Not Your Standard Undead Tale: An Interview with Jason Mott by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff (Part 4)

[Check out part one, part two and part three of the interview!] 

Jason Mott is a poet and novelist. His first two collections of poetry, We Call this Thing Between us is Love and Hide Behind Me, were published by Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2011, and his first novel, The Returned, was released in August 2013 with Harlequin MIRA and has been adapted for the television show, Resurrection, by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Mott was nominated for an NAACP Award in the category of “Outstanding Literary Work—Debut Author” in 2014. Resurrection airs TONIGHT on ABC.

This conversation took place in May of 2013.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff: Ok, so what are the returned? I mean it’s one of the mysteries of the book. They look and act more or less like normal humans. They have to eat, drink, sleep; they have internal organs etc. There are some differences like the vast amount of food they eat and the slight amount of time they sleep, but they seem more or less normal. What are they?

Jason Mott: I’m a very rational person. I love science, but at the end of the day this is an event that could never happen. So this question about the explanation comes up a lot. This is impossible. I’m not going to insult my readers by giving them some condescending answer. Instead, I ask the readers to ponder the question for themselves and, at the end of the day, the returned are whatever the reader decides they are. The reader can fill in the backstory of the returned however they see fit.

AMK&MH: Even if it did happen in the real world, we probably would be able to determine how, right?

JM: Precisely. To me, the returned are representative of so much more than whatever the answer to who or what they are could answer. It really comes in a far second to what they offer and what they fulfill in people. I just don’t really care what their backstory is or how they got there. If my mother showed up today, I wouldn’t give two shits about the how or why, I’d just be happy she was there. I would take circumstances as they were and make the best of what was given.

AMK&MH: This is another reason The Returned crosses over from genre to literature in my opinion: you don’t ask, “What’s going to happen next?” you ask, “What would I do if this happened to me?” You ask, “Why has this happened, not just what is going to happen.” I suspect that’s what will draw folks to The Returned... the novel as well as the TV show. Do you really believe you’d accept your mother if she returned, no questions asked?

JM: Oh yeah. I would love to have her return just to see how far I’ve come. I wanted to create this world where you had people who weren’t excited about those who were coming back. Every death is different, and it affects those connected differently. I’m not the same person I was when my mother passed in 2001; I’m not the same person I was when my father passed in 2008. So… in a way, part of me is worried, if she did come back, would she like the person I’ve become? Would we have friction? Would there be anything about me now that she wouldn’t like or approve of? I wanted to put those ideas into character as well.

AMK&MH: I hadn’t really thought of it that way before.

JM: Yeah, you spend years apart and you change and grow and develop; you get new interests, hobbies, you develop new outlooks on life. Take the pastor for example: his love interest (when he was 17) returns, but now he’s a married man, he has a wife. But she’s still 17; she still sees him at that stage in his life and, he has to ask himself if he is comfortable with who he has become in order to stay in the role he lives now. I think that’s a big friction point for people; I like to provide friction points for characters.

AMK&MH: How long did it take you to write The Returned?

JM: About ten months.

AMK&MH: Woah! That seems quick.

JM: Well, that’s before we got into revisions and serious editing, but yeah about ten months for the first draft of the entire manuscript. I started drafting it in September 2010 and finished it around July 2011.

Then I sent out queries way earlier than I should have….. I got lucky that my agent didn’t reply back until October; by then I had made some very heavy revisions. It wasn’t a complete train wreck by the time I actually got to speak with someone about it.

She did do a great job of making The Returned a viable book. I think this experience taught me as much if not more than my MFA program did. I’ve learned to be more self aware about what the art is doing and how it is working. For instance, the character of Lucille was a character who was pretty far down the row, to me. The novel was Harold’s; she was important but not extremely prevalent. In the original version, Lucille died four chapters before the end of the book. To me, that seemed like an appropriate departure for her as I didn’t view her as a particularly important character, I wanted the ending just to focus on Harold and Jacob. But when my agent read the script, the first thing she said was that Lucille died too early.

And something else I hadn’t considered while writing is that other people view the story through different characters. She said that Lucille was her main lens through which she read the book. Lucille was her filter. To have her die really didn’t work.

AMK&MH: Well, if we did a page count, I’ll bet Harold and Lucille actually share roughly the same page space. Like you said, they’re a unit.

JM: Lucille was as equally invested in the narrative as Harold was, and Harold was invested in her. But at the time, I was so engrossed in Harold and Jacob that I kind of forgot Lucille. That’s one thing my agent pointed out. She said you have to keep her alive longer, your climax is too early—you can’t forget that this is her story as well. At first I really resisted making these changes, but she talked about it again with my buddy, Justin, and he agreed with her. Then he came to me and reiterated that she does this for a living and that I needed to trust her judgment. From that point forward, I made any changes she suggested with no reservations. I didn’t even blink; I just did it. If she told me to get dressed up in an animal costume and go dance on the street corner I’d do it.

