a medley of melodies sung aboard the vessels. I couldn’t help but think of that stuff as I imagined what story to tell about the prairie. Pirate and sea stories have always felt vaguely nostalgic to me, and that fit neatly with this one.
It is worth noting that lots of people before me have thought of and written about the prairie as an “inland sea,” though not all as literally as I do here. There’s something about tall, obscuring grasses (tall enough, an ecologist once told me, to “obscure a man on horseback”) that makes a mysterious promise. What’s under there? What’s hiding in there? What strange things does the dark hold? Maybe you can tell that story with a mountain (the Balrog beneath Moria or something like that), but it feels different to me when it’s a grassland, and there’s nothing but air and a few plant fibers between you and the mystery—as opposed to hundreds of tons of rock.
MR: As a hearthfire keeper, Kindred must sing to the fire in order to control things like the speed and direction of the ship. Some of her songs are sea shanties, while others have deep emotional significance, such as the children’s song she stole from her grandmother, the formidable Marchess. How did you come up with the songs? What was your inspiration?
JPJ: This is a tough question! To be honest, I just found a lot of those songs inside me. I know that sounds silly and too abstract, and I don’t mean for it to at all. They all went through revision, and I made sure that they were all accomplishing the plot and tonal things I wanted them to, but at the start, I just sat and tried to listen for a melody inside of me for them. There’s this wonderful idea I first encountered in the work of Sondra Perl (though I don’t know that she was the one to coin it or first discuss it) called “felt sense,” which is a kind of bodily feeling connected with writing. It’s the moment where you sit quietly and listen/look inside yourself for what needs to come next or how that line should feel or sound. For me, a lot of prose comes from that place and that approach, and the songs all came from there, at least at the beginning.
As for the inspiration, I tried to listen to a lot of sea shanties and read a lot of poetry. Poetry (at least most of my favorite poetry) and music are deeply related for me, and I treated my attention to one as almost the same as my attention to the other when it came to filling my inspirational well for the hearthfire songs.
MR: Your novel, as well as your short stories, have a distinctly poetic way with language. Have you written poetry before, or perhaps taught it? Can you talk for a bit about your experience writing poetry?
JPJ: Oh thank you for saying that! I dearly and deeply love poetry, and I simply have no idea how to write it. The space between poetic (the adjective) and poetry (the noun) is a vast chasm that I have yet to cross, but I remain a constant reader of poetry. I do teach it in some creative writing classes, and I try to be really honest with students when I do. I’m not a poet, though I’d love to be. I find poetry endlessly interesting and powerful, and I try to be the best reader of it I can, with the hopes that it will both enrich me and my fiction.
As I was working on both The Forever Sea and the sequel, The Endless Song, I was reading and rereading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which is one of my favorite texts of all time, and I find his incredible use of lists—long, iterative, momentous things that gain power and meaning with each new syllable and comma–so wonderful. I tried and continue to try to imitate and use that in my own prose, though not as well as he did. Outside of Whitman, I read a lot of Ross Gay, Athena Kildegaard, Todd Boss, Heid Erdrich, Etheridge Knight, and John Milton.
MR: While reading The Forever Sea, I also appreciated that your magic system was technically sophisticated, yet still wild, unpredictable, and wondrous. It can be a difficult balance to strike. What challenges did designing your magic system present?
JPJ: The biggest challenge for me, by far, was figuring out my answer to the question of how much of my magic system to reveal (and, relatedly, how “hard” to make it). There are fantasy writers who are so good at utilizing every aspect of a super systematized magic system; they create spellwork that can be represented with flow charts and formulae, and it works! Readers gain a real pleasure by thinking through the science of the magic system and gaming it out, and I find that cool and interesting and totally impossible for me! So I settled on a much softer magic system, one that Kindred operates mostly through feeling; one with rules that seem more like abstract dicta than concrete cause-and-effect relationships; one that feels more like art than science. For me, that kind of magic system makes sense, but I realize it can be frustrating to a reader, and so a big part of my challenge was trying to find a happy medium between magic being hard to describe and wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey and magic being understood enough to grasp plot points and character decisions.
