Sneak Peek: Andrew Krivak Podcast

Andrew Krivak: So after my second novel, “The Signal Flame,” I just wanted to do something different. I was taking a break and my wife and I have a house in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in the shadow of Mount Monadnock, and I’ve always just loved going up there. There’s a kind of quality to the nature that just always surprises me in its simplicity. It was, by the way, a favorite place for Henry David Thoreau and Emerson, a lot of the transcendentalists, and I think I know why. Because there’s just this quality of its oldness, and I thought my next project would be -- I wanted to write a novel in which an older person and a younger person were living close to the land, and how would they interact with nature? And I was out fishing in my boat one day trying to think about how I could create this narrative which was both a domestic narrative and also a journey narrative, and I was just looking around at the mountain and the forest and the water, and I thought to myself, “Wow, this must’ve been just beautiful for the first people who were here,” and I thought, “I wonder what it’s going to like for the last?” and that’s when it hit me. I just rode to shore and I sat down and wrote of the last two, and after that it became clear that if this was the case, that each step of the narrative had to mirror that. How did they live? How did they measure time? What was their present moment like? What was their future like or how did they imagine their future? And so that’s where the book itself took on that final stage of the last two.