AMK&MH: So what are you working on now? I feel like I keep hearing about another new novel and some Retuned spinoffs.

JM: I just finished a draft of a second book set in the mountains of North Carolina. A small move from the coast to the mountains. A novel focusing on a father/daughter relationship, based loosely on one of my good friends from college. The novel has a few elements of the fantastic involved in it. Religion and a few other more characteristic elements of Southern fiction come into it.

AMK&MH: It’s unavoidable. Religion plays a huge role in those parts of the country.

JM: So I’m focusing most of my energy on that and also tying up a few loose ends with this novel. On the backburner I have a couple of fun graphic novel projects I’m working on. So hopefully if this does well and someone comes knocking on my door I can be like, “Hey! I got this too!”

As for the spinoffs, they’re prequels. They’re short stories that give early readers a chance to get a sense of the premise and tone of the novel, as well as my writing style. I’m a debut author. No one knows me. So these prequels are a good way for both The Returned and me to say “Hello” to readers.

AMK&MH: Thank you for your time, Jason.

JM: Thank you!

Not Your Standard Undead Tale: An Interview with Jason Mott by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff (Part 3)

[Check out part one and part two of the interview!]

Jason Mott is a poet and novelist. His first two collections of poetry, We Call this Thing Between us is Love and Hide Behind Me, were published by Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2011, and his first novel, The Returned, was released in August 2013 with Harlequin MIRA and has been adapted for the television show, Resurrection, by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Mott was nominated for an NAACP Award in the category of “Outstanding Literary Work—Debut Author” in 2014. Resurrection airs on March 9, 2014.

This conversation took place in May of 2013.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff: The Returned takes place in the small, Southern town of Arcadia. When Arcadia is selected as a location for a Bureau internment camp (as more and more returned flood the streets of America, the Bureau decides that “temporary” incarceration is their only option) the novel changes from a story about a small town to a story about a small town taken over by Colonel Lewis and his camp. The story also takes on a lot of historical weight from this point on. The Holocaust, for example, is referenced. A pretty serious risk.

Jason Mott: There were some delicate steps taken when I was working on this part of the novel. You know, once you tread into that territory there are so many things that people start bringing to the reading and interpretation of the book.

At the same time, when I was in grad school I did this project which focused on Japanese internment camps during WWII. So I spent a couple of years researching camp Topaz out near Salt Lake and learned a lot about that type of life and what those people endured. Many of the camps were quite nice but others were just devastating. These were just ordinary U.S. citizens who happened to be Japanese and all of a sudden they were jailed in these camps. That stuck with me for a long time. I think that this section of the book was largely a reaction to this past and also from a fear that it might happen again. It seemed important to me to write about.

Given the unique circumstances that occur during the book, you would need these pre-built/fabricated rural areas to put these camps in (old schools, for example). The town of Arcadia (modeled more or less of the town my mom is from) fit that purpose perfectly. And it made logical sense for the story too. The returned were growing in number and the US reached a point where they had to figure out what to do with all of these unaccounted people. Not all people are wanted back by their families—

AMK&MH: Right, when Agent Bellamy asks Harold if he wants to keep Jacob, he first says “No.”

JM: Exactly. Imagine how many people might reject the returned. There are only so many people that any one place can hold. Ergo, you have to keep these people somewhere. These camps made the most sense. So I don’t think it’s fair to say I’m making a political statement here but to deny the historical/political reference it makes would be ludicrous.

There certainly are shadows of the Holocaust here. Any time you have a group of people who are perceived to be different based upon race, religion, creed, etc., (in this case they people discriminated against used to be alive!) you have, I think, the potential for a lot of turmoil, chaos, and instances of regular, everyday people making poor choices. But you also have extremists. That’s why the Colonel Lewis shows up. I try to make characters who counter one another.

AMK&MH: The Returned doesn’t have a huge, explosive ending, which makes it (aside from the writing itself, its pacing and structure) a shade more literary than it might be with a more punctuated climax.

JM: I didn’t want a terribly dramatic ending. In small towns, you can have feuds, but there are limits to how far they will take them. It’s very rare that any feuds end in bloodshed. You’ll shoot someone’s dog, but you won’t shoot them. There’s lots of animal theft and weird things like that but not much more, While you can fight all you want in a small town, when something bigger comes along, you head over to that person’s house and help them out, even if you hate them. If a hurricane comes through a town like that, you’ll find sworn enemies helping to rebuild each-others homes. You can hate them later.