MR: What was the biggest challenge you faced when writing this book, and how did you overcome it?
JPJ: This book had such a long lifecycle that it’s hard to identify one particular challenge that rose above the rest. That said, finishing the first draft was particularly hard for me. I’d written myself so far away from the ending I’d planned (and that I knew was right for the book), and so I sat with a conundrum for a long time: do I write the correct ending for that draft or the correct ending for the next draft? In the end, I chose the second option and stuck a mismatched, unprepared ending on to a messy draft, and it hurt to write every single word.
MR: Kindred is scolded as an apprentice hearthfire keeper, yet when she gains an apprentice, she must become a teacher herself. Did you draw from your own experiences as an educator when you wrote this aspect of Kindred’s arc?
JPJ: Oh yes! Teaching has been my career for almost 10 years now, and I still find it as challenging and complicated as I did on the first day, maybe more. What do you do when your understanding of a thing is partially intuitive and yet your job is to explain it to someone else? How do you teach intuition and creativity and art? Can you teach that stuff? These are things I think about a lot when I teach creative writing (and even academic writing) classes, and I wanted some of that to filter through to Kindred, who is good at what she does but perhaps not so great at teaching.
I also wanted to spend some time in this book (and in the next) thinking about how Kindred’s grandmother, The Marchess, taught her to keep the fire, and what kind of person and hearthfire keeper that made her. I’ve been lucky to have lots of different teachers during my life, teachers of many different topics and types, and the ones who taught me most (or, maybe, who gave me space and created the conditions for me to learn the most) were the ones who offered their opinions and ideas with full confidence and yet encouraged me to think critically and do what I wanted with the content of their teaching.
And so Kindred is someone who learns how to keep the fire from her grandmother, but is then put under the responsibility of a hearthfire keeper (Rhabdus) who takes a different approach to keeping the fire (and doesn’t think much of Kindred’s intuitive, artistic keeping). This conflicting pedagogical lineage comes to a head when Kindred gets her own chance to teach, and I wanted to contend, at least a little bit, with the decision teachers have to make about stepping away from the techniques that worked for them as students.
MR: To be a complete theory nerd, I was thinking a lot of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s distinction between smooth and striated spaces when reading about the nomadic Once-City squaring off against the settled city of Arcadia, which attempts to tame and exploit the prairie. Were you thinking of Ten Thousand Plateaus when writing about it? There is certainly a strong ecological message in this novel.
JPJ: Oh boy. I haven’t thought of Deleuze and Guattari since graduate school! I loved Ten Thousand Plateaus when I read it back in 2011 or 2012, but I haven’t thought consciously about it since then, and while I’d really like to claim some brilliant theoretical underpinning to the architectures and cultures of those two cities, I think any influence from TTP is coming from a level of my mind I don’t have access to.
The biggest conscious influence for the Once-City and Arcadia comes from Paul Gruchow’s brilliant book, Journal of a Prairie Year, where he observes with startling, beautiful clarity how landscape (and how the prairie) can work on the mind and the heart and the culture of a people.
MR: You told me once at Odyssey that your prairie pirates project was going to be a gender-flipped little mermaid story about a man living at the bottom of the prairie sea. Is this what’s in store for the sequel, The Endless Song? What exciting adventures can we expect?
JPJ: I had all sorts of big, wild ideas about this story before I really started writing it. Initially, I had imagined a kind of dual narrative where someone from below was trying to reach the surface and someone from the surface was trying to reach below, but I couldn’t find a way to make it work in one book.
The Endless Song does, though, offer a double-POV narrative, one of whom is Kindred and one of whom is a new character named Flitch o’ the Borders, and readers will get lots of time spent (*Sebastian voice*) unda da sea. I think I’ve lost some of the gender-flipped Little Mermaid, but you can expect lots of other neat things: a Forever Sea floor littered with strange creatures, strange people, and strange myths; a Mainland above on the precipice of major conflict; a mysterious labyrinth haunted by an enigmatic creature; and all the prairie sea a growing body needs!