I really wanted this small town dynamic represented in the characters. I wanted these characters, when they finally confronted one-another, not to be strangers. They still live in the same town and are both part of that community. So when Fred finally confronts Harold, when Fred demands he let him kill the returned Harold is keeping safe, when that big, explosive climax should happen, it can’t.

AMK&MH: They’re also cast in extreme circumstances. Harold seems pretty cognizant of that. He basically gets what’s going on; he understands what Fred is up to. That’s one of the things about the book that I really liked, when they finally get to the big confrontation Fred’s like, “I’m gonna burn your house down, but it’s cool cause you have insurance.” Hilarious!

JM: That’s kind of what I’m saying, no matter how much you dislike someone, there are limits to what kind of damage you’ll do. You can absolutely hate someone, but you still won’t want to do them permanent damage, and if push comes to shove you help them out. In small towns, there isn’t a lot of outside help, so you’re somewhat forced to rely on one another.

Not Your Standard Undead Tale: An Interview with Jason Mott by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff (Part 2)

[Check out the first part of this interview here!]

Jason Mott is a poet and novelist. His first two collections of poetry, We Call this Thing Between us is Love and Hide Behind Me, were published by Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2011, and his first novel, The Returned, was released in August 2013 with Harlequin MIRA and has been adapted for the television show, Resurrection, by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Mott was nominated for an NAACP Award in the category of “Outstanding Literary Work—Debut Author” in 2014. Resurrection airs on March 9, 2014.

This conversation took place in May of 2013.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff: How did you come up with this idea of the dead reanimating as near-exact copies of their former selves rather than as flesh-hungry zombies or ghosts or something more…. mainstream? I’ve read that the premise emerged from a dream you had.

Jason Mott: Yes, I had a dream where I came home from work, just a regular sunny day and my (deceased) mother was sitting at the kitchen table. She was just sitting there waiting for me, much as she had in my childhood when I would come home from school.

It was a weird dream. Humdrum really, a boring type of dream where nothing particular happened. In the dream I just came in like this was a normal occurrence and then she asked me how everything had been going. After that we just spent the entire dream sitting at the table and talking about everything that had happened since she died.

I told her going to undergrad, about grad school, new friends I had made…just normal life. She harassed me about still not being married. There was no dramatic ending to it; I just remember waking up and being incredibly emotionally distraught. I expected to walk out and find my mother in the other room.

I told one of my good friends (Justin Hedge) about this, and he brought up the notion that I might not be the only person with these experiences. “What,” he asked if it weren’t a dream and it was happening to people across the world?” He ended up talking me into writing a short story about the experience. I read the story at a reading we were doing together a bit later, and it was received very well— visceral responses from everyone. After that we talked a bit about whether or not it had potential as a novel, tossed around story ideas, and then I started writing.

AMK&MH: So the two of you did a sort of “treatment” for the novel like a film?

JM: Yeah, we bounce material and ideas off of each other all the time. This was one of the ideas that Justin believed in more than I did, but it ended up working out.

AMK&MH: The Returned is a complex novel with a particularly vivid world. How did you go from dream, to premise, to a world rich with such varied characters, settings, and conflicts?

JM: It started slowly. We started talking about how people would react when their family members started returning. On a small scale, it is first perceived as a miracle. But on a larger scale you’d have to have people who could help place these returned back where they belong or to help you find someone you thought might be returned. Thus the “Bureau of the Returned,” a government agency designed to help return the returned to their families and to make sense of them. They, of course, coalesce an extreme level of political power and wealth as the crisis escalates and, by the end of the novel, are on the verge of taking over the world.

We wanted to develop an organization similar to the Red Cross, something to help people out but also an organization that aided in the organizational properties of the narrative itself…like a character. I figured I needed one government bureau to take the reigns of this problem rather than have many smaller organizations scattered throughout the story. You don’t want to make the reader wander aimlessly; you need to keep the narrative focused as much as possible.

Once we had the Bureau, it was nice because you can give a made-up organization whatever freedoms and limitations you deem necessary. On a small scale (realistically), you have many branches of government that all operate under different rules and circumstances. Then you have different governments that operate differently in different countries. By using the umbrella of the bureau simplified things as it would operate the same on a global scale, the reader doesn’t have to worry about change of rules across various parts of the globe. The book takes a leap from this one small town to this global issue in a simple way. I try not to distract readers too much; that’s something I struggle with on first drafts because I always have tons of distracting elements that need to be streamlined and extricated from the text.

There’s nothing cooler than the massive, faceless corporation. I’ve always been a huge fan of video games and many games make use of this to great effect. I’m a huge fan of this idea and using it in my writing… giving them their own character.

AMK&MH: How did you manage to create such a rich, original world without falling into the more standard undead story, i.e. The Walking Dead and World War Z.

JM: Those are great books… but they’re different, that’s all. They’re both well-written, literary, and intelligent. They’re just different stories from The Returned. I never thought of myself as trying to avoid writing another type of book (especially since I’m a big fan of those books), I just chased an idea and the story grew in its own direction.

AMK&MH: Like most parents who lose a child, Harold blames himself for Jacob’s death; Jacob wandered off while he was the one who didn’t keep a close enough eye on him. I think this is why Harold struggles so greatly to accept Jacob when he returns. Now he must face his demons… literally…

JM: Exactly. Harold has spent his life hiding from Jacob’s death. Now, there is this paradigm shift and Harold can no longer hide; Jacob is sitting right there on the chair in their living room. That’s why Harold has the most conflict with this change; he can’t hide anymore.

AMK&MH: You don’t have any children, but the way Harold and Lucille deal with Jacob and parent him once this conflict is resolved for Harold is wonderfully genuine and authentic. It almost feels “old American”…

JM: Well, I don’t have kids of my own, but when my mom passed, I was twenty-three and my nephew, Justin, was thirteen. I became this type of surrogate wife to my father. I cooked the meals and more or less raised my nephew while my dad went to work. Luckily, I had already quit my job and moved back in with my father to pursue a career in writing, so I was around.

I learned a lot about parenting through my nephew and my father. It was kind of like being thrown into the deep end of the pool; I started my experience raising kids by raising a teenager just a few years after being a teenager myself. It was a quick learning process you might say, because I was learning to take care of someone younger, take care of my father, and also learning to write during this period of my life.

A lot of people have asked me, “Why didn’t you use younger characters for Harold and Lucille?” It’s a popular trend in novels and in Hollywood right now. But the greater the distance between Jacob’s death and his return, the greater the emotional complexity. That’s why it takes the entire novel for Harold to come to terms with what has happened and how things have changed; Harold has been brooding on hiding from his son’s death for fifty years now.

AMK&MH: This conflict reaches its climax when Lucille finally confronts Harold about the way he’s treating Jacob. Harold won’t hang out with him or even really acknowledge him; he just sits on the front porch smoking cigarettes while Jacob stands inside the screen door. When Lucille asks why he won’t acknowledge Jacob, Harold says something to the effect of, “That’s not my son.” Lucille smacks him, and Harold has a decision to make. In many ways, The Returned is about marriage; it’s about family.

JM: I’ve never been married, but I drew a lot on my parent’s and my friends’ marriages for Lucille and Harold. I think that in a strong marriage, a good marriage, each person becomes a living representation of the other person’s conscience. So it took Lucille slapping the shit out of Harold for him to be able to embrace Jacob. It took that moment of spurn for him to make that journey. I don’t think I’ve ever properly grieved for my mother; I think that’s partly what allowed me to write so strongly for Harold’s part and to root for him in his journey. Harold and Bellamy were always my focal characters.

AMK&MH: Is The Returned Harold’s book?

JM: The book is more or less about Harold’s grieving and having a second chance. In whatever form you recognize resolution, Jacob’s return was Harold’s chance to find it. Anyone’s death leaves unresolved issues for those still living. Some are bad. Some are good. I wanted to provide, through Harold’s character, some answers to these issues everyone deals with at some point in their lives.

***

Stay tuned for more of this interview later this week!

Not Your Standard Undead Tale: An Interview with Jason Mott by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff (Part 1)

Jason Mott is a poet and novelist. His first two collections of poetry, We Call this Thing Between us is Love and Hide Behind Me, were published by Main Street Rag in 2009 and 2011, and his first novel, The Returned, was released in August 2013 with Harlequin MIRA and has been adapted for the television show, Resurrection, by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. Mott was nominated for an NAACP Award in the category of “Outstanding Literary Work—Debut Author” in 2014. Resurrection airs on March 9, 2014.

The Returned centers on the sleepy, Southern town of Arcadia and an elderly couple, Harold and Lucille Hargrave, whose son, Jacob, shows up on their doorstep fifty years after his drowning. He is one of “the returned”: women, men, and children of every age, race, and nationality who have returned, impossibly, from the grave.

Unlike the undead in recent novels and films like World War Z and Zombieland, the returned are not hungry for human flesh or lifeless reanimations of their former selves; rather, the returned return just as they left the world, their memories and personalities fully intact, their bodies as capable or sickly as the day they died.

This conversation took place in May of 2013.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum & Matthew Huff: Given our culture’s current obsession with zombie, vampire, and what we could call apocalyptic narratives, The Returned is a little different. It takes place in a small town. It’s about two old people. The returned aren’t zombies; they’re basically regular people. Even so, The Returned is selling very well and ABC has invested quite a bit in Resurrection. What do you think your publisher and Plan B and ABC see in The Returned and Resurrection given that it’s not the standard undead tale?

Jason Mott: I think Plan B and ABC see the potential of the personal interaction, that personal friction between characters in the book that could make for great television. They’re excited by the prospects of how we would deal with all the returned as well. They see the potential for viewers to come to the TV each week with the questions “What would I do if my mother or sister came back from the dead? Would I be happy to see them, or would I be terrified? What would we do as a nation with all these returned flooding our homes and streets?”

AMK&MH: Do you know what the show is going to look like? As I read The Returned, I thought it definitely had the makings of a film, but it was a little harder to see how it could be made into 40-minute episodes.

JM: I have a general sense of what they’ve got in mind for the arc of the television show, but no specifics. And I’m okay with that. The TV show is their baby, and I trust the people who are producing it and I feel like they will be true to the spirit of the novel. That’s good enough for me.

The writer, Aaron Zelman (he’s written episodes for The Killing, Damages, and Criminal Minds), is a really great guy and amazingly talented. In all honesty, he inserted certain elements in the pilot that, when I read it, I was like “Man, I wish I’d thought of thatl!” I think that’s the biggest compliment and statement of my faith that I can give Aaron. And he deserves it. You always hear horror stories about how literary projects get dismantled in the transformation to screen, but I’ve actually had quite the opposite experience; this hasn’t been the case at all with Aaron at all.

AMK&MH: What’s it like seeing your characters “in the flesh”?

JM: Oh, the casting is spot on. Each time a casting announcement came, I was like “Yes! That’s exactly who should play that part!” But it’s funny: I try not to think of these actors as just the physical representation of my characters. I’ve met them all and they’re not the characters they play on television or in movies, they’re people. Kurtwood Smith isn’t “Red from That '70s Show,” he’s Kurtwood Smith—an actor, a husband, a father, and a great guy. So, more than anything, I’m excited by the skill, talent, and passion that these actors will be bringing to their roles…and it’s just an added bonus that these roles will be my characters.

AMK&MH: How has it been working with them?

JM: Man, they’re pretty amazing. A bunch of them found me and asked to read the book so they could learn about their characters from me rather than just the script they were given. It’s funny, one guy got his copy before everyone else did and they all got really jealous! It felt great. I came into this expecting many of the actors to be standoffish. I expected (sorry guys!) them to have this attitude of, “I’m the actor. I’m the talent.” But they have been almost the opposite of that, very friendly and approachable. We’ve actually had many very fun, cool conversations. I can’t begin to tell you what terrific people they all are.

AMK&MH: In The Returned, Harold and Lucille lose Jacob when he drowns in a nearby river. Then, when Jacob returns fifty years later (thirty-two years in the show), Lucille immediately welcomes him home even though she is a staunch Christian who believed, just moments before Jacob came back, that the returned are devils. Harold, on the other hand, has serious doubts. Just who and what is Jacob? he wonders. How has this person who passed away fifty years ago suddenly reentered the world? This becomes the major conflict for Lucille and Harold, for Arcadia as more and more return, and for the world at large. How did you come up with this conflict?

JM: It came about in part due to my own upbringing. I grew up in a very small town, just outside of Wilmington, North Carolina—so small that I just tell people I’m from Wilmington: one blinking stoplight, no fast food, two gas stations, and 600-800 people.

People in such small communities tend to make, in my experience, snap judgments like the one Lucille makes before Jacob comes back. She sees the returned on the news and, because she’s so distanced from them, she has no problem saying they’re devils. But when one of them turns out to be her blood, everything changes. When something like this bleeds into the small town, things get very complex in that town. Small towns are used to being overlooked. Whatever politics are going on in the world or whatever is happening outside of these small communities doesn’t seem to affect them much. Change doesn’t occur very often in small towns, so when change does come, people tend to react very dramatically.

So when these fantastic events start occurring, Lucille falls back on her religious upbringing while Harold remains somewhat aloof to the change so long as it doesn’t drastically affect him in a personal way. When Jacob arrives on their front porch, they start to own it, they have a personal investment. For Lucille, she gets her child back—the only child she could ever have. Lucille immediately declares that this event is a miracle. For Harold though, this event becomes a living, breathing reminder of what he perceives as his failure as a parent.

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Stay tuned for more of this interview next